Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Family. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Reviews 40 - John Dixon The Point

Reviews 40
The Point
by
John Dixon



Reviews have not yet been indexed.  I discuss many novels within the context of various writing techniques they illustrate, and a few (40 so far) separately, to be referred to later.

Today, I have a novel -- mostly Urban Fantasy -- by John Dixon from Del Rey books -- which was sent to me (free) in ARC form via Amazon Vine.

I review products for Amazon which they send out free samples to promote.  The deal is the reviewer pays the income tax on the wholesale price of the item, so it isn't really free, but the slug at the top of the review identifies the Vine Voice -- meaning, getting the item free, they might not be as critical as they should be.

I will post an Amazon page review of this novel, John Dixon's THE POINT, using most of what I have to say here, but the Amazon page comments are not "reviews" and not aimed at Romance readers or Romance writers looking to deepen their craft skills.

THE POINT - by John Dixon, is an attempt at a new angle on the "posthuman" or mutant human who gets "superpowers."

It is of interest to Romance Writers (probably not to READERS of Romance genre) because the main female kick-ass Character experiences a glancing infatuation after bouncing around among sexual encounters and the drug scene.  Having no home life to compare her feelings with, she risks her standing at West Point to meet her lover at night.  That's ALL there is in this novel - a mostly off-stage Relationship between wasted and weak Characters who turn out to redirect World History.

None of the characters are "admirable" in the sense of exemplifying Values our society today adheres to without realizing they are Values.

Since all the characters are on the same moral/spiritual level, there actually is no conflict -- not internal or external.  Conflict is the essence of both story and plot -- but this novel has neither.

This makes the book worth studying because it was published in August 2018 by Del Rey in Hardcover etc.  This prestigious publishing house expects broad audience appeal.  I don't think so -- but they might sell the movie rights.

Why would it make a movie, though it fails as a text story?

Because though there isn't much sex, there is Violence, and ESP powers that allow for burning, ugly events, explosions, levitation, and overpowering the Will of others, even in large groups.

There is lots of visual interest loosely glued together by a narrative line.

You don't "live" the growth experiences of these Characters, and learn their life lessons vicariously.  You are TOLD (not shown) that the Characters change their minds about how to live, usually under the hammer of Authority and threats of jail.

They "are forced" to West Point where they are press-ganged (legally) into a secret program (actually housed under ground at West Point) run by a guy who instigated the genetic mutation that caused them to be born with "powers."  Each has a different sort of "power."

This guy, the backstory reveals slowly, was in charge of a unit that got poisoned in a war theater, med-evaced to a place where experimental methods were used to "cure" them.  The children of those soldiers were born with "powers."

This is the oldest form of "science is evil" novel.

These Characters are the product of Science, and not a one of them has any sense of "right vs. wrong" -- just expediently adopting whatever ideas are floating around them.  They eventually adopt the ideals of West Point -- but there is no foundation for this philosophy.

There is no reason for these Powered People to loyally defend their country, except that their country has press-ganged them and brainwashed them.

There is a wan, half-hearted attempt at the end to enunciate the Values that West Point is based on, but it fails because it is all tell and no show.  And the infatuation which flickers randomly through the course of events is not a Soul-Mate driving force, bringing a flash of true illumination to the Souls of the couple.  There is no reason, other than being defeated by force, to adopt the Values of West Point or Patriotism in any form.  Nothing "good" is revealed about government.  There is no hint that these people will not switch loyalties again at the first challenge because there's no reason for them to become loyal to the government. 

Some of the products of this guy's experiment wash out of "The Point" program, and are sent to "The Farm" where they are imprisoned because they are too dangerous to release.  They escape and form the opposition the recruits at The Point are being trained to overcome.

One guy, some wild science experiments, and two factions are generated who strew the landscape with destruction.

The Point is the stuff Hollywood looks for, but not what novel readers seek.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Defining And Using Theme Part 2 - Love vs Politics by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 Defining And Using Theme
Part 2
Love vs Politics
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Part 1 of Defining and Using Theme, listing some previous posts that are relevant to Theme, is here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/05/defining-and-using-theme-part-1.html

We touched on A Spoonful of Magic by Irene Radford in Part 1, continuing the focus from Dialogue Part 14 - Writing Inner Dialogue of Person Being Lied To.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/04/dialogue-part-14-writing-inner-dialogue.html

This post is an exercise in generating usable theme statements, not advocating a particular political position.  But a theme-statement is, grammatically, an advocating of a position.  So read this with your writer's glasses on.

A Spoonful of Magic 
is mostly about liars in love, so it can be regarded as about lies and when it is OK to use them.  Think about today's politics and the first element that leaps out at you is Fake News.  Thus family politics is a related subject.

Theme is a very slippery element in Art, generally, but fiction writing in particular.  As in music, "theme" usually means some snippet that is repeated at specific and identifiable points throughout the piece.

Themes recur in real history, as we discussed in the context of the cycle of Generations based on the signs Pluto (profound change) occupies during each 20 years.  Some themes surface only once or twice in thousands of years, and are predicted by some prophetic writing.

Here is a video about the spooky similarity between the story of Purim and the story of Hitler, using a mystical explanation, illustrating how the motif of "recurring theme" has to be used in novels because it happens in reality - you need the drumbeat of recurrence to create verisimilitude.

https://www.facebook.com/JTVTheGlobalJewishChannel/videos/583579778644015/

And it is exactly that in fiction, too, slippery and recurring in spooky ways.

Theme is especially prominent in Romance genres in general, and in Paranormal and Science Fiction Romance as well.

When you mix genres (any 2 or 3 genres), the "spoonful of magic" you use to make the ingredients blend is Theme.

Each genre is defined by theme -- and subdivided by "setting" (time, place, social status) -- and then subdivided by plot type (Mystery, Romance, Western, Horror).

For example, the theme of "Horror Genre" is "Evil Can Not Be Conquered."  The theme of Romance is "Love Conquers All."  It is very hard to mix those two equally, so in any work of art, one of those themes must yield (at least temporarily) to the other - as in "Happily Ever After, For Now."  Evil can be sequestered, buried, put away for centuries or millennia but it can not be vanquished and will come back to bite you.

Theme is the invisible substance of the lens through which a Character views reality, life, the universe and everything.  Theme both limits and expands that view.

So "theme" essentially defines the market, the target audience.

Thus publishers create "imprints" or "lines" of product all with the same core theme, artfully dressed up in surface detail to seem like different products, but appealing to and satisfying a specific readership.

One example is Star Trek's intro: "...where no man has gone before."  The change in target audience is illustrated in the shift of that phrase to: "...where no one has gone before."  Either way, exploration of the unknown is both the theme of Science Fiction and of Westerns -- face it, of Romance, too.

Mastering "theme" is the writer's secret to selling fiction, and so to become a prolific writer, a person should ponder what the theme of their own life is, then look at other people's lives and find themes (by reading biographies.)

The other source of themes that tie our society and civilization together is, of course, Headlines.

The business of journalists is to spot themes surfacing in society and present a "narrative" that defines and sticks to that theme.  The result is reinforcement.

As mentioned previously in these blogs, one of the ties that bind us together is the animal-human (the basic primate) need to "blend in" and to "belong" to a Group (Tribe, Pack, Gang, Family).  There is a physiological basis in the brain -- a compartment of sorts -- designed to contain this material of unconscious assumptions, and beliefs that are not your own, but that you MUST adopt to survive.

We, on a basic animal level, believe what those who protect us believe.  We oppose, fight, reject, and run from other beliefs because those "ideas" impact the neurological system of the body as "killing blows."

Once cemented, our "theme" of life, the outline and framework, a honeycomb of compartments designed to contain information, and the lens through which we "see" and understand survival, can not be distorted, shifted, altered, expanded, or re-shaped without experiencing "fear-fight-flight" responses.

For some of us in the most recent generation (say, born from the 1990's on) politics has been one of the honeycomb compartment walls that defines the notion of the shape of reality and how to survive in it.

The conflict (essence of story, remember?) is rooted in the theme of "what is government"  -- and also, "what is the purpose of government."  Ayn Rand was catapulted to world fame with her work, Atlas Shrugged, as she challenged the basic notion that groups of humans "need" government.

We have, as humans (consider how your Aliens might differ) generated various governmental forms for maybe 8 or 9 thousand years (maybe more).

Perhaps we could do without government, but apparently we don't want to.

So we always make one.

And then we make another.

And then we fight over which is better -- trying our best to kill everyone who disagrees about the role of government in reality.

Government ranges from Head of Family living in a cave to Kings governing an area with arable land and peasants working it, to High Kings like King Arthur, to Emperors like Napoleon or Alexander The Great.

Hitting on the Emperor model, humans lived centuries with wars, conquering, and marrying off daughters to opposing Kings to make peace by blending families.

Then in the 1700's the world rebelled and overthrew monarchs, after weakening their position with the "Constitutional Monarchy."

And a bunch of nerdy science fiction writers geeked out on Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman Literature and then-modern French thinkers works and wrote the Constitution of the United States of America, a work that should have won a Hugo for inspired imagination.  It is all about humans governing themselves -- neither democracy or republic, but self-governing hybrid form.

