John Scalzi’s written a nice little post in his Reader’s Request series concerning genre fiction series’ sometime tendency to become stagnant. But one little bit of the piece stood out for me:
look, people: World building is hard. You want us to have to build an entire universe from scratch every single time we write a book? Well, okay. You want us to have to run a marathon every time we walk down to the corner store to get some milk, too? Or maybe assemble a car from the wheels up, every time we want to drive to the mall? We spend all this time building this ginchy universe and its rules, and then you say “Oh, that world again?” No one ever pulls that shit with other genres. People don’t go up to Carl Hiaasen and say “What? Another book on Earth?” And he didn’t even make up that planet! It’s an open source planet! Damn slacker.
Referring to Earth as an “open source planet” is clever, funny, and right on target.
If you liked that post, then try these...
Milestones on March 24th, 2008
Ernest Hemingway's Writing Tips on March 7th, 2008
Mount Zion Review: R.I.P. on February 21st, 2008
Publication on June 1st, 2007
Blog Fiction on March 11th, 2008
April 4th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
His world building was built on the open source Earth. Cake. Try building worlds where you can’t call your characters Earth scientist names, because there is no Earth. Sure SF/F is hard, but if he didn’t like it he wouldn’t be doing it.
April 4th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Meetzmop Krinnigimop…Diggle Pusnut (wait, is that an alien scientist or a modern-day porn star?)… Crap, I’ve just humored myself. Excuse me as I giggle :-)