• Home
  • Blog
  • Books
  • Bio
  • Appearances
  • Links
  J M Beal

A guest post about space operas and jibber jabber.

5/22/2015

6 Comments

 
As promised, below you will find a guest post. I could gush on and on about Briane's book, Codes, but that's arguably not what you came to read today. So, check out the post about great books Briane left us, and then stay tuned at the bottom for more news about next weeks Contest of Awesome!
Picture
Last week, JM posted a list of the five greatest books ever written, and as I was getting ready to write this post, I figured I would take the easy way out and do something that’s more or less the same thing see if I couldn’t try to come up with my own list to spark debate while also providing a little insight into what makes me, as a writer and a reader, get excited.  And having just written my own [sure to be best-selling have you bought it yet why not?] sci-fi novel, Codes, it made sense to focus on that genre.

I’ve been reading, and writing, science fiction since I was just a kid, starting with comic books and Star Wars novelizations before I was even 10 years old -- materials which spurred me to write my own copyright-infringing space opera, Stardogs, when I was 11.  Stardogs told the amazing story of a young, hotshot fighter pilot who manages to get away from his dreary life on a backwater planet to become a pilot for the Space Rebels, and near the end of the story the hero uses his piloting skills to blow up a space station.  My mom, my earliest fan/critic, read it and said dryly that she was pretty sure she’d seen that plot somewhere.

I eventually got a little more creative in my writing – Codes hardly steals from George Lucas at all! – but that early attempt at creating my own (?) universe shows the effect great stories have on me: when I’m reading a truly excellent story, half of me is thinking oh man I’ll never write anything this good and the other half is wanting to rush to my laptop to see if I can’t after all come up with a story at least that good. So when I sat down to come up with a list of sci-fi books that are the all-time greatest, a bunch sprung to mind as either inspiring me to want to write something at least that good, while some of the others simply stuck out as great stories.  I listed all the greatest books I could find, and then whittled them down and down as far as I could.  I wanted to get to five, but in the end, I just couldn’t pick any that I didn’t think deserved to be on a list of the greatest books ever.

Enough with the jibber-jabber! Let’s get to that list, beginning with:

6. John Dies At The End (David Wong): 

First off, this book should be an inspiration to every person who ever posted their stories on their blog and hoped for the best. (It’s not just me, right?) Wong began writing this story as a serialization, and then it got picked up by a publisher, and then he wrote a sequel which was nearly as good as this one and almost made this list in its own right, and then the book got made into a motion picture, only because it didn’t feature soft-core bondage nobody really paid any attention to it.  Also, the movie was terrible. Don’t see it. Read the book, though: the story of two guys fighting weird animals coming through from another dimension into their town is hilarious, sad, dramatic, weird, and overall a rambling fun time that gets really really freaky at the end of the story. 

How it made me a better writer: 

Reading John Dies and it’s sequel This Book Is Full Of Spiders Seriously Dude Don’t Touch It helped me remember that stories ought to be fun, and that science fiction can literally go anywhere and do anything and you can bend the rules in all sorts of ways and still have a great story.

5. Startide Rising (David Brin): 

David Brin is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi writers. Without making a big deal of it the way some writers do (Larry Niven *ahem*) Brin manages to write the kind of science fiction I think of as “hard” sci-fi, based on what seems to be fairly realistic science, but he keeps it relatable and doesn’t overwhelm you with math and engineering and the like.  Startide Rising is the first in his “Uplift” saga about humanity venturing into the wider universe after having helped make dolphins and chimpanzees sentient starfaring races in their own right, and it manages to be a massive space opera spanning an entire system (if not a galaxy) while also feeling intimate and close-up.  What’s most amazing about the story is that Brin’s dolphins and chimps and aliens aren’t just humans with fins: they manage to have unique personalities that fit together with the species they are.  That’s actually rare in sci-fi.  Too many times, nonhuman species are more or less just regular people in a costume, acting the way a human thinks an alien would act.

How It Made Me A Better Writer: 

Brin’s science is a good example of “show, don’t tell.” The science-y talk in Brin’s stories fits in well with the plot and doesn’t drag or slow it down.  Whereas some writers (Niven, again) will spend pages explaining something they find interesting, Brin works it into the story in a fairly organic way.  It makes reading his books less like reading a technical manual and more like reading a novel.  It’s going to be necessary, in speculative fiction, to explain some things, but if you can do it without resorting to putting a teacher in a room with a chalkboard, so much the better.

