Worldbuilding For Science Fiction Romance

As I've pointed out in many posts on this blog, the sift-sort screen a writer uses to pull a second draft out of a first draft is built on the warp and woof of composition.

Composition is the essential ingredient that transforms Reality into Art.

Composition is created differently in different art forms, but the principles are always the same. If you know one art form, you can at least appreciate if not practice the others. And you have a leg up on learning the others.

"Business" and "Marketing" are two other art forms that today's writers really need an appreciation for.

Healing or Medicine are art forms where the medium is actually "science," or as in oil painting, the pigment is science and the canvass is the unique human being.

In say, interior decorating (something a writer must do with every interior scene) you choose a key color and come off that key color with compliments, contrasts, and tones to create a palette. Colors are associated with emotions and with various mystical functions. So what's happening in the scene, the subtext and plot movement dictate the choice of color of carpet and drapes.

The room's decor all stands or falls on the exacting relationships between the key color and everything in the room. You can (as a writer) choose color combinations to convey the mood of the scene set there. For example, if a main character is conducting a conversation in his living room, you can dress the main character to match or clash with his room's decor to convey a subtle mood to keep the visitor off balance.

In say, figure skating or ballet, choreography is composed to fill the display arena or stage, and costumes are colored to underscore the mood of the music.

In photography, an angle is chosen to follow the "perspective lines" you've seen oil painters trace in charcoal on a bare canvass -- to draw the viewer's eye precisely to a given focus spot. The good photographer will hang upside down from a tree limb to get that view.

In music, "scales" are created by the relative pitches of a set of notes, while other notes are excluded. From those notes on the scale, the composer creates a mood and plays the emotional tension up and down to thrill the audience.

Human emotion is rooted in the perception of the relationships of things to other things - sensory input to other sensory input. Pattern recognition is our survival mechanism.

The term "black velvet" for example calls forth color perception and tactile perception - add "voice" for sound, "A voice like black velvet" -- in truth such a phrase makes absolutely no sense. In Science Fiction Romance, it conveys a world of meaning, very precisely.

How you as a writer arrange things in relationship to other things in your fiction conveys your theme -- and the most powerful themes are the ones that are never stated in words.

The theme of a story is the key color, the key note of the scale, the defining edges of the skating arena or stage, the universe of discourse and all its unconscious assumptions.

The theme of a story is not just repeated. A motif is repeated, but the motif is chosen from the theme -- it is not the theme.

The theme is echoed or exemplified in every single element, every relationship of one element to another -- in the composition of the worldbuilding.

If something doesn't fit the theme of the story, fit into the arena or stage, inside the edges of the photograph, or onto the scale, the writer must delete that thing or change the "angle" (for example, choose a different main character or combine two characters, or separate one character into two.)

Sometimes, the element that's been deleted must be replaced by something to perform a plot function. The replacement must be chosen from the theme to complete the composition.

The deleted element may (in fact usually does) belong to some other story the writer has incubating in the subconscious. Usually what must be deleted is just plain GOOD, sometimes even GREAT -- very often the scene or character that has to be deleted is the one which first popped to mind bringing along with it the story that is now being told.

Just because it came to mind pulling this story with it - does not mean it belongs to this story.

A story has a composition that the reader will be looking for.

An element the writer feels is important might actually betray the reader's trust that this universe has a composition. That betrayal of trust will throw the reader out of the story, leave them bewildered and disappointed.

Writers Need Editors

Testing the "composition" and searching for any intrusive element (character, plot twist, ending point, beginning scene, mid-point, setting, McGuffin, backstory, background exposition) is a job for another pair of eyes besides the writer's eyes.

That's why writers need beta-readers, preferably not friends but acquaintances the writer knows have an appetite for the kind of story this is supposed to be.

Beta readers don't necessarily need a conscious mastery of composition.

That's really the writer's and editor's job. The beta reader however will squirm or point at something that doesn't work. "I didn't like this character" or "I just didn't understand this." "It would be better set in Italy." "This is boring." "The ending isn't satisfying."

Beta readers untrained in composition and the craft of writing will squirm and use non-quantitative (and very unhelpful) language. They will use subjective measures of how "good" a story is, not the objective measures I've been focused on in these posts. They don't know what they like, they just know the feeling of liking. (which is fine if they'll pay you!)

The writer's business is to know that what the beta-reader is pointing at may not actually be the source of the reader's problem.

What's being pointed at is not necessarily the source of the problem in the manuscript.

If a writer is professional enough to know this about beta-readers, a bad opinion from a beta reader won't "hurt" or dismay or evoke any particular emotional reaction. It will merely trigger an alert re-evaluation of the composition, searching for the source of the reaction (without asking the beta reader any further questions). Composition is always the source of the reader's reactions -- almost nothing else, really, but composition speaks directly to the reader's innermost nerve.

The reader may say the ending was unsatisfying while the writer knows that what made the ending unsatisfying was a missing scene that should have formed the middle of the story. But during writing, the writer didn't know what to put there in that scene, so didn't write it (or maybe cut it because it seemed to corny).

How do you compose that missing scene? Look at the composition as a whole, and check everything against the theme, and the bit that punches up the ending will be apparent.

This is much easier to achieve when you are not mixing genres.

But my favorite stories are all mixed-genre!

What Makes Science Fiction Romance into both Science Fiction and Romance without ruining either genre's punch?

Composition. That's it in a word, and Linnea Sinclair has noted that it's a hard struggle to get that balance right. This editor says that, that reader says something else, this audience wants more this, that audience wants more that.

Linnea and this phalanx of brave new writers are creating A NEW COMPOSITION.

Once created, other artists will be able to use that composition to hit the mark every single time.

At the moment, both readers, writers and editors are groping. Readers have to have their tastes expanded and the expectations trained. Writers have to learn a whole new set of no-no's. Editors have to understand the risks of exploring new territory also come with rewards.

So let's look more closely at the problem of composition with two genres, equivalent to jumping double-dutch, and see if we can find some rules to test.

Science Fiction has never been adequately defined, but for our purposes think of it as fiction about the scientific way of investigating the world, "going where no man has gone before." Think of Roger Bacon's "scientific method." Think of empiricism. Think about hypothesis, theory and fact. Think about well proven facts suddenly being demonstrated to be untrue.

ITEM: Evidence is mounting about Dark Matter and the Big Bang theory. The universe is actually not behaving as if there had been a Big Bang, at least as far as we can see now. NEW HYPOTHESIS has it that this is due to the Dark Matter strewn about the universe. But wait - it was an old hypothesis that Einstein came up with and then decided couldn't be true.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0106/New-findings-on-dark-energy-back-discarded-Einstein-theory

So "Science" is all about doubting what you know to be true, and the scientific method is all about knowing that you don't really know what you actually know for sure. In fact the more positive you are, the more likely you are to be wrong. But wait! Once you figure out that you were wrong, you know for sure that what you think now is also probably wrong!

That's the scientific method. Doubt, investigate, prove, and doubt some more. Never cease questioning.

Remember my blog post on Theodore Sturgeon's ASK THE NEXT QUESTION. That's the scientific method.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html

And so that's the plotting method of SCIENCE fiction.

Take something that is so relied upon that it is never questioned. Question it. What if? If only...? If This Goes On ..." Create a world based on something we know for a fact turning out to be not-true.

Romance is a story about the initial phase of forming an idealized and permanent relationship.

Science Fiction Romance is a Romance (primarily) that occurs during, in spite of, or because of, some "built world" which exemplifies the scientific way of looking at things by discarding a belief that has been well proven and well supported.

In SFR, the SF should be the background and the Romance the foreground (in artistic composition terms).

That means all the worldbuilding has to be shown not told as background elements.

BACKGROUND vs. FOREGROUND

"Background" and "Foreground" are composition concepts

We've discussed back story, background, and foreground at length in previous posts here. So let's simplify the definition we'll work with.

Think of a painting or photograph.

We see a tennis player, wearing pristine whites, positioned in the front of the frame, racket raised, ball standing still in front of the player, free hand under the ball. Off to the right is the suggestion of a net. Off to the left is the suggestion of people in the stands. Beneath the player's feet is astro-turf. Way back is a woman on a tall chair painted white. Behind her is some blurry greenery. Above is bright blue sky. The shadows are long to the left of everything.

Can you tell what's foreground and what's background?

