In archaeology, they call this processual (there was a lot more to unpack in this movement, also called the New Archaeology, and why we are somewhere in post-post-processual today). In SF, we call it part of the fun; Gernsback's "What happens next?" and so on. And it is absolutely all over the Athena Fox books.
How did this thing come to be? What forces shaped this thing? What are the implications of this thing? You can't stroll through modern Paris and not have the very path you take be shaped by the decisions taken by Baron Haussmann, working out of the philosophies of his time -- and the desires of his Emperor Napoleon III.
This is why I keep coming back to the Athena Fox series. And why I have so much trouble with the tiki book. Because the latter is just conceit. It is surface texture. There are interesting things I'd like to unpack and explore about the nature of tiki; about exoticism, appropriation, the commercialization of leisure. But it doesn't really have those meaty questions of "why."
And that's why I keep taking notes about Ensign Blue. (Working name for the file folder, I will have you know! Not an actual title or character name.)
Which came, mind you, out of experiments I was doing with WAN2.2 et al towards telling a story in animation via AI. Which is a fool's quest but that's another story. So; those same questions you ask of "Why didn't the Maya use the wheel?" or "why are barns red?" are baked into this project from the start. "Blue" is because the renders I used as a starting point had a character in a blue uniform. Okay?
And in longer twisty paths I don't feel like spending the time going over, there are things about the various cultures and their interactions which came out of those WAN experiments. Things about them that became ways of thinking about them, and the kind of exploration I've been talking about.
A theme, even; behavioral determinism with its insights, its process, and its limitations. (Which, to any student of the history of archaeology, is familiar ground; the way the understanding of cultures was shaped by the systems of thought of archaeologists themselves, which themselves came out of the same processual -- and other! -- forces.)
(Something which was way back in the first Athena Fox book. Our way of looking at classical cultures is shaped too much by our history with the Classics. The Greeks and Romans wrote. A lot. And via Rome -- and to a lesser extent the Greek Orthodox strains of Christianity -- western culture preserved the ability to read Latin and Greek. Which circled around and became a status symbol -- something that started back when the clergy were, essentially, the lettered class -- and that meant privileging of a particular way of viewing the classical cultures that also not-coincidentally privileged those doing so.)
(Or so goes the gloss. It would take a very long essay to unpack that one even slightly more than that.)
But to boil it down, Ensign Blue gives me an excuse to play Jared Diamond/Larry Niven games with biological and environmental determinism, while at the same time making pointed commentary when the facile "The Hrunt are descended from herd animals; they will never go to war" gets shown wrong on the pointy end of an incoming armada of Hrunt warships.
And all the fractal way down; Blue is an engineer, a ship's engineer, and there is always a world of "why the hell did they design it this way!" that can, at times, be ways that make it difficult to maintain, ways that make it prone to break under certain conditions, ways it can be repurposed, and ways it can be hacked.
Like, well, vents. You can call them Jeffries Tubes if you like, but at the bread-and-butter, there's a way that your clever characters can get around the boarding party.
One thing, though. (Well, there's a lot more than one...) Having this sort of underlying structural rationale that can be leveraged to generate "what kind of ships do they have on this planet" answers, or exploited to explain how the good guys (or the bad guys, who are allowed to be clever, too) manage to get some plot-necessary thing to happen, means it would all work better if some of this world was planned before I started writing.
Yeah. I actually have a structural and even thematic reason to want to embrace world-builder's disease.
(That, and I'm plotting backwards. Well, plotting is always a dialogue, but I've had a lot of experience lately with having to build the plot around what is actually on the ground. My concept for this book, it works just fine if I already have the map and the tech and I try to figure out stories that work with that groundwork.)
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