Whew! Now the election's over we can drop politics because it's not important anymore, right? Ooooo. Ummmm. Oy, I don't think so.
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm not arguing either side of this issue. I'm examining why the HEA is so universally scoffed at.
We began in Part I of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice on October 26, 2010, discussing Glenn Beck and noted:
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
And to whom does it matter? And what can we do with that information?
In my blog post "Glenn Beck Did Not Invent The Overton Window" (October 19, 2010, aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com ) I mentioned that I disagree (personally) with some of what Beck is "selling" (and he uses a "hard sell" technique right out of his enemy's playbook). But I don't disagree with all of it.
So what do I disagree with and why should you care?
As I pointed out in the October 19th 2010 post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com Glenn Beck is moving the Overton Window, or trying to, or maybe just doing it inadvertently in response to commercial demands and pressures.
He got the concept of the Overton Window from a Think Tank which got it from some mathematicians researching how to describe the behavior of large numbers of people making decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
That mathematics is employed by advertisers to make people buy products. It's proven stuff and it works.
The Mackinac Center http://www.mackinac.org/7504 -- uses this math to describe the political behavior of people by the millions while advertising uses it to shape preferences for brands of toothpaste or perfume. There isn't enough profit in novels to afford to hire those folks to sell a novel -- but film producers definitely use their services.
This math is not just statistics, it's a method of changing what the majority hold to be true and unquestioned. It can change what is deemed "politically correct."
And it has.
The entire technique is rooted in a view of the universe based on the "zero-sum-game" -- which is why this branch of mathematics came from and informs game-theory. (which is why video games have become so popular; they depict and infuse the player with the zero-sum-game philosophy).
That the physical universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the social universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the economic universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
Nowhere in our mainstream, Hollywood films, Manhattan publishing, nowhere in the big money, high capital cost/high profit margin business models do we see evidence of anything but a zero-sum-game model of the universe.
The biggest TV audiences are drawn by sports - and every professional sport is based on the zero-sum-game model of reality. I win means you lose.
I win causes you to lose.
"There Can Be Only One"
In Part II we noted that it seems (to me, and others) that the Socialist and Communist views of the world are based on this zero-sum-game model.
The reason that some people are poor is that other people are rich.
That's connected as cause-effect. The only way that rich people get rich is by taking away from (oppressing) "workers" who work themselves to death for bare subsistence wages and there is no way for these hard working, upstanding, deserving workers to get rich other than to demand justice from the rich who have stolen the product of the worker's sweat and tears. (That's not all pure fantasy either. There is proof it has happened, but not that it must be the only way it can ever happen.)
The theory is that there is a limited amount of "rich" -- You win means I lose.
Well, I won't stand for that. I'm taking your win away from you right now! And that's only justice. I demand justice.
The clear, clean, beyond question obviousness of this point of view is simply irrefutable.
If you are inherently incapable of questioning the unconscious assumption about the nature of reality rooted in the zero-sum-game model, you can not rationally come to any other conclusion than that the rich are rich because they suck the life-juices out of the poor.
The rich are "winners" and the poor are "losers."
Put another way, the poor are "losers" BECAUSE the rich are "winners." AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
It's simply too obvious to be denied by any rational person.
The HEA, the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, can not be had by all!
It's pie in the sky. Only certain "chosen" golden children ever dare aspire to happiness, and YOU ARE NOT CHOSEN. Therefore you must fight yourself, using all your energy to subdue your inner self. See the example I found involving oral sex in Part II (posted November 2, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com).
But why is it obvious?
Well, look at marriage, especially through the prism of that item on oral sex in marriage. Look at our most intimate relationships. Look at how parents raise children. Look back on how your parents raised you.
From the child's point of view, "because I said so" is how parents rule -- and parents get their way because they're big.
If parents "negotiate" with a child before the child is really old enough to process all the variables at once, the parent is seen as weak, incompetent, manipulatable, and the child gets an inflated view of Self.
There is a corporate executive training program that companies pay thousands and thousands of dollars to put their trainees and new hires through. The program teaches "YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU DESERVE; YOU GET WHAT YOU NEGOTIATE."
And it teaches the art of negotiation as a form of warfare.
Warfare has always been practiced as a zero-sum-game. Our professional sports are modeled after warfare. Corporate culture is modeled on football.
Our culture has forced us to adopt the zero-sum-game model of the universe by excluding any other style activities from your notice (yes, such activities exist but you are flimflammed into not-noticing or not-recognizing them).
Now look at the dust-up recently on bullying in the school yards and how much damage that does to children that then subsequently shapes their potential as adults.
Parents have come out passionately against bullying in school yards. Teachers and school administrators must stop the bullying - it's the school's responsibility to protect my child against bullies.
But where do bullies come from?
How many really creative people have admitted in biographies that they were bullied, and thus forced to learn a response?
How many chimp studies have examined chimp tribes and bullying, or jockeying for pecking order among say, ducks.
Should we intervene in the society of children to stop bullying?
It's an unexamined assumption among parents that their child must not be bullied. (which doesn't mean it's wrong; just not thought out carefully)
It's an unexamined assumption among the parents of children that do the bullying that their child is showing leadership potential, a winner's profile, not a loser's profile, and their pride (however secret even from themselves) knows no bounds. WINNER means NOT LOSER.
Why must our children not "be bullied?"
Recent research on mice has shown us a possible chemical mechanism for the end result of having been bullied.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 12, 2010 titled GENETIC MECHANISM BY WHICH LOVE CONQUERS ALL
Yeah, we're still on the HEA subject.
The mice that had repeated lost fights with other mice in that experiment showed a later life tendency to be timid, not to fight for their place, and not to explore.
Dissection of their brains revealed a chemical in the submissive mice's brains, wrapped around their genes, that wasn't present in the mice that had not lost the fights. These chemicals wrap around the genes and allow or suppress expression of the genes.
So we have a purely chemical (not spiritual or soul-based) explanation of how it is that kids who are bullied in school yards grow up to become submissive - and don't explore.
"Explore" for a mouse is a kind of boldness.
We're talking about the kind of boldness that makes human beings explore questions, that makes human beings question unconscious assumptions being "sold" to them by clever mathematicians manipulating the Overton Window. To question authority, such as teachers.
Because of human creativity, artistic talent, a lot of bullied kids turn out to be the boldest questioners. Maybe they get bullied because they are artistic?
But most don't turn out to be artists.
Allowing school-yard bullying while assuring the parents "we're doing all we can" (God Forbid anyone in this world should heroically exceed their abilities and actually grow as a person and a hero by doing something they can't do - something outside their job description!) is one of many ways to create a pliable and obedient population.
Allowing schools to teach "the truth" (carefully editing textbooks) keeps children from being confused, feeling threatened, and needing to think before deciding or expressing an opinion.
They grow up to be adults who want "the government" (or someone) to keep them safe.
Since they never learned in school that one of the basic principles that made the USA successful as a country is that the police do not prevent crime, they expect to live in a crime free world where police prevent crime.
However, in principle, the police (and all criminal statutes) are aimed only at people who have actually done criminal deeds -- and thus the police (an arm of government) can act only after the fact, lest government gain power over individuals. That is, the majority must never inhibit the exploration activities of any individual. Freedom of thought, religion, speech - all rests on the concept that the Police must not prevent any activity.
Under no circumstances can any arm of government ever be allowed to prevent anyone from doing anything. Government must not be allowed control.
Yeah, they don't teach that in school any more, but it was a core principle in the civics classes in my grammar school, and today it is a fully examined and questioned assumption of mine -- though it started out as unquestioned.
Today, however, "Crime Prevention" (another sobriquet promulgated by those with a very specific political agenda) is lauded, and when it fails people are so offended they throw out their elected officials who failed to prevent crime. Remember we're talking about the plausibility of the HEA here. You can't have happiness if your expectations regarding safety and predictability are not met.
We're missing a social mechanism that damps down if not prevents aberrant behavior, keeps it at a tolerable level where expectations are mostly met.
Today huge, massively funded federal agencies are devoted to public safety - and to protecting consumers.
The government's role is primarily to protect us (seal the borders, for example). Very often we are being protected from ourselves -- pharmaceuticals legal in Europe can't be sold here because they would undercut the market of some big pharma company here, but we're told we are being protected from potential harm caused by our own bad decisions.
But big corporations are seen as bullies because they're big.
Glenn Beck showed (I caught a quick clip of this channel surfing) a cartoon line-drawing animation that is being shown in schools to instruct kids on the relationship between corporations and government.
The government was shown as a small image, a neat, clean straight line drawing, of I think, a building. The corporation was shown as a huge, round, blown-up quasi-human image -- something like humpty-dumpty is often drawn. Bloated and distorted.
The corporations were noted to be bigger than government, and positioned by artistic composition to be menacing the little government.
Any reasonable person, especially someone bullied as a child, would conclude that government must be grown bigger to face down the ugly big bully corporations. That's how we conquer schoolyard bullies - we grow larger, hit harder or get friends to gang up on them with us.
This is a truth that becomes internalized as an unquestioned assumption. Government must grow or the world won't be safe. (maybe so, but who knows?)
Worse, the assumption becomes unconsciously processed because of the graphics - and I could see the art of this Overton Window mathematics behind that composition in the cartoon. As I said previously I don't see what most viewers see when I watch TV. This image of the relationship between government and corporations becomes UNQUESTIONABLE TRUTH, not merely an assumption, a hypothesis or a theory subject to revision according to new facts unearthed.
An assumption can never be called into question because you don't know it's there.
It has been presented to the very young in their own language, the language of the bully in the play yard, and presented to be true by authority in the form of the teacher.
Every time a parent says, "listen to the teacher" "sit still in class" "don't act out" "don't pester the teacher with questions, you'll get bad grades" -- every time a parent reinforces a teacher's authority, the result is more assumptions driven into the child's mind that will become unquestionable assumptions later in life (which might be good if the assumptions stay reliable throughout the child's lifetime).
Was this done to you?
Are you doing it to your children?
Have you ever had to change any "fact" you learned in school?
Look at this: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/11/discovery-pushes-human-tool-use-years/
Every so often, we have to revise what we know to be true. Are you preparing your children to do that?
What has all that to do with the HEA?
If you live in the world I've described above, you have been taught by these zero-sum-game based philosophical methods that you are not qualified to live the HEA - that it's not realistic to expect your life to reach HEA. It's not even "right" to try because if you get an HEA life, that means you took it away from someone else! (zero-sum-game - there isn't enough happiness in the world to go around - you win, someone else loses.)
It's not realistic because not everyone can be a winner.
How do you know that?
Because in that same grammar school class that taught you about big bad corporations, you learned that only some kids in class can get an A, and a few more a B, most will get C's, and a few D's and F's -- or whatever numerical or euphemistic substitute for those grades is used.
The use of euphemisms like "needs improvement" "excels" etc does not mask the fact that it's a zero-sum-game. School is graded on a curve, and eventually we learn what that means. A few are chosen to be winners, and all the rest of us lose because those winners took away our right to win.
There can be only 10% or fewer A's, or "Excels" in a class. Not everybody can "excel" or "excel" means nothing.
Whether they know it or not, all teachers are taught that statistically humans fall on a bell curve and it's their job to sort out the top 10% for college bound.
The rest are "workers." Oppressed, you will see, if you read the first part of this series WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE on October 26, 2010.
The only way you can ever begin to even wonder if any of that is true is to question the assumption that reality is a zero-sum-game, inherently, intrinsically and realistically, there really is only so much good crop land, only so much drinkable water, only so much gold mine country, only so much uranium, only so much zinc, copper, oil, and only so many can be happy. The only way to be happy is to "win" -- so that means half lose.
But if you win, you did it by being a bully, so you have to be miserable with what you've won. Which half of humanity then can have an HEA?
We have to organize into countries big enough and mean enough to fight and win those critical resources or we will die.
Our big, muscular HE-MAN MEN must "fight for us" and win, so we can be protected to raise our children to fight and win.
It's all about competing and winning. Competition is the only correct way to organize human beings. It brings out the best in us.
We MUST compete with each other, and we must be the winner. And only winners then get to have children.
Therefore, if you hold the unconscious assumption (possibly implanted, possibly actually true) that you are not a winner, you have only one logical recourse - rise up and smite the winners and take what they have (i.e. raise taxes on the rich).
In that universe, there can be no HEA for anyone.
If you win Happily Ever After, it won't bring you happiness because you got it by taking it away from someone else. And you know in your heart that the someone you deprived will rise up and take what you took from them.
Why would it bother you that you caused someone pain so you could win? If you didn't snatch what happiness you can, someone else would take it - probably waste it, too. After all, you can do better with resources than others.
If you live in a universe where the only way to satisfy your heart's desire is by preventing someone else from satisfying their heart's desire -- i.e. you have to GET A MAN by "winning" him away from some other woman in a contest of beauty or fellatio, and the only way to hold a man (whether he prefers to be held or not) is by doing something you'd really rather not do because "men can't help it" -- then your happiness is achieved at the expense of someone else's misery.
Now we elevate this discussion to a dimension few are willing to access.
As far as I know, the only universe of discourse where the zero-sum-game assumption about reality can be questioned (not dispensed with, just questioned) is the universe where the Soul is real.
The part of you that prevents you from exulting totally in causing others misery is what we call the Soul.
OK, maybe SPIRIT. Conscience?
Maybe some other term applies. But it's a non-tangible, immortal part of Self that matters more than "here and now" because its joy and its pain is eternal. It's the part of you that's miserable when you lose, and can't be happy when you win because that means someone else lost. It's the non-sportsman in you. It's where your Charity comes from, where your Hope and Joy reside.
And there is some part of every human's awareness that connects to that dimension.
But that connection is like a switch. It's not always open. Sometimes it rusts shut.
In my personal philosophy, judging whether that rusted-shut switch's condition is good or bad for you is above my pay grade. I just use it in characterization.
I think there are people who need to be cut off from their awareness of the existence of their Soul, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, at least for part of their life.
There are people who need to be fully in touch. Sometimes switch's rust can be dissolved by Love.
Most people are sporadically and partially aware, or just aspire to repeat moments of contact through an open connection.
Whoever you are and however you are, you're just fine. You'll change when you're ready - opening or closing that contact as you need to in order to accomplish your purposes in life and beyond.
My attitude is, it's none of my business. I have enough on my own plate.
But given the notion that there exists such a thing as a non-material part of a human being, the whole "model of the universe" thing changes.
The worlds you can, as a writer, build to tell stories in become richer, deeper, more complex, harder to handle, but ever so much more realistic (to me anyway).
If the Soul is real, there may in fact be SOUL MATES -- in which case, the HEA becomes an inevitable end-point for each of us, not a ridiculous fantasy that's not "realistic."
If you live your life wearing blinders, refusing to question the zero-sum-game model of the universe because answers would be dangerous, confusing, or doom you to being a loser, then you don't dare accept the HEA except as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy achievable in real life only by the chosen few, and then only temporarily.
If you live your life totally aware of your own Soul, and can see the Soul behind the eyes of others, and know there is a Divine Spirit somehow intimately interacting with this world and your personal life, then when you get to the HEA in a novel that reflects the particular Soul hypothesis you are using, you are emotionally satisfied.
If you live your life putting your blinders on to function in a corporate environment, in the world of science, and peeking around them during your family time, then quickly taking them off for an hour once a week to worship, then the HEA will attract you, reassure you, seem somehow RIGHT, but it's just a novel. Real life is not so simple. But you'll never stop striving for your own happiness without taking it away from others.
Awareness of Soul makes people unable to tolerate being the agent of deprivation and pain to others.
Now, it's true, many people who scoff at the notion of Soul and are committed to explaining all human behavior with brain chemistry and science, people who have been successful commanding the Overton Window to move to where they want it, are equally unable to tolerate being the agent of pain to others.
In fact, MOST of the people involved in "Progressive" or "Liberal" causes, helping the poor, running free clinics, fighting AIDs in Africa, bravely standing up to corporate bullies with Green Peace ships are purely motivated to alleviate human suffering everywhere once and for all and forever.