If I did it right, the player is obviously foreground. The player is described FIRST, and in great detail. You should be able to tell that the player is about to SERVE THE BALL (it's an action in progress which is where you always start a story). You can tell it's pretty formal by the player's dress and the referee. You don't see the opponent at all. Everything else is "suggested" at varying degrees away from THE PLAYER. Everything that's described is positioned RELATIVE TO THE PLAYER.

The player is the foreground, the rest is background.

You do the same thing when you write any story. What you put first, what you describe in detail, what you describe everything in reference to, is the foreground.

The foreground is the focal point, the point the artist wants to draw the reader/viewer's eye to. It's the important thing. The thing ABOUT WHICH this story is. Everything else is chosen to support that focal point.

The PLOT is the development of the Relationship in the foreground.

The COMPLICATION to the plot is the development of the scientific puzzle in the background.

In ROMANCE, the foreground is the lovers and their relationship.

In SCIENCE FICTION the foreground is the single scientific principle that has been called into doubt, and the resolution of that doubt by investigation.

So how do you compose a blend of Romance in the foreground with Science Fiction in the background?

What works best, because the Romance readership is not totally composed of those trained in the rigors of the scientific method (or who are not wholly bemused by scientific thinking processes) is what's often called SOFT SCIENCES.

Sociology, psychology, parapsychology, politics, religion, economics, archeology, anthropology (maybe not paleontology which is mostly hard science).

But those are still sciences and make dandy SF backgrounds for real Romance.

So let's watch how a composition of these two genres can be created from scratch using the principles of composition so familiar in all artforms. This principle works for any genre combination.

For Example

Think of the art of fabric weaving and putting a pattern into a weaving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weft

The whole universe is often referred to as the product of a goddess that weaves the tapestry of events.

When you start out to build a "composition" you won't succeed if you apply your creativity to the principle behind the construction. Creativity has to be applied to the part of the composition that shows, the part that varies from one universe-fabric to another.

So look at the illustration of fabric weaving. The principle is that a warp is constructed of parallel strings that are made of a strongly spun yarn, and a softer, maybe weaker yarn is twisted between the verticle strings, over and under, now you see it now you don't.

The creativity of the artist is in the pattern, not in the concept of over-and-under.

The craft of the artist is in the clever way this thread and that thread are chosen for strength, for "hand" or for size. Make those choices wrong, and the "fabric" won't be a fabric -- it'll just unravel or fall apart.

The seamstress won't be able to make garments from the fabric because the seams will unravel if the craft of fabric-weaving isn't well applied.

You can, however, weave a wondrous fabric by combining different types of yarn, or making yarn out of more than one kind of fiber. Still, ultimately, over and under, strength and flexibility, are matters of craft.

How is that analogous to a story?

The Theme is the warp of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.

You choose what theme you want to use via your art, but you do have to have one or the fabric will fall apart.

A short story can have a theme and 1 sub-theme, the over and under of the warp, now it shows now it doesn't, to make a pattern.

The story's Setting is the weft or woof of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.

The theme is what your story says. The setting is how you say it.

You can use the same theme in different settings: a historical, a Regency Romance, a Roman Legion Romance, a Western, a Contemporary, a Paranormal, or Futuristic.

You can use the same warp with different woofs to get totally different fabrics.

The Setting is woven through, around, over and under the Theme of the fabric until they are of one piece.

The writer tamps the theme and setting down snug so the viewer/reader/audience can't tell the difference between Setting and Theme. Well tamped, the two together form a single, solid whole upon which the pattern is visible.

But the warp and woof of the fabric MUST NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION, or you spoil the effect for that "beta reader" type of reader (the ones who pay you).

The reader is the seamstress, cutting and sewing a garment from your fabric and its pattern for her own pleasure. If a seamstress likes working with your fabric (it holds shape, doesn't bunch when sewn, doesn't fade or pill) she'll buy more from you in a different color.

As Marion Zimmer Bradley quoted often, "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote."

The reader creates their own story by turning the material this way and that, cutting, pasting, (editing mentally).

The writer's job is not to impart the writer's story to the reader but rather to incite the reader's imagination to create their own garment from the material. The writer's stock in trade is fun, enjoyment, pleasure.

To test my analogy, just ask someone who has read the same book you have read to describe what they read. The book you read will likely be barely recognizable in the description.

Ever seen a post on a forum asking if anyone can identify "A book where ..." because they can't remember the title?

Each reader remembers something different about the story and fills in the gaps with their own creativity.

So in our example, first let's choose a theme (sometimes in actual writing, the theme is the last thing you discover about the story you've written -- it doesn't matter as long as the finished product holds together good and tight).

THEME

"Only Age Brings Wisdom." A corollary of Experience Teaches in the School of Hard Knocks.

We could tell the story of acquiring Wisdom in any Setting.

Acquiring Wisdom makes a great Romance theme because it is a logical extension of "Love Conquers All."

Since this is SFR, let's say our Setting is The Near Future -- a futuristic sociological SF Romance.

It's a Romance, so IN THE FOREGROUND (Tennis Player) we have two Classic Characters refusing to fall madly in love with each other because they are on opposite sides (over and under) of the thematic proposition, Only Age Brings Wisdom.

Our Hero is an advertising writer. He thinks up those annoying commercials that pitch products you don't want and makes you want them even if they're too expensive.

He's a Confidence Man at heart. He makes you do foolish things because you don't have Wisdom (yet). And he's proud of that ability.

He's spent lifetimes perfecting the ability to make anyone do anything. (BACKSTORY THE READER DOES NOT NEED TO KNOW: In past lives he ran the racket on rich widows, or he's done heiresses out of fortunes.)

But in this life, he's gone straight. All he's ever done in this life is to pick up women in bars and get them into bed. So he has absolute confidence in his ability to make any woman groan "I love you" within 3 days of meeting her. His ad campaigns are famous. They work.

And so he has no respect for women.

Our Heroine is one tough broad with an attitude.

She's spent lifetimes (as man or woman) building and holding a family together against all odds, often violent odds. She has decided that The Government is the enemy of The Family because of 18, or even 21 being the voting age. Youth has bad judgment. (Illustration - all the young people who fell for Country Wide's 0-down mortgages.) They marry the wrong people mistaking infatuation for love; they don't save enough money; they choose the wrong majors in college; they party before studying; and are apt to try drugs from peer pressure. She feels law shouldn't grant that much freedom before the age of Wisdom because it weakens society.

Betty Friedan is her heroine. An individual can cure the ills of society.

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE: recent NEWSWEEK ARTICLE
http://www.newsweek.com/id/230061
shows that the Baby Boomers who tried drugs in the Woodstock Summer of Love are now coming down with Hepatitis C which takes 30 years or more to incubate.

So instead of getting married and raising boys to march off to war, she's a career woman who has finally been appointed CEO of a Polling Organization that's made a name for itself using a computer algorithm she has created.

Contracted by an online Match Making Service, her company has been doing statistics on marriage and divorce, and the life-courses of children through variations of the situations of their parents. She's investigated (maybe won some kind of prize for?) the grandchildren of divorced parents, and the grandchildren of unhappy marriages (that should have ended in divorce), and how to match up people with such a history to create a solid marriage that will last. She has statistics on children pushed out on their own too young.

It's Election Year. She's out to change the world because all this family pain she's been researching is just too much to bear (echoes of past life stresses). She applies for and gets a contract to do political polling for, say, a major online presence - or possibly a TV network.

She's going to prove, scientifically, that advertising chooses the winning candidate, regardless of the real heartfelt views of the voters.

In other words, she's going to prove that the world is being run by advertisers -- like Our Hero, people who are only grifters twisting people's minds against their will.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertising damages families by pitting the opinions of youth against those of the family elders, splitting families with acrimony.

And now, at last, she has the computer power, the surveying power, the money and corporate power to achieve her goal of scientific proof and present her personal solution.

She wants to get Congress to raise the voting age to 45, which has been scientifically proven to be the upper limit of the effectiveness of advertising. People over 45 do not change their buying habits in response to seeing a commercial or online advertisement.

(That's why TV, movies, and even books are aimed at younger people.)

Her objective is to remove advertising from all political campaigns since it would be a waste of money if those who can be influenced by advertising are not allowed to vote.

Our Hero is of course hired by one of the political parties to create the best, most persuasive political ads ever.

