It's the everyday details -- not everything described completely, but what the character does and doesn't take for granted: how is food prepared? what do you wear on your feet? does hair style or earring design have symbolic meaning within that culture? how do people deal with weather? How does their clothing fit, and what works and what doesn't? And only after that do I get to the issues of giant bugs and so on. I have no real problem with the concept of giant bugs -- because I imagine that they're hollow inside, not gushy, and being hollow are lighter-weight, which makes it possible for them to move faster and not violate cube-square and so on. (Hollow bugs, just as birds have hollow bones...)
A lot depends on whether we are dropped inside the culture and hearing about it from someone who grew up in it or has lived there a long time or from someone who is a newcomer. The comparisons are different, the contexts are different.
ETA: Re the planet with one culture -- no. Just no. We don't have countries with one culture. We don't have *cities* with one culture -- there are different cultures, different lifestyles, different opinions and ways of cooking and everything, based on where people's ancestors came from and when and how, on whether they're keeping the old ways or modifying them, on what they believe is important and why, and on how long people have actually lived together in a specific place during recent memory -- and I'm pretty sure that extends down to the village level in a lot of places. There could be a lot of intersecting small cultures that have enough similarities to get along and meld in a few places, but it's not all the same thing. The older an area is, the deeper the culture and, if they're fortunate, the deeper the cultural memory. I cannot remember the name of it, but there was a BBC show some time back that looked at the history of much of Britain through archeological digs within one small village, which found such things as weaponry of different styles going all the way back to Rome, medieval pottery, some small bits and pieces of things that the Iceni had left during a battle with Rome or earlier, and the way that the fields were divided up for families and how that changed over time...
The other thing that sticks in my mind is a naturalist's study of hedgerows in Britain (and I think elsewhere in Europe also?) that noticed that it was possible to date the age of the hedgerow by the number of different species growing there -- at something like 100 species per century, so that the very oldest hedgerows, the ones in fields that had been cultivated back to the medieval era, could be distinguished from newer ones by the number of food-bearing plants grown to maturity in them (like berry bushes).
Sorry, my mind is wandering this morning but I hope this helps?
no subject
It's the everyday details -- not everything described completely, but what the character does and doesn't take for granted: how is food prepared? what do you wear on your feet? does hair style or earring design have symbolic meaning within that culture? how do people deal with weather? How does their clothing fit, and what works and what doesn't? And only after that do I get to the issues of giant bugs and so on. I have no real problem with the concept of giant bugs -- because I imagine that they're hollow inside, not gushy, and being hollow are lighter-weight, which makes it possible for them to move faster and not violate cube-square and so on. (Hollow bugs, just as birds have hollow bones...)
A lot depends on whether we are dropped inside the culture and hearing about it from someone who grew up in it or has lived there a long time or from someone who is a newcomer. The comparisons are different, the contexts are different.
ETA: Re the planet with one culture -- no. Just no. We don't have countries with one culture. We don't have *cities* with one culture -- there are different cultures, different lifestyles, different opinions and ways of cooking and everything, based on where people's ancestors came from and when and how, on whether they're keeping the old ways or modifying them, on what they believe is important and why, and on how long people have actually lived together in a specific place during recent memory -- and I'm pretty sure that extends down to the village level in a lot of places. There could be a lot of intersecting small cultures that have enough similarities to get along and meld in a few places, but it's not all the same thing. The older an area is, the deeper the culture and, if they're fortunate, the deeper the cultural memory. I cannot remember the name of it, but there was a BBC show some time back that looked at the history of much of Britain through archeological digs within one small village, which found such things as weaponry of different styles going all the way back to Rome, medieval pottery, some small bits and pieces of things that the Iceni had left during a battle with Rome or earlier, and the way that the fields were divided up for families and how that changed over time...
The other thing that sticks in my mind is a naturalist's study of hedgerows in Britain (and I think elsewhere in Europe also?) that noticed that it was possible to date the age of the hedgerow by the number of different species growing there -- at something like 100 species per century, so that the very oldest hedgerows, the ones in fields that had been cultivated back to the medieval era, could be distinguished from newer ones by the number of food-bearing plants grown to maturity in them (like berry bushes).
Sorry, my mind is wandering this morning but I hope this helps?