Tiki-Adjacent

That's the phrase used in tiki forums. There's no official literature, so instead there is literature that is considered "adjacent."

Primarily, pulp noir. Well, tiki is in large part a drinking culture, so it sort of makes sense to go towards those infamously hard-drinking low-rent PIs. But there does seem to be a peculiar resonance with Black Mask type stories, post-war Americana and filled with sweltering heat, bottle blondes, murder and copious drinking.

As the author of the crime novel Ritual of the Savage (to be confused with the Lex Baxter album of the same name) notes, the idea of "Tiki Noir" is a recognized sub-culture. The connections between pulp detective fiction and tiki seem well established now.

Ritual of the Savage also very much touches on what Crime Reads calls "Nuclear Noir," as exemplified in book and especially film Kiss Me Deadly. I guess it makes sense in terms of 1950s Americana but there is some peculiar connection here to Cold War fears and radioactive dreams.

But what else are you going to do? It is largely a visual style. It isn't really Polynesia (and the food is Chinese, the music has a Latin beat, and the drinks are rum based). So you sort of can watch Elvis movies, South Pacific, the right Gidget movie or maybe some Hawaii 5-Oh, but this doesn't really speak to a writing genre or style.

Or at least, not a specific one. You are left hunting for the appearance of tiki elements in something like an old Brady Bunch episode.

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I'm having a different style problem, though. I've outlined the first sequence, and I'm to the point where I'm trying to figure out the look and feel of the tech. And more than that; the approach. There's a style in some consciously retro SF to belabor certain descriptions. Sure, that was seen in some works so it makes a useful signifier, but the good authors were avoiding it and that I think is the more important thing. Story, that is. Style has to take second place to clarity of story.

Just, we are so far along the trail of retro-retro pastiche...we recognize intentional mimicry of things that are mimicking things. And I do have to think the same thing was going on in later Roman comedies, with things that were intended to remind the audience of other playwrights, who were doing those things to remind their audience of the Greeks...

When you mix this in with SF (or fantasy) you've got worse problems. The experience of reading F&SF is all about figuring out how this particular world works, what this particular author is doing, and how well they are doing it.

Especially SF; a lot of authors now don't know their science, and are equally unfamiliar with what used to be thought of as the foundational works. So if they drop a "psionic" in the mix you don't know immediately if they are referencing Campbell or Cronenberg, or for that matter, if they think the stuff is real.

The reader is, in short, extrapolating and filling in the gaps, and if you leave it too long, they will construct a world that has nothing to do with the one you are trying to present. (There's an amusing series now on bookTok where the presenter is reading the first page of a fantasy book and trying to form the picture of the protagonist in her mind. "Wait, pirates? Oh, hold on, let me change that," and switch to a different actor in completely different costume...)

I could have hit this in a dozen places. I hit it where my outline suggested the good guys switch some labels on a cargo manifest so the wrong crates get loaded.

Which...are they holding up readers and scanning the digital labels? Doesn't that imply a whole wireless infrastructure as well, which has obvious knock-on to things like personal communication, electronic banking.....?

If you try to scoot around it, just suggesting this is something electronic, then you are letting the reader imagine too widely and two minutes later when the bad guys jump them, the cry of "Why don't they just call 911!" is heard.

But if you nail it down...well, besides taking away options, you are creating a whole bunch of other knock-ons.

And worst; this is one of those places where the style, whether post-war or atom punk or cassette futurism or what have you is given a chance to appear. So you kind of do want to break the rules just a little and go into slightly more detail than many of the actual period writers would. Because you aren't a period writer. You are writing for a modern audience who has a lot more background in all the ways other writers -- and the real world -- has come up with in solving those problems.

You are talking to a reader who has met bar codes and RFID, carbon paper and floppy disks in their lives or in history, and all sorts of tricorders and PADDs and sonic screwdrivers they have seen in fiction.

Which means on the one hand you can suggest something they've seen in the world or in other media very, very efficiently. "Blaster" is now such an established term of art there's no need to go into the extra words of "plasma" or "atomic" or however you are justifying "pistol-sized weapon of scientific destruction." But at the same time, you have to be very careful the reader didn't just imagine a red-headed jedi -- instead of your blonde with a totally unrelated kind of laser sword.