#WordWeavers January 2: How does your MC talk? Describe their voice and speech.
Can't: WIP is set 700K years hence, they're not even H. Sapiens type humans, the conceit is the novel has been "translated" into terms familiar to us using an LLM.
There is serial tech-mediated reincarnation over a thousand year period, and there has been at least two vowel shifts, a period of data censorship, and a state-mandated writing system change-over during that period: deliberately, to kill unwanted ideas.
@cstross well there's an idea Orwell would recognise.
#WordWeavers At one point in the WIP, a recently-reincarnated character checks her dictionary and can't find a cognate for the word feminism *anywhere*. It's still in archived historical texts that usie the old writing system nobody is taught any more, but the lower classes (who aren't allowed reincarnation) don't get to learn that. Or how to understand the spoken language back then (the vowel shifts are barriers to comprehension).
It's not the only evidence of censorship she discovers ...
@cstross Annalee Newitz had a vaguely similar theme in Future of Another Timeline - time travel novel of feminists and anti-feminists battling to define the timeline. Very much looking forward to reading what you described.
@cstross Annalee Newitz had a vaguely similar theme in Future of Another Timeline - time travel novel of feminists and anti-feminists battling to define the timeline. Very much looking forward to reading what you described.
