Worldbuilding, "Inclination", Alternate Universes, and the Creation of Vulcan
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| Title: | Worldbuilding, "Inclination", Alternate Universes, and the Creation of Vulcan |
| Creator: | Laura Jacquez Valentine |
| Date(s): | June 2001 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | The Sentinel, Star Trek |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Wayback; WebCite |
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Worldbuilding, "Inclination", Alternate Universes, and the Creation of Vulcan is an essay by Laura Jacquez Valentine.
It was originally posted to Prospect-L. Also posted to ASCEM as a TSU lecture. Edited for clarity, it was posted to listen to me! listen to me! essays.
The essay discusses her story Inclination, in which Blair Sandburg is a Vulcan.
Excerpts
"Inclination" was a very interesting story to write. It's about twice as long as anything else I've ever written, and I had to deal with a lot of unexpected things while working on a story of that length and complexity. If you don't want to hear a lot of what went on in my head while writing it, you really hate Star Trek, and/or you're horribly bored by worldbuilding, you probably ought to bail on this post right about now.The genesis of the story was someone (Kalia, I think) begging me to write Elf!Blair. Sure, right...ice skates, Hell...if you're going to have a pointed-ear Blair, why not be slightly more interesting and make him a Vulcan? He's been done in the Trek universe before (Saraid's "Guided Voyage" and...um...the sequel. "Voyager's Guide"?), but I hadn't seen him done as a Vulcan. And, on the surface: Blair? Vulcan? Never the twain shall meet.
So you have a worldbuilding challenge now: How do you build a universe in which Blair can be Vulcan? For that matter, how do you look at the Trek universe and fit Sentinels into it? For *that* matter, what does that universe do to the characters? How does it change them and the way they view the world? What parts of the characters do you need to bring out? I'm now off on the subject of AUs, which in general I dislike; I dislike them mostly because people tend to Insert Generic Bad Tolkein Imitation Fantasy World Here or somesuch rather than going to the trouble of worldbuilding.
At this point, you're being stared in the face by Terrible, Terrible Things. (1) Fanon. You hate fanon. However, all of a sudden you're in a world where The Bond is...Canon. Much weeping. How do you change the bond so that it's working within that dual framework? What changes can you make that make it unique to the pair? (2) Trek and its tendency towards monocultural worlds. You hate this too. How do you make an alien culture that is more fully realized than anything you're given in Trek canon? (3) Just how the heck do you get a Vulcan to be anything like Blair, anyway?The only way I could see to get any of this to work was to do serious and in-depth R&D on Vulcan culture. We have a lot of hints about it, but there's not much hard-and-fast information. The usual fan/fanfiction extrapolation from canon is that the Vulcans are logical and enlightened, with an elegantly ritualized culture; that they tend to think themselves superior to other species and have an isolationist streak; that you really shouldn't get on the bad side of them.
It's not surprising that those are the usual interpretation from Trek canon; they are almost the most explicitly stated or hinted. However, there's a lot that gets ignored in that interpretation, and I wanted very much to bring those elements into play. In particular, I wanted to play with the Vulcan permission of slavery, Vulcan sexual attitudes and biology, their inability to conceive of being conquered, and collective memory.
What I ended up with was not what I expected to end up with when I started the story. And, yes, I know that in some ways it feels "unfinished." I think that's because it's operating in a larger universe, one that I developed partially because I love worldbuilding for its own sake. I think it's because there was a basic issue at stake in this particular story--Telar's marriage to Jim--and the larger issues (like the rights of Telar's caste in general, or the function of Sentinels within the Federation) are secondary. They're things that I might want to deal with inside this universe, but not NOW. Not yet. Here, I wanted to get two men who needed each other very much to grow together into that need and into a relationship with each other. I wanted to leave the story open at the end--but I didn't want to leave it completely unfinished. I think it ends on a hopeful note: Telar's resolved a lot of his issues; he and Jim have gotten their act together; and Telar's caste has started to follow his lead. It's not The End, it's more like a The Immediate Issues Are Dealt With. Which is the nature of a universe of this size and complexity; it's too large to close. People are still writing Star Trek fanfiction thirty years on; it's not a universe that's really open to closure. I haven't even gone into the two months of Vulcan language research that went into this damn thing, which necessitated building the entire Vulcan society from pre-Surak to the present with appropriate factioning, splinter groups, colonization periods, major splits, the Romulan Exodus, the development of the acolytes at Gol and other ritual groups including the soulhealers.... If I wanted to, I could write from now until Doomsday in this universe alone.