It was the first (and so far pretty much the only) attempt to structure a government that is prevented from governing but works just fine, thank you.

Many Amendments have diluted that structure so it is hard to discern now.  For example, having Senators elected by a State's voters instead of by State Legislators dilutes the "Republic" aspect and emphasizes the "Democracy" aspect.

The US Constitution was constructed by two opposing groups that agreed to disagree.  Remember, one group wanted George Washington to be King!  The other wanted to do away with the very concept King in favor of a chief department manager (president).

The disagreement was over the essential question of "what is government for?"

They did not have time to argue that into the ground and hammer out an answer because the little, individually weak, colonies were about to be "brought back under the King's control" by the British soldiers.  They needed a "common defense" so that's what they created.

As a result of not being able to settle this question of the function of government (in the abstract) thus chasing away everyone who couldn't adopt this "unconscious assumption" as part of their mental honeycomb structure, we currently have BOTH types of believers in the USA voting public and at the family dinner table.

As with the warring Kings of old, families have intermarried.

Thus Thanksgiving Dinner has become the flashpoint of the year for many families, a political holiday with warring factions married.

No longer does everyone in the family adopt the Head of Family's politics.  Conflict ensues, and conflict is not so great for digestion.

An entire Romance novel could unfold during Thanksgiving Day!  (and has).

There is the situation where you bring home a new boyfriend for Thanksgiving Dinner, the political discussion erupts, and the new boyfriend is revealed -- either outspoken and opposing the Head of Household, or obviously trying to blend in and pretend to adopt the acceptable view.  Which is lie, and which is true?

Dating a guy is one thing - bringing him home another thing altogether, as that brings into play the physiological human need to belong, to be accepted.

As a result, today we have Internet Dating Sites dedicated to matching people by political persuasion (this is serious business; I know marriages that broke up over politics.)

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-singles-trump-dating-websites-for-maga-supporters-2018-2

----quote-------
------end quote-------

But most people who argue one side or the other at Thanksgiving Dinner are advocating or opposing answers, plans of action, and maybe the rightness or wrongness of the answer to the problem chosen for Headlines by Journalists.

Defining the unconscious parts of these cemented, do-or-die, political positions on issues is the job of the fiction writer -- not the journalist who is trying to write non-fiction.

The fiction writer, the artist, can pare away the surface decoration and reveal the eternal truths behind beliefs -- e.g. describe the honeycomb size, shape, transparency, and above all the structural integrity and strength of the "belief system" for which my "honeycomb" metaphor stands.

So stating the theme of these family arguments is our job as purveyors of the Happily Ever After Ending.

There are many (many-many) correct answers to the question, "What are they really arguing about?"

Each correct answer can be a theme for a novel, or series of novels, in any genre.  It all depends on how you state the theme.

The writer's (artist's) trick is taking a complex mess of a warring situation and reducing it to its bare bones, then re-clothing it in different packaging.

So let's just take some examples, and then you can search for other examples in the Headlines.

THEME: "Humans want government to protect them from Alien Invaders."

THEME:  "Humans want government to protect them from their fellow citizens."

THEME: "Humans want government to protect them from government."

Each of these stated purposes is, of course, subject to "mission creep."  As a result, dinner table arguments wander far afield.

One reason family dinner table arguments wander is simply that to remain a protected member of the family (i.e. to survive) you must all be organizing your perceptions of the world into the same (or very similar) honeycomb structures.

Of course, famously, the Battle of the Sexes
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/08/theme-conflict-integration-part-1.html
 and the Battle of the Generations,
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/03/theme-conflict-integration-part-3.html
happen because the honeycomb shapes that we brutally hammer our information into are just a bit different.

So by gender and generation, we believe differently even if we think alike.

For the most part, Romance happens within a generation.  Yes, there are exceptions where Soul Mates have been scattered more than 20 years apart in age, and that makes for High Drama, but we usually dream of a mate closer in age.

So look at those 3 theme variants on the nature and purpose of Government.

Consider how imicible Romance and Horror genres are, why they conflict.

Romance belongs to the broad theme bundle, "Love Conquers All."

Horror belongs to the broad theme bundle, "Evil Can Not Be Conquered."

Now look at the statements about government in terms of conquering not protecting.

THEME: Government exists to Conquer Alien Invaders.

THEME: Government exists to Conquer unruly fellow citizens.

THEME: Government exists to be Conquered by its citizens.

THEME: Love Conquers All.

THEME: Evil Can Not Be Conquered.

This juxtaposition reveals a whole set of themes that are (perhaps) uniquely human.

THEME: Humans Must Conquer.

Being human, living a human life is ultimately about conquering.  The "what" that is to be conquered is irrelevant.  As long as there is something to pretend to conquer, we're fine with it, even if it is another human.

Now, suppose your Aliens do not have that seminal urge to "conquer" -- that is, do not dominate (human sexuality seems these days to pivot on dominance).

Consider meeting up with a species that simply does not "versus" -- does not oppose, or contest.

Since, for human audiences, the essence of story is conflict, could you write about a Romance with an Alien without conflict?  What cognitive dissonance would that create?  Could you make art out of lack of conflict?

Romance is not about sexuality -- the experience of the physical body.  Romance is about the Soul.

The physical body has a mind of its own.  Sexually fueled urges to dominate, conquer, exhibit prowess, and be the "Defender" of all that's mine form one side of the argument raging in all humans (think about your Aliens with different biology).

The Soul has a mind of its own.  The Soul yearns for its mate, fueled by beliefs about the Soul's own unique identity and thus what size-and-shape the mating identity would take.

In other words, the body seeks to hammer other bodies into a desired shape, obedience and compliance, while the Soul seeks that which is already shaped to fit.

The Soul has no desire to conflict, conquer, prevail or dominate.

The body must conflict, conquer, prevail AND dominate.

The Soul and the body are are odds, just as Romance and Horror genre themes are at odds.

Conflict is the nature of this Reality -- the Soul seeks a different reality.

Love conquers All, not by reshaping by force but by inspiring the body to reshape itself.

Love makes the body want to fit in, not hammer down.

Love changes what the body wants.

Change is the essence of plot, and plot (conflict) is the essence of story.

So the details of how a Conquering Hero is Domesticated by Love is our Novel of Choice.

Do we want to "be protected" -- or do we want to "be the protector."

Is "government" about "protecting" or is it about mating, fitting together, covering each other's flanks?

The Happily Ever After Ending is about attaining a joined-state in marriage, in mating, where the two individuals become "one" -- become unconquerable, impervious to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

If "unconquerable" is the essence of "Evil," is it also the essence of "Love?"

If "Politics" is about hammering others into accepting your beliefs so you can be a "member of the Group" and satisfy the body's urge to belong, is "Love" the urge to belong without hammering or being hammered?

To generate even more fascinating questions about the nature of Love and the impact of Romance, ponder the Biblical Commandment to Love The Lord Your God With All Your Heart and All Your Strength."

If Love Conquers All, and you Love God, then what happens?

There is so much more to be said on Love vs. Politics.  Say it in fiction.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Plausible Path To Happily Ever After by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Plausible Path To Happily Ever After
by
 Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

A good part of the target readership for Romance (and all its sub-genres) just can not see the Happily Ever After endings that we favor as realistic.

We have discussed the "realistic" Happily Ever After previously:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/worldbuilding-from-reality-part-5.html

But how does a writer craft a plot and a story that bring the reader to experience an HEA that the reader simply does not consider possible -- and perhaps does not consider desirable?

If the fiction lacks sufficient realism to be convincing, if it is too implausible even for a fantasy, or if it is a fantasy the readership scorns as unhealthy (which is how Science Fiction has been regarded), then the vital life lessons of Romance fiction will be lost.

Readers want to be convinced, but without giving up current beliefs.

Today, because of the condition of the world we live in, the Happily EVER After concept seems childish, and reading HEA style fiction seems mentally and emotionally unhealthy.  HFN, Happily For Now, seems far-fetched.

So there are several questions a writer has to answer for herself.  Most of the answers do not belong in the fiction being written -- but they must be woven into the worldbuilding behind the fiction, and then not mentioned.

These answers become the Characters' beliefs, the convictions the Characters won't change despite evidence to the contrary.

The HEA is the target that the "arrow" of the book must hit.

The most excited new fans of your work who will talk about it incessantly to their friends are the ones who "discover" the plausible, real-world, path to the HEA by reading your novel.

That won't happen if you set out to convince them that the HEA is real.  People don't read fiction to be "set straight" about their misconceptions.

A novel is not an argument with your readers.  It is, however, a "quest" -- a search, and a trail of breadcrumbs, clues about what questions to ask.

Fiction is not the mechanism to convey your answers to Life's Big Questions.

Fiction is the mechanism to pose Questions About Life.

Fiction questions reality.

As I've noted in previous entries here, writers write because they are bursting with something to say -- and writers write a specific genre because they have to say it to certain people.

That "bursting" point often comes when a new answer to an age-old question comes clear.  The writer has a new truth to impart to others.  But having a truth, and saying it, are not the same thing.

