(no subject)

[olivermoss]

The new Trope Talk is on communication in Sci Fi and Fantasy fiction and how when it's written tends to reflect where real world tech is at. It's interesting and it's worth noting that a lot of older canons rely on people simply not being able to call each other anywhere. It's a good video, but I think she overlooks a few things.

She keeps using the example of R2-D2 needing to carrying a stored message when holographic interplanetary calling existed. It existed, but that doesn't mean it's secure. R2-D2 is transporting the message at the height of Imperial Power. That plot may have been a result of dated expectation of technology, but I think it holds up. It still makes logical sense to me that a secret message from a powerful political figure to someone living in rural outskirts might not be secure on the wireless network.



I think she takes a little too for granted that everything is connected these days and that it's a natural progression. Making calls to other states used to be extremely expensive and that didn't change due to better tech, that changed due to market competition. Here in Oregon, unless there has been a massive change in just the past two years (and I doubt it), much of the state doesn't have cell coverage. Telecommunications needs infrastructure. During the 2017 Solar Eclipse, Oregon had temporary cell towers brought in for safety reasons. Our rural areas were flooded with people and that could have caused unpredictable problems. For a month we had great cell coverage of all of southern Oregon, and then it went away. Oregon contracted with the companies that provide temporary and/or boosted service to music festivals and events like that. And speaking of temporary infrastructure...

Ever go to a convention and go 'yay, despite these thick walls my phone works fine!' and then you go to another event at the same place and your phone has no signal? Conventions can rent repeaters to create temporary cell service in those thick walled LEED certified buildings, but then other conventions don't budget paying AT&T and Verizon to rent repeaters. The problem is that a lot of buildings were built with or retrofitted with Nextel repeaters, who made exclusive deals with Hilton and other companies... and then Nextel went out of business. So the infrastructure that exists in a ton of hotels and convention centers is useless. Sometimes AT&T will pay a venue to put in it's repeaters, but sometimes that comes with a non-compete clause.



Anyway, that was a lot of words to say that I don't think limited, intermittent or lack of wireless communication in sci fi / spec fic is necessarily the writer not getting where the future is heading. The current state of our telecommunications is shaped by technology, but then it also gets shaped by market forces. If the US Government hadn't decided to split up the Bell Company, US telecommunications would be extremely different. One thing I really like about Star Trek: Enterprise is that they build out the communications network as they go, at least in season 1.

Anyway, despite my overly detailed objections, it's a good video. I love the Trope Talk series, but I was very 'IDK where you live but it sure as hell ain't here'

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

I think that's a really good point. She may be right that it was written that way due to a tech oversight, but... even so, yeah, I think it is arguable that it could have been a more secure way to share that message, ensuring it only made it to the right person. Communication is absolutely an area where higher tech does not mean more secure. If you want to avoid interception, then going low-tech is often one of the better ways to do it. (Not that it's foolproof either, but physically intercepting something is often more difficult to do than digitally intercepting data, and at least requires proximity and timing to a greater degree.)
I'm not going to say that that's absolutely why R2-D2 had to save a hologram recording, but it makes sense as an explanation. I guess it's a whole Doyalist vs. Watsonian perspective, but it works for me.

And oh yes, cell reliability. In part it's because I have a shitty phone, but there are wide areas in my major metropolitan area where I have the cellular equivalent of dial up speeds.

[olivermoss]

Thinking through how reachable by message people are is good, but less reachable isn't always an oversight. Also, there may be energy or psychic costs to weigh.

Security is a whole thing as well, but of course I ramble about infrastructure because like... things don't just exist like magic because they are theoretically possible! Or, in magic systems, there may be costs and privacy concerns. Imagine if people really could just speak into your mind out of nowhere... yeah, it smooths out D&D sessions but let's really think through if everyone would be chill with this!

[mistressofmuses]

Infrastructure is something a LOT of fiction forgets about, I think especially in sci-fi. (Though fantasy suffers from it to, so it's really a spec fic as a whole issue.) Still, it's maybe most noticeable in high-tech settings, because people think about that tech working fairly flawlessly or effortlessly, as well as very consistently. When in the example of Star Wars... there's absolutely a huge difference in terms of what tech different planets have access to.

I've often thought that about things like telepathy, too. Like, it's a neat power! But in reality, hoo boy, no one wants randos eavesdropping on their every thought! Or accidentally projecting their every thought to randos! Or having anyone able to push a message through into their brain! (The most realistic interpretation is probably someone using it for the worst, most inescapable advertising, lol.)

