Theme-Plot Integration Part 5 - A Great Steampunk Example

We did weeks of Theme-Worldbuilding discussions ranging all over how philosophy shapes our real world, and how whatever philosophical issues (themes) are driving your customer's real world have to be incorporated in the foundation of your fictional world in an "off the nose" way.  And this is the 5th in the Theme-Plot Integration series. 

Theme-Worldbuilding-Plot -- it all has to end up being "of one  piece, a single unified whole when you get done writing.

That is, the issues have to be there, but a direct and forthright discussion of the day's hot topics just isn't amusing when you have to live amid a morass.  You read fiction to get a birds-eye-view of your life, not to relive it! 

Getting that mix right is an artform, a performing artform.

Here are the previous 5 parts of this series: 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-1-never-let.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-2-fallacy.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-3-fallacy.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-4-fallacies.html

Now, in November I posted a report on Chicon7 -- the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in September 2012.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/11/chicon7-con-report.html

At that convention, I was touring the Dealer's Room and happened to be drawn into a discussion with a fellow who was minding a table -- upon which was the following novel:



As a reviewer, I became interested, and I really liked the pitch for this novel.  It just sounded so very promising that I accepted a review copy.  I'm glad I did.

The Thunderbolt Affair is a "steampunk" novel with a twist -- the technology is more SF than Fantasy, and the History is alternate universe but with a strong logic behind it.  Both the History and the Science "work" in this novel's "worldbuilding."  This sets it apart from other things published under the Steampunk genre label. 

As with all good Steampunk, you get more out of it the more "real" history you know.  Steampunk and other alternate history exercises are a playground for historians as galactic science fiction is a playground for inventive scientists.

So all in all The Thunderbolt Affair is a very worthwhile read, a lot of fun, and a pleasure to return to when you have to put it aside. 

Here's the official back cover copy that so intrigued me, copied from Amazon:
------------QUOTE----------------
“What you will be working on is underhanded, unfair, and damned un-English.”

1887
The British Empire is in danger of collapse and teeters on the brink of war with the Kaiser Reich. Spies and saboteurs play at deadly games in the British shipyards as each side seeks naval superiority.
Ian Rollins is collateral damage in their shadow war. The “accident” and his grievous injuries are about to bring his naval career to an ignominious end. But with the aid of a former Pinkerton detective, a clandestine agent for the Admiralty, a brace of Serbian savants, and one, mostly sober valet, he might survive. If he can master the skills necessary to command the world’s first fully operational combat submarine, the HMS Holland Ram, and protect the secrets of the Thunderbolt.

Historical Note. The Fenian Ram, fictionalized for this novel, does exist and is currently on display at the Paterson Museum in Paterson, NJ.
-----------END QUOTE------------

I don't just rave about novels I discuss in this blog.  I dissect them and look for ways they could be improved.  I look for reasons why a book went to a small publisher rather than a larger house, or vice-versa.  I look for things that enlarge the potential market and things that restrict it to a smaller market.  I look for characteristics of the piece that identifies who will enjoy it -- and who won't. 

I started to read The Thunderbolt Affair -- mostly just because I was given a copy.  I kept on reading because I got caught up in -- ok, yes, I admit it -- the love story. 

I'm a sucker for a good Romance, and the glaring anachronism in this novel of portraying a female mechanic against this Steampunk background just tickles me no end.  Or she may be a technologist -- an implementor who MAKES things, rather than a theorist or researcher who nails the basic science, or an inventor who comes up with new applications of basic science.  She fabricates models and prototypes, and by the way, improves the design as she goes.  A man who loves that woman, loves me! 

I always enjoy the SF novels featuring inventors who just cobble together stuff and get it to work, -- um, sort of work anyway.  Then they improve it.  I love the thinking behind "improving" inventions -- even though I think the worst swearword in the English language today is "Upgrade." 

But then I loved The Thunderbolt Affair for the rich detail of inventing crazy stuff out of nothing much.  I am also a sucker for stories of the improbable accomplished by clever people, sometimes from cleverness, sometimes by accident, sometimes by sheer cussed determination. 

Reading The Thunderbolt Affair was, though, more like reading a great fanfic than like reading a Mass Market Paperback.  I could easily see the structural problems, and even see how the editor should have fixed those problems, but because it was a roaring good story, I didn't care.