If she succeeds and the voting age is raised to 45, he will essentially be impoverished because his only clients would be makeup and Slimfast manufacturers, maybe jeans makers. Maybe government anti-drug use commercials. He's scared of her. He likes his Manhattan penthouse and chauffeured limo lifestyle.

So as the campaign develops, her polling reveals the upper limit to the effectiveness of his ads. He desperately brings online more and more unproven jazzy techniques trying to push his effectiveness age higher, succeeding a few months at a time in persuading older folks to believe whatever nonsense he's peddling.

Worldbuilding

Think of every sort of change that will be wrought on our society as digital TV enters the market. We have a 3-D set coming onto the market this year, and a 3-D channel being launched. On Demand movies, series episodes, and anything you can find online now will be on your living room set (along with all the games that are online, probably console games too).

All the data sites like Google collect on you will make you the target for ads specifically crafted to make you do things against your better judgment, and these visuals will be very, very powerful because they really are aimed directly at your weakest spot.

Nothing like that exists today.

This is SFR. You can be manipulated and the technique does not even involve "subliminal advertising."

The hardware is evolving to where you'll even do email, twitter, Facebook etc on TV screens hung on various walls around your dwelling -- you'll never be out of eye-shot of such a device, and much of what it does may be 2-way interactive, tracking your behavior and feeding you advertising tailored to your behavior. Think of images that project into the air in front of you.

Think of how many of the changes in society sparked by cell phones were completely missed by futurologists of the 1950's (except Robert Heinlein; he got it).

Now, build a world, warp and woof, Theme and Setting tamped down to make one solid pattern. Build it out of the changes that computers, polling, and advertising psychology will have created in society by -- oh, say 2025. Add in human nature's never-changing traits (like the age of Wisdom; and question what age that might be.)

Polling and Advertising are natural allies against the you as a member of the population. Already, polling and advertising's single biggest client is government in the form of political campaigns.

Polling and Advertising are all about mass movement among people, all about crowd control and predicting and directing the majority of people to do this, think that, believe the other. Polling is the eyes and ears of Advertising, just naturally so.

But the internet, Web 2.0, social networking, are all about communication between individuals with no third orchestrating party, no gatekeepers.

At the moment, the third controlling orchestrating parties are struggling mightily with every scientific tool to get on top of this unruly population of social networkers. (Think e-publishing, self-publishing, blogging the news.)

Human nature is winning in the world where your readers live.

A very controlled and well edited, fact-checked world of journalistic ethics hard won in the early 1900's has suddenly turned back into the world of rumor-driven news as people talk directly to each other instead of through an editorial filter of journalists and fact-checkers. People hardly know the difference between opinion and fact already, and cell-phone-video and YouTube are confusing the issue even more. Seeing is believing, right? (That plane never crashed into the Pentagon -- see the video?)

What will happen next?

Well, the major theme of all Romance is Love Conquers All, and in our example here we're exploring Wisdom being gained only with Age. Romance is normally the business of the very young. The thrice divorced are not so susceptible to being swept off their feet.

Our Hero and Our Heroine, one in Advertising and the other in Polling, are at each other's throats with opposing views and equivalent computing power.

It's war.

What happens after they fall into bed for one wild night of carnal sexuality? (that's the PLOT)

Will they form an alliance, expose the winners of the election for the incompetents they are? Show how they were chosen by a manipulated youth vote? Will they split the country into a generation-war? (Think Star Trek: TOS's "genetics war" of the 1990's.)

Or does the choice of the over-45's win the election, then prove to be incompetent demonstrating that age has even less judgment of character?

Does the choice of the under-45's prove to be wiser?

Or do we find proof that young and old voters alike are insightful judges of character who are able to ignore commercials, given some special training in grammar school?

Or will one destroy the other's business, humiliating their own Soul Mate?

How can Love conquer the Pollster vs. Advertiser face-off?

The answer to that question lies in the Worldbuilding, in the warp and woof, and the answer is the Plot of this story.

In today's world, as things stand for your reader, there is no solution, and so there's no way this story could happen now. It's a Futuristic.

You, as writer, must artistically and creatively choose what changes to make this plot resolvable. (and plant that element in chapter one)

The world you build is the Setting or soft, flexible woof of the fabric that weaves around the warp or inflexible Theme revealing then concealing the ultimate statement about reality, thus asking the seminal question your Theme addresses -- is Wisdom only available to a human beyond age 45? Or are younger people wiser?

This is SF Romance, so the science of the worldbuilding has to provide a solution that could not exist now, that could not work the way things are now, that stretches the imagination of the reader and astonishes and delights with surprise, that provokes thought, that shakes the reader's certainties in unexpected ways, but also delivers the satisfaction of a plausible Happily Ever After ending.

Take the condition of Advertising (and the psychological research behind it) and the condition of Polling (how accurately it predicts outcomes of elections even now 11 months before the actual vote), add the condition of Politics (the show-don't-tell of a President addicted to his Blackberry so the company had to invent a new security protocol so he could keep it!) and extrapolate into our future.

In building your world, don't forget the force of Religion (think about those Mega-churches and the financing behind them as well as the social forces creating them). Then there is international politics, and the explosive effects of terrorism on old-form established governments (Yemen brewing up a storm while Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran hold world attention -- anyone noticed how close Yemen is to Sudan? Is there a power-axis brewing there?) Given the political instability, unemployed scientists and engineers are racing to supply tech solutions to "Security" at airports and elsewhere.

What will those unemployed brains come up with that will change the world our children will live in? Maybe change them? (don't forget genetics modifications to cure diseases)

And then there's China desperately trying to keep its people off the internet, and Iran choking off access to twitter.

There's class warfare (it's OK to tax the rich because they're a minority and it's majority rules -- and the rich can't have lobbyists advocating for them in Congress because it's wrong to go against the will of the majority even if the majority wants to destroy you) -- and generational warfare (youth that doesn't see the point of buying health insurance when old people get all the benefits.)

Look at the whole picture here, not one issue at a time but as a whole pattern, and extrapolate a result of all this churning change when mixed with the person-to-person communication revolution.

You can use astrology or any other tool you prefer to create your extrapolation rules.

If the theme is "Only Age Brings Wisdom" -- then you need an ending where one or the other or both protagonists reach that age and gain Wisdom, or gain Wisdom without reaching that age and disprove the proposition.

Youth growing up swimming in high-powered advertising has a much better chance of becoming immune than their forebears ever had against advertising when it was a new technology. But that doesn't seem to be happening today.

Turn the issue around backwards, and visit an alternate universe where only those under 45 are allowed to vote? How would that work? How did it start? Who could overthrow it? Should it be overthrown? Argue all sides of the issue, each side with a character exemplifying the point of view.

If the majority of voters were under 45, they could pass a law against lobbying and then pass a law (Constitutional Amendment maybe) with a voting-age ceiling.

As you build your world, warp and woof, you need to consider all the different beliefs your readers might hold and create a powerful (and plausible) spokesman for each of those beliefs.

That means you must be able to understand and explain a belief that you, personally, think is utter blithering nonsense. And you have to do it with a straight face because some of your readers take that nonsense as gospel.

Before you can expect your readers to believe six impossible things before breakfast, you have to be able to do it yourself -- and convince the world that you believe them!

How do you organize all those characters that exemplify the sides of an issue you're writing about and their different beliefs?

COMPOSITION. That's it. That's the whole trick of this entire profession.

You anchor the composition in your foreground character (the Tennis Player) and describe and portray each of the other characters from that central reference point. Everything in your composition is relative to your central reference point, just like notes in a scale or colors on a palette.

In a Romance, typically, there are two "central reference points" -- your lead couple. Their center-of-gravity (a point somewhere between them, perhaps closer to the more vivid or powerful one) is your central reference point. Everything in the composition is measured, described, formulated, colored, keyed to that central reference point.

From that central reference point, you choose the fiber, dye lot, and gauge of your theme to form the warp, and the time, place, social level, and details of your setting(s) to form the woof. Tamp them together until the reader can't tell the difference, and the rest will unfold naturally.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Science: Fact is funnier than Fiction

I'm always on the lookout for unusual, but plausible tricks to play on my heroes, although I balk equally at doing permanent damage, and at torments that result from stupidity.

Above all else, I require my SFR heroes and villains to be intelligent, effective and competent. Therefore, if my hero is going to suffer, it has to be a richly deserved come-uppance for his own arrogance, vanity, over-confidence, bad habits, or sexism. More often than not, I will strike him creatively below the belt, but my heroines… won't.