Novels are a conversation, often between a group of readers and a group of writers -- very much like a panel discussion at a Convention where writers answer questions from the audience and argue with the other writers while the audience is jumping up and down.

One signature trait of writers -- we all argue for a hobby.

But the trick to arguing is to direct your energies away from "winning" (e.g. changing the other person's mind to agree with yours) and toward posing questions that may (or may not) lead the other person to rethink their positions.  Of course, in the process, you might come to question your own position.  Thinking can be the most dangerous thing a human can do.

What if there really is no such thing as a Happily Ever After?

What if Happiness is not achievable? Remember: "What if..." is one of the key ingredients in science fiction, and this blog is about science fiction romance.

As noted previously in these entries, many times you can't change someone's mind on a subject because that someone did not ever make up his own mind.  Rather, people (having no energy to waste) adopt the opinions of others.  Once adopted, an opinion and whatever factoid is the excuse for holding the opinion, will lie unquestioned and unquestionable.

We discussed some of this here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/06/theme-plot-integration-part-17-crafting.html

Where we cited research published in early 2017 confirming the psychological traits delineated by research in the early 1970's.

Speculation in Psychology is that human reasoning processes developed to facilitate the ability to "blend in" with the tribe or group, to keep domestic peace and direct energies toward fending off enemies, not fighting among ourselves.  Thus we adopt protective coloration of opinion -- and come to solemnly believe opinions that are not our own -- and come to resist to the death any "facts" that contradict the "opinion" that keeps our allies fighting for us, not against us.

This could be a good description of the old fashioned nuclear family.

I've said previously that family is rooted in privacy -- what happens in this house stays in this house.  The Family presents a united front to the community.  Don't air your dirty laundry in public.

See this article in the New Yorker Magazine:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

------------quote--------
The Stanford studies became famous. Coming from a group of academics in the nineteen-seventies, the contention that people can’t think straight was shocking. It isn’t any longer. Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does right now. Still, an essential puzzle remains: How did we come to be this way?

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coƶperate. Coƶperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.

--------end quote-----

Read the whole article and ponder this perspective when considering the nearly panic stricken rejection of the Happily Ever After ending by such a broad spectrum of the general public.

The threat of Happiness is somehow alarming.

Applying this research to the question of why Happiness would be a threat, you can see that being the ONLY happy couple in a sea of abject misery would make you (and your children) a target of resentment, rejection, and eventually ejection from the Group.

The miserable, or Happy Only Temporarily (HFN or Happy For Now) couples might number among them a majority of jealous types who might think the Happy Couple is happy because of "things" (nice house, car, job) that couple has that others don't have.

Perhaps the Happy Couple would be seen as having happiness they don't deserve.

QUESTION: what can a human do to "deserve" happiness?

There's a Romance Plot in that question -- depict a Couple doing what it takes (regardless of personal cost) to earn Happiness and then actually getting what they think they earned.

Perhaps the majority of the miserable couples would believe the Happy Couple is happy because of what they own.  But, "You Didn't Build That" -- you  have success only by utilizing the hard, sweaty, miserable work of the vast majority who actually pay for the roads and bridges, electricity generating dams, and other infrastructure.  Therefore, what you earn is not yours but belongs to everyone.

QUESTION: Is the emotion of "happiness" a consequence of possessions?

There's a Romance plot in that.  The US Constitution is predicated on the idea that humans, by right of being human, are entitled to PURSUE Happiness, but not necessarily to attain it.  It's the theory of "equality of opportunity" but not "equality of outcome."  A great moral argument lies in that -- the sort that can make or break marriages.

Think again about that scientific research about human cognition.  It exists to allow us to blend in, to adopt others opinions and assumptions, to knuckle under, to avoid conflict with those we depend upon by never (ever) changing our minds.

To discard the opinion of the Group (because of a newly discovered fact) is literally suicidal -- unthinkable to a sane person.  There's too much at stake - spouse, kids, career, social standing, entre to higher circles.  Facts are nothing but false information.  True information reinforces alliances with the Group.

Hard facts, the "Cold Equations" of reality do not figure into beliefs, unless the one person ("Leader" maybe, or priest or pundit) who calls the tune actually takes hard facts into account.

QUESTION: Does being that "Leader" of thought guarantee Happiness, or Happily Ever After?

There's a Romance Plot in that: consider a Couple that first met inside a Cult (like, for example, the Manson Cult) and saw it was headed for suicide.  Suppose that Happy Couple managed to escape.  Would the Cult Leader who lost that Couple, and all of his followers, still be "Happy?"  Were they ever Happy?  Could the Couple reach a "Happily Ever After" by having escaped?  Can they find a community where almost all the Couples are "Happily Ever After" achievers?

There's the problem the modern Romance writer faces.  We are writing for a readership living alone, disconnected, among a vast sea of troubled and dysfunctional couples with children. Many readers are teens feeling trapped in a dysfunctional family, having never encountered a functional family.

There is a huge percentage of people who do not have experience of observing a family being functional.  They don't have a mental model of what functional families feel and sound like.  "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Brady Bunch" did a disservice in that functionality was depicted as a bit too "rosy."

The bliss promised at the wedding is never sustained through children, school, extracurricular carpooling, job layoffs, skyrocketing bills and decreasing income.

We discussed that at some length here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-hea-is-implausible-how-come-it.html

And also in the context of the Wedding itself in Why Do We Cry At Weddings, which is two parts inside the larger Theme-Symbolism Integration series?

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-2-why.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-3-why.html

So again, think of that fully functional, Happily Ever After Family embedded in a community of miserable or broken families mired in dysfunctionality.

Do you, as a writer, have in your real life a "model" -- real life people -- who are currently living a Happily Ever After life?  Do you know a family where the elders are dying off after having lived a Happily Ever After (Norman Rockwell painting style) perfect life?  Do you know a family where the elders are dying off and the younger generation and its children are carrying on the tradition of the Happily Ever After perfect life?

Is that family living alone amidst a sea of miserable families and family-fragments?

Given that cognitive research cited above, I rather imagine that the only environment where you will find HAPPILY EVER AFTER families is one where the vast majority of families in the community are also living happily ever after.

Why would that be?

Birds of a feather flock together?  (OK, you all know how I just love cliche).

It's not enough (for humans -- Aliens is a different discussion) for one, single, lonely family to live "Happily Ever After."  Either they move away to join a happy community, or they create one around themselves -- or they make it to Happily For Now and no further.

That's right, real Romance fiction has to come in long series of long novels, like Gini Koch's ALIEN series.  Life is crafted one step at a time, and the more beautiful and happy the goal of those steps may be, the more fierce the opposition, just as Gini Koch has depicted.

Gini has her Characters at the stage of married with two children, and building a Family By Choice.  The married couple adopts, then fosters, then allies with other couples with children, until their community numbers in the dozens -- possibly hundreds.

If the goal of the Romance experience, (finding a love interest, cultivating a Relationship, maybe living with each other, planning a future) is to reach the Happily Ever After steady state of life, then the goal of Romance is Family.

Usually, the Romance novel ends at "I love you," or "Will you marry me?" or perhaps at the Wedding and all the relatives crying at the wedding, dancing the night away and eating chocolate cake with white frosting.

We get a glimpse of the potential future where nothing goes wrong.

Usually, the concept of children is just an abstraction, and the idea of raising children is pictured without screaming, feverish nights, teething, sibling rivalry, or one having to give up a career to follow the other to a better paying job.

Most young people looking for that first serious Romantic Encounter would not have in mind the image of such a strife-ridden Family, torn this way and that by finances and illness, sagging under the burdens of pregnancy and armfuls of infants when thinking of Happiness.

Young people don't regard a long life dotted with brief moments of contentment as Happily Ever After.

Our culture does not now provide an image of Happiness amidst challenges, adversity, or the long-long haul of endurance necessary to build something lasting -- a family dynasty that produces productive and industrious people who know how to be happy in circumstances that most people would view as inherently miserable.

As we looked at the singular Family that is Happily Ever After embedded in a community of misery, we noted how some people view possessions or financial circumstances as the root source of happiness.  This view is reinforced and encouraged by modern media and currently published Romance novels (of all mixed genre types).

Get some physical thing, or a job or income level, title, prestige, social position, -- garner the admiration of others for your art, or whatever you pride yourself on -- and your entire inner self will switch from dark misery to bright joy.

The Commercial Establishment encourages this with things like "Mother's Day" and "Father's Day" both holidays created and sustained by mercantile interests.  Buy something = Make Someone Happy.  Christmas likewise = Buy A Child A Toy And MAKE them happy.  MAKE being the operative word.

The grain of truth behind the connection between material wealth and happiness is what makes it possible to found an entire culture on this assumption.

Now put together this Material Things Make Happiness cultural assumption with the psychological studies indicating the purpose and point of human cognition and fact-free opinion forming.

Once convinced that finding the RIGHT GIFT will force someone who is miserable to become happy -- no fact will change that opinion.

It becomes an opinion upon which life itself hangs.  We must give children gifts on Christmas or they will be scarred for life.  Likewise material gifts at birthdays, back to school, etc become a habit to give and a habit to receive.

How is it even remotely possible to conceptualize an entire LIFE lived "Happily Ever After" if "happiness" is absolutely dependent on material objects owned?