And frankly, I'd stand with them, put my life on the line with them. I hold nothing back from these causes. They are my causes and always have been. Green energy, anti-global warming measures, reducing our collateral ecological damage -- walking softly in the world, caring for our environment, all of that is core principle with me.
But how many of them are fighting with all their might because they see the world as a zero-sum-game while at the same time feeling their Souls aching for the unfortunate, the poor, and the victims of corporate greed (which is also very real).
How many of them have a good solid plan for what they'll do when they've WON and thus caused someone else to lose?
On the one hand, you feel your Soul, you know it's real.
On the other hand, you feel your Body, and you know you must fight for the resources to stay alive.
Something is telling you it isn't right, it isn't just, that some people don't have and it's up to everyone to keep all humans safe.
You demand your HEA and won't give up your zero-sum-game fight-and-win scenario.
There's a High Concept film in that conundrum. Think about it.
Turn around now and take another look at politics.
My stand on politics is that no politician should ever be allowed to hold public office.
The steering decisions for a whole country, state, even county, should not be made by compromise. You can't find the right answer to a problem by partially giving up a principle.
I don't want anyone fighting for me, or fighting for my rights, or my anything.
You can't get anything worth having by winning.
So what do you do instead?
Become more interested in what is right rather than who is right.
Argue until you, cooperatively as a group, figure out a right answer. (not THE right answer - there are lots of right answers, usually only a very few really wrong ones)
Govern by consensus not compromise? That's never yet worked, though compromise has sputtered along for the 200 years or so the USA has used it. We need to think some more.
The problem is this Overton Window thing that allows a few people to manipulate consensus to be what they want it to be. So everyone has to be armored against unconscious assumptions in grammar school, trained to be very aware of their personal philosophy but knowing theirs isn't any better or worse than anyone else's.
We'd have to immunize our children to the Overton Window. It would take a new philosophy. (Isn't that what SF/F writers are supposed to be doing?)
Some philosophies though, are more effective and efficient at producing an HEA style life. Fiction exploring the possibilities could be a "pen mightier than the sword" moment for humanity.
Think of the Blind Men And The Elephant. The men are all correct, all have an opinion that isn't the truth, but they won't know it until they stop fighting and start cooperating to create the total holographic, 3-dimensional image from all the fragmented points of view.
Right now, we don't combine our philosophies, we fight to win by cramming our philosophy down someone else's throat.
The zero-sum-game assumptions require that we must fight.
Look again at this entire election process and the results, scrutinize everything that's being said, everything "they" are making you feel, and try to see how to question the underlying zero-sum-game philosophical assumption they are cramming down your throat.
Ask yourself who benefits if you swallow their assumption that all life is fighting and not everyone can win.
Now think about all the discussions we've had about Love, and how Love Conquers All isn't just a novel theme, it's actually true about real reality.
Love is the most powerful binding force in the universe.
If the universe is constructed in such a way that Love Conquers All, how can it possibly be a zero-sum-game?
If "All" is conquered, there is only one winner -- ALL.
What is "all"? - it includes you but is not limited to you.
You see why I don't want politicians fighting for me? The more fighting, the less Love.
Fighting doesn't conquer anything, least of all All.
You can't win by fighting, just as you can't get rid of starfish in your clam beds by cutting the starfish in half and throwing the halves back in the water. The more you fight, the more enemies you have.
When you start to fight, you lose. If you win, you're miserable because you caused someone else misery. If you lose, you're miserable because you don't have what you went after.
It's the zero-sum-game model of the universe that causes people to reject the HEA, to be unable to feel the emotion generated by novels that lead, however logically, to the HEA.
The zero-sum-game model of the universe has become an unquestionable assumption at the bottom level of our subconscious minds. You don't even know you believe it, or how it limits your actions.
To gain acceptance for the HEA, artists must successfully challenge the zero-sum-game philosophy by worldbuilding with Fire and Ice.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label SFR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SFR. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I Failure of Imagination Part IV
Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I
Failure of Imagination Part IV
Politics is surely fire, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Philosophy is surely ice, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Mix in pair-bonding in any variety or style, especially if you include Soul Mates which implies some dimension of spirituality, immortality, possibly reincarnation - i.e. a larger point to your life than is apparent in this life itself --
Stand back and just admire the mushroom cloud.
And that tall mushroom cloud creates the potential for a huge audience "reach."
But you (the writer) have to make the mushroom cloud comprehensible as a mushroom cloud.
You have to show-don't-tell your readership and audience that it's beautiful and captivating and they should just sit back and enjoy the show.
How, exactly, does a writer do that? How does a reader become a writer?
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/are-commercial-writers-born-or-made.html
What is the transformative moment when the passive person who just imbibes and enjoys fiction becomes the active creator and purveyor of that inner pleasure we all know but can't name (probably because English doesn't have a word, or the word has fallen into disuse).
As I've explained and explored in a number of posts, the key ingredient in the writer's craft tool box is philosophy.
That's why it's so hard to explain to a new writer what a "Concept" actually is (as opposed to an Idea For A Story) and how to identify a "High" concept. A High Concept is that cap on the mushroom cloud mentioned above. At that moment of recognition: "My Idea Is Actually A High Concept" a reader may be spurred to write, if not become a writer. Very often a reader sees a novel they are reading as a movie -- or a movie as a novel -- or a TV show as missing a "story" (hence fanfiction).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
The artist's job, role in "society" is to translate the abstract into the concrete, to make theory visible, to make aspirations and dreams tangible, to give the customer a whiff of what life on Earth will be like when they reach "success" (whatever that might be for the individual) -- which for us means the elusive HEA.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
Right now, the USA has returned to a knife-edge balance, half passionately convinced that one philosophy is the only honorable and true philosophy, and the other half convinced that the opposite philosophy is the one and only honorable and true philosophy. A hefty percentage of the electorate stands in the middle of this half-and-half split, convinced that neither side is right, but both sides are right.
Few, if any, are doubting or questioning what they "know" to be true.
Leaders, entertainers, and information vendors (i.e. "news") are using every sophisticated tool in their toolboxes to sell their ideas, to convince a lot more people that this one idea is correct. But they aren't thinking in terms of Concept - the highest crest of that mushroom cloud that can be seen from afar.
Read again this description of High Concept and why it serves so well to convey Idea to so many.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2006/02/02/the-death-of-high-concept/
Read Sarah Beach's comment of Sept 9th on that page where she says:
---SARAH BEACH----
I’ve always felt that High Concept was like seeing a line of mountains on the horizon. You know exactly what is in front of you, and even at a distance, you can see the main features of it. Low Concept was like a rolling landscape where features are hidden, waiting to surprise you.
Notice that High Concept can also have surprises in the detail (like hidden canyons and rivers). But you still have a very clear idea of what you’re heading into.
-----END QUOTE-----
Or you can think of it as the top of that huge mushroom cloud formed by the explosive force of Fire and Ice, Politics and Philosophy.
But there are some whose work is extremely effective and efficient who are indeed thinking in terms of Concept rather than Idea.
My blog post on October 19, 2010, "Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window"...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
...flicked past this issue which I'm going to explore now from the point of view of the Failure of Imagination preventing the popularization of the Happily Ever After concept of real life.
See my post FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART III, September 28, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
Failure of Imagination Part II is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part I is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Where Imagination has Failed is in questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality.
We saw in Where Expert Romance Writers Fail that when asked, ordinary people say the reason they refuse to read "Romance genre" novels is that the HEA isn't "realistic" or is a requirement of the genre that just does not satisfy them in their hunt for an emotional payoff.
We discussed that "emotional payoff" problem referring to a blog post by an SFR writer reviewed on thegalaxyexpress.net chaffing at the "restriction" of the HEA requirement for storytelling.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on September 21, 2010 titled "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA"
From our point of view the HEA is not a restriction or formulaic requirement but the natural, inevitable, unavoidable point at which "the story" is over. Until you get to the HEA, you haven't finished the story. Would you think you'd finished having sex if you didn't finish?
From our point of view, it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly even think, nevermind actually say, that the HEA is a recipe for boredom.
But that's a point of view, not a fact of life.
It's hard to understand how it might be possible for anyone to fail to understand that the HEA is NOT a "fact of life."
But that's what writers (artists of all stripes) do for a living. Understand the alien. Explain it.
We have to put yourselves into the mind of "other" people - people who really do live in "alien" universes, who look out of their eyes and do not see what we see.
We have to be able to understand how different people see the world, then create a piece of art that explains one kind of people's views to the other kind of people.
What kinds? Men. Women. Gay. Bi. Rich. Poor. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Christian. Muslim. Hindu. Jew. Human. Non-human. (WRITING EXERCISE: extend that list to 10 more kinds of viewpoints.)
Take any category from that list, and explain it to another category.
To achieve that explanation, you will find yourself grappling with politics, philosophy, religion, sexuality, morality, ethics, -- all manner of intangibles that must be made tangible in order to tell the story. Show Don't Tell.
To present that story, you must worldbuild.
You must create the "world" that one kind sees that the other kind does not see, and create it in show-don't-tell so that it can be understood by those who can't see it, won't believe it if they do, and must suspend disbelief to enter the story.
Neither one of those worlds will be your own world (most of the time).
But your own world, your point of view on reality, your essential take on Creation, The Soul, Evolution, Justice, Ethics, Morals, will show through.
Not only can you not help it - you should not help it, because that show-through is the carrier wave of your own ART. It's your "voice" - the thing that makes you distinctive as a writer.
OK, now back to the "real" world.
It has been noted any number of places, the Glenn Beck show in particular in 2010, that in the last 50 years or so, the "Liberal" political viewpoint has become utterly dominant in Hollywood.
There was a whiff of Liberalism in "Hollywood" in the 1950's which sparked the Witch Hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy - if you're too young to have studied the McCarthy Hearings in school, go google it up. Hold your nose and read carefully.
McCarthy was right - Communists and proto-Communists and pre-Socialists, and people who were generally critical of and obstinately against many of the values held most dear in the USA during the 1800's had begun infiltrating the entertainment media. Or perhaps the entertainment media had summoned them because they had a High Concept to display.
Being writers, creative types, they re-invented the entire vocabulary by which their vision of how a country should organize its economy and government could be discussed, a vocabulary of images and characters, of symbols. They renamed philosophies without changing the tenants much. They set out to use their artistic skills to change the "image" of the then-demonized philosophies.
Three generations later, according to Glenn Beck, they've succeeded. He's made a huge fortune exploiting the absolute lack of his point of view in the media. He has hit on a High Concept and tickled imaginations into gear with it. Remember, this man is an actor who got his start in comedy, exploiting his ADD tendencies to advantage, and never lets you forget he's a recovering alcoholic. He's a performer who presents himself as an overgrown child, but does that in and of itself totally invalidate what he's saying? After all, he employs 40 researchers in addition to the Fox News resources. His imagination hasn't failed. And he's making money from it. He's holding out, as a carrot on a stick, the inkling of a suspicion that the HEA might be possible in real life, and it's making him a fortune.
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm a writer. I build worlds to ask entertaining questions. You have to do the answering.
If you let yourself get all wound up in Glenn Beck's politics, you'll never be able to discern the mechanism he's using behind that smokescreen. So take a few deep breaths, cool off (yeah, it's hard, but being a writer is not an easy life), and study the phenomenon Beck has created with his High Concept.
That's the kind of phenomenon we need to create for the HEA driven fiction that is the core of the Romance and SFR and PNR genres.
Part II of Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Failure of Imagination Part IV
Politics is surely fire, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Philosophy is surely ice, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Mix in pair-bonding in any variety or style, especially if you include Soul Mates which implies some dimension of spirituality, immortality, possibly reincarnation - i.e. a larger point to your life than is apparent in this life itself --
Stand back and just admire the mushroom cloud.
And that tall mushroom cloud creates the potential for a huge audience "reach."
But you (the writer) have to make the mushroom cloud comprehensible as a mushroom cloud.
You have to show-don't-tell your readership and audience that it's beautiful and captivating and they should just sit back and enjoy the show.
How, exactly, does a writer do that? How does a reader become a writer?
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/are-commercial-writers-born-or-made.html
What is the transformative moment when the passive person who just imbibes and enjoys fiction becomes the active creator and purveyor of that inner pleasure we all know but can't name (probably because English doesn't have a word, or the word has fallen into disuse).
As I've explained and explored in a number of posts, the key ingredient in the writer's craft tool box is philosophy.
That's why it's so hard to explain to a new writer what a "Concept" actually is (as opposed to an Idea For A Story) and how to identify a "High" concept. A High Concept is that cap on the mushroom cloud mentioned above. At that moment of recognition: "My Idea Is Actually A High Concept" a reader may be spurred to write, if not become a writer. Very often a reader sees a novel they are reading as a movie -- or a movie as a novel -- or a TV show as missing a "story" (hence fanfiction).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
The artist's job, role in "society" is to translate the abstract into the concrete, to make theory visible, to make aspirations and dreams tangible, to give the customer a whiff of what life on Earth will be like when they reach "success" (whatever that might be for the individual) -- which for us means the elusive HEA.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
Right now, the USA has returned to a knife-edge balance, half passionately convinced that one philosophy is the only honorable and true philosophy, and the other half convinced that the opposite philosophy is the one and only honorable and true philosophy. A hefty percentage of the electorate stands in the middle of this half-and-half split, convinced that neither side is right, but both sides are right.
Few, if any, are doubting or questioning what they "know" to be true.
Leaders, entertainers, and information vendors (i.e. "news") are using every sophisticated tool in their toolboxes to sell their ideas, to convince a lot more people that this one idea is correct. But they aren't thinking in terms of Concept - the highest crest of that mushroom cloud that can be seen from afar.
Read again this description of High Concept and why it serves so well to convey Idea to so many.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2006/02/02/the-death-of-high-concept/
Read Sarah Beach's comment of Sept 9th on that page where she says:
---SARAH BEACH----
I’ve always felt that High Concept was like seeing a line of mountains on the horizon. You know exactly what is in front of you, and even at a distance, you can see the main features of it. Low Concept was like a rolling landscape where features are hidden, waiting to surprise you.
Notice that High Concept can also have surprises in the detail (like hidden canyons and rivers). But you still have a very clear idea of what you’re heading into.
-----END QUOTE-----
Or you can think of it as the top of that huge mushroom cloud formed by the explosive force of Fire and Ice, Politics and Philosophy.
But there are some whose work is extremely effective and efficient who are indeed thinking in terms of Concept rather than Idea.
My blog post on October 19, 2010, "Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window"...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
...flicked past this issue which I'm going to explore now from the point of view of the Failure of Imagination preventing the popularization of the Happily Ever After concept of real life.
See my post FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART III, September 28, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
Failure of Imagination Part II is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part I is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Where Imagination has Failed is in questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality.
We saw in Where Expert Romance Writers Fail that when asked, ordinary people say the reason they refuse to read "Romance genre" novels is that the HEA isn't "realistic" or is a requirement of the genre that just does not satisfy them in their hunt for an emotional payoff.
We discussed that "emotional payoff" problem referring to a blog post by an SFR writer reviewed on thegalaxyexpress.net chaffing at the "restriction" of the HEA requirement for storytelling.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on September 21, 2010 titled "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA"
From our point of view the HEA is not a restriction or formulaic requirement but the natural, inevitable, unavoidable point at which "the story" is over. Until you get to the HEA, you haven't finished the story. Would you think you'd finished having sex if you didn't finish?
From our point of view, it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly even think, nevermind actually say, that the HEA is a recipe for boredom.
But that's a point of view, not a fact of life.
It's hard to understand how it might be possible for anyone to fail to understand that the HEA is NOT a "fact of life."
But that's what writers (artists of all stripes) do for a living. Understand the alien. Explain it.
We have to put yourselves into the mind of "other" people - people who really do live in "alien" universes, who look out of their eyes and do not see what we see.
We have to be able to understand how different people see the world, then create a piece of art that explains one kind of people's views to the other kind of people.
What kinds? Men. Women. Gay. Bi. Rich. Poor. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Christian. Muslim. Hindu. Jew. Human. Non-human. (WRITING EXERCISE: extend that list to 10 more kinds of viewpoints.)
Take any category from that list, and explain it to another category.
