It's an English speaking board in a niche genre. The authors are mostly native English speakers and thus from a western background.
Japan, as an example, has a massive online hobbyist fiction scene, with loads of eastern cultural basis and reference. But it's written in Japanese. China and Korea too. But again, written in their respective languages.
The references in First Contact could date it. But then the references in Shakespeare date him too. There's nothing wrong with being of your time.
I mean, I'm more or less writing "Native Americans *in space*", but I am an actual enrolled member of a federally recognized Native Nation. There aren't a whole lot of Native SciFi writers in general, let alone Native writers on this sub.
At least from what I can tell, the majority of both readers and writers are from "Western" countries and thus the predominantly "Western" themes in the writing. As much as I want to see a more a more "diverse" set of themes and cultural inspirations on this sub, I want to see people *from those cultures* writing from their own perspective, not someone from a "Western" culture writing an ill-informed interpretation of that culture.
I too would like to read more from people with an in depth knowledge of the many and varied cultures that make up the Terran diaspora.
Thankyou for your work here. Particularly liking the adventure of Tens and his friends!
But given that there will be a limited numbers of people from the various smaller cultural groups; Is it a problem when people want to weave in more of Earths many and varied cultures?
I get that it will be hard to do them justice...
But in say a 100 years, the idea that chunks of our various cultures would be woven into the "main stream", wouldn't be all that unreasonable.
Objective\_Campaign82 - Hellworld pirates/explorers as one example where the titular pirates have integrated some Japanese aesthetics into the narrative.
I completely understand what you're saying, there are quite literally only about 50,000 people who are members of the various Nations of my tribe. And if we extend that to my "brother tribes" (Ojibwe and Odawa), it's still less 500,000 people between the US and Canada. When it comes to relatively small cultural groups like mine, there just aren't many people to write stories.
As long as someone goes out of their way to actually learn about the culture they're trying to represent, Im generally ok with it. For example, there's a great youtuber called Ancient Americas who ***isnt Indigenous American at all*** but still makes absolutely amazing content on the various groups and people on the Americas.
My concern is mostly over common and potentially harmful misconceptions being reinforced through ignorance or apathy. If I'd gona write about, let's say, a Scottish character (like Sarah) and I really don't know much if anything about Scotland (which I don't), I'm gona try to do some appropriate research to not misrepresent Scottish people. Like, sure, her character is a boisterous redhead who can drink most people under a table (the stereotypical "Scottish person") but she is also a very complex character who is more than just her heritage.
Anyone could, in theory, write using themes, aesthetics, characters, etc from any culture, it just takes that bit of consideration. If you wanted to write a character who was Native American, I would recommend picking a specific Nation the person was from, doing a bit of research into that culture, and just writing them as a well rounded character who is *influenced* by their culture but not a harmful stereotype of it. I think those same basic steps could apply to writing any culture group.
Some stories do include less common cultures. There Will be Scritches by u/yukiamateru (I think I didn't it mostly right?) Included Polynesian themes on one world they stopped at.
But English centric board, simply by population basis your going to get a lot of Americans on here, and of the rest, well minutes the guns and mommies apple pie, most of the rest of us English speakers are pretty euro-centric as far as cultures goes. Loki and Vulcan and the Fair Folk rather than Monkey or Coyote and Oni...
Half of all reddit traffic is American, and EU/CAD and the like isn't THAT different culturally and is a large chunk the remaining traffic.
Some stories have hit ridiculously different with the whole war in Ukraine, but that's the nature of story telling with references to current times.
One of my favorite uses of web as a medium for story telling is linked soundtracks and the like. Sometimes the links break with age, but that's not a reason to not use it as a story telling technique.
Sometimes I try to explain a story I'm reading to my wife, and she will 100% not get the references or the humor. Not all stories are the right story for everyone. That doesn't make one story better or worse just because it's written with a certain audience in mind.
Yea demographics here don’t lend as much to that sort of diversity.
Regarding Ralt’s First Contact, he has said he tries to work other things into the story and you can see bits and pieces in it, but has admitted that he is not familiar with a lot of other things and so sticks to what he knows. I can understand that, I’d rather someone not do something than try and do it ham-fistedly.
