One thing you have to know about me to understand the way I tick is that I'm an optimizer. That means as I go through life, I am constantly thinking, How can this system work better? (If you need an example, just check out my bed setup under the Sleep heading.)
No systems do I spend more time thinking about than those of daily living: eating, cooking, cleansing, sleeping, traveling, and so on. Usually, that means I'm coming up with real-life solutions, because real life is what I have to work with. But sometimes I long for just a bit of magic, because just a dollop of it would make so many things so much better. That's why in this post on my favorite things in fiction, I'm going to talk about improvements to daily life.
Except . . . apparently I'm so passionate about this subject, I'm going to have to make this another mini-series, because what I originally had was getting way, way too much for one post. So this is part 8.1 of . . . I don't even know how many points it's going to take.
This one is focused on sleeping and cooking/food.
Sleeping
I'm passionate about wellness, and as I'm sure many of you know, sleep is essential to your wellbeing, perhaps even the cornerstone of it. Even though my family has teased me on occasion about it, I've been obsessed for years with ways to improve my sleep quality.
To demonstrate just how serious I am about sleep (and about optimization in general), here's my current bed setup: I have a foam mattress topper; zippered sheets (because I'm a tosser, and otherwise my sheets would get ridiculously tangled each night); heated blanket for the colder months with the controller attached to the wall for sleepy, semi-conscious button pushing in case I need to turn it on/off in the middle of the night without rousing myself too much; gravity blanket on top of that; small oblong pillow to hug (I'm a side-sleeper); cooling honeycomb-gel pillow for my knees; total light-blocking foam sleep mask for side-sleepers (took me forever to find the perfect one, but now that I have, I'm in love); a small fan clipped to my headboard for easy turning on/off for cooling myself throughout the year (I start out cold, and thus use the heated blanket, and then I get hot and usually need the fan by the middle of the night, even in the winter); and my phone on my nightstand, charging and playing a deep-sleep ambient-wave soundtrack throughout the night. I am always improving the system and usually my Christmas wishlist has some sleep-themed item. My latest quest is to find the perfect pillow, since right now, I'm using an artificial downy-type that I'm always squishing up against the headboard for enough height (which led me to putting a thin cushion against the headboard to spare my head).
Hey, we all have our hobbies. Mine . . . happens to be making my life more comfortable and efficient.
Anyhow, this was supposed to be about my favorite life-improvements in fiction, but I thought the above was a good starting point to show you just how interested I am in this subject. So here are some examples that I can remember off the top of my head that are sleep-related.
I read one fantasy book (can't remember the name) in which the group was traveling through a forest which got dangerous at night, but they were safe while they were in the trees, so they had these pod-things they hung from branches and slept in. Kinda like a hammock but totally enclosing and upright (if I remember correctly). Minus the dangerous necessity, that sounds so cozy and at least a 50% improvement to most camping setups I've had, even if you have to sleep somewhat upright.
I don't know why, since it's not necessarily an "improvement," but I get a kick out of tiny-people, fairy-style beds made of things like nuts and down. Or sleeping in closed-up flowers. (Or tiny-people innovations, period. . . .)
I can't think of a specific example at the moment, but surely I've read something about a healthy, non-habit-forming sleep aid, meant to be self-administered in doses you can still wake up from in an emergency, so not the sleeping potions to knock guards out cold. There's got to be one out there. Right?
I read one fantasy book (can't remember the name at the moment) in which one kingdom was stuck in eternal day and another in eternal night, so they both had to come up with light/dark solutions to sleep and not go crazy, like blackout curtains in the day kingdom. Not magical, and something I have too (didn't mention it in my sleep set-up because it's for multiple purposes). The night kingdom had something magical for their light, though, but I can't remember exactly what—some kind of magical ball of light at the top of their cavern? Sorry, apologies for the memory lapse there.
Cooking/Food
Cooking
I . . . hate cooking. In the choice between dishes and cooking, I'd take doing the dishes every night versus having to cook even one night a week. That's how much I hate it.
It's not that I can't cook; I had a very good mother who taught me the basics and has had me contributing to family meals most of my life. I don't believe in eating out all the time, either (and have never had the budget for it, besides), so to me, cooking is one of those things that I have grudgingly accepted as a necessity of life, and a duty that I must not shirk or take unhealthy shortcuts on. That doesn't mean I have ever come to enjoy it.
After some introspection over the years, I've come to the conclusion that it's mainly about how hard it is for me to optimize that system, especially with communal living (a.k.a., living with roommates or family). Cooking has so many parts: the built-in kitchen setup (which you can't change without owning the place and spending lots of money); how you organize your kitchen; what tools/appliances you buy; how you organize/fill your pantry (if you're lucky enough to have one); how you meal-plan (or don't); how you shop/budget; where/when/how you eat; and how you clean up afterward. And each person you add into that system complicates it even more, to the point that I have given up for now. I have dreams of optimizing it all, and in the brief spurts I've lived on my own, I've tried, but until I live on my own again, I'm never going to achieve those dreams.
