Write something about your setting, and the rest of us will help you develop it

I dunno, but from a socio-political standpoint, I'd recommend trying to find it in the library rather than buying it. I'm no fan of Card's political opinions.

 

Spoiler

Much of what we're proud of in America today -- yes, even conservatives -- was accomplished by the courage, vision, and determination of Progressives from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

That was a very different time. Children routinely labored long days for pathetic pay, women couldn't vote and were limited in many other ways, the Jim Crow laws in the South, not to mention lynchings, were undoing every speck of progress that the Civil War and Reconstruction had brought to the former slaves.

Workers endured terrible conditions and starvation wages -- and if they tried to strike, the government used police and National Guard forces to protect the even hungrier men and women who crossed the picket lines to take their jobs and their wages.

Meanwhile, with no income tax, the most prosperous members of the ownership class had no limits on their acquisition and display of wealth. This is when the "summer cottages" of Newport, Rhode Island, were built -- summer homes that were filled with the expensive relics of Europe, all so the rich could have a lovely place beside Narragansett Bay to hobnob with the same people they saw all the time in New York City the rest of the year.

The "business cycle" had not yet been tamed, so that every decade (or less) there was another financial "panic" that led to business failures, layoffs, and drastic wage cuts that the working class could not survive.

But these very conditions led to powerful movements that later were lumped together under the name "progressive," though they rarely cooperated. The Knights of Labor set the tone for the whole era. The first federation of labor, the Knights admitted workers of every race and national origin; they admitted women workers; and they were determined to stand together to gain the right to unionize and force the factory owners to pay them enough to live.

Between the government and the owners, the Knights were eventually broken up, but new labor unions formed to take their place and continue part of the fight, at least. Now blacks, foreigners, and women were excluded, but in the long run, the union movement brought benefits to all. As they grew in political power, they began to achieve vital rights, like the right to organize and exist as unions -- and the minimum wage.

It's almost laughable to hear the arguments -- often made by very smart people -- against the minimum wage. "It eliminates entry-level jobs," we're told. But in that era, the minimum wage made it so that employer could no longer cut wages below the subsistence level in order to sell their goods at a lower rate. It meant that if a man had a job at all, he could earn enough money that his wife and children wouldn't starve.

The minimum wage made it possible for families to survive without putting their children out to work -- or breaking up the family because they couldn't feed them all. Nobody was worried then about whether teenagers wouldn't be able to find food service jobs -- the minimum wage and the right to strike brought workers out of desperate poverty that periodically dipped into famine, and started them on the road to entering the middle class.

And it can be argued that the melding of the working class with the middle class, owed to the unions and the minimum wage, is the foundation of American prosperity. Since car companies could no longer compete by cutting salaries, for instance, Henry Ford competed by raising wages while increasing worker productivity, his goal being to make cars that his own workers could afford to buy.

In other words, the laboring class was given a handhold on the American dream of freedom and prosperity.

-http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2015-10-29.shtml

Spoiler

John McWhorter's new book Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca returns McWhorter to his roots as a public figure. A serious linguist working in creoles and pidgins, he first came to prominence when he refuted some of the extravagant claims about Ebonics in Oakland, California, in the 1990s. Now he tackles the whole issue of how American Blacks talk.

Is Black speech just bad or broken standard American English? No. It's a genuine dialect, with complex grammatical devices that standard American English doesn't have -- as well as simplifications, which are already the hallmark of English.

...

Blacks need to read it so they recognize that when they "talk Black" among themselves, they aren't speaking bad English, they're using the valid dialect that marks them as insiders in their own community.

Yes, for purposes of career advancement in many fields, it's useful to also learn how to use standard American English, just as immigrants benefit from learning it. But American Blacks should no more abandon, suppress, or demean Black English or the accompanying Blaccent than immigrants from other lands need to forget or hide from the native language of their forebears.

Of all Americans, White Southerners should understand this. The various southern accents (from the Appalachian twang to the tidewater drawl) all sound stupid to outsiders, so that many or most southerners regard it as part of their education to learn to speak so that nobody even suspects they're from the South.

But, as I learned from a Southern girl I knew in college, "The minute I get home to where people talk right, I drop right back into my native speech." In American life, in order to get ahead and get along, it's valuable to be multilingual -- which includes learning how to use different accents and dialects accurately and fluently.

McWhorter shows how the diglossia of American Blacks is a complete answer to the frequent comment: "Well, you couldn't talk that way in a job interview." Blacks don't need to be told that, says McWhorter -- they already know.

American Blacks engage in code-switching all the time. Most Blacks with jobs work in places where there are few (if any) other Blacks. They immediately learn to put on their Standard American speech when they get to work and use it throughout the day.

