Gallery of Diegetic Works

Welcome to the Gallery of Diegetic Works! A place where authors can describe, post excerpts from and talk about various works of in-universe media- be they fiction or nonfiction- that appear in their stories.

It's something of an under-appreciated aspect of worldbuilding, at least in my opinion, and can offer a unique form of insight into the worlds we create and the types of people that inhabit them. What a culture finds worthy of putting down on record can tell us about what their beliefs and values are.

I'll start us off.

Epigraphs always seemed to me to be an incredibly useful worldbuilding tool. Myke Cole does this to good effect in his Shadow Ops series, with little snippets of in-universe documents, interviews, public speeches and the like starting off every chapter. So, I've decided to have some emphasis on coming up with non-fictional documents that characters in my stories can reference or be inspired by. The following is one of these.

Casus Belli in the Age of Succession by Petra Van Doorn

Casus Belli is a wildly ambitious work of historical journalism that seeks to be the definitive chronicle of politics and warfare between the various branches of post-exodus spacefaring Humanity in the centuries since the flight from Old Earth. It charts as complete a picture of Humanity's fractured development across the light-years of space the diaspora scattered the remnants of Humanity as the author's research could discern, and is particularly notable for drawing almost exclusively from primary sources.

As befits it's name, Casus Belli has a special focus on how this fractured development led to the technological and cultural differentiation that would provide the context for the conflicts between Human spacefaring civilizations that have taken place in the modern era.

Widely considered to be a seminal work in it's field of documenting the causes of contemporary conflict, it has been praised by the academic communities of numerous "first-worlds" for both it's depth of historical analysis and a writing style that makes it an accessible- if not exactly sensational- read for the average member of the public.

The book is broken up into a large number of easily digestible chapters, each focusing on a particular region of space and proceeding in a consistent manner from a general overview of the civilizations that inhabit it to an account of their history and what local conditions had a hand in the course of that history.

In the closing chapters of her book, Van Doorn notes that feudalism is disturbingly common among those stellar polities that are known to inhabit the fringes of civilized space, and that contrary to conventional wisdom, many of these feudal civilizations have superior technology to most democratic stellar polities. She posits that there is a relationship at work here, and that certain advanced technologies are the cause for this regression in social development. This is a very controversial claim given the ongoing debate on the extent to which transhuman technologies ought to be permitted on modern "first-worlds", seeming to imply that social advancement and technological advancement are not only two separate scales of progression, but that they are also fundamentally at odds with one-another.

edited 19th Dec '15 12:08:06 PM by Gault

Oooh. Here's a couple of mine from a current project:

After Armageddon: A Collection of Memoirs and Essays, published in Spring 1951.

A large book carrying different author accounts of life post-1945 Collapse (a cataclysmic event). Many have stories to tell of comparing of the war to the unsettling transition into midcentury modern. Some authors give political commentary, some discuss concepts strange to the new world, and some give anecdotes.

"The View From Moscow" by Dorian Donovic, bestselling Russian gothic horror novelist, talks about the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of a hyper-capitalist society across the world. He also talks about the changes he sees from his time in Moscow, including his place of residence. He also notes a story of him enduring the Assault of Moscow, and not blaming the raiders for being angry. His essay/memoir dreams of communism to rise again.

The Spy Who Knew is a controversial novel by G.J. Argyle, published in 1949. It's a tale of a young boy, named Norman, whose parents take in a beaten man who is revealed to be a corporate spy of a large weapons manufacturer. Norman introduces the man to lower class society, and all the workers have to endure. Norman gets drawn into the spy's conflict as his boss wants him back, leading to a race against time for the spy to decide his allegiance. At the end, the spy changes his allegiance to the workers and decides to kill himself in the name of freedom, which is hinted to cause a large-scale rebellion lead by Norman.

The book is heavy in anti-commercialism, anti-capitalism, and pro-working class. It humanizes the workers and demonizes corporate leaders, especially with his caricature villain Mr. Fornley. The fact that Norman is tortured and loses innocence gives a cheap "deep" Take That! to said CE Os.

