{"id":4634,"date":"2026-06-10T05:54:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4634"},"modified":"2026-06-09T11:56:59","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T19:56:59","slug":"provisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2026\/06\/10\/provisions\/","title":{"rendered":"Provisions"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Okay, so my sweetie and I have been watching an old SYFY series, 12 Monkeys<\/em>, 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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<\/em> 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<\/em>, 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.”<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}