Hana's Husband

Exode pulped: a whimsical depiction
of how Hollywood might present
the secret history of Earth...aliens
created the human species and then
used us as slave labor. Image source

When I started writing Exode, Hana was supposed to be the main character in the novel. The story was to begin on Earth and show Hana dealing with the behavioral problems of her daughter, Hilde. There was to be a mystery surrounding both Hilde's odd behavior and her father, whose location was unknown to readers at the start of the story: he had "abandoned" Hana half way through her pregnancy.

Prediction: Hollywood's obsession with alien monsters
in space is just as silly as imagined sea monsters.

If  I
were
to
give
in to
my
muse
and
affix
the
most
cliché
and melodramatic Space Opera spin to the plot of Exode, I'd say that poor Hana had secretly been used as a convenient incubator for a human-alien embryo. As a scientist in training, Hana could not help studying both her daughter and the mysterious puzzle of how a virgin (Hana) could get pregnant.

Hana finds the unique
gene pattern of Hilde.

Putting together the various available clues and puzzle pieces and making use of new DNA analysis tools like gene restriction enzyme site mapping, Hana eventually learned too much about her daughter.  As a consequence of her insatiable curiosity, Hana got to meet "Hank" Montpellier, an Interventionist agent.

Far left: Hilde.

Hank realized that Hana was soon going to reveal to the world the fact that the human species had been -and continued to be- crafted by aliens. Hank knew that he could "get rid of Hana" by telling her about other inhabited worlds in the galaxy and offering her the opportunity to go visit them.

Hana was a good mother, but when she was offered a chance to leave Earth and go exploring among the stars, she went. Hank had arranged for his assistant (an artificial life form that, for simplicity, I'll call a robot) to become the surrogate mother for Hilde.  Exode was intended to be the story of Hana's travels among the stars and her discovery of what motivated the Interventionists to work secretly on Earth.

Click image to enlarge. Kirk loses another redshirt. Classic
Space Opera: male protagonist, damsels in distress, alien
monsters, dead redshirts...all sadly lacking from Exode.

Although I seldom write stories about death and destruction, I spent some time trying to decide if I should include the death of Hana's husband in Exode.

The term "Hana's husband" is really a misnomer. Hana was never married, so if "Hana's husband" has any real meaning then it is something like: "the father of Hilde".

Suspicion of who might be the father of Hilde has, through the years, fallen on a few likely suspects.

Peter pulped. source

Firstly, there is the Editor. About the time that Hana became pregnant, the Editor was her boy friend. However, Hana and the Editor never engaged in sexual intercourse, so it always seemed very unlikely that the Editor was Hilde's father.

The second suspect was Peter. Peter did know Hana when they were in college and Peter, as a carrier of many alien genes, believed that he could not father children with Earth women. Confident that he could not become a father, Peter had unprotected sex with several women, including Hana's college roommate. Later, after discovering that Peter was inter-fertile with some Earthlings, some commentators noted that there was a theoretical possibility of Peter being Hilde's father, but there was never any evidence to support this idea.

Hilde's family tree.

Eventually, when advanced DNA sequencing technology became available, it was possible to demonstrate conclusively that neither the Editor or Peter was Hilde's father.

Surprisingly (for Hilde, Hana and the Editor), Hilde turned out to be one of the Atlantis clones, a group of alien-human hybrids who play an important role in the Exode Trilogy.

Peter had rather callously implanted an embryo inside Hana, but he never bothered to explain his actions to Hana.

Ivory's attempt to use the Bimanoid Interface.

When Ivory Fersoni was growing up, she was trained to fill out forms by indicating that her father had been a man named Adão. Since hearing that story of her origins from Ivory, I have subsequently received hints from Angela that contradict such a conventional explanation for Ivory's existence. Here are two alternative stories:

1) Marta, realizing that no human male on Earth could father her children, simply cloned herself. In other words, Marta might have been the original Atlantis clone.

