Katherine, the up/down thing would just work out for communication. If you turn your TV upside down the picture turns upside down with it. Or if the camera turns upside down your TV picture will turn upside down apart from your TV. It’s all in the signal.
The transporter problem would go the same way, if there’s a downside at the emitter then that information will get sent to the receiver which also has a downside.
Things like space battles usually don’t show enough detail to see that they’re thinking in 2D. The StarTrek movie The Wrath of Khan did a parody of that, though. Kirk realizes that Khan is thinking in terms of two-dimensional strategies, so when Khan is chasing Kirk’s ship, with all the advantages because he’s behind, Kirk moves his ship up and Khan is completely confused and goes straight ahead so that Kirk can then go down and get behind him. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to be a parody, but it’s so stupid I’d rather give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t remember that LeGuin story, but somebody—LeGuin? Joanna Russ? -- did a Clarion exercise where they had some of the writing students pretend to be aliens who communicated with stylized gestures, and the other students were supposed to react to that. The aliens did their thing and nobody could figure any of it out. The aliens started “dying” and they called it all off because it was so totally frustrating.
CJ Cherryh wrote a story where human soldiers were fighting on some dreary planet where the enemy never surrendered but sometimes would commit suicide rather than keep fighting. Their carrion birds actied kind of weird, everything was a little strange, the humans got very tired of fighting with people they didn’t understand. The viewpoint character has gotten completely sick of it, and at the story’s end when they’ve negotiated a sort of peace he realizes that to actually seal the peace a human soldier has to do a mutual suicide with one of the local soldiers, and he pulls the grenade pin while the other guy holds it.
People who read science fiction like to get insights from it. But when it’s alien stories, it’s hard to provide the right level of hints. Too many and it’s trite, too few and it never makes sense. Hard to calibrate that for the average reader.
If I remember correctly, LeGuin wrote about a Clarion workshop where she asked her students to write stories with aliens, and all the stories were comic. So she asked them to write stories about dying aliens. This was an introduction to a story about an alien whose culture uses mazes as a basic tool of communication.
Human scientists capture it and put it in a maze. The alien is distressed and bewildered because the maze doesn’t make sense and the humans don’t respond to any of the alien’s efforts at communication. The alien eventually dies, though I don’t remember how much this is of misery and how much that the physical conditions are wrong for it.
Katherine, the up/down thing would just work out for communication. If you turn your TV upside down the picture turns upside down with it. Or if the camera turns upside down your TV picture will turn upside down apart from your TV. It’s all in the signal.
The transporter problem would go the same way, if there’s a downside at the emitter then that information will get sent to the receiver which also has a downside.
Things like space battles usually don’t show enough detail to see that they’re thinking in 2D. The StarTrek movie The Wrath of Khan did a parody of that, though. Kirk realizes that Khan is thinking in terms of two-dimensional strategies, so when Khan is chasing Kirk’s ship, with all the advantages because he’s behind, Kirk moves his ship up and Khan is completely confused and goes straight ahead so that Kirk can then go down and get behind him. It’s possible it wasn’t meant to be a parody, but it’s so stupid I’d rather give them the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t remember that LeGuin story, but somebody—LeGuin? Joanna Russ? -- did a Clarion exercise where they had some of the writing students pretend to be aliens who communicated with stylized gestures, and the other students were supposed to react to that. The aliens did their thing and nobody could figure any of it out. The aliens started “dying” and they called it all off because it was so totally frustrating.
CJ Cherryh wrote a story where human soldiers were fighting on some dreary planet where the enemy never surrendered but sometimes would commit suicide rather than keep fighting. Their carrion birds actied kind of weird, everything was a little strange, the humans got very tired of fighting with people they didn’t understand. The viewpoint character has gotten completely sick of it, and at the story’s end when they’ve negotiated a sort of peace he realizes that to actually seal the peace a human soldier has to do a mutual suicide with one of the local soldiers, and he pulls the grenade pin while the other guy holds it.
People who read science fiction like to get insights from it. But when it’s alien stories, it’s hard to provide the right level of hints. Too many and it’s trite, too few and it never makes sense. Hard to calibrate that for the average reader.
If I remember correctly, LeGuin wrote about a Clarion workshop where she asked her students to write stories with aliens, and all the stories were comic. So she asked them to write stories about dying aliens. This was an introduction to a story about an alien whose culture uses mazes as a basic tool of communication.
Human scientists capture it and put it in a maze. The alien is distressed and bewildered because the maze doesn’t make sense and the humans don’t respond to any of the alien’s efforts at communication. The alien eventually dies, though I don’t remember how much this is of misery and how much that the physical conditions are wrong for it.