What's an everyday or mundane thing you'd like to see fantasy/sci-fi authors explore more? (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I think I'd like to see what people would do in their leisure time or domestic work . You see so many stories about travel and war, but you rarely see people interact outside of that. And if you do, it's usually not made unique for a setting that isn't Earth.

What cutlery do they use? What does a morning routine look like? In a world where fire magic is commonplace, how do they cook? How would those things evolve over centuries?

Fantasy especially feels stagnant for this, but I think sci-fi is guilty of this too. Are there things in specific works where an innocuous detail made you wonder more about how a setting worked?

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[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Just general urban infrastructure is a big one.

Being able to shrink things or set things on fire would have massive ramifications on waste disposal.
Being able to manipulate water would have huge consequences on water transportation, indoor plumbing, and so on.
Flesh-to-stone/stone-to-flesh means meat can be indefinitely preserved.
Society's relationship towards death would be completely different with resurrection spells. One consequence is that graves probably won't be a thing because permanent death would most likely come from the complete destruction of the body with nothing left to bury.
Transformation spells more or less mean society is post-scarcity. Imagine being able to transform air into anything other than air (food, water, clothes, metal, wood, weapons, building material, fuel).

this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023

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