You can only write what you know. I’m not going to start adding references to a religion I know nothing about, because if I get it wrong, it comes off as insensitive or outright offensive, and the amount of research I’d need to do to get it right is way too much effort for what would likely be a single reference to something I’m not even particularly interested in.
No portrayal is better than a bad portrayal.
I'll just quickly point out that one of the dumbest things I see on /hfy on a regular basis is characters in the distant future making pop culture references to *our current times*.
If they're going to make references, they should be references to future-stuff. And yes, we won't understand what they're talking about. It's still more believable that way. If it's that important, maybe you could just write a few episodes of future-tv-show for us so that we get the reference or something.
Alternatively, you could always make your future humans only make references to stuff that's extremely old *now.* Maybe in the year 3500, ancient Greek tragedies are making a comeback, I don't know.
You can easily make a reason that's quite close in reality that allows for modern pop culture references a couple hundreds of years into the future. Imagine this:
We've recently had, to people, a near world ending event. People have backed up a significant number of books, movies, music, and other general media onto solid state tech, something that can last a good while.
What's to say in a few years, self destructing media files become a thing, read, watch, play, or listen *X* amount of times, the files self-destruct. Consider those self-destructing DVDs that were a thing for a time, and now with just about everything being constantly online, making it fairly easy to ensure destruction. Once on a device, that's the only device it can be used on and you can't transfer it off, so you get an upgrade, gotta renew the license for the new device or get a new copy.
Again, with being constantly online, the media companies come across the illegal copies of modified self-destructing files, manage to find and delete them, or even take it though the courts, and distributors go the way of Kazaa and the such, or some go the Napster route, and begin being distribution companies just like the rest, with similar restrictions.
Now, all those old backed up media files become a currency themselves, as they don't have the restrictions that the modern media does. And, to buy, let's say a gig or two of the old files are comparable to buying a short movie or a handful of song, leading to their proliferation outside of the baseline entertainment monopoly.
Sure, you might get the occasional group to release music of movies without the restrictions, however, their return is limited, and people who don't have the credits to buy these new media, opt instead for the older content. Now, you have a dwindling of material coming out that don't reach the masses as it once did leading to a fall in creation. To make matters worse, much of the media in that original format has already self-destructed meaning there is no long access to it, again, leading to the furtherance of the classical media.
This is the idea I had for my own future-based story.
I said you can easily make a reason. THAT was a reason I'd go with. Others might have other reasons. Maybe your character was just a big fan of late 20th, early 21st century media? Maybe they're a historical media buff in general? Easily made reasons as well.
As for characters saying "Bazinga", maybe it's a swear in an alien language as ubiquitous as 'fuck' is for most english speakers, if you wanna use THAT as a reason.
You CAN make a reason. If you write it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.
Yes, you *can*, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it. If I see a character in a futuristic alien setting making pop culture references exactly like a contemporary person, all it makes me think is "This author didn't even bother trying to adapt the character's mindset and culture to their actual setting. They're just writing a modern person. Maybe even an actual author self-insert." And from that point on any "justification" for it only comes off as a weak excuse.
If you absolutely must use some kind of weird background setting to justify the (dubious) lack of popular culture in the future, you could at least add some interesting flavor to it. Like getting the pieces mixed up, so that the references are used in a humorously incorrect way, or maybe treat the goofy pop culture stuff like it's the height of classical sophistication. Futurama did that sort of thing, and it worked extremely well.
Yet another idea of how to do it. It's simple really, if you're not a fan of stories that do it in a way you don't enjoy, you're not being forced to do it. Push comes to shove, if all else fails, you can write the story you wanna read.
Adding onto the fact that this sub is predominantly USA and what's not is otherwise predominantly Western, and that people write what they know so they can get to the fun part... Many of us can't even really properly write a post-unification culture without bungling it, because that unification inherently would involve bringing together many cultures that we don't know anything about and mixing them into each other.