2) The Atlantis clones originated as a woman who long ago lived in the Galactic Core. According to this hypothesis, when Marta wanted to have a child, she was simply implanted with an "Atlantis clone embryo".

Next: I had so much fun with the Hank Montpellier character (A.K.A. Parthney) that I decided to give him a larger role in Exode.

200 - Blogging about Writing

The Olmec Intervention

This is my 200th post to this blog, so I'm going to take a look back and reflect on some of my experiences with collaborative fiction writing and blogging that have changed the way I write science fiction stories.

In 2005 I started exploring the use of wiki websites as a tool for collaborative fiction writing. Prior to that time, working by myself, I had created the first story set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. Exodemic was written as a kind of alternative history story, but I was feeling dissatisfied and constrained by that format. It was valuable for my growth as a writer to go online and find other science fiction writers who I could collaborate with and by doing so gain writing experience that expanded my fiction writing repertoire.

Elsewhere, I've summarized some the important online collaborative writing projects that I've had the pleasure to explore by making use of wiki technology and in 2009 I started blogging about my fiction writing, both here and at other websites.

Looking back on what I've learned from these online experiences, I can identify a few types of activities that have been particularly fun and educational. The rest of this blog post provides a summary of those experiences.

Fan Fiction

The Start of Eternity

Back in 2005 I had recently discovered the joy of fan fiction. I've occasionally blogged about my condition: I now suffer from "fanfiction disease", the incurable desire to write stories that make use of famous characters created by others and it is my habit to do so by inserting those characters into stories that are set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe.

My first act of fan fiction sin involved the creation of an X-Files/Star Trek story in which I brought together Gene Roddenberry's characters from Assignment: Earth with some X-Files characters. I've also sinned by making fan fiction using characters from science fiction novels published by Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, Carl Sagan and Sydney J. van Scyoc.

source

The most egregious example of my tendency to hijack famous characters is a fan fiction novel called The Start of Eternity. As described in a recent blog post, I'm very pleased with The Start of Eternity because it allowed me to make use of the Huaoshy to provide an amusing ending to Asimov's Foundation Series. At the same time, I was forced to develop my thinking about the technological prowess of the Huaoshy and define some limits on their seemingly god-like powers.

Right now I'm feeling very happy with my fan fiction experience because as a consequence of my dabbling in this sinful activity I was able to imagine a satisfying backstory for my current science fiction writing project: Exode. That backstory involves time travel, but Exode is not a time travel novel.

Time Travel
One of the first science fiction movies that I remember seeing was The Time Machine. Even when I was ten years old I was disappointed by the idea of a time machine looked like a sleigh. The only time travel story that captivated me was The End of Eternity.

For most of my life I was a space travel snob, convinced that the proper domain of science fiction is stories about spaceships and distant planets with alien beings. However, I was haunted by the thought of Noÿs Lambent living out her life in the 20th century after having been born ten million years in our future. When I finally decided to write a fan fiction sequel to Asimov's Foundation and Earth I could not resist the temptation to include Noÿs in the story.

When I translocated Noÿs into the Exodemic Fictional Universe I had no desire to write a time travel story, rather, I wanted to put an end to time travel. This was possible for the Huaoshy, who, it turns out, were responsible for the existence of time travel. When the Huaoshy altered the dimensional structure of the universe so as to make possible faster-than-light travel, they inadvertently also made time travel possible. As described in The Start of Eternity, time travel was not invented by the Huaoshy. In a strange twist of fate, time travel was discovered by positronic robots.

Having developed the technology for time travel, the positronic robots of Earth caused a big headache for the Huaoshy. Eventually, the Huaoshy decided that the had to undertake one final dimensional engineering project that would make time travel impossible. At the same time, that shift in the dimensional structure of the universe ended the ability of positronic robots to exercise the telepathic abilities that Asimov had depicted in his robot stories.