I love to start with a scientific fact, and weave it into an intelligent but humorous, character-driven Science-Fiction Romance plot. For instance, in googling "lightning" I was delighted to discover:

"Males are struck by lightning four times more than women."

Why is that? Scientists suggest this might be because males spend far more time in the great outdoors, swinging metal objects: swords, axes, hay forks, shotguns, rods (fishing rods), golfclubs… and thereby inviting disaster.

My own, more chaotic theory is that men bring Nature's wrath upon themselves owing to their size, physique, nature, and inclinations. They tend to whip out their whizzers and attempt to kill trees and offend dryads when Nature calls.

They do this standing up, creating a grounding arc of conductible matter, standing under trees (which is known to be ill-advised when a storm is brewing.) Ladies with a going problem on a golf course usually squat, if they cannot wait, which is considered a much safer attitude.

However… being of an inquiring mind, I proceeded to do a Boolean search  [men struck by lightning while urinating OR men electrocuted while urinating]. My search was highly satisfactory, not to confirm or refute my theory (which it didn't, at least on the first two pages), but because my search led me to some fascinating bits of esoterica.

The burning question (more specific than mine) Has a man been struck by lightning while urinating off a cliff ... went unanswered. I'm sure that was asking for too much information, anyway!

Apparently, a child "was struck by lightning while urinating on an electric cattle fence in rural Texas". And the same happened to a man in Montana. Then, there are men who mow the lawn during a storm, while listening to their ipods, and when struck, sue Apple.

Now, that's conduct unbecoming of a compellingly attractive Romance hero (or Romance villain.)

I came across several eminently sensible Navajo Taboos about appropriate behavior during thunderstorms, and also about poetic justice for those who are cruel to very small animals.

http://www.navajocentral.org/navajotaboos/taboos_nature.html

"Do not do a rain dance during a rainstorm because you will be struck by lightning."

In fact, I am working on a twist to this one for my next alien Djinn romance "Grand Fork". My heroine does the equivalent of a rain dance. The hero is struck.

"Do not urinate on an anthill because you will have trouble going to the bathroom."

If there were any truth to that, maybe as part of Health Care reform, patients might be required to wash away a few anthills before their treatment could be escalated to a prescription for Flowmax (or whatever it is called!)

PETA might object. So might the EPA…(please follow this link for news of the EPA granting a Presidential award to someone who came up with a way to stop animals urinating on trees!) Imagine! Perhaps you can see why my imagination has been described as Monty Pythonesque on more than one occasion. Science is such fun!

Even more to my taste is this site:

http://www.thenewz.com/weird-people.htm


WISCONSIN – "A man will spend 20 days in jail for urinating on an ATM machine. Apparently [the gentleman] became frustrated when the machine wouldn't give him any money and proceeded to pee all over the machine. Unfortunately, for [the gentleman], a security camera recorded the whole thing...."

He was lucky. A skinny dipper in New York State came away with less than a whole "thing" when

"… a giant snapping turtle used part of [the gentleman's] anatomy as a meal. [The victim] later stated, "I felt this excruciating pain in my groin and when I got my bearings, I realized a turtle had bitten my testicles and swam away with them…."


Naturally, I cannot introduce a successful snapping turtle into a Romance novel, because his happiness would tend to interfere with the traditional Happy-Ever-After of a Romance, which ought to involve marriage and the prospect of children.

However, there was a dangling bait element in Insufficient Mating Material (my second alien romance novel in the god-Princes of Tigron series).

I'd been intrigued by Discovery Channel documentaries about candiru (a bloodthirsty little fish from the Amazon river) being attracted to urea and mistaking a man's equipment for the gills of its normal prey.

The true science inspired me to write the "a fish nibbled me" scene. Now, I don't approve of doing permanent harm to my heroes, so I might as well tell you that the teeny weeny willie fish was a plot device, dreamed up by the hero because he wanted the heroine to take a close look at his wedding tackle… He had a very good reason for that.

Djetth, hero of Insufficient Mating Material, faced a lot of challenges, including a broken jaw at the beginning of the book, and being marooned with the heroine on an island without running water or toiletries, and being hunted by a swat team of assassins. His story was immense fun to write, and although the book was categorized as a fantasy, there's a great deal of hard (well, sound) science in it.

Tarrant-Arragon led pretty much a charmed life, but he did experience an unpleasant moment, thanks to an alien version of the "Teddy Bear" cactus, which I learned about on a corporate team-building trip to Arizona. (I also discovered on that trip that I am a fantastic shot with a six-gun.)

The cactus's fruits have papery spines that are attracted to liquid, and it can kill a rabbit or any other animal by sinking deeper and deeper into the flesh. If you remove the spines and peel the cactus –which our guide did—it tastes a bit like kiwi, and is a very good source of Vitamin C. We were also told (after I'd been the group member who volunteered to sample it) that it was simultaneously a powerful aphrodisiac and laxative.

Since I cannot possibly leave you on a low note, I shall end with a scientific term for a phobia.

Keraunophobia : an abnormal fear of being struck by lightning.


I wish you all a very safe, happy, healthy, prosperous New Decade.

Rowena Cherry
Originally posted (with fewer scientific links and references) as part of a two-week-long contest (ending today, Sunday 3rd January) at http://lasrguest.blogspot.com/2009/12/guest-blog-rowena-cherry.html


(Visitors who leave comments on ALL posts have a chance to win a bundle of prizes)

Alien Romances Is Part Of The Galaxy Express's SFR Holiday Blitz

THOSE WHO WISH TO BE ENTERED IN THE SFR HOLIDAY BLITZ SHOULD ADD A COMMENT TO THIS POST.

See the sidebar for cover art of the prizes to be won in the SFR Holiday Blitz on this blog.

*****

The Galaxy Express streaked onto my radar with Heather's very first post on May 19th, 2008 which was titled "All Aboard -- We're Ready To Launch", had witty subheadings such as "It Takes A Village To Maintain A Lunar Outpost" and "A Wormhole By Any Other Name..." 

I did enjoy Heather's scholarly nod to "Romeo and Juliet"!

The Wormhole paragraph included a live link to this alien romances blog, which was very courteous and kind of Heather, and which resulted in a Google Alert.

I also rather enjoyed thinking about the village. Does anyone else remember a rock group called "The Global Village Trucking Company"?

Moreover, my favorite novel by Isaac Asimov is "The Gods Themselves" and one of the three parts involves a love story on a lunar outpost. What was yours?

How did you discover The Galaxy Express ?
Do you remember which of Heather's posts set fire to your imagination? If so, please tell the story in the comments here, below the official contest announcement which I quote:

The holiday season upon us, and that means 2010 is simmering just below the horizon. Start your New Year off right with a chance to score a free read in one of the hottest up and coming genres around—Science Fiction Romance!

Here’s the scoop: 12 bloggers have teamed up with 17 authors for your chance to win over 30 SFR books. Whether you’re new to the genre, or a fan looking to add to her collection, this event is for you.

Best of all, it’s dead simple to enter: There are no quizzes to answer, no hoops to jump.

For your chance to win all of the books listed in the sidebar by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Linnea Sinclair, Susan Sizemore, Margaret L Carter, Susan Kearney, and Rowena Cherry all you have to do is leave a comment for this post.

Print book prizes are limited to U.S. residents unless otherwise stated.

The deadline to enter is midnight on Friday, December 11, 2009. The winner will be announced on Saturday, December 12, 2009.

But don’t stop here! Increase your chances of winning even more books by visiting all of the participating blogs.

It’s easy:  Just click on one of the links to the participating bloggers below. Make sure to leave a comment on the post titled “SFR Holiday Blitz.” From there, you can then jump to the next blog. There’s a wide variety of books to win so why miss out?

Other blogs:

The Galaxy Express (which started the phenomenon, and could entertain you for hours!)
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net

Dirty Sexy Books

http://www.dirtysexybooks.com/Dirty_Sexy_Books/Home/Home.html

Ella Drake http://elladrake.blogspot.com 

Enduring Romance http://enduringromance.blogspot.com 

Flying Whale Productions http://maryfitz.typepad.com/my_weblog  

Lisa Paitz Spindler http://www.lisapaitzspindler.com/blog  

Love Romance Passion http://www.loveromancepassion.com  

SciFiGuy http://www.scifiguy.ca 

Spacefreighters Lounge http://spacefreighters.blogspot.com 

Take It To The Stars http://takeittothestars.blogspot.com 

Queen of the Frozen North http://www.cathypegau.blogspot.com 

You are here:
Alien Romances http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com 

Visitors can also see almost all the books that have been donated in the "Biggest Bang" "Listmania" on Amazon... We'd really appreciate some "Helpful" votes.