4. The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell): 

This was recommended to me by author Andrew Leon (The House On The Corner, Shadow Spinner), and I’m glad I took his advice.  The Sparrow tells the story of humanity’s first contact with aliens, on another planet – but the mission is undertaken by the Jesuits on behalf of the church, rather than by a government or corporation.  I was initially concerned that the story would be preachy – aliens and God are a tough mix – but The Sparrow managed to be philosophical and weighty without ever becoming didactic or ponderous, and was one of those rare books that had me anxious to keep on reading it.  I’d actually regret it when I got too tired to read it at night.

How it Made Me A Better Writer: 

I’ve always thought writing should have a point – not necessarily a moral, but something to say, a reason for telling the story.  The Sparrow was perhaps the first book in which I thought the point, the thing the author was trying to say, was just: think.  I’m sure Russell had some idea of her own themes, but the overarching idea I got was that she just wanted people to ponder the ideas she’s wrestling with.  Sometimes, writing about things you don’t yet understand is more compelling.

3.  Stranger In A Strange Land (Robert Heinlein): 

Valentine Michael Smith might be the single most memorable character ever created, and this weird, wonderful book, which I first read when I was about 19, has haunted me for nearly 30 years.  Haunted in a good way.  Smith’s human-raised-by-Martians-come-back-to-Earth character manages to upset the entire world, one person at a time, enraging people and making them fall in love with him as he tries to understand our society.  The ending of the book is somehow both peaceful and disturbing in ways that make it stick with you.  It’s the kind of book that just pops into your mind at odd times of the day or night.

How it Made Me A Better Writer: 

Stranger is more or less the Platonic ideal of how to build a complete story out of an elevator-pitch concept.  The thesis statement for this book is that simple: Imagine a human raised by Martians, come back to our society as an adult: what would happen? Everything in the book, from the simplest to the most outrageous moments, seems to flow organically from that idea. There isn’t a single moment in the book that doesn’t seem a natural next progression.  It’s a work of art.

2. Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut): 

I don’t have to say what this one’s about, right? Everyone’s read it, or hopefully will.  Billy Pilgrim’s travels through time, to World War II and then to Ilium, New York, and then Tralfamadore, are a funny, sad, sweet story that has weight well beyond the slim novel.  I read Slaughterhouse when I was in high school, and I’ve never forgotten it.  I remember it almost verbatim, even though I’ve never gone back to re-read it.  I’m not even sure I could, as it’s devastatingly sad in its simplicity.  Plus, it has the single saddest scene I have ever read in a book: the part where Billy goes to a cave with his parents, when he’s a kid.  I know there are sadder things that have happened, both real and imagined, and there are even more terrible things that happen to Billy, but that’s the scene that gets me, every time I think of it.

How It Made Me A Better Writer: 

Vonnegut’s stories are so sparse as to be almost nonexistent; he uses a paucity of words and just enough “science” to make his books sci-fi rather than fiction, but somehow the books add up to more than the sum of their parts, primarily because of the emotion Vonnegut conveys.  Using minimalist techniques, Vonnegut communicates a wealth of sadness, in that good kind of way: sadness because people are what they are, and the world is what it is, even in a made-up futuristic society of aliens.  Reading Vonnegut helps me realize that books should convey a sentiment as well as a story: they can tell how you as the author feel about something, without being direct about it.

1. Angelmaker (Nick Harkway): 

I had trouble deciding which of Harkaway’s three books to put on here, but there was no doubt that one of them should be.  Harkaway might be the best pure writer I have ever read, by which I mean that every single word he uses counts.  I have no idea how he does it, but Harkaway writes these big sprawling books that go off on seeming tangents for pages, if not chapters, and introduce a willy-nilly of characters and ideas and then bam! They all come together like a jigsaw puzzle made of magnets.  Angelmaker features a watch/clock repairman who is called in to work on a bit of steampunk-ish beehive-esque art, and who then unwittingly turns the thing on, learning too late that it might be a doomsday device.  That description in no way does this book justice, though.  Harkaway’s stories are outrageously entertaining, his characters are memorable, his language is phenomenal, and the books deserve to be read, then cast in bronze and put on a pedestal, and then read again, in front of large crowds of people cheering him on and urging him to write another book.  Read Angelmaker, and then read his other books (The Gone Away World and Tigerman) and see if they don’t ruin you for most other books.

