Casting Our Vote(s)

Let us give thanks that this election cycle has ended, and we'll have a short rest from the acrimonious politicking. (Maybe. It seems that nowadays we hardly get a moment's peace before campaigning for the next election starts.) The political barrage reminds me of an entertaining article on that topic by Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein's essay and story collection EXPANDED UNIVERSE includes a short section defending his controversial novel STARSHIP TROOPERS and proposing, with varying degrees of apparent seriousness, alternative methods of determining who gets the right to vote. (You won't find this piece by scanning the table of contents; it's the Afterword to "Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?") He suspects that one major objection to STARSHIP TROOPERS is that it portrays a political structure in which the franchise must be earned—a policy Heinlein seems to approve of. He asks us to stipulate that "some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren—and yours." He points out that the "Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone"; a citizen had to be "a stable figure in the community" as evidenced by owning property, employing others, or the like. Heinlein skips over the part where the Founding Fathers didn't grant the vote to the Founding Mothers, much less people of whatever gender who belonged to the wrong race.

He goes on to suggest some possible alternatives to universal "warm body" franchise, in addition to the STARSHIP TROOPERS requirement for earning citizenship through public service. (1) The government's sole source of revenue comes from the sale of franchises. In other words, legalize the buying of votes. Heinlein believes if the price per vote were set high enough, few rich people would want to impoverish themselves to control an election. (2) Solve a math problem in the election booth before being allowed to cast a vote. As a variation on that plan, deposit a non-trivial sum of money first, which you get back if you qualify but lose if you fail the test. Under that rule, only citizens seriously interested in the political process would bother to participate. Considering that he thinks his idea of requiring people to solve a quadratic equation might be "too easy," I'm dubious of this notion. Having never really grokked math and having forgotten whatever I once knew about quadratic equations, I would surely find myself disenfranchised.

His final suggestion arises from the fact that female suffrage hasn't changed society and politics as much as suffragists predicted. Maybe the change didn't go far enough. Suppose, in a spirit of fairness, we don't allow men to vote for the next hundred and fifty years? Voting, office-holding, and the profession of law would be reserved for women. He goes even further with this modest proposal by pondering whether those rights should be restricted to mothers, who have an inescapable stake in society.

Like Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" for eating babies, Heinlein's hypothetical ideas for reforming our political system sneak up on the reader so smoothly that, for a few seconds, one feels they almost make sense. He also mentions Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondour," which can be read here:

The Curious Republic of Gondour

Under the system of this imaginary nation, every citizen automatically has one vote. They acquire additional votes, however, according to their education and wealth. A poor man or woman with a "common-school" education has two votes, someone with a high-school diploma gets four, and a university education bestows nine votes, a coveted and highly respected honor. The number of votes one is entitled to also rises in increments based on wealth, but those can be lost if the individual's wealth decreases. As a result, in the government of Gondour "ignorance and incompetence had no place. . . . A candidate for office must have marked ability, education, and high character, or he stood no sort of chance of election."

Imagine living under a government where we could count on those qualifications!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Common Assumptions

In his essay "On the Reading of Old Books" (written as the introduction to a 1943 translation of St. Athanasius's book on the Incarnation), C. S. Lewis explains why he thinks it vital for modern people to read old books:

"All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth."

Therefore, says Lewis, we need the literature of past ages to awaken us to the truth that the "common assumptions" of one era aren't necessarily those of another, and ours might actually be wrong. Speaking of the "contemporary outlook" of Lewis's own period, through much of the twentieth century experts in psychology and sociology held the shared assumption that no inborn "human nature" existed, that the human mind and personality were almost infinitely malleable—the theory of the "blank slate." We meet versions of that belief in works as different as Lewis's THE ABOLITION OF MAN (where he views the prospect with alarm), Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, Orwell's 1984, Skinner's WALDEN TWO, and Heinlein's first novel (published posthumously), FOR US, THE LIVING. Later research in psychology, neurology, etc. has decisively overturned that theoretical construct, as explored in great detail in Steven Pinker's THE BLANK SLATE.

Whatever our positions on the political spectrum, in the contemporary world we embrace certain common assumptions that may not have been shared by people of earlier periods. We now believe everybody should receive a free basic education, a fairly new concept even in our own country. In contrast to our culture's acceptance of casual racism a mere sixty years ago, now racial prejudice is unequivocally condemned. Whatever their exact views, all citizens except members of lunatic fringe groups deny being racists. Outward respect for individual rights has become practically worldwide. Dictatorships call themselves republics and claim to grant their citizens fundamental human rights. In our country, all sides claim they want to protect the environment and conserve energy; disputes revolve around exactly how to go about reaching those goals. Everybody in the civilized world supposedly respects and values human life, even if in some regions and subcultures there's little evidence of this value being practiced. One universally accepted principle in the modern, industrialized world is that children and especially babies are so precious that we should go to any lengths to protect them and extend their lives. For instance, expending huge amounts of energy and money to keep a premature baby alive is considered not only meritorious but often obligatory. The only differences on this topic among various factions of our society involve how much effort is reasonable and where the cutoff line should be drawn (e.g., how developed a preemie should be to receive this degree of medical attention, at what stage and for what reasons abortion should be allowed, etc.). Yet in many pre-industrial societies, it was obligatory to allow a very premature newborn or one with severe birth defects to die; expending resources on an infant who would almost certainly die anyway would be condemned as detrimental to the welfare of the family and tribe. The development of advanced medical technology has probably played a vital part in changing attitudes like this to the opposite belief we hold in contemporary society.

It's likely that alien cultures we encounter will have different universal assumptions from our own. In Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Mike (the human "Martian") reports that on Mars competition between individuals occurs in childhood instead of adulthood. Infants, rather than being cherished, are cast out to survive as best they can, then re-admitted to the community after they've proven their fitness. To creatures who've evolved as units in a hive mind, the value we place on individual rights would make no sense. A member of a solitary species wouldn't understand the concept of loyalty to a group. Where might the "characteristic blindness" of our time and place in history be lurking?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Is the World Improving?