Moreover, if any science-fiction-romance lovers who are signed in to their Amazon accounts click through to the book pages to read the reviews, excerpts, and what-have-you, we'd very much appreciate it if readers would either check or write in tags such as "sfr" or "science fiction romance" to help other readers find great examples of this subgenre.

Thank you for your visit, your comments, and your support of SFR.

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 
on behalf of the alien romances authors

Science Fiction Romance and The Comedy Of Manners

Almost any plot or subgenre of literature can be reinvigorated as science fiction.

Westerns are a natural. You simply give black hats to some of your fellow Space-Ark-mates, or colonists and substitute aliens for the gentlemen in war bonnets.

Better still, make the alien equivalents of Native Americans the heroes. Or, make all of humankind walk in the shoes of all the aboriginal peoples our own colonists have wronged in the past, and present the incoming aliens as pilgrim fathers or conquistadors. Ah, but that isn't the stuff of Romance. Moreover, the natives win in "Independence Day".

You can have Quest plots (The Holy Grail in outer space... and very often, as with the Da Vinci Code, the holy grail in sfr is a fertile, pure young woman), Discovery plots, Adventure plots, Pursuit plots, Rescue plots, Mysteries (including murder mysteries), Rivalry plots, Revenge plots, Underdog plots, Transformation and/or Metamorphosis Plots, Beauty and the Beast, Coming Of Age, Who's Coming For Dinner (prejudice/forbidden love)....

The one plot that may not translate so well into an alien romance is The Comedy Of Manners... which in turn might be described as a highly entertaining, watered down Morality Play. (Erring protagonists don't die, they just end up married till death do them part.)

Yes, I watched "Sense And Sensibility" last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The cast included Emma Thompson, Tim Rickman, and a rather hunched Hugh Grant. I wonder how long it will be before Emma Thompson does us (us Romantics) a huge favor and makes movies of some of the Georgette Heyer novels.

The trouble with Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer --when it comes to space travel-- is that their plots and heroines don't kick butt. They are rewarded for not kicking butts, nuts, or giving tongue lashings to anyone. Heyer heroines, actually, are more dynamic. Some of them do have violent tempers, like Leonie, and they shoot men (or want very much to do so) and fight with swords, and cross dress (like Viola and a few other Shakespearean heroines), and drive racy vehicles too fast.

A Comedy Of Manners depends on the heroine wanting to marry a gentleman, but not being able to tell him so. She is too well-mannered, and he requires more encouragement than she offers.

Usually, she has a sister (possibly multiple sisters) who is/are man magnets, often for the wrong sort of man, and who behave like the sort of woman/women a chap would take as his mistress, but would never marry. Villainy in a man could mean that he has sex with a virtuous young woman (or tries to do so, or promises to do so within marriage) and then leaves her.

Imagine! James T Kirk would be the worst of villains in a Comedy Of Manners. The continent Spock would be the hero.... which he was for most of us, anyway.

In science fiction romance, our heroines have to be in greater physical danger than losing their reputations (ie being suspected of not being quite virginal). Unless they are Queens or Empresses married to a Henry VIII type, and likely to be subjected to a show trial and executed. But that is a different sort of plot. The archetypical Sir Jasper does not cut the mustard as a sfr villain. He'd have to want her world as well as her body.

Our heroines in futuristic settings are expected to be sexually liberated, to have smashed the glass ceiling, to hold their own and often their hero's (blaster or equivalent weapon). They have to rock. And multi-task. They cannot sit around, being nice and proper.

By rights, Eleanor ought to have ended up with Colonel Brandon. We saw much more of the Colonel. He was by far the most heroic. However, he did not want Eleanor. He was doggedly determined to love Marianne... and Marianne was the stock "silly girl" whom (in my opinion) we see far too often, setting themselves up as role models for our impressionable daughters in endless sit coms, Disney movies for teens, and high school dramas.

Eleanor got the man she wanted, but only because of the perfidy of Miss Steele. Colonel Brandon's patience was rewarded... but in sfr, does any hero or heroine worth his or her salt settle for being second best?

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Vampire Archetype Flashburned Into Memory

Before we start, look at the graph on this blog tracking the meteoric rise of Vampire Romance by number of titles per year over 10 years.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

I found this via the following post on Twitter which I retweeted (I don't know who Michele Hauf retweeted here):

RT @michelehauf: RT Track the meteoric rise of vampire romance over the past decade at VampChix! http://bit.ly/ycx0r

That's a shortened URL going to the whole blog - the long URL above goes directly to the specific post with the graph that tells it all.

And if you haven't investigated my Vampire Romances, take a look at http://www.simegen.com/writers/luren/ to sample free chapters and look at what other Romance writers have said (I can still post more comments if you have any you want linked back to your own website.)

OK, now that you've done your interesting homework, come to class, sit in your chair, fold your hands and prepare to be bored out of your mind with one of my insanely long posts -- which is worse this time because I have to brag or there's no way to make this point, and the point is really, really abstract and you probably don't want to know, and maybe it really ought to be kept a deep, dark secret.

--------Skip If You Know All About Archetypes-------

We've discussed archetypes before, and I've always assumed everyone knows what they are and how they work and why. But maybe not. If you know all about archetypes you can skip this section of this post and still understand the point. Look for the dashed-line divider below that says SKIP THIS SECTION IF. to see if you need to read that section.  That would be two whole sections of this monster that you can skip and still get the point.

The thing with archetypes is that they don't look like whatever manifestation you're seeing them inside of.

They don't seem "real" and have no absolute specifics about them. It takes some practice to walk the world and spot interacting archetypes in the people around you and their biographies.

People are so different, no two alike, and the differences matter to us. The similarities, not so much.

How can you say one person is "just another version" of another person?

But that's what successful Romance Writers (and other genre writers) do to make their characters (and dialogue) Flashburn into reader's Memory.

Some really successful writers don't even know (and shouldn't know) they're doing that at all.

Learning a little (very little) bit of Astrology can help sort the world around you into archetypes, but that's the lazy woman's way of learning it.

You can't make a diagram of an archetype (though that's what Tarot cards are and that works for some people). You can't do an animated gif to show what archetypes are. They aren't tangible or visible.

Archetypes are psychological patterns of non-manifested FORCE or ENERGY. They are templates for reality, not reality itself.

Yes, an archetype is a little like a web page template. It's not the template that matters to the page visitor, it's the color, sound, motion, words, videos, links, that make this page different from that page, and that is all that matters to a visitor, "what's here that's different from what's there."

But web designers know that what makes all the content accessible and high-impact on visitors (stopping surfers mid-click), conveying the meaning that is within the content is the underlying pattern, the design, the composition, the template.

Fictional characters are just like web pages in that sense.

If the template design shows through you get a stereotype. If the template design does not show through, you get a living, breathing, psyche-penetrating, communicating, real character who seems like a real person and "lives" in the reader's memory, dreams, and even manifests in their lives (yes, I have testimonials from my readers about how my characters have affected their real life decisions and results - to the good, thankfully!)

New writers need to learn to percieve this dual level of reality (template vs. content) because what matters to people is the specific manifestation of the archetype, not the archetype itself. "Happiness" is achieving a specific manifestation of whatever archetype is operating in life (and none of the other possibilities within the archetype), and nobody cares what the archetype is as long as the specific desired manifestation appears.

People and thus characters prefer to ignore the fact that an archetype encompasses their reality. It's irrelevant. They want what they want.

For example: In Astrology, Tarot and in Archetypes, there is no distinction between "winning" and "losing" -- between succeeding and living or failing and dying. These are polar opposites to us living beings, but irrelevant distinctions on the level of archetypes.

I'll leave you with that concept for a while because it's so nonsensical to our ordinary consciousness it takes a while to sink in. But it's the main clue you will need to understand a couple of future points I hope I can make on this blog.

Archetypes exist on the astral plane, or in Kabbalah Yesod represented by The Moon in astrology.

The best show-don't-tell I've ever seen for "the astral plane" was the Star Trek: The Original Series episode SHORE LEAVE (also written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of my favorite authors and I knew him well enough to know that he understood the astral plane well enough to have encoded it in this episode deliberately, though I don't know if he did.)