It calls for change in current society, which led to its banning in most countries and their corporate governments. Workers and businessmen are banned from purchasing it, and are at risk for detention if caught reading it. Critics find it to be poorly written and preachy, filled to the brim in forced aesops with little showing and more telling. Still, it finds popularity because of its infamy.

Tales of the Waterfall Tribe: A popular Uelane anthology — on the surface, an arguably pornographic collection of interlocking Slice of Life stories about a utopian, free love type tribe dealing gracefully with the natural difficulties of an intentionally primitive lifestyle. It doesn't translate well, since much of its humor is its mockery of the Uelane's own Proud Warrior Race Guy tendencies. For instance, in several stories, actions and misunderstandings that led to massive body counts and Shakespearean betrayals in well-known Uelane epics are instead defused by the Waterfall Tribe with nothing worse than comical mischief that resemble the elaborate and gory revenges of the epics just enough to be winking references. Many of its fans consider it subversive, which the Magocracy finds amusing. They could have censored it if it actually did present a threat to their power, but the complexity of its language and its libertine values, rejected by most of Uelane society, mean its fans are primarily bourgeoisie Uelane who talk a big game but have too much to lose if any meaningful change occurs.

One the other hand, there's The Absolutely True and Genuine Travels of Imes ul'Ushomex; despite being a century old, they're still quite popular. Aside from a brief disclaimer at the beginning, the tale is presented by its eponymous narrator as the absolute truth. The stories Imes ul'Ushomex (a name equivalent to "John of Erehwon") tells are all wild and unbelievable, often relying on Refuge in Audacity and Rule of Funny rather than any veneer of believability. (Since Uel is a Death World already, this takes a lot of audacity.) The Travels remain popular because they are well-written, funny, and often involve Imes using wits and charm to deal with the absurd situations he presents rather than overpowering them. The Magocracy mostly tolerates the Travels because they were a lot more scattershot about censoring works when it was published, and it just plain flew under their radar at the time. Now it's just too old and beloved to touch, and besides, the most effective of the barbs subtly aimed at the Magocracy are now obsolete.

As a general rule of thumb, despite the fact that both are comedies that pointedly mock the violent, often self-destructive tendencies of Uelane culture from within, Travelers and Tribals have little overlap and tend to despise one another, with a very Snobs Versus Slobs rivalry. Travelers think Waterfall Tribe is nothing but pornography with grandiose delusions of importance; at best, they'll admit it serves that purpose excellently if you skip the obnoxiously "clever" plots. Tribals think the Travels are a hoary old collection of empty, farcical tall tales which, at best, are individually quite funny but nothing more than passing, forgettable fancies.

...I gotta say, The Spy Who Knew sounds like one of those Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped type works, painfully unsubtle but, given what it's dealing with, perhaps necessarily so, a la Nineteen Eighty-Four. And I've got a few well-loved books like Casus Belli on my shelf; readable for a common schmo like me but damn useful at a cocktail party.

edited 19th Dec '15 6:55:15 PM by KillerClowns

-cracks knuckles- My time has come. I've been wanting to bounce off these ideas for a while, but I usually end up boring whoever I'm talking to.

Fair warning, I am absolutely awful with titles, please don't judge too hard.

For notable Renesian nonfiction, I'm going to start with A Treatise on Freedom and Identity, a pamphlet that was anonymously published during Kartalian rule of Ren Island. After the Renesian Revolution, Gongtien Feng revealed the author to be their deceased parent, former treasury minister Jinsum Feng, and donated the original manuscript to the Renesian Grand Archives for public display. Minister Feng, who publicly advocated for peaceful negotiation with the Kartalians, takes on a very different tone in this pamphlet, passionately arguing for overthrowing them and becoming an independent nation. Emphasizing the importance of dignity and cultural tradition, Feng speaks directly to the apathetics who claim they couldn't care less if the Kartalians stayed in power or not; so long as they minded their own business and paid their taxes, what was wrong, really, with the way things were? The work is credited with playing a significant role in turning public opinion in favor of ending Kartalian rule and praised for its rhetoric. What really makes the treatise stand out from similar works circulated at the time is its readability and, therefore, accessibility to Renesians from all walks of life. It is part of the curriculum for Level 9 Renesian students (eighth grade in the American system, so they'd be around thirteen), though most have read and analyzed a few of the treatise's more famous passages by then. Now that Renesian culture is once again under attack (this time by Pallonians), the pamphlet has seen a recent resurge in popularity outside of academia.