Psychologist Steven Pinker has just published a new book, ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, a follow-up to his 2011 book THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED. In that earlier work, he demonstrated with page after page of hard facts that we're living in the least violent period in recorded history. ENLIGHTENMENT NOW, subtitled "The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress," expands that project to support the claim that human well-being has increased in virtually every measurable way since the dawn of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. (I have to confess that I bristled a bit at the title itself, since "Enlightenment," like "Renaissance," was a self-designated label meant to dismiss previous eras as centuries of benighted superstition, barbarism, and stagnation.) Contrary to the widespread belief that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, according to Pinker this is the best time in history to be born, even in third-world nations. The headlines that make many people wonder, "Why is it getting so hot, and what are we doing in this handbasket?" represent, in Pinker's view, a distortion of the facts. (Why a handbasket, by the way? If all of us are in it collectively, wouldn't a bushel basket make more sense? Or a laundry basket? Of course, then we'd lose the alliteration.) Health, education, the spread of representative government, overall quality of life (evaluated by leisure time, household conveniences, access to information and entertainment, etc.), among many other metrics, have measurably improved. Fewer children die in childhood, fewer women die in giving birth, many diseases have been conquered or even eradicated, in the U.S. drug addiction and unwed teen pregnancy have decreased, fewer people worldwide live in extreme poverty, and in the developed world even the poorest possess wealth (in the form of clean running water, electricity, and other modern conveniences) that nobody could have at any price a couple of centuries ago. As for violence, Pinker refers in both books to what he calls "The Long Peace," the period since 1945 in which no major world powers have clashed head-on in war. What about the proxy wars such as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts? Faded away with the Cold War itself. Anarchy and bloody conflicts in third-world countries? While horrible present-day examples can easily be cited, the number of them has also decreased. Pinker also disputes, with supporting figures, the hype about "epidemics" of depression and suicide.

Despite Pinker's convincing array of statistics, readers may still find themselves protesting, "But—but—school shootings!" Why do we often have the impression that the condition of the world is getting worse when it's actually getting better?

For one thing, as we all know, "If it bleeds, it leads." News media report extraordinary, exciting events. Mass murder shocks us BECAUSE we're used to expecting our daily lives to remain peaceful and safe. Yet even the editorial page of our local paper recently noted that, although high-profile episodes of "rampage killings" (as Pinker labels them) seem to have occurred with alarming frequency lately, incidence of gun violence in general in the U.S. is down. We tend to be misled by the "availability heuristic" (things we've heard of or seen more frequently or recently, or that we find disturbing, loom large in our consciousness, appearing more common than they really are) and the "negativity bias" (we recall bad things more readily and vividly than good ones). Then there's the well-known confirmation bias, the inclination to notice facts in support of a predetermined position and ignore those that refute it. As for the actual numbers for mass murder, the stats for 2015 (the latest year for which he had data while writing the book) classify most rampage killings under the category of terrorism. The total number of deaths from "terrorism" in the U.S. in that year was 44, as compared to over 15,000 fatalities from other kinds of homicides and vastly more deaths from accidents (motor vehicle and other).

What does Pinker's thesis that the arc of history bends toward justice (and peace, health, and prosperity) imply for the prospect of encountering alien civilizations? Isaac Asimov believed we're in no danger of invasion from hostile extraterrestrials because any culture advanced enough to develop interstellar travel would have developed beyond violence and war. Pinker would probably agree. I'm still dubious of this position, considering that one of the most technologically advanced nations of the twentieth century perpetrated the Holocaust. Moral advancement may tend to grow in step with scientific development, but I don't see that trend as inevitable. The reason I think an alien invasion is unlikely is that any species capable of interstellar travel would have the intelligence and technological skills to get anything they need in much easier ways that crossing vast expanses of space to take over an already inhabited planet. I trust that any hypothetical aliens we eventually meet will be intelligent enough to realize, as most of the nations on Earth have, that trade and exchange of ideas trump genocidal conquest as methods of getting what they want from other sapient species. Much of science fiction has traditionally offered hope, for instance many of Robert Heinlein's novels. Today, amid the fashion for post-apocalyptic dystopias, we can still find optimistic fiction. S. M. Stirling's Emberverse, which begins with the downfall of civilization in DIES THE FIRE, focuses throughout the series on cooperation in rebuilding society rather than on the initial collapse.

While Pinker doesn't deny that our world is far from a utopian paradise, there's a lot of work yet to be done, and any mass murder rampage is one too many, this is fundamentally an optimistic book. It's a refreshing reminder that we're not necessarily doomed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timey-Wimey Tangles

I just finished watching a Netflix series (which I won't name because there are spoilers ahead) at the climax of which the hero learned the only way to avert apocalyptic disaster was for him to go back in time and refrain from a certain action he performed at the beginning of the series. Thereby, everything he'd done since then would never have happened. And of course nobody he'd come to care for over the course of the series would remember meeting him and participating in those adventures, because they never happened. The hero asks to be allowed to remember the now-nonexistent events, a petition the sorcerer performing the spell grants. The mage also grants a similar request from the hero's love interest. In the final scene, shortly after the hero has made the sacrifice of finding himself back at the start and choosing not to do what he did the first time around, the heroine joins him. They ride off into the sunset for a life of adventure together. Though the ending is bittersweet (everybody else has still forgotten the hero and his exploits among them), I liked it very much.

However—because we don't witness the conversation between the heroine and the sorcerer, we don't know whether she simply left her home and neighbors (with no explanation, since their memories have been reset) to meet the hero when she knew he'd show up or whether she, too, was magically sent back to the restart point. If the latter, now she is living in two places at the same time, in her home town and on the road with the hero.

