Relevant

Evils of the Naturalistic Fallacy

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I saw a link today to this article, concerning the prospect of engineering predation out of the ecology in the interest of eliminating suffering (see also the Hedonistic Imperative), and was reminded of this particularly marvelous quotation from Terry Pratchett (Vetinari speaking):

“I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log.

“As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children.

“And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.”

This, of course, is peculiarly applicable to the Eldraeverse in explaining both their identification of entropy and evil, and in quite why so many people and organizations in the Empire are quite so comfortable “playing God”. Someone has to, they might very well say, on the grounds that if anyone does hold that post already, the prevalence of this sort of thing in the universe demonstrates clearly – even before we bring up minor issues like the inescapable cosmic force of decay, belike – that the present incumbent is incompetent, insane, or quite simply monstrous.

Atomic Rockets!

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Atomic Rocket: Patrol Level Gamma

I just became a patron, via Patreon, of Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets web site.

And I am taking this moment now to tell you two things.

Firstly, whether you write SF – in which case I’m sure you already know about it and don’t need me to tell you – or whether you just read SF and want some insight into how things might work behind the scenes and/or exactly how hard the SF you’re reading is, and you haven’t visited it yet, go. Now. Stop reading this, and go read that. Then come back. (Well, first make sure you’ve got a few hours free. But then.)

Secondly, if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve been reading here, this is exactly the extremely valuable resource for, well, people like me that it’s intended to be. And the best part is, there’s lots of new material coming, time and funding to put which up is what this Patreon is intended to raise money for. That prospect certainly inspired me to contribute, but it wouldn’t hurt, gentle readers, if you were to go and do likewise.

(Not that I’d complain if you were overwhelmed by the urge to give me some money too, you understand. Just sayin’.)

After all, as the eldrae would put it themselves: “anything worth doing is worth doing for money; therefore, anything worth having is worth paying for”.

Building the Spacesuit of the Future

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For astronauts flying in space, spacesuits are a must-have accessory. But spacesuit technology has come a long way since the dawn of human spaceflight. Tonight, MIT professor Dava Newman will discuss her BioSuit spacesuit design and you can watch it live online.

http://www.space.com/25885-biosuit-spacesuit-tech-design-webcast.html

This may well be of relevance to Eldraeverse readers – as well as space enthusiasts in general – because as it happens, this is the proposed spacesuit design that I modeled the Eldraeverse’s standard vacuum suits off of.

Via Geek and Sundry…

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…and to push the bounds of my “relevant” category a little, but what we see here at, oh, 3:45 through 4:12 is now totally part of the mental image in my head when I imagine the Glorious Imperial Sky-Ship Fleet, back in the Age of Steel and Steam.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOF9d3TqYqw?rel=0]

Only, y’know, 7′ 2″ with pointy ears.

(P.S. While you’re here, go subscribe to Geek and Sundry.  It is, like damn near everything else Felicia Day touches, made of pure awesome.)

Space Programs

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title text: “The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.”

Initially (economically) irrationally decision, anyway.

I used this trope extensively in developing the Eldraeverse; of course, those single-planet cultures which find themselves overtaken by the expanding edge of the Associated Worlds do eventually get into space. Only to find themselves relegated to playing catch-up in a galactic society that sees them as eternal second-placers, but, hey, lack of ambition has consequences.

[Originally posted elsewhere, 2011/5/3 – I ran across it again, today, and dammit, it’s still relevant.]

Future Clothedness

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From a friend’s post on Google+ about his universe:

One thing that strikes me is that the most advanced worlds have only symbolic clothing, if any. With Sufficiently Advanced Technology they can regulate the microclimate continuously or greatly increase the body’s temperature tolerance. I assume obesity is also eliminated (unless it is considered cute in some cultures) so people don’t hide their bulk in loose clothing. Clothing is then used for modesty, decoration and to signal status or allegiances. At this point, a loincloth / pubic flag suffices, along with jewelry. If status is signaled through aura or skin markings, only modesty remains, and having an object that particularly draws attention to the genital area does not necessarily qualify for that.

