Eccentric Flower:200912/The Alien Washing Machine

So here is the thing about the TV Tropes site: Often I agree with it, and I applaud its callings-out and I am amused by them ... but, in general, reading that site is a bit like eating Fritos; eat too many in one sitting and they'll disagree with you.

The longer I stay on the TV Tropes site the more I start feeling the sick welling of indignation in my stomach. It's like indigestion but it stings more. I find myself recoiling at the overall tone of its copy (which is meant to be like an encyclopedia but often feels more like a shooting gallery), and I start thinking things like, "Well, who the hell do you prats think you are, anyway?"

So imagine how I feel when I read a trope whose inclusion I don't agree with!

Once upon a time, back when you were all young and dinosaurs walked the earth, I wrote a second novel. The second novel had a sole virtue: It was better than my first novel. I handed it to a test reader who tore it to shreds. It would be an oversimplification to say I never forgave him, and after all I did want honest criticism, but I felt his reaction was so out of proportion to the actual sins of the manuscript (which, I admit, were many) that I realized he wasn't just acting out of honest criticism; that he was achieving some sort of personal gratification by tearing my work into little pieces, that it made him feel good to do so - and that was the beginning of the long slow end of our friendship.

None of this is to the point, but you see, I need to vent that every now and again. Don't mind me.

One of the things he pointed out about the MS was that during the bulk of its action, which was told by a human surrounded by aliens on an alien world, that I kept throwing in concepts which were really just human technology and concepts in very thin disguise. Now, while I recognize that I could have made the aliens more alien - and if I ever rewrote the MS I probably would - there's more here than meets the eye.

1. Parallel Evolution.

My Ring stories get around the idea of alien reproductive anatomy with two bits of Ring slang: "socket" and "sprocket." The basic theory is that, in any alien species which has evolved basically two-gendered means of sexual reproduction, one of those genders is going to be an innie and one is going to be an outie, so to speak.

Thus we get away from such tricky questions as "male" and "female" - or, conversely, free ourselves to focus on those tricky questions, as the topic of the story at hand (the first of these stories did exactly that, for a species whose notional gender was almost completely detached from their physical gender).

The thing is: Imagine a species that has two reproductive genders - that is, two distinct sets of physical hardware needed to do the deed. How do you do that in any way where one is not a socket and one is not a sprocket? Even if you are discussing tentacled oozes, a key element of the physical process of sexual reproduction for the higher phyla is the insertion, thus making possible the fertilization of eggs without having to actually lay the eggs first. This is Biology 101. Hence, unless your aliens really do reproduce without direct contact between the genders - like fishes, one lays the eggs and the other squirts milt on them - and I might add it's hard to make this work in non-watery environments - somebody's got to put something into somebody else, even if it's a turkey baster.

(A species where each party has both sets of equipment - hermaphroditic, to use Earth terms - is not a species with two reproductive genders, I hasten to point out.)

OK, now, imagine you have a society that has evolved far enough to get the idea of a machine to launder clothing. (Yes, that was a sudden change of subject. Take a moment to recover, then proceed.) Let's assume that we're dealing with planets which are similar enough in ecology to have mostly water-soluble stains and excreta and so forth (remember, my alien world has an ecology a human can survive in without external pressure/breathing apparatus, so that limits your options severely right there).

How many different ways can you design a washing machine? How do we put across the idea to the reader that this is a washing machine, to make that clear instantly and quickly enough to be absorbed and then passed by (because it's not all that important to the story, we don't want it to get in the way) without explicitly saying "This is a washing machine"? How do you make something obviously a washing machine and also obviously alien?

Now extend that to indoor cooking, sleeping accommodations, etc, etc - all the aspects of modern-day domestic life with the possible exception of personal computing (where there is considerably more leeway for different design metaphors) and travel (because it's easy to postulate all kinds of other alternatives there as well).

When is an oven not an oven? It could be made out of clay, duralex, zgwortz, cast iron, polymer unobtainium, whatever, but it's still a box with a heat source, and you still want readers to understand that he's putting the roast in the oven even if the roast is from a beast never seen by man and the oven is called something unspellable.