Granted, that's not an uncommon situation in time-travel fiction. In the Harry Potter series, Harry and Hermione see their earlier selves when they revisit past events through the use of a time-turner. In THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, the hero often has duplicate selves in existence at the same moment. Heinlein frequently allows more than one of the same person to exist at the same time, e.g. in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, and the iconic short stories "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies."

In strict science fiction terms, though, that phenomenon amounts to having matter (the atoms and molecules making up the character's body) created out of nothing. If two iterations of one person exist simultaneously, where does the material for the duplicate come from? Dean Koontz's novel LIGHTNING postulates that a traveler can never occupy a point in time where he already exists, a rule that not only respects the laws of physics but creates suspense at the climax, when the time traveler has a very tight window in which to save the heroine without bumping into his former self. (That's a fantastic SF romance, by the way, although it isn't marketed as such.)

In the recent season finale of THE LIBRARIANS, a time reset similar to the conclusion of that Netflix series saves the world from a colorless dystopia in which the Library, and therefore curiosity and imagination, don't exist. Since the dystopic timeline constitutes a self-contained alternate world, when it's wiped out by the reset there's no problem of people duplicating themselves. In the case of such works as THE LIBRARIANS, the Harry Potter novels, and the Netflix series, we can say it works because it's magic. In SF terms, the unfinished story "The Dark Tower," attributed to C. S. Lewis (some scholars have doubts about the authorship), carries the paradox to the logical conclusion by declaring that physical time travel is impossible, because in either the past or the future the atoms making up the traveler's body would be dispersed elsewhere throughout the environment. A character in the story invents a device for remotely viewing a different time period, though. The protagonist of a short story whose title and author I don't remember discovers that, while physical time travel is impossible, he can project his consciousness into the minds of other people in the past. He uses the technique to invade Hitler's mind—and, not surprisingly, incites the global tragedy he's trying to prevent. (TV Tropes calls this phenomenon "Hitler's Time Travel Exemption." Anything a time traveler does to try to thwart him will fail or even produce a worse outcome.)

In my opinion, allowing corporeal time travel makes for more interesting fictional scenarios, even if they have to be justified with, "It's magic."

Margaret L. Carter/p> Carter's Crypt

Trazzles and Tweedlers

While re-shelving our books in our newly redecorated basement "library," I came across WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? (2001), a collection of essays from ANALOG by the long-time editor of the magazine, Stanley Schmidt. While most of the stories in ANALOG don't excite me, because I don't really get into "hard science fiction" (a term Schmidt doesn't like; he maintains that rigorously science-based SF should be called simply "science fiction"), I've always loved the editorials. My favorite article in WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE?, "Bold and Timid Prophets," contemplates how visions of the future (in both factual predictive writings and fiction) typically measure up to the actual development of culture and technology. Often a story set in the future imagines the technology as a perfected version of the cutting-edge inventions of the present day. For example, a nineteenth-century speculative novel might envision the twentieth century as powered by highly advanced steam engines. Making an imaginative leap into a world filled with devices that do things impossible in the current state of knowledge is much harder.

Schmidt illustrates this problem by starting the essay with an ordinary letter written in the late 1990s as it would appear to a reader in the 1860s. He substitutes a nonsense word for every term that didn't exist then (or combines familiar words in ways that would have made no sense in the mid-nineteenth century, such as "answering machine"). (I think he cheated a bit with "pilot." Boats had pilots for a very long time before airplanes began to need them.) "Plane" becomes "trazzle"; "computer" becomes "tweedler." "Fooba" substitutes for "e-mail" and "zilp" for "fax." Even where the nineteenth-century reader could recognize all the words, many of the sentences would appear to express impossibilities. How could parents know the sex of a baby in utero? How could a person travel a total of 20,000 miles in only one month? How could a human heart be transplanted? How could a transatlantic trip take "just a few hours"?

Doubtless the distant future will include inventions and achievements we can't currently imagine because they'll depend on discoveries and technologies unknown to us, just as the nineteenth century couldn't predict the practical applications of electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics. Even the boldest and best of classic SF writers get things amusingly wrong when writing about the not-so-distant future. "Where's my flying car?" illustrates one well-known unfulfilled prediction. Personally, I shudder at the thought of flying cars being anything other than toys for the rich. Autonomous ground cars, which now seem just over the horizon, sound much more desirable. What I really want, however, is my housecleaning robot, which Heinlein in THE DOOR INTO SUMMER expected by 1970. Also, in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, Heinlein envisioned a near future with a moon colony—and slide rules. The social structures portrayed in some of his juvenile novels are even less "bold" than the concept of slide rules on the moon—the families of the twenty-first century look like suburban American households of the 1950s—but, in light of his posthumously published first novel, FOR US, THE LIVING, that absence of innovation probably wasn't his fault. I suspect editors of books for teenagers in the 1950s wouldn't have accepted anything unconventional in that area.

Schmidt concludes that "well-balanced science fiction" needs "both extrapolation—things you can clearly see are possible—and innovation—the things you can't see how to do, but also can't prove impossible." That's one thing I like about J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas mysteries; their vision of the 2060s strikes me as convincingly futuristic but also plausible in terms of current technological and social trends.

WHICH WAY TO THE FUTURE? addresses a variety of other intriguing topics, such as the definitions of "intelligence" and "human," why we haven't been contacted by aliens (the Fermi Paradox), the proliferation of unrealistically exaggerated fears of marginal hazards, etc. Fortunately, Amazon offers numerous used copies of this fascinating collection.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Redesign

In Heinlein's METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN, well-meaning, godlike aliens on a colony planet redesign the DNA of a human embryo to produce what they consider improvements, such as replacing fingers with tentacles; Lazarus Long's people react with horror instead of gratitude and hastily leave that world. Recently on Quora, someone posted a question about what changes you would make to improve the human reproductive process, if you had that power. Some suggestions offered were: give women the ability to end a pregnancy at will (maybe by resorbing the embryo, like rabbits) or pause a pregnancy in suspended animation until convenient, like kangaroos; separate the sexual function from the excretory function (presumably referring to males—the idea of placing those organs in completely different parts of the body goes way beyond tweaking with the human blueprint to making our anatomy downright alien); getting rid of menstrual periods (only a few mammals menstruate, so why can't we simply absorb the excess uterine lining the way other females apparently do?); allow people to transfer the embryo to the father, like seahorses.