How It Made Me A Better Writer: 

Forget it. It didn’t. There’s no way anyone can do what Harkaway does.  We can try, and plenty of people can write great stories or books, but nobody will match him.

Briane is the author of Codes: Robbie had an ordinary life, until she walked into Gravity Sling. Now he’s seeing coded messages everywhere, being chased by shadowy big-corporation goons, and questioning literally everything about the world as he knows it. Some questions need answers. This Phillip K. Dick style debut science fiction novel raises questions about how people use technology and each other.

Links:

Follow Briane on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianePagel

His blog: Thinking The Lions: http://www.thinkingthelions.com

Picture

So many new books to read that really should not be new...

Anyway, are you excited about the contest? I'm excited about the contest. Also, I might be mildly panicking about AwsomeCon still. As one does. 

Update about the Contest of Awesome (which I shall call it from now evermore) I'll be posting the first scavenger hunt clue/trivia question Monday morning! Then, I'll post it again about noon because I know sometimes feeds are strange, strange creatures. As soon as we have a correct answer I'll tweet, but I won't announce the day's winner until the end of the day. That way I can check and make sure the first correct answer I see is actually the first correct answer. 

Now I just have to go decide what Monday's prize is...
6 Comments

Now THAT'S a skipping stone.

5/15/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
Picture by Sergio Conti, used under CC 2.0
I like the concept of meteors. I'm always a little freaked by them, because I feel like I'm unlucky enough if I'm anywhere near one it's going to land on me, but I still like them. And that one up there, the Hoba Meteorite is special for a couple of reasons. 

First, it's the largest 'naturally occurring' piece of iron at the earth's surface. It weighs somewhere around 60 tons, and it's 84% iron. Which makes a case of it being a little special just because nobody farmed it out and sold it off. 

Second, when it fell to earth (somewhere around 80,000 years ago) it fell unusually slowly. Arguably this is because of it's flat shape, meaning it skipped across the atmosphere until it slowed down enough it landed without shattering into a bunch of smaller pieces. It's always the largest single-piece meteorite on the planet. 

There are all sorts of other cool bits about it on the Wikipedia page here, but I thought it was worth sharing just so we could all imagine watching a giant hunk of metal skipping across the atmosphere like someone's throwing pond stones at us.

We are mostly water. 



Come back next week, we'll have a guest post on Friday and on Wednesday we'll either talk about creating dynamic women in fiction, or creating a bestiary as a tie point for your universe. 
1 Comment

Guest Blog: Women in Sci-Fi by Ashley K Voris

5/1/2015

1 Comment

 
This week's Sci-Fi Friday post comes from Ashley K Voris, who's awesome kids picture book about puppies came out last week. You should totally go check it out, and then scroll down to read about her favorite women in Sci-Fi.

Picture
Hello, everyone. Today's Sci-fi Friday will be hosted by me, your friendly neighborhood Ashley. I have been asked to write a post and so I have. Fair warning, I like to ramble, go off on tangents, and write in ADD. I will try to keep that to a minimum since this is not my blog.

My Top 5 Favorite Women in Science Fiction

Before we begin, I would like to point out that this list in MY opinion. There are plenty of kick ass women out there in space, but these are the ones that I like. Please feel free to add to the list in the comments. Also, possible spoilers.

1. Captain Janeway- Star Trek Voyager
I love Star Trek. I was introduced to it early since my grandmother was in love with Kirk. (Hey, who wasn't?). My favorite was TNG, and there were plenty of great women in the series that were really awesome, but Janeway was my favorite. She had the best resting bitch face. She was a real leader. She believed and encouraged her crew to do their best with what they had. She picked them up when they failed but did not put up with any crap. She wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty and do work on the ship. She was strong and she could lead.

2. Princess Leia- Star Wars
Okay, so this one is a gimme. But, honestly, though, total badass. She steals plans for the Death Star. Survives torture and her planet being destroyed right in front of her. Gives so much sass to the scruffy looking nerf herder. Yeah, she falls in love with him, but she does it on her terms. She is not afraid to fight for what she believes in and fight she does. She also, eventually, (according to canon that they will hopefully keep) becomes a Jedi. Princess Leia with a light saber? Yes, please.