The TV News is filled with images of tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes etc wiping out entire houses, villages, families.  War slaughters so many, how can the bereaved emerge "happy" (never mind ever after).

TV News is full of Great People -- people with multiple Titles, heads of corporations, towering prize winners, toppled from grace by an injudicious email or phone call.

Given this tangible vision of how fragile possessions and position are in this life, how can "Ever After" have any meaning?

How is it possible to life Happily Ever After when at any moment the entire life built with such arduous effort can be just wiped out?

In a group culture that "believes" happiness is caused by things, and given human nature is to resist to the death allowing facts to alter beliefs, where are you going to find readers to accept (nevermind believe in) the HEA and thus Romance that is not just sexual lust run amok?

Think about that and maybe you can see why Science Fiction is the right genre to "cross" into Romance to depict the Happily Ever After.

Science Fiction is the Literature of Ideas, and the core Idea common to almost all science fiction is "Suspension of Disbelief."

Right now, the majority readership of Romance disbelieves in the HEA.

Add science fiction to Romance, and suspend their Disbelief.

Then ask some of those pesky questions about human nature and the construct we call reality.  Show (don't tell) a Character noticing a Functional Family embedded in a community of miserable families.  Ferret out that happy family's secret, the thing that makes them different, the Idea that lets them experience "happiness" amidst misery.

A war-torn city is one setting that lends itself to this investigation.

A drug-saturated Inner City that's Gang Dominated is another such setting.

Or as Gini Koch chose, Washington DC and the duplicitous swamp works well as a backdrop for a functional family.

Fiction is an art form like all others that depends on contrast to become vividly memorable.

Let contrast between emotional tenor of the foreground Characters and the tangled, dark threat/misery of the background setting rev up the power of your novels.

Why do we cry at weddings? Is it because we see all the sadness to come?  Or is it because we can't tolerate the brightness of real happiness?

Perhaps the disbelief in the Happily Ever After is rooted in the Idea that the physical body (all Romance Leading Females are "beautiful" and all males "Handsome") is a material possession.  We live in a culture of body building and weight loss Icons -- as if the shape and form of your physical body is something you get to CHOOSE.

We see the physical body as the source of Happiness.  You have to have the right shape, and the right clothes (or absence thereof), the right hair in length and color, and the right "moves" in grace and power.

The physical body is a thing you acquire by hard work (starving, exercise, expensive face "work" and capped teeth.)

With this focus on the appearance of the body delineating the place in the Group, in society, in career, it is small wonder that "Happiness" is regarded as arising from the physical appearance.

Here is another "read" on our current culture as of Spring 2017 by none other than a Rasmussen poll.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/holidays/may_2017/fewer_americans_see_motherhood_as_a_woman_s_most_important_role

Fewer Americans see motherhood as a woman's most important role.  Also note the birthrate is alarmingly low in the United States.

Today, career is more important even than pregnancy (despite research showing a pregnant woman's stress level adversely affects fetus) -- but some companies are hiring pregnant employees some help.  This means mothers are not only out-sourcing infant care and childhood education ( day nurses, and daycare) but now also out-sourcing decision making about pregnancy itself.

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/maternity-concierges-let-you-focus-your-job-while-they-prepare-n757966

In 2014, we had 1.86 live births per woman - that is a fast shrinking population. 2.0/woman would be break-even, not growth.  The population is still growing because of longevity, but at about the rate the economy is growing.  Anyone who understands the dynamics of these connections, and who equates happiness with material possessions, will see a bleak future, not a happily ever after one.

Here is an interactive graph with loads of information on population growth.

https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_tfrt_in&idim=country:USA:CHN:JPN&hl=en&dl=en

And if you believe the cultural assumption that the material body is the source of happiness and that motherhood is not the woman's most important role, it is obvious that the fleeting appeasement of the sexual appetite is the correct model for the achievement of Happiness.

It is clear why an entire culture has adopted (eagerly) the equating of Romance with Great Sex.

Great Sex equals Happiness.

And since Great Sex is a truly fleeting experience, then likewise the only possibility for happiness is the HFN.  If something else doesn't go wrong in the bedroom, then age will wipe out, or at least reduce, the Great Sex.  You have to be careful not to have children because crying infants tend to reduce the frequency of Great Sex, so then you won't be happy.  

QUESTION: What if sexual satisfaction has no relationship whatsoever to Happiness?  Would the Happily Ever After ending then make sense?

There's a Romance plot in that question.  What sort of Romance can the severely wounded war veteran have if sexuality is eliminated?

Or flip that around, and use the "Arranged Marriage" scenario where two complete strangers share a wedding night -- and dutifully have sex to produce a pregnancy and an heir.  What could ignite Romance between them?

There are many novels on the market today that explore love (and hate) that grows after an arranged marriage -- but many more about escaping an arranged marriage for the arms of Romance.

Also marriages that are "for convenience" - a business deal - form the basis of many Romances.

Arranged Marriages usually involve aristocracy, often Monarchy.  So the details focus on a unique couple with unique problems -- as the scenario discussed above where the happy couple lives amidst miserable families.

But what if all the marriages of everyone the couple knows have been arranged?  And what if the norm, the vast majority, of those families are indeed happy, stable amidst challenges, losses, bereavements, and attacks by hostiles?

Suppose this community is the last shred of humanity alive in this galaxy, and the marriages are arranged by an A.I. -- maybe not the single power running the whole show, but an A.I. specialist in choosing humans to mate both for genetics and for happiness.  Could an A.I. pair Soul Mates?

To use that artistic trick of contrast, you would have to tell the story of that one miserable family amidst a sea of happiness, and the temptation would be to tell the story of how all those happy couples are really victims of horrendous misery, tricked into a dull and manipulated life.

To turn that story to science fiction, you have to reverse that situation and convince your readers that all those A.I. dominated human families actually ARE happy, and living happily ever after.  You have to show don't tell how the single miserable family is outcast because they don't "buy into" whatever belief system is sustaining the culture's happiness (according to the psychological research cited above).

The writer's temptation is to prove that the miserable family is correct and to break that culture out of its A.I. domination.

But first imagine what you'd have to build into their world that would bring the miserable family into the HEA all the other families are living?  Then try to develop a way to sell that entire concept to a modern readership.  How could you get today's readers to root for the miserable couple to join the happy majority instead of exposing their happiness as a fraud?

How could you make that miserable family's journey to happiness seem so plausible and so desirable that the modern reader would be rooting for their success and then be satisfied with the ending?

There are two ways to do this.  Either choose a story and find a readership for it, or choose a readership and craft a story that expresses their most dearly held beliefs.

Who believes in the HEA?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Reviews 32 - C.J. Cherryh and Gini Koch In The Same Breath by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Reviews 32
C. J. Cherryh and Gini Koch In The Same Breath
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

This blog series posting on Tuesdays is about Science Fiction Romance, how to write it, where to find it. and why this mixed genre is significant in the sweep of human history, or future history.

So, because we focus on writing craft, we have to analyze many novels -- some having science fiction elements, some having romance plots, and some with fragments of each buried within the Depiction.

Reading this year, and watching TV Science Fiction/Fantasy, I've noted many deep themes laced through it all.  Romance is surfacing, like a submarine, just showing a conning tower right now.

Romance is the bedrock of the Love Story - and Love is the binding tie of civilization, the cultures that make up a civilization, and the organized governmental entities that are formed by civilizations.

We have a number of countries around the world where we are noticing a "failed state" -- a government that can not keep law and order.

We see small examples of that in the USA big cities -- the shooting wars between gangs, some of them international gangs, fighting over territory to sell drugs, and slaves, or kidnap children to sell, or harvest organs to sell.  These international cartels are also harvesting our disregarded geniuses to work as hackers, trying to bring down whatever system they target.

Living against that backdrop, your readers thirst for a good "take me away from it all" or "rescue me" Romance.

But many young readers are entering the "kick butt and break out of here" head-space.  They are just fed up with being victims.  They want stories about women who rescue themselves, and maybe rescue their guy while they are at it, put the world to rights and maybe save the galaxy in their spare time.

Feminism is loud and boisterous today, but under that there is a recognizable trend of women who don't need liberating because they've never been enslaved.  They are adopting feminine flattering fashions, working ambitious jobs, and having kids.  These women will read Romance, but also play kick-butt video games as proficiently as their male peers.

These young women are looking for the strategy and tactics of living a good, honorable life, raising kids to be indomitable adults.

Counterpoint to that, current publishing markets are noticing the rise of the "Cozy Mystery" that we discussed here previously.  And the news is full of campus movements for safe spaces, stress free living, safety from emotional challenges while learning.  There is a readership looking for stories that do not challenge them to change their minds.  Mother's Day 2017 produced this article - the title says it all.  Parental Burnout is real.

https://qz.com/976560/all-i-want-for-mothers-day-is-for-my-wonderful-family-to-leave-me-alone/
So you see two market trends in conflict.

Always remember Conflict Is The Essence Of Story.  As I employ the terminology, Plot is the sequence of deeds and events, while Story is the effect of the Plot's Because-Line of Events on a given Character (how that Character interprets the significance of the consequences of an action) -- which powers the Character-Arc, the way the Character learns basic life lessons in the school of hard knocks, suffers growing pains, and matures in outlook.

