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Incongruous sci-fi occupations
There's something I forgot to say in my earlier post talking about AUs, which specifically applies to the difference between fanfic AUs and original fiction of whatever stripe. Fanfic AUs throw a really wonderful element of character incongruity into the mix. That is, you end up with space adventures or epic fantasy or rom-coms in which the characters are really not the type of people who tend to be in those kinds of stories. And that's wonderful! I think that's honestly one of the things I love most about AUs, and it's something that I keep making a mental note to apply as much as possible to my original fiction. It's one of the reasons, I think, that fanfic AUs can be so much livelier and more original-feeling than a lot of published genre fiction -- because, when you go to create a fantasy or urban fantasy or space opera or whatever from the ground up, it's really hard to think outside the box and not go straight to the fresh-faced farm boy and tomboyish princess in disguise, or whatever. Your character may (hopefully will) eventually evolve beyond the stereotype, but it's difficult not to do that in the initial planning stages without even thinking about it.
Although I've thought about this before, what got me thinking about it today was answering older comments on my "White Collar IN SPACE!" AU, and one of the comments was speculating on Elizabeth's role in the AU: she could be an event planner for spaceship galas! And I thought, wow, how cool and original is that? I've read a ton of sci-fi, but I've never seen anything like that. I'm not sure if I would read a contemporary novel about an event planner, but I would totally read a novel about a space event planner. (Or write one!)
But you get that a lot in fanfic AUs, because you start off with a cast of characters who are typical cop-show characters, or sci-fi spaceship show characters ... and THEN you stick them into a whole different genre, so suddenly they are space explorer types running a coffee shop, or cop-show characters as the police force in a fantasy land. I wish there was more of that kind of thing in original fiction, though you do get some genre crossover (murder mysteries in a space setting, for example).
Anyway, since I'm still working out my slate of things to write in 2014 - help me brainstorm, flist! Spaceship marines, doctors, and emotionally constipated smugglers are a dime a dozen in sci-fi. One of the things I really loved about Zenna Henderson's 1960s SF books and short stories is that she often wrote about stay-at-home moms and kids, which is something you hardly ever saw in sci-fi of that era. What else don't you see in sci-fi or fantasy? What would you like to see? Throw ideas at me -- what are some occupations/social roles you don't really ever see in spec fic? (Space event planner!) On the flip side, it'd also be interesting to hear which occupations/character types are so common in sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy that you're getting tired of them! (Space marines, anyone?) Flist: go! :D
Although I've thought about this before, what got me thinking about it today was answering older comments on my "White Collar IN SPACE!" AU, and one of the comments was speculating on Elizabeth's role in the AU: she could be an event planner for spaceship galas! And I thought, wow, how cool and original is that? I've read a ton of sci-fi, but I've never seen anything like that. I'm not sure if I would read a contemporary novel about an event planner, but I would totally read a novel about a space event planner. (Or write one!)
But you get that a lot in fanfic AUs, because you start off with a cast of characters who are typical cop-show characters, or sci-fi spaceship show characters ... and THEN you stick them into a whole different genre, so suddenly they are space explorer types running a coffee shop, or cop-show characters as the police force in a fantasy land. I wish there was more of that kind of thing in original fiction, though you do get some genre crossover (murder mysteries in a space setting, for example).
Anyway, since I'm still working out my slate of things to write in 2014 - help me brainstorm, flist! Spaceship marines, doctors, and emotionally constipated smugglers are a dime a dozen in sci-fi. One of the things I really loved about Zenna Henderson's 1960s SF books and short stories is that she often wrote about stay-at-home moms and kids, which is something you hardly ever saw in sci-fi of that era. What else don't you see in sci-fi or fantasy? What would you like to see? Throw ideas at me -- what are some occupations/social roles you don't really ever see in spec fic? (Space event planner!) On the flip side, it'd also be interesting to hear which occupations/character types are so common in sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy that you're getting tired of them! (Space marines, anyone?) Flist: go! :D
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In general, I think that examining the infrastructure of a world would probably yield some really interesting roles. I don't know how – okay, I was going to say I don't know how some of them would support actual plot work, but really, I think using those characters would open up a whole bunch of new ways to structure arcs. Like, one thing I just thought of was, what if you had a fantasy world with no way to quickly send information back and forth, and you had the messenger as the POV character? Being continually sent away on the eve of major engagements in the war, or riding ahead of the chaos in the court as the king mobilizes all of his vassals. It'd make it hard to do a traditional epic fantasy; the messenger is on the road trying to get back to the castle to raise reinforcements while the battle is being joined, half the time. But it would open up a really neat opportunity to try to tell the epic story around the edges of a closer, personal one.
Rachel Swirsky wrote a story – The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window – from the perspective of a being that got summoned at, you know, the climaxes of things. Like you'd usually see a being of great power being summoned to win a war, or whatever. And that being's awareness was these little snippets of often contextless climactic action.