About a billion years ago, in a distant galaxy, a sapient biological lifeform developed the technology that is required to harness fusion energy and antimatter-based spaceship propulsion. They started slowly exploring their galaxy while looking for the means to travel through space at speeds faster than light. These beings were not yet Huaoshy, but I'll use that label for convenience since they eventually transformed themselves into the Huaoshy.

The Huaoshy discovered that they could alter the dimensional structure of the universe. By first switching the dimensional structure from the "ground state" to a "transitional state" they made possible faster-than-light communications using hierions. This was a great advance for the management of their growing interstellar civilization.

However, the Huaoshy really wanted to be able to travel through space at faster-than-light speeds. They completed another even more technologically challenging alteration in the dimensional structure of the universe that gave them mastery over sedronic matter and which allowed for faster-than-light travel through space.

The Huaoshy were satisfied with that new dimensional structure and they slowly transformed themselves into an artificial lifeform composed of sedronic mater.

However, when humans invented positronic robots the Huaoshy discovered that their dimensional engineering had also made time travel possible. Eventually the Huaoshy made one more change to the dimensional structure of the universe which made time travel impossible while continuing to allow travel through space at faster-than-light speeds....which, afterall, is an important technology to have around for space operas!

Space Opera

My personal introduction to space opera was similar to that described by Will Stackey. When I was 12 years old it was fun to imagine building a spaceship and heading off to the stars...meeting aliens, defeating the bad guy and ending up with the girl...at least, for as long as the innocence lasted. Unfortunately, the more I learned about science the less I was able to tag along with Dr. Smith and his cosmic adventures, particularly when they involved spacecraft that flew at the speed of thought. 

Smith can be blamed for starting my revolt against science fiction written by physical scientists. Given my interest in biology it should be no surprise that I have trouble when chemical engineer starts trying to get me to believe that thought "travels" faster than the speed of light.

By the time I was out of my teens I had developed a preference for "hard science fiction" that never seemed to violate the laws of physics or trot out biologically implausible plot elements.

For example, when I started writing Exodemic, I wanted to depict a future in which there was no faster-than-light travel, no time travel, and no telepathy or "mental powers"....and no religion, too.

I had reached the point in my thinking where I was more comfortable traveling slowly from star to star in generation ships than flashing across the universe in defiance of the laws of physics.

Writing The Search for Kalid

Then I was lucky enough to participate in the collaborative writing of The Search for Kalid. Left to myself, I never would have started writing a space opera. Three of the important things I learned from that collaboration were 1) that some characters can be crafted and developed in certain ways just because it is fun to do so (plot-driven science fiction can take itself too seriously), 2) it can be fun to include social elements like religion in a science fiction story even if the story is not directly about cultural elements like religion and 3) I was able to start making room in my science fiction for imaginary technologies like faster-than-light travel, teleportation and even forms of "weird biology" that would make possible "mental powers" and telepathy.

These changes in my science fiction writing "comfort zone" were very liberating. I've learned to live with "imaginary science".

Fictional Science
My science fiction writing has been powerfully shaped by three key ideas: 1) the Fermi Paradox, 2) Richard Feynman's realization that there is plenty of room at the bottom and 3) Clarke's suggestion that advanced technology can seem like magic.

The plot of Exodemic involves the realization by humans that small can be powerful and during the past year while creating Exode I've further refined my thinking about how to include the power of the very small in my fiction.

Nanotechnology

When I wrote Exodemic I used the term "nanodevice". At the Fiction Wikia I picked up the term "nanite" and started using it, for example to account for the ability of Isis to morph between human and cat forms.

Originally I conceptualize nanites as microscopic devices composed of conventional matter. However, I imagined that sophisticated nanorobotic devices could use fictional "hierions" to exchange information. Hierion-based communication between microscopically small symbionts inside people became a means of achieving telepathic communication.

Later, I developed the idea that there could be a type of matter formed by hierions where the bond lengths were zeptoscale. In Exode, the pek are composed vast numbers of nanorobotic devices that are made from of such matter.