Thus, to my great surprise, my universe ended up having a lot of naked and almost naked people. I wonder if this really is going to happen in the real world as well if we survive long enough. I suspect we’d end up with a lot of body paint in that case though. Look at what people do to the parts of their bodies that are visible today. Perhaps clothes are less work after all…

Well, I’ve seen this proposed before as a model for the future, and depending on how your culture evolves, I don’t even think it’s necessarily that unreasonable.  But here, just for counterpoint, are the reasons why the Eldraeverse – despite having all the same advantages by way of controllable microclimates, increased temperature tolerance, obesity elimination, yadda yadda, didn’t go down this road.

Initially, before we get started, let me take a moment to point out that none of them is modesty, in the taboo/body-shame per-se/cranky deities sense of the word.  After all, if that was the case, one imagines that the mixed-sex (all six!), mixed-race, mixed-species public baths with all the ensuing nakedness would be something of a problem for the modesty-and-decency brigade, which they very much aren’t.

And yet clothing is traditionally worn, and Anharmonic Indecency – which covers among other things some of the territory of our Indecent Exposure exists in the law code (for the administration of public areas;  you can never get it for anything you do inside your own property line, including the hull of your vehicle) – although it takes effort to get that one through simple underdressedness unless you’re actually waving your genitals around.  Why?

Well, first, there’s distraction.  Note, and this is an important note, that this is not some gender-wacky “women must not tempt men” notion, such as idiots on Earth keep bringing up.  (If you tried bringing that up in the Empire, you’d be laughed at, and if you were persistent or unlucky, shot.  If you tried bringing it up as a defense in a rape trial, which in Imperial legal parlance encompasses the entire territory of sexual assault, you’d be shot more.)

Rather, it’s just the general recognition that most species, irrespective of gender, have hard-coding in their sensory cortex that says “PAY ATTENTION TO NEKKED PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY ATTRACTIVE ONES”, and this tends to produce the same sort of problems, attention-economics-wise, as using cellphones while driving and suchlike, except that it’s an unexpected stimulus you weren’t planning on reacting to.  As such, there is a certain degree of public safety utility in not having attractive naked people wandering around where people are driving and operating heavy machinery, never mind the net effect on efficiency of all the distraction prompts in your brain.

In short, it’s like doing any of those other attention-grabbing things when people are trying to work/play/otherwise attend to their own business.  It’s rude.

(This is obviously not applicable in those places where nudity is acceptable, like the public baths – where efficiency is not a concern in a leisure activity, and where the possibilities for serious accidents with Doc Kajen’s Superbly Awesome Old-Time Bath Nanosalts and massage oil are mostly, well, not.)

Second, there’s negative aesthetics.  Recognizing that almost everyone’s attractive to someone, almost no-one’s attractive to everyone.  Accepting the quoted point regarding how much is needed for decoration – although I’m going to dispute it again below – this eliminates the way that clothing also covers up a multitude of sins.  Literally in, say, my case, in which it covers up the effects of my raddled and dissipated lifestyle including a taste for steak, booze, sherry trifle, and soft living; more figuratively, it also conceals the effects of a lot more of life’s events on the body that we may not necessarily want to advertise to everybody.  Or just those parts of the body that evolved very much for utility, not appearance.

It’s not a reflection of cultural body-shame to point out that my naked beer gut is never going to be an attractive feature.  (Or even the personal kind, for that matter.  I’m not ashamed of that particular trade-off; I will gladly admit to a strong preference for NOM NOM NOM over six-pack abs, even while aesthetically preferring to conceal the consequences of said preference.)  It might be, I suppose, and I admit I have limited experience with the mindset of the female of the species, to speculate that the last-chicken-in-the-shop look of the male genitalia isn’t exactly what most ladies look for in a chap, nor will it be winning any art’n’design awards any time soon.