3. Zoe Washburn- Firefly
How can I have a list like this and not include Zoe? She is a war veteran and second in command of Serenity. She is not one you want to make angry. She is not afraid to call out Mal when he needs it, like in “Serenity” when Mal shot the guy holding on to the vehicle thingie. She can take a bullet and still kick your butt. She was married, but again, it was on her terms. When Mal hired Wash, she couldn't stand him. “He just bugs me.” Even after losing her husband, she still did what she had to do to put the ship back together and protect her crew.

4. Donna Noble- Doctor Who
The thing I loved most about Donna was the lack of romantic attachment. We had to deal with the Rose/Ten love drama that, after a while, was really annoying, followed by the Martha trying to get Ten to fall in love with her while he was still mourning Rose. I mean, yeah, Martha finally realized that it wasn't going to happen and left, but still the constant, “Oh the Doctor doesn't love me boo hoo” made me was to reach through the TV and smack her. It seemed that way with the other companions as well. Sarah Jane, for instance, was rather upset when Ten showed up again and even told Rose to find her if she needed to one day because she understood the heartbreak that comes with falling in love with a Time Lord. Donna, on the other hand, just wanted to travel. She just wanted to see the universe and be a friend. She didn't want anything other than to be a friend. She also wasn't afraid to call the Doctor out, if needed. She had sass and charisma and such a big personality. I adored Donna. I was really upset the way her story arch ended, but that is what happens when you watch Doctor Who. You can't get attached.

5. Samantha Carter- SG1
I just recently discovered SG1 and it makes me both sad and happy. Happy that I discovered it, but sad that I missed out when the series was on TV. From the very first time she came on the screen and gave O'Neil such crap, I was hooked. It was wonderful She was able to hold her own in a cast full of men. She had a Ph.D. in astrophysics, very knowledgeable in quantum mechanics, a Gulf War veteran, and a leading expert on the Star Gate. And...AND....she was blonde and pretty, showing me that I can be pretty and smart at the same time. She had a zero tolerance for chauvinistic macho man crap but handled it with the grace and dignity of a lady or in some cases, with sass and a fist. I love Dr. Carter.


So there you have it. My list. I could go into much more detail about each person, but that would make this a ridiculously long post and turn into a tl/dr post. I would like to add a couple of Honorable Mentions to my list.

Ellen Ripley- the Alien franchise
Sarah Connor- Terminator
River Song- Doctor Who
River Tam- Firefly
Kira Nerys- Star Trek: DS9


What are some of your favorite strong female characters in sci-fi? Other genres?


So great big thanks to Ashley, I'm always pleased to not have to write a post. Come back next week, where I'll find some way to bend an entire week of posts around the book I'm launching in less than two weeks! 
1 Comment

Facts are these...things. Some people use them.

1/16/2015

1 Comment

 
Today's Sci-Fi Friday post is about pseudoscience because the Paddington theme meant I either had to talk about bears in train stations or Peru, and I couldn't come up with anything scientifically cogent about bears in train stations. 

So now comes the challenge where I talk about South American pseudo-science without exploding into an incoherent ball of rage repeatedly screaming VAN DANIKEN!!!!

I'm probably going to fail, so you've got that to look forward to.
Picture
"The Astronaut." A large geoglyph near the Nazca Lines.
Back in the annals of history (about 1960 but really in 1968) this... "theory" started doing the rounds about how basically humans are dumb and silly and everything great we've ever done we needed aliens to help us with. 

I'm sorry. That's as close to seriously as I can take the ancient astronaut hypothesis. 

I could bang on about this forever, seriously. Like when I decided to do this today and the internet was being unhelpful I just went downstairs and got my textbooks from ANTH 503--Archaeology Fact or Fiction because I figured I was having google fail and the truthful and un-skewed information was there somewhere. And I could bang on about Van Daniken-- oh could I--but after I'm done going on about his stupid ancient mirror stone cutter that couldn't burn a Popsicle stick it all sort of degenerates into incoherent angry grumbling.

So in the interest of brevity, I'm going to contain myself to my biggest issue with the entire concept of the ancient alien theory. 