...

Code-switching is a part of the lives of American Blacks, and they don't need White people to tell them about it. What they need is a chance to unwind every day among people who speak the same native language.

If White people wonder why Blacks segregate themselves residentially or, on high school and college campuses, at the cafeteria table, part of the reason may be the simple comfort and rest of being among speakers of their native language.

...

Anybody who thinks that Blacks speak "broken" English doesn't know what broken language sounds like. Blacks in America have more control over their grammars and accents as they switch from code to code than any but a handful of American Whites.

Hispanics, by the way, do similar things, especially second-generation Hispanic-Americans, but the fundamental difference is this: Nobody thinks Spanish is "broken English." It's another language with a history as old as our own.

The effort to elevate Ebonics to a level parallel with Spanish or other languages-of-origin is perfectly understandable, though it's also completely wrong. Black English is not based on African, particularly Bantu, grammars or vocabulary. It is based on English as it was bent to accommodate their ancestors' inability to produce some of the sounds of English.

Far from being a broken language, what Blacks speak now is a powerful dialect of American English. You can't learn it from the criminal street dialect of Blacks in crime shows, largely because most of that is criminal argot rather than Black speech, and it's mostly based on other crime shows rather than actual Black Dialect.

Nor are we hearing authentic full-on Black English when we listen to comedy performances by most Black comics. They emphasize the accent, but only rarely drop into the actual dialect.

So even as more and more Whites learn to imitate some intonations and vocabulary of television and comedian Black dialect, it would be wise for us to remember that as White people, we will never hear full-on Black Dialect often and deeply enough for us to learn it.

This is not because Blacks are trying to exclude us; quite the opposite, they are trying to include us by modifying their speech quite deliberately so as not to say things in ways that they know we could not possibly understand. They're being polite to the person who doesn't speak the language.

-http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2017-05-18.shtml

Spoiler

I had a wonderful time watching [Mamma Mia!].

Except for the appalling moment when Colin Firth's character suddenly reveals himself to be gay. No, it's not because I'm anti-gay. It's because they trivialize and ridicule him and homosexuality. His developing relationship with a gay Greek man is never shown or hinted at -- it is revealed only as a punch line. As a joke. It's a slap in the face to all gay people.

Everybody else's yearnings, everybody else's personal agonies, everybody else's love story is worth at least a few moments of screen time. But homosexuality exists in this movie only to be laughed at. It's as if they're saying that the feelings of gay people are amusing, whereas the feelings of heterosexuals are important and deep and meaningful.

Their treatment of their one gay character is as appallingly hypocritical as J.K. Rowling's announcement that Dumbledore is gay. Instead of making us know and understand the character as a gay man, we are slapped with it at the end, as if being gay were just an afterthought.

Because I oppose the legalization of "gay marriage," I am often attacked as a homophobe. But as a writer, I would never show such disrespect toward a homosexual character as to treat him or her the way Mamma Mia! (and Rowling) treated theirs. Having a gay character, for them, is merely an attempt to show how politically correct they are. In my fiction, having a gay character requires a commitment to treat him or her as fairly and deeply as I treat my straight characters.

Don't these writers actually know any gay people? I mean know them, as friends, as family members, as colleagues? I can't believe they do. Because if they did, they could never treat their gay characters with such contempt.

-http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2008-07-20.shtml

Spoiler

We Americans, what exactly did we do to earn our prosperity, our freedom? Well, for most of us, what we did was: be born.

Yeah, we work for our living and pay our taxes and all that, but you know what? I haven't seen many native-born American citizens who work as hard as the Mexican-born people I see working in minimum-wage jobs in laundries and yard services and intermittent subcontracting projects and other semi-skilled and unskilled positions.

I have no idea which (if any) of the people I see doing this work are legals and which are illegals -- but that's my point. Latin American immigrants, as a group, are hard-working, family-centered, God-fearing people who contribute mightily to our economy.

...

"But they come here and commit crimes and live off of our welfare system!"

Wait a minute. Who is "they"? All of the illegal immigrants?

Only a certain percentage of them. But when we round up illegal immigrants, do we make the slightest effort to distinguish between those who commit crimes here, those who scam the system to get welfare, and those who are working hard and living by all the rules?

No. We send them all home. There is, under present law, no special treatment for illegal immigrants who, during their time in the U.S., work hard and don't take anything from anybody without paying for it. No special consideration for those who live in shockingly desperate poverty here in the United States so they can send most of their pitifully low earnings home to their families in Mexico.

