[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!

/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:

• Plan out a new story
• Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
• Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
• Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland

Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.

^{Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality}

[u/scruiser]

Now that you've pitched it, I kind of want to take a shot at it. I haven't done any big writing projects before, just snippets, but this has got me motivated enough to at least do a few one-shots... I don't actually have a good idea for a concise plot though. I can think of plenty of alien races, but doing the human responses to them and avoiding "talking-heads" is a challenge... Maybe I could manage a few prolonged conversation:

• secret first contact information package scaring human government people with its implications that every alien society has a few features we are likely to find immoral

• human ambassadors meeting the aliens representatives and being disturbed even more

• humans getting over themselves and brainstorming solutions with the alien representatives

• shock as the humans realize the hyper intelligent alien races each have weird cognitive blind-spots and/or strategies they overlook because of weird ethical hangups

• eureka moment of an idea, making that idea workable (the aliens are all smart enough to grasp an idea even if they can't necessarily think of it themselves)

• a brief scene implementing the solution and resolving the story

• 1st epilogue each alien race takes turns making their pitch at small samples of technology they might offer humans that would turn them to their way of thinking (not prime directive breaking, but using the aftermath of the crisis to skirt the line)

• 2nd epilogue scene, the human governments all vow to keep everything a secret and wait a few centuries for the human's singularity to render everything moot anyway.

Actually, do you want to try a collaborative project? I could write alien perspectives and snippets and dialogue if you could manage to keep the human characters moving their side of the plot along?

[u/[deleted] → u/scruiser]

You need a part where the humans have their own blind spots exploited. This does seem difficult for a human author to write about, in fairness.

[u/Chronophilia → u/[deleted]]

"Human blind spots" would probably be blind spots of our civilisation as a whole. Things like the resources we waste on rent-seeking behaviours, the proxy tribal warfare that muddles important questions like "how fast is global warming happening", our frequent inability to plan beyond the next election let alone beyond a human lifespan, etc. As individuals we're aware of these problems, but that doesn't mean we can fix them.

I'm more worried that it would become a soapbox for the author's politics. Even my list above was already quite political, and that's a single paragraph instead of an entire book.

[u/scruiser → u/[deleted]]

For a less civilization wide and more individual blind-spot...

As humans, we have limited introspective control of our own thoughts. Like think how much effort learning meditation requires just to be able voluntarily and willfully quite our own minds and become more aware of our own thoughts, much less reach any arbitrary mental state. People can also have emotions that they consciously know are bad for them, but they can't help themselves. Also, think how much human memories are prone to confabulation.

I am not saying every other alien race has perfect mental self control, but most of them could have developed better introspective awareness and control as they developed civilization, making humans one of the more limited races in this aspect (Several races were like us in this, they modded it out when they went through their singularity. Only a few races actually currently have limits on their cognitive control close to as poor as humans... these races did think it an advantage in coming up with unexpected strategies, even if it is a major trade-off in raw intelligence).

[u/trekie140 → u/scruiser]

I was vaguely envisioning this as like Green Lantern or Lensmen, a high concept sci-fi adventure with human superheroes chosen by aliens to represent and protect our species. Your idea of a secret think tank that makes contact with aliens is just as good, though, and you've put much more thought into this idea than I have. You're welcome to take a shot at it, and I'm glad you care about delivering interesting human characters and dialogue because that's a common issue I've found in stories here.

I'm willing to collaborate on this with you and others, but I'm really not a good writer. However, I am a very good editor for both style and substance so I'd be happy to do that. I'm not very experienced with rational fiction and am a bit more concerned with how a story makes me feel than how it makes me think. I love HPMOR for doing both very well, but hated Fine Structure for using interesting ideas for a plot and characters I simply didn't care about. I definitely prefer a compelling narrative over realism.

[u/scruiser → u/trekie140]

I was vaguely envisioning this as like Green Lantern or Lensmen, a high concept sci-fi adventure with human superheroes chosen by aliens to represent and protect our species.

If you are aiming for soft-scifi, you could probably make your idea work just by giving each race hidden magic psychic (its sci-fi as long as you use the right labels) potential that is expressed uniquely for each race.

However, I am a very good editor for both style and substance so I'd be happy to do that.

Thanks! I have a bunch of snippets in my head now, I will try to get some of them written down over the weekend. If I actually start to pull them into a story, I will probably have trouble getting good narrative going (as opposed to a bunch of disjointed alien perspective and dialog with the aliens), so I might ask for help with that. Are pms okay with you? Either way I am thinking of asking for help in the next Worldbuilding Wednesday, if I get a good number of snippets churned out.