An ancient writer known only as "Yinlam" is considered a master of Renesian minimalist poetry. The most popular anthology in print today is simply called The Works of Yinlam. Published by one of Ren Island's largest printing houses and compiled by esteemed poetry scholars, the volume includes useful editorial footnotes and commentary on each poem to explain historical context and clarify archaic language. It also contains a wealth of artwork inspired by the poems. Not much is known about Yinlam themself, only that they were likely a member of the royal court in the days when Renesians still lived on the Shijounese continent. Students tend to dislike Yinlam's poetry for being ambiguous and and difficult to understand, and it usually isn't assigned until Level 10 or higher. Hardcore academics, on the other hand, celebrate their work as the embodiment of the Renesian spirit. One can still sense the raw emotion beneath the carefully selected, almost clinical words on the page.

I might come back with more later. I think about these things a lot but don't organize my thoughts about them because I'm not that kind of writer and I never expect these things to come up in my drafts in this level of detail. I also think more about mass/ pop culture as a whole than individual works, if that makes sense.

edited 20th Dec '15 2:04:19 PM by SnowyFoxes

Well I kind of made this up after reading this thread (with some outside influences), but I got something:

Second Exhale is a story originating and mostly known in the Chronocracy of Gajas but has spread to other nation, including Gajas' enemy the Skyling Collective. It was written by Nilos Ingham, a geographer. It tells of a pilgrim who meets a being unlike any earthly creature nor is it one of the engi spirits that once manifested in Lina-Yula, but clearly wasn't the God he believed in either. This being sends him on a task needed to avert a calamity, yet doesn't know itself why this task is necessary. The pilgrim struggles over what extent he should trust this being and what its existance means for his faith. Ultimately the calamity still happens, but they manage to save many who would otherwise have been killed. The ending reveals that it was actually from the viewpoint of the being, and the pilgrims questions about it was actually its own. (This one is fictional in-universe, but has parallels to the works I'm putting in my Lina-Yula setting.)

I think I'd like to read Travels. Sounds very Huck Finn. Tribe sounds like a book people would reference to when talking about an openly sexual and carefree person.

Yinlam sounds interesting. It's like Homer but without the mythology epics.

I'm mostly wondering of HOW we'll use these works... For me, I'm taking the Dune (and by extension, Gault's example) approach by prefacing chapters with excerpts of novels and nonfiction created in my story world.

Referenced by characters from time to time — for instance, when someone needs to explain to an Uelane why two American former friends all but swore a vendetta over whether or not "a playwright, more or less" is overrated, the Travelers/Tribals thing is brought up to quickly get the character up to speed with the reader while averting No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture and tossing in a bit of Narrative Filigree in the deal.

edited 20th Dec '15 9:22:47 AM by KillerClowns

^^ I also preface my chapters with excerpts, but they're usually diary entries or letters. They were inspired by the Bioshock audio diaries, so my goal is to use them to shed a little light on the backstories and feelings of important secondary characters, usually people like the protagonists' parents. In other cases they're newspaper articles, transcriptions of court records and political speeches, laws, and treaties. I may use excerpts from something like the Treatise or propaganda from other countries, but I don't think readers are going to benefit from looking at Yinlam's poetry. It's more likely to be referenced by characters like "Man, glad we got away from them, what kind of a pretentious dick quotes Yinlam in casual conversation?"