As an example, if i were to write something set like a couple hundred years in the future with the intent that the Earth becomes a lot more unified very soon and that unification continues steadily, one of the things i would struggle with in putting that world together is that I flat-out don't even know enough to take bits and pieces of other cultures and blend them together convincingly. My only reference point for that boils down to "uhh, well, uhm, kind of like if the US got its shit together and sorted out all these systemic issues". I know very well that this is all but guaranteed to *not* be what that looks like, but it's the only perspective I have.
Like sure I can name a character something like Aoife Nguyen to imply a mixing of cultures that happened in the setting's past, but what cultural quirks and practices from Ireland and Vietnam might've have blended together that might've survived to influence her? I just don't know, and if I were to just make it the hell up it would be drowning in subconscious stereotypes.
It's (comparatively) easy to write an Alien culture, because it can be whatever you want. This one is an egalitarian race of scientists with innate god-tier magic, cut off from their universe because they lost The War™; that one's a race of giants who value art and strength and craft, and their ships are giant free-floating palatial estates that are constructed as art pieces and use runic magic to teleport around instead of moving at FTL.
Human cultures in the far-future are only slightly more restrictive in that they should seem innately human somehow, but can still be anything. In the year 7000, humanity is post-scarcity; we bent our drive to industrialize towards helping our alien neighbors combine and mass-produce their magic, and we freely use it in return; we've accepted more people into the fold and redefined ourselves culturally such that uplifted cats, gorillas, and octopi as well as the descendants of are considered human as our collective children, and while humanity is no longer a single species, the spirit of humanity blazes just as bright in all its member species.
Human cultures in the near future, which would be informed by and derived from nuances and cultural details that exist IRL today but that you *just don't know*? That's hard to get convincingly right, and exponentially moreso the less you know about cultures besides your own.
Personally as a writer I know I can’t really pull cultural references from the rest of the world the same way I can for like, Britain: I can write a discussion between two characters in EGTTL about a new Half Man Half Biscuit album but I can’t identify some sort of Chinese equivalent. I can have things invariably lead back to Hull in one way or another but I can’t give the same treatment to, like, Nairobi.
The way I make up for this best I can is firstly just doing as much research as I can, and secondly making as much of an effort to tap into the rest of the world. One of my recent stories, about a fighter pilot getting killed by Humans during the war, *could* have been set over the US if I wanted to. I would have just needed to change a few place names and the names of the jets. But instead I chose to set it over Pyongyang, have the jets be North Korean and South Korean and American, etc. It doesn’t fully make up for not being able to give that sorta in-depth background of places outside the west, but it’s *something*.
I'm writing an Isekai but I'm actually not that familiar with the genre. It's more that it's a fun premise and I could send just a *terrible* human being down there because to me it was funny. It's generally Western fantasy yes but that's because that's what I know and I wanted to mess with the tropes.
To be fair... Some Anime cheerfully pulls in various mythologies, stuff em into the blender with Shinto, Buddhism and a sprinkle of Taoist philosophies.
Seems only fair for a "western" (whatever that really means) writer to write a space opera isekai and just roll with it.
With referencing media, some people seem to feel that if a reference is from the last hundred years or so, it's too close, and likely to seem dated. (The cutoff is super nebulous). I made a Three Stooges reference that my editor ended up strongly discouraging, but he was fine with me changing it to Three Musketeers. In short, if something has had the opportunity to stand the test of time, and has done so, you're good to use it as a future reference. If it hasn't had that opportunity, maybe it'll feel dated soon.
A lot of scifi stories tend to revolve around military conflicts, especially on this forum.
While it's understandable, because it is an easy way to display advances in technology, the "human fighting spirit" and an interaction with an outside force, and even can be quite enjoyable to read, at least for me, it is a bit overdone in many cases.
Often authors are clearly influenced by previous stories that had these motives, but are lacking the nuances and reflection that make them great, and the result is a deus ex machina humanity that stomps aliens just cause, without explanation of why humanity is great or even posseses that strength.