Maturing often means changing your mind or opinion about some vast philosophical abstract subject (God Is Real or God Is Fictional Ploy To Control Me).  Changing our minds is one thing humans (as individuals or whole societies) resist to the death.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

Life's hard pounding Events, disillusionment, betrayals by lovers, betrayals by politicians who promise anything to get elected, overcome that resistance to changing our minds.

Novel plots are made of a sequence of Events that pound a lesson into some Character's head and force the Character to face the Ultimate Truth they would rather die than face.

This is the kind of change we call maturation.  But resistance to maturation has produced another old adage (good plotting is made of challenges to old adages) -- "As We Grow Old, We Do Not Grow Different, We Grow Moreso."

In other words, whatever base personality you are born with emerges at first just a little bit, and then as age sets in, that personality becomes more dominant.  Depicting that kind of change is called a Character Arc.

We have two (among many) writers topping the charts today who are producing long Series that chronicle the "Arc" of a Character from adult immaturity to seasoned Age.

Both series now have brought their Characters to middle-aged mindsets.  One series started with a hot Romance, and still (in married with children stage) features really hot Alien Sex.  The other started with a Career Move achieved after much striving within a University, dealt with isolation and loneliness, and forged a solid human/alien sexual and intimate Relationship that has reached stability.

Both these series feature the Family Unit embedded in an extended family.

Both depict how family and ancestry shape and direct a Character's life, and how that may be passed down to the next generation.

They are both Action Series of galactic proportions.

In early 2017, we got the 18th and 15th entries in these two whopping wonderful Series:















They are both tightly focused on a Human/Alien Love Story.

In the Foreigner Series by C. J. Cherryh, the Aliens are the natives of the planet a stray ship full of humans happened upon.



In the Alien Series by Gini Koch, the Humans own Earth and the Aliens happened upon us and planted a colony of refugees.



In both series, the colonists are in the midst of being caught up with by those they were leaving behind (generations ago).

The Conflict and "action" battle scenes are generated by the pursuit, while the two varieties of people living on one planet seem to get along fairly well.

In other words, both (long) series in totally different worlds, circumstances and Alien biologies, are Refugee Stories.

At the same time, both are Generational Sagas spanning many generations.

Both follow family-genetic relationships and descendants while at the same time embedding the Main Characters deeply into a Chosen Family (as my sometime collaborator, Jean Lorrah, calls the Sime~Gen Householdings).

Yes, I write Generational Sagas about genetic vs chosen family.  The reason is probably that I love to read that kind of story -- a story of long-term consequences, the ripples in Time caused by innocent decisions, the Disturbance In The Force as Characters learn hard lessons.

Both the Foreigner Series and the Alien Series are about Characters under extreme stress, learning fast, running for their lives making snap decisions and suffering the consequences -- and changing their minds about what they perceive as "what is really going on."

These are both very popular series, and they are about exactly the sort of situation and Character that a huge percentage of the population find odious.

Nobody wants to find out their thinking is completely wrong-headed.  How would you feel if confronted with absolute proof that Climate Change is not the result of human activity at all?  Not at all!  What notions embedded in your entire view of reality would have to be uprooted and discarded?
You pick up a Romance Novel to get away from that kind of stress or threat of stress.  You want to feel that if everything isn't wonderful right now, it will surely be wonderful tomorrow.

You want to ride with a Character who is finally-finally meeting that special, specific Someone whose very existence will make everything wonderful.

When in the mood for a Romance, you don't want the complications that a Family adds -- yet the characters came from somewhere and if the Romance pans out, will likely have children and grandchildren.  In fact, even if the Romance does not pan out, they might have children and grandchildren to complicate the families they do marry into.

Families are an irritation and an inconvenience.  In fact, many feel that Family is an impediment to happiness.  Just think of the angst surrounding that invitation to Thanksgiving Dinner.  Or remember that the "Home For Christmas" commercial that was a heart-warmer for so many years no longer runs -- and there's a reason for that.

The real life experience of your readers is that Family is a Pain In The Neck -- they don't want to deal with their Mother or Father.

Check out recent TV Series that depict someone with a Parent nosing into their affairs.  The Parent is always a source of disruption, difficulty, maybe embarrassment.  In ROYAL PAINS
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1319735/
the father of the brothers running Hankmed concierge medical practice abandoned his family leaving the boys to take care of a dying mother, is known as a confidence man, spent time in jail, and through interacting with his grown boys now, finally starts to "reform" -- but we're never wholly convinced.

Find a currently popular TV Series where the parents appear on the show, and are admired, emulated and loved dearly.

In the TV Drama about Lawyers, Suits, we have an aging Grandmother who is beloved and emulated (sort of), but who dies early in the series.  Her teachings of morality are repeated but not lived up to.

In fact, the entire "Characters Welcome" showcase on USA Network never involved a warm, loving, "Leave It To Beaver" or "Brady Bunch" family.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-farewell-to-usa-blue-sky-shows-20160707-story.html

I have raved about all of these "Blue Sky" TV Series because they formed the basic Character Study necessary for good Science Fiction Romance -- the plot dynamics were rooted in Relationships while the Action was just decoration.

Now, the newest crop of TV Series might be called Dark Skies, not Blue Skies.  This trend will reverse, but for now this is the reflection of reality the large TV (broadcast and streaming) audiences accept as plausible depictions.

I keep using that word, depiction, because we've discussed it at depth.  Here is the index to the Depiction Series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Here is Part 27 in that Series
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/03/depiction-part-27-depicting-love-by.html

While I suspect Gini Koch's Alien Series will make it to the TV Series screen (the writing is intensely visual and feeds the Gamer's thirst for action), I would be surprised if the intricate family relationships survive translation into the broader audience.

No matter how big a Best Seller a book might be, the viewership of a TV show is orders of magnitude bigger.  Best Selling books may sell a few hundred thousand copies -- a failure of a TV Series reaches a few million viewers.

That's why novels converted to movie or TV become so distorted -- the larger audience just will not tolerate what thrills the smaller audiences.

You find the same phenomenon with self published novels.  Some self published novels are BETTER than anything that can be commercially published because the self publishing writer can please a smaller audience, and thus afford to please that smaller audience more intensely.

Today's larger society is slowly abandoning the Nuclear Family life-structure (Father/Mother/Children), and with each couple having fewer children, the extended family structure of Aunts, Uncles, Cousins numbering in the hundreds does not exist.

That Extended Family structure often breeds the phenomenon of the Tribe or Clan -- a group so large that no one person knows everyone, but yet accords others in the Group the respect due a sibling or parent.  A Tribe or Clan usually develops a Leader, often an eldest or richest, who passes down the adages that reveal ultimate truth.

Adages (which quickly become cliche) are sayings you memorize (reluctantly) in childhood, and firmly disbelieve until Middle Age when the truth inside them is finally revealed.  A Stitch In Time Saves Nine.  It's Just Growing Pains.  Pick On Someone Your Own Size.

The set of all adages absorbed in childhood constitutes the framework of a culture -- it is one firm thing everyone you know has in common.

What happens in the Family, Stays In the Family.

The essence of Family is privacy.  We present a united front to the world, but bicker endlessly behind closed doors.  Bickering is the Sport of Families.

Bickering is an expression of familial Love.

Think about that.  Strife is a binding force in human society.

So many of your readers have never met a functional family, never lived inside one, never made the acquaintance of the middle child of a brood of nine or more, and simply do not have a set of Adages in common with you, or with anyone they know.

Family has been the core of human civilization for thousands of years, but now family members are the last people you want involved in your life.

At the same time, statistics show that families without a live-in Father produce children who tend to join Gangs and adopt a dog-eat-dog lifestyle.

Science is telling us, firmly and unequivocally, that Family is important for societies, yet at the same time genetics editing and artificial wombs are being developed that will shatter what family ties remain.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/26/health/artificial-womb-premature-babies-lambs/

These crosscurrents in society are the main substance of Science Fiction Romance.

Science is studying brains, spirits, and family formation.  But the plot is Romance.

Romance happens when a child grows up and bursts forth from a family into the world.  It is a stage of transformation into adulthood and maturity.

Romance can also happen at the end of life -- September Song.

Romance is the expression of the meaning of Family, and the essence of Family is Privacy.

Think about that as you recall what you learned of Plato's writings while you were in school.

Plato was born around 428 BCE (four hundred years before Jesus).

This from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
----------quote----------
Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his most famous student, Aristotle, Plato laid the very foundations of Western philosophy and science. Alfred North Whitehead once noted: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
----------end quote--------

Plato grew up in a world where the Jews were emerging from obscurity into becoming a force in the Middle East (look at the map: little wooden ships sailed from what is now Israel or Lebanon to Greece easily).  The Middle East was the neighboring trading partner to Plato's Greece.

http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/faculty/thomas/classes/rgst116b/JewishHistory.html

--------quote--------
Judah returned from exile in 539 BCE. Israel became a province of Persia under the priests. In 428 CE, Ezra brought the Torah from Babylon to Jerusalem, effectively marking the beginnings of modern Jewish religion. Ezra was a priest who reorganized the Israelite state politically, and organized the new religious system that included study of the Torah: he is known as the "Father of Judaism." Nehemiah, a court official in Persia, returned slightly later to rebuild the city walls and the temple in Jerusalem: this is the "Second Temple" in Jerusalem (the first temple was built by Solomon), so one speaks of "Second Temple Judaism."

