Empathy for the snowpocalypse
Feb. 14th, 2014 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteDon't recall where I saw it, but on one of the sites I visit while I'm avoiding work (or letting my brain cool down before digging into a thorny manuscript again), there were a bunch of northerners expressing bafflement for how badly southerners were coping with the recent descent of winter.
A voice of reason (quickly drowned in all the usual silliness) pointed out that southerners have no experience with such weather: they don't have practice driving in snow, they don't have snow tires, they don't have plows and salt trucks to keep the roads safe, their homes aren't insulated (because they don't need to be), and on and on. I greatly appreciated this person because they really "got it": they understood "the other", and how we northerners take for granted our competence dealing with snow. I imagine southerners would have equal fun mocking us northerners should we ever have to deal with a hurricane, something many of them take for granted and just deal with the same way we deal with huge blizzards.
It reminded me of how, when you're writing fiction, the hardest thing to do is to really (really!) understand where the other people are coming from: even for familiar people (e.g., those who live in the same city we inhabit), their assumptions are so different from ours that even if they're nominally humans, they're quite alien to us. Anyone who's married or who has been in any of various other forms of long-term relationship knows what I'm talking about: periodically, you have one of those "where the heck did that come from?" moments, when you suddenly understand how little you understand your partner. When you're writing science fiction or fantasy, the problem's even worse: if the characters are truly "other", you don't even have familiar human reference points you can start from.
This is why there are so few good aliens in fiction: most writers (and I include myself in this group) are bound by our assumptions and by a failure to recognize just what those assumptions are. It's a useful exercise to stretch your mind by imagining what life looks like from the perspective of (say) your cat or dog -- two creatures who seem so familiar and so much part of our lives that we just assume they're People Like Us. They aren't. I have a much better understanding of our cats since I've made an effort to see things from their perspective, but still have frequent "what were you thinking?" moments even after a dozen years.
Imagine, for example, what it would be like if you (a 5- to 6-foot-tall human) depended for your food and shelter on a 36-foot-tall being who periodically picked you up and slung you over their shoulder, all the while crooning nonsense words at you. Someone who didn't understand a word you were saying. (I've come to believe that cats don't communicate in words, but rather in emotions. Weirdness) Someone who abandoned you with no predictable clues and gave no evidence they would ever return again to feed you. Imagine what that would feel like, and that's just a start to getting yourself into the head of something that looks familiar but really isn't.
I'm convinced that our first encounter with intelligent alien life will end in disaster due to some perfectly plausible gesture that violates some unknown but fundamental cultural assumption. When my son was (briefly) in Cub Scouts, I was told that the reason they shake hands left-handed was that the founder of the group, Baden Powell, learned this from an African people he stayed with for a time. The notion was that if you shook hands with your left hand, it meant that you had to put down your shield, thereby showing your trust by making yourself vulnerable to their weapon hand. In marked contrast, European cultures shake with the right hand, because in doing so, you disarm yourself (you can't simultaneously shake hands and hold your weapon). Of course, both cultures assume that most people are right-handed, since these practices clearly wouldn't work for a southpaw. Wheels within wheels...
I think that as a standard rule, all first-contact specialists in science fiction should say one thing before anything else: "Look here: I guarantee you that through stupidity and ignorance of your customs, I'm going to do something that will offend you. Please forgive me, and understand that this is not malicious. If we're going to have a productive dialog here, we both need to understand this fact about each other."
Of course, some future culture will undoubtedly find that approach highly offensive. But what can you do but try?
A voice of reason (quickly drowned in all the usual silliness) pointed out that southerners have no experience with such weather: they don't have practice driving in snow, they don't have snow tires, they don't have plows and salt trucks to keep the roads safe, their homes aren't insulated (because they don't need to be), and on and on. I greatly appreciated this person because they really "got it": they understood "the other", and how we northerners take for granted our competence dealing with snow. I imagine southerners would have equal fun mocking us northerners should we ever have to deal with a hurricane, something many of them take for granted and just deal with the same way we deal with huge blizzards.
It reminded me of how, when you're writing fiction, the hardest thing to do is to really (really!) understand where the other people are coming from: even for familiar people (e.g., those who live in the same city we inhabit), their assumptions are so different from ours that even if they're nominally humans, they're quite alien to us. Anyone who's married or who has been in any of various other forms of long-term relationship knows what I'm talking about: periodically, you have one of those "where the heck did that come from?" moments, when you suddenly understand how little you understand your partner. When you're writing science fiction or fantasy, the problem's even worse: if the characters are truly "other", you don't even have familiar human reference points you can start from.
This is why there are so few good aliens in fiction: most writers (and I include myself in this group) are bound by our assumptions and by a failure to recognize just what those assumptions are. It's a useful exercise to stretch your mind by imagining what life looks like from the perspective of (say) your cat or dog -- two creatures who seem so familiar and so much part of our lives that we just assume they're People Like Us. They aren't. I have a much better understanding of our cats since I've made an effort to see things from their perspective, but still have frequent "what were you thinking?" moments even after a dozen years.
Imagine, for example, what it would be like if you (a 5- to 6-foot-tall human) depended for your food and shelter on a 36-foot-tall being who periodically picked you up and slung you over their shoulder, all the while crooning nonsense words at you. Someone who didn't understand a word you were saying. (I've come to believe that cats don't communicate in words, but rather in emotions. Weirdness) Someone who abandoned you with no predictable clues and gave no evidence they would ever return again to feed you. Imagine what that would feel like, and that's just a start to getting yourself into the head of something that looks familiar but really isn't.
I'm convinced that our first encounter with intelligent alien life will end in disaster due to some perfectly plausible gesture that violates some unknown but fundamental cultural assumption. When my son was (briefly) in Cub Scouts, I was told that the reason they shake hands left-handed was that the founder of the group, Baden Powell, learned this from an African people he stayed with for a time. The notion was that if you shook hands with your left hand, it meant that you had to put down your shield, thereby showing your trust by making yourself vulnerable to their weapon hand. In marked contrast, European cultures shake with the right hand, because in doing so, you disarm yourself (you can't simultaneously shake hands and hold your weapon). Of course, both cultures assume that most people are right-handed, since these practices clearly wouldn't work for a southpaw. Wheels within wheels...
I think that as a standard rule, all first-contact specialists in science fiction should say one thing before anything else: "Look here: I guarantee you that through stupidity and ignorance of your customs, I'm going to do something that will offend you. Please forgive me, and understand that this is not malicious. If we're going to have a productive dialog here, we both need to understand this fact about each other."
Of course, some future culture will undoubtedly find that approach highly offensive. But what can you do but try?