To achieve that explanation, you will find yourself grappling with politics, philosophy, religion, sexuality, morality, ethics, -- all manner of intangibles that must be made tangible in order to tell the story. Show Don't Tell.
To present that story, you must worldbuild.
You must create the "world" that one kind sees that the other kind does not see, and create it in show-don't-tell so that it can be understood by those who can't see it, won't believe it if they do, and must suspend disbelief to enter the story.
Neither one of those worlds will be your own world (most of the time).
But your own world, your point of view on reality, your essential take on Creation, The Soul, Evolution, Justice, Ethics, Morals, will show through.
Not only can you not help it - you should not help it, because that show-through is the carrier wave of your own ART. It's your "voice" - the thing that makes you distinctive as a writer.
OK, now back to the "real" world.
It has been noted any number of places, the Glenn Beck show in particular in 2010, that in the last 50 years or so, the "Liberal" political viewpoint has become utterly dominant in Hollywood.
There was a whiff of Liberalism in "Hollywood" in the 1950's which sparked the Witch Hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy - if you're too young to have studied the McCarthy Hearings in school, go google it up. Hold your nose and read carefully.
McCarthy was right - Communists and proto-Communists and pre-Socialists, and people who were generally critical of and obstinately against many of the values held most dear in the USA during the 1800's had begun infiltrating the entertainment media. Or perhaps the entertainment media had summoned them because they had a High Concept to display.
Being writers, creative types, they re-invented the entire vocabulary by which their vision of how a country should organize its economy and government could be discussed, a vocabulary of images and characters, of symbols. They renamed philosophies without changing the tenants much. They set out to use their artistic skills to change the "image" of the then-demonized philosophies.
Three generations later, according to Glenn Beck, they've succeeded. He's made a huge fortune exploiting the absolute lack of his point of view in the media. He has hit on a High Concept and tickled imaginations into gear with it. Remember, this man is an actor who got his start in comedy, exploiting his ADD tendencies to advantage, and never lets you forget he's a recovering alcoholic. He's a performer who presents himself as an overgrown child, but does that in and of itself totally invalidate what he's saying? After all, he employs 40 researchers in addition to the Fox News resources. His imagination hasn't failed. And he's making money from it. He's holding out, as a carrot on a stick, the inkling of a suspicion that the HEA might be possible in real life, and it's making him a fortune.
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm a writer. I build worlds to ask entertaining questions. You have to do the answering.
If you let yourself get all wound up in Glenn Beck's politics, you'll never be able to discern the mechanism he's using behind that smokescreen. So take a few deep breaths, cool off (yeah, it's hard, but being a writer is not an easy life), and study the phenomenon Beck has created with his High Concept.
That's the kind of phenomenon we need to create for the HEA driven fiction that is the core of the Romance and SFR and PNR genres.
Part II of Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Failure of Imagination Part III: Education
We're going to look at an article that surfaced in July 2010 in Newsweek Magazine, of all places, that unintentionally reveals a lot about the fiction marketplace and how that fiction market is morphing as we begin this new decade.
Who would think Newsweek would give writing lessons?
The overall general topic I've been tackling in these posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is how to improve the general reader/viewer's opinion of the Romance Genre - particularly SFR and PNR.
Part I of this sequence on Failure of Imagination is not labeled Part I because I had no idea the topic would spread so far:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Part I is about professional romance writers unable to imagine the HEA is actually a real part of everyday mundane life.
Part II is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part II looks at our failure as a society to imagine solutions to some problems -- and therefore we must suspect we fail to imagine and actualize solutions to other problems. It's not a failure to solve A problem - it's a failure at problem-solving-methodology. I wrote this before the Newsweek article came out.
Part III is this post where we will look at why Americans are wearing such blinders on the Imagination.
We put blinders (those leather cups around the outside of the eyes) on race horses to help them concentrate on running where the jockey points them and not spook at every movement close by, especially when being put into the starting gate stall. They also protect the horse's eyes from flying mud kicked up by a horse next to them.
It's a kindness to the horse, and a way of getting the horse's best out of him/her.
But should humans be treated that way?
When some of our data-input channels (mental and emotional bandwidth?) are blocked by "blinders" do we perform "better?"
Well, if you prevent certain sorts of human behavior before the behavior is even conceptualized, the human might become more tractable, more easily directed into certain group coordinated activities like running in a herd.
How can you put blinders on a MIND???
I don't mean how can you get up the nerve, the gumption, the chutzpah to do that -- but rather how can a mind be "blinded?"
Well, it's psychological of course.
And isn't psychology what fiction is about -- while Romance genre specializes in microscopic examination of the psychological?
You know me and cliches. Here's another old one I haven't harped on before. "As The Twig Is Bent, So Grows The Tree."
People can be bent psychologically if you can get at them early enough in life. The rule of thumb is give me a child until he's 7 years old, and you can do anything you want with him after that. (Is that from the Jesuits?)
We know this from child-abuse studies. A person abused in childhood turns out to be an adult with "issues" -- if overcome, those issues can be a strength, but if not overcome then they can cut swaths out of the individual's total potential.
People are bendable. Thus humans can "adjust" culturally, physically, psychologically, to almost any environment and circumstance.
Humans inhabit this world from the Arctic to the Tropics, on tundra and in deep forest. Humans live packed into cities, and spread onto prairie. Humans live under dictators and alone in single families or tribes. Humans can do anything if they start young enough.
This is what gives us the scope to postulate human-alien Romances, galactic civilizations, lost human colonies on worlds peopled primarily by Aliens (Examples: C. J. Cherryh's fabulous FOREIGNER series and my own Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends. Find free chapters of my novels at http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com )
This bendable trait of human beings gives fiction writers much fodder for character development, story arc, plot and worldbuilding.
There's the story of overcoming childhood trauma -- the story of frigidity being overcome by Love -- the story of a weakness becoming a strength as someone takes their trauma and say, founds an organization to fight that issue in the general public.
Say a kid witnesses their elder sibling being killed by a drunk driver and grows up to found a National Chain of Bar & Grill joints which fight alcoholism and drunk driving, hiring real Psychologists to be bartenders?
There's no such thing as a life-event that is inherently ALL BAD. But there is trauma that changes people in ways they would rather not be changed.
As I've detailed in my series of posts here on Tarot and Astrology, all these life-events are just made of ENERGY - and it's how we bring that energy into manifestation and make choices which put the energy to use that determines whether the energy does more damage than good.
That's the essence of the "Beat Sheet" -- a "beat" is a BANG made by ENERGY - kinetic energy turned into sound. Or in the case of a story: emotional energy turned into action. It all has rhythm. The energy builds, the energy is released in a BEAT.
The rhythms of the world these fiction-beats are derived from are well depicted in Tarot and Astrology (and dozens of other fields of psychology) in a way that writers can use them to create characters, life stories, and plots.
Find the series of posts on Tarot and Astrology listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html (this one lists a group of very esoteric essays I did for my professional Review column on Snyder's Beat Sheet - and Snyder agreed).
So people (humans and most of the aliens we write about) can be "bent" as children, and very often, without warning and at great inconvenience to the "benders" they can, as adults, "snap back."
And those snaps can be used by writers as beats for fiction -- beats that mirror the rhythmic drumbeats of real life.
So what has all this to do with Newsweek Magazine?
Well, Newsweek featured a story which came out of scientific research.
The importance of this article is largely in the fact that it is a subject taken up by Newsweek. People will read this who would not read the peer reviewed articles in a Journal.
Read this article on Creativity Quotient if you missed it in your dentist's office:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
----Quote From Newsweek--------
Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
----End Quote From Newsweek------
Go read that article.
Creativity Quotients had been steadily rising, just like IQ, until 1990 when among American children, the CQ scores suddenly bent down, and kept dropping.
For this CQ test, they target 8 year olds, 3rd graders.
Kids who were 8 in 1990 were born in 1982.
See my blog entry on the character of generations as described by the position of Pluto in their Natal Chart, and what that means for writers looking to target an audience.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
followed by
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
I just got an advertising email for a seminar on screenwriting about how to pitch your screenplay to producers. The pitch for the pitch-course asks, "Do you know how to answer the most common first question producers will ask in a pitch session?" If you can't answer it, you won't even be considered.
Q: What demographic does your screenplay target?
See my series on WHAT EXACTLY IS EDITING -- 7 posts in a row, Tuesdays starting August 3, 2010.
This Producer-pitch question is the editor's and agent's primary question.
Several tweets from Agents on twitter have pinpointed the first sentence of the query letter as crucial, and the information in that sentence has to be WHAT this novel is, meaning the demographic it's aimed at.
That doesn't mean you should write "This Novel is aimed at girls 8-14 years old" -- but it does mean that whatever you say has to IMPLY STRONGLY that you have a direct bead on a specific demographic and what that demographic is.
In fact, the first sentence of your pitch or query letter is an opportunity to show-don't-tell that you have the ability to "show don't tell" as well as that you know the demographic, can hit the demographic, and can specify that demographic.
Marketing is all about demographics, and today everything is so advertising supported that demographics is the be all and end all of saleability.
So in 1982 where was Pluto?
PLUTO IN LIBRA generation (assimilating out of justice?) Late 1971 - 1984 (Gen Y? sort of)
PLUTO IN SCORPIO generation 1985-1995 or so (video game generation?)
Those born in 1995 were 8 years old in 2003.
The Newsweek article points at video gaming and the TV as babysitter (a 1970's 80's phenomenon) as possible culprits in blunting American creativity.
But then it looks at the various attempts to "reform" our education system, and the current "teaching to the National Tests" format.
People born in 1984 are raising kids now. In fact many may have 6 year olds now. That critical first 7 years of bending the twig is in its second generation.
The Newsweek article makes some assumptions that writers working in Contemporary settings need to take into account.
The most glaring to me is the assumption that kids are the product of the school system, and how school is taught determines how the kids turn out.
Well, it's a big part, to be sure.
And perhaps in today's world, the current 20-somethings raising kids with both parents working 40 hour weeks (they should be so lucky these days), perhaps the school and daycare center is in fact the biggest influence on a child's direction of growth.
How many parents teach their kids to stand up to the teachers and show the teachers where the teachers are just plain wrong to teach "what to think" rather than "how to think" -- and just how far would the poor kid get with that? In fact, would it do the teachers any good? Teachers must do exactly what the Principle and Board and so on tell them to, not what they believe is right. Kids don't understand "the system."
How much face-time do you have with your 8 year old (and younger).
Will that sparsity of face-time with their parents make them turn out to have different "issues" than you do when they grow up?
Cruising the web, I saw an article about education advancements. Kids in K-8 grades are using handheld devices to interface with classroom servers. Teaching is high tech because the jobs these kids will eventually need to do will be even higher tech.
Even car mechanics work with "chips" now -- and if they don't do it right, your car stalls or accelerates out of control.
With all of these factors shifting in less than the span of a mere 20 years or so during which a person can go from being a child to being a parent, which way should we bend our children to give them the best chance in the world we can't even imagine?
Because our imagination fails, we don't know how to bend and blinder our children for their success - or even survival.
With the torrential information explosion, overload, blasting at us all from every direction, do our kids need to have "blinders" installed to protect them from the flying mud kicked up by the kid next door inventing something in their garage that will change the world?
Do we need more information, or less, or someone "up there" in authority controlling our information?
Do we need totally free access to anything anyone wants to put up on the Web (including things we'd rather our pre-adolescents not be exposed to?)
Do we need blinders so we don't see those things that would spook us and distract us from our job?
Or would such blinders "bend" our imaginations so that we can't even imagine that we might imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever imagined existed?
What if we imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever solved before?
Isn't that the beginning of a Ph.D. thesis?
Those questions each can be morphed into a Theme and used to generate incredible fiction very relevant to today's demographics.
But the writer needs to look at that Newsweek article from another perspective, the demographics of the writer's intended audience.
Pitch a "concept" at a producer who was 8 years old somewhere between 1990 and 2000, and if that "concept" is in the youngster's imagination-blindspot he/she won't be able to see it as a commercially viable concept.
You might have the best idea ever for a High Concept novel-film-TV show, a potential multi-media empire seething through the worldbuilding you've done. If the producer, agent, editor can't "see" it because their imagination has failed - then they won't buy it from you.
And that producer would be correct to pass over your property.
Why?
Because your property would fall into the imagination blindspot of the audience demographic that producer is aiming for. It would mean nothing to that audience, certainly not what it means to you.
So a writer must know what blinders her audience is wearing, blinders the audience is not aware exist. The writer must know the limits of the audience's imagination.
What happened when Star Trek first went on the air - say 1967?
It set off an explosion of imagination among young college students - 20 year olds born in the baby-boomer years.
PLUTO IN LEO 1939 - 1957 (Became The Flower Children of 1960's and '70's)
Pluto in Leo folks have a magnified emphasis on being leaders, commanders, examples that others follow. Pluto is a magnifier and Leo represents "The King" - the chief. Gene Roddenberry had Sun in Leo.
And Leo rules the natural 5th House, so it's associated with entertainment, and children and siblings, with personal CREATIVITY in general.
Star Trek dropped into the minds of 20-somethings who already had an excess of creativity. That generation, fans and non-fans, produced the Internet, the Web, home computers, satellite, GPS navigation, genetic engineering, even matter-transmission and the discovery of planets around other stars, all in the last 40 years or so.
That didn't happen worldwide. It happened in the USA. But then it started, and is now continuing to happen in other countries where Star Trek has reached. It's slacking off in the USA, and many patents corporations have filed are actually in the names of folks born and raised, even educated elsewhere.
Star Trek may not be the "cause" -- but its popularity, its appeal, is to the imagination. It energizes imagination that already exists. It can't be popular where that imagination fails.
But now the USA is not producing such imaginative people though other countries are.
So the position of Pluto in natal charts and other factors that exist worldwide doesn't account for the change the Newsweek article notes in creativity in the USA as opposed to creativity in other countries.
So where are these blinders on the imagination of USA youth being implanted? In school, by daycare, in sports and other group activities, or in the home, in TV, Internet, and gaming hours?
And what will happen when this generation, or two generations, snap back, rip off the blinders and look at the world again?
Did we implant these blinders on our children to protect them from the excess amount of change the information age has created?
Again, each of these (unimaginable) questions could lead to blockbuster novel sales, films, TV series. Who knows? Can you imagine that?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Who would think Newsweek would give writing lessons?
The overall general topic I've been tackling in these posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is how to improve the general reader/viewer's opinion of the Romance Genre - particularly SFR and PNR.
Part I of this sequence on Failure of Imagination is not labeled Part I because I had no idea the topic would spread so far:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Part I is about professional romance writers unable to imagine the HEA is actually a real part of everyday mundane life.
Part II is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part II looks at our failure as a society to imagine solutions to some problems -- and therefore we must suspect we fail to imagine and actualize solutions to other problems. It's not a failure to solve A problem - it's a failure at problem-solving-methodology. I wrote this before the Newsweek article came out.
Part III is this post where we will look at why Americans are wearing such blinders on the Imagination.
We put blinders (those leather cups around the outside of the eyes) on race horses to help them concentrate on running where the jockey points them and not spook at every movement close by, especially when being put into the starting gate stall. They also protect the horse's eyes from flying mud kicked up by a horse next to them.
It's a kindness to the horse, and a way of getting the horse's best out of him/her.
But should humans be treated that way?
When some of our data-input channels (mental and emotional bandwidth?) are blocked by "blinders" do we perform "better?"
Well, if you prevent certain sorts of human behavior before the behavior is even conceptualized, the human might become more tractable, more easily directed into certain group coordinated activities like running in a herd.
How can you put blinders on a MIND???
I don't mean how can you get up the nerve, the gumption, the chutzpah to do that -- but rather how can a mind be "blinded?"
Well, it's psychological of course.
And isn't psychology what fiction is about -- while Romance genre specializes in microscopic examination of the psychological?
You know me and cliches. Here's another old one I haven't harped on before. "As The Twig Is Bent, So Grows The Tree."
People can be bent psychologically if you can get at them early enough in life. The rule of thumb is give me a child until he's 7 years old, and you can do anything you want with him after that. (Is that from the Jesuits?)