[olivermoss]

Going into too much detail about infrastructure can make fiction boring, but a good awareness of it adds so much realism and feel. I've never been too into Star Wars, but yeah varying tech levels suits what I know about it.

I like how Mercedes Lackey handled telepathy. It had an energy cost, long distances were harder and coitus interuptus and other stuff happened. Also, privacy was an important concept.

I like the idea of using it for advertising. Well, I hate it but there is some comedy potential there.

[mistressofmuses]

Right. Like, I don't actually need or want to know a ton of minutia about how a general system works in a story, unless it's plot-relevant and interesting. But feeling like I *could* know more about it, and getting the handful of details that imply a consistent and well-thought-out system behind the parts we actually interact with makes things SO much better.

I read so much Lackey in my early explorations of fantasy that her stuff has been my general template for a lot of "how this would work." I like the restrictions on it - that it's easier if both parties have the ability, that distance matters, that sometimes it IS a bad time for this actually, that people care about ways to keep privacy intact, for themselves and for others.

Lol, I do think that has dismally comic potential, haha. I wonder if I have any settings I could work that in to...

[olivermoss]

Yeah, it's good to have a world that feel solid and not like a bunch of hand-waving.

Lackey's magic systems were really solid. The world building, as far as I read, was really good.

[mistressofmuses]

Exactly. A world that has depth to it is going to feel MUCH more interesting and dynamic than one that feels like it's just set dressing.

For all the issues with Lackey's work, I genuinely enjoyed her magic systems, and the amount of thought put into them, including multiple types of magic that have different rules to them. It's still a benchmark for me in terms of how magic can be handled in high fantasy, with a good balance of both rules and flexibility.
(At least before I'd sort of noped out of her more recent stuff; though because it was such a solid system, I don't have any reason to believe it got less so.)

[olivermoss]

Yeah, I stopped reading Lackey a while back, but the early stuff I read was surprisingly solid in a lot of ways. The solid feeling, the clarity, I didn't realize how good it was at the time. I'm mostly blamed her for a constant wish to write in rotating POV... and yeah there is other stuff.

The feeling of effort and cost for spells in her worlds was really good

[mistressofmuses]

Even before I was a little more aware of some Unfortunate Implications and such in her works (or her personal life/interactions with fans, oof), I got pretty burnt out on her stuff when it became obvious that she didn't seem to have an editor anymore. No idea whether it was that she's too "big" an author to "need" an editor, or whether she just refused to take editor suggestions, or whether an editor just didn't feel like they should edit her work... it got real obvious for a while.

But yes, I still genuinely think the worldbuilding for her Valdemar books is excellent, and same - I didn't realize how good it was until I read a lot of other stuff that... wasn't. So much fantasy of the time seemed to really just take a "magic can do anything! Except when it can't for plot reasons! Don't think about it!" attitude.

Though lol, yes, I can probably blame her for my enjoyment of and desire to write multiple POVs, lmao.

[olivermoss]

I started to go off of her stuff when Larry Dixon got involved in her writing. Her underlying POV on a lot of things changed and some of it was very dark.

I still think a lot of fandom needs group therapy sessions for the impact of Mercedes Lackey, and also unpacking what was good about her writing, because there is a lot that can be learned from there.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. I liked the Mage Wars trilogy (The Black Gryphon/White Gryphon/Silver Gryphon) that they wrote together, and it added a lot of cool historical context for the Valdemar books as a whole, but that was about it that I really enjoyed that he was involved with. My brain slid off of most of the stuff after that.

Lol, I think a lot of fandom would benefit from a "recovering Mercedes Lackey fans support group" hahaha. (And there are a few of her works that I still genuinely do like, if mostly through a nostalgic lens.) But yeah, there's a LOT of impact she had on the genre, and on fandom, and on how people relate to both.
But I do think that it's worth acknowledging that a lot of her works resonated so strongly for actual reasons! There are aspects of her work that are genuinely very good. There are also some aspects that are really unfortunate and icky in hindsight!
A lot of the people who grew disillusioned with her work seem to have done a 180 to how it's all bad and terrible and had nothing good about it, which isn't fair either.

[olivermoss]

Yeah, the way we just don't talk about her or what's good about her work is a shame. She's still a major author with a massive influence, but if anyone is doing video essays on her impact or why she's compelling it's well outside of any bubble I'm in.

I tried to look up whether her recent books still make bestsellers lists and that was weirdly hard to look up? Based on a page preview it looks like Hunter from 2017 made the NYT bestsellers list but when I clicked through I got NYT's error page.