-------end quote---------

Imagine the flourishing Trade economy, the politics, the wars, that framed Plato's productive years, the family adages he absorbed, and the hammering that "life" gave him.

Now consider this from a Biography of a famous Jew of the 20th Century: (I'm breaking the paragraphs to make it easier to read on this blog, but it is a direct quote from this Biography telling of an incident where a fellow named Block met The Rebbe, the head of a Chasidic sect in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Remember, we're talking about Family and how themes regarding Family lace two major novel series together, Foreigner and Alien.  Read this quote and think about how those two novel series would have to be changed to make them into TV Series.

-----------quote------------
"Rebbe: The Life and Teachings of Menachem M. Schneerson, the Most Influential Rabbi in Modern History" by Joseph Telushkin

In the circles in which Block moved at Harvard, Plato was regarded with the highest respect, representing the epitome of high culture and civilization. But the Rebbe had a different take on Plato’s writings: He spoke of Platonic philosophy as cruel.

“That’s the word he used, ‘cruel,’” Block recalled in an interview decades later.

What upset the Rebbe in particular was Plato’s social philosophy, his advocacy of the abolition of the nuclear family and his belief that children should be taken away from their parents. Plato claimed that parents influence children to be egotistical, and it would be better if children were raised without knowledge of their parents, as wards of the state.

For Judaism, the family was central, as expressed in the Fifth Commandment; for Plato, the family was destructive.

Although everything Block heard that day about Plato was accessible to anyone who read through his writings, this critique was new to the young philosophy student. He had never heard it offered at Vanderbilt or Harvard, the two universities where he had studied. Yet, as he sat there, he realized it was unarguable (it was clearly expressed in Plato’s writings, though academics ignored it) and that the implications were immense and far-reaching.

In addition to the obvious ills that resulted from alienating children "from their parents, an attack on the family was also the source of totalitarian ideologies. Once you raise a generation of children to be more loyal to the state than to their families, there is no limit to what you can demand of them. In the Soviet Union, as the Rebbe, who had lived under Communist rule, knew, the government glorified children who informed on their parents and sometimes brought about the imprisonment—or worse—of their parents for making anti-Communist remarks or showing opposition to the state.

Raise people to not feel love or loyalty to their parents, and it will not be easy for them to feel love or loyalty to anyone else—only to the state.

The cruelty of Plato’s thinking, the Rebbe emphasized that day, was not just in breaking up the family unit. It was in depriving children of parental love. For it is the parents, not the state and its functionaries, who have a genuine love for their children. And depriving children of this love, which is their due, was perhaps Plato’s greatest cruelty.

Block recalled that a few years later, a philosopher with respected academic credentials stunned the world of philosophy by writing about these aspects of Plato’s writings. In the book, he depicted Plato’s social philosophy as “cruel.” Block remembered being struck by the philosopher’s use of this term, the same word used by the Rebbe. The book caused a furor, but what really impressed Block was that “nobody ever refuted it in any way.” However, as Block recalled, all that this professionally trained philosopher, a man who devoted his whole life to philosophy, had done was “to say the same thing that the Rebbe told me years earlier.”

-------end quote---------

Start reading it for free: http://a.co/1G1VgIb
--------
Download Kindle for Android, iOS, PC, Mac and more
http://amzn.to/1r0LubW

Have we become Plato's envisioned world?  Is that why the general public rejects the notion of the Happily Ever After ending?

We have discussed Plato's view of the rise of Biblical culture in the neighboring lands previously.  He had good reason to view "Honor Your Father And Mother" with horror and perhaps panic.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/10/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-9.html

That epoch of human pre-history could be characterized as a war between pro-family and anti-family cultures.

Until Greece invented Democracy (and later Rome, the Republic), the only forms of government were Kingdoms and Empires, a family based aristocracy in which ordinary people had no say in the direction of their lives.

Kings and Aristocrats got to be the bosses by owning land, which they acquired by killing more people, more savagely than anyone else.  Then their children inherited and perpetuated the iron-fisted bossing.

So, since aristocracy was nothing but family and family connections, it is perfectly sensible for Plato to see the only hope of humanity as the destruction of the family.  What other sources of information did he have?  The family constituted the greatest source of Evil in his world - so advocating its destruction of the family was his way of being kind, not cruel.

But now we can see the results of the disintegration of the Family at the core of society, and the devastating effects on the human psyche.  Today we have information and we have options.  We are not doomed to practice the profession or craft of our parents.

We are free.

So what do we do with that freedom?  

We now live in a society where marriage is optional, parents are to be shunned especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and nobody is personally responsible for the behavior of anyone over 18 years of age.

Note how many of the mass-shooting-rampage perpetrators are characterized as "loners" -- nice folks, mind their own business, but no friends or visitors.  If they live with a parent, the parent has no clue what they've been up to in the basement or online.

Disconnecting leads to suicidal and homicidal angst, or to connecting with Gangs, criminals, thugs, and power-makes-right folks.

We know that Love Conquers All -- but how, in this case, can it conquer the disintegrated family?  Children raised without Parental Love may experience Romance -- but the fluff-headed blur of Romance turn to true Love?

We see neurological studies (yes, SCIENCE fiction romance can include the sciences of neurology and genetics as well as physics) showing how the brain's neurons forge connections because of experiences (learning).  Is there a certain brain configuration that allows us to believe in, and actualize, the Happily Ever After?

One of the things I love about C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner Series is the way she depicts a very amenable alien species based on a civilization without "love" -- an alien physiology that forms strong emotional bonds but literally can not comprehend the concept of Love, not Romantic Love or Brotherly Love or any form of Love.

We also know now that genes may or may not "express" the trait they configure.

We know that early experiences, maybe in the womb but surely during infancy, shape the brain's development and ultimately the adult who will emerge from that childhood.  Experiences shape genetic expression and neurological pathways -- humans are extremely malleable, adaptable.  That is one primary survival trait of the human species.

Can Romance reconnect the "loner" -- the child of a shattered or dysfunctional family -- to the rest of humanity?  Or is that what is happening as families disintegrate and children gravitate toward Gangs, end up in jail and become part of a self-perpetuating criminal culture?

Is the human need and impulse to "bond" as strong as a newly hatched chick to "imprint" on a parent?

The Greeks and Romans used to "expose" defective newborns on the city wall, leaving them to die.  Some were "rescued" -- grew up bonding to some stranger.  Are we the descendants of those improbable survivors?

Gini Koch's 2017 entry in her Alien Series, Alien Education, focuses sharply on the doings of schools, PTA, Teachers, teenagers, and what happens in a world where a multiplicity of Alien species raise their children in the same school.

Has Gini Koch depicted our world of bonded and non-bonded and un-bonded humans by inventing alien species to represent us all?  Are we that alienated from each other?

In these two, long and complex novel Series, we have one of the most profound sources of thematic material for science fiction romance.  I recommend reading both series while thinking carefully and precisely about what Family means to humans.

What forces form and hold families together -- what forces rip them asunder -- and most importantly, which is the Good and which is the Evil?

Is your family relevant to your life?  Why?  Is that even an important question when it comes to Romance?  "Who" are you?  Does your family define you?  Or do you define it?  Are you a victim? Or a kickass heroine?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 3: Creating Future History

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 3: Creating Future History by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

But first I have to point you at the new story-driven, cross platform, science fiction RPG Ambrov X -- there's a constant stream of news about it on the Facebook Page,
https://www.facebook.com/ambrovx

and a free Newsletter signup at:

http://www.ambrovx.com

About Ambrov X

A story-driven, cross-platform Science Fiction RPG set in the award-winning universe of Sime~Gen®! Join us on Kickstarter on Sept. 3, 2013! ambrovx.com
Description
Set in the award winning Sime~Gen® Universe by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah, Ambrov X casts players in a far distant future as leaders of an unlikely but elite crew tasked with planting space beacons which allow for faster than light space travel. The Ambrov X saga unfolds into an action-packed story of first contact. Complete with epic battles and emotional decision making, Ambrov X brings to life the single-player, story-driven RPG through a thrilling space opera adventure. Releasing cross-platform for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.


-----------Worldbuilding From Reality Part 3------------

Previous Parts in this series and a Link List for Worldbuilding posts:


http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/02/worldbuilding-from-reality-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html




Have you ever explored biorhythms?  They graph like this image above from
http://www.whitestranger.com/free_biorhythm_chart.php 

Note that an astrology chart or a biorhythm chart has no beginning and no end. 

Astrology takes BIRTH as the beginning of a sequential process that is endless, but there's conception before that -- and the parent's origins -- and after you, your descendants and the echos of your actions in life.

WORLDS ARE ENDLESS. 

We just arbitrarily stipulate "the beginning" of "the story" and the "end of the story."

