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I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "preq

I think the silliest part of complaining Middle Earth is based on Earth, is the fact that Middle Earth IS Earth, explicitly. Tolkien states that LoTR is a "prequel" of real world history of sorts. Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. It is obvious it will be based on RL cultures, because... it is. Ditto for people that complained that Fremen in Dune are too much like middle eastern people. Seriously, their religion is literally called "Zensunni" and they are settlers that explicitly came from middle east cultures of Earth.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel". (If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.) In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.
- logicprog 3y ago
  > which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Who said we live in the real universe? Maybe Mosk really was a giant with a spear of fire, and a capital city armed with missiles was as close as we could come. One of Brandon Sanderson's recent books invoked the concept of alternate realities in which it could be objectively determined that some were more real than others. (None could be found that were more real than "our" world, but also, it was impossible for objects from less-real worlds to move into, or presumably perceive, more-real worlds, so no conclusion could be drawn.) The book is set in a world where magic and gods exist. The gods are the same ones we know from our own, realer world, except that they exist and have the powers attributed to them in our own myths. The end of the book gives us a divine point of view, and we learn that the gods are moving "upstream", in the direction of reality, but that this is difficult or painful for them. This seems to conflict with the premise that the characteristics of less-real worlds are derived from the more-real worlds on which they are based. The possibilities are that our (real) mythology derives from the gods approaching us, which is the wrong direction of causality (but of course, they are moving upstream, which is also supposed to be impossible), or that the gods take on the characteristics that are attributed to them in whatever world they enter (but... who is who?). The "real" world of the book is set in the cyberpunk future, which I think is unfortunate - I'd be all over a series showing the progression of the gods into the real present or past, but a cyberpunk future is less interesting to me. (There's still room to show them progressing through the past, though!) > (spelled it first try!) I believe that tel'aran'rhiod is required to be set in italics, subject to the normal rules of things that are italicized. ;p
da_chicken 3y ago
I don't think that's really relevant. It doesn't matter if, diagetically, the world is rooted in Earth or not. Fundamentally, all cultures are going to be based on real-world human culture, because that is all we know. Even if we try to imagine what a non-human culture looks like, we still construct it with the composite elements we know are common to human cultures. Even the most alien and inhuman cultures any author has ever imagined are still defined by how not like human culture they are. They're a negation of what human culture is, which is to say they're still a reflection of it. We cannot do otherwise. We have never seen a non-human culture equivalent to human culture. Further, all aliens and all fantasy creatures are analogs for humans or analogs for animals. Because that's all we know. Even if we could create a truly alien culture, we could only understand it in terms and concepts that we already have because we do not understand concepts and ideas that we cannot conceive ourselves. Because those are the only concepts and ideas we have ever had exposure to. It's like asking what color infrared or ultraviolet would be. We don't know. We don't have that experience. Or like asking what oranges tastes like if you've only ever had apples, cherries, grapes, and so on. How can we conceptualize something we have no conception for?
- bluGill 3y ago
  While you are not wrong, you can derive a lot of human culture from first principals based on constraints that are universal. We have to eat for energy: a lot of culture is really built around meals. We grew denser than hunter gathers could find food so we had to start farming, and that density forces a lot of culture on us (you can't just kill each other when someone makes you mad). We expanded to places where we cannot live nude: we have to make and wear clothing - a lot of culture is around clothing (dance and music is different in places where clothing makes movement uncomfortable). Of course there is a lot of variety possible within those, and that is not an exhaustive list. However just those constraints force a lot of culture and while the result for aliens can be different, they will face those same constraints and thus you can develop a lot of similar culture around them.
  - da_chicken 3y ago
    Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all, all creatures have a need for the energy required to survive. Not all of them develop a culture, even if they live in communal groups. Bacteria, I suppose, if you don't mind some equivocation. The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots. Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so? The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> Ditto for Wheel of Time, that instead is set in a distant future. Wheel of Time is explicitly set in both the future and the past. That's why it's a "wheel". (If you need an example, consider that Arthur Pendragon is, in the setting, a historical person who existed a couple thousand (?) years in the past, while at one point Egwene finds a much older Mercedes-Benz hood ornament in a museum.) In the second book, The Great Hunt, the concept of a multiverse of alternative realities (that interact with each other!) is also introduced, which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us. It is necessarily in a related world, where it's not clear what "related" means.