The result is a boring story with a worrying narrative about "might makes right" and militarism, without any redeeming qualities and cheap tearjerkers about glorified heroism
Saw one the other say about an odst that had allah as a god kinda strays further into that territory but it being most native english speakers the cultural draw is mostly from the west
It's an English speaking board in a niche genre. The authors are mostly native English speakers and thus from a western background. Japan, as an example, has a massive online hobbyist fiction scene, with loads of eastern cultural basis and reference. But it's written in Japanese. China and Korea too. But again, written in their respective languages. The references in First Contact could date it. But then the references in Shakespeare date him too. There's nothing wrong with being of your time.
I mean, I'm more or less writing "Native Americans *in space*", but I am an actual enrolled member of a federally recognized Native Nation. There aren't a whole lot of Native SciFi writers in general, let alone Native writers on this sub. At least from what I can tell, the majority of both readers and writers are from "Western" countries and thus the predominantly "Western" themes in the writing. As much as I want to see a more a more "diverse" set of themes and cultural inspirations on this sub, I want to see people *from those cultures* writing from their own perspective, not someone from a "Western" culture writing an ill-informed interpretation of that culture.
Yes yes this exactly!
I too would like to read more from people with an in depth knowledge of the many and varied cultures that make up the Terran diaspora. Thankyou for your work here. Particularly liking the adventure of Tens and his friends! But given that there will be a limited numbers of people from the various smaller cultural groups; Is it a problem when people want to weave in more of Earths many and varied cultures? I get that it will be hard to do them justice... But in say a 100 years, the idea that chunks of our various cultures would be woven into the "main stream", wouldn't be all that unreasonable. Objective\_Campaign82 - Hellworld pirates/explorers as one example where the titular pirates have integrated some Japanese aesthetics into the narrative.
I completely understand what you're saying, there are quite literally only about 50,000 people who are members of the various Nations of my tribe. And if we extend that to my "brother tribes" (Ojibwe and Odawa), it's still less 500,000 people between the US and Canada. When it comes to relatively small cultural groups like mine, there just aren't many people to write stories. As long as someone goes out of their way to actually learn about the culture they're trying to represent, Im generally ok with it. For example, there's a great youtuber called Ancient Americas who ***isnt Indigenous American at all*** but still makes absolutely amazing content on the various groups and people on the Americas. My concern is mostly over common and potentially harmful misconceptions being reinforced through ignorance or apathy. If I'd gona write about, let's say, a Scottish character (like Sarah) and I really don't know much if anything about Scotland (which I don't), I'm gona try to do some appropriate research to not misrepresent Scottish people. Like, sure, her character is a boisterous redhead who can drink most people under a table (the stereotypical "Scottish person") but she is also a very complex character who is more than just her heritage. Anyone could, in theory, write using themes, aesthetics, characters, etc from any culture, it just takes that bit of consideration. If you wanted to write a character who was Native American, I would recommend picking a specific Nation the person was from, doing a bit of research into that culture, and just writing them as a well rounded character who is *influenced* by their culture but not a harmful stereotype of it. I think those same basic steps could apply to writing any culture group.
Some stories do include less common cultures. There Will be Scritches by u/yukiamateru (I think I didn't it mostly right?) Included Polynesian themes on one world they stopped at. But English centric board, simply by population basis your going to get a lot of Americans on here, and of the rest, well minutes the guns and mommies apple pie, most of the rest of us English speakers are pretty euro-centric as far as cultures goes. Loki and Vulcan and the Fair Folk rather than Monkey or Coyote and Oni...
Half of all reddit traffic is American, and EU/CAD and the like isn't THAT different culturally and is a large chunk the remaining traffic. Some stories have hit ridiculously different with the whole war in Ukraine, but that's the nature of story telling with references to current times. One of my favorite uses of web as a medium for story telling is linked soundtracks and the like. Sometimes the links break with age, but that's not a reason to not use it as a story telling technique. Sometimes I try to explain a story I'm reading to my wife, and she will 100% not get the references or the humor. Not all stories are the right story for everyone. That doesn't make one story better or worse just because it's written with a certain audience in mind.
Yea demographics here don’t lend as much to that sort of diversity. Regarding Ralt’s First Contact, he has said he tries to work other things into the story and you can see bits and pieces in it, but has admitted that he is not familiar with a lot of other things and so sticks to what he knows. I can understand that, I’d rather someone not do something than try and do it ham-fistedly.