We cut a "novel" or a "story" out of an endless sequence of interwoven events -- like the waves of the ocean, without beginning and without end.

So when you set out to write a novel, that "beginning-less and endless" vista has to be part of your worldbuilding -- the building of the world your specific character must navigate.

It isn't enough for a writer to create a world with a history of it's own.  That world, in which your characters work and live, has to have a future, too.

A story or a novel is a POINT -- two points and you can draw a line, but a line isn't a direction or trajectory.  Three points - maybe a triangle.  Lots of points (my Sime~Gen universe has 12 large points, novels, and several small short-story points with a videogame extending it into it's "future history) create a curve.

To get the sine-wave of History, you need points extending over years and years.  Whether you write those endless years into your novel or not, they need to be in your head somewhere (not necessarily consciously). 

To know your character, you have to know where he/she came from -- but to know that character's story, you have to know where that world is going and what that character has to do with that destination.

Look again at that pattern of interwoven sine-waves.  There is a way to graph the planetary movements that is used in astrology to understand influences in play for a particular life over a particular stretch of years.  It looks exactly like that biorhythm chart.

It doesn't matter whether you (personally) "believe in" astrology, Tarot, Romance, biorhythms, or whatever else.  To become the best writer you can be, you must be able to look at data-sets from all kinds of points of view, from within every sort of belief system, so the characters who disagree with each other, who argue and conflict to generate story, who oppose each other, can SPEAK to each other in ways that will ring true to readers who live within one or another belief set.

You don't have to believe it, but you do have to understand what the world looks and feels like when you do believe it.  You need to walk some miles in the moccasins of various belief systems.

My blog posts here are all about how the writer's mind works, inside itself, and how to train your mind to work like whichever sort of writer you want to be.  More than that, whatever sort of writer you are now -- to be "professional" at writing, you must be able to produce ALL the other sorts of writing.

Professionals (i.e. those who make a living in a field) spend most of their time mastering their tools.

You can tell a professional in any field by that versatility of mind, the ability to improvise with whatever tools are at hand, and the ability to know which tools can do which jobs most efficiently.

The difference between "amateur" and "professional" is basically attitude, but the result that others see to judge professionalism is "efficiency." 

So the writer's career is spent LEARNING -- constantly and forever learning, every day something new, and every day another stage of mastery of a tool of the trade.

Today's exercise is in PERSPECTIVE.  Today we look at the world readers live in, and attempt to replicate it's shape in a fictional piece of worldbuilding.

OK, one thing readers live with but never notice is that "no beginning, and no end" effect of biorhythms. 

To cope with that scope of the world around them, (being human/ -- non-humans might do this differently) humans IGNORE what came before, and mostly don't think about "the future."

People used to think about "the future" more than they do today.  Our temporal horizon in this culture has shifted to a more "now" focused view.  Writers must, however, worldbuild with the unseen past and unforeseeable future in mind.

How do you go about doing that? 

Energy.  Kinetic energy and potential energy. 

You analyze what is now in terms of those interacting sine-waves in that image to find the amount of available energy -- the potential being stored, the potential stored from distant history, what has been released and is moving now, where that motion will lead.

That's very abstract.  How do you apply such an abstraction to the task of worldbuilding for a novel?

Watch the daily news -- and watch some TV series fiction.  Watch some specials.  Read some biographies.  Maybe watch some really old movies on Amazon or Netflix.

Let's look at a set of data from an exercise of that type and see how to apply this "no beginning/no end" model.

Focus on SOCIETY.  Personally, I regard "society" something that doesn't exist.  It's rare to find two people who mean the same thing by the word. 

But let's look at FOUR "periods" in social-history.

A) 1940's-1950's
B) 1960's-1970's
C) 1980's-2000


Take for example the 1940's, just after Rosy The Riveter won World War II for the USA.

Yeah, women moving into men's jobs (jobs "society" reserved only for men) freed up most of the able bodied workforce to go fight a war. 

After 1946, the repercussions of that never stopped.  The men came home but the women didn't want to go home. 

The women were forced to "go home" as the baby-boom exploded.  With the technology available at that time, there was no other way to have and raise kids than to have a family structured with a breadwinner and a homebody to raise the kids.

In the 1940's, there were still many homes with no telephone, or if they had a phone it was a party-line where the neighbors could hear what was said from your house.  People generally had electric lights, indoor flush toilets, many had a car but they didn't work very well, and there were no interstate highways (there was the U.S. Highway system, not very good).  Everyone had a radio, and radio drama and news wove the country into a single culture. 

They had refrigerators, but usually only a tiny compartment of a freezer that had to be defrosted weekly.  Women cooked and did laundry and cleaned (even in an apartment that was 30 hours a week at least) and shopped every day.  Clothes had to be hand washed on a washboard, hauled outside and hung to dry, then IRONED (another 10 hours a week for a family of 3 or 4).  Shopping was usually done at a local market, DAILY, bags hand-carried home or rolled in a "shopping cart."  Milk was delivered in glass bottles which were collected for refilling not recycling. 

There was no such thing as a diaper service for cloth diapers and no disposable diapers.  Diapers (cloth) were washed by hand and then boiled.  Baby formula was only beginning to exist, and many made baby food though Gerbers existed.  Babies were nursed for years (as is coming back into fashion today).  While nursing or pregnant, women had to do all that hand-housework so "exercise" and "gym" didn't exist as an activity.  Everyone was too tired.  In fact women were cranky and tired when their husbands demanded attention. 

So the returned soldiers set out on a concerted effort to create "labor saving devices" and "convenience" became a marketable commodity. 

The returned soldiers were eligible for school grants and housing loans.  Housing was built fast (you've seen some of those 1950's houses, maybe live in one).  They had good jobs and worked specifically to buy a house for their wives to raise all those kids in. 

In the 1950's working-class homes began to have television sets and clothes washers (no microwaves, but power-appliances for kitchens), and freezers to store lots of food, and the TV dinner, and other frozen convenience foods.  And cars. Everyone had a car or was saving to get one.  Houses and cars were suddenly "within reach" and that generated the suburbs and the commuter.  

1960's-1970's

This was the do-it-yourself generation, the home-handyman/woman, the rise of "kits" and every manner of repair or build-from-scratch project.  People didn't pay others to do things.  They did it themselves -- gardening to roof repair.  They did it themselves to SAVE MONEY, and the saved money was indeed saved (in a bank). 

This next period saw the wild post-war success of Rosie The Riveter at home raising kids as an opportunity, a hope, a rising joy with no end.  (remember that no beginning, no end)

Women could now spend less vital energy just keeping house and raising kids. Clothes washers and permanent press clothes, the freezer and frozen dinners, VACUUM CLEANERS!!!, and a myriad labor saving devices and products gave women spare time they'd never had before.  Ever.  In all history and before that. 

Girls could aspire to college and majors other than teaching or librarian.  Secretaries didn't need college, and neither did waitresses. (today waitresses need a college degree in business because they're really just working their way up to owning the franchise!).

And this was the era of Star Trek (late 1960's TV Series) where people focused on the future, and the sky was no limit.  Here is the origin of the computer, the internet, the world wide web (two different structures), and today the smartphone/tablet/phablet and beyond. 

So women awoke, and demanded equal pay for equal work.

Previously, women who worked were secretaries or teachers and that was considered a temporary phase in a life destined to bearing and raising 12 kids.

Birth control options changed that, big time, but let's focus here on the part of the society-dynamic introduced by the notion of WOMEN WORKING PROFESSIONALLY (potential energy -- remember, go look at those sine-waves again and think ENERGY).

Here's the argument from the 1960's, which originated in the 1940's.  Prior to the 1940's this argument wasn't in play because women had no options. 

Employers MUST pay women LESS for their hours of work because MEN MUST SUPPORT A FAMILY, and any money an employer pays a woman is money taken away from a man.

Women were not "bread-winners" and not responsible for SUPPORTING DEPENDENTS.  Being female meant being dependent -- no option.

And that is the reality of things in 3rd world countries today -- and in anti-women societies which may not be all that primitive technologically, but adhere to a philosophy which places steel-walls around the entire class "female." 

Male = PROVIDER
Female = DEPENDENT

That's a social paradigm that has existed since "female" was invented. 

The argument that we can still play with in futuristic romance is still a hot one. 

Now with "labor saving devices" (so far no artificial womb such as Bujold postulates in her VORKOSIGAN SAGA series) and contraception, women can choose.

That choice threw "society" into a tizzy because the stable situation of all choices made for you before birth ws suddenly upset, but in a lopsided way.  Women could choose but men couldn't.

1980-2000

In the 80's and through the 1990's men began to grab their right of choice back.

Marriage as an institution is in flux, being redesigned.  Romance isn't any less common, soul-mating and life-bonding is not less common.  But "Marriage" took a body-blow with the anti-marriage tax penalty structure in the USA (where a married couple that both brought home man-sized salaries paid more in tax than two people living together but not married).

We get the rise of the "house-husband" -- and during the economic bubble-burstings of the 2000-2020 decades we're seeing the whole FAMILY PARADIGM SHIFT.

Not just marriage is being redefined -- FAMILY is being redefined drastically.

