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I'm having issues suspending disbelief in dystopian food supplies lately. Typically, the lonely hero straggles through a featurelss land and stumbles across a fortuifous bunny, emaciated, of course. Our hero captures the bunny or cat, and maybe even feeds his fellow travelers with it.

These are typically post apocalyptic. Man has all but been wiped out. There should be enough vegetation that, where there's one bunny there are lots of bunnies. If there isn't enough vegetation to feed the bunnies, where's the oxygen coming from that our travelers are breathing?

Am I being too picky? I think I may be.

Are you thinking of any dystopian novel in particular?

I usually have the opposite problem with dystopias, "where is all this food coming from?" For example, the city in Divergent seems to consider the outlying area hostile wilderness, so we're the farms? In The Maze Runner, a few Gladers miraculously grow enough food for all the Runners, etc. In Uglies, apparently no one has to work; outside the city is forbidden (I seem to recall the rebels have a reasonably prosperous agricultural village going in the hills.) Maybe all the dystopian farming is supposed to be done by robots?

On the other hand, Wool has a lot of the silo dedicated to hydroponics.

The availability of wild game probably depend on the source of the dystopia / apocalypse:

In McCarthy's The Road, the great disasters never specified, but it seems to have killed off all life, plant, animal, and human. So, no hunting, or even foraging for roots and berries.

Zelazny's Damnation Alley is a post-nuke world, so the outside is toast.

In The Hunger Games, game seems plentiful outside the District, but hunting it is illegal (though Katniss seems to slip out to hunt and sell on the black market, thanks to local police corruption.) I assume the Capitol uses the food supply as a means of control.

I don't remember anyone hunting in 1984, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, and other classic dystopias. :)

Anyway, I guess I don't usually let mundane stuff like food source get in the way of a otherwise interesting story, unless searching for food is a big part of the story (such as The Road.)

I've always wondered exactly what it is that orcs live on in The Lord of the Rings. Granted they will eat man-flesh or horse-flesh when they can get it, but presumably that doesn't happen very often. Mordor is evidently a wasteland of ash and 'slimy oozy pits', so nothing would grow there. No-one in the West is likely to trade with Mordor, so what's left?

The only solution I can think of is that orcs eat dead orcs: Soylent Green is made out of goblins.

But that's the perpetual motion fur farm problem. How do you feed enough orcs to raise enough orcs?
But LOTR is rife with difficulty. How did they get water up to Minas Tirith? Or food supplies, for that matter -- haul everything up those narrow windy roads to the fortress at the top? My theory is a bank of Otis freight elevators, around in back.
And think about the Elves of Mirkwood. Winedrinkers, you remember -- that's where all the wine barrels come from, empties from Elvish chugalug parties. Assuming that somebody out in the sunshine is raising the grapes and making the wine, how are the Elves paying for this? They can't be selling jewelry; the forest produces zip and you can't imagine tree elves being lumberjacks and selling wood.

Orc food may well be magical, and they probably don't need very much anyway. [iirc it's mentioned how little elves can get away with eating]
Minas Tirith is no more a problem than any other city in a difficult location, which historically has been an awful lot of cities. Is Minas Tirith less accessible than Machu Pichu?
Elves are supposedly fantastic craftsman, so I should imagine their exports lean heavily on high-end worked goods. However, I think they tend toward autarky, and would suspect supernatural assistance in their winemaking.

Any society without cheeseburgers deserves to wallow in it's own vapid shallowness. Orcs, buns, and a proper blend of condiments might just be the key to reversing their genetic mutation to an Elvish state. Fizzy cola drinks are also a prerequisite.

For me, this was probably the wrong question to tackle around lunchtime. :}

I face similar problems usually with horses. People are always hopping on them as if they're cars with hooves. Any issues they have are always convenient to the plot. Ours are the spawn of Murphy. We spend far more time & effort taking care of them than riding them.

All those little details that make civilization possible! If a story tried to explain more than a few significant ones, it would probably be pretty boring. A story needs some to make the setting believable, but does anyone really want to know how hobbits process their waste products?