There are only so many ways certain concepts can evolve. And, sometimes, if you go to great lengths to try to work your way around them - to try to find something truly novel and alien, like washing your clothes by feeding them to a gigantic domesticated ruminant who also eats a lot of a local mineral which happens to have a surfactant action - you're wasting plot energy that really should be spent on what your story is actually about.

In the case of my aliens, there was a central facet of their alienness where they were really - scarily - alien. This was, in fact, the core revelation of the novel. To concentrate on the differences in the way they washed their clothes, et cetera, would have dulled the impact of the big bomb.

2. Can't Stop the Story.

In many cases, these details are really unimportant. Well, then, leave them out, I hear you say. No. Sometimes you need stage business. Sometimes it's important that the character has an oven to put the roast in while he's busy having the crucial dialogue with his alien lover about why she has suddenly grown cold on the relationship and why she's practically hiding from him. It's a punctuation thing. Imagine the famous "Why would a man want to marry another man?" scene from Some Like It Hot without the maracas and you'll understand.

We also need such details to make the scene a real scene. I mean, I could say, "OK, character X is on an alien world," and then focus on the interactions with the aliens, which is after all the important part, and not tell you anything at all else about the world, the beds, the ovens, the washing machines - but then the character would be performing his activities on a bare stage, and you'd find that even more jarring than alien washing machine analogues.

But, although we need these details and need them vitally, we don't want them to stop the story in its tracks. I don't want you worrying so much about the alien oven or how many legs the roast beast had before it was a roast beast that you miss the import of the dialogue with the lover and its ramifications.

Thus it's easier simply to say, "Look, it's an oven, you know it's an oven, I know it's an oven, let's move on," and have done. And I would like to think that most readers are intelligent enough to accept this bargain.

3. They Have a Name For That.

I think what bothers some people - certainly it seems to be the primary gripe on the tropes page - is the terminology. That is (goes the argument) if it's a cup of coffee and you know it's coffee and I know it's coffee, or is meant to serve exactly the same prop purpose as coffee, then just call it coffee.

This is a valid complaint - to a point.

The problem is, you can't please all the readers, and there are those who get more bogged down on consistency of language than they do on ideas. If everything in your alien tongue is translated, if there's a magic Babel fish and everything the aliens say and express is magically rendered into English for the reader, then fine, in that case you can call the coffee "coffee." (But be prepared for letters from people saying, "Hey, how come these are aliens and they have coffee?" Because, as I say, you can't please everyone.)

But if you are making it explicit that there is a level of translation, indirection occurring - in my case it's because the story is being told through the hero's journal and he gives the alien terms as he learns them, but then just sticks to the English equivalents for what are, after all, his own personal notes - then you do need to come up with an alien word for your "coffee" analogue ... and no matter what kind of word you come up with, someone on the TV Tropes page is going to make fun of it.

Because you can't win. If you say, "It's a smeerp," and then go on to describe a creature which is pretty much like a rabbit, people will shout that you should have just said it was a rabbit. If you say, "It's a rabbit," people will shout that it's an alien world and therefore it couldn't possibly be a rabbit. If you have someone say, "It's a smeerp, but [your people call it|we might as well call it] a rabbit," someone will shout, "Was this trip really necessary?"

4. In Summation.

I don't mind picking on tropes when they are out of laziness. In fact that is practically the definition of a trope, to my mind - it's shorthand that got overplayed because it was easier to use the shorthand than to do it the hard way.

But this trope, which may not even be a trope, is not due to laziness - it is often the only solution to the problem! Sometimes it's done with less grace than others, I concede (the quasi-neologisms in the recent "Battlestar Galactica" made my teeth grind, for example - frak you, lazy BSG writers), but there's no way to do it without some clumsiness somewhere, I don't think.

Given that all possible solutions are going to be inadequate in some way, the answers are 1) either to damn the torpedoes and name your washing-machine analogue while trying not to make too big a fool of yourself, or 2) never set fiction in any sort of alien environment at all ... and wouldn't we all be the poorer for the latter option?

And if you think you know a better way around this problem that I have missed, by all means tell me. Because there's always a chance I'll want to rewrite that novel one day.