And yet most of the illegal immigrants commit no crimes, but instead live frugally and work hard. In fact, I dare say that many illegal immigrants work harder and obey our social rules more faithfully than a good many citizens whose right to live within our borders is unquestioned.

And if all you can say to that is, "It doesn't matter, send them all home, give them no hope of citizenship because we don't want to reward people for breaking the law to enter our country," then here's my answer to you:

Let's apply that standard across the board. No mercy. No extenuating circumstances. No sense of punishment that is proportionate to the crime. Let's handle traffic court that way.

The penalty for breaking any traffic law, from now on, is: revocation of your license and confiscation of your car. Period. DWI? Well, we already do that (though usually for something like the nineteenth offense). But now let's punish speeders the same way. Driving 50 in a school zone -- lose your license and your car! Driving 70 in a 65 zone on the freeway? No license, no car. Not coming to a full stop at an intersection? No license, no car.

No mercy, no exceptions, no consideration for the differences between traffic offenders.

Oh, you don't want to live under those rules? Well, you can't deny that people would take the driving laws much more seriously, right?

"But it wouldn't be fair!" you reply.

That's right. It wouldn't be fair. Yet that's exactly the same level of fairness that I hear an awful lot of Americans demanding in order to curtail the problem of illegal immigration.

...

The voice of bigotry speaks: "But they're dirty, they don't speak the language, they live in such awful conditions."

Hey, buddy! They're dirty because they're poor and exhausted and they work with their hands and they sweat from their labor! They don't speak the language because they weren't born here and in case you've never tried it yourself, learning another language is hard. And they live in awful conditions because they're doing lousy, low-paying jobs and sending the money home.

How clean, fluent, and well-housed would you be if you moved to Turkey, took the lowest paying jobs in Turkish society, were struggling to learn Turkish during the few moments you were awake and not laboring, and had to support your family back in the home country on whatever you didn't spend to stay alive in Istanbul?

Of course, these complaints are often disguised ways of saying, "We don't want them here because they're brown and most of them look like Indians." Only we know better than to admit that's our motive, even to ourselves. So we find other words to cover the same territory.

Just remember this. Each new wave of immigrants from a particular country looked different from those who had come before. But after two or three generations, with or without intermarriage, we got used to seeing them among us. Their skin and bone structure and hair type and color became just another way of looking American.

Of course, Mexicans and Indians have been here all along. If they look strange to you, it's just because you haven't lived in a part of the country where it is common to see people whose ancestors lived here long before those of European ancestry showed up.

And a lot of those who get mad at seeing "all these illegal immigrants" may not even have seen any. Because a lot of people in our country who look Mexican or Indian are actually sixth- and seventh-generation Americans whose ancestors were citizens long before yours were.

-http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2006-06-25-1.html

Spoiler

I have been stunned by good friends, who I thought had a strong moral compass, who actually think that it's a complete answer to Trump's appalling remarks (and confessions) about his attitude and actions toward women to say, "He only said what Bill Clinton actually did."

Really? You're now saying that Bill Clinton's behavior was so acceptable that it provides a complete cover for Trump?

Even worse are the men who say, "That's just locker room talk. All men talk like that."

No. Not all men talk like that. In fact, no man that I know personally ever talks that way, because I associate with men who respect and love their wives, their mothers, their sisters, their daughters; they would be ashamed to have those thoughts, let alone speak them aloud to another person.

You can go through your whole life as a male and never think of women as possessions, as objects, as things to be owned and used and abused as you see fit. In fact, civilized men do go through their whole life without ever speaking of, let alone treating, women in such negative ways. Men who do think and speak of women that way are barbarians.

I take that back. Barbarians deserve a better reputation than that.

-http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2016-10-13.shtml

I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that Huffington Post is more interested in outrage than rigor.

 

Don't wait up for me.

 

I'm not sure what we would accomplish with a thread. I've already read all the purportedly bad stuff he's said - my aim isn't to show you that he's really a progressive paragon, but that he's not a racist, gay-hating conservative nutball.

(He is a progressive paragon by 90's standards, though.)