Oh, I'm sure they just dump everything into the Brandywine.

George wrote: "All those little details that make civilization possible! If a story tried to explain more than a few significant ones, it would probably be pretty boring. A story needs some to make the setting be..."

Now that you've brought it up, I can't stop thinking about it. I suppose it depends on whether we're talking rabbit-like pellets or steamy porridge piles. I don't see Hobbit logs. :}

Brenda wrote: Oh, I'm sure they just dump everything into the Brandywine.

I'm sure hobbits are instinctive recyclers. Every garden in the Shire would have had a huge compost heap. And there's no reason to think they didn't have plumbing. Tolkien says they don't understand anything more complex than a forge-bellows or a water-mill, but a water closet is no more complicated. And as for laying sewage pipes - easy-peasy for a burrowing race.

Mika wrote: "Just shows the writers of these novels need to put more effort into their details."

If you mean they need to think about them, I agree. If you mean they need to write about them, I don't. They just need to factor them into the background & make allowances. It can be a good thing since a hard journey is even harder when they have to find & swap horses, deal with tack, or saddle sores.

Jim wrote: If you mean they need to think about them, I agree.

But as Brenda pointed out earlier, LOTR is rife with difficulty, and yet it continues to sell hugely. Perhaps the need is only in the minds of nerds like us who contribute to these threads.

That's a good point, Chris. Fantasies can vary greatly in their tone & style. Depending on the writing, my sense of disbelief can vary. I don't expect the same sort of realism in a fable as I do in an urban fantasy. It's OK for a rat to become a coachman in a fairy tale, but it won't work in an urban fantasy unless someone addresses conservation of mass. Even if they don't know where the extra mass comes from, just the question helps since this subgenre is usually our world with just a bit extra. I assume a modern knowledge of scientific thinking, even if it is bent by magic. I don't in myths & fables. Tolkien's work falls more in the myth category for me.

The setting doesn't always mean I'm looking for realism, it's more the tone or aim of the writing. If Tolkien had ever even mentioned a hobbit taking a leak or Gandalf struggling to fit into one of their privies, the entire series would have been opened up to realistic judgements, but it never came up &I never looked for or expected it.

On the other hand, something like Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule tries for realism in some ways & it wound up bothering me a lot at times when it fails. For instance, 3 of them show up at Chase's place & Goodkind spends a couple of paragraphs outfitting the Confessor in clothes to travel, but nothing is ever mentioned about Zed. How did he handle sitting on one all day when apparently all he's wearing is a robe? Makes my crotch hurt just thinking about it.

And the moral, I suppose, is to avoid writing realistic fiction, because it's just too much hard work getting the details right. Write myths instead.

I agree about Tolkien's work being basically myth. It isn't a modern novel, even though it's written in modern language, and it can't be judged by the standards that are applied to modern novels. It's as pointless to ask where Tolkien's elves dispose of their waste as it would be to ask how the gods on Olympus disposed of theirs. Nevertheless, it's fun to speculate.

Chris wrote: "And the moral, I suppose, is to avoid writing realistic fiction, because it's just too much hard work getting the details right. Write myths instead...."

I think that's going a bit too far. Modesitt does very well dealing with blacksmithing & woodworking in his Recluse books. He even pays attention to the economy. His realistic touches give them depth & make them far more enjoyable without bogging down. Goodkind made the mistake of not following through properly. An author can't have it both ways or I'll notice. If one character needs proper dress, they all do or at least mention why they don't.

Of course, we tend to notice what we're well acquainted with & that means not only does an author have to be well read & do a boatload of research, but they need a diverse set of early readers with expertise in different areas. Some subjects are just touched on & not worth researching. Others 'everyone knows' but just aren't so. I think the latter are the ones that bug me the most. It happens with horses & dubbed sounds in movies.

While squealing car wheels on gravel roads don’t do a movie any favors, a similar error is multiplied in a book since reading engages far more of my mind. When a rider jerks the reins to halt a horse and it causes the horse to whinny, I’m knocked out of the story. A whinny is a greeting or call, not a sound that is made in annoyance or pain. I wouldn’t call a greeting into thin air after someone suddenly jerked me to a halt nor would a horse. Anyone who spends time with a horse would notice this & it really hurts the story.

