What kinds of models could be created--how inventive are we? I can bring up some current methods as a jumping-off point. I think somebody mentioned Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, which had an outside observer revealing life as a race of mutable gender people. Who takes which role in the mating phase (like going into heat) is decided during the mutual pheromonal/biochemical interaction. During the neutral phase, they might have a slight bias away from neutral toward one gender or the other, but going too far by being mostly one gender-role all the time was perverse in that society. I thought she did a nice job of conveying how this influenced larger social organizations without spending a lot of the reader's time and effort on info-dump. She did this with simple dialogue and the use of a few new words, like "kemmer", for the mating phase. This sort of thing could involve names for different styles/choices of gender just as easily. More recent SF subgenres like cyberpunk just embed a lot of stuff into constructed words and names, expecting you to guess at the meanings from a range of associations, languages, and word-roots, without explaining it much. Some of the steampunk folks seem to be taking that approach to naming things even farther. A fairly obvious example there is how Firefly/Serenity used Chinese words to convey chunks of the back-history in their world-building. No reason why we couldn't use similar word choices to convey other kinds of information. That's just a start--there's probably other playful, inventive methods being used already out there.
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Date: 4 May 2012 02:29 am (UTC)I can bring up some current methods as a jumping-off point.
I think somebody mentioned Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, which had an outside observer revealing life as a race of mutable gender people. Who takes which role in the mating phase (like going into heat) is decided during the mutual pheromonal/biochemical interaction. During the neutral phase, they might have a slight bias away from neutral toward one gender or the other, but going too far by being mostly one gender-role all the time was perverse in that society.
I thought she did a nice job of conveying how this influenced larger social organizations without spending a lot of the reader's time and effort on info-dump. She did this with simple dialogue and the use of a few new words, like "kemmer", for the mating phase. This sort of thing could involve names for different styles/choices of gender just as easily.
More recent SF subgenres like cyberpunk just embed a lot of stuff into constructed words and names, expecting you to guess at the meanings from a range of associations, languages, and word-roots, without explaining it much. Some of the steampunk folks seem to be taking that approach to naming things even farther.
A fairly obvious example there is how Firefly/Serenity used Chinese words to convey chunks of the back-history in their world-building.
No reason why we couldn't use similar word choices to convey other kinds of information.
That's just a start--there's probably other playful, inventive methods being used already out there.