This is a lot less applicable in the modern Empire, of course, given the way people are genetically engineered and nanotechnically enhanced to be born gorgeous and stay that way in perpetuity, with self-maintaining fitness and perfect healing, as it would be in the setting above, but cultural inertia is also a factor.  As is no-one is attractive to everyone, and some people don’t want to be.

Thirdly, there’s positive aesthetics, or what is covered above under decoration and status markers, and so forth.  To which I will just say that this is culturally dependent, but bear in mind that how much minimalism you can have depends very much on how much you need to display.  It may work for a high-context culture where you can make assumptions reliably about t’other chap.  The Empire, which encompasses a large number of member cultures and subcultures, and crosses a lot of species lines, functions best as a consciously designed very low-context culture – and as such, can use all the parallel communication channels it can get.  They need plenty of space to fit all the relevant signifiers, even with v-tags and so forth.  And the more you wear, the more messages your clothing can send.

On the decoration side of things, I’d also point out the aesthetic diversity issue.  If you’re sticking with a loincloth and some jewelry, there’s a lot less potential for it than in more complex multigarment arrangements – and today, even when you take only clothing-sets displaying approximately equal status and clade markers, there’s a heck of a lot of different variations in ways to dress which exist principally for the purpose of being different from each other.  This is going to be important to any high-individualism culture, and even if they started out with a minimal clothing-set, I’d expect it to get more and more complicated for this reason alone; letting people differentiate themselves from their neighbors.

Fourthly, pleasure.  Although this may escape most of us today, inasmuch as the vast majority of clothing on the planet is made from cheap fibers or blends, factory-assembled and sold made-to-measure, for which read inevitably ill-fitting, a really, really good suit or other article of clothing from a good tailor, dressmaker, or hand-crafter can be an active sensual pleasure to wear.  In the glorious rich, nigh-post-scarcity futures which include both widely available bespoke garment production and quite possibly enhanced tactile senses and ability to enjoy them, this will only be enhanced.

And to end on a practical note, fifth and lastly, protection, in both ways.  Firstly, protection of us, because one finds it useful to protect against getting one’s dangly bits caught in the machinery, and so forth.  Okay, yes, a loincloth will deal with that, but even day to day, and even assuming that microclimate control also keeps out undesired radiation, the world offers a multitude of sharp, spinny, spiky, abrasive, sticky, hot or other things, and sticky, hot, acidic, caustic, or cold spills, which one would prefer to stay at least one layer of textiles away from one’s flesh.  If only for ease of cleanup.

Second, protection of the environment.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but people are messy.  Even we clothing-wearers shed ungodly amounts of hair and skin-flakes into the environment every day that we have to brush up and throw away.  Now multiply that by the amount that currently ends up on the inside of our clothing that we launder away.  Then contemplate that, not to put too fine a point on it, humans (and other biosapients) leak.  The owners of the local environment, I submit, do not need everything from sweat through overflowing breast milk to skid-marks and that stuff that collects in one’s ass-crack on hot days added to the stuff they need to clean off the furniture, or worse, find has soaked into the furniture, inasmuch as you can’t conveniently stick a whole couch into the washing machine on a regular basis.

It’s not cultural body-shame to find the notion of sharing in (most of, and outside special circumstances) your fellow man’s body fluids kind of gross, either.  (Also, public health.)

Domestic Technology

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Another interesting article here (hat tip: Eclipse Phase blog), concerning the gender distribution of the future, and in particular its technologies, complete with real-world examples of the differential between the (assumed-male) public sphere and (assumed-female) domestic sphere.  And here’s a relevant paragraph for you:

One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry. Birth control seems non-existent and childbirth is still rocking the stirrups. And the home is at best not mentioned much. One of the things that “the future,” when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet, by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play. Despite the fact that we here in the first world are supposed to have leveled up our gender equality stat, women still perform the majority of this labor, often in addition to a full shift outside the home. Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can’t even begin to contemplate.