I can't separate it from it's inherent racism. 

The most popular ancient alien theories are from cultures that the western world hasn't, generally speaking, been all that interested in viewing outside of their own bias. We talk about the stone walls at Machu Picchu, or the Nazca lines, or the Mayan 'airplanes' and it's always, at least to me, couched in some sly backhanded understanding that the people in these places aren't bright enough to do these things themselves. And they say 'ancient people couldn't' but I always hear 'ancient people of color couldn't.'

Probably because I was taught by someone who always pointed out that an archaeological hypothesis isn't any more removable from researcher bias than anything else is. 

And I'm going to leave you with a quote from one of those text-books. It comes from the book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, third edition, by Kennith Feder. About the Nazca Lines in Peru...
"They likely were intended to please the gods and were constructed with the use of scale models. They certainly did not require the intervention of extraterrestrials--and why would aliens from outer space instruct ancient humans to draw giant monkeys, spiders, snakes, and the like, in the first place?"
1 Comment

The Line Between Maybe and Yes.

10/17/2014

0 Comments

 
It's Sci-Fi Friday, and I'm actually going to have some kind of serious scientific post on here. I know, I'm shocked too. 

I made a post a while back about earthquakes in Kansas (not a place people typically think of as quake prone). At the end of it I intentionally left a little note about how I have no stake in the 'predicting natural disasters' category, because there are things I wouldn't ever want to be right about. How that ties in with this will become apparent here in a bit. 

Right now in Italy seven scientists are appealing a manslaughter conviction that most of the scientific community sees as a grave injustice. The short version--I'll provide links to the source material I'm using here in a second--is that a severely old mountain town in Italy suffered a quake in 2009 that killed 300 people and injured around 1500. More or less days after a government panel of officials were "quoted" as saying no such quake would occur. 

There's a whole wealth of junk there, but let's do the links first.

The Aftershocks, by David Wolman. It's long, and occasionally heart-wrenching, but it's worth it.
Italian Scientists Appeal Absurd Conviction for Quake Deaths, also by David Wolman.



Now assuming you've read through all that, there are a whole handful of things that become immediately problematic. At what point does someone's bad decision making--even bad decision making that leads to a death--constitute criminal negligence? 


I don't have an answer for that, any more than I have an answer for the conceptual responsibility of doomsayers. Half a world away, in my cozy little corner I can say if you're going to put the scientists on trial for ineffectually trying to derail the panic train, you should probably add in the guy who started that train rolling. 


"But he didn't know what he was doing! They're scientists!"


True, but from what I'm seeing more or less everyone agrees the scientists were saying 'we don't know' too. So because they carry a degree their lack of knowledge (in that it's everyone's lack of knowledge because you cannot predict earthquakes with any accuracy) is criminal?


Also, I'm just gonna say that again. You cannot predict earthquakes with any accuracy. 


Ditto for a whole range of other major natural disasters. Hurricanes are relatively slow moving and consistent--again, relatively--and Volcanoes generally give you a whole slew of warning signs. And yet still, sometimes they do things we don't expect. I don't think we need to get into the habit of assuming the people we think should know just whiffed it. We watch the clouds for tornadoes and rain fall indicators for floods, and after decades of work we've gotten the warning time to a general 'this may happen' from a 'holy sh*t it's happening now.'


What I find most interesting about that first article is the break-down of how much trouble human beings have with 'maybe' or 'improbable.' How the vast majority of us have problems conceptualizing a vaguely possible threat. And when I say it like that, it makes more sense. We aren't, generally speaking, built to handle possible threats. We're built to handle probable threats. "That fruit is very very bright and oddly colored, I probably shouldn't eat it." "That animal has very large teeth and also runs fast, I'll avoid him." 


Even more, society has trouble with vagueness. When pushed, one of those Italian scientists--before the panel and utterly out of context--said an earthquake wouldn't happen. Because he was doing a sound bite for the news and we don't like maybe. We want yes or no. But flip that on its head and look at the response from every credible scientist ever. They don't like to give us yes or no. 


Yes or No leave entirely too much room to be wrong. 


