Okay, so my sweetie and I have been watching an old SYFY series, 12 Monkeys, loosely based on the very creepy and good Terry Gilliam film of the same name from 1995. It has moments that are very effective, mostly it’s a little incomprehensible (time travel and paradoxes feature largely) and at this point we’re only there to see how they resolve the plot. But it raises a question that has been–for me–raised by a number of the fantasy books I’ve been reading of late: where do these people get their provisions?
In 12 Monkeys the action goes back and forth between now (2015 or thereabouts) to 2043 (or thereabouts) to the mid-1800s to the dystopic future of 2163 (again, or thereabouts). In the dystopic future there are scenes were someone is being urged to eat. While she’s a prisoner, she’s being fed fairly lavishly, for reasons. We don’t see much of the landscape surrounding the place where the prisoner is being held, but glimpses suggest that it’s blighted–and we know that even in the their-past-still-our-future of the 2040s, food was hard to come by. No one is out there planting or growing, and apparently not much grows on its own. Survivors kill each other for scraps. So WHERE DOES THIS SPREAD OF HEALTHY FOOD COME FROM?
In the same way, deploying the universal film-and-tv metaphor for a character’s despair, many of these characters are seen morosely downing whisky (it’s always whisky, or brandy, or some brownish liquor). The bottles have labels that signal single malt or at least Scotch. WHERE DO THESE BOTTLES COME FROM? Okay, maybe at the outset of the Very Bad Thing That Happened to cause a dystopic future, someone was hoarding bottles. But surely at some point the well would have run dry?
In the same way, I just finished reading a very good fantasy novel. Like many of the fantasy novels set in secondary worlds, people still drink coffee and whisky, and they smoke tobacco. Again, these things are useful in setting mood and character (and they call them coffee and whiskey and tobacco, because we’ve seen how often calling coffee klah, or something like that, pulls a reader right out of the story). But I often and often wonder: okay, the way you’ve described this world, where are the coffee plantations? Coffee requires a very specific climate to grow. And who’s growing and curing the tobacco? How about grain farms, and distilleries?
Are there fruit farms? It’s all well and good to imply, as the Hunger Games did, that there are districts that supply agricultural products (but oranges grow in climates where blackberries might not, and saying “district” seems geographically and therefore horticulturally limited to me). I might find it more believable if someone picked up an apple and said “Gosh, that’s a rarity! You must have some pull to be able to acquire an apple.” There’s your world building and character building right there.
I know: the point of the book is not where dinner came from. But if you just dump lavish meals on your fantasy and SF tables without at least a little handwavium, it is distracting.
To its credit, in the last episode of 12 Monkeys, someone asks another character where she had been getting her cigarettes from all these years. She answers that she planted tobacco around the side of the facility some years earlier. This of course raises all sorts of other questions, like: how was she arranging to cure and process those tobacco leaves in between attempting to save the universe through time-travel science (and since this character is almost never seen without a cigarette in her hand, the amount of tobacco she had planted had to be non-trivial.) But they made part of an effort. Kinda.
At least Star Trek had the good sense to give us the replicator, to keep Picard in “tea, Earl Gray, hot.”
A bunch of writers started hanging out in a virtual treehouse when the pandemic hit and now don't want to leave.
You made me worry about what I might have done with that, but I looked back at For the Good of the Realm and decided I hadn’t done too badly. In my current work on the sequel, I make a point of one family that has built its wealth on importing things from “the East,” which is to say silk and tea. Also, the location — which is not France or Europe, since this is a made-up world despite being inspired by Dumas — is set up from the beginning to be a place criss-crossed by traders, leading to a diverse population and diverse sources of goods. And there are farmers who also raise animals. People eat a lot of bread and stews and cheese. Fruit is a seasonal item. There is wine, but lots of it is low-quality, I’m pretty sure.
I Don’t think I ever paused while reading For the Good of the Realm to wonder how people were eating–it felt enough like Dumas’ France that I pretty much knew how they were surviving, and yes, the trade came through.
But in fantastic landscapes where the scarcity is the point–where the land is blighted, or where it’s clear (as in Hunger Games that most of the agriculture is bent toward serving a small chunk of the population–the Capital–it would help to have a little handwavium. If you’re eating hand-to-mouth in a setting where there is virtually no agriculture because the land is blighted, but someone is eating fresh fruit and veg, how is that happening?
It’s also entirely possible that I get distracted by side issues if I’m not fully engaged.
Much easier to get distracted by side issues when not fully engaged. I sometimes notice issues with books on a third or fourth read, which I suspect makes them beside the point.
I suspect that most modern writers, particularly those in wealthy countries, have no true conception of scarcity, including me. I have been broke enough to have to eat on the cheap, but that meant lots of beans and brown rice with veggies, because those things were plentiful and cheap. Also nutritious. That is not the same thing as actual scarcity.
It occurs to me that I wrote a story about this sort of thing once, called “The Dog at the End of the World.” I don’t think it’s in print anywhere. I should be looking for a reprint market for it. Seems timely.
I’d like to read that story.
I’ve never been really hungry, for which I am grateful. And I’m really spoiled: I can go to the market and get pretty much whatever I want and can afford. But I do remember when strawberries only showed up in the summer (now you can get them year-round, if you don’t mind them tasting like meh and costing the earth). When I think of scarcity I think of strawberries-about-everything. It’s as close as I can get.
Living in the Bay Area has spoiled me with respect to seasons because so many things are available from nearby places almost year-round. I think our farmers market didn’t have strawberries for maybe a couple of months this year and even mid-winter there were a few avocados from places that had them in cold storage. I doubt I’d do as well anymore if I lived somewhere up north with a really short growing season.
The one exception is tomatoes, which I only buy in season from the market. Even in California you can’t grow tomatoes year round. You gotta have heat.