Toward the 3/4 point, I realized I had to point you at this novel because it's a vivid example of how to limit your possible readership to a very small group.  You can get this in ebook - and it is worth the ebook price.

The author admits editors told him he had too much technical detail about the things they build (these things include a couple of submarines and some artificial mechanical limbs, even a mechanical eye that eventually should be able to let the wearer "see"). 

The point of the novel, the thing that drove the writer to complete the project, was his love of Steampunk technology, and he wanted to show off what can be done with the basic capabilities and materials of the 1800's and a lot of imagination. 

But beta readers and editors prompted him to trim, cut, condense the technical explanations -- which he said he did.  I think he did, from the way the tech stuff reads.  It's expository lump after expository lump.

But his editors gave bad advice. 

Now, if you're serious about learning to do what I've been describing in this blog since 2006 when I started posting here every Tuesday, go get a copy of The Thunderbolt Affair, read it and take notes, figure out what went wrong inside this writer's mind, and then come back here and finish reading this post.

START FINISHING READING THIS POST HERE AFTER READING THE NOVEL.

OK, now that you've read the novel, and probably some of the reader commentary on Amazon, let's think about what the editor of this novel should have said.

When you are handed a manuscript that has "too much" of something (say for example, too many sex scenes in a Romance -- which is, believe it or not, possible!), do you tell the writer to cut some of those scenes? 

When you are handed a manuscript that has expository lumps, do you tell the writer to trim, reduce, condense or break up the expository lumps?  Is that the cure for expository lumps (and sex scenes are usually expository lumps technically speaking). 

Think about The Thunderbolt Affair -- consider what the full blown technical dissertations on the machinery and ship building must have been like, and why the author wrote them out in full.

I'm betting (though I don't know for a fact) that this kind of expository lump over-kill happens for the same reason that 'too many sex scenes' happens --- it's INTERESTING.

The author is fascinated, interested, engaged, enamored, transported, and somehow fulfilled by these scenes and just massages them over and over and over because it feels good to the author.  The assumption is that if it feels good to the author, it will feel good to ALL READERS.

Nope.  Not the way entertainment works. 

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught an old quotation, so old and oft quoted you have to consider it an adage:  "The book the writer wrote is not the book the reader reads." 

Readers make up their own characters, emotions, even background images, room decorations, clothing, etc. -- they "see" the main characters in their minds, and it doesn't look the way the writer sees it!

How can you convince yourself of this?  Find a graphic artist, show your manuscript and ask the artist (without further input from you) to draw the scene. 

You won't recognize it! 

When you do get anything even a little bit recognizable, it's because you talked to the artist, watched them draw and pointed out changes as they went. 

Here are three examples from my own work:

All 3 of these novels (plus 9 more in the Sime~Gen Universe) are now available in e-book, paper, and 2 in audiobook with 4 more in production at audible.com

Now here's the ONE cover that all the inveterate fans of Sime~Gen agree is most representative of the series. 

This is the omnibus edition (in hardcover and paper) containing House of Zeor, Ambrov Keon, and Zelerod's Doom.

It's also available as a poster from the artist who is the incredibly famous (justifiably so) Todd Lockwood.

http://www.toddlockwood.com/galleries/books/02/sime_gen.shtml

In the poster print, there's no overprinting -- the title and author names, just the gorgeous art.

I got to talk to the artist for a long time, to explain what this character looks like -- and it's close, seriously close, and very much as the fans see it, and the way all the visual artists see it, but not what I see. Still, it's so gorgeous!

In the course of working with the professional editors for these novels, and interacting with the growing fandom surrounding them, I learned much of what I'm showing you how to do here.

Here's the trick that's so important to master. 

When the editor or beta reader tells you there's too much of something, and the cure for that is to CUT THAT SOMETHING -- to reduce the amount of words devoted to it -- that may not be the way to fix the problem the editor or beta reader is having with your material.

Readers, even professional editors, don't necessarily know what's bothering them, though they can point to WHERE it bothered them.

The business of being a professional writer is the business of reverse engineering reader responses to find the cause the reader does not know is there.