Some changes I would wish for in an ideal world: Not only for pregnancy, but for human comfort in general, it would be nice if evolution had done a more efficient job of transforming us from quadrupeds to bipeds. Imperfect adaptation to walking upright leaves us subject to many uncomfortable conditions such as back, joint, and foot pains, hernias, and organ prolapse. For reproduction in particular, voluntary control of the process would solve many problems. Suppose women could ovulate or suppress ovulation at will? And if conditions of the pregnancy or the environment turned unfavorable, in this scenario they could resorb the embryo by an act of will, as mentioned above. It would also be convenient if men could produce erections, or suppress them, at will. For both sexes, a lot of anxiety would disappear if we could simply decide to have orgasms when desired. I'd like to have labor pains reduced to mild cramps, just enough discomfort to alert the woman that she's in labor. Why does dilation of the cervix have to hurt so much? At the actual delivery phase, a sensation of slight pressure would be enough to tell her to start pushing.

That last request might be impossible without a total restructuring of the human body, because of the compromises we already make between the sizes of the baby's head and the mother's pelvis. But, again, in an ideal world where we have voluntary control over physical processes and sensations, we could mentally suppress most of the discomfort associated with pushing out a full-term infant. Those compromises make another possible wish, that babies not be born so helpless, out of the question. Human intelligence means our offspring have large brains and large skulls, and the human female's pelvis can't grow much bigger while still allowing her to walk upright. That's why human babies are born so undeveloped; the size and lifespan of our species would lead us to expect our infants to stay in utero about twice as long as they do. In effect, a newborn baby is an extra-uterine fetus.

Given absolute power to alter human anatomy and physiology, what improvements would you make to the reproductive process? Or any of our physical attributes?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alien Romance

I'm prepending a comment on the "Great First Lines" discussion, then my own post on the definition of Alien Romance, or maybe SFR. They're sort-of related.

For my money, the single most grabbing "first line" I have ever encountered (in countless thousands of books read) is Marion Zimmer Bradley's opening to the original SWORD OF ALDONES (not the rewrite SHARRA'S EXILE).

We were outstripping the night.

Why is that a great first line?

Because it bespeaks the essential theme, the pacing of the novel, and delivers that same sense of motion without knowing where you came from or where you're going that the novel does. The novel delivers on the promise of the first line, and that is what makes it a grabber.

A slushpile reader is trained to look at the FIRST LINE - then compare it to THE LAST LINE -- split the MS and look at the MIDDLE. If the 3 points don't match, the MS does not get read, it gets rejected.

So it's not "great first lines" that is the real challenge. It's crafting a first line that bespeaks the essence of the story at the thematic level.

There is a method of achieving this effect which MZB beat into my reluctant head and I finally formulated into a style of working that I can grasp. Maybe this will help you, too.

Ask yourself WHY DO I WANT TO WRITE THIS NOVEL?

The reason why you want to write the novel or story is the reason why people would want to read it. But you can't simply state that reason. You have to ENCODE it in SHOW DON'T TELL using foreshadowing and symbology, art and craft welded together.

Now armed with the answer to that arcane question, you search for the beginning of the main character's story. You have to run up and down that character's whole life and ask yourself, WHERE IS THE STORY? You have to ask, "WHAT EVENT SEQUENCE CHANGES THIS CHARACTER IRREVOCABLY?"

Each real life has such a point (can be 3-4 years even). Some of us do change under that influence - and we have a "story of our life" - others don't change and meet a different fate because of that choice.

The FIRST LINE and FIRST PARAG of a novel (not, interestingly enough, of a screenplay) are composed of the the point in time & awareness when the character is jolted out of his/her former life, and dumped into his/her next life.

The OPENING SITUATION of a novel is composed of the point in the main character's life where the CONFLICT IS JOINED -- where the CONFLICT BEGINS -- where CHANGE BEGINS. (this is also the key to writing great biographies.)

Thus in the typical romance the cliche opening is where the main POV character first sees or encounters the love-object or some effect that love-object has left in his/her wake.

The mistake most beginning writers make in choosing a protagonist and in finding the point where that person's story BEGINS (and thus the opening line of the novel) is to fail to spot, identify, and express the conflict. Or the reverse, knowing the conflict but failing to discover which of the ensemble characters HAS that conflict and is therefore the protagonist because that is the person who will resolve that particular conflict. (all these story components are related, and that relationship is expressed in the perfect opening line, the narrative hook.)

As a result of that failure to find character and conflict, the new writer will open their composition with a long, rambling, abstract history lesson setting out the parameters of their made-up universe, the long life histories of the characters, the politics and everything else that has nothing to do with the conflict.

This preamble is all material the writer feels the reader has to know BEFORE being able to understand or enjoy the story. This opening expository lump happens because the writer doesn't know the craft techniques I call "information feed."

No matter how clever or engrossing or startling the first line is -- that expository lump method is bound to fail.

Why? Because someone looking for a story is, whether they know it or not, looking for a conflict that can be resolved a number of ways -- and the story is about which way this particular person resolves that specific conflict.

Before the reader is ready to memorize the names of all the Empires and relatives of the royal families and the list of all the baddies who want to kill the protagonist, the life history of the person she/he will fall in love with -- BEFORE ALL THAT, the reader has to be made as curious to know those facts as a lover approaching orgasm is eager to GET THERE.

First you have to tease the reader into excitement -- THEN you can inform them, but never using dialogue or exposition. You must encode this information in SHOW DON'T TELL -- which means you must make the reader figure it out for him/herself because they want to know, not because you want them to know.