Here's a reminder about the episode on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shore_Leave_%28Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series%29

What you think, wish, dream, what just crosses your mind, what you subconsciously fear or want, becomes MANIFEST on the astral plane. Your psyche is the template, and energizes your personal reality. On the Astral Plane, anything you want (or fear or don't want) will surround you.

The Kabbalistic trick is to understand that the astral plane is the foundation of our actual concrete everyday reality. And our reality actually is influenced starkly by what we think, dream, feel, and subconsciously hold dear.

Archetypes are the pattern of illusion and delusion, and they're plastic.

In addition to your personal manifestations of archetypes in your own life, archetypes have attributes defined by the human Group Mind that downloads and pours content into them, content that is displayed on that Group Mind's homepage.

Maybe all archetypes are eternal and the same ones arise wherever humans are. The Magician. The Mage. The Vampire. The Maiden. The Mother. The Crone. The King. The Queen. The Youth. The Outsider. The Alienated Hero. The Warrior. The Shaman.

Which are you living inside? Living with? Playing publically?

You can recognize archetypes manifest in something you're familiar with. A badly handled archetype becomes a stereotype, just as a badly handled "foreshadowing" becomes "telegraphing."

Last week we discussed Sharon Green's WARRIOR WITHIN starring Terrilian.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (which post is mis-named, it is Astrology part 7)

Remember what we discussed and think about The Female Warrior Archetype - Amazon? - Marion Zimmer Bradley's Renunciates?

Archetypes do change how they manifest over generations. Yet the more they change the more they stay the same. Still, the available options you may choose from in your life or your novels change with the Group Mind.

You can change your options list by changing what Group Mind you belong to. Think about how a person can change when they do something drastic in their life - such as a religious conversion, joining the Army, graduating and leaving the "old neighborhood" losing touch with all the kids from class and finding new friends among co-workers. Consider a Rock Star fan who moons&moans, then cuts loose and goes Groupie, following the star around the world, associating with the Star's friends and forgetting family. Same person: different manifestation.

Today the female image has shifted markedly from where it was in, say, the 1940's before women contributed to the USA winning World War II. Now some women have become (or been brainwashed into becoming) suicide bombers, and there are more acts of violence against women in TV fiction than ever before since anyone started counting violence on TV. But at the same time, women are combat trained and gaining combat stripes in the armed forces, rising to high rank where that was prohibited before.

Something is changing in our Group Mind, and that change is accelerating.

But that's all very theoretical and abstract. Worse, that quick reprise doesn't even scratch the surface of what we can see once we are able to sort the world around us out into archetype and manifestation. But seeing doesn't accomplish much.

What can we do with this concept of the archetype?

Can we make our Group Mind change its mind about Relationships, and thus consequently about the merit of the Romance Genre in general and all its variants in particular, and possibly even the entire notion of what constitutes "peace" in this world?

----SKIP THIS NEXT SECTION IF...--------

...blatant bragging offends you or if you're already familiar with the origin of the Sime~Gen Universe novels and all the Star Trek connections underlying them, and how this all spawned Vampire Romance.

You can happily skip this section, and still probably get the point anyway. Scroll down to the next line of dashes where it says POINT.

In the Bantam paperback STAR TREK LIVES! on which I was the primary author, we discussed the then popular theory that "Spock" was actually a new Archetype - The Alienated Hero but heroic because of Intelligence not Brawn. In retrospect, it's clear that Spock actually raised the prestige profile of the Geek, the outcast Class Brain. Spock was considered sexy! The Group Mind attitude toward the Geek, The Brain, the Egghead changed in much the way we would like to see the prestige profile of the Romance Genre raised.

It's unclear whether the Archetype illustrated by Spock caused the change, or emerged because of the change sparked by Star Trek -- possibly this Group Mind/ Archetype Manifestation process is as interactive as the manifestation of Violence on TV vs. Violence in Society. Think of bootstrapping, or climbing the inside of a rock chimney. It's not either/or. It's a little this, a little that, until change manifests.

Smart men weren't considered sexy in the 1960's, any more than smart women were attractive.

The book STAR TREK LIVES! (which was published in 1975, six years after my first SF story sale and a year after House of Zeor, my first novel) blew the lid on Star Trek fandom and brought in (via the Star Trek Welcommittee) hoards of new fan writers brim full of stories to tell.

Some of those new fan writers had grown up reading Romance and though they may have watched the same TV screen with the men in the room, these women saw a different Star Trek. They saw hot romance sizzling in the background and sub-text of every scene, and that is what they wrote about in fanzines.

They literally invented from scratch what has become the genre of SFR or Science Fiction Romance.

The first Inspirational Science Fiction Romance is posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

And as published Relationship Driven HEA Trek, they lured many readers into the genre until it finally (after several sad failures) burst into the Romance genre scene with THE VAMPIRE ROMANCE.

Huh?

What has VAMPIRE ROMANCE to do with SFR? With Science Fiction?

Vampires are FANTASY. Paranormal. Aren't they?

Vampires are supernatural EVIL, so they have to be FANTASY right?
Vampires can't be Science Fiction?

Vampires are Horror. That's the vampire archetype. Right?

How many posts have I done on this blog explaining the paradigm and trope underlying genre fiction, and how a new writer breaks that trope at peril of life, limb, reputation and career?

Romance trope requires the couple find each other attractive (if not at first; eventually).  Real attraction often first manifests as repulsion, and that makes a good Romance, but ultimately it must transmute into an attraction the reader can relate to.

And how can anyone love something EVIL?

Evil isn't sexy.

Surely not?

Oh, our predecessors soooo lacked imagination!

Or did they?

When and where did SFR and romantic Vampires actually begin?

Margaret Carter, one of our staunch contributors on this blog is the expert on the history of Vampire literature, so I'll let her point you to the answers on that. It was actually longer ago than you might think.

Major classics of Great Literature aside, though, look again at that graph I pointed you to at the beginning of this post.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

It only goes back to 1997 which is ancient history for most readers of this blog. But I'm discussing the manifestations of the Vampire archetype in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's. That graph would not be parabolic had there not been 30 years of cultivating of the Group Mind's taste before 1997.

The Romance mass paperback publishers found there was a sudden market in a certain age group for Vampire Romance.

The Vampire did, however, turn off a lot of romance readers.

It disturbs people. Even today you say "I write Vampire stories" in a full room and listen telepathically and you'll hear "Evil" and all the religious people will leave the room or try to convert you.

OK, so the Romance publishers started putting VAMPIRE ROMANCE or something similar on the spines of those certain, slightly different, romances -- romances with a supernatural dimension, edgy romances flirting with the issue of Evil -- to warn off their more sensitive readers.

Meanwhile, in Science Fiction and the budding Fantasy field (yes, before STAR TREK fanfic, there really wasn't much of an adult Fantasy field - "adult" not meaning graphic sex scenes, but fantasy that was not aimed at 10 year olds) there was a flood of Vampire novels published.

Concurrent with the Science Fiction genre was the Horror Genre, often confused with SF, and most all the Vampire novels ended up labeled Horror even those with Good Vampire Heroes. That was when I started reading a lot of "Horror" even though I dislike the Horror genre. Non-Horror genre novels were published under the "Horror" label because nobody else would have them -- they contained a VAMPIRE!

A genre example.

Star Trek was the first real SF on TV. When it was cancelled after the first 3 years, and went into syndication so successfully, producers began to search for a way to lure the Star Trek audience to a new show.
They presented Star Trek fans with SPACE 1999, thinking they had the combination. But SPACE 1999 was actually HORROR FANTASY, and SF fans just don't respond to Horror (or if they do, it's with a different part of their literary taste buds.) SF fans at that time were somewhat allergic to Fantasy as well because most of the best selling Fantasy writers were women (SF editors wouldn't buy SF from women, so women went and made their own genre. So what else is new?)

This was such a hot-button issue in the 1970's that when I was nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1973 for my Star Trek fanzine universe Kraith (up for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) there was a big political flap in SF fandom at Worldcon, and that was before K/S emerged.

Kraith plays with telepathic bonding and all the Theodore Sturgeon elements, Vulcan culture and its being shaped by telepathy. But those who voted against Kraith did so because it was Star Trek and was nominated by Star Trek fans who happened to be Worldcon members.