So where do we go with this in the future (I will tie this into Sci-Fi Friday if it kills me)? It's hard to read something like this and not envision a world, fifty or a hundred years in the future, where all of our 'warning' scientists have gone away. Nobody studies vectors for the CDC any more, if you're wrong they'll throw you in jail. Nobody chases Tornadoes and tries to find better monitoring systems, one failure and you've been sued for all you've got.


But what about the other direction? What happens in a world where scientists stop and realize "regular" humans have trouble with their definition of probability, and find ways to bridge the gap? Where they circumvent the talking heads and deliver their responses, however accurate they can make them, in a way the people they're making them too will understand? 


I don't have an answer for that either, but it's an interesting question.


Come back Monday, there is a high probability I will have something random and silly to share.
0 Comments

Stare at the Pretty...

9/26/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
NGC 4258 aka M106--much like our Milky Way, only with two extra arms that glow x-ray, optical, and radio light.
Sci-Fi Friday today is just the pretty. If you want to know more about it, click on the picture up there. It's straight from Nasa JPL and I didn't really understand the explanation enough to try giving it to you. 
It's pretty, isn't it? Looks vaguely evil, but all the same. 
1 Comment

Wibbly Wobbly

9/7/2014

0 Comments

 
So. hehe. Time travel, and I'm gonna ask you to pretend it's still Friday. 

I was going to do a blog about time travel without mentioning Doctor Who, but f-that. 

Archaeologists
I love time-travel. Obviously I love Doctor Who, because I have a hard time understanding how someone can not. He's so ridiculous, and then sometimes he's so amazing that the collection of the two pretty much always gets me. But that's more a character conversation, for some Wednesday when I'm out of other topics.

I write time-travel utterly nothing like Doctor Who, but I love it just as much. At it's base, time-travel is just the 'stranger in a strange land' story-line that's been going in Science Fiction/Fantasy since it became a genre. And I know there are all kinds of issues with lumping those, but I'm going to, because for me the best sci-fi stories have a bit of fantasy. Maybe not orcs and trolls, but all the same. 

Time-travel is one of the clearest exercises of Suspension of Disbelief I think you'll find, outside of actual Shakespeare. Very rarely do we get any actionable explanation of how the time travel works, unless someone just has utterly horrific world-builder's disease. Because even if the author was smart enough to come up with actionable science--and seriously, if you can come up with completely plausible science for time travel put the writing away and go. I want to see a dinosaur. Safely, from a very long way away, but still--the audience most likely isn't going to be capable of understanding it. 

It's that tacit permission, for an hour and a half of TV or a couple of hours of a book, or whatever, to step out of literally everything we know and just pretend. It's being six and tying a towel around your neck and pretending to be a super-hero who makes exploding mud pies that attain sentience. It's pretending the refrigerator box can fly.

But more than that, if it's done right, it's using the past (or the future) to teach us something about ourselves. You think you're a screaming liberal? Can you imagine what people in another two-hundred years would think of you? How about the other direction? How frustrating would it be to find yourself in 1954 Alabama? The future and space seem scary? How about we drop you on a boat in the middle of the ocean in 1450. Are you feeling particularly safe? 

There's a secret to that archaeologist quote up there. 

I was an archaeology major in college. And there's a long, unrelated story to why I didn't finish that has to do with the job market, and life, and the fact I'd more or less taken whatever classes I wanted, which meant I had one major class left and nearly two years of gen-ed. 


Anyway, aside from knowing things--about late-Omaha pipe structure, and the shift in the use of the letter A in English that caused the relationship of apron and napery to loose all actual sense--no one needs, I remember exactly how...inexact archaeologists are. I did base study of dendrochronology, and the general run-down of the time-frame you get from radiocarbon dating, and potassium-argon dating. There's a reason archaeologists qualify everything.

And have a less than stellar opinion of historians.

If one day we actually manage time-travel, and it doesn't unmake everything (I could drone on and on about theory here, but I'll save us all), can you imagine how much history we'd have to rewrite?
Picture
xkcd: Inside Joke--used under cc2.5
0 Comments

Blow the Ballast, Here We go!

8/29/2014

0 Comments

 
So here on my normal blog, I talk about Science-Fiction on Fridays and originally at the start of the week I was going to do that on the Art of Procrastination too this Friday. Maybe find something interesting to talk about in regard to what it takes to get into the SFWA, or something else that tied it to publishing.