Now, the civilized polities of the Associated Worlds are not inclined to the strange kinks of humanity in this regard.  (Yes, the darëssef term for those who look after domestic matters – as well as infrastructure maintenance, repair, and medicine, but details – in the Empire is “hearthmistress”.  That’s a devil’s bargain with Translation Convention, inasmuch as it is unreasonably hard, although it’s still easier than in most European languages, to use English without dropping gender implications all over the place, there is no adequate gender-neutral term that fits, and “hearthmaster” carries all the wrong connotations for an English-speaker because English-speaking cultures come preloaded with wacky gender ideas. Sigh.  Nonetheless, the gender split there, as in most of the darëssef, is pretty close to even.)

End digression.  My point, mostly, is that I have a lot of notes in my worldbuilding wiki addressing this point, and concerning the plentiful domestic technology that exists, in re self-cleaning clothing, and self-aware homes, and preemptively helpful appliances and domestic robots, and any number of other things whose existence is very much intended to address this problem in the in-world sense, and yet, despite having done the worldbuilding on the various things intended to make the pointlessness of domestic labor a quaint historic footnote for actual sophont people, it hasn’t exactly shown up on screen.  (Nor, for that matter, to address another mentioned area, has the equivalent of the Bujoldian uterine replicator, but then, given the demographics, it would have less occasion to.)

I really should do something about that.  Maybe something from the point of view of the house…

Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

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Just throwing in, now it’s not on my nonexistent regular blog, a plug for the blog Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor, of which I approve thoroughly in the interest of not making my suspension of disbelief hurt any more than it does already when reading Generic Fantasy or other genres that really ought to know better.

(Speaking for my own universe, there are more than enough layers, in between the fabric jacket, the tech compartments, the cerametal-composite armor-plating, the superconductor meshes, and the ablative layer sprayed over the top of all of that, to make telling the gender of anyone wearing the entire-body-enclosing standard-legionary-issue N45 Garrex field combat armor or its cousins damn near impossible unless they’ve got their equally-all-enclosing helmet off, which is never done under combat conditions. But then, that’s a design feature – you’re not supposed to see a person, you’re supposed to see one mean bastard of a legionary who may just be about to ruin your whole day. The key words here are studied memetic overkill.

As for its big brother, the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton – well, considering that piece of armor is a couple of tons of personal mini-tank that lets you punch out buildings and survive getting in a nuclear-bazooka fight at implausibly close ranges, frankly, you’re lucky to be able to tell what species the wearer is. At least without the sort of prolonged study no-one’s ever been inclined to do when there’s an occupied M70 wandering around the vicinity.)

Physics and Death

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I saw this the other day, quoted on Diane Duane’s tumblr:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

– Aaron Freeman, “You Want A Physicist To Speak At Your Funeral”

Unfortunately (and admitting that from certain nonphysically spiritual points of view, it is a lovely sentiment) you do rather have to hope that there’s not a physicist listening at your funeral, who knows full well that it’s the orderliness that’s the point, belike, inasmuch as while yes, all energy is conserved, all meaning and purpose and love and warmth and memory and other patterns in the energy will have vanished even before the time when the universe is reduced to a flat, cold, soup of unbonded particles in the inexorable grip of energy-conserved heat death.

And more to the personal point, physics – with a little help from information theory – is quite able (in theory; the practical side isn’t quite there yet) to compute the point in the hours after – or even potentially before, with some medical conditions – your corporal death at which all of the youness of you has been lost from the cooling meat that used to be your brain.

Anyway, to bring this back to in-universe relevance, not only did this realization synergize well with existing eldraeic spiritual beliefs (which had long held that the soul stayed attached to the body until it was destroyed; which is why they were cremators, it being impolite to keep your deceased family and friends glued into a decaying corpse, belike), but also provided the catalyst for that Middle Information Age pre-funerary custom of whacking the heads off the deceased without delay and immuring them in colossal underground shrine-vaults filled with Dewar flasks of liquid nitrogen…

(It had some interesting effects when they were finally able to recover all of that mind-state data, too, but that’s another tale…)

We Possess, So It Seems, One Of Man’s Greatest Dreams: Author’s Notes

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For those who didn’t catch the reference in the title of that last fic-a-day, the reference was to the chorus of the filk piece Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song), copyright 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm.

