I’ve been reading Juliette Wade’s blog for some time now. She’s a linguist and anthropologist who also writes SF. Her insights in to culture are well-written and uniformly insightful. I look forward to her posts.
Today’s post is called, .Don’t make them all the same and deals with different approaches to creating multi-cultural fantasy characters.
Here’s a teaser.
The other thing is, don’t make every character from a particular alien or racial group exactly the same. This is what I’ve earlier referred to as “running true to type.” It’s fun to have a group of people from different races, whether that be elves, dwarves and humans, Braxana and Azeans (thanks to C.S. Friedman) or the people of Sendaria, Arendia, Nyissa etc. (thanks to David Eddings). But if the belief systems of these people are entirely uncontested, uniform across the race or alien group, the story won’t have all the dimension it could.
There are two ways to approach this. One is from the character direction, making sure that your characters are three-dimensional and have motives and inner conflicts and all those important things. That’s certainly true of the characters from the authors I’ve mentioned. The other is to think directly about the character’s relationship to the social group they belong to.
Check it out.
As may not surprise you, this is a theme near and dear to my own heart, and one that surfaces often in the obligatory language panel that I seem to do at nearly every convention.
The latest incarnation was just this past Saturday at Capclave where I was joined by some wonderful co-panelists (loaded down with boatloads of credentials including cultural anthropology degrees, fullbright awards, and doctorates a plenty).
The best example I recall giving (that relates to your post) was that when the aliens land and send forth their delegation I want to hear not just the cultured tones of the professional ambassador, but also the speech impediments of his assistant who only got the job because of nepotism.
I want our terrestrial linguists to waste time running in circles until they realize that a particular syllable or phoneme (or click, or whiff of ammonia) isn’t a meaningful unit, but the alien equivalent of “um” or “uh” or “ya know.”
I want aliens with different metaphorical systems than we readily recognize, and variation within those systems by speakers of their own language (like we have in, oh, I don’t know, with speakers of every language here on Earth).
I also want a pony.