So the FORMULA for finding that all important opening line that prevents the expository lump of an opening is -

WHY DO I WANT TO WRITE THIS WHOLE STORY?

WHAT IS THE CONFLICT?

WHAT IS THE RESOLUTION OF THE CONFLICT?

WHOSE STORY IS IT?

WHERE DOES THAT STORY START?

WHAT IS THAT STORY IN ONE SENTENCE?

That one sentence is your opening line. It is your pitch for the screenplay. It's the line you use at the SFWA cocktail parties to pitch yourself to an Agent or Editor. It's what sells the thing (and you).

Study each of the suggested opening lines in the previous posts -- analyze them. You won't learn anything, especially not how to produce those lines from the mishmosh story idea in your head.

You can't learn that trick by reverse engineering great opening lines. The greater the line is, the less you can learn by studying it.

Make a pile of your favorite books. Write down the opening line, the last line, and the middle paragraph of each book.

Use this list of questions above and produce your own opening lines (do dozens for stories you will not write). Then rewrite them and rewrite them -- until you can see how you are in fact replicating the EFFECT of the opening lines YOU admired.

The whole rest of the novel is about WHO THAT PROTAGONIST REALLY IS UNDERNEATH IT ALL. And maybe about how the protag finds out who he/she really is, which is often different from who they think they are.

So a fully encoded SHOW DON'T TELL story is all about Identity, and how Identity changes under the impact of EVENTS. IDENTITY change is STORY. EVENTS SEQUENCE is PLOT. I call the Event Sequence the "because" line -- because this happened, that happened, and because of that, this other thing happened. Because this happened, that person did this, which causes this other person to do that. "Because" cross-links the story and the plot so that a reader can't tell the difference.

It's like making soup. You can't replicate your Mom's soup without knowing the ingredients and proportions.

The FIRST EVENT (often psychological not physical, sometimes both) in the plot is hidden (or maybe not so hidden) in the first line. The first Identity Change potential lies nascent in the first line.

"We were outstripping the night." -- flight from dark horrors. WHO? A person being chased by that which is inside himself. RESOLUTION - turning to face that demon, The Shara Matrix. Lew Alton's story -- starts with him returning home to make home strange. Notice "outstripping the night" looks "backwards" or "behind" the character. The entire novel is an unraveling of the true meaning of events long past.

That's SWORD OF ALDONES. Go read it. Study it. It's a masterpiece. But MZB didn't like it because she thought events happen without CAUSE being apparent. I love it because I can imagine the causes. When the reader is prompted to contribute important elements to the fantasy, they become invested in that story - and look up your byline again. Leave room for the reader's imagination.

I learned while interviewing Leonard Nimoy for Star Trek Lives! that this technique of leaving an open spot for the viewer's imagination is called in theater OPEN TEXTURE. It's a technique that makes the characters walk off the page and into the reader's dreams. The opening line sets up that "texture" effect.

So now to today's post! Sorry about the rambling preamble! But I think the previous posts on opening lines were about the art, and about admiring other people's art. This is my contribution to the "craft" -- the part of writing anyone who can write a literate English sentence (As Marion Zimmer Bradley always said) can learn.

----------------------

Yesterday, I had an interesting experience. The mother of a young man in High School had told him to call me for advice about what story to write for a science fiction course he was taking. (???? SF taught in HS? With writing? What an interesting new world.)

Well, this young man is highly proficient in Math and Science -- but really lacking when it comes to writing papers and so on, i.e. verbal skills. And she knew he'd never call me.

So I said, "Well, tell him to go to the definition of SF. 'What if ...? If only ...? If this goes on ....' And start from there. Put one of those in a story, and you might have SF. Put all 3 and you have an award winning SF story."

She memorized the list of springboards, but didn't understand, so I said, "Well, what if Hillary Clinton becomes President? What if she cut science funding to fund health care?" (because the kid likes science and is a kid so doesn't care about healthcare yet)

What if -- Hillary wins? If only -- we had universal health care. If this goes on - we have to cut something to fund healthcare. See?

(Hey you and I know Hillary wouldn't, but that's not the point -- the point is to demonstrate how to use the springboards to create a story that is SF, so some absurdity is required in the premise, then you work it out logically from there. Cutting science to fund healthcare is a contradiction because you need basic science to create new cures -- which is why this would make an SF story. It's fiction about science.)

Well, she went away confident that she can propel her son into writing a story now. It's hard being a mother who can't help with homework.

So then I got to thinking about the definition of SF and remembered I'd forgotten to include the really salient part of the definition. Fred Pohl and John Campbell and Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon I think, came up with this one in a brainstorming session. (long, long story there)

"If you can take the science out and still have a story, it wasn't SF to begin with."

We use the same test for Star Trek fanfic. If you can take the Star Trek out and still have a ST fan story, it wasn't a ST fan story to begin with, and you should write it in its own universe and sell it. (some writers are doing that successfully now, though the first few attempts failed)

So we come to the problem that really has my attention -- defining Alien Romance.

You all know by now my own attempts at this definition created the premise that there is a Plot Archetype which I dubbed INTIMATE ADVENTURE, the core of ST fanfic. In the 1970's you couldn't buy Intimate Adventure SF/F at Waldenbooks so people paid exorbitant prices for fanzines printed on paper.

http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html

I still think of Intimate Adventure as a genre, but it is actually a Plot Archetype, which my sometime collaborator Professor of English Jean Lorrah has proven.

So that disqualifies it as the "definition" of Alien Romance because I/A is really not a genre. So I'm back to square one trying to define what it is that I actually write.

At the moment, I am working on transposing my Romantic Times Award winning novel, DUSHAU, into script format. So I have my nose into that universe again, and it definitely is Alien Romance -- it's SF Romance with an alien as one of the protags in the Relationship that drives the plot. In the third book, they actually get it on, too.

Appropos of the prepended item on FIRST LINES, the opening of DUSHAU is a parag all in caps, centered above the first paragraph of real text.