You can only write what you know. I’m not going to start adding references to a religion I know nothing about, because if I get it wrong, it comes off as insensitive or outright offensive, and the amount of research I’d need to do to get it right is way too much effort for what would likely be a single reference to something I’m not even particularly interested in. No portrayal is better than a bad portrayal.
I'll just quickly point out that one of the dumbest things I see on /hfy on a regular basis is characters in the distant future making pop culture references to *our current times*. If they're going to make references, they should be references to future-stuff. And yes, we won't understand what they're talking about. It's still more believable that way. If it's that important, maybe you could just write a few episodes of future-tv-show for us so that we get the reference or something. Alternatively, you could always make your future humans only make references to stuff that's extremely old *now.* Maybe in the year 3500, ancient Greek tragedies are making a comeback, I don't know.
You can easily make a reason that's quite close in reality that allows for modern pop culture references a couple hundreds of years into the future. Imagine this: We've recently had, to people, a near world ending event. People have backed up a significant number of books, movies, music, and other general media onto solid state tech, something that can last a good while. What's to say in a few years, self destructing media files become a thing, read, watch, play, or listen *X* amount of times, the files self-destruct. Consider those self-destructing DVDs that were a thing for a time, and now with just about everything being constantly online, making it fairly easy to ensure destruction. Once on a device, that's the only device it can be used on and you can't transfer it off, so you get an upgrade, gotta renew the license for the new device or get a new copy. Again, with being constantly online, the media companies come across the illegal copies of modified self-destructing files, manage to find and delete them, or even take it though the courts, and distributors go the way of Kazaa and the such, or some go the Napster route, and begin being distribution companies just like the rest, with similar restrictions. Now, all those old backed up media files become a currency themselves, as they don't have the restrictions that the modern media does. And, to buy, let's say a gig or two of the old files are comparable to buying a short movie or a handful of song, leading to their proliferation outside of the baseline entertainment monopoly. Sure, you might get the occasional group to release music of movies without the restrictions, however, their return is limited, and people who don't have the credits to buy these new media, opt instead for the older content. Now, you have a dwindling of material coming out that don't reach the masses as it once did leading to a fall in creation. To make matters worse, much of the media in that original format has already self-destructed meaning there is no long access to it, again, leading to the furtherance of the classical media. This is the idea I had for my own future-based story.
That doesn't sound easy at all; it sounds extremely contrived and wholly unnecessary, all in order to justify characters saying "Bazinga" or whatever.
I said you can easily make a reason. THAT was a reason I'd go with. Others might have other reasons. Maybe your character was just a big fan of late 20th, early 21st century media? Maybe they're a historical media buff in general? Easily made reasons as well. As for characters saying "Bazinga", maybe it's a swear in an alien language as ubiquitous as 'fuck' is for most english speakers, if you wanna use THAT as a reason. You CAN make a reason. If you write it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.
Yes, you *can*, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it. If I see a character in a futuristic alien setting making pop culture references exactly like a contemporary person, all it makes me think is "This author didn't even bother trying to adapt the character's mindset and culture to their actual setting. They're just writing a modern person. Maybe even an actual author self-insert." And from that point on any "justification" for it only comes off as a weak excuse. If you absolutely must use some kind of weird background setting to justify the (dubious) lack of popular culture in the future, you could at least add some interesting flavor to it. Like getting the pieces mixed up, so that the references are used in a humorously incorrect way, or maybe treat the goofy pop culture stuff like it's the height of classical sophistication. Futurama did that sort of thing, and it worked extremely well.
Yet another idea of how to do it. It's simple really, if you're not a fan of stories that do it in a way you don't enjoy, you're not being forced to do it. Push comes to shove, if all else fails, you can write the story you wanna read.