Not satisfied with that level of miniaturization, the Huaoshy have taken their technology to an even smaller scale where intelligent artificial life exists in the form of sedronic matter in which bond lengths approach to within a few orders of magnitude of the Planck length.

Mental Powers

I never understood how Asimov imagined that telepathy would work in his stories. In Second Foundation he wrote about returning "the recording of his original brain-wave makeup" to Bail Channis in order to restore his erased memories, as if our memories are some kind of electronic software program to be loaded into a computer, or erased.

Asimov wrote that the Mule could sense the electric fields generated by a brain, thus allowing him to "read thoughts".  He could also alter personalities using "mentalics", impressing his pattern of brain activity on others.

First Foundationers who lacked the biological equipment needed for "mentalic abilities", were shown using sensitive brain wave recording technology to detect evidence that the function of brains (like that of Homir Munn) had been altered by "mantalic manipulation". So, electromagnetism was the basis of "mentalics", but the brilliant Dr. Darell had to invent an electromagnetic "mental static" device with hundreds of circuits in order to prevent mentalic mind control by the Second Foundationers. Eh?

While working on The Search for Kalid I took the time to seriously think about how it might be possible for telepathy to evolve and be present in a biological species like we humans. Thus, the telastid was invented and used as the fictional explanation for telepathy.

Having grown comfortable with such an imaginary mechanism for telepathy I no longer have qualms about endowing technologically advance artificial lifeforms with "mental powers" that can involve hypothetical hierions and be entirely independent of any physics as primitive as electromagnetism.

Illustration and Video
In my teens, when I first started writing stories, I had a dream about a science fiction book that I would one day write. In my dream, that book had an animated cover like a miniature television screen. When we finally rumbled into this millennium I was pleased that my science fiction stories no longer had to be restricted to text.

One of the joys of writing stories in electronic format is that images and videos can be easily added to the text.

In the first scene of Exode that I imagined, Hana saw a business card from Parthney with the provocative text: "Change your world" and images of some planets located far away towards the center of the galaxy.

Hemmal became the most important such planet in Exode, the world where Parthney was born. The nearby planet Oib was where the Pla developed their plans for how to bring a technological culture to the people of Earth.

The Koly star system has one other inhabited world, Clu'ten'ium. No human would think to live there, but it is a world with some appeal to the Fru'wu, so that becomes the secret location of Lendhalen.

Blogging about Writing
As described above, my online experiences have greatly modified and expanded my interests as a writer. While I greatly enjoy collaborative writing, I've also learned to make use of blogging as a way to explore and develop a story.

Of course, when I say "develop a story" I really mean the development of the imagined universe that I think of as the Exodemic Fictional Universe. For me, that development process is endless fun because there is a logic to the Huaoshy. As an artificial lifeform that designed itself, the Huaoshy have an identity that is hidden from we humans, but if we keep chipping away we can reveal the structure of that logic.

There is no escape from the recursive nature of that logic. The Huaoshy created we humans and we find ourselves struggling to understand our origins. To do so, we we must imagine the Huaoshy and what they must be like in order for them to have created us and kept us so ignorant of our origins.
_________________________
Exode is the story of a small group of people who are trying to discover the nature of the aliens who made we humans. The story is under development and collaborating authors are welcome.
______________________

Death and Destruction

If you have never read Jack Vance's "Demon Princes" novels then I suggest you go read them and come back here later.

In the Demon Princes novels, the protagonist (Gersen) is out for revenge (actually, he explicitly denies that his motivation is that simple and it may be that he is mainly interested in preventing the Demon princes from doing more harm to humanity). He lives his life for one purpose, to kill the five criminals who destroyed his family.
Spoilers follow....

