Weaving the Web, 3: Worldbuilding
In my last post on this subject, I rambled in general terms about the storytelling opportunities the novel offers, as opposed to the TV series itself. This post is much more specific (and spoilery), because it’s about the really interesting and fun opportunity: worldbuilding.
Within the Stargate franchise, this got incredibly short shrift. I don’t actually have too much of an issue (in this case) with the trope of the monocultural world: my take on most of the planetary cultures is that the Goa’uld slave worlds were mostly started from a single ‘seeder’ group, abductees from a specific geographic location and time in history. Under Goa’uld domination, a given colony isn’t free to expand naturally, so most worlds of this type will have small, homogeneous populations, centred in the area close to the Stargate (unless there’s a very good reason for them to have relocated elsewhere).
This falls apart for the advanced cultures, the ones independent of the Goa’uld, which tend to fall into the trope of the Planet of the Funny Hats. Those are annoying as hell, even given the constraints of screen time and production time.
What annoys me in a big way isn’t the monocultural world: it’s the whitewashed galaxy. After a few attempts in S1 to experiment with multiculturalism (mostly ham-handed if not just plain offensive), the show retreated to the Mediterranean and then headed straight to Europe for its root cultures, retconning to allow them to tap later eras in history (which allowed them to go whole hog Caucasian). After ‘Demons’, attempts to get away from a medieval Europe root culture pretty much vanish.
[Contains Spoilers through Chapter Three]
So my first step in worldbuilding was, guess what, to look elsewhere! I have a lovely book titled ‘Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World’, which would have made a fine resource for the show’s writers if they’d gone looking for ideas of where, other than Europe, you can look for relatively advanced cultures prior to 800 AD. There are a lot of them, and they’re interesting and complex, and (best of all), it’s mostly unploughed territory.
Anyone who’s read as far as chapter 3 of Spider's Web knows by now that the team is dealing with two different colonies and two different ethnic groups. I knew going in that I needed two, and I wanted them both to be, in a word, kick-ass. One needed to be a reasonable root culture for handling the complex administration of a multiplanetary economy: I needed them to have agriculture, animal husbandry, military structure, manufacturing, and trade. The other needed to be on a comparable level (so I wouldn’t have one supposedly ‘superior’ group and one supposedly ‘inferior’), and had to be a reasonable source culture for the Goa’uld to go looking for slave labour for mining. And both groups had to be tough.
For group #1, I never really considered anything other than Africa: I just needed to look through the available cultures (first getting away from the Nile valley), and figure out which ones were thriving at the right level within my target period. There are several - Ethiopia and Zimbabwe for starters - but I settled pretty early on sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the ancient kingdoms of Ghana and its successors, Mali and Songhay. Modern-day Ghana is named after the ancient kingdom, although it’s actually in a slightly different location. At its height, it epitomized the non-whitewashed world view - literally, they had cities when my own ancestors had mud huts. And that was even before Islam brought them a fresh wave of science and scholarship.
Group #2 is Korean. I already knew a bit about both cultures when I started researching, but I knew far less about ancient Korea, and they make really, really fascinating reading! When I found myself thinking “These people could get along with Jack really well, given a chance”, I knew I had my second group. I’d narrowed down my target era based on the choice of Ghana/Mali/Songhay, and ancient Korea - Goguryo - had the mountains and miners I needed at the right point in history. Both cultures had several elements in common that I found useful, some of which I'm not mentioning right at the moment, because spoilers.
And Ghanaian mythology has a very, very interesting story about a nine-headed serpent demon that required sacrifice of beautiful young women.
One of the biggest gems that the early research turned up was the fact that the descendents of that culture still have, to this day, a full-blown and still functioning bardic caste, the griots. (And yes, there’s still a linguistic battle over whether the word is indigenous - in spite of a complete lack of plausible cognates in the language of the European explorers - because hey, why should they have their own word for a key role in their own culture?) That opened up a nice shiny path for Daniel to gallop down, which helped, because I’d been really nervous about writing Daniel.
Of course, research is fun. I love research. But OMG . . . worldbuilding is hard. Just the groundwork is massive, and it was promptly topped with a layer of anxiety over how much (or how little) to use in the story itself. Data dumps can be so damned seductive, and when it’s data that you’ve had to build yourself out of spare parts and sweat, the seduction is even more intense. I had two worlds to build, which intersect to some degree, but they still had to be built separately so that the intersection could then be built (if that makes sense).
On the other hand, the heavy lifting of double worldbuilding did at least distract me - for a while - from the scariest aspect of the project . . .
. . . I’d committed myself to two entire planets of OCs.
Non-Caucasian OCs.
I’m a middle-class white chick.