The feeling was that Worldcon was being taken over by "those people" - actor groupies who'd never read an SF novel. The disdain had a similar feel to the disdain focused on Romance and Vampire Romance. Today, Fantasy out-sells SF. If you graph the stats, I'll bet you find the same parabolic curve seen in the graph we're studying here on Vampire Romance titles.

In Science Fiction, the Hero prevails. The ending (as with Romance) has to have a specific flavor -- winning; triumph; achievement; understanding; satisfaction. Romance needs the HEA, the Happily Ever After, ending, and nothing else sells quite as well as an HEA.

An HEA can't actually be generated by a heroic success -- it isn't "Happily Ever After" if one partner forces the other to love them. That makes a good middle, but not an HEA.

SF needs the success ending, whatever success is. It has to be a definitive success and it has to be brought about by the Protagonist's personal actions which must proceed from the protagonist's ability to THINK CLEARLY. And preferably in an application of the scientific method, to resolve the plot's conflict via scientific reasoning even if the problem isn't actually a science problem.

SF became "Action-Adventure" because cerebral stories don't sell well, so publishing demanded that the SF novel end with a VICTORY imposed by FORCE of some kind - i.e. action. It wasn't enough to solve an intellectual puzzle any more. There had to be a physical problem with physical action and a physical resolution.

In the Horror genre ending, the protagonist must not prevail over Evil.

Evil can never be destroyed. The most you can achieve is to cram it into a coffer, a closet, a cave, and seal it with a magical seal that will hold for centuries, or millenia with luck. You have to leave the problem to your descendants. You can't win. That's the message of Horror. And SF is all about winning definitively, and that total triumph when a definitive solution slams into reality and changes everything.

The Horror premise is that evil is a property of reality, and reality wouldn't exist without it. Good and Evil must always be at odds, always in conflict, but neither can ever win.

The premise of SF is that humanity will prevail.

And that, as Gene Roddenberry said so many times, is the premise of Star Trek. We will go where no man has gone before, and we will prevail. We will prevail by intellect, compassion, and by wisdom. (He used that word, Wisdom, a lot in everyday talking, not just in speeches before throngs -- "When humanity will be wise ..."  )

It's a philosophical difference that the producers of Space 1999, and the next TV offering to Star Trek fans (marketed specifically to Star Trek fans) Battlestar Galactica (the original), just couldn't grasp.

And so both shows failed to capture the Star Trek audience which continued to grow and grow, through an animated Saturday morning cartoon version of Trek, through books and the films, and into several TV series, with convention after convention making headlines everywhere, even on TV news. What an embarrassment.

Eventually, Ronald D. Moore succeeded in creating a Battlestar Galactica remake that grabbed Trek fans - he had the experience.

Here's his comment on my theory of Intimate Adventure:

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

That link reveals that Ronald D. Moore is a Sime~Gen reader, maybe fan, and it's posted with his permission. I did send him a set of Kraith Collected at his request.

Here's Ronald D. Moore's filmography on imdb.com

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601822/

So after Anne Rice's first novel INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE became such a runaway best seller, Horror genre re-exploded with a new wave of Vampire novels. But they were horror vampires, bent on evil, destructive killers, not to be reasoned with, and with no shred of humanity left.

Then the Romance Genre pretty much invented THE VAMPIRE AS GOOD GUY and those books flooded the market for years. Then all of a sudden (about the time I was writing Those of My Blood - 1985-ish) you couldn't sell a Vampire Romance. Editors said don't send it, we're overstocked.

Everyone thought that meant they'd never publish any more, and the genre was a failure. I finished Those of My Blood anyway, and after more than 20 submissions (the only time that ever happened to me, and my agent was adamant that it would sell) it sold to St. Martin's Press for Hardcover. St. Martin's touted it as my breakout book. It was published in 1988. The paperback came out in 2003, but the new publisher refused to label it Vampire Romance because it takes place on the moon and so nobody would buy it. The graph we're studying begins in 1997.

Those of My Blood - Amazon Page.

Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series started with Guilty Pleasures in 2002, and either rode or created a contemporary urban fantasy Vampire Romance/Horror genre mix. Look at 2002 on that graph.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show was on the air as TV beginning in 1997 when this graph begins.

Archetypes keep creating this kind of chicken/egg problem. When you can't solve a problem, as every math student knows, it's because you haven't stated the problem correctly.

OK, so what happened with the archetypes from Star Trek (1966) to now (2009)?

That's over 40 years, two generations.

These kinds of Group Mind archetype changes span generations. See my post on generations and taste from October 2009 which really is Astrology Part 6 (the November 2009 one is Part 7) -- on Pluto and the generations:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

Think about that post on Pluto because there's more to say about how Pluto manifests via the Group Mind and why it's so clear that Astrology is utter nonsense. Let the notions soak in for a while.

Archetypes are always shifting and changing in the way they manifest, but there is (by definition) a core pattern to each archetype that is somehow inherent in all humanity and unchanging through millenia.

These patterns turn up in all cultures over all times that we've any record of. The Vampire myth is everywhere in one form or another. It's always been there, just not the subject of popular fiction. (of course "popular fiction" and "mass market" are new phenomena, and are now melting away under the force of the specialty niche market ebook!)

So what happened between the advent of Star Trek fan fiction (STAR TREK LIVES! was published in 1976 but it was based on 5 years of research in Star Trek fan fiction) and the explosion of Vampire Romance novels that continues today in a rapidly evolving form of Paranormal Romance, SFR, and Time Travel Romance, etc etc.

How could Science Fiction spawn the Romance Vampire?

Science Fiction readers tended to loathe the Romance field. Romance readers tended to loathe Horror. All vampires are horror genre.

What happened?

Before there is a runaway best seller in any new sub-genre, there has to be what Heather at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ called in her post
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/10/does-science-fiction-romance-need-gene.html
a "Ground Zero" where the explosion of a genre happens.

Before we get to that Ground Zero, there are usually a number of novels that do pretty well, but just don't attract any attention. Audiences build a taste for a genre slowly (actually as we're seeing here over generations), and then BOOM something hits big time. Commercialization interests notice the small following, and promote it using sly, sneaky, underhanded but effective advertising tools that cost a lot of money.

And its a generational thing. In the 1980's, there were a series of children's books for pre-teens and tweens set in High School and featuring Vampires -- evil ones, and not-so unreasonably evil ones. They conditioned an entire generation to be willing to try things with fantasy and urban fantasy - and set the stage for Harry Potter.

In 1974, my first novel, House of Zeor was published.

It's the first novel in the Sime~Gen Universe, but my first sale is a Sime~Gen story that appeared in the January 1969 issue of WORLDS OF IF Magazine edited by Fred Pohl.

House of Zeor was reviewed by Jean Lorrah with the title of the review being VAMPIRE IN MUDDY BOOTS.

The Sime~Gen Universe is built on the Good Guy Vampire with a core of pure DANGER.

As a child, I had read a number of SF works with Vampires as aliens from outer space, or otherwise built on the Vampire archetype.

But I always felt there was something wrong, something missing, something just plain out of FOCUS in these SF universes. Very often they were published as SF but would have been published as Horror if they didn't have science fiction in them.

I wrote Sime~Gen to fix what was wrong with the portrayal of Vampires. The first story, Operation High Time, is available on the Web for free reading (It's not very good, but it is short.)

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/oht.html

From 1970 to 1975 I was working on STAR TREK LIVES! researching Star Trek fanfic (and writing tons of it in Kraith which you can read online for free at http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) and meeting Marion Zimmer Bradley, and marketing HOUSE OF ZEOR.

I was also raising two kids. I don't know how I did it all.

Sime~Gen, complete with Vampire archetype to the letter, came from the mid-1950's, long before I knew anything about archetypes, but I did know Vampires from SF.

I know now that what was totally missing from those early SF Vampires that I so needed to "correct" was Relationships as the plot-driver.

So that's what I wrote into House of Zeor - Relationship as a plot driver.

It's about Vampires in a Science Fiction Universe with a framework of a Romance plot, a solid love-story in every novel, a love-story that eventually shapes the way things turn out.

Sime~Gen has a hidden Fantasy premise (ESP, Magic, and the supernatural that comes out later in the novels). Because of ESP and Magick, it is disqualified as SF.

It's mixed genre with the mixture hidden so it could be published as SF (because no other genre would allow the SF part). But House of Zeor is actually a non-Horror Vampire novel with a love-story plot driver.