We know this from child-abuse studies. A person abused in childhood turns out to be an adult with "issues" -- if overcome, those issues can be a strength, but if not overcome then they can cut swaths out of the individual's total potential.
People are bendable. Thus humans can "adjust" culturally, physically, psychologically, to almost any environment and circumstance.
Humans inhabit this world from the Arctic to the Tropics, on tundra and in deep forest. Humans live packed into cities, and spread onto prairie. Humans live under dictators and alone in single families or tribes. Humans can do anything if they start young enough.
This is what gives us the scope to postulate human-alien Romances, galactic civilizations, lost human colonies on worlds peopled primarily by Aliens (Examples: C. J. Cherryh's fabulous FOREIGNER series and my own Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends. Find free chapters of my novels at http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com )
This bendable trait of human beings gives fiction writers much fodder for character development, story arc, plot and worldbuilding.
There's the story of overcoming childhood trauma -- the story of frigidity being overcome by Love -- the story of a weakness becoming a strength as someone takes their trauma and say, founds an organization to fight that issue in the general public.
Say a kid witnesses their elder sibling being killed by a drunk driver and grows up to found a National Chain of Bar & Grill joints which fight alcoholism and drunk driving, hiring real Psychologists to be bartenders?
There's no such thing as a life-event that is inherently ALL BAD. But there is trauma that changes people in ways they would rather not be changed.
As I've detailed in my series of posts here on Tarot and Astrology, all these life-events are just made of ENERGY - and it's how we bring that energy into manifestation and make choices which put the energy to use that determines whether the energy does more damage than good.
That's the essence of the "Beat Sheet" -- a "beat" is a BANG made by ENERGY - kinetic energy turned into sound. Or in the case of a story: emotional energy turned into action. It all has rhythm. The energy builds, the energy is released in a BEAT.
The rhythms of the world these fiction-beats are derived from are well depicted in Tarot and Astrology (and dozens of other fields of psychology) in a way that writers can use them to create characters, life stories, and plots.
Find the series of posts on Tarot and Astrology listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html (this one lists a group of very esoteric essays I did for my professional Review column on Snyder's Beat Sheet - and Snyder agreed).
So people (humans and most of the aliens we write about) can be "bent" as children, and very often, without warning and at great inconvenience to the "benders" they can, as adults, "snap back."
And those snaps can be used by writers as beats for fiction -- beats that mirror the rhythmic drumbeats of real life.
So what has all this to do with Newsweek Magazine?
Well, Newsweek featured a story which came out of scientific research.
The importance of this article is largely in the fact that it is a subject taken up by Newsweek. People will read this who would not read the peer reviewed articles in a Journal.
Read this article on Creativity Quotient if you missed it in your dentist's office:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
----Quote From Newsweek--------
Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
----End Quote From Newsweek------
Go read that article.
Creativity Quotients had been steadily rising, just like IQ, until 1990 when among American children, the CQ scores suddenly bent down, and kept dropping.
For this CQ test, they target 8 year olds, 3rd graders.
Kids who were 8 in 1990 were born in 1982.
See my blog entry on the character of generations as described by the position of Pluto in their Natal Chart, and what that means for writers looking to target an audience.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
followed by
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
I just got an advertising email for a seminar on screenwriting about how to pitch your screenplay to producers. The pitch for the pitch-course asks, "Do you know how to answer the most common first question producers will ask in a pitch session?" If you can't answer it, you won't even be considered.
Q: What demographic does your screenplay target?
See my series on WHAT EXACTLY IS EDITING -- 7 posts in a row, Tuesdays starting August 3, 2010.
This Producer-pitch question is the editor's and agent's primary question.
Several tweets from Agents on twitter have pinpointed the first sentence of the query letter as crucial, and the information in that sentence has to be WHAT this novel is, meaning the demographic it's aimed at.
That doesn't mean you should write "This Novel is aimed at girls 8-14 years old" -- but it does mean that whatever you say has to IMPLY STRONGLY that you have a direct bead on a specific demographic and what that demographic is.
In fact, the first sentence of your pitch or query letter is an opportunity to show-don't-tell that you have the ability to "show don't tell" as well as that you know the demographic, can hit the demographic, and can specify that demographic.
Marketing is all about demographics, and today everything is so advertising supported that demographics is the be all and end all of saleability.
So in 1982 where was Pluto?
PLUTO IN LIBRA generation (assimilating out of justice?) Late 1971 - 1984 (Gen Y? sort of)
PLUTO IN SCORPIO generation 1985-1995 or so (video game generation?)
Those born in 1995 were 8 years old in 2003.
The Newsweek article points at video gaming and the TV as babysitter (a 1970's 80's phenomenon) as possible culprits in blunting American creativity.
But then it looks at the various attempts to "reform" our education system, and the current "teaching to the National Tests" format.
People born in 1984 are raising kids now. In fact many may have 6 year olds now. That critical first 7 years of bending the twig is in its second generation.
The Newsweek article makes some assumptions that writers working in Contemporary settings need to take into account.
The most glaring to me is the assumption that kids are the product of the school system, and how school is taught determines how the kids turn out.
Well, it's a big part, to be sure.
And perhaps in today's world, the current 20-somethings raising kids with both parents working 40 hour weeks (they should be so lucky these days), perhaps the school and daycare center is in fact the biggest influence on a child's direction of growth.
How many parents teach their kids to stand up to the teachers and show the teachers where the teachers are just plain wrong to teach "what to think" rather than "how to think" -- and just how far would the poor kid get with that? In fact, would it do the teachers any good? Teachers must do exactly what the Principle and Board and so on tell them to, not what they believe is right. Kids don't understand "the system."
How much face-time do you have with your 8 year old (and younger).
Will that sparsity of face-time with their parents make them turn out to have different "issues" than you do when they grow up?
Cruising the web, I saw an article about education advancements. Kids in K-8 grades are using handheld devices to interface with classroom servers. Teaching is high tech because the jobs these kids will eventually need to do will be even higher tech.
Even car mechanics work with "chips" now -- and if they don't do it right, your car stalls or accelerates out of control.
With all of these factors shifting in less than the span of a mere 20 years or so during which a person can go from being a child to being a parent, which way should we bend our children to give them the best chance in the world we can't even imagine?
Because our imagination fails, we don't know how to bend and blinder our children for their success - or even survival.
With the torrential information explosion, overload, blasting at us all from every direction, do our kids need to have "blinders" installed to protect them from the flying mud kicked up by the kid next door inventing something in their garage that will change the world?
Do we need more information, or less, or someone "up there" in authority controlling our information?
Do we need totally free access to anything anyone wants to put up on the Web (including things we'd rather our pre-adolescents not be exposed to?)
Do we need blinders so we don't see those things that would spook us and distract us from our job?
Or would such blinders "bend" our imaginations so that we can't even imagine that we might imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever imagined existed?
What if we imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever solved before?
Isn't that the beginning of a Ph.D. thesis?
Those questions each can be morphed into a Theme and used to generate incredible fiction very relevant to today's demographics.
But the writer needs to look at that Newsweek article from another perspective, the demographics of the writer's intended audience.
Pitch a "concept" at a producer who was 8 years old somewhere between 1990 and 2000, and if that "concept" is in the youngster's imagination-blindspot he/she won't be able to see it as a commercially viable concept.
You might have the best idea ever for a High Concept novel-film-TV show, a potential multi-media empire seething through the worldbuilding you've done. If the producer, agent, editor can't "see" it because their imagination has failed - then they won't buy it from you.
And that producer would be correct to pass over your property.
Why?
Because your property would fall into the imagination blindspot of the audience demographic that producer is aiming for. It would mean nothing to that audience, certainly not what it means to you.
So a writer must know what blinders her audience is wearing, blinders the audience is not aware exist. The writer must know the limits of the audience's imagination.
What happened when Star Trek first went on the air - say 1967?
It set off an explosion of imagination among young college students - 20 year olds born in the baby-boomer years.
PLUTO IN LEO 1939 - 1957 (Became The Flower Children of 1960's and '70's)
Pluto in Leo folks have a magnified emphasis on being leaders, commanders, examples that others follow. Pluto is a magnifier and Leo represents "The King" - the chief. Gene Roddenberry had Sun in Leo.
And Leo rules the natural 5th House, so it's associated with entertainment, and children and siblings, with personal CREATIVITY in general.
Star Trek dropped into the minds of 20-somethings who already had an excess of creativity. That generation, fans and non-fans, produced the Internet, the Web, home computers, satellite, GPS navigation, genetic engineering, even matter-transmission and the discovery of planets around other stars, all in the last 40 years or so.
That didn't happen worldwide. It happened in the USA. But then it started, and is now continuing to happen in other countries where Star Trek has reached. It's slacking off in the USA, and many patents corporations have filed are actually in the names of folks born and raised, even educated elsewhere.
Star Trek may not be the "cause" -- but its popularity, its appeal, is to the imagination. It energizes imagination that already exists. It can't be popular where that imagination fails.
But now the USA is not producing such imaginative people though other countries are.
So the position of Pluto in natal charts and other factors that exist worldwide doesn't account for the change the Newsweek article notes in creativity in the USA as opposed to creativity in other countries.
So where are these blinders on the imagination of USA youth being implanted? In school, by daycare, in sports and other group activities, or in the home, in TV, Internet, and gaming hours?
And what will happen when this generation, or two generations, snap back, rip off the blinders and look at the world again?
Did we implant these blinders on our children to protect them from the excess amount of change the information age has created?
Again, each of these (unimaginable) questions could lead to blockbuster novel sales, films, TV series. Who knows? Can you imagine that?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Mutants as Aliens in Sime~Gen
As I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago, I recently stumbled upon a blog entry from a reader in Australia who reread Unto Zeor, Forever (my second Sime~Gen novel published and my first Award Winner) recently and she identified the reason she had been fascinated by this novel years ago upon first reading.
Unto Zeor, Forever is actually SFR where mutation generates the Alien in Alien Romance.
Here's the blog post that started me thinking:
-------quote--------
This was before I found romance. And looking back, the only one on the list that’s really a romance (and probably the only one of all the books I read at the time) is Unto Zeor Forever. Interesting that it was the romance that I obsessed abut the most, yes?
------end quote-------
http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html
Unto Zeor, Forever is a novel that stands about among its contemporaries because the plot is relationship driven. It's typical SF in that the plot puts the fate of the world in jeopardy and appoints one particular individual to exceed his personal limits of capability (to sacrifice himself to near destruction, and even beyond destruction of everything dear to him in life) in order to Save The World.
It's a "first contact" novel. Two people from distant societies isolated from each other first learn about the other, find the "other" unbearably strange, and must adjust.
It's a "Mutant Novel" - in that it's set in the far future when humanity has mutated into two strains. It's set beyond the point where they each intend to kill the other side off, and at the cusp of the point where they begin true acceptance instead of an uneasy truce.
Acceptance means destruction of social orders on each side of their borders, so it's sociological science fiction.
It's "hard SF" in the sense that the main plot problem is a scientific puzzle that can be solved only by scientific experiment, investigation, amassing statistics, understanding the inscrutible nature of the two kinds of human biology (Sime and Gen).
The resolution of the plot happens only because of a scientific breakthrough. But the "science" is entirely "made up" - totally imaginary. It simply fills the spot in their society that our science fills in ours.
All of those kinds of SF novel were extant and very popular at the time Unto Zeor, Forever was first published in hardcover (1978).
What was unusual, perhaps even anti-commercial publishing, was that all these types of SF novel were jumbled together in one novel, a "cross-sub-genre" novel.
What you see when you read this novel depends on what you expect to see, what you want to see, and maybe also on your ability to follow a complex piece of writing. It simply would never make a movie. It's way too "deep."
Unto Zeor, Forever is also a trope-busting novel, another reason it was shoved aside and shunned by vast sections of the publisher's target readership.
What trope did it bust? SCIENCE FICTION must never contain ROMANCE, and ROMANCE must never contant SCIENCE FICTION.
The structure of Unto Zeor, Forever is basically SFR, and the blend is crafted in such a way that, unless you're well practiced at analyzing novels, you will have a hard time deciding if it's SF that contains Romance or Romance that contains SF.
Romance drives the plot, but not via sexuality. (but some readers can't tell that).
Science drives the plot, but not via "real" science or even extrapolation of existing science.
Because the science is totally made up, this novel published as SF then might today be published as FANTASY! (the field of futuristic fantasy didn't exist at that time so publishers had no way to market such a misfit novel)
What is the science made up of, though? The material underlying the made-up science of the Sime~Gen Universe is material no self-respecting SF writer (such as Robert J. Sawyer who had the grace to drop a very insightful comment on my post about his fabulous SF novel, WWW: WATCH
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/wwwwatch-by-robert-j-sawyer.html ) would touch.
As the success of STAR TREK (slow to start as it was) illustrated, one core value of SF decades ago was the total rejection of the model of the universe in which God runs things, up close and personal.
In STAR TREK, all divine beings turn out to be frauds.
At the time the Sime~Gen Universe world was built, STAR TREK had not yet been conceived, at least not in the form we eventually saw it take.
Science Fiction which I surveyed and analyzed had left the entire realm of human psychology, the human spirit, and the yearning for real touch with the Divine out of every story.
The philosophical premise of the SF field was simply that science can explain everything about humans (and non-humans) simply by studying biology, biochemistry, physics, and hard sciences.
The premise that there exists and Divine force, that souls are real, was discarded before the worldbuilding began.
The Sime~Gen premise is "real SF" because it takes that blind assumption of all the writers and readers of the field, and challenges it from the blind spot.
That's right, Sime~Gen was deliberately crafted to blindside readers, hit where no one had hit before.
The science and worldbuilding of Sime~Gen is rooted in psychic sciences, spiritual sciences (karma, reincarnation), anthropology, linguistics, social sciences, psychology, and even religion.
But in order to sell it, none of that could be allowed to show on the surface in the early novels. (and to date, one novel where it's tackled head-on, has not made it into publication, The Farris Channel).
As a result of hiding the premises, and deliberately blindsiding the readership, half the fans drawn to the books really dislike the whole psychic, ESP, other dimensional aspects of the worldbuilding.
Two Sime~Gen Novels allow some of that "The Soul Is Real" premise to trickle through into reader consciousness.
Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg are both blatant "Soul Mate" stories.
First Channel was recently singled out in this Romance blog:
http://likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=7437
-----quote----
While First Channel is not a romance, the story is propelled by Rimon and Kadi's feelings for each other. Other characters fall in love as well, some with tragic consequences. Events unfold over several years, giving it a more realistic feeling than in so many stories where everything is resolved in a relationship in a week or two. The setting was so unique that I am planning to read some of the other books in the series to find out what the future holds for the Sime and Gen.
-----end quote-----
It's more than "the story" that's propelled by the young couple's feelings for one another. It's the plot of the book, AND the fate of the entire human species, Sime and Gen alike, as love itself cracks a scientific puzzle that has locked humanity into a decline into primitive warfare where 30 years old is ancient.
Both these novels detail the meeting and mating of two people who are Soul Mates, Destined for each other. Their decisions actually change history, change the world, at a deeply personal cost.
Jean Lorrah, after analyzing and dissecting an early draft of Unto Zeor, Forever, penetrated to the core of the matter with her premise that ONLY LOVE could ever have taught a Sime how not-to-Kill Gens.
Buried deep inside Unto Zeor, Forever is the Great Theme of all Romance, "Love Conquers All" but it's not revealed until Jean Lorrah came along and detailed it in First Channel.
Each member of each couple makes certain independent free will choices, and the cascading results of those choices tumble them willy nilly into the annals of History.
As mentioned above, "The Soul Is Real" concept leads directly to REINCARNATION IS REAL in the Sime~Gen Universe.
So if you know how to read these novels, if you know the unpublished secrets behind what's really happening, you can see that you are reading a series of LIFETIMES lived by the same souls, taking different relationships to each other, learning from past errors, making up for the untoward results of their previous actions.
And in some lifetimes, the souls are rewarded by finding their Soul Mates and achieving spiritual goals -- all without knowing it, just like in our real lives.