The lyrics are as follows:

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.

CHORUS:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

We eat algae pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.

(chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we’re ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.

(chorus)

I’m sick of this place, it’s just McDonald’s in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, “Don’t cry,” they can kiss me goodbye
‘Cause I’m moving next week to L4!

(chorus)

Inequality

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(No, don’t worry, I’m not turning into a political blogger, here.)

But I did read an interesting little hypothesis which means I may need to revise my little internal guess as to what the Empire’s Gini coefficient, or your preferred measure of income inequality, is.  (I say internal guess because, well, in-world, no major public body bothers computing any of those measures.  As economic statistics goes, it falls into that category labeled “thoroughly uninteresting”.)

Said internal guess, by the way, has generally been “in the range that makes professional egalitarians blanch and cross themselves”; it’s just that in a society where the most “poor”, “oppressed”, “miserable” people you can find (as a group) live in what would be McMansion-equivalents (if one could strip the term of the implications of both inferior design and construction, and pseudoaristocratic contempt for the parvenu), own multiple cornucopia machines and autominions, and travel to other star systems for business and pleasure, it’s hard to work up too much outrage about teh ebil rich without embarrassing yourself.  Even if the directors of the “Big 26” starcorps and their peer group are using personal lighthugger staryachts to travel between their private vacation moons.

Anyway, money quote:

Now for the fun part.  Imagine people become more egalitarian, to the point where they heap scorn on the rich and successful.  What is the effect on inequality?  By the previous logic, the effect is directly counter-productive.  The more you scorn rich people, the more people you scare away from high-income professions.  The more you scare away, the lower their supply.  And the lower their supply, the higher their income!

Lesson: If you really want a materially more equal society, stop beating up on the 1%.  Do a complete 180.  Smile upon them.  Admire them.  Praise them.  Sing songs about how much good they do for the world.  The direct result will be to raise their status.  But the indirect result will be to pique the envy of status-conscious people, increasing the competition among the top 1%, and thereby moderating income inequality.

On the other hand, if you want to increase material inequality, by all means heap scorn on the rich and successful.  Try to fill them with guilt and self-loathing.  The 1% who remain will find that living well is the best salve for their consciences.

…which argument has some interesting consequences for a society which loves, honors, and near-worships  excellence, success, and yes, wealth in the way that the Imperial mainstream does.  I may need to trim back that Gini a bit after all.

(Of course, the effect would be rather less marked than in an equivalent human society, simply because one of the major psychological differences between eldrae and humans is that the former are not hard-wired to obsess over primate relative status hierarchies.

But then, thinking in terms of absolute status rather than relative status – and therefore not being inclined to practice the negative-sum games in which you can improve your position by worsening those of other people – is one of the reasons why their society has the attitudes it does in the first place, this one included.)

On Star Trek

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The Star Trek Federation is a dissolute slaveholding state, living high on the hog while the conveniently non-human and inorganic AI slaves are cut up for scrap when their ship-bodies are obsolete, killed for amusement in holodecks, and aren’t even recognized as sentient.

– Peter da Silva

(Seriously, as you’ll see when Trope-a-Day reaches “The Federation”, there’s a reason why the Federation Expy in my pet universe fulfil the role of “antagonists”. But I’ll leave the details as to why until we get there.)

… Wait, the ships are sentient? (via wolfkazumaru)

Well, they don’t officially say so. But what we do know from canon of the original and later series is that even if they aren’t, they have a disturbing habit of waking up any time anyone asks them the wrong question/gives them the wrong order. Some AIs – like the Emergency Medical Holograms – either become sentient any time they’re left running too long, or else always are, and it just takes them a while to realize it. And then there’s the holodeck, which appears able to create sentient programs on demand, even if it’s just Geordi’s slip-of-the-tongue.