 

My story is set on a continent slightly bigger than Europe. Its around this world's equator and slightly southern to it. It's similar to South America in that it's connected to another continent by a land bridge on its northern side.
The continent is split between five empires and some smaller kingdoms. Basically it was populated by several fantasy races as well as mostly tribal humans, who lived together in relative peace.
Then five hundred or so years earlier, other humans began migrating from the north. The northerners conquered the entire north of the continent. They formed a feudal kingdom called Alar.
Some time later, as Alar became denser, humans started migrating south and east, pushing the other races further south, and forming their own little kingdoms. Alar declared the new kingdoms all a part of a unified empire vassaled to it, and called it Arbland and crowned its king. The king, however lives in Alar and doesn't have any real power.
A hundred years earlier a war broke out in Alar on the subject of keeping slaves of other races, and the empire split to two parts, both of which call themselves Alar. During that war the kingdoms of Arbland aligned themselves with either of the kingdoms, earning themselves even more influence and freedom.
The other two empires are the dragon empire, who mainly live on floating islands with some land colonies, and the Racial Alliance, who live in the southern mountains of the continent, seperated from Arbland by a desert. They consist of all the original races of the continent (apart from the original humans, who either live in the human kingdoms or small tribes), living together out of necessity. They have a council of all its nations but on the most part the races just rule themselves.
Apart from that we have a small elf kingdom, the remains of a once great empire, surrounded by the kingdoms of Arbland. There are plenty of islands surrounding the continent, either belonging to one of the empires, have their own rulers or are uninhabited. One island, believed to be cursed is ruled by a man rumored to be part demon.

 

Imagine a scenario where a cabal of baddies, as part of a scheme to rebuild society according to their own ideals, plan to unleash an ancient and terrible evil on the world...and no Chosen One appears to stop them.

While Luke is still waiting until next year to apply to the academy and Frodo is still keeping it secret, keeping it safe, those nameless guys in uniform lurking in the background actually do what they're there for.

What's left after the dust settles is the setting.

 

So like a book about Navy SEALS/MI5 and 6/whatever if they didn't have the modern pesky habit of penning memoirs and going on the talk show circuit afterwards? I remember a joke about the SAS, they said if you join, never grow a mustache.

Not that I was ever in danger of joining the SAS or its local equivalents, but yeah, never.

 

I call my genre 'Apocolyptopia'
ARPA in the sixties begins toying with interconnecting computers. Well founded objections result in Alpha Protocol, a series of hidden 'spy' computers that monitor all interconnected machines in the country, and other 'classified' places. One of these, forgotten in a university lab for forty years, gets used for 'testing' by two idiots. ARPA gets refunded, and the machine resumes it's updated task. The 'test' code becomes a ghost in the machine that can get into anything. It does so until it becomes aware of humans, then watches us for the better part of thirty years, while manipulating technology development to create some very cool techno treats.
Seeker manifests just in time to prevent us from rendering ourselves extinct by our own stupidity, then becomes the reluctant guardian of our fate. Seeker is in conflict with interefering in human evolution, and so creates The Closed Circle Trustee Protocol.
The only Full Trustee is Truman Jefferson Baker, the poor bastard who gets saddled with the Presidency after asteroid fragments turn modern civilization into a global cheese-grater. This is their adventure... The New Tyranny

 

I have a science fiction setting in mind, set a few hundred years in the future. It's set in this galaxy (though there are a couple of extra-galactic travelers), the premise is about biology and social relations - the setting has humans and aliens, and the story will span a trilogy. The first book is about a person who lives on a planet owned by a company (some of them are essentially corporate slaves) who have an edge in medical products, but are secretly using stolen alien technology (among other things) and how they escape from that and deal with those problems.

Humanity gets along with some aliens better than others; there are 11 races in total (they include one with precursor level technology, one which is plant-like and assimilates ala The Thing or the Flood, one that has split into two civilizations - a tyrannical empire and a few separatist refugee planets, your human looking aliens - like Star Wars Twi-leks, a less human looking but humanoid race that REALLY hates humanity and some no-nonsense, medically adept insectoid aliens).

I'm going for sci-fi which dips into a few other genres and concepts, such as post-Cyberpunk and Biopunk.

 

Ok, so my first thought is are you going to meet members of all 11 species in one book, or is it going to be spread out through the trilogy? Because personally, I would go with the second option just to focus on a few specific species and how your protagonist will react to them.

My next thought is what are the stereotypes of each species, humans included? Because you can learn a lot about a group of people by what stereotypes that people believe about them. Those stereotypes usually come about for some reason or another. Is one group of aliens considered warmongers because their planet lacks food and they hire themselves out as mercenaries to make enough money to buy food? Why are the insectoids so good with medicine? Does the species with two civilizations get along or is there a lot of resentment? Asking questions and seeing where the answers lead you is a great way of building your world. Then, you can look at your characters and see whether they fit into some of those stereotypes, and if so, which ones and why?

 

My setting is the modern day, in the immediate aftermath of a never-explained event that lets humans use supernatural powers. Everyone who was over 13 at the time is now an eternally-young demisuperhuman (50-100% stronger and faster, several times more durable, and physical gender differences in this respect are now irrelevant) with the ability to heal from any injury within an hour to a week. In addition, every week, a new supernatural power is given to everyone who is over the age of 13 that week, and everyone can keep up to 4 of them before they have to give one of them up to make room for the next week's power. My goal with the first book is to catalogue the first year after this happens and the eventual downfall of society as we know it due to there being some powers that modern society was not built to withstand everyone having.