You're right, she resonated with a lot of people for good reason but we just don't talk about it

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, I feel like there's sort of a weird hole around her work, for as influential as it has been and still is. Maybe there IS more balanced talk around her work, but if so, I've also missed seeing any of it. I see more "ugh, I can't believe I used to like her stuff so much..." attitude, and that makes me sad.
I DO think her work declined pretty sharply in quality, at least in that quintology that marked her return to Valdemar after her hiatus, and I didn't stick around beyond the first few of those books to see if things got better again. (I didn't even like the protagonist! Why did she write a quintology about him *plus two more trilogies*?) Even so, a lot of her older work does hold up pretty well, and had a HUGE influence on the "romantic fantasy" subgenre.

Though maybe that's part of the issue: romantic fantasy/swords-and-sorcery *feels* very 80s/90s, and the subgenre is at odds with what's popular in fantasy now. I think that a lot of people look at more clear-cut good vs. evil fantasy as "frivolous" compared to the things that are more popular now.

Bestsellers lists ARE weirdly hard to find information on. I remember someone else talking about that recently-ish (like, within the last couple years) when there was some attention being paid to someone making a lot of (false) claims about their book being a bestseller.

But yeah. The enjoyment of her work didn't come out of nowhere. It's fair to look back and recognize some areas in which it had Unfortunate Implications, or fell short of things it tried to do, etc. without utterly writing the entire body of work off.

I think a lot of people's feelings about her work are complicated, because they both see the flaws AND feel fond nostalgia, so they aren't sure how to deal with that. And as usual, there seems to be a push against nuance and toward "this was imperfect, so you should feel guilty for ever liking it."

[olivermoss]

She's had a huge influence on romantic fantasy, soul bonds, and a bunch of other stuff. And it's not like she disappeared in the 90s or something!

I don't even get what's popular now and if I was farther ahead in my orig fic projects, a lot of my comps would be Diana Tregarde books and that would be a problem! Because you need comps that like people these days know about.

I assumed bestseller info would be easily googlable or front and center on the Amazon or Goodreads page, but nope. That an author has had bestsellers, sure, which ones and how many? Who knows?

There are a lot of unfortunate implications, but how she's just silently cancelled is odd to me? But I haven't read past Mage Winds I don't think. I did read the Knight of Ghosts and Shadows sequels and am forever upset about them. They've been a spicy topic when I've brought them up in some places.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh jeez, I wasn't even thinking about how strongly it likely influenced ideas about soulmates and bonds and such! But you're absolutely right. I feel like there are a lot of genres that would look very different without her influence, including fic as a whole. And she's still writing! She didn't vanish!

Man. Children of the Night was hardcore formative for me. For some reason that was the only Mercedes Lackey book my middle school library had, and I read it so very many times, lol.

Bestseller lists SHOULD be easy to look up! It's super weird that they aren't, right?

The whole situation with her feels very weird to me. I don't know if it's just plain old "death to nuance", or if it's just that people THINK she stopped writing in the 90s, or what. I just checked on her bibliography and she has been PROLIFIC AS FUCK for the last 10+ years! Yet I never hear her stuff mentioned except as some mildly-cringe nostalgic relic of the past.

I did not read Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, but I do think that at least some of her returns to worlds she'd written for were disappointing. (I'm harping on the Valdemar ones, but I was so disappointed in Foundations lol [which were NOT the ones about the Founding, which I have not read, and am a bit afraid to.]) Maybe that's why people don't talk about any of her current work, but it's not like there are conversations happening about new works not being good, either.

[olivermoss]

Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is absolutely setting up a poly triad where one of the guys is struggling with his same sex attraction... then years later there is not only a sequel but a lot running series that explicitly and specifically retcons all of that. While the book Fades to Black a few times, it's very clear where goes in the blanks. They are overtly a bonded, romantic triad even if the sex is a bit 'MC has super UST at the Elf and then suddenly feels very relaxed and satisfied after sharing sleeping space for some reason'.

There are a number of people who are salty about this. You can probably guess how salty people are about this.

Yeah, she's talked about as if she died at the turn of the millennium, a half forgotten relic, but she's not and afaik her books sell well. Went she went YA with Hunter she got a lot of new readers.

[mistressofmuses]

Oh, I would be SO PISSED. That doesn't sound like subtle setup, so to just retcon that shit? Ugh, I'd be so mad! I haven't even read it and you can add me to the salt pile.

Right? I'm baffled at fandom as a whole's relationship to her (or mainly lack there of). Not that I have my fingers on the pulse of all of fandom or anything, but it just seems very weird.

[olivermoss]

It was pointedly retconned. It's just a mess.

Yeah, I am also kind of baffled. It makes me feel like I'm missing something.