Even if I never end up directly referencing or quoting these things, the world still benefits from me making them. What kind of poetry would Renesians designate as highbrow and lowbrow? Why? What would be the most widely circulated piece of nonfiction on Ren Island? Why? Asking myself questions like these during the process helps me explore a culture as a whole and develop it more, not just its literary canon. I especially like doing this with literature because literature is kind of my thing. At one point I considered double majoring in English and media studies (now it's just the latter) because analyzing texts and their historical/ sociological context is something that I feel is worthwhile and interesting.

edited 20th Dec '15 2:05:34 PM by SnowyFoxes

Spot-on. Even if the reader never gets to see 99% of the worldbuilding you do, the work isn't wasted. The way I see it, worldbuilding is more for the benefit of the author, so that they can come to better understand their own world, and therefore be able to convincingly render all the story-relevant aspects of it. Sort of like a scaffolding, where you can see how everything should look like.

I always hate it when I stumble across a story I end up liking, then dig a bit beneath the surface to find that I put more thought into it than it's creators must have. Always grates on me.

I also think that culturally or politically significant pieces of writing, or the things they talk about, are a better fit to describe the motivations of large groups of people. Every story needs a personal element, but there are many situations where that just wouldn't really fit. Amon's daddy issues in the Legend of Korra, for one example.

Zakus in the Mud: On its face, it's merely the wartime memoirs of the commander of the Earth Attack Force.

However the book was always going to come with a lot of political baggage, as its author was the only known surviving member of the family that plunged humanity into the bloodiest and most destructive war in its history. It could have been apologia of the highest order or a damning indictment of greed and inhumanity. Most people expected the former, compared with various other feel-good books coming out at the time to repair the shattered self-image of Zeon.

They got the latter. Despite his affection for some of his family, Garma Zabi pulled no punches in describing the power struggles and infighting that dominated his family and the war effort. He has ultimately harsh words for every one of his family; his father, who made them what they were and couldn't stop them when he should have, his older brothers for unleashing the greatest atrocity in human history when they gassed most of the space colonies, his sister for choosing to follow them in that game, even himself for being unable to entirely blunt the effects of his brother Gihren's desire for grand and bloody gestures with the destruction of Seattle and New York.

The book is not shy about the unwinnable nature of the war for Zeon, but offers an interesting thesis: while the Federation's industrial might meant that over the long term the war was unwinnable, Garma proposes that over the short term Zeon's penchant for atrocity cost it the war. By having killed half the human race they made their defeat an axiomatic good in the eyes of the common man, and enraged the Federation's soldiers so much that they would frequently sacrifice themselves to ensure the destruction of their enemies.

Despite its lack of an implicit call for a halt to the romanticizing of the lost cause of Zeon, the book brought that movement to a screeching halt inside the Republic proper. It also initiated a period of national soul-searching that would continue for almost a decade.

The Dream In Flames did not come into widespread acceptance until almost a decade after it was published. The book has been described as intensely bitter, or hard-headed realism, by different critics; sometimes by the same critics in different moods. The dream of the psychic spacemen solving all conflict through their ability to perfectly understand each other that was at the heart of much of the spiritualist underpinnings of Zeon Deikun's philosophy proved he was a visionary, for such people did exist.

The Dream In Flames contends he was also childishly naive. The book was written under a pseudonym shortly after the end of the One Year War and the emergence of the Newtype phenomenon being widely documented; based on its first-hand description of combat during the war the author is believed to have fought for the Federation and was a Newtype, though it's not clear whether they were recognized as such at the time. All of the proposes suspects have denied being the author, though several of them have voiced general agreement with the book.

In brief, The Dream In Flames talks about how the psychic spacemen turned out to be...pretty much anyone, without rhyme or reason, who'd been to space, and that understanding did not fix underlying problems of belief in different ideals and people. In one of its later chapters, it even describes a situation where perfect understanding of an opponent lead to hatred; that understanding them perfectly meant understanding how thoroughly contemptible they were. The book also has a strongly atheistic bent, and though it never quite deploys the Epicurus quote, it comes very close on several occasions when describing events or people. The way it ends in a surprisingly upbeat belief in humanity, even as it has spent most of its time talking about how individual humans were terrible; while the author professes little faith in the dream of understanding, they seem to deeply believe in the goodness of the average human being.