Does anyone else here remember RaceFail 2009?
This has gotten quite long enough for a single post, so I'll take a break here. More nattering later!
Within the Stargate franchise, this got incredibly short shrift. I don’t actually have too much of an issue (in this case) with the trope of the monocultural world: my take on most of the planetary cultures is that the Goa’uld slave worlds were mostly started from a single ‘seeder’ group, abductees from a specific geographic location and time in history. Under Goa’uld domination, a given colony isn’t free to expand naturally, so most worlds of this type will have small, homogeneous populations, centred in the area close to the Stargate (unless there’s a very good reason for them to have relocated elsewhere).
This falls apart for the advanced cultures, the ones independent of the Goa’uld, which tend to fall into the trope of the Planet of the Funny Hats. Those are annoying as hell, even given the constraints of screen time and production time.
What annoys me in a big way isn’t the monocultural world: it’s the whitewashed galaxy. After a few attempts in S1 to experiment with multiculturalism (mostly ham-handed if not just plain offensive), the show retreated to the Mediterranean and then headed straight to Europe for its root cultures, retconning to allow them to tap later eras in history (which allowed them to go whole hog Caucasian). After ‘Demons’, attempts to get away from a medieval Europe root culture pretty much vanish.
[Contains Spoilers through Chapter Three]
So my first step in worldbuilding was, guess what, to look elsewhere! I have a lovely book titled ‘Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World’, which would have made a fine resource for the show’s writers if they’d gone looking for ideas of where, other than Europe, you can look for relatively advanced cultures prior to 800 AD. There are a lot of them, and they’re interesting and complex, and (best of all), it’s mostly unploughed territory.
Anyone who’s read as far as chapter 3 of Spider's Web knows by now that the team is dealing with two different colonies and two different ethnic groups. I knew going in that I needed two, and I wanted them both to be, in a word, kick-ass. One needed to be a reasonable root culture for handling the complex administration of a multiplanetary economy: I needed them to have agriculture, animal husbandry, military structure, manufacturing, and trade. The other needed to be on a comparable level (so I wouldn’t have one supposedly ‘superior’ group and one supposedly ‘inferior’), and had to be a reasonable source culture for the Goa’uld to go looking for slave labour for mining. And both groups had to be tough.
For group #1, I never really considered anything other than Africa: I just needed to look through the available cultures (first getting away from the Nile valley), and figure out which ones were thriving at the right level within my target period. There are several - Ethiopia and Zimbabwe for starters - but I settled pretty early on sub-Saharan Africa, specifically the ancient kingdoms of Ghana and its successors, Mali and Songhay. Modern-day Ghana is named after the ancient kingdom, although it’s actually in a slightly different location. At its height, it epitomized the non-whitewashed world view - literally, they had cities when my own ancestors had mud huts. And that was even before Islam brought them a fresh wave of science and scholarship.
Group #2 is Korean. I already knew a bit about both cultures when I started researching, but I knew far less about ancient Korea, and they make really, really fascinating reading! When I found myself thinking “These people could get along with Jack really well, given a chance”, I knew I had my second group. I’d narrowed down my target era based on the choice of Ghana/Mali/Songhay, and ancient Korea - Goguryo - had the mountains and miners I needed at the right point in history. Both cultures had several elements in common that I found useful, some of which I'm not mentioning right at the moment, because spoilers.
And Ghanaian mythology has a very, very interesting story about a nine-headed serpent demon that required sacrifice of beautiful young women.
One of the biggest gems that the early research turned up was the fact that the descendents of that culture still have, to this day, a full-blown and still functioning bardic caste, the griots. (And yes, there’s still a linguistic battle over whether the word is indigenous - in spite of a complete lack of plausible cognates in the language of the European explorers - because hey, why should they have their own word for a key role in their own culture?) That opened up a nice shiny path for Daniel to gallop down, which helped, because I’d been really nervous about writing Daniel.
Of course, research is fun. I love research. But OMG . . . worldbuilding is hard. Just the groundwork is massive, and it was promptly topped with a layer of anxiety over how much (or how little) to use in the story itself. Data dumps can be so damned seductive, and when it’s data that you’ve had to build yourself out of spare parts and sweat, the seduction is even more intense. I had two worlds to build, which intersect to some degree, but they still had to be built separately so that the intersection could then be built (if that makes sense).
On the other hand, the heavy lifting of double worldbuilding did at least distract me - for a while - from the scariest aspect of the project . . .
. . . I’d committed myself to two entire planets of OCs.
Non-Caucasian OCs.
I’m a middle-class white chick.
Does anyone else here remember RaceFail 2009?
This has gotten quite long enough for a single post, so I'll take a break here. More nattering later!