House of Zeor was written during and after I did a close analysis of Star Trek, Star Trek fan fiction, and why fans wrote (and read) Star Trek fan fiction.

The lead character of House of Zeor is Spock, but he's not the POV character. He's a scientist in a non-scientific world struggling to solve a problem with scientific thinking. So the book really is SF. But he's a Vampire with all that implies - except he's not supernatural, he just has supernatural Powers (but he doesn't know that).

I sold 65 copies of House of Zeor on a money-back guarantee in the expensive hardcover edition to Star Trek fans who liked Spock, and never had one returned.

I wrote House of Zeor to prove the validity of the hypothesis I set forth in Star Trek Lives! about why fans wrote stories about Spock. That's why House of Zeor had to be published before Star Trek Lives! (to see if what I said in STL! was true.)

House of Zeor connected. It was in print continuously for over 20 years, and came back in the Omnibus SIME~GEN: THE UNITY TRILOGY.

Meanwhile, Jean Lorrah joined me collaborating on Sime~Gen novels, and writing on her own in the universe, too. Many readers prefer her touch on Sime~Gen.

Further proof of my theory about the connection between the Vampire Archetype and Star Trek -- and thus the nature of the SF genre -- was supplied when fans of Sime~Gen began writing their own stories in the Sime~Gen Universe, spawning at one point, 6 publishing fanzines of fiction and non-fiction about Sime~Gen.


Much of that fan written material is currently available online for free reading, and new material is still being added at http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

which is an index page full of links to huge sections of Sime~Gen fan activity. To read fiction, see Rimon's Library at the bottom of that page.

To read free chapters of the published novels and find links and background information on Sime~Gen see
http://www.simegen.net (net not com)
or
http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/

So just as Star Trek spawned fanzines of fiction (prior to Star Trek, SF 'zines contained NO FICTION, but only non-fiction, letters, opinion, personal updates, the kind of thing you find on blogs -- and like fanzines, blogs have evolved to carry fiction), so Sime~Gen spawned fanzines full of fiction, and a little non-fiction.

The Vampire is still my favorite archetype, but as GOOD GUY.

------------POINT-------------------

At last, to the point of it all.

On this blog, I've been discussing various philosophical nooks and crannies, plus a whole lot of intellectualized analysis of story telling techniques.

I've discussed marketing, and genres, and social networking and the changes wrought either because of ebooks or that ebooks are the result of other changes in the publishing industry (such as a major change in the tax laws that killed the mid-list).

And each of these individual points I've made are defining a universe of discourse for solving the problem of the attitude of the general public toward the Romance Genre, and SF Romance and Paranormal Romance, Vampire Romance, Alien Romance.

I've told you a lot about writing technique, simply asserting that doing it this way assures your story will be forgotten and doing it that way will assure that your story will be remembered and called a classic.

I've never offered any evidence that I know what I'm talking about.

But I stumbled upon a bit of evidence in the last few weeks. I only realized what it was evidence OF a couple days ago.

Sime~Gen keeps getting mentioned on various websites, even blogs. So? That's nothing new.

When my sifting tools turn up one of those mentions, I try to find time to drop the blogger a note.

I found a blog a couple weeks ago that mentioned Sime~Gen. It was fairly typical, though outstandingly articulate and well written.

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/sime-gen-authors-query.html

On that blog entry freyashawk says:

"Some time ago, I wrote an article about a series of books that impressed me deeply when I first read them. They were novels about the Sime-Gen universe, created by Jacqueline Lichtenberg who, with the collaboration of Jean Lorrah, then proceeded to weave an elaborate tapestry depicting an alternate future of the human race based on a strange mutation.

Rather to my astonishment, Jacqueline Lichtenberg read my article and responded with a comment a few days ago. She wrote:

'Thank you for the nice words about the Sime~Gen Universe novels.
Please let us know what format you'd like to see these novels in next.'"

And a bit down the page, it says:

"I re-read the entire collection of Sime-Gen novels and stories last year, after recommending them to some one else who, like most of her peers, was infatuated with the 'Twilight' series. To me, the Sime-Gen universe depicted the same sort of social conflict that occurred between vampire and human, with concepts of prey and predator being turned upside down by love."

FLASHBURNED INTO MEMORY

Do you see my point? These books, read decades ago, persist in memory and get REREAD, then recommended to a new generation because they compare with something very current, like THE TWILIGHT SERIES.

Freyashawk did a second post that answers my question where she is staunchly advocating the necessity of producing reprints ON PAPER because ebooks are too ephemeral:

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/ongoing-correspondence-with-jacqueline.html

"Use the internet by all means to promote the Sime-Gen series and network with other writers, but find a way to PRINT the books at a reasonable cost. If you do not wish to organise that aspect of it yourself, I would expect that there are countless writers' groups and small publishers who would be more than pleased to assist in this project if the behemoths of the book-publishing world are too short-sighted to involve themselves. The reputation of any small publishing venture would be enhanced greatly if it were to produce a new edition of these Classics as well as new novels in the series."

This response from readers happens because of the techniques I have described in previous posts here, starting with the 20 posts on Tarot, through all the Writing Craft posts on theme, structure, plotting, story, conflict, etc etc.

Remember Archetype and Template as discussed above in this post.

The techniques of writing craft are like the archetype or template, but it's the content -- the specifics of the story -- that matter to the reader. If those specifics matter too much to the writer who then mis-applies the template, the reader will never recieve the message, the imagery, the content that matters to the writer -- for the same reasons cited above in the section about archetypes.

These writing craft techniques when applied to archetypes that are currently changing in a Group Mind's manifestation of them (Vampires-are-Evil to Vampire-as-Good Guy, is still Vampire Archetype), produce ReReadable Books, books that are remembered for decades and recommended to new generations.

Sime~Gen so easily gets flashburned into the reader's memory because the universe premise asks questions using the Vampire archetype, questions about real world current issues that the readers don't usually know, consciously, are really bothering them. But as Gene Roddenberry taught me, don't answer the questions. Just ask.

When you ask those obtuse, difficult, ellusive questions at the nexus of change in an archetype's manifestation, you capture the attention of those to whom the content matters but the delivery vehicle does not.

The Vampire Archetype manifestations (not the archetype itself; the manifestations) were morphing with the culture through the 1970's, '80's and still are even today, reflecting cultural changes such as the role of women, of racial prejudice, sexuality, the toxicity of violence.

How do you get your way? How do you get satisfied? How do you survive a crumbling life situation? What right do you have? How do you get what you need? And even though you have a right, do you have the right to exercise that right over everyone else's objections?

In Astrology, it's all bound up in 1st House/ 7th House matters, obstructed by 4th House / 10th House matters. That's another essay, but there are the 4 archetypes that quarter our existence.

It could be that the entire paradigm underlying our world culture is shifting more massively than anyone now knows.

The element that could be shifting is all about how one gets one's needs met -- taking your fair share from whoever's trying to keep it from you; exploiting the labor of others (slavery was abolished but continued to evolve via underpaying wages spawning Labor Union's battles); Charity and giving your fair share to taxes as a means of ensuring that Charity is done properly.

Think sweeping meta-history -- history about history. Get an orbital perspective on it all.

Giving and Receiving, the biggest, most abstract (dry, boring) concept behind Kaballah.

Shifts are happening generation to generation on that most fundamental level of the asbsolute structure of the universe.

Is "Evil" a fundamental component of our "Reality" -- or can it be vanquished forever? If we vanquish EVIL, will it take GOOD with it?

Do a quick run through some video games to check subject matter and problem solving techniques. What constitutes the problem in the most popular games? What's the conflict? How is it resolved to the benefit (high score) of the player? Much of gaming is about Good and Evil at War. Primal. Nothing new there. Shades of gray would spoil the fun.

The video game is today what the Vampire novel was to kids growing up in the 1980's. An obsession. I knew it then. My Vampire Romance hardcovers, Those of My Blood (1988) and it's sequel Dreamspy (1989) are still available now in paperback.

The "Vampire" is a perfect amalgam of the issues disturbing the deepest levels of our culture, the issues where the underlying archetype of human nature is changing the way it manifests (not the actual core of human nature; just the way it manifests, the part that matters to us living creatures, is changing. 2009's Halloween included Vampire films with awesome FX.

The Vampire is still popular, more popular as Horror, but go back again and just stare at that graph of Vampire Romance titles.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

Think about what that means and we'll dig into it more in future posts.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com