The gay-marriage argument is very complex.  There are a few among the advocates of gay marriage as a legal institution who opening admit that their ultimate goal is the destruction of marriage as a way of life. (really, there's a whole coherent philosophically driven group dedicated to that).  But the majority just want government to leave people alone to do what they want. 

Statistics show that children raised by a man and woman who are married (usually to each other; not always these days) fare better in school and in life than children raised by a single parent.  This holds true even if both husband and wife work.

Which brings us back to the EQUAL PAY issue.

Today compared to the 1940's (remember we're focused on no beginning/ no end), a husband and wife who BOTH WORK bring home about what a HUSBAND of the 1950's was bringing home in terms of purchasing power.

To have a medium-nice house in the suburbs, car, clothes, food, college for say 3 kids, both husband and wife have to work.  That same lifestyle in the 1950's was financed by one man working -- and didn't have to be a college graduate professional to pull in that much purchasing power.

So (a writer can have a character argue) it turns out that the MEN arguing against EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK in the 1950's were in fact CORRECT (if not "right"), that men were pulling larger salaries BECAUSE they had dependents to support.  Putting the dependents into the work force could be seen as causing that single salary to be divided between two workers.

Again, go back and stare at those sine-waves.

Think potential energy transforming into kinetic energy, and back again, no beginning, no end.

The world your readers live in came FROM --

One bread-winner supporting one dependent plus kids (sometimes 10 or 12 kids, but the older boys start work at age 10 and the girls work at cooking, sewing, cleaning, growing vegetables, canning etc.)

TO--
Two bread-winners supporting 2 or 3 kids, sometimes 0 these days as the USA birthrate is under 2.0 for the first time on record.

Remember, in worldbuilding -- no beginning and no END. 

So you have to project the world your reader is living in ahead into your reader's future (as your reader might see it).

Think potential energy again, and think of that constantly undulating sine-wave.

We had the paradigm:

Male = PROVIDER
Female = DEPENDENT

But we broke it with technology freeing women -- and the men created that technology of labor saving devices to free up their wives so they could have attention (you know what kind; you're a romance writer so use your imagination).

What got broken?  Only one of the two things got broken -- the relationship between gender and role in providing.  The paradigm part that did not break is PROVIDER VS DEPENDENT.

Today we have the house-husband displaced from professional arc by these nasty recessions staying home (maybe working from home, selling on eBay or whatever), and the woman climbing a corporate ladder.

That's not a common arrangement, but it is losing stigma.  2020 to 2040 will see a change.

OK, what might that change be?

Look at the economy, then look at 1950's Science Fiction. 

What we see happening is just exactly what was postulated by 1950's science fiction -- a problem was described back then and never solved.  Without that vision of a solution, we (as a society) are muddling through to something that might be a solution.

Your readers don't want to look at that future, but they are aware of it, and you can use that awareness to craft your "endless world" illusion.

In the 1950's, writers were pointing out the effects of the burgeoning technological revolution.

By 1960, that revolution was roaring out of the laboratories into manufacturing.

The trend the SF writers of that day saw was the demise of the "idiot stick" job.

An "idiot stick" is a broom.  Many jobs of that post-war period, and very often the job the 12 year old boy would get as his first job -- especially as far back as the 1920's -- was pushing an "idiot stick" or the classic paper route on his bicycle.

In other words, every boy started his working life with UNSKILLED LABOR, and a certain percentage never gained any skills beyond that level.  By 1960, jack-hammer operator was added to unskilled labor. 

All those jobs are gone now.  Only a few years ago, "voice mail" replaced "telephone operator" (the girl's unskilled labor job) and "message taker" in hotels were GONE.  Now a machine does that.  Soon robots will clean rooms and make beds in hotels.  Farmers are already investing heavily in picking equipment to replace the migrant labor they can't get across borders.

Child labor laws and automation have eliminated starter-jobs.  Look at amazon's warehouse operation -- mostly automated.  One classic unskilled job is stocking grocery shelves and produce departments.  Amazon and other online sources are beginning to handle groceries.  Amazon is building warehouses all over so they can deliver "same day" -- where does that go?  Produce and perishables will be added to amazon's warehouse, eliminating grocery stock clerk jobs.  Google is working on a car that drives itself -- truck driver will be an unskilled job (even school bus driver) that is eliminated.

Now look at the jobs that are left standing.

They all require considerable training and intelligence enough to absorb that training (not to mention showing up for work without drugs in your system).  Look at new categories of jobs being created.

America's employers are screaming for Engineers of every stripe! 

Other jobs of that kind that are being invented all require an IQ above 100 to learn and to do.

That's what the 1950's SF writers pointed out -- automation and computers would inevitably lead to a world where to get a job you had to have an IQ way above 100.

100 is "average" for a reason -- half the people in the world have an IQ less than 100.  They can't learn or do these jobs -- not won't, CAN'T.

The other counter-trend to take account of in worldbuilding is that we are now using computer chips to alter "jobs" -- to dumb-down procedures so that average people can do them.  Look at smartphones -- you don't have to be a genius to use an app, but running a full Microsoft desktop computer used to take engineer-level tech skills and the ability to acquire new skills very fast.  Now everything is "in the cloud" and anti-virus companies just send you updates like all other software.

Microsoft is already running "rent-it-by-the-hour" software in the cloud.  That dumbs-down the requirement for being a typist.

Less and less THINKING ABILITY is required to do jobs, so they can "employ" average people (who abound in numbers).

Today, schooling generally consists of learning to use an iPad to access Wikipedia. 

What kind of future are the current teens envisioning? 

IQ 100 people expect to get paid what an IQ 130 person would be worth. 

Do you think that will happen (there's a novel in that) -- and then what about the IQ80 folks, whose numbers likewise abound?

Who's going to create the tech that does the actual work FOR the IQ 100 employee?  Will that IQ 130 person get paid more than the IQ 100 person who uses what the IQ 130 person creates?

Why didn't we have this problem BEFORE World War II?

Well, we did.

Remember, another argument against employing women at equal pay is that women aren't as good at working, aren't as smart as men which is why women shouldn't be allowed to go to college.

Now remember what you read (I hope you've read it by now) in the Darkover Series by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  Inside every man there's a woman/ inside every woman there's a man.

We are all both.

The paradigm technology broke was the link between gender and dependence.  What technology didn't break -- what it actually exaggerated, is the link between PROVIDER and the DEPENDENT.

The reason we didn't have "a problem" before WWII is that we had a PROVIDER who provided for a FAMILY.

We had a classic nuclear family structure consisting of provider, and dependents.

Today, the family is shattered.  With each decade the man/woman/marriage/kids paradigm is dissolving away.

There are those today who scream bloody murder over this dissolution.

But we're romance writers.  We write romance novels for a reason.  It's not going away. 

Soul-Mates isn't going away.  "The Family" as we knew it is never coming back.

We are in the process (look again at the interlinked sine-waves -- PROCESS)  of creating a new paradigm for family.

The economic basis for FAMILY is what always held it together, but that grip created a great deal of serious Evil with a capital E while it was about doing all that good for humanity.

The Evil in the old-fashioned family was that it was a trap that stole a woman's FREE WILL.

Remember philosophically I'm really bugs on FREE WILL CHOICES.  It's the free will choice that starts a novel, that impels a character onto a path of confronting a conflict and resolving it. 

Without free will choice, there is no story, and I'm all about STORY TELLING.

The stories I see that now need telling are stories about NEW TYPES OF FAMILIES.

And the opportunity I see in the past I've described here since WWII is the creation of a new family consisting of a bread-winner, a PROVIDER and his/her DEPENDENTS, regardless of the ages, genders, IQ or talents of either provider or dependents.

That's the argument for gay-marriage as a legally supported institution. 

The element, though, that both straight and gay communities have lost over the last decades is the permanents of marriage.  The concept "marriage" shouldn't necessarily have so much to do with gender as it does with provider/dependent agreements.

Note how I described the typical wife's life in the 1940's -- that's a dependent, yes, but not someone who does not "work."  Wives contributed, as did kids.  We now legally prevent kids from contributing.  That needs some serious thinking (I'm adamantly against exploitation, but it makes dynamite story material.)

One of the reasons Rosy the Riveter revolted in the 1970's was that "women's work" (e.g. housework) was as physically demanding as "men's work" but garnered nothing but contempt from society (except on Mother's Day an invention of commercial interests).

The New Family Structure has to include serious respect and rewards for the economic dependent that rival or exceed the respect and rewards garnered by the provider. 

Remember that sine-wave.  We're going to get to parity between provider and dependent, but at that point there will be more kinetic energy than potential energy and we will blast right through parity to another imbalance (though none of us may live to see that happen.)

So fasten your creative mind around that picture of the world your reader lives in.

Now REPLICATE THAT SHAPE -- not the details, but the shape -- in the world you are building for your characters to romp through an adventure in, taking those readers along with them.  The world you build has to be familiar enough to your reader that it doesn't distract them from the story, and at the same time contain some unfamiliar elements that shadow the developments your reader unconsciously expects to see in the real world around them.

Shadow is the substance of fiction.  But it has to be a shadow of reality.

by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com