During most of the UC 80s it was regarded as the bitter product of a burned-out veteran, with its authorship generally assumed to be assigned to one of two people. Its scorn among Newtypes themselves was a thing of legend, most of them subscribing to what the book refers to as "the comforting, glittering Dream". Following the mass weaponization of Newtypes and their powers during that period however The Dream In Flames spoke to a wider audience both inside and outside the Newtype community and has come to be taken as a serious work; it was put on the required reading list for the Federation's Newtype Pilot School during the early UC 90s and seems to have acquired a place of respectful disagreement even among those who disagree with it.

edited 22nd Dec '15 4:35:53 AM by Night

Night, out of curiosity, have you ever played Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War?

Comparative Utility Theory: A Primer, by the Commonwealth Academy of Civil Logistics, in cooperation with the Bureau of Public Education

This pamphlet is intended as an educational material devised by the Commonwealth's leading university of economics- called Civil Logistics for political reasons- for both the general public and to distribute to foreigners. It lays forth, in language plain enough to be comprehensible to most literate people, a condensed version of the concept central to the Commonwealth's ideology.

Comparative Utility is a theory of labor that endeavors to describe the economic relationship between Mages and normal people. The pamphlet offers numerous concrete examples of what it describes as the "gulf of ability" between those people born with the ability to use magic and those who were not as it would relate to the lives of most working people. For instance, it points out that Mages, being a minority of the population, don't have to compete with one-another nearly as much as non-Mages do. As such they will on average both earn higher salaries and have better job security than non-Mages.

It also presents the theory as a mathematical formula: V=(Lc/Lm)

"V" stands in for Value, "Lc" (or Labor, common) means the total man-hours necessary to complete a given task if worked exclusively by non-Mages using best methods, and "Lm" (Labor, magical) means total man-hours necessary to complete said task if worked exclusively by Mages using best methods.

This formula outputs V, which is the utility ratio between magical and common labor for that given task. Several types of work are listed, along with their supposed utility ratios as tested by the Commonwealth Academy of Civil Logistics. The numbers vary, but all of them are above 1, in many cases very significantly so, and almost never below 2.

The writing style is very matter-of-fact throughout most of it, as if it were describing a scientifically verified phenomenon. However, a section at the end of the pamphlet- which is the only part of it that was obviously influenced by the Commonwealth's propaganda department- decries this inequality, emphasizing what it describes as the Commonwealth's core belief in the inherent equality and value of all of Humankind. It beseeches the reader to take a hand in the creation of a more just and equitable world by supporting the Commonwealth or local Commonwealth-aligned parties.

Gault, would you happen to have a background in economics? Just wondering, I don't have any specific commentary on Comparative Utility Theory or anything. I'm really not qualified.

The OP is quite open-ended and it got me thinking about putting together a brief tour of music history in the Republic, but I was afraid it would get too technical for people without any musical background, so I dunno. Probably gonna stick to texts for now.

I'm kind of necroing this thread to add: does movies and other fictional media count?

If so: in my "Rhapsody in Midcentury" setting, there's the Film Noir classic: A Season of Crime, released in 1952, which stars Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster, as private bodyguard and security specialist partners Carl Miller and Arthur Holt (respectively). After the murder of a mob boss, Big Tony, a city is high in tension. Paula Escot, a woman of high stature, requests Carl to accompany her to a party, as she is in danger of being killed by a mysterious vigilante, known as "The Dissident", who is accused of killing Big Tony.

As it turns out, Arthur is the Dissident, who only killed for the sake of bringing up the business after almost failing. What's more is that Paula was Big Tony's mistress, and truly the next target of the Dissident. In the final confrontation, Carl shoots and kills his best friend and partner. And although he has fallen in love with Paula, she turns herself in on criminal charges.