But midnight starts the annual 3-day Novel Challenge. I'm taking the weekend off from being a publisher. Until midnight on Monday I'm just a writer. I like to talk about writing. And cheese. And occasionally sheep.

Someday on here I'll go into the whole story of why we're called Golden Fleece Press. Or maybe Kate will. One of us will happily drag you into the fabled land of crazy with us eventually, don't worry. When we do, why I've mentioned sheep when I'm going to talk about World Builder's Disease will suddenly, miraculously, make sense. You're welcome.

I have fully realized, type A, un-treatable World Builders Disease. Like it needs a national day of recognition, it's so bad. So I should understand the impetus to draw a map of your fantasy kingdom, or tell me the full five-generational family tree of your main character. I should have gobbled up those pages of genetic coding in Jurassic Park, instead of skimming past them to get back to the swimming T-Rex.

But I don't, and I didn't. I lose patience incredibly quickly with information I don't need.

You think the next thing I say is going to be that you shouldn't do all that, don't you?

Not in a million years. Because that highly-detailed, rich background world hiding in your notebook will leak onto the page in a million other places. In places I want it, because it keeps your world and your characters from being weak card-board cut-outs. So watercolor a full topographical map of your kingdom. Figure out the exact science of gene-splicing your frog-bat. Determine exactly how Frank Idiot the Third is directly related to the Holy Roman Emperor.

Just only tell me the stuff I actually need to know.

This super short post is brought to you by the fact it is 11:28 and I'm already itching to dive into creating a pin-board of visual inspiration I shouldn't have time to look at this weekend.

0 Comments

All the Shiny Lights...

8/15/2014

1 Comment

 

AntikytheraMechanismSchematic-Freeth12.png
"AntikytheraMechanismSchematic-Freeth12" by SkoreKeep - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

You would think the pretty little diagram would make it easier to understand, but obviously not.

Off the coast of the island of Antikythera in 1901, while excavating a ship-wreck, a group of archaeologists and divers pulled up a hunk of rock, along with a whole host of other minutia thought to come from the isle of Rhodes, during the time of Julius Caesar. The hunk of rock wasn't particularly interesting, so it went into storage. 

Until about a year later when an archaeologist noticed a gear, embedded in the rock. He believed it to be some kind of astrological clock. But given it's complexity, and their understanding of the other things taken from the site, it fell back into storage. Until someone else picked up the trail in 1951, but even with interest it was still 1971 until they took x-ray and gamma-ray images of the 82 fragments. 

Hundreds, nearly thousands of years in the silt at the bottom of the ocean, and the nearly another hundred in a lab, and still the best we can guess, the Antikythera Mechanism was being taken back to Caesar as a spoil of war. We don't know how many tries it took to create the thing, or who, or how. We're not even entirely sure what it's supposed to do--though totally check out the theories, if you're up for the science content. 

Things like this in science always make my psuedo-science brain buzz (for a fun time, check out Mischa Collins in Stonehenge, Apocalypse, which I'm almost positive mentions this little beauty and even if I'm wrong, it's still worth a watch). There are so many things about the ancient world we don't really understand yet, and I'm not an 'alien assistance' kind of girl, but I always wonder when we're going to fill those holes.
1 Comment

Guesty posts of guestness

8/1/2014

0 Comments

 
This weeks Sci-Fi Friday is brought to you by my friend Michael. You can find his regular blog here.

Lovely, wonderful Michael got me his post well on time. The fact this is happening on Sunday instead of Friday might possibly have something to do with me spending a weekend at the lake without any kind of internets.

Anyway, gorge the eyestalks.


Recently this blog discussed the flying cars that we were all promised when the future got here. This romanticized flying car future has yet to materialize though and our continued yearning for it masks an overlooked truth: no one has been promised a flying car utopia since like, the 1950s. More recent generations were promised corporate-run dystopias, which we’ve been delivered by the way. But I don’t want to talk today about flying cars or about the cyberpunk future we live in. I want to talk about something awesome.

You know what’s awesome? Time travel is awesome. I love time travel stories! When done right, they can offer an in depth look at a setting and its characters from multiple perspectives in a short amount of in-universe time.

Groundhog Day is a great, light hearted introduction to this style of story. If you aren’t familiar with the movie, basically Bill Murray’s smarmy character is trapped in a town during Groundhog Day and forced to relive the same day again and again. Not even death is an escape for him, as he simply wakes up in bed the next day.