I've long been intrigued by the ways that Vance found to "terminate" the five criminals. Gersen is disciplined and he goes about his task with workman-like efficiency, although he always wants to have a face-to-face meeting with his adversaries and tell them why they are about to die. I've been thinking about death and destruction in the context of the story that I'm currently creating (working title: Exode). I completed an outline of chapters for Exode today and realized that as things stand there is no death or destruction in the entire story! I'm not sure that we are allowed to write science fiction novels in which nobody dies and no planets are blown up.

cover by Edmund Emshwiller

At the end of the first Demon Princes novel (Star King), the "bad guy" tries to escape from Gersen. Gersen is ready and willing to "blast" the bad guy with his Space Opera blaster, but an alien creature is conveniently available to deliver the coup de grâce. Gersen walks off into the sunset with Pallis Atwrode, damsel formerly in distress. Gersen saves the girl and does not actually have to bloody his hands. Although, along the way to a happy ending, Gersen does break the bones of one evil minion in hand-to-hand combat and also poisons one of the Star King's evil henchmen (Suthiro), who, ironically, is a Master Venefice, a well-trained poisoner (Gersen neatly flushes Suthiro's corpse out into the vacuum of space). A third evil  henchman (who actually kidnapped Pallis) has to live out his life as a slave-like captive under conditions that are worse than the fate of death.

Sessily and Glawen

I wonder if Vance started out feeling a need to demonstrate Gersen's credentials as a ruthless killer, but then later had second thoughts about the mounting body count in the Demon Prince novels. Even before Gersen is on the trail of the first Demon Prince, Vance tells us that Gersen killed his first man in a street brawl, at the age of 14. Just to get started, to discover the names of the five Demon Princes, Gersen must torture and kill one of the evil henchmen. Much later in the series, Gersen says that he can't kill people without having a good reason for doing so. However, in Star King, Gersen poisons Suthiro for no obvious reason. (It is later suggested that as part of Gersen's training on Suthiro's home world, he learned to quickly poison anyone like Suthiro who would soon become an enemy.)

source

Revenge for murder is a popular theme in many Vance novels and central to the Demon Princes story. In Vance's Alastor Cluster novels the protagonists must deal with 1) the murder of a brother (Trullion), 2) the murder of a father (Marune), or 3) mass murder (Wyst). In the Cadwal Chronicles the pattern is similar: Glawen must deal with the murderer of his girl friend (the charming Sessily), Wayness must go on after the murder of her brother and in the final book of the trilogy they must deal with mass murder.

Cloned damsels in distress

In the second Demon Prices novel (The Killing Machine) Gersen hunts down Kokor Hekkus and blasts him to oblivion at point blank range. Along the way Gersen rescues (repeatedly) another damsel in distress, Alusz. Maybe there is a calculus according to which SciFi heroes must redeem themselves for each murder by rescue of a damsel in distress. By my count, Gersen is at about 4 murders and 2 damsels rescued by the end of The Killing Machine.

In The Palace of Love, the third Demon Prince has cloned a damsel in distress. Gersen rescues 4 cloned damsels in distress and at the moment when Gersen is ready to blast the bad guy, he falls to his death, so I'll not count that as Gersen murdering someone. By the wonders of cloning and "accidental deaths", the count has become 4 murders by Gersen and 6 damsels rescued.

Alice Wroke

In The Face, Gersen kills both Bel Ruk and Lens Larque in revenge for their roles in the death of his parents. Gersen has a serious romance with Jerdian, but I can't count her as a damsel in distress. Going into the fifth and final novel it is 6 murders by Gersen and 6 damsels rescued.

In The Book of Dreams, Gersen tries to kill Treesong, but fails. Ultimately, two of Treesong's henchmen and Treesong himself die in "accidents" that are arranged for by the Cleadhoes, Gersen's partners in retribution. I'm tempted to assign these three deaths as follows: one each to Gersen and the two Cleadhoes. Does Gersen rescue the miraculous Alice Wroke? Is she ever really in distress? I have to wonder what her fate might have been had Gersen not fallen in love with her....possibly the same fate as her father, who Treesong murdered. So my final tally is 7 murders by Gersen and 7 damsels rescued. Of course, Alice shares Gersen's motive to eliminate Treesong and along the way she rescues Gersen right back.