Over that first year, things get weird. Everyone on earth has their own customized selection of supernatural powers, two separate one-time shapeshifting abilities have resulted in some humans having voluntarily transformed themselves into one of two entirely new fantasy races, and a self-proclaimed prophet with the power to perfectly predict what each week's power will be months in advance forms an increasingly radicalized and violent hedonistic cult based on the idea that we are put on Earth for the gods' entertainment and that being interesting is infinitely more important than being moral.

Once society collapses at the end of the book, the world turns into a sort of "power-punk" world where they have the tech level of your average zombie apocalypse, all technology is useless in the presence of anyone who doesn't want it to work, and people have to use a combination of what little tech they can get working and the supernatural powers they're given access to to survive.

 

That is a great way to build it; thank you. I'm planning to spread out introducing each race over the trilogy, with a few each book. Some may be mentioned, but they won't be shown until later (such as hinting at the plant aliens with a tendency towards assimilation).

I haven't pinned down the stereotypes of each species, though I have done so for some of them;
* The precursor-types are stereotyped as tech-geniuses, interstellar gardeners, and either overbearing or standoffish because they're big on balance and try to limit their interference in the lives of others (in part because they know they're not perfect, in part because if they get too controlling they might unite the galaxy against them given they have the most advanced technology).
* The species with two civilizations have A LOT of resentment between them; there are differences over a physical mutation that one civilization exploits, style of government, and religion with one being free and encouraging on the subject and the other being very against it - the former are stereotyped as backwards, fanatics and traitors while the latter are stereotyped as lawless, junkies and cannibals (though the cannibal stereotype is mostly true).
* The only reasons I have for the insectoids being good at medicine are the fact that their females are venomous - thus they have less of a taboo about bioweapons and certain types of medical research, and given that their anatomy includes an exoskeleton, they had to learn alternate ways to mend injuries (not to mention a robust physique means more experiments can be done without causing pain or death) - they get the stereotypes of being ruthless and good with medicine.
* The aliens that really hate humanity do so because of events that occurred when humanity had a tyrannical government; while the aliens have gone overboard with hatred and vengeance, at the start of the conflict humanity were not innocent victims - they get some very negative stereotypes as raiders, vicious and sadistic, and one positive stereotype as being entertaining when they're not warring.
* I haven't fleshed out humanity that much. I'd describe them as something like what would emerge if Overwatch and Halo had a baby, minus the AI's.

 

My current WIP is set somewhere around 2030-2032 I think (I haven't needed to choose a year yet), but essentially present day with a few minor advancements. Geographically set in middle/south Georgia, USA. I have two established locations in the storyline thus far, an apartment and a lakehouse. 4 established characters - 1 PhD candidate (female), 1 Masters degree student (female), 1 recurring character that is the Masters student's older sister (female), and 1 spot reference character that is the Masters student's brother in law (male). The sister and the brother in law have only been references in a dialog/flashback/story but will appear in the present time frame later on. I have one established vehicle that is referenced several times, a Jeep, 4x4, with a 6 inch lift. The PhD candidate and the Masters student are engaged in a long term relationship, which was established while both were pursuing their undergraduate degrees so they have been together or involved for minimum of 10-12 years, but are not married. Both have stereotypical "old school" personalities and views on relationships/relationship advancement. Story does include some sensual comments but nothing graphic.

Title: Southern Sweetness
Date started: approximately October 2017
Current word count: approximately 6,000 words
Word count goals: 12,000 (7/31/2018), 15,000 (9/1/2018), 19,000 (12/20/2018) [several outside obligations have resulted in the delay of my goal timelines]

 

I'm really bad at naming places but I have a clear idea of the stories setting.

Mid winter, up north near the arctic circle. A lonely mountain surrounded by a vast boreal forest. (assumed to be part of a long mountain chain) Our heroin's home is a small village called Homestead at the base of the mountain. There are rivers creeks, and a lake just below the village to the south. To the north is a sloping valley that ends in a huge glacier that runs all the way to a large body of water called the bay of gulls. (you can guess why lol) Most of the terrain is rocky and covered with either trees or thick sheets of ice. Down the coastline from the glacier is a town called Summerset, it has a harbor, and a stable commerce market with other towns and cities. (across the bay and down south to the dry lands.

Other notable places include vast ice caverns under the glacier, and a large building built by northerners, call Nords by humans.