Humans Do Human Stuff - Vol. 1 Ed. 44
May 22, 2021 12:26 am
World Builders' Guild Newsletter
Unforgettable stories happen when you introduce an unexpected foreign object to a world.
The humans inside the world respond in ways that only humans can. They lose themselves. The primitive ape brain grunts and scratches trying to dislodge the disturbance. Eventually, they adapt.
Sometimes, they die.
Spoilers ahead for a few pieces of early 21st-century fiction.
An Explosive Discovery
In the 2005 sci-fi novel Spin, the earth unexpectedly and instantaneously becomes enveloped in a planetary barrier. The stars blink out of view. The sun simmers into an eerie pale facsimile of itself.
Humans discover that the source of the "spin barrier", which alters the passage of time in relation to the rest of the cosmos, is two machinations suspended in the upper atmosphere over the poles.
The first thing they do is try to nuke them out of orbit.
The second thing they do is conduct a proper scientific study as to the origin and purpose of the spin barrier.
Deadly Serious Religion
The undead hordes in the late 2000s survival horror video game Dead Space crawled not from a medieval crypt, but from a colonies surrounding bizarre, extraterrestrial megaliths known as "Markers."
In a desperate attempt to stave off certain extinction on Earth, humanity engineers a fleet of massive interplanetary mining ships that successfully "crack" dozens of other words and strip them of their precious resources.
While mining, one ill-fated mining ship gets caught up in a clandestine religious conspiracy to recover and study a Marker.
The rot goes all the way up to the highest ranks of the popular Church of Unitology who believe that the Markers are an important part of fulfilling their religious duties to discover the origins of humanity.
Instead, they accidentally form a necromorphic death cult.
Well done, guys.
It's not Mars, but you also can't grow stuff here. (Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash)
You Only Miss It When It's Gone
Removing things from a world can produce a similar reaction from its inhabitants.
Take 2011's The Martian, for example. Astronaut and botanist Mark Watney finds himself stranded on Earth's nearest neighbor with no hope for rescue for several years.
He uses all the resources at hand, whatever's left of the former crew's surface habitat, decommissioned rover hulls, and his own bodily gifts to keep himself alive long enough to be saved.
Two words: shit potatoes.
To future worlds,
Matt Ventre
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