Fuck in Speculative Fiction
There has been couple of interesting posts on swearing in speculative fiction at Joe Abercrombie’s blog and at Dribble of Ink. Some people apparently feel that normal English curses like fuck, cunt, shit, motherfucker or cocksucker shouldn’t be used in speculative fiction as they are either offensive, or considered to be unfitting in the context, a fantasy or a future world that is.
Swearing doesn’t really bother me, though I don’t sweat that much. Modern curse words don’t really affect the immersion in any way, the made up ones quite often do, as they are fairly long or obviously substitutes for real words. What I’ve noticed is that most of the bothered ones are from United States, foul language seems to be a big no-no there. Haven’t really run into similar attitudes here in Finland since school.
To me it’s a bit of mystery cursing as cultural phenomena has so much negative connotations. I understand that originally cursing was basically expressing your secularity by for example using God’s name in vain et cetera. Why these negative connotations have moved to words describing genitalia and secretions like shit and piss is beyond me. Maybe it is part of the(Victorian?) move of making a lot of bodily functions and body parts shameful.
Tags cursing, speculative fiction, swearingRelated Posts:
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