In one of his Foundation stories, one of Asimov's characters says, "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," but in standard Space Opera fashion, Galactic civilization begins to crumble and, as the story flowed from Asimov's trusty typewriter,  the destruction became epic. There are battling fleets of space ships and bombardments of planetary populations from space. At the personal level, Onum Barr takes revenge for the slaughter of his family by the crumbling Empire, murdering Bel Riose, the last strong General of the Empire. There is attempted assassination of The Mule and Bayta Darell has to murder poor Ebling Mis in order to prevent The Mule from becoming Emperor of the galaxy.

Exode

I'm not sure that Exode is best categorized as a Space Opera. Can you have a Space Opera story without death, battles and destruction?

In my story Exode there are many humanoid robots. Asimov is famous for his "laws of robotics" which allowed him room for stories about robots killing people and even a robot that murders another robot. In Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, an intelligent machine commits murder (Sorry, Dave).

The robots of Exode are tools of the Huaoshy. The Huaoshy are "alien invaders" of our galaxy, but they actually create the human species. In typical science fiction, alien invaders bring death and destruction to Earth. In Exode, the Huaoshy create and nurture humanity.

Kach, a character in Exode.

So far, I do not see any reason to have a murder in Exode. No wars, no space battles, no exploding planets. However, I could arrange for Parthney to kill Hana's husband. My original plan was to simply allow an Overseer to cart away her husband, but by forcing myself to find a way to add a murder to the story I can imagine that Parthney might realize that Hana's husband needs to be killed in order to prevent him from attracting the attention of an Overseer.

source

If I go this route (murder), I can also write the story so that, even after the murder, the Overseer still moves in and captures Parthney and Hana. The murder would weigh heavily on Parthney both for the act itself and because of its utter futility. What do you think? Should I throw a murder into Exode? The story is still under development and collaborating authors are welcome.
______________
Can't Count

There were several henchmen of the Demon Princes who are rather impersonally dispatched by Gersen and who I failed to count, above. In The Face, 4 of Larque's goons follow Gersen from the Black Barn and Gersen kills them all. At the high school reunion of Howard Treesong, Gersen kills 9 of Treesong's battle troops. Updated body counts.

The Exode Saga

Aliens say: "Take us to your money"

war$

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent and the first choice of Caleb $charf. And $tephen Hawking. And Hollywood ($tar War$). And video games like Ma$$ Effect.

In ‘Mass Effect’ Solves The Fermi Paradox?, $charf adopts a popular approach to the Femi Paradox which suggests that our fate is "a huge planet-destroying, species-wrecking, epic finale". Is utter de$truction inevitable in Hollywood and video games just because violence $ell$?

Could anyone be surprised by the violence-filled plots of games like Ma$$ Effect and big $$$ makers like $tar War$? I'm only surprised when I find science fiction that is not built on death and destruction. $charf says "you have been warned" before discussing the plot....just so that the revelation does not $urpri$e anyone?

But why are $pace alien$ "out there", patiently waiting to destroy us? $o they can "use the genetic slurry of millions, billions of individuals from a species [humans] to create new versions of themselves". Duh! Of course, why didn't I think of that? It i$ all $o $imple.

Yes, in case you did not notice, the fate of humanity is in the [hands?] of "a hyper-advanced machine race" that has spent the past 37 million years systematically destroying every advanced organic civilization in our galaxy. I guess this is why the Mayans built an end into their calendar....they got advanced warning about the Reapers.

The first alien invasion story I ever saw was the 1953 movie version of War of the Worlds. That one story was more than enough for me. How can there be an endle$$ market for $torieS about alien inva$ion$ and $lime-dripping alien$ who could de$troy the human $pe$ieS in a flash of advanced weapons technology, but who almost always are so bumbling that a tribe of naked apes (or even Earthly bacteria) can defeat them? When I was 12 I was not buying this plot. Really, why does it continue to $ell? And $ell....and $ell.....and $ell... (if Hollywood can endlessly make movies with the same science fiction plot, then John can endlessly complain about it)

source

So what do other people have to say about the phenomenon of endless alien invasion movies?