logicprog 3y ago
> which means that the setting is not necessarily in the same world as us That's not quite true, interestingly! Yes, there are alternate timelines available through the portal stones, but they are explicitly described as only sort of secondary reverberations, inherently not quite fully real, but just pale echoes of the true timeline that most of the books take place in. So it's pretty unlikely that, according to the metaphysical rules of the wheel of time, we are not living in the main timeline. In fact, it's later explained that Tel'aran'rhiod (spelled it first try!) Is the sort of semi-real limbo it is because it's a similar phenomenon to the portal stone worlds, just cross-secting all alternate realities instead of parallel to them. Maybe you're talking about the world's through the Twisted door frames, where the snakes and foxes live, but it's unclear exactly what relation they have to our world, and I'm inclined to suspect that we aren't intended to think that our world might be one of those, since those worlds seem to operate by very different laws even regarding basic spacetime.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Who said we live in the real universe? Maybe Mosk really was a giant with a spear of fire, and a capital city armed with missiles was as close as we could come. One of Brandon Sanderson's recent books invoked the concept of alternate realities in which it could be objectively determined that some were more real than others. (None could be found that were more real than "our" world, but also, it was impossible for objects from less-real worlds to move into, or presumably perceive, more-real worlds, so no conclusion could be drawn.) The book is set in a world where magic and gods exist. The gods are the same ones we know from our own, realer world, except that they exist and have the powers attributed to them in our own myths. The end of the book gives us a divine point of view, and we learn that the gods are moving "upstream", in the direction of reality, but that this is difficult or painful for them. This seems to conflict with the premise that the characteristics of less-real worlds are derived from the more-real worlds on which they are based. The possibilities are that our (real) mythology derives from the gods approaching us, which is the wrong direction of causality (but of course, they are moving upstream, which is also supposed to be impossible), or that the gods take on the characteristics that are attributed to them in whatever world they enter (but... who is who?). The "real" world of the book is set in the cyberpunk future, which I think is unfortunate - I'd be all over a series showing the progression of the gods into the real present or past, but a cyberpunk future is less interesting to me. (There's still room to show them progressing through the past, though!) > (spelled it first try!) I believe that tel'aran'rhiod is required to be set in italics, subject to the normal rules of things that are italicized. ;p

da_chicken 3y ago

I don't think that's really relevant. It doesn't matter if, diagetically, the world is rooted in Earth or not. Fundamentally, all cultures are going to be based on real-world human culture, because that is all we know. Even if we try to imagine what a non-human culture looks like, we still construct it with the composite elements we know are common to human cultures. Even the most alien and inhuman cultures any author has ever imagined are still defined by how not like human culture they are. They're a negation of what human culture is, which is to say they're still a reflection of it. We cannot do otherwise. We have never seen a non-human culture equivalent to human culture. Further, all aliens and all fantasy creatures are analogs for humans or analogs for animals. Because that's all we know. Even if we could create a truly alien culture, we could only understand it in terms and concepts that we already have because we do not understand concepts and ideas that we cannot conceive ourselves. Because those are the only concepts and ideas we have ever had exposure to. It's like asking what color infrared or ultraviolet would be. We don't know. We don't have that experience. Or like asking what oranges tastes like if you've only ever had apples, cherries, grapes, and so on. How can we conceptualize something we have no conception for?

bluGill 3y ago
While you are not wrong, you can derive a lot of human culture from first principals based on constraints that are universal. We have to eat for energy: a lot of culture is really built around meals. We grew denser than hunter gathers could find food so we had to start farming, and that density forces a lot of culture on us (you can't just kill each other when someone makes you mad). We expanded to places where we cannot live nude: we have to make and wear clothing - a lot of culture is around clothing (dance and music is different in places where clothing makes movement uncomfortable). Of course there is a lot of variety possible within those, and that is not an exhaustive list. However just those constraints force a lot of culture and while the result for aliens can be different, they will face those same constraints and thus you can develop a lot of similar culture around them.
- da_chicken 3y ago
  Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all, all creatures have a need for the energy required to survive. Not all of them develop a culture, even if they live in communal groups. Bacteria, I suppose, if you don't mind some equivocation. The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots. Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so? The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.