Heracles inexpectatus

[landingtree]

Day's writing productivity: working out what kind of fish the protagonist is being given. Yesterday's writing productivity: working out that the other protagonist's village mainly grows rye. Grand strides? Grand strides.

Mainly, though: New Zealand was apparently once home to a three foot tall parrot.

Comments

[leaflemming]

Why do they grow anything at all? Why are they not hunter-gatherers? I am increasingly puzzled over the fact that humans developed agriculture, when 1) it seems to have been a harsher and far less healthy life, and 2) getting wild grains to become useful crops was a multi-generational project that no one could have known in advance would work. (Potatoes are nightshades! Who decided to cook them for a bit and eat them on the offchance it would be survivable? Were they using vounteers? HOW MANY TIMES DID THEY HAVE TO TRY TO GET IT RIGHT?)

Granted, we developed it in multiple places independently, so there's an implication that there was some sort of historical imperative operating. But even so, I'm starting to see the default presence of farming in nearly all fantasy worlds as a systemic genre failure. If you were operating in a universe where any sort of prescience or magical insight was available, you wouldn't go down this road.

[landingtree]

a) I don't know very much about the origins of agriculture, or what theories are currently standing about that. And I take it to be a hard problem! But

b) I have the instinct that you've set the problem in its hardest form with getting wild grains to become useful crops was a multi-generational project that no one could have known in advance would work. My instinct is to doubt that anyone had agriculture in mind as a goal when they started the processes that lead them to agriculture. Many of those steps would have to have been followed as by-products of previously existing life modes before anyone could have the thought, 'Hey, we could make a system out of this, let's test these nightshades on people we dislike.' I take this to mean that hunter-gatherer life has some tendency to produce the kind of accidents which can result in agriculture. (Not that this is an answer, this just shifts the field of my version of the question!) However,

c) I take it that one of the assumptions of hunter-gathering is mobility; that people had to roam over a fairly large range except in conditions of exceptional land productivity. (Now I feel as though I should check that further). But when your land is draped in an apparently-mystical shroud of cobweb which drains vitality out of humans preferentially, followed by other large mammals, followed by everything else in the ecosystem and possibly the structure of reality as well, then there's an incentive toward concentrating into larger groups and maintaining the long-term fertility of a comparatively small area of land.

(What I need to research more is what actual concentration of humans this would result in based on different parameters of how the cobweb might behave. For the moment I am fudging this, though, which is why protagonist's village is a village).

[landingtree]

It was interesting when I was thinking about grains, though, how much I thought of wheat as 'unmarked standard grain', whereas when I thought about corn my instinct was, 'That's too specifically tied to the Americas.' Rice is the other staple that seems most neutral to me, presumably because I eat so much of it and haven't read anything about the history of rice recently. I do not think any of this has much to do with the nature of the grains. I should be suspicious whenever I catch myself writing wheat fields or equivalent.

[leaflemming]

Yeah, that wasn't a clearly phrased argument -- the point about modified strains of staple grains was mostly there just because it's been on my mind. (HOW DID THEY DO IT? WHY DID THEY DO IT?) In terms of world-building, it's the other thing I'd stress: agriculture appears to have led to reduced height, health, and life expectancy. Also a range of ecological problems. So in the world I've been tinkering with for the "Aotearoa without extinctions" thread of my possibly-one-day-to-be-finished novel, it presents as a path they wouldn't obviously have a reason to take -- since they have omniscients wandering around in the population from well before the end of the ice age. And it seems to me this constraint would apply to a lot of extant fantasy worlds if they were thought through a little more.

As to the mobility requirements of hunter-gatherers: more research needed on this, but it's going to have to do with population density, and in my world this has been kept deliberately low by real world standards. (As a means of preserving ecological richness, which is considered to be in the long term interests of everyone, as well as being valued in its own right). As a general point, I think the range of your average hunter-gatherer in our own history didn't have to be that large.

[landingtree]

-- since they have omniscients wandering around in the population from well before the end of the ice age. And it seems to me this constraint would apply to a lot of extant fantasy worlds if they were thought through a little more.

Yeah, that's interesting -- especially in fantasy with gods. (The Thessaly books have gods who aren't omniscient and learn as they go, but it isn't something I've seen terribly much of. A story I started a few years ago has gods in it who have this problem, they embody social baselines which now look very odd to me, and there is no explanation except 'It seemed resonant at the time'. At which point the thing to do is probably lean into the oddness while complicating it around the edges).


I don't think I've ever (before now, possibly) seen fantasy where the result of having precognition is 'Society starts with all the possible fruits of human learning already available.' I like how that works in the bit of that thread of your story I've read so far. I have questions! but I will wait and see what happens instead of asking them.


I will think about hunter-gathering, while trying to keep on the 'writing something' side of the line and not fall over into 'Trying to devise a whole world, help, help.'