None of these novels could ever have been published if all that "Fantasy stuff" and that "Romance stuff" had been blatantly displayed on the surface. And in fact, the merest whiff of these matters disqualified these novels from becoming publisher's "Lead Title" (the only one ever put on book shelves in chain stores or supermarkets).
So even though Unto Zeor, Forever ends in a tragedy of monumental proportions, and heads into a hiatus of spiritual progress for one of the souls, you can see that the tragedy had a past-life cause and will generate a future HEA when you reread the series of 8 novels in different orders.
Making a spiritual premise (Human Nature can change, and for the better too -- all humans are Good at the core) into the "Science" in the Science part of Science Fiction challenges the very definition of what SF really is.
That subliminal challenge offends some, and awakens others to the vast possibilities SF of previous decades left unconsidered.
That awakening is starting to explode into our world with Vampire Romance, with female lead characters in Urban Fantasy, with warfare against Evil led by women.
Here is a collection of links to links to my previous posts on the "science" upon which Sime~Gen's worldbuilding rests, included here because someone just wrote to me saying she'd found my first non-fiction book on the Tarot and wanted the rest.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
And here's an exchange from twitter:
@JLichtenberg: @Azrael52 Novels now come in serials just like TV shows "story arc" - everything pubs send me is bk#X in YYseries #scifichat
@michaelspence @JLichtenberg (And whose fault is that? YOU were the first writer I read who talked in terms of series rather than individual stories! :^) )
I always find it amazing when other professional writers say they've read some of my novels, or even just Star Trek Lives!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (currently available)
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (complete bio-biblio)
Unto Zeor, Forever is actually SFR where mutation generates the Alien in Alien Romance.
Here's the blog post that started me thinking:
-------quote--------
This was before I found romance. And looking back, the only one on the list that’s really a romance (and probably the only one of all the books I read at the time) is Unto Zeor Forever. Interesting that it was the romance that I obsessed abut the most, yes?
------end quote-------
http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html
Unto Zeor, Forever is a novel that stands about among its contemporaries because the plot is relationship driven. It's typical SF in that the plot puts the fate of the world in jeopardy and appoints one particular individual to exceed his personal limits of capability (to sacrifice himself to near destruction, and even beyond destruction of everything dear to him in life) in order to Save The World.
It's a "first contact" novel. Two people from distant societies isolated from each other first learn about the other, find the "other" unbearably strange, and must adjust.
It's a "Mutant Novel" - in that it's set in the far future when humanity has mutated into two strains. It's set beyond the point where they each intend to kill the other side off, and at the cusp of the point where they begin true acceptance instead of an uneasy truce.
Acceptance means destruction of social orders on each side of their borders, so it's sociological science fiction.
It's "hard SF" in the sense that the main plot problem is a scientific puzzle that can be solved only by scientific experiment, investigation, amassing statistics, understanding the inscrutible nature of the two kinds of human biology (Sime and Gen).
The resolution of the plot happens only because of a scientific breakthrough. But the "science" is entirely "made up" - totally imaginary. It simply fills the spot in their society that our science fills in ours.
All of those kinds of SF novel were extant and very popular at the time Unto Zeor, Forever was first published in hardcover (1978).
What was unusual, perhaps even anti-commercial publishing, was that all these types of SF novel were jumbled together in one novel, a "cross-sub-genre" novel.
What you see when you read this novel depends on what you expect to see, what you want to see, and maybe also on your ability to follow a complex piece of writing. It simply would never make a movie. It's way too "deep."
Unto Zeor, Forever is also a trope-busting novel, another reason it was shoved aside and shunned by vast sections of the publisher's target readership.
What trope did it bust? SCIENCE FICTION must never contain ROMANCE, and ROMANCE must never contant SCIENCE FICTION.
The structure of Unto Zeor, Forever is basically SFR, and the blend is crafted in such a way that, unless you're well practiced at analyzing novels, you will have a hard time deciding if it's SF that contains Romance or Romance that contains SF.
Romance drives the plot, but not via sexuality. (but some readers can't tell that).
Science drives the plot, but not via "real" science or even extrapolation of existing science.
Because the science is totally made up, this novel published as SF then might today be published as FANTASY! (the field of futuristic fantasy didn't exist at that time so publishers had no way to market such a misfit novel)
What is the science made up of, though? The material underlying the made-up science of the Sime~Gen Universe is material no self-respecting SF writer (such as Robert J. Sawyer who had the grace to drop a very insightful comment on my post about his fabulous SF novel, WWW: WATCH
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/wwwwatch-by-robert-j-sawyer.html ) would touch.
As the success of STAR TREK (slow to start as it was) illustrated, one core value of SF decades ago was the total rejection of the model of the universe in which God runs things, up close and personal.
In STAR TREK, all divine beings turn out to be frauds.
At the time the Sime~Gen Universe world was built, STAR TREK had not yet been conceived, at least not in the form we eventually saw it take.
Science Fiction which I surveyed and analyzed had left the entire realm of human psychology, the human spirit, and the yearning for real touch with the Divine out of every story.
The philosophical premise of the SF field was simply that science can explain everything about humans (and non-humans) simply by studying biology, biochemistry, physics, and hard sciences.
The premise that there exists and Divine force, that souls are real, was discarded before the worldbuilding began.
The Sime~Gen premise is "real SF" because it takes that blind assumption of all the writers and readers of the field, and challenges it from the blind spot.
That's right, Sime~Gen was deliberately crafted to blindside readers, hit where no one had hit before.
The science and worldbuilding of Sime~Gen is rooted in psychic sciences, spiritual sciences (karma, reincarnation), anthropology, linguistics, social sciences, psychology, and even religion.
But in order to sell it, none of that could be allowed to show on the surface in the early novels. (and to date, one novel where it's tackled head-on, has not made it into publication, The Farris Channel).
As a result of hiding the premises, and deliberately blindsiding the readership, half the fans drawn to the books really dislike the whole psychic, ESP, other dimensional aspects of the worldbuilding.
Two Sime~Gen Novels allow some of that "The Soul Is Real" premise to trickle through into reader consciousness.
Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg are both blatant "Soul Mate" stories.
First Channel was recently singled out in this Romance blog:
http://likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/bookReview.pl?BookReviewId=7437
-----quote----
While First Channel is not a romance, the story is propelled by Rimon and Kadi's feelings for each other. Other characters fall in love as well, some with tragic consequences. Events unfold over several years, giving it a more realistic feeling than in so many stories where everything is resolved in a relationship in a week or two. The setting was so unique that I am planning to read some of the other books in the series to find out what the future holds for the Sime and Gen.
-----end quote-----
It's more than "the story" that's propelled by the young couple's feelings for one another. It's the plot of the book, AND the fate of the entire human species, Sime and Gen alike, as love itself cracks a scientific puzzle that has locked humanity into a decline into primitive warfare where 30 years old is ancient.
Both these novels detail the meeting and mating of two people who are Soul Mates, Destined for each other. Their decisions actually change history, change the world, at a deeply personal cost.
Jean Lorrah, after analyzing and dissecting an early draft of Unto Zeor, Forever, penetrated to the core of the matter with her premise that ONLY LOVE could ever have taught a Sime how not-to-Kill Gens.
Buried deep inside Unto Zeor, Forever is the Great Theme of all Romance, "Love Conquers All" but it's not revealed until Jean Lorrah came along and detailed it in First Channel.
Each member of each couple makes certain independent free will choices, and the cascading results of those choices tumble them willy nilly into the annals of History.
As mentioned above, "The Soul Is Real" concept leads directly to REINCARNATION IS REAL in the Sime~Gen Universe.
So if you know how to read these novels, if you know the unpublished secrets behind what's really happening, you can see that you are reading a series of LIFETIMES lived by the same souls, taking different relationships to each other, learning from past errors, making up for the untoward results of their previous actions.
And in some lifetimes, the souls are rewarded by finding their Soul Mates and achieving spiritual goals -- all without knowing it, just like in our real lives.
None of these novels could ever have been published if all that "Fantasy stuff" and that "Romance stuff" had been blatantly displayed on the surface. And in fact, the merest whiff of these matters disqualified these novels from becoming publisher's "Lead Title" (the only one ever put on book shelves in chain stores or supermarkets).
So even though Unto Zeor, Forever ends in a tragedy of monumental proportions, and heads into a hiatus of spiritual progress for one of the souls, you can see that the tragedy had a past-life cause and will generate a future HEA when you reread the series of 8 novels in different orders.
Making a spiritual premise (Human Nature can change, and for the better too -- all humans are Good at the core) into the "Science" in the Science part of Science Fiction challenges the very definition of what SF really is.
That subliminal challenge offends some, and awakens others to the vast possibilities SF of previous decades left unconsidered.
That awakening is starting to explode into our world with Vampire Romance, with female lead characters in Urban Fantasy, with warfare against Evil led by women.
Here is a collection of links to links to my previous posts on the "science" upon which Sime~Gen's worldbuilding rests, included here because someone just wrote to me saying she'd found my first non-fiction book on the Tarot and wanted the rest.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
And here's an exchange from twitter:
@JLichtenberg: @Azrael52 Novels now come in serials just like TV shows "story arc" - everything pubs send me is bk#X in YYseries #scifichat
@michaelspence @JLichtenberg (And whose fault is that? YOU were the first writer I read who talked in terms of series rather than individual stories! :^) )
I always find it amazing when other professional writers say they've read some of my novels, or even just Star Trek Lives!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (currently available)
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (complete bio-biblio)
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
Is there a taboo against romance in science fiction?
SFSignals-Mindmeld-
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/06/mind-meld-sfr
just did a Question which they asked me (among others) to answer.
Here's the Question they emailed me.
--------
[INTRO] From Star Wars to Avatar, stories blending science fiction and romance have persisted for decades in books, films, fan fiction, and even videogames. However, despite such evidence, there are those who believe the two genres can’t, or shouldn’t, be combined.
Q: Is there a taboo against romance in science fiction? What does romance bring to the SF genre? What are some good examples of romance in SF that illustrate this?
--------
So I emailed back and asked how much room do I have? And can I cheat by including links?
(they had NO IDEA of the size of this topic!!!!)
They emailed back and answered 1,000 words max and yes I can use links.
So I cheated my way through the answer, but I wanted to share it with you here because last week, my blog post here was titled: "Why do "they" despise Romance?"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-do-they-despise-romance.html
That post is based on a discussion on a twitter chat #scriptchat (I also attend and often blog about #scifichat ) about the Romantic Comedy film subgenre. That post answers this SFSignals question at length.
Here's my brief answer.
For at least twenty years, Romance writers have sought to inject elements of SF and Fantasy into Romance novels.
Lately, SF writers have begun to blend Romance motifs into novels.
Certain editors and mass market publishers have found a receptive readership for this kind of mixed-genre product, and others have just bounced right out of the market entirely.
This is a marketing puzzle, a writer's business model puzzle, and a reader's dilemma. Why do these two fields repel each other?
Solve that puzzle and make a fortune because Romance is huge and SF is shrinking.
My exploration of this puzzle has caught the imagination of Heather Massey at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ and she has compiled a pair of posts about how hard it is to mix SF and Romance.
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/05/brief-history-of-science-fiction.html
followed by
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/05/why-sf-fandom-is-full-of-romance-haterz.html
There she focused on my 1978 Award winning novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER -- published when there was an absolute, blast-barrier wall between SF and Romance, a taboo stronger than the taboo against words like hell and damn in books sold to libraries (almost all of my fiction, so it doesn't contain much English invective).
In 2010, I found my name mentioned (via feeddemon search) in an Australian blog and discovered a woman who had read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER years ago, and only now, on re-reading realized that it is indeed SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE and belongs with the modern books she likes. That's why UNTO stood out to the point where she had obsessed over it. At that time, it was almost unique "Alien Romance" - and now it's a genre.
http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html
So in 1978, SF readers were starting to accept a romance driven plot.
By 1985, Romance readers started to accept an SF driven plot.
The first novel in my DUSHAU TRILOGY, DUSHAU (now available on Kindle) won the first Romantic Times Award for Science Fiction and shocked the socks off my agent who was marketing me as an SF writer.
Today, if you read the comments on Heather Massey's two posts cited above, you'll see that readers of SFR and Paranormal Romance are devouring novels by a writer who admired some of my novels and founded a career "writing like that" -- SF with a solid romance driving the plot and story, Linnea Sinclair (I adore her books!).
Linnea likes my Vampire Romances, THOSE OF MY BLOOD and DREAMSPY, too.
And there's a generation of writers (and readers) now working to replicate the magic Linnea Sinclair has created who have never heard of me.
Ten years from now, nobody will remember that it was ever possible to write SF or Romance as separate genres.
The reason for that is that both SF(including Fantasy) and Romance are "Wish Fulfillment Fantasy" genres.
We enjoy the stories that show us how to get our heart's desire.
SF delivers the heart's desire of someone who wants to be loved as the one person who actually understands what's going on and can solve the problem innovatively, thinking outside the box.
Romance delivers the heart's desire of someone who wants to be loved because they are more important than war, work, politics or sports - loved, admired and valued because they are understood completely (no matter how far outside the box the guy has to think in order to grasp the intricate complexities of who this very special person (me!) is.
Now you explain to me how those could possibly be incompatible objectives?
Here is a more complete explanation and a long list of examples in the early years of how to blend these two genres
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
For more examples in current novels:
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/ (my prof review column archive)
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (full bio biblio)
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (current availability & free chaps)
Can be followed on twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Or facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
Or friendfeed.com as jlichtenberg
---------
SHORT BIO:
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, ( http://www.sfwa.org ). She is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe with a vibrant fan following ( http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/ ), primary author of the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! which blew the lid on Star Trek fandom, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the genre term Intimate Adventure, winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction with her second novel, and the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel with her later novel Dushau, now in Kindle. Her fiction has been in audio-dramatization on XM Satellite Radio. She has been the sf/f reviewer for a professional magazine since 1993. She teaches sf/f writing online while turning to her first love, screenwriting focused on selling to the feature film market.
Screenwriting: http://www.slantedconcept.com
--------------
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/06/mind-meld-sfr
just did a Question which they asked me (among others) to answer.
Here's the Question they emailed me.
--------
[INTRO] From Star Wars to Avatar, stories blending science fiction and romance have persisted for decades in books, films, fan fiction, and even videogames. However, despite such evidence, there are those who believe the two genres can’t, or shouldn’t, be combined.
Q: Is there a taboo against romance in science fiction? What does romance bring to the SF genre? What are some good examples of romance in SF that illustrate this?
--------
So I emailed back and asked how much room do I have? And can I cheat by including links?
(they had NO IDEA of the size of this topic!!!!)
They emailed back and answered 1,000 words max and yes I can use links.
So I cheated my way through the answer, but I wanted to share it with you here because last week, my blog post here was titled: "Why do "they" despise Romance?"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-do-they-despise-romance.html
That post is based on a discussion on a twitter chat #scriptchat (I also attend and often blog about #scifichat ) about the Romantic Comedy film subgenre. That post answers this SFSignals question at length.
Here's my brief answer.
For at least twenty years, Romance writers have sought to inject elements of SF and Fantasy into Romance novels.
Lately, SF writers have begun to blend Romance motifs into novels.
Certain editors and mass market publishers have found a receptive readership for this kind of mixed-genre product, and others have just bounced right out of the market entirely.
This is a marketing puzzle, a writer's business model puzzle, and a reader's dilemma. Why do these two fields repel each other?
Solve that puzzle and make a fortune because Romance is huge and SF is shrinking.
My exploration of this puzzle has caught the imagination of Heather Massey at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ and she has compiled a pair of posts about how hard it is to mix SF and Romance.
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/05/brief-history-of-science-fiction.html
followed by
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2010/05/why-sf-fandom-is-full-of-romance-haterz.html
There she focused on my 1978 Award winning novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER -- published when there was an absolute, blast-barrier wall between SF and Romance, a taboo stronger than the taboo against words like hell and damn in books sold to libraries (almost all of my fiction, so it doesn't contain much English invective).