So, given all that, maybe it's not surprising that I'd like to read about innovations in cooking. Notice I said I'd like to, because, once I started thinking about it . . . I couldn't think of any fiction examples that I haven't . . . written myself. Except for a handful that feel like cheating the whole system, not improving it:
The Cauldron of Plenty from Patricia C. Wrede's Dealing with Dragons, which basically produces whatever food you want—except dessert.
The magic pantry in Calling on Dragons (book three in that same series) that does the same thing, but, if I recall, the pantry also does desserts just fine (or wasn't specifically mentioned as being bad). Don't get me wrong, that sounds amazing, and given the option, I'd take it, but I would guiltily feel like I was cheating all the while. At least the cauldron would force me to do something for myself.
The TARDIS-dispensed nutrition bars, which . . . sound unappetizing.
OK, well, clearly somebody needs to point me in the direction of fantasy/sci-fi cooking-focused books (with innovations in the actual process, not simply in making it appear or taste unbelievably good, because to me, the latter is just . . . whoop-de-doo).
Food
I have one other little pet peeve in this area, and that's about the raw materials: food. Almost all fantasy books I've read that are set in other worlds use exactly . . . the same . . . foods that we have on Earth. Now, I get why, so I can sympathize: it is so much easier to use foods the readers are already familiar with for the ease of conjuring textures, flavor profiles, recipes, etc., with only using one or two words. When every descriptive paragraph is a chance to lose the reader's interest, I get it. I do.
And yet, as a reader . . . this is one of the things that pulls me out of the story most frequently. I don't know why. For some reason, it is so much harder for me to suspend belief on this than on so many other things. I fully recognize it's arbitrary of me, since I don't care much about realism in, say, architectural size, structure, and integrity (which drives my engineering-minded mother bonkers). But when an author who has clearly established the setting is not Earth and has never had contact with Earth writes something like, "And then they had some carrots," I inwardly groan, Why does this place have carrots? Unless there were some carrot seeds that floated through some portal at some point into this world, it seems highly improbable that these people have the exact same orange, pointed root vegetable that I am thinking of when they say the English word carrot.
(Huh, I just had an epiphany: this is just as much a linguistic pet peeve as a biological diversity one, so there's a combined strike-out for me there. Maybe that's why it's so powerful for me.)
This goes for all flora and fauna, by the way—I don't single out food. Although I'm not distracted by broader categories of "birds" or "fish" or whatnot. I don't expect the author to invent completely new forms of life, since it seems entirely logical to me that one lifeform that has found success in surviving in one way would replicate in roughly the same shape in the same environment elsewhere, so I would have no problem reading about a made-up bird or fish native to that world. It's when a specific species that should be exclusive to Earth/English is used (robin or salmon, for example) that I am pulled a bit out of the story.
(Yes, I know you can argue that a human is a specific species that has a low probability of exactly replicating elsewhere, but that doesn't bother me in the same way, and we could have a whole other post about why, so I won't go there . . . right now.)
But again, I get why. It takes skilled word-smithing to name a made-up animal and give the reader at least a workable impression of what kind of animal it is without adding and, by the way, that's a fish. I'm not saying I do that well as a writer either, so I'm not calling anyone out, I would never include it on any "bad practices of fantasy" list (were I ever to make such a thing), and I don't mind it that much. I get it. But it is one of those hard-to-suspend-disbelief things I can't seem to shake, no matter how arbitrary I know it is.
Plus, it seems to me like another wasted opportunity in speculative fiction. Why not make at least a token effort to create new and cool-looking foods? Why not make them more nutritious, have hardier varieties, or have more sustainable or at least more efficient harvesting practices, and so on? These are the kinds of problems we're trying to solve in our own foods; I would be fascinated to see it at least lightly attempted more in fiction. (And that's a note to myself, too! Maybe I need to write a cozy farming fantasy at some point. . . .)
So in my own writing, I would rather err on the side of giving an immersive term and no explanation (as long as understanding isn't important to the story) than an Earth/English term. Maybe that annoys the heck out of my readers, but so far, only one person has brought it up.
And so, coming back to food . . . the only author I can think of who bothers to create immersive enough foods for his not-Earth-worlds . . . is Brandon Sanderson. (But maybe I'm reading all the wrong stuff; feel free to send me suggestions!) He does this through lots of ways, often by naming broad categories of foods, like "grain," or naming flavors, like "spicy" that transfer just fine in my head to other worlds. So I've tried to do the same. Or, when understanding isn't necessary to appreciate the story, I'll just give the term, notate the definition in a glossary to later share with curious readers , and move on.
This approach means I can't go on and on about the foods my characters are eating without an excessive amount of interposed explanation, so no multiple paragraphs describing a feast for me. (Cue a sarcastic, Oh no!)
In all seriousness, I am perfectly happy with that trade-off; I wouldn't write paragraphs about a feast anyway, even one taking place on Earth and using Earth foods. I'm not Brian Jacques, for goodness' sake. I skip feast descriptions as a reader, too (especially Jacques's; I loved his Redwall series as a kid, but I skipped the food even then).