"I hoped this movie would be a blockbuster. Something to make me believe Hollywood is generating creative, and innovative stories to take me away from reality for a couple of hours. This movie was a serious disappointment."

"I'd like my money back please. What a stinker!"

"It's as if Spielberg has sunk down under the weight of so much shoulder perching, and has been reduced to foraging for ideas in the mud."

"...the audience around me laughed derisively...."

"I hate to say just how disappointed I am in this film."

War of the worlds book cover By theaven

"Spielberg has made forgettable junk, cobbled together too quickly, with far too little imagination."

"Spielberg shouldn't be allowed to make science fiction films. I was more than disappointed by it. It made me angry."

"Ugh, what an awful movie!"

"Sucks. Now who do i see to get my money back."

"I think it was one of the worst movies ever, which would have passed unnoticed have not been directed by Spielberg, and played by Cruise, of course, that's the whole point of the Hollywood industry, to raise the expectations as high as you can, no matter what the cost, and then produce a really crappy product. From the economic point of view i understand it perfectly, is like putting your label on some crappy product and then making out a fortune, because of people's ignorance."

"Horrible, awful, embarrassing"

"This had to be one of the most GOD AWFUL PIECES OF CRAP I HAVE EVER SEEN!"

$pielberg and Crui$e laugh all the way to the bank and science fiction fans wait for something worth watching. The entertainment industry reminds me of R. J. Reynolds. As long as ca$h keeps flowing in, who cares about the product and what it does to people?

Related Reading: Protests over ending of Mass Effect 3 show fan investment in story control

One of the comments after the ars technica article: "you wouldn't try to protest the ending of a major work of film or literature if you didn't enjoy how it played out."

Why not? This is not 1912. Here in 2012 we are now in the era of global communications where consumers can come together on the internet and complain about a product that they paid money for.

"Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

I'd love to see 2012 be the start of a time of protest during which consumers refused to buy video games, see SciFi movies and buy science fiction novels that have the same tired plots. We can do better (is participatory cinema a path to a brighter and more creative SciFi future or just more of the same dreck?).

The Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Overly Melodramatic

I use 'abysses of pain' as shorthand for overly melodramatic description of a character's emotional state. "His eyes were deep, dark wells of agony," and so on. A lot of bad fantasy does this and I used to be prone to it.

The above is a comment about my previous blog post. I've been trying to embrace melodrama while working on The Search for Kalid, a science fiction novel that has elements of Space Opera.

I agree that there are times when making a story overly melodramatic will only earn the label: FAIL. However, part of the magic of art is that it is possible to take an idea so far beyond the point of failure that it emerges from the "dark side" and becomes something wonderful. The are some formulas that "work" so well that they can tell us something fundamental about human nature. Artistic forms can go out of style, but there seems to be a large momentum associated with successful formulas. Art critics might lament the plebeian tastes of an audience, but that will not stop people from spending hard-earned money on the forms of art and entertainment that they truly like. There always seems to be an audience for melodramatic forms, even if going down that path might earn you an automatic failing grade from a publisher.

In the case of The Search for Kalid there is a scene in which the young Sybil is worrying and worrying (and worrying some more) about her future. All the worrying is just too much and the reader might wish that Sybil would just shut up. Hopefully the reader does not give up in disgust because while Sybil's worrying is close to pathological, it is in the story for a reason. Spoiler warning: plot details follow. Sybil has telepathic powers and is able to receive information from the future. She's getting "bad vibes" from the future, but she does not know that.

I think there is a theorem: when writing, anything can be done right or wrong...write with adequate awareness of a goal and a purpose and you can get away with anything. The corollary is that writing anything reflexively and for no good reason will earn you scorn.

Image: source.