No author will ever get it ALL right for ALL people, but they should try hard. Quality counts.

The number of films/TV/novels where people say something like "It's -3000 degrees centigrade out there." it is depressing.

If people can't even get basic science right then not sure there is much hope of anything more being right!

Well remember that the people in Hollywood never read anything but scripts, so it's not a fair analogy.

What we are really talking about is worldbuilding, and worlds are built in different ways. It is perfectly obvious, for instance, that Tolkien (a professional philologist) didn't care at all about plumbing and hobbit sanitation. What turned him on was languages, and so LOTR is as full of as many nifty-keen languages as you could desire. His enthusiasm for that carries the reader through a whole lot of poetry, even in Elvish.

I am sure we have read those fantasy novels that were written by people who were really turned on by fashion, or weapons, or combats. Or, another notorious subclass, porn. (John Norman, looking at you.) All the authorial TLC goes into what she loves, and the less interesting stuff gets less of her attention.

That being said, the pros know that there are certain areas where it is worth putting in the research to get it right. If it's anything dimly historical, then history. Guns. Clothing. Horses. There are too many readers who really do know these things, and you cannot get away with error. (And in the case of guns, these people are armed!)

Jim wrote: Chris wrote: "And the moral, I suppose, is to avoid writing realistic fiction, because it's just too much hard work getting the details right. Write myths instead...."

I think that's going a bit too far.

I was speaking tongue-in-cheek. I should have added an emoticon to show that, but I'm useless at emoticons. (Surely Emoticon should be a convention of writers and readers of romantic fiction?)

Sanitation wasn't the only thing Tolkien didn't care about. He didn't care about cosmology, evolution, the impossibility of species interbreeding, the impossibility of giant spiders... But hell, when you're writing a book in which magic works, does any of this matter?

Chris wrote: "Jim wrote: Chris wrote: "And the moral, I suppose, is to avoid writing realistic fiction, because it's just too much hard work getting the details right. Write myths instead...."

I think that's go..."

On politically themed topic comment postings I see constant referencing of "sheeple"..,so.., apparently, species interbreeding is possible. :}

Sorry, Chris. Went right over my head. Now I hear the whooshing sound.
;-)

One thing I learned through reading Jack Vance was that a little bit of detail goes a long way. Just a throw away line can give the impression that the author has everything covered to that level of detail.

I always imagined the Orcs ate some kind of fungus/mushroom stuff, seeing as they are largely underground.

Being "one with nature" I would expect Elves to be excellent wine makers.

As for the other technical problems, that's what wizards are for. One enchanted cess pit would last a thousand years, take care of all the waste and would probably smell of lavender to boot.

Jim wrote: "One thing I learned through reading Jack Vance was that a little bit of detail goes a long way. Just a throw away line can give the impression that the author has everything covered to that level o..."

Great point. Zelazny said when he was trying to break into writing, he went back over his rejections & decided he was over explaining to the detriment of the story. He went far to the other side & sold well. He knew the details & they are apparent in the subtext, but he didn't write them down. One of his rules was not to mention more than 3 things about a character when describing them at a time. I really appreciate that. It keeps the story moving.

That's a good rule.
I tend to mention the food characters eat, you can get an awful lot of background into a few words describing the food :-)

Jim wrote: "That's a good rule.
I tend to mention the food characters eat, you can get an awful lot of background into a few words describing the food :-)"

I've used that. On Tau Ceti 2, Earth crops are limited in variety, and the colonists have tended toward heavy use of the flavorings they have, i.e., they like really spicy food. Some of my fans have really gotten into that aspect.

You want to remember that the point-of-view characters will only notice what they notice. Infodumps about things which they know nothing and care less are implausible -- as implausible as infodumps about the plumbing and interstate system in a contemporary novel.

If you ever had a bowl of Pitcairn chili, you'd notice it.