One of the things I actually liked about the Captain America movie (which I otherwise... did not respond well to) was that it had the war story of the war in the support ranks. (Of course, it played it like that was War Lite, and Not Worthy, which I found deeply annoying.)
Or, I have an idea rumbling around the back of my head about a little enclave at some point post-Zombie-apocalypse, where one of the highest statuses is that of entertainer, because right at the beginning someone looked around the ragtag group of survivors and did all the expected "Okay, you go on scavenging parties, you set up the gardens, you train people as guards", but also singled out a few people who could play musical instruments, who were good at conflict resolution, etc. and went "You guys, keep people sane. Make an art of it." And suddenly, when there's no electric lighting and rationed fuel for lanterns and no TV, no internet, etc, if there hadn't been planned entertainment and such to take people's minds off things until they could adjust, people would have just lost it.
So, yes. Support types. I am a big fan of seeing support types appear in fiction.
...also, not that uncommon, but librarians. I do not think I can get enough librarian specfic.
Might also be cool to look at social facilitator roles, or even make some up. Like, American culture really doesn't preserve the role of a matchmaker, but what if you had that general role for all sorts of different interpersonal connections? From my experience in tech, there's a certain prevalence of recruiters who find people and do pre-interviews for corporations, but that's not ubiquitous. What if there was a social role which was basically "This company/entity/branch of civil service/etc needs someone to fill X position; the standard process is to provide a facilitator with a complete analysis of the need, and the facilitator will find someone to fill it and conduct all the interviews and the process of hiring"? You'd have a character who knew tons of people, most likely, and was very good at looking at a person and figuring out how they'd work with others, how they'd function in different environments, their strengths, their skills, their weaknesses.
Let's see... my brother was talking, a bit ago, about how... okay, I'm just going to link to his post because he phrases it better than I can paraphrase it. But to quote a representative sample: [Law & Order is one of the most important police procedurals ever made, if only because it doesn’t use the easy conceit that every case ends with an arrest and the trial is just a footnote. [...] But while the show tells us that two groups represent the people in our criminal justice system — “the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders” — hardly anything gets said about the lawmakers who decide what’s a crime in the first place.]
...anyway. I've just been rambling off scattered ideas, but now you've got me thinking about how interesting it would be to, as an exercise, worldbuild two worlds in different genres, work out casts for each and the basic situational groundwork of plot – and then switch the casts, AU style, and write both. I feel like this would also be a really cool group challenge: write up world specs, write up character notes, and then randomize between x entrants and post all the results at the end.
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Or, I have an idea rumbling around the back of my head about a little enclave at some point post-Zombie-apocalypse, where one of the highest statuses is that of entertainer, because right at the beginning someone looked around the ragtag group of survivors and did all the expected "Okay, you go on scavenging parties, you set up the gardens, you train people as guards", but also singled out a few people who could play musical instruments, who were good at conflict resolution, etc. and went "You guys, keep people sane. Make an art of it." And suddenly, when there's no electric lighting and rationed fuel for lanterns and no TV, no internet, etc, if there hadn't been planned entertainment and such to take people's minds off things until they could adjust, people would have just lost it.
... heeee, this is one of my unwritten novel ideas as well! Although in my case it was based off the idea of a traveling post-apocalyptic theater troupe who perform stories that they remember from their (pre-apocalyptic) youth -- so, they're doing performances of Star Wars and Marvel comics and episodes of old sitcoms and whatever else they can remember well enough to put in a show. (The general concept is basically "Slings & Arrows" in a post-apocalyptic setting, with more SF geekery.)
Anyway, these are fabulous ideas, and now I really like the idea of coming up with a cast and then genre-switching it. You don't necessarily even need to do it collaboratively; you could conceive of a rather standard (say) space-opera cast and then genre-switch them into fantasyland and get something absolutely fascinating, I think!
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I don't actually see any space cops, either, unless they're cameo appearances. (Our Heroes are in a jam, and "station security" is looking for them because they've been set up, etc.) What would be the challenges of enforcing law on a tight-knit, resource-limited community such as a ship, or a space station where there's an enormous transient population (possibly coming from places with very different legal systems!) passing through?
Not many fashion designers or interior decorators seem to be in space, either! Yet people aren't going to stop having a sense of style, or wanting luxury items; and attractive design is arguably even more important in an environment that people are going to spend large amounts of time confined inside of. Somebody has to invent the fashions of the future (and manufacture them, and advertise them), and somebody has to figure out what goes into space ships and space stations and other places where gravity doesn't always apply (and thus something as 'simple' as "beds go in the bedroom" has to be reconsidered) and the temperature conditions, or user demands, could be extreme.