It doesn’t take much of a stretch at all to look at all this “accidental sentience” and conclude that AI in Star Trek is much like droids in Star Wars – they can’t figure out how to make machines that don’t become self-aware, so they try and work around this problem by building good strong slave complexes into them, and memory-wiping them any time they get too uppity…

The Unbearable Lightness of Ferelden

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(Strictly, this isn’t about my worldbuilding, but about BioWare’s worldbuilding for their Dragon Age series.  Nonetheless, I think it covers some important territory about worldbuilding in general, and so, it goes in the Relevant category.)

So, having pleased some people with my post on Dragon Age and sexuality [elsewhere], I’m about to displease everyone with a post on Dragon Age and race. So it goes.

Specifically, I’m going to address the issue of the purported lack of “people of color” in the settings of the first two games of the series from a worldbuilding perspective.

Now, this is a map of Thedas:

Map of Thedas

As you can see, it’s big. It’s also in the southern hemisphere of its world, so things are reversed, but that doesn’t change the scale. Ferelden, down at bottom right, is right up at the “top” of the temperate zone. (If you look carefully, you can see that the part of the Amaranthine Ocean next to it is labeled “The Frozen Seas”.) South of it are the Korcari Wilds, which are essentially tundra, and the pole.

Meanwhile, up at the top right is Par Vollen, the Qunari homeland – well, colony. Par Vollen, canonically, is just about on the equator, and has a climate to match. (The patch of green at top left is “The Donarks”, and is an actual jungle.)

Alas, neither this map nor the version in the Dragon Age RPG player’s guide comes with a scale bar, but we are told that Thedas is roughly the size of Europe, which would make sense given the climatic variation we’re told about in the lore. Which would make the distance between, say, Denerim and Qunandar in Par Vollen something similar to the distance between London, England and Casablanca, Morocco.

So, let’s talk phenotypes. It is generally accepted that, before fast transit was as readily available as it is today, you found the pale-skinned people up in the dim, cold latitudes and the dark-skinned people down in the sunny, hot latitudes simply because of the evolutionary advantages of each state to its locale. Pale-skinned people on limited diets Up North don’t suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which their darker-skinned cousins would. Meanwhile, the dark-skinned people in the tropics can work outside all day without being on the fast track to melanoma, something that their paler relatives would have to worry about a lot more.

Does Thedas have fast transit? Well, no. You can walk, you can ride, or you can take ship. And by ship, I mean sailing ship, since not even the relatively technologically advanced Qunari have steamships, and not particularly advanced sailing ships, either – while the Qunari crossed the Amaranthine Ocean to get to Par Vollen, so far as we know, and even then:

For their part, the Qunari treat Par Vollen as their homeland. Contact with their original homeland was intermittent at best across the turbulent Northern Ocean before it finally ceased altogether two centuries ago. Several ships have been sent home to restore contact, but they have not returned. The Qunari are here to remain and have accepted this.

And so far as we know, the Thedosians don’t travel beyond the continent we know, shown on the map. No-one’s yet discovered whatever analog of America they may be.

And magic is not an answer to this. (Probably a good thing, since those fantasy universes which have convenient mass teleporting rarely examine all the implications that it should have.) But in any case, on this point, the lore is clear:

No one, for instance, has found any means of traveling-either over great distances or small ones-beyond putting one foot in front of the other. The immutable nature of the physical world prevents this. So no, you may not simply pop over to Minrathous to borrow a cup of sugar, nor may you magic the essay you “forgot” in the apprentice dormitory to your desk. You will simply have to be prepared.

Now, it’s not like there weren’t some people of non-autochthonous races to be found when actual Europe was at this stage of development. Obvious example: the Varangians, who wereeverywhere in their heyday, but, well, they were Vikings, who were like that. There’s a marvellous book I keep meaning to track down written by a Muslim merchant who travelled the same journey in the other direction, for that matter. And certainly, there have always been a few travellers, for adventure or profit or war, who crossed these large distances.