THE KAMMINTH OLIAT HAS RETURNED AND IS SCHEDULED TO RECEIVE COLONIZABLE PLANETARY DISCOVERY HONORS. IN THE NAME OF EMPEROR RANTAN, ALL SURVEY BASE PERSONNEL ARE COMMANDED TO ATTEND THE AFTERNOON AUDIENCE.

The protagonist who sees that announcement on her desktop display, responds instantly with total professional outrage, and eventually murders the Emperor because of this opening event. She has to change her loyalties to do that. The student should note what is NOT included in that opening line.

For more on why the accurate definition of the genre is vital to generating a FIRST LINE that will sell the book, see my January column and the review of SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES! by Blake Snyder and my comments on Amazon and on blakesnyder.com blog. It's a huge topic all about Commercial Art as a business.

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2008/

Well, AR always seems to have a "What if ...?" element because you need to cast a universe around the characters. It has an "If only ...?" element because most all Romance does (the yearning for a soul mate), and occasionally AR comes up with an "If this goes on ..." type of prediction.

But what is the TEST to see if this particular novel is AR or not?

It can't be "If you take the romance out and still have a story, then it wasn't AR to begin with." Because that's the test for ROMANCE, not AR.

It might be, "If you take the alien out and still have a romance, then it's not AR?"

But then you come to what constitutes an "alien" -- as I've pointed out previously, humans can be the most bizarre aliens of all.

Take for example Banner's Bonus, by Carol Ann Lee (new author!) at awe-struck.net (for my money, the best e-publisher currently operating).

This book is as well constructed and well written as anything Manhattan publishes. It should be a Mass Market paperback.

Awe-struck.net sells it as SF Romance, but I think that's borderline. I also don't see it as Alien Romance, but it almost is.

This is set in a Star Trek like universe but apparently without non-human aliens (think Firefly). So some humans have been affected by a substance that has left them with Empathy, a trait that breeds true. So they're "alien."

However, halfbreeds have unpredictable half-talent. The particular kickass girl we follow is I think quarter or eight Empath. She believes she has no talent because she was tested. Her mother reads her father extremely well, though, and seems to be "bonded."

Her father hires a tough guy who hauls (interstellar) freight for him to protect his girl from some killers. She's a virgin. She spends weeks isolated in a small space ship with this tough guy, who melts. She (unknown to herself) bonds with him empathically, and thus becomes able to track him when he's kidnapped.

Definitely a Romance, and not too much actual sex. He takes her to the last place in the galaxy anyone would think to search for her -- his family's home. He has brothers - equally tough guys. They see she's bonded with him, even though he and she do not.

The SF universe building seems to me lacking. There is nothing different about the ports they visit, the types of people (crooks, criminals, lowlives, and heroes) they meet, the galactic political situation, the ways people do business -- and nothing at all is made of the mechanics of the space-drive they use, or any other science or technological innovation that might change the way people live their lives (watch a movie made before cell phones, and you'll see what I mean). In fact, their tech is less than we have today.

So the extrapolation of science is lacking. The worldbuilding, that we've discussed on this blog at such length, is a failure in this novel (even though it's a very well written novel.)

The Empathic premise could be something that happened on Earth -- Chernobyl comes to mind. Imports from China. There's no reason inherent in the story that forces the setting into the galaxy. They go from planet to planet as people might go from Southsea Island to China or India or San Francisco. The port bars are about the same. There's nothing galactic in this galaxy.

There's no reason that this story needs space travel. You take out the science, and you still have a story -- it's not SF.

Its "alien" is only human with a genetic twist of empathy that does not dominate or twist her personality, limit or inhibit her abilities, or rebound in any unexpected and unpredictable way making a problem the protags have to surmount (except the old Star Trek fanfic cliche of telepathic bonding) unique to this constructed universe.

It isn't SOLD as Alien Romance, but as SF Romance. Awe-Struck is the best publisher because they're honest and totally up front about their packaging. What you see is what you get.

Banner's Bonus is only just barely "SF" -- and the SF ladled on top like frosting. You can scrape it off.

But underneath the frosting, it's one whale of a good read! It tickles my AR button, but doesn't actually press it.

So what is it I'm really looking for in Alien Romance? What is the real core of the definition without which you do not have an ALIEN Romance?

Banner's Bonus is an example that should reveal the answer to that question. But I don't see it yet. It's a must-read because it's a book to study.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Heinlein On Love

Folks:

I returned yesterday from a unique weekend immersed in
scholarship and erudite discussion of Robert A. Heinlein,
celebrating the day (7/7/07 ) when he would have been a hundred
years old had he lived.

I learned so much I didn't know! My background and interests are
much more like Heinlein's than I had ever suspected.
And I'm sure I said things others didn't know that changed their
views -- they came up after the panels and asked for my handouts
which contain the URL of the Alien Romance blog.

Frederick Pohl (the editor who bought my first story, the first
Sime~Gen story, for WORLDS OF IF MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION and later as book editor for Bantam Books bought my first non- fiction project STAR TREK LIVES! and who has written a long list of SF novels) was there speaking fluently, casually, mellifluously, about Robert, his attitudes, experiences, friends, associates, and his three wives.

As I said in my previous post, I was on 6 panels and an
autographing in 2 days -- Friday and Sunday. Saturday I wandered
in and out of panels, and watched a few videos and talked and
talked to people.

The weekend became a blur of significant experiences. But there
was an odd theme running through it all -- love. Heinlein on
love is a remarkably deep topic.

You may think of his later books, Stranger in a Strange Land,
Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough For Love -- but there are
deeper themes on love in his "juveniles."

The Heinlein Centennial was co-conventioned with the SFRA
(Science Fiction Research Association -- professors who read
papers on SF because they happen to be fans who write academic
papers). So on Thursday evening, I spotted Fred Pohl through a
crack in a door, and crept in to an SFRA panel to listen to the
end of that panel.