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Odo is awesome and sexy and should be in every episode ever! Even if Homestuck fandom has forever made buckets a source of hilarity to me, and thus any mention of his sleeping arrangements always results in me snorting tea up my nose due to giggling. :D
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I really do think that station security would make an EXCELLENT basis for a series or just a "crime in outer space" novel!
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One occupation/profession I can't place in many space operas is sports--you'd think there'd be more shipwide sports, with all those long sedentary hours between stars.
Cooks. There should be more cooks in space. And spaceship tow truck pilots. And fishermen. And librarians.
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I read both this post and your previous one about AU's, and I *love* your AU thoughts. I find them particularly fascinating because while I started on my love of AU's for the same reasons you said you frequently AU (taking characters completely out of their established settings and putting them somewhere to see how they fit), you've made me realize how my approach has changed over various fandoms and years. I started my love of AU's with Criminal Minds, a procedural comparable to your description of White Collar (which I also watch and agree with you that it's immensely AU-able) where you take these characters with their core personalities and occupations and put them into something *far* outside their canon setting. I also really love putting them into different alignments - what happens when you make a good guy go bad, or a bad guy one of our heroes' strongest allies? I think certain settings lend themselves to that type of AU; dystopias or noir or darker space AU's along the lines of Battlestar Galactica.
And I also started thinking about which shows I feel are more AU-able. Because I can be deeply in love with a show (say, Battlestar Galactica) and never, ever need or want to put it into an AU setting. Sometimes, like you say, it's the fact that BSG is so tied to its post-apocalyptic setting that taking it out just cheapens it and doesn't do anything to develop the characters. But I feel the same way about Harry Potter - I can see where an AU could be fascinating and highlight a lot of things about the series, I just don't *need* to AU it. And conversely, there are shows I love (the Hour, Mad Men, Peaky Blinders) that owe so much to their setting, but that I can't help but wanting different AU's for. I feel that with shows like that, the challenge is to take these strong, brilliant characters out of their time period, and keep them completely themselves while exploring this new setting.
Bringing this back to SF and space AU's, I think the one that I'm just sick to death of is Starfleet and Jedi AU's. Trek and Star Wars have been around for so long that they've been done so often, and not always done well. I don't think a Starfleet or Jedi AU really adds much to a canon. Whereas I'd love to see more Vorkosigan AU's - plunk Don Draper or Harry Potter down on Barrayar and see what happens. Or a Pacific Rim AU, give me *all* the Jaeger-pilot fic in the WORLD.
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Pacific Rim REALLY lends itself to AUs/fusions, I think. :D I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be a fandom like His Dark Materials, where almost every other fandom does a fusion with the basic canon concept at some point.
And yeah, some kinds of AUs are really overdone! I also think, for me at least, that certain canons suggest certain kinds of AUs -- for example, with White Collar, I've been mostly drawn to AUs that still take place in our world but have certain other elements (superheroes, psychic powers, urban fantasy) and that seems to be mostly what there is in the fandom, too; AUs that transplant them wholesale into another setting are relatively rare (not that they don't exist - I've even written a couple). Whereas Stargate fandom was full of AUs set in other times/places/settings. Sometimes I think it probably has to do with canon; sometimes maybe it's just what the fandom is generally into (sort of like the way that some fandoms are dominated by certain pairings and others aren't).
ETA: Oh, I forgot to comment on the "changing alignments" idea, because that's something that sounds really fascinating and yet I rarely see it in my canons (Stargate a little bit, I guess). I think you're right that this works best in dystopia/noir settings and most of my fandoms have been based on generally fluffier canons, where there's not so much potential for characters to "slip" their canonical alignments like you get in darker canons where there's more side-switching anyway. (I like darker stuff, I just don't really seem to fan on it in the same way.)
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But really, I think there's something immensely easy about taking the basic conceit of HDM (the other half of your soul takes animal form) and applying it to a world very different from Pullman's Victorianesque/steampunk London. As a tool for characterization, it's top notch - you can tell a good daemonverse from a bad one in one fell swoop by whether or not you agree with the choice of daemon. It's so common for me to back-button out of a daemonverse story because the main character's daemon is just "wrong".
IRT which AU's lend themselves to canons - YES, absolutely. I think the crowner for White Collar AU has to be
Alignment-Switching: Not to self-rec or anything, but I've written two stories that explore that potential. One is a Criminal Minds "turn left" story, which changes the good-guy profilers to various types of serial killers and/or victims; and the other is The Hour done 1984-style, which takes three of the characters and parallels them to Big Brother, O'Brien, and Winston. And I think the stories in this vein that inspire me the most do the same thing - keep the characters' personalities, but make that one left turn down the wrong path or take that one flaw and blow it up. I definitely ping on the darker stuff in those canons that lend themselves to it.
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And thank you!
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