In 2010, I found my name mentioned (via feeddemon search) in an Australian blog and discovered a woman who had read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER years ago, and only now, on re-reading realized that it is indeed SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE and belongs with the modern books she likes. That's why UNTO stood out to the point where she had obsessed over it. At that time, it was almost unique "Alien Romance" - and now it's a genre.
http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html
So in 1978, SF readers were starting to accept a romance driven plot.
By 1985, Romance readers started to accept an SF driven plot.
The first novel in my DUSHAU TRILOGY, DUSHAU (now available on Kindle) won the first Romantic Times Award for Science Fiction and shocked the socks off my agent who was marketing me as an SF writer.
Today, if you read the comments on Heather Massey's two posts cited above, you'll see that readers of SFR and Paranormal Romance are devouring novels by a writer who admired some of my novels and founded a career "writing like that" -- SF with a solid romance driving the plot and story, Linnea Sinclair (I adore her books!).
Linnea likes my Vampire Romances, THOSE OF MY BLOOD and DREAMSPY, too.
And there's a generation of writers (and readers) now working to replicate the magic Linnea Sinclair has created who have never heard of me.
Ten years from now, nobody will remember that it was ever possible to write SF or Romance as separate genres.
The reason for that is that both SF(including Fantasy) and Romance are "Wish Fulfillment Fantasy" genres.
We enjoy the stories that show us how to get our heart's desire.
SF delivers the heart's desire of someone who wants to be loved as the one person who actually understands what's going on and can solve the problem innovatively, thinking outside the box.
Romance delivers the heart's desire of someone who wants to be loved because they are more important than war, work, politics or sports - loved, admired and valued because they are understood completely (no matter how far outside the box the guy has to think in order to grasp the intricate complexities of who this very special person (me!) is.
Now you explain to me how those could possibly be incompatible objectives?
Here is a more complete explanation and a long list of examples in the early years of how to blend these two genres
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
For more examples in current novels:
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/ (my prof review column archive)
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (full bio biblio)
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (current availability & free chaps)
Can be followed on twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Or facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
Or friendfeed.com as jlichtenberg
---------
SHORT BIO:
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, ( http://www.sfwa.org ). She is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe with a vibrant fan following ( http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/ ), primary author of the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! which blew the lid on Star Trek fandom, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the genre term Intimate Adventure, winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction with her second novel, and the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel with her later novel Dushau, now in Kindle. Her fiction has been in audio-dramatization on XM Satellite Radio. She has been the sf/f reviewer for a professional magazine since 1993. She teaches sf/f writing online while turning to her first love, screenwriting focused on selling to the feature film market.
Screenwriting: http://www.slantedconcept.com
--------------
Sunday, April 11, 2010
SFR Community On Amazon
I happened to be doing something or other public-spirited in nature on my personal Amazon Communities home page (Your Communities) when "Linnea Sinclair" popped up.
I thought that I saw that Linnea Sinclair had just tagged Rebels and Lovers However, now I poke around on the SFR community, I think it must have been Laurie G who did the tagging. It is quite alarming how little privacy one enjoys on Amazon.
Laurie G, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and this author are currently the top ranked "Contributors" in the SFR Community on Amazon. This simply means that we have taken the trouble to add "sfr" as a tag to other authors' books in order to help readers find SFR works if they happen to search by "SFR".
Once a "Community" is created on Amazon, through "tags" anyone can vote on the tags, start a discussion (which one hopes will be relevant), add images and more. At the moment, the SFR community is thinly populated.
If you have a book, or a friend, or a stake in the future of SFR to promote, please take a look.
Find the SFR Community.
http://www.amazon.com/tag/sfr/ref=tag_ybc_ybs_itdp
Rowena Cherry
Friend of ePublishing 2009 Award winner
Please tag Mating Net as SFR for me
http://www.amazon.com/Mating-Net-ebook/dp/B002MQYO98/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1270989513&sr=1-1
I thought that I saw that Linnea Sinclair had just tagged Rebels and Lovers However, now I poke around on the SFR community, I think it must have been Laurie G who did the tagging. It is quite alarming how little privacy one enjoys on Amazon.
Laurie G, Jacqueline Lichtenberg and this author are currently the top ranked "Contributors" in the SFR Community on Amazon. This simply means that we have taken the trouble to add "sfr" as a tag to other authors' books in order to help readers find SFR works if they happen to search by "SFR".
Once a "Community" is created on Amazon, through "tags" anyone can vote on the tags, start a discussion (which one hopes will be relevant), add images and more. At the moment, the SFR community is thinly populated.
If you have a book, or a friend, or a stake in the future of SFR to promote, please take a look.
Find the SFR Community.
http://www.amazon.com/tag/sfr/ref=tag_ybc_ybs_itdp
Rowena Cherry
Friend of ePublishing 2009 Award winner
Please tag Mating Net as SFR for me
http://www.amazon.com/Mating-Net-ebook/dp/B002MQYO98/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1270989513&sr=1-1
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Worldbuilding From "Reality:"
On twitter on #scifi chat on Friday Feb 26th, the discussion centered on Urban Fantasy. That was the day after I saw the Healthcare Summit on live feed. Talk about a reality check!
"Reality" of course means your subjective bubble reality that you live inside of.
We all walk around inside bubbles and see the world through reflections of ourselves and ghosts of what's out there.
This blog is about Alien Romance, Science Fiction Romance, and what goes on inside a writer's mind that results in a well concocted universe and a story that fits into that universe artistically.
The main Worldbuilding Posts that I've written are here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/worldbuilding-and-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
I've done a number of posts not listed above describing the worldbuilding process, the way a writer creates a "selective representation of reality" against which to tell a story about characters who encounter problems tailor made to break the character's psyche in half, and how the character learns to heal that broken psyche because of the traumatic events.
That applies to action stories as well as to romance, though romance is much better at breaking psyches than action is. Combine the two, toss in some skewed SF speculation, and the resulting story can resound down the ages as a lesson to be grappled with.
Nothing arouses the emotions to the breaking point like politics. Politics can break a good marriage! The human species is still trying to find a method of governing that actually works.
So science fiction writers keep exploring the options, looking for some new ideas, generating a whole sub-genre of "sociological SF" which lends itself particularly well to Romance, especially Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy.
Alternate universes and alternate histories are in style as venues for telling such stories -- but I haven't seen any really NEW ideas lately.
Fantasy genre tends to default to Aristocracy and Kings as the governing method. Maybe that's just lazy writing.
Destroy our current civilization and we start over basically with the same-old, same-old. You've seen that happen in "reality" on TV news as other countries, knocked back by natural disaster or war, re-form their organizations around "strong men," gangs, religious leaders, -- anyone who can command enough loyalty to defend a neighborhood.
Crowning Kings is what humans do. We need "Kings" to unite us in defense, and to go conquering to pacify larger territories, get water and arable land, etc.
I talked a little about that a couple weeks ago in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
In that post, I explored the origin of the I.Q. test and how it originated in politics and might still be used by politicians because the concepts embedded in it lend themselves to creating an Aristocracy.
At the moment, most of the world and particularly the USA is using a government format that is rooted in Aristotle's philosophies.
That's right, our concept of how to govern ourselves is THAT old!!!
Nearly a hundred years of dedicated futurologists and really original thinkers writing SF and Fantasy haven't yet come up with a new idea.
But if you look at the Romance field, you see how crucial are the assumptions about how the overall government around the bonding couple works.
Bonding into a couple is fragile at first, and very often in "reality" defies local "authority" and gets bashed down hard, sometimes too hard.
Human couples form that wondrous, and unbreakable, bond across the artificially created lines of politics, religion, and cultural taboos, and somehow, against all odds, coupling prevails because of romance, not because of practical everyday strengths.
Once formed, that human coupling bond is stronger and more compelling than any other force, even politics most of the time. It's especially stronger than religion. But both politics and religion can crack open a marriage, especially after children arrive which "raises the stakes."
So you might expect the Romance field to have produced some Fantasy Romance using something other than Kings, Queens, and aristocrats.
Fantasy has used various sorts of aristocracies -- some based on merit where the Hero(ine) has to swing a sword better than anyone else or pass some other test, or have an ESP Talent to qualify.
But, in Urban Fantasy and PNR, the default format of what can somehow, almost, manage to govern humans is a bureaucratic, autocratic or mystical aristocracy.
The assumption is that some people are just inherently better than others, that some people are born to rule.
But our real world does not laud that theory at all.
In our reality we keep trying to get this election thing perfected, and let vast numbers of people select people to go solve our problems from a central location (with the implication that once we choose the right person, we don't have to pay any more attention).
That lack of constant attention by the electorate is starting to evaporate under the impact of social networking online.
The pendulum seems to be swinging toward the general public micromanaging elected officials.
And concurrently, we are getting more of an assumption that the highest elected officials have been tasked with micromanaging our individual lives.
That's a view from inside my personal subjective bubble. Your view ought to be different (I hope).
This blog is not about what my (or your) political bias is. The point is that we all have a bias, and the very existence of a bias or perhaps a scorn for those who have a bias, makes a great conflict to embed in a world you're building -- so the bonding couple can have a hard time and learn from that.
Another subject we've been discussing here is screenwriting, or "visual storytelling."
Text-narrative writers have to do this, too, but with different tools.
A feature screenplay or TV show can simply specify the visual clues in the environment that illustrate the emotional undercurrents and richly built world behind the drama.
A text narrative has to accomplish the same thing with tools more like a Japanese Brush Painting, illustrating the rich detail with a few, bold, vivid strokes that engage the human brain's ability to fill in the gaps by inference.
If you do a quick survey of the Urban Fantasy novels of the last 2 years, two things leap right out at you.
1) There's almost nothing but SERIES, and some are not numbered but labeled "A Violet Simpering Novel" or whatever the main character's name is.
2) They use what I've called the "thin film over a seething cauldron of Evil" vision of reality to create dark, ugly, underbelly-of-civilization stories.
The most popular are told in our everyday universe where in some adjacent universe with evil, bad, ugly, threatening beasts plot to invade and destroy or take over our reality. The only thing stopping them? Our Hero(ine).
The evil is among us and someone has to live a nasty life in order to save us - whether we want that or not.
Amidst this all-encompassing "darkness" we sometimes have a pair of lovers who somehow find each other against all odds (I personally love that story!)
Now duck back into everyday "reality" and take a look what's coming off your TV screen.
The USA is in the midst of take-2 of the Healthcare Debate.
OK, now everyone is standing up shouting at me, either "healthcare is a right!" or "healthcare is a privilege" -- or whatever your opinion might be.
SHELVE YOUR OPINION.
This is a writing exercise that requires looking at "reality" as objectively as you can in order to create a few swift strokes to depict a fictional reality where everything is sooooo diffferrrennntttt!!
To be different, you have to figure out what you're different from.
So we need to look at the US government with an artist's eye, with a visual story-teller's eye, and with a philosopher's eye.
Where have we been with governmental forms? Where are we now? Where are we going? Extrapolate - "If This Goes On ..." where will we be?
Worldbuild the place where we're going, and set your romance there and it will be sociological SFR.
Well, that's what I do everyday, even when I'm not particularly focused on building a new world or writing a new story.
So a couple weeks ago, I sat all day Thursday and watched the antics of real world politicians before national cameras "discussing" healthcare reform. Well, truth is I multi-tasked, cooking while watching.
And though I searched, I didn't see any discussing at all.
The POTUS ordered "no talking points" and everyone proceeded to utter all their most polished talking point lists uttered in perfect sound bytes.
Each person at the huge, square table gave a prepared speech, and only acknowledged anyone else at the table in cursory asides that made it seem like a conversation -- but it was not a brainstorming, problem-solving, solution-inventing session, which is what it should have been.
I mean, we pay their salaries to solve these problems. They wasted our time right in front of our faces. Personally, I'd dock their pay.
If you wanted to hear what these people were thinking, you did well to not-watch the 7 hours of television. I've seen miniseries that were shorter.
On the other hand, it was a feast set out for a writer!
Defiance of authority seemed interesting to me as talking-point after talking-point was uttered but only one man got scolded by Authority. Since I knew the back story, I found that had subtext galore.
I was particularly interested in the face of authority defied. Lots of good drama there.
But there was other really rich material, especially for a romance writer.
Because the networks kept cutting in to insert commentary and commercials when someone they didn't like was talking (sometimes when POTUS was talking), I ended up switching to my computer and watching it "live streaming" where they showed every single moment.
And I'm glad I did because later, comparing the clips shown on TV to the view via live-streaming, I SAW THINGS in the room that I wouldn't have seen, things the TV shots left out, visual clues which I could use to make up a story.
Perhaps the 7 hours is archived online somewhere, I don't know. If you have a day to waste, you might want to hunt it up and watch.
But here are my observations.
The one single, loudest cry from the voters that I've heard consistently from all shades of the political spectra is that "Government Is Broken" -- this from the people who want a public healthcare option and from those who are against it. Both sides are convinced "government is broken" because they can't seem to get government to do anything, and when it does do something, it's disastrous immediately, or in the future.
Government Is Broken
If you've wondered if government really is broken in the USA, it might be informative or at least stimulative to the imagination to watch a good portion of the live-streaming feed of this healthcare summit meeting.
Now, I've wondered about this idea that government is broken. And I keep thinking a good SF writer ought to be able to posit a fix for the break, if it exists.
Note that above I said that the best Romance is written by taking a character, breaking the character's psyche with Events, then healing that character by lessons learned from those Events.
Government has experienced an Event (the Financial System meltdown).
If they learn from it, and heal, then "broken" is a really good way to be at the moment. If they don't learn and heal, then "broken" portends personal disaster for us all.
But why would the financial system meltdown Event "break" government?
Was that Event the source, or just a trigger?
Let's say it was a trigger.
We have to look for the source of the weakness. Something within the governmental philosophy behind the structure of this government FAILED.
What was it?
The electorate is gearing up to "throw the bums out" and get ourselves some "new bums" which has always worked before.
A democracy representing a Republic, that's the nested structure of the USA. We have a Representative Democracy.
As far as I know, we're the only democracy that uses the form of government we have -- everyone else uses the British parliamentary system or some variation on a multi-party system.
Ask The Next Question.
What could cause a representative democracy to fail?
Well, let's look at how the Federal Government functions.
a) No Congressman or Senator ever reads all the Bills they vote on. In fact, the elected folks don't WRITE the Bills - aides do that.
b) Congressmen and Senators are on multiple "Committees" and "Subcommittees" -- all of which cram meetings and hearings into the very few work-week hours these people are officially on the clock.
c) They have to show up in person on the Floor to vote, but they DO NOT SIT THROUGH the "Debate" on any bill. I've seen on CSPAN and elsewhere any number of really important Bills debated. The speaker stands up at a microphone and reads a prepared speech TO AN EMPTY ROOM except for the presiding officer (usually not the actual top official who should be presiding) and a secretary.
OK, it's true this stuff is televised and they can watch from their offices, but do you think they're hanging on every word? Do they read the Record or even read the text of the speeches from the opposing side?
Why aren't they all at the floor sessions, listening? Well, they're on committees, in meetings, or out to lunch with lobbyists. They're on the phone with constituents. They're all over town, and in some cases actually doing some work. They're too busy to sit and listen.
d) There are exactly 2 Senators from each state, regardless of the population of that state or its physical size. 100 Senators.
e) There are a fixed number of Representatives (that could be raised but hasn't been for a while) apportioned among the states by population and among the counties of a state by population, all according to the 10 year Census.
This from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives
----------
Each state receives representation in the House in proportion to its population but is entitled to at least one Representative. The most populous state, California, currently has 53 representatives. The total number of voting representatives is currently fixed by law at 435.[1
-----------
Do you see what I'm getting at?
I've run through the population growth statistics of the USA here a few times because anyone trying to market fiction has to learn to think in terms of "market share" and market composition. You need to know what the numbers mean.
Roughly, the USA population grew from 200 million to 300 million from 1960 to 2000 and today is estimated to top 330 million.
That's a 50% rise in 40 years.
The 1790 Census stood at 4.55 million. That's the kind of population magnitude the structure of this government was created to handle. That was before California was discovered. (Gold Rush was 1849)
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1790.htm
At the time the Constitution was framed, who could IMAGINE 400 million people under ONE GOVERNMENT, all of them voting and micromanaging the government via twitter?