It gave me a hundred ideas for things to say on the later panels
I was on, but I only got to say one of them.
Being academics, they were talking (in grieved tones) about
teaching Heinlein's books, and how younger people just WON'T
read Heinlein.

Later at another panel I heard someone who should know state
that when RED PLANET (the animated version of Heinlein's novel)
was aired, children ran to the library searching for more books
by him.

But before I heard that, on Friday at noon I was on a panel
about "Everything I Needed to Know I Learned From Heinlein" --
(which is pretty much true). And there I mentioned this blog and
pointed out how, RAH's themes, ideas, and vision lives on and on
and ON through us.

Young people who read my books (and there are amazingly large
numbers) are reading Heinlein (and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and
Theodore Sturgeon, Hal Clement, etc etc). Even younger people
who are reading Linnea Sinclair are reading Heinlein, which
would be true even if Linnea had never read Heinlein because
she's read my books.

In fact, any modern fan of novels with SF or Fantasy content
that ALSO involve strong characters and plot-driving
relationships is enjoying the legacy of Robert Anson Heinlein.
Linnea is now training new writers, and so the legacy will be
passed on to yet another generation -- and that legacy is,
without love you don't have a story!

It's especially true of Science Fiction -- one definition of SF
Fred Pohl and John W. Campbell came up with was "if you can take
the science out and still have a story, you don't have an SF
story."

Most Alien Romance that I've seen to date passes that test --
there's some science element that absolutely MAKES the story.
But there is also some Relationship (not always romantic love;
parent-child, teacher-student, buddy, sister-sister, oath-bound,
magical geas, etc) that causes the characters to make one plot-
decision and not another -- that drives the plot to a satisfying
conclusion.

And that's what Heinlein invariably did. He showed us the role
of love in society, even alien society, and that to handle
science efficaciously, one must be filled with that love -- love
of humanity (or one's own species), love of town, country,
village, tribe, family, spouse(s), children, teachers, -- LOVE
drives the world.

But learning steers us -- and Heinlein glamorized education to
such an extent that maybe a third or a half of the people who
showed up for the Centennial had advanced science degrees
because of their early exposure to Heinlein.

Reading Heinlein makes you WANT to study -- even if the subject
is boring -- because you can see the use for being educated, as
opposed to "getting an education."

On Saturday, I learned that Heinlein had, as a very young man,
memories of 2 or 3 past lives. That could easily explain the
level of mature genius he evidenced throughout his whole life.
But by his thirties, those memories had faded to memories of
memories.

Still it gave him an awareness that science doesn't study the
whole of our real universe -- an attitude I have always had.
Maybe I was born with it, or maybe I absorbed it with RAH's
novels, or my upbringing -- but it pervades my life to this day.
Science is absolutely necessary, but it doesn't apply to
everything of importance in life.

Heinlein had read James Branch Cabell (fantasy writer of the
1920's and 1930's) who influenced the field markedly and then
fell out of popularity. And Heinlein knew L. Ron Hubbard, and
some associates of Madame Blavatsky -- who had at the time moved
her operations to India.

This mystical view of the universe blended into his scientific
view of the universe in every book he wrote, but became more
pronounced in later years -- after the feminist revolution of
the 1970's and the influence of Star Trek on the SF/F reading
population when he saw he could publish stories about what he
had originally wanted to write about. (we have a "manuscript
found in a drawer" that's recently been published to show this
is true.)

Also on Saturday I saw all at once, without commercials, the
cartoon film made of his novel RED PLANET -- which was a major
love of mine. It's a story about motherly love, and a rite of
passage story for a boy and his sister. The boy makes best-
friends of a young Martian while Earth is terraforming Mars
(something they're now talking about actually doing).

Of course, since it's a juvenile, the boy and his Martian friend
save Mars and change the course of history. That's the "great
man" theory of history, and one I use in my own novels because
sometimes it's true that apparently insignificant people make
huge contributions because of their personal emotional life.

But for me, the book has always been about the intense love and
understanding between the boy and the alien-child.

The significant story development, for me, is the scene where
the alien (after sticking with the human boy through many life-
threatening adventures) tells him that he must hibernate and
morph into his mature form, which will take longer than the
human boy's entire lifetime.

That leave-taking, that parting scene, is for me THE defining
moment of SF as a genre. I internalized it so greatly that I
barely remembered it until I saw it on the screen.

The animated version tag ends the story with a scene where the
Martian, as an adult, is telling his best-human-friend's
grandchild about his childhood best friend. It's a cartoon! I
cried my head off!!!!

On Sunday I did 4 panels and hardly had a moment to sit and
listen to other panels. I was on a panel titled "I now pronounce
you" -- which turned out to be about people who are actually
living Heinlein's model of the "line marriage" and the "group
marriage" from Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I did two panels on Heinlein's Heroines, and got into a number of discussions
challenging the view that Heinlein's writing is male chauvinistic (it's not -- but those who don't understand the nuances can't tell the difference.)

One thing about this convention that was really odd. There were,
I think, fewer than a thousand people spread over two huge
hotels with multiple tracks of programming going all the time --
and despite all that, all the panels I did filled the room. It
wasn't ME or the celebrities I was on with. It was that people
came to the event in order to go to the panels!

But I also had a few people who had seen me at a panel on Friday
following through to all the panels I did on Sunday -- people
who hadn't read my books and didn't know who I was. I had three
or four long conversations in the hallways, too.

I was on a couple of panels with J. Neil Schulman, an SF writer
who is forging ahead into film making. He's written, produced
and directed a feature film which is an Action Comedy starring
Nichelle Nichols (Uhura on Star Trek: The Original Series).

The film, titled Lady Magdalene's, is being marketed for theater
release.

http://www.ladymagdalenes.com/

"Jack Goldwater, an IRS Agent on load to the Federal Air Marshal
Service, is relieved of field duty after insulting a powerful U.
S. Senator, and finds himself exiled to a humiliating desk job
in Nevada as the Federal Receiver managing a legal brothel in
tax default. Where -- with the help of the brothel Madam, Lady
Magdalene (Nichelle Nichols) -- he uncovers an Al Qaeda plot to
unload a nuclear bomb sized crate at Hoover Dam. " Runtime 117
minutes.