The movie was adapted from the short story "You Must Believe in Spring" by Sarah Mc Cullen, in which Carl was the Dissident, and only killed Big Tony because he wanted to be with Paula—and Arthur joined in on keeping the secret to bolster his business.

Though readers of the original liked its ending better, critics loved the movie's interpretation.

I don't see why they wouldn't.

A few:

• Byrne River Outlet by A. Wyncott: A High Romantic bildungsroman about the lives of young poets, featuring all the sorts of melodramatic trappings one might expect of such a work, not limited to love polygons, suicidal ideation, and impassioned monologues about Art and Truth and all that jazz. The final sequence, set during and after a devastating storm along the titular estuary, ends on a cryptic, almost unsettling note, the interpretation of which fuels a rather curious argument between two characters.
• Lord Alfred Mosley's translation and Reflections on Harfidel of Königsberg's "Easter Treatise": A rather involved early 18th century analysis and English translation of a similarly esoteric 13th century religious exegesis on a now-lost set of heretical texts of unknown antiquity, the latter written by a Gothic monk from Sambia, the former by a possibly bipolar viscount from a very dreary part of Northumberland. The key part of the equation, mostly paraphrased in Harfidel's text, is some sort of revelatory text in the Docetic Gnostic vein expounding upon the concept of suffering, apparently containing a rather unusual take on the creation of the world. The Goth seems to have found this unsettling; the Brit, strangely enticing. Some version of this concept exists in a great number of parallel worlds.
• The Analekta of the Drakontes: A gigantic informal compendium of historical anecdotes and allegories comprising something akin to a cross between the Arabian Nights and a quasi-secular Bible within a very ancient civilisation mostly composed of snakelike creatures. Most of the stories are bitter, ironic, perverse, or very hard to relate to without a lot of context; most are written in what can only be described as a kind of analogue hypertext. Several anecdotes, including the Parable of Damnation by Thought, are of great importance to one character, who has a very sick sense of humour.

The Epic of the Solar Throne could not be written in modern Uel, and survives mostly because it's a cultural touchstone. It tells, loosely, the story of the most prominent of the many Yoth civil wars, between two brothers with differing claims to the Yoth throne: the doomed, tragic hero, Solar Falcon, a Necessarily Evil Hobbesian despot, and Solar Blade, his idealistic Hero Antagonist brother, a dupe for the vile schemes of the Yoth priesthood and their dark god Elas, God of Slavery. (Never mind that the Yoth never worshipped Elas, who was actually the God of Rain for a city-state far to the Yoth's south.) While hammy, theatrical epics have mostly fallen out of favor, educated Uelane can still be heard quoting lines from it in sudden bursts of theatricality if it seems appropriate, and the language, despite its grandiosity, is vivid and clear enough for an uneducated Uelane to easily understand, making it a staple of traveling performing troupes.

The Travels, mentioned above, includes a condensed version with the same Shakespearean body count (Uelane humor permits a lot of corpses) and hammy language over the ownership of a failing fruit vendor's stall, with both brothers running their other, genuinely successful businesses into the ground over the fight while Imes offers commentary and briefly tries to resolve the fight sensibly before giving up and taking both the morons for every copper he can. Given the amount of death it involves and how barbed the satire is, it's generally considered something of a Black Comedy Burst in the otherwise more absurd Travels, but some love it most of all for that very reason. Whether the author of Travels loved or hated the Epic of the Solar Throne is hotly debated; she, being as impish as her protagonist, thought it funny to leave the question unanswered.

In practice, the Epic gives me an excuse to (sparingly) use hammy, over-the-top lines that would otherwise be out of place in my Low Fantasy by making them quotes from the Epic. (And to cover my ass if they prove less awesome than I think, it will be mentioned that the Epic is another one of those works that doesn't always translate well.) Likewise, unusually well-placed snark in response to these epic pronouncements can be ostensibly pulled from the Travels if the character isn't naturally that fast with a quip.

edited 28th Feb '16 6:47:25 PM by KillerClowns