In Business, the corporate structure is periodically examined with an eye to "scalability" -- and very quickly and efficiently restructured as the company grows.
But in government, the same structure is pushed to govern through growth of 2 orders of magnitude.
OK, government added Representatives -- but a single body of 435 disparate voices all concerned about local things but not national things is just way too large to manage.
We added States so we added Senators. We started with 26, you know. In a body of 26 people, everyone can talk to everyone and make group decisions. In 100, it can't happen. In 435, it's ridiculous.
How many corporations have TOP management of 535 individuals all with equal authority? (Senate and House).
If the USA government is broken, then I suspect it's because of scalability in the structure.
Not only do we have about the same number of people doing the governing work as for 200 million, but we've INCREASED the amount of work they have to do.
And it's not just population growth that increases the work load on Congress and the Senate. Today, no sooner do they get something done than they have to do it over because the world changed.
We made it through the industrial revolution, but we've totally drowned our government with the technological revolution.
They can't make new laws fast enough, nevermind anticipate what laws we need governing what new invention.
That's how the financial meltdown occurred.
Some bright people had the brilliant idea of a way to make a huge profit off of loans that were certain to default and never be paid back.
They went global with the idea (the group was originally based in London).
It worked gangbusters, mostly because no government had authority or power or the computerized tools to audit, regulate, or assess these instruments. They were HIGH TECH instruments nobody understood, least of all the inventors and others who pretended to understand.
Because our government is stuck in the stone age of mainframe computing, and because all our laws are archaic, and can't be deleted and replaced as fast as corporations can invent and ditch technologies and strategies based on video-game-speed transactions -- we got destroyed.
Because our government is designed to govern 4.5 million people, and is now governing maybe 350 million (soon to be 400 million I don't doubt - and that's not counting illegal immigrants though the early census counted slaves), and because our government is not state-of-the-art computerized, we will crash again. Maybe this summer.
In today's age, it should take Congress and the Senate maybe a day to write a Bill, and get it passed by the President. It'll be obsolete when Microsoft releases its next operating system.
If our government can't move that fast, we will be thrown back to the stone age -- or become an anarchy. (I'm not sure we aren't already an anarchy, but Congress hasn't noticed yet.)
So What Shows That USA Government Is Broken?
If you're writing a book or screenplay and need to show a government that is broken, what would you show -- what images would you use.
Here's an idea:
1) Show the governed doing business. Show a corporate meeting. Show "Go To Meeting" or some other teleconference. Show a brainstorming session where actual problems are solved.
What would you see in a real working meeting of a functional international group?
Computerized "white boards" -- whole wall flatscreens like you see on TV tracking elections or weather where the reporter kind of waves his hands over the screen and windows open and move, text boxes show up with statistics all organized. A big iphone screen.
Watch TV news. Say CNN. The commentators sit at a high table with notebooks or netbooks open before them, earbuds connected to producers.
Watch yourself doing some real work. If your internet connection is down, you can't work. You need google and bing and whatever to look stuff up to be sure of your facts.
2) SHOW the broken government doing some work, holding a meeting, solving a problem. (Healthcare is not something to fight over; it's a problem to be solved and it should take about 2 hours to write a whole new healthcare system, and update it next month.)
If you wanted to show the broken government trying to manage a populace armed with computers, earbuds, cell phones, etc, you would concoct the visual images we saw at Obama's Healthcare Summit.
To invent a totally new form of government for your novel, you have to incorporate clues that tell the reader you understand the current state of affairs, so your invention seems plausible not naive.
So you have to study the visual differences (show don't tell) between the governed and the governors as it stands today, then invent visual differences to indicate how well the invented form of government works.
What did I notice in the healthcare summit live-stream that I could use to show broken government, and generate a visual indication of a non-broken government?
a) Only on the live streaming internet view, I saw closeups of each person at the table, looking DOWN on them. I saw all around the table, everywhere. I saw the table in front of each person. NO COMPUTERS, no netbook, no handheld (even Obama didn't have his blackberry and had to be handed a paper note at one point). This is our government at work. They may as well have met in 1790, not 2010. I was so horrendously embarrassed, you have no idea. Crushed!!!!
b) I saw stacks of bound printouts we were told were the passed Healthcare bills. They were thumb-indexed with sticky index tabs.
c) I saw a several page printout we were told was from the website posting Obama's proposed Reconciliation bill. We were told that once written up properly it would be that huge. As I said above aides do this, not actual elected people we have given the sole authority to write bills.
d) I saw a couple aides sitting behind people at the table who had cell phones or blackberries. I saw Secret Service people with nothing in hand paying actual attention to everyone around and about.
e) I saw what each person at the table was wearing (very informative). I compared what they were wearing then, to what I see them wearing in Hearings to what they wore at the State of the Union address and the Inauguration. I noticed how they wore their hair.
f) I saw what people at the table were doing while other people were talking.
g) I saw the speaker system set up in the open square in the middle of the table.
h) I saw one cameraman with a camera on his shoulder -- obviously there were others, someone took the picture of the cameraman. Usually, at committee hearings, there are a few dozen cameramen/women squatting before the speakers or on the sides by the wall.
i) as the day wore on, I saw water GLASSES (few plastic bottles) appear before people while the camera I was watching through looked elsewhere. I saw after lunch a couple of COFFEE CUPS -- gold gilt, open handle, very elegant presidential grade china cups with embossed saucers, set behind where they wouldn't be in the TV broadcast camera shot.
j) we were told there had been debate whether the attendees would eat while before the cameras and it was decided to have a buffet style lunch served off camera. We were told the menu (elegant - nothing I'd care to eat).
k) at the lunch break which was delayed because speakers ran over time, they HAD TO BREAK then because the Representatives had to go to the Floor to vote. That's important. That happens at Hearings, too. They don't have time to listen to debate on the floor, they just run in and vote and run out. They're not doing the work we hired them to do. Why not? Because they don't want to? Or because they've got too much work?
We saw them walking out across the street from Blair House wearing what they wore inside even though it was really cold in DC, though not snowing as it was in NYC. They did return (presumably after the buffet lunch) pretty much on time, and the POTUS allowed the whole discussion to run 1 hour over the announced time and he called that good for a DC meeting.
l) That night, I was thinking about all that I saw, and noticed something else that hadn't struck me at the time. These folks, I know most of them by sight because I do watch congressional hearings sometimes, these folks are the heads of committees, the ones elected to internal offices of their parties, (like Majority Leader and Whip) functionaries of the Congressional organization. These were not the everyday worker bees of Congress -- these were somebodies at the top of their careers. Mostly elder white males, a couple young white males, a couple of women also not young, I recall only one other black male besides Obama, again not young.
This group did not visually represent a statistical cross section of America. No Indians, no Spanish accents, no Hispanic looking people, no Orientals of any ilk, and no American Indians (though 17 Healthcare bill amendments inserted a specification that a paragraph or another applied to American Indians, too, all 17 submitted by one person).
m) Also noted how the microphones had red circles that glowed when the mike was on, and a switch the person sitting at it could control. Didn't hear any howls of feedback, so that tech was pretty modern.
n) noted the hanging ivy behind the POTUS, artfully draped over the old mantle but no skylight in the room that I could spot. It was a room the size of a ballroom at a hotel, with a good carpet and fine acoustics. I didn't see any ugly gray duct tape on the carpets securing wires for the microphones but it might have been there. I think the system was wireless. At least that. *sigh*
o) I also noted, many times, the horridly uncomfortable straight backed cane chairs, ever so stylish period pieces, but everyone seemed to sit so still, straight, and stiff when the cameras were on. Maybe nobody wanted to show their age or infirmity when the cameras were on. I felt that a really functional government would have provided chairs that wouldn't distract participants with pain.
I do know that Congress and the Senate are a lot more "diverse" than what I saw and Congress itself has slightly more modernly ergonomic chairs.
Now there's your visual portrait. Think about those points.
Nevermind the incendiary subject they were discussing, nor the total lack of HEAT from any of them except POTUS scolding one Senator.
Think about what you see in that image. And what you do not see. And what you see among the working people these folks are there to govern when a group sits down to solve a problem with corporate policy.
The USA government is behaving as if the internet is irrelevant. These are "executives" (the level that doesn't type and doesn't make coffee and does take inordinate pride in their practical disabilities).
They are publicly, (knowing they're on national television) showing you how wonderful they are, how on top of everything, how much you can trust them to do this job, and how fabulously efficient they are at it. Some of them are up for re-election this November and really need to get that message across.
Not a handheld or computer. Not an earbud. No way to find a page of that bill they're discussing and project it to the overhead, use a laserpointer (no laser-pointers in breast pockets or on the table) to highlight an item and discuss it. If they had networked laptops, they could all be referencing the same sentence and could hash out what to change it to. Nope. But they're supposed to be showing us how competent they are to manage our government at Broadband Speeds, do an end-run around corporations and protect us from corporate predation.
At one point one person challenged another person's statement about a "fact" -- saying the fact referred to was not a fact at all, but didn't say what the real fact was.
After that challenge, there was no equipment brought in to overhead project or whiteboard illustrate where the cited fact came from and what the true fact actually is.
How can this group solve the healthcare problem (or any problem) if they don't even bother to ascertain the correct facts?
The total lack of computer equipment, the reliance on hand written (hand written, not even typed) notes likewise indicates a total lack of competence to do the job they've been elected to do (make laws faster than corporations can circumvent them).
These folks aren't incompetent. They're among our brightest and best!
It's not the people we need so much to change (you can't find better people anywhere), but the scalability of the government structure.
The way this government does its work -- not the work itself -- is broken because it has not been updated to keep pace with the governed.
The second-biggest-failure in the history of the USA (the financial meltdown) happened because our government is unscalable and obsolete.
The first biggest (the Great Depression) happened for essentially the same reason and a measure was passed to prevent that happening again -- the act which separated deposit banks from investment banks. That act was repealed a few years ago, but not replaced with something more modern. Lawmakers could see the original act was way obsolete, but could not see what to replace it with.
The government can't move fast enough to keep up with the governed.
So we need to invent something new in governmental forms and that's the business of futurologists, essentially SF writers of all stripes and ilks, including SFR writers.
The thesis here on this blog is "Love Conquers All" -- and it seems to me if a philosopher is going to arise to point us at the first totally new form of government in, what?, 2500 years (if you don't count Sharia Law circa a thousand years later, but as I understand that system, it's another form of dictatorship or totalitarianism where the governed don't get a sayso; anyone know more about it?), then it'll happen because of LOVE not because of politics, hate, or healthcare.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
"Reality" of course means your subjective bubble reality that you live inside of.
We all walk around inside bubbles and see the world through reflections of ourselves and ghosts of what's out there.
This blog is about Alien Romance, Science Fiction Romance, and what goes on inside a writer's mind that results in a well concocted universe and a story that fits into that universe artistically.
The main Worldbuilding Posts that I've written are here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/worldbuilding-and-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
I've done a number of posts not listed above describing the worldbuilding process, the way a writer creates a "selective representation of reality" against which to tell a story about characters who encounter problems tailor made to break the character's psyche in half, and how the character learns to heal that broken psyche because of the traumatic events.
That applies to action stories as well as to romance, though romance is much better at breaking psyches than action is. Combine the two, toss in some skewed SF speculation, and the resulting story can resound down the ages as a lesson to be grappled with.
Nothing arouses the emotions to the breaking point like politics. Politics can break a good marriage! The human species is still trying to find a method of governing that actually works.
So science fiction writers keep exploring the options, looking for some new ideas, generating a whole sub-genre of "sociological SF" which lends itself particularly well to Romance, especially Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy.
Alternate universes and alternate histories are in style as venues for telling such stories -- but I haven't seen any really NEW ideas lately.
Fantasy genre tends to default to Aristocracy and Kings as the governing method. Maybe that's just lazy writing.
Destroy our current civilization and we start over basically with the same-old, same-old. You've seen that happen in "reality" on TV news as other countries, knocked back by natural disaster or war, re-form their organizations around "strong men," gangs, religious leaders, -- anyone who can command enough loyalty to defend a neighborhood.
Crowning Kings is what humans do. We need "Kings" to unite us in defense, and to go conquering to pacify larger territories, get water and arable land, etc.
I talked a little about that a couple weeks ago in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
In that post, I explored the origin of the I.Q. test and how it originated in politics and might still be used by politicians because the concepts embedded in it lend themselves to creating an Aristocracy.
At the moment, most of the world and particularly the USA is using a government format that is rooted in Aristotle's philosophies.
That's right, our concept of how to govern ourselves is THAT old!!!
Nearly a hundred years of dedicated futurologists and really original thinkers writing SF and Fantasy haven't yet come up with a new idea.
But if you look at the Romance field, you see how crucial are the assumptions about how the overall government around the bonding couple works.
Bonding into a couple is fragile at first, and very often in "reality" defies local "authority" and gets bashed down hard, sometimes too hard.
Human couples form that wondrous, and unbreakable, bond across the artificially created lines of politics, religion, and cultural taboos, and somehow, against all odds, coupling prevails because of romance, not because of practical everyday strengths.
Once formed, that human coupling bond is stronger and more compelling than any other force, even politics most of the time. It's especially stronger than religion. But both politics and religion can crack open a marriage, especially after children arrive which "raises the stakes."
So you might expect the Romance field to have produced some Fantasy Romance using something other than Kings, Queens, and aristocrats.
Fantasy has used various sorts of aristocracies -- some based on merit where the Hero(ine) has to swing a sword better than anyone else or pass some other test, or have an ESP Talent to qualify.
But, in Urban Fantasy and PNR, the default format of what can somehow, almost, manage to govern humans is a bureaucratic, autocratic or mystical aristocracy.
The assumption is that some people are just inherently better than others, that some people are born to rule.
But our real world does not laud that theory at all.
In our reality we keep trying to get this election thing perfected, and let vast numbers of people select people to go solve our problems from a central location (with the implication that once we choose the right person, we don't have to pay any more attention).
That lack of constant attention by the electorate is starting to evaporate under the impact of social networking online.
The pendulum seems to be swinging toward the general public micromanaging elected officials.
And concurrently, we are getting more of an assumption that the highest elected officials have been tasked with micromanaging our individual lives.
That's a view from inside my personal subjective bubble. Your view ought to be different (I hope).
This blog is not about what my (or your) political bias is. The point is that we all have a bias, and the very existence of a bias or perhaps a scorn for those who have a bias, makes a great conflict to embed in a world you're building -- so the bonding couple can have a hard time and learn from that.
Another subject we've been discussing here is screenwriting, or "visual storytelling."
Text-narrative writers have to do this, too, but with different tools.
A feature screenplay or TV show can simply specify the visual clues in the environment that illustrate the emotional undercurrents and richly built world behind the drama.
A text narrative has to accomplish the same thing with tools more like a Japanese Brush Painting, illustrating the rich detail with a few, bold, vivid strokes that engage the human brain's ability to fill in the gaps by inference.
If you do a quick survey of the Urban Fantasy novels of the last 2 years, two things leap right out at you.
1) There's almost nothing but SERIES, and some are not numbered but labeled "A Violet Simpering Novel" or whatever the main character's name is.
2) They use what I've called the "thin film over a seething cauldron of Evil" vision of reality to create dark, ugly, underbelly-of-civilization stories.
The most popular are told in our everyday universe where in some adjacent universe with evil, bad, ugly, threatening beasts plot to invade and destroy or take over our reality. The only thing stopping them? Our Hero(ine).
The evil is among us and someone has to live a nasty life in order to save us - whether we want that or not.
Amidst this all-encompassing "darkness" we sometimes have a pair of lovers who somehow find each other against all odds (I personally love that story!)
Now duck back into everyday "reality" and take a look what's coming off your TV screen.
The USA is in the midst of take-2 of the Healthcare Debate.
OK, now everyone is standing up shouting at me, either "healthcare is a right!" or "healthcare is a privilege" -- or whatever your opinion might be.
SHELVE YOUR OPINION.
This is a writing exercise that requires looking at "reality" as objectively as you can in order to create a few swift strokes to depict a fictional reality where everything is sooooo diffferrrennntttt!!