Why does he repeat the same day again and again? How does this time loop work? Why is it centered on Bill Murray’s character? We never get the answer to these questions in the movie; and why should we? Those questions aren’t what the story is about. The movie is really about the growth that the setting forces on Bill Murray’s character and the people he meets and gets to know along the way.

Part of what I love about Groundhog Day is how over the course of the movie, you see Bill Murray interact with several minor background characters who you might not give much thought to if you saw them walking down the street, but Bill Murray has all the time in the world to get to know the personal life stories of everyone in town and so do we as the viewers.


Picture
Figure 1 Several people on YouTube assure me this is definitely a time machine. Why doesn’t the media cover this?!
Ultimately, that movie is a romantic comedy. What if we’re in the mood for something more adventurous? There are plenty of great stories in the time travel genre that fit this qualifier as well! To name another movie that everyone will know: Back to the Future is a perfect example of this. Marty McFly has great adventures as he tries to stop his parents from breaking up and cause him to never be born because of events that he changed when he went to the past. It’s a lovely introduction to time paradoxes and definitely recommended for anyone who wants time travel itself to play a bigger role in the stories. The characters are often wrestling with what they can change in the past to affect the future without causing unintended consequences. Another standout example of this sort of film is Looper which I won’t talk about too much here, but it follows this same sort of slightly more involved time travel film.

But finally we come to my favorite sort of time travel story: the structured time travel story. Now, don’t take that to mean that other time travel stories aren’t structured, but rather it’s the type of story that spends an (often non-trivial) amount of time laying down the rules of how time travel works before the characters go and muck things up and then either have to deal with the consequences of their actions or figure out how to work within the rules to set things right. One example of this is the 2004 movie Primer, which I adore, but it’s a very difficult movie to follow specifically because of how it doesn’t hold your hand as characters are bending the fabric of space-time to their whims. Therefore, I won’t spend more time on it other than to recommend it to you.

Another lovely example of this sort of story is Steins;Gate, a visual novel (which itself is a topic I could easily write a whole blog post about) and the inspiration for this post. In this game, a group of friends accidentally invent a time machine and spend the first half of the game experimenting with it and learning the rules of the system only to find themselves in a horrible trap of their own design.

Picture
Figure 2 Dr People, the time travellers' drink of choice.
What I find so powerful and attractive about the game is how the time travel allows for the player to go back in time and interact with other characters differently. A little insight here, provoking a reaction there, it all lends itself to the player developing an intimate relationship with each character, even those who at first seem ancillary.

Time travel stories are captivating and have so much more to offer than what I’ve written about here. If you’re usually turned off to Sci-Fi involving time travel I hope you’ll be intrigued to seek out recommendations of stories that are lighter on the time travel and bigger on character driven interactions. If you’ve never thought about using time travel elements in your stories before, then consider it as a specialized tool for certain settings that let you show similar (or even the same) events from an evolving perspective as your viewpoint character learns more and more about the plot of a story. Time travel, I submit to you all, is awesome.

0 Comments
<<Previous
    Picture

    Author

    There's a link to my bio at the top of the page, but for these purposes it's probably best to just say I'm strange.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    June 2021
    August 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    August 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    Categories

    All
    Aliens!
    #atozchallenge
    Book Lover's Bazaar
    Book-Lovers' Bazaar
    Book Review
    Bunny
    Camp Nano
    Canyons
    Contest
    Cornucopia Conundrum
    Editing
    Fantasy Friday
    Goals
    Guest Posts
    I Don't Know How To Tag Anymore
    Kids Stuff
    Life
    Misc
    Miscellaneous Monday
    Movie Books
    Movies
    Nanowrimo
    Outlines
    Procrastination
    Pseudoscience
    Publishing
    Science!
    Sci Fi Friday
    Sci-Fi Friday
    Screaming Fits
    Short Fic
    Snowballs
    TerribleMinds Challenges
    That Title Makes Absolutely No Sense
    The OUTDOORS!
    Three Day Novel
    Unholy Vacuums Of Suck
    Weirdness
    Well Written Wednesday
    Wellwritten Wednesday
    Writing
    Year Of Creative Pursuits

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.