Watch theaters for that film - it'll likely be a landmark.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Patriotism and Robert A. Heinlein

A version of this was submitted this week to
The Heinlein Centennial Reader A Call for Articles and Essays
about Heinlein's Life & Work
http://www.heinleinsociety.org/

I'll be going to the Robert Heinlein Centennial convention in
Kansas City over the July 7, 2007 weekend. They've put me on 6
panels in two days. So I've been preparing some handouts and
thinking about the topics.

Meanwhile, one of the Sime~Gen fans (Midge Baker) announced
she's a Robert Heinlein fan -- imagine that -- and gave me a URL
I'd like to share with you.

It is ever so gratifying to discover that some of my all time
favorite authors have fans who also like Sime~Gen and my other
work. And that happens quite a lot. Maybe I've done something
right.

You may note that my first novel, a Sime~Gen novel titled House
of Zeor which first came out from Doubleday in hardcover then
had numerous mass market paperback and translation reprints,
plus an Omnibus reprint, was dedicated to Robert Heinlein.

After a lifetime of reading his work, I first met Robert at the
World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City in 1976 when I
was on an autographing tour for my non-fiction book Star Trek
Lives! about why fans like Star Trek. They held the first
Worldcon Blood Drive at that convention, and donating blood was
the only way to get RAH's autograph.

As it happened, I was disqualified from blood donation at the
time, but he built in a dodge to get around the requirement. If
you stood in line at the Bloodmobile, and were turned down, you
got a heart-pin that was your ticket to stand in line at the
autographing.

So I did both stand-in-lines (long ones) and got my heart-pin
which I still wear, and finally got to the desk where he was
signing books. Instead of asking for his autograph, I gave him
House of Zeor autographed to him by me.

He later called me and made some very encouraging remarks. So I
sent him my second novel, Unto Zeor, Forever and he called me
again asking if I was a medical doctor (which I'm not) because
I'd portrayed the essence of that profession with remarkable
realism.

Later still, he invited me and my family to visit him in his
home, a visit where my children (just the right age) got
autographed copies of his juveniles which they treasure to this
day.

There's a reason for that dedication of my first novel -- and it
wasn't to get an invitation to Robert Heinlein's house.
Sime~Gen and almost all of my work falls into the category I've
named Intimate Adventure
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
for more detail.

Romance and Intimacy (which aren't necessarily the same thing)
are both about Relationship -- about me vs. other with the focus
on Other.

Romance and Intimacy both create the binding force that holds
society and civilization together -- the bonds between
individuals which then extend to children, ancestors, extended
family, tribe, city, nation, etc.

It is this fundamental binding force of civilization that Robert
Heinlein writes about with such moving conviction that it became
one of the core drivers of my own fiction.

I became a science fiction writer very much because of Robert A.
Heinlein's vision of what humanity could and should be -- our
highest calling -- the counter entropic force in the universe,
the organizing force.

I first discovered his novels in the library in the early 1950's
-- or more accurately, my mother discovered them for even his
juveniles were shelved not in the children's library but in the
adult library to which I didn't qualify for a card. So my
mother sneaked me books way above my grade level. So I
did learn everything I needed to know about life from those
early juveniles.

One of the most important things I learned was the reason for
Patriotism and for Good Manners in any society containing
humans.

Here's the URL where you can find Robert A. Heinlein's speech on
the nature of Patriotism on Jerry Pournelle's website (which is
worth exploring).

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail212.html#RAH

That reason is survival. Pure and simple. Human societies that
fail to engender patriotism and good manners become extinct.
Heinlein held that "women and children first" = Patriotism.
That no society can survive if it doesn't reproduce. In that
endeavor males are expendable; women and children are not.
It's not that women CAN'T fight -- it's that society can't
afford it. If it comes down to a woman defending her children,
the warriors have failed. (but the attacker is going to be very
very sorry!)

In Sime~Gen, the channels don't fight because the Householding
that doesn't put "channels & Donors first" doesn't survive, even
though the channels are the most powerful combatants.
Heinlein had a reverence and respect for the POWER of womanhood
that went bone marrow deep - beyond words.

Heinlein's vision of the reason why viable human societies
produce Warriors is very deeply ingrained in my concept of
"Intimate Adventure."

Intimate Adventure replaces the "action" in Action/Adventure
with Intimacy -- so it becomes Intimate/Adventure.
In Intimate Adventure the Warrior's courage is needed on the
field of Intimacy, as well as the field of physical battle.
The Warrior's ability to give wholly of himself in service of
the Group -- to hold nothing back -- is rooted in personal bonds
of all kinds. The first personal bond that begins this process
is infant to care-giver (child to mother).

Through life, an individual forms hundreds of such bonds with
varying degrees of Intimacy -- and eventually, finds a mate and
raises children.

Romance is that activated state just prior to forming a mating
bond -- and the process of forming that bond.

What attracts a woman to any man is that man's untapped ability
to form such a bond at the deepest, most intimate level -- the
level where "what does she see in him?" and "what does he see in
her?" are clear and self-evident.

Women seek Men who will put them first in "women and children
first" -- a man who will stand between danger and the survival
of the group.

That ability to stand between danger and the survival of the
group is based on that network of bonds formed with individuals
of the group, the ancestors' sacrifices, and the vision of the
accomplishments of the progeny. So deeply steeped in Heinlein's work,
I wrote House of Zeor to portray a "Group" that would be worthy
of the kind of Patriotic Warrior Heinlein wrote about, the
Householdings that exist to prevent the extinction of the human species.

Robert Heinlein advocated "Pay It Forward" -- so I'm paying his
legacy forward by teaching the Intimate Adventure style of
writing on simegen.com.


Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/