To be different, you have to figure out what you're different from.
So we need to look at the US government with an artist's eye, with a visual story-teller's eye, and with a philosopher's eye.
Where have we been with governmental forms? Where are we now? Where are we going? Extrapolate - "If This Goes On ..." where will we be?
Worldbuild the place where we're going, and set your romance there and it will be sociological SFR.
Well, that's what I do everyday, even when I'm not particularly focused on building a new world or writing a new story.
So a couple weeks ago, I sat all day Thursday and watched the antics of real world politicians before national cameras "discussing" healthcare reform. Well, truth is I multi-tasked, cooking while watching.
And though I searched, I didn't see any discussing at all.
The POTUS ordered "no talking points" and everyone proceeded to utter all their most polished talking point lists uttered in perfect sound bytes.
Each person at the huge, square table gave a prepared speech, and only acknowledged anyone else at the table in cursory asides that made it seem like a conversation -- but it was not a brainstorming, problem-solving, solution-inventing session, which is what it should have been.
I mean, we pay their salaries to solve these problems. They wasted our time right in front of our faces. Personally, I'd dock their pay.
If you wanted to hear what these people were thinking, you did well to not-watch the 7 hours of television. I've seen miniseries that were shorter.
On the other hand, it was a feast set out for a writer!
Defiance of authority seemed interesting to me as talking-point after talking-point was uttered but only one man got scolded by Authority. Since I knew the back story, I found that had subtext galore.
I was particularly interested in the face of authority defied. Lots of good drama there.
But there was other really rich material, especially for a romance writer.
Because the networks kept cutting in to insert commentary and commercials when someone they didn't like was talking (sometimes when POTUS was talking), I ended up switching to my computer and watching it "live streaming" where they showed every single moment.
And I'm glad I did because later, comparing the clips shown on TV to the view via live-streaming, I SAW THINGS in the room that I wouldn't have seen, things the TV shots left out, visual clues which I could use to make up a story.
Perhaps the 7 hours is archived online somewhere, I don't know. If you have a day to waste, you might want to hunt it up and watch.
But here are my observations.
The one single, loudest cry from the voters that I've heard consistently from all shades of the political spectra is that "Government Is Broken" -- this from the people who want a public healthcare option and from those who are against it. Both sides are convinced "government is broken" because they can't seem to get government to do anything, and when it does do something, it's disastrous immediately, or in the future.
Government Is Broken
If you've wondered if government really is broken in the USA, it might be informative or at least stimulative to the imagination to watch a good portion of the live-streaming feed of this healthcare summit meeting.
Now, I've wondered about this idea that government is broken. And I keep thinking a good SF writer ought to be able to posit a fix for the break, if it exists.
Note that above I said that the best Romance is written by taking a character, breaking the character's psyche with Events, then healing that character by lessons learned from those Events.
Government has experienced an Event (the Financial System meltdown).
If they learn from it, and heal, then "broken" is a really good way to be at the moment. If they don't learn and heal, then "broken" portends personal disaster for us all.
But why would the financial system meltdown Event "break" government?
Was that Event the source, or just a trigger?
Let's say it was a trigger.
We have to look for the source of the weakness. Something within the governmental philosophy behind the structure of this government FAILED.
What was it?
The electorate is gearing up to "throw the bums out" and get ourselves some "new bums" which has always worked before.
A democracy representing a Republic, that's the nested structure of the USA. We have a Representative Democracy.
As far as I know, we're the only democracy that uses the form of government we have -- everyone else uses the British parliamentary system or some variation on a multi-party system.
Ask The Next Question.
What could cause a representative democracy to fail?
Well, let's look at how the Federal Government functions.
a) No Congressman or Senator ever reads all the Bills they vote on. In fact, the elected folks don't WRITE the Bills - aides do that.
b) Congressmen and Senators are on multiple "Committees" and "Subcommittees" -- all of which cram meetings and hearings into the very few work-week hours these people are officially on the clock.
c) They have to show up in person on the Floor to vote, but they DO NOT SIT THROUGH the "Debate" on any bill. I've seen on CSPAN and elsewhere any number of really important Bills debated. The speaker stands up at a microphone and reads a prepared speech TO AN EMPTY ROOM except for the presiding officer (usually not the actual top official who should be presiding) and a secretary.
OK, it's true this stuff is televised and they can watch from their offices, but do you think they're hanging on every word? Do they read the Record or even read the text of the speeches from the opposing side?
Why aren't they all at the floor sessions, listening? Well, they're on committees, in meetings, or out to lunch with lobbyists. They're on the phone with constituents. They're all over town, and in some cases actually doing some work. They're too busy to sit and listen.
d) There are exactly 2 Senators from each state, regardless of the population of that state or its physical size. 100 Senators.
e) There are a fixed number of Representatives (that could be raised but hasn't been for a while) apportioned among the states by population and among the counties of a state by population, all according to the 10 year Census.
This from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives
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Each state receives representation in the House in proportion to its population but is entitled to at least one Representative. The most populous state, California, currently has 53 representatives. The total number of voting representatives is currently fixed by law at 435.[1
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Do you see what I'm getting at?
I've run through the population growth statistics of the USA here a few times because anyone trying to market fiction has to learn to think in terms of "market share" and market composition. You need to know what the numbers mean.
Roughly, the USA population grew from 200 million to 300 million from 1960 to 2000 and today is estimated to top 330 million.
That's a 50% rise in 40 years.
The 1790 Census stood at 4.55 million. That's the kind of population magnitude the structure of this government was created to handle. That was before California was discovered. (Gold Rush was 1849)
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1790.htm
At the time the Constitution was framed, who could IMAGINE 400 million people under ONE GOVERNMENT, all of them voting and micromanaging the government via twitter?
In Business, the corporate structure is periodically examined with an eye to "scalability" -- and very quickly and efficiently restructured as the company grows.
But in government, the same structure is pushed to govern through growth of 2 orders of magnitude.
OK, government added Representatives -- but a single body of 435 disparate voices all concerned about local things but not national things is just way too large to manage.
We added States so we added Senators. We started with 26, you know. In a body of 26 people, everyone can talk to everyone and make group decisions. In 100, it can't happen. In 435, it's ridiculous.
How many corporations have TOP management of 535 individuals all with equal authority? (Senate and House).
If the USA government is broken, then I suspect it's because of scalability in the structure.
Not only do we have about the same number of people doing the governing work as for 200 million, but we've INCREASED the amount of work they have to do.
And it's not just population growth that increases the work load on Congress and the Senate. Today, no sooner do they get something done than they have to do it over because the world changed.
We made it through the industrial revolution, but we've totally drowned our government with the technological revolution.
They can't make new laws fast enough, nevermind anticipate what laws we need governing what new invention.
That's how the financial meltdown occurred.
Some bright people had the brilliant idea of a way to make a huge profit off of loans that were certain to default and never be paid back.
They went global with the idea (the group was originally based in London).
It worked gangbusters, mostly because no government had authority or power or the computerized tools to audit, regulate, or assess these instruments. They were HIGH TECH instruments nobody understood, least of all the inventors and others who pretended to understand.
Because our government is stuck in the stone age of mainframe computing, and because all our laws are archaic, and can't be deleted and replaced as fast as corporations can invent and ditch technologies and strategies based on video-game-speed transactions -- we got destroyed.
Because our government is designed to govern 4.5 million people, and is now governing maybe 350 million (soon to be 400 million I don't doubt - and that's not counting illegal immigrants though the early census counted slaves), and because our government is not state-of-the-art computerized, we will crash again. Maybe this summer.
In today's age, it should take Congress and the Senate maybe a day to write a Bill, and get it passed by the President. It'll be obsolete when Microsoft releases its next operating system.
If our government can't move that fast, we will be thrown back to the stone age -- or become an anarchy. (I'm not sure we aren't already an anarchy, but Congress hasn't noticed yet.)
So What Shows That USA Government Is Broken?
If you're writing a book or screenplay and need to show a government that is broken, what would you show -- what images would you use.
Here's an idea:
1) Show the governed doing business. Show a corporate meeting. Show "Go To Meeting" or some other teleconference. Show a brainstorming session where actual problems are solved.
What would you see in a real working meeting of a functional international group?
Computerized "white boards" -- whole wall flatscreens like you see on TV tracking elections or weather where the reporter kind of waves his hands over the screen and windows open and move, text boxes show up with statistics all organized. A big iphone screen.
Watch TV news. Say CNN. The commentators sit at a high table with notebooks or netbooks open before them, earbuds connected to producers.
Watch yourself doing some real work. If your internet connection is down, you can't work. You need google and bing and whatever to look stuff up to be sure of your facts.
2) SHOW the broken government doing some work, holding a meeting, solving a problem. (Healthcare is not something to fight over; it's a problem to be solved and it should take about 2 hours to write a whole new healthcare system, and update it next month.)
If you wanted to show the broken government trying to manage a populace armed with computers, earbuds, cell phones, etc, you would concoct the visual images we saw at Obama's Healthcare Summit.
To invent a totally new form of government for your novel, you have to incorporate clues that tell the reader you understand the current state of affairs, so your invention seems plausible not naive.
So you have to study the visual differences (show don't tell) between the governed and the governors as it stands today, then invent visual differences to indicate how well the invented form of government works.
What did I notice in the healthcare summit live-stream that I could use to show broken government, and generate a visual indication of a non-broken government?
a) Only on the live streaming internet view, I saw closeups of each person at the table, looking DOWN on them. I saw all around the table, everywhere. I saw the table in front of each person. NO COMPUTERS, no netbook, no handheld (even Obama didn't have his blackberry and had to be handed a paper note at one point). This is our government at work. They may as well have met in 1790, not 2010. I was so horrendously embarrassed, you have no idea. Crushed!!!!
b) I saw stacks of bound printouts we were told were the passed Healthcare bills. They were thumb-indexed with sticky index tabs.
c) I saw a several page printout we were told was from the website posting Obama's proposed Reconciliation bill. We were told that once written up properly it would be that huge. As I said above aides do this, not actual elected people we have given the sole authority to write bills.
d) I saw a couple aides sitting behind people at the table who had cell phones or blackberries. I saw Secret Service people with nothing in hand paying actual attention to everyone around and about.
e) I saw what each person at the table was wearing (very informative). I compared what they were wearing then, to what I see them wearing in Hearings to what they wore at the State of the Union address and the Inauguration. I noticed how they wore their hair.
f) I saw what people at the table were doing while other people were talking.
g) I saw the speaker system set up in the open square in the middle of the table.
h) I saw one cameraman with a camera on his shoulder -- obviously there were others, someone took the picture of the cameraman. Usually, at committee hearings, there are a few dozen cameramen/women squatting before the speakers or on the sides by the wall.
i) as the day wore on, I saw water GLASSES (few plastic bottles) appear before people while the camera I was watching through looked elsewhere. I saw after lunch a couple of COFFEE CUPS -- gold gilt, open handle, very elegant presidential grade china cups with embossed saucers, set behind where they wouldn't be in the TV broadcast camera shot.
j) we were told there had been debate whether the attendees would eat while before the cameras and it was decided to have a buffet style lunch served off camera. We were told the menu (elegant - nothing I'd care to eat).
k) at the lunch break which was delayed because speakers ran over time, they HAD TO BREAK then because the Representatives had to go to the Floor to vote. That's important. That happens at Hearings, too. They don't have time to listen to debate on the floor, they just run in and vote and run out. They're not doing the work we hired them to do. Why not? Because they don't want to? Or because they've got too much work?
We saw them walking out across the street from Blair House wearing what they wore inside even though it was really cold in DC, though not snowing as it was in NYC. They did return (presumably after the buffet lunch) pretty much on time, and the POTUS allowed the whole discussion to run 1 hour over the announced time and he called that good for a DC meeting.
l) That night, I was thinking about all that I saw, and noticed something else that hadn't struck me at the time. These folks, I know most of them by sight because I do watch congressional hearings sometimes, these folks are the heads of committees, the ones elected to internal offices of their parties, (like Majority Leader and Whip) functionaries of the Congressional organization. These were not the everyday worker bees of Congress -- these were somebodies at the top of their careers. Mostly elder white males, a couple young white males, a couple of women also not young, I recall only one other black male besides Obama, again not young.
This group did not visually represent a statistical cross section of America. No Indians, no Spanish accents, no Hispanic looking people, no Orientals of any ilk, and no American Indians (though 17 Healthcare bill amendments inserted a specification that a paragraph or another applied to American Indians, too, all 17 submitted by one person).
m) Also noted how the microphones had red circles that glowed when the mike was on, and a switch the person sitting at it could control. Didn't hear any howls of feedback, so that tech was pretty modern.
n) noted the hanging ivy behind the POTUS, artfully draped over the old mantle but no skylight in the room that I could spot. It was a room the size of a ballroom at a hotel, with a good carpet and fine acoustics. I didn't see any ugly gray duct tape on the carpets securing wires for the microphones but it might have been there. I think the system was wireless. At least that. *sigh*
o) I also noted, many times, the horridly uncomfortable straight backed cane chairs, ever so stylish period pieces, but everyone seemed to sit so still, straight, and stiff when the cameras were on. Maybe nobody wanted to show their age or infirmity when the cameras were on. I felt that a really functional government would have provided chairs that wouldn't distract participants with pain.
I do know that Congress and the Senate are a lot more "diverse" than what I saw and Congress itself has slightly more modernly ergonomic chairs.
Now there's your visual portrait. Think about those points.
Nevermind the incendiary subject they were discussing, nor the total lack of HEAT from any of them except POTUS scolding one Senator.
Think about what you see in that image. And what you do not see. And what you see among the working people these folks are there to govern when a group sits down to solve a problem with corporate policy.
The USA government is behaving as if the internet is irrelevant. These are "executives" (the level that doesn't type and doesn't make coffee and does take inordinate pride in their practical disabilities).
They are publicly, (knowing they're on national television) showing you how wonderful they are, how on top of everything, how much you can trust them to do this job, and how fabulously efficient they are at it. Some of them are up for re-election this November and really need to get that message across.
Not a handheld or computer. Not an earbud. No way to find a page of that bill they're discussing and project it to the overhead, use a laserpointer (no laser-pointers in breast pockets or on the table) to highlight an item and discuss it. If they had networked laptops, they could all be referencing the same sentence and could hash out what to change it to. Nope. But they're supposed to be showing us how competent they are to manage our government at Broadband Speeds, do an end-run around corporations and protect us from corporate predation.
At one point one person challenged another person's statement about a "fact" -- saying the fact referred to was not a fact at all, but didn't say what the real fact was.
After that challenge, there was no equipment brought in to overhead project or whiteboard illustrate where the cited fact came from and what the true fact actually is.
How can this group solve the healthcare problem (or any problem) if they don't even bother to ascertain the correct facts?
The total lack of computer equipment, the reliance on hand written (hand written, not even typed) notes likewise indicates a total lack of competence to do the job they've been elected to do (make laws faster than corporations can circumvent them).
These folks aren't incompetent. They're among our brightest and best!
It's not the people we need so much to change (you can't find better people anywhere), but the scalability of the government structure.
The way this government does its work -- not the work itself -- is broken because it has not been updated to keep pace with the governed.
The second-biggest-failure in the history of the USA (the financial meltdown) happened because our government is unscalable and obsolete.
The first biggest (the Great Depression) happened for essentially the same reason and a measure was passed to prevent that happening again -- the act which separated deposit banks from investment banks. That act was repealed a few years ago, but not replaced with something more modern. Lawmakers could see the original act was way obsolete, but could not see what to replace it with.
The government can't move fast enough to keep up with the governed.
So we need to invent something new in governmental forms and that's the business of futurologists, essentially SF writers of all stripes and ilks, including SFR writers.
The thesis here on this blog is "Love Conquers All" -- and it seems to me if a philosopher is going to arise to point us at the first totally new form of government in, what?, 2500 years (if you don't count Sharia Law circa a thousand years later, but as I understand that system, it's another form of dictatorship or totalitarianism where the governed don't get a sayso; anyone know more about it?), then it'll happen because of LOVE not because of politics, hate, or healthcare.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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