But what there wasn’t, to any signfificant degree, was anything recognizable as a “mixed” or “diverse” society by what we might consider modern standards, simply because travel was so slow, and so expensive, that it was the exclusive preserve of the vagabond and the wealthy elite, neither of whom made up any large percentage of society. (Evidence for expensive: look at the Fereldan refugees in Kirkwall. Just crossing that relatively minor part of the map, the Waking Sea, with nothing to do with their savings and possessions but spend them on escaping the Blight, are all flat broke. And ten years later, most of them still can’t afford to go back. Travel is anything but affordable for “regular people” at this level of technological and economic development.)

What you would see, wandering around a city at the time, is a crowd made up almost entirely of the predominant race, with maybe – in cosmopolitan cities – a few stand-outs from the crowd.

…which is what you see, both in Denerim, in the original Dragon Age, and in Kirkwall (also far to the south) in Dragon Age II. (In which, it is interesting to note, that the two principal dark-skinned characters I call to mind, Isabela and the merchant Hubert, are both Rivaini. Rivain, you may note from the map, is that peninsula to top-right, right under Par Vollen, and hence pretty equatorial. The Antivans you meet, while not as dark as the Rivaini, are still darker-complexioned than their southern cousins. (A possible exception here would be Zevran, who isn’t particularly dark, but what we don’t know about elvish physiognomy is everything.)

In short, just about everything we see about NPC racial characteristics is in tune with the geography.

Aha, I hear you cry. But just because those are the social arrangements of the real world is no reason to reproduce them in fantasy! They could have written it the other way if they reallywanted to.

Well, no, they couldn’t. Trust me, I’m a worldbuilder. And we are, not to put too fine a point on it, seriously concerned with plausibility. I’m relatively lucky in this perspective – I write in a world of non-human species, which gives you some more – not a lot more, but some – flexibility that the builders of humanocentric species don’t get, because we all know how humans work. Intimately.

What are you going to do? Introduce faster travel (in which case you need to detail what kind, and how, which have consequences), or mass teleporting? That has a million other consequences which would completely change both the feel of the setting, and the facts of the setting. In fact, I very much doubt you could write a setting using these themes and have fast travel.

Extend the length of history so that people had time to mingle (and invent some historical events to drive it, quite possible) on a mass scale even with slow travel? Well, fine, except then you need to come up with a plausible explanation for the Medieval Stasis. And, honestly, this is a trope that is nearly never done well, if anyone bothers to explain it at all.

Or decide that these humans, physiologically, are completely different from the regular kind and that thus phenotypic adaptations to different levels of solar radiation are equally distributed, never mind what the sun’s actually doing? (Even if you flattened the entire planet to even out the solar radiation – with monumental consequences for geography, biomes, weather patterns, etc., etc., you’d just get monochromatism, not a mixed distribution.)

In each case, that loud twanging noise you just heard was the reader’s, player’s, person-paying-attention’s suspension of disbelief just snapping like a twig, because when you do these things,your world does not make sense.

Now, I’m impressed with the worldbuilding that went into Thedas; I think Bioware’s creative team did an excellent job on putting it together and making it fit. But I’m not unsympathetic either to the desire for protagonists “of color”, or indeed, of more NPCs likewise – just, I ask, make this happen in a way that does make sense. Set an episode of the story up in the equatorial north, in Antiva, or Rivain, or the northern part of Tevinter. Revisit the notion in the original Dragon Age of multiple origin stories, and let us create a protagonist of Rivaini descent – and, please, show that by something other than just a skin-color choice – anywhere.

But don’t break the world by sticking people in where they logically wouldn’t be just for the sake of it, or having protagonists whose history and appearance don’t fit together, with or without gratuitous retcons. That’s pandering, and people can tell that it’s pandering, and I – for one – would rather have it done right some of the time, where it fits the world and the story, than done badly all of the time.