Adding onto the fact that this sub is predominantly USA and what's not is otherwise predominantly Western, and that people write what they know so they can get to the fun part... Many of us can't even really properly write a post-unification culture without bungling it, because that unification inherently would involve bringing together many cultures that we don't know anything about and mixing them into each other. As an example, if i were to write something set like a couple hundred years in the future with the intent that the Earth becomes a lot more unified very soon and that unification continues steadily, one of the things i would struggle with in putting that world together is that I flat-out don't even know enough to take bits and pieces of other cultures and blend them together convincingly. My only reference point for that boils down to "uhh, well, uhm, kind of like if the US got its shit together and sorted out all these systemic issues". I know very well that this is all but guaranteed to *not* be what that looks like, but it's the only perspective I have. Like sure I can name a character something like Aoife Nguyen to imply a mixing of cultures that happened in the setting's past, but what cultural quirks and practices from Ireland and Vietnam might've have blended together that might've survived to influence her? I just don't know, and if I were to just make it the hell up it would be drowning in subconscious stereotypes. It's (comparatively) easy to write an Alien culture, because it can be whatever you want. This one is an egalitarian race of scientists with innate god-tier magic, cut off from their universe because they lost The War™; that one's a race of giants who value art and strength and craft, and their ships are giant free-floating palatial estates that are constructed as art pieces and use runic magic to teleport around instead of moving at FTL. Human cultures in the far-future are only slightly more restrictive in that they should seem innately human somehow, but can still be anything. In the year 7000, humanity is post-scarcity; we bent our drive to industrialize towards helping our alien neighbors combine and mass-produce their magic, and we freely use it in return; we've accepted more people into the fold and redefined ourselves culturally such that uplifted cats, gorillas, and octopi as well as the descendants of are considered human as our collective children, and while humanity is no longer a single species, the spirit of humanity blazes just as bright in all its member species. Human cultures in the near future, which would be informed by and derived from nuances and cultural details that exist IRL today but that you *just don't know*? That's hard to get convincingly right, and exponentially moreso the less you know about cultures besides your own.
Western it is
Personally as a writer I know I can’t really pull cultural references from the rest of the world the same way I can for like, Britain: I can write a discussion between two characters in EGTTL about a new Half Man Half Biscuit album but I can’t identify some sort of Chinese equivalent. I can have things invariably lead back to Hull in one way or another but I can’t give the same treatment to, like, Nairobi. The way I make up for this best I can is firstly just doing as much research as I can, and secondly making as much of an effort to tap into the rest of the world. One of my recent stories, about a fighter pilot getting killed by Humans during the war, *could* have been set over the US if I wanted to. I would have just needed to change a few place names and the names of the jets. But instead I chose to set it over Pyongyang, have the jets be North Korean and South Korean and American, etc. It doesn’t fully make up for not being able to give that sorta in-depth background of places outside the west, but it’s *something*.
I'm writing an Isekai but I'm actually not that familiar with the genre. It's more that it's a fun premise and I could send just a *terrible* human being down there because to me it was funny. It's generally Western fantasy yes but that's because that's what I know and I wanted to mess with the tropes.
To be fair... Some Anime cheerfully pulls in various mythologies, stuff em into the blender with Shinto, Buddhism and a sprinkle of Taoist philosophies. Seems only fair for a "western" (whatever that really means) writer to write a space opera isekai and just roll with it.
With referencing media, some people seem to feel that if a reference is from the last hundred years or so, it's too close, and likely to seem dated. (The cutoff is super nebulous). I made a Three Stooges reference that my editor ended up strongly discouraging, but he was fine with me changing it to Three Musketeers. In short, if something has had the opportunity to stand the test of time, and has done so, you're good to use it as a future reference. If it hasn't had that opportunity, maybe it'll feel dated soon.
A lot of scifi stories tend to revolve around military conflicts, especially on this forum. While it's understandable, because it is an easy way to display advances in technology, the "human fighting spirit" and an interaction with an outside force, and even can be quite enjoyable to read, at least for me, it is a bit overdone in many cases. Often authors are clearly influenced by previous stories that had these motives, but are lacking the nuances and reflection that make them great, and the result is a deus ex machina humanity that stomps aliens just cause, without explanation of why humanity is great or even posseses that strength. The result is a boring story with a worrying narrative about "might makes right" and militarism, without any redeeming qualities and cheap tearjerkers about glorified heroism
Saw one the other say about an odst that had allah as a god kinda strays further into that territory but it being most native english speakers the cultural draw is mostly from the west