Some people learn to do this by having the process explained to them.  Others need concrete examples.  And others have to have it DONE TO their own work by other hands.  Marion Zimmer Bradley did this kind of thing to my own prose -- just took my words and re-did them so they'd work right in a scene. 

Bradley was a talented writer.  I don't think she really knew how she'd learned to do what she did -- she may have been born with this talent.  But I learned from her rewriting of my prose.

So, what do I notice first about The Thunderbolt Affair?

At the half-way point, I looked up and said to myself, "There are three novels here, loosely packed between two covers.  Shaken not stirred.  They just aren't blended properly, but I don't know why."

By the 3/4 point, I realized the author apparently had no clue he had fallen off the conflict line.  Which he had, but by the time I got to the end, I realized where the issue really was.  Theme-Worldbuilding integration, the subject of this series.

Now this is an advanced series.  We've been at this writing craft discussion for 6 years or so, and only if you've been digging back into those posts, or have been following for 6 years, do you see instantly what I mean by "falling off the conflict line" or what I call "the because line." 

However, even if you've mastered your conflict line and how to stay on that because-line, you probably won't know how to "fix" this novel we're discussing.

It's got three distinct because-lines --- and virtually no theme of enough moment to support three plot-lines.

So fixing this because-line issue won't fix this novel and make it salable to the huge market for Steampunk in general, or for Romantic Steampunk! 

Here's what I see after finishing the novel.

We have a sub-strata of the technical because-line -- the British navy stole a submarine, reverse engineered, improved on the design using an outside consultant (Tesla by the way is justly famous in our real world), and built a larger submarine that it then used to avert a war by displaying what a threat that ship could be. 

On top of that (very solid and interesting) foundation, we have a Love Story (main Navy character falls for female mechanic-genius).  Nothing much ever comes of that infatuation on any because line. 

And, disconnected from everything, just puttering along in counterpoint, we have a saboteur and an espionage threat (complete with kidnapping the girl but nothing ever comes of that) and ultimately the theft of the big ship, but NOTHING COMES OF THAT THEFT because the Hero gets the ship back through heroic efforts which are well foreshadowed.

These three separate novels have a few laborious cross-linkages, some "because" connections, but nothing strong enough to drive the three plots together. 

The real author-love is lavished on the technology (which I adore!) and the rest is tossed in on top of that just to make a book -- the whole thing just doesn't crystallize as a single unified entity, a NOVEL.  It's 2 novels and a non-fiction book.

Why?  This author worked so hard, he tried so hard, he's so proud of his work, why doesn't it make a novel?

The three main elements are not INTEGRATED -- they haven't become one thing. 

We know whose story it is, the Captain of the submarine.  We see his career unfold as he becomes the Captain and trains a crew in this new technology.  He falls in love and gets his girl, his promotions, and saves his country while he's at it.  Any writer would be proud of that story! 

The worldbuilding is as sound as it could possibly be -- Steampunk has lacked this dimension of technological plausibility, so what is preventing this thing from solidifying?

You might conclude, from the "because-line" problem, that the novel won't crystallize because while the story is solidly constructed, the plot is not of the same caliber. 

I think that's true.  The plot is not as strong as the story, but why is that?

We have a dynamite action-scene opening with the theft of the little submarine.  Then we follow the little submarine as it is worked on by an outside consultant-genius, concurrently with building another larger submarine.  We have the Captain losing a hand and an eye, and the technologist consultants concurrently working on an artificial limb of the Captain's design.  And we have sporadic attacks by "someone" for "some purpose." 

There's nothing lacking for plot material, so how could it have failed to crystalize?

Go back over those three PLOTs carefully. 

1) Stolen technology improved and employed by a government using foreign national to do improvements.

2) Hero falls in love with fascinating genius-woman mechanic and wins her heart

3) Foreign government spies infiltrate and attempt to steal technology and fail because of Hero and genius-woman

What THEME do these 3 plots have in common? 

If you've got 3 plots, you need 4 themes, but they must be RELATED IN A VERY SPECIFIC STRUCTURAL MANNER.

You need a master theme, and 3 sub-themes or versions of that theme, all leading to a single STATEMENT at the end of the Master Theme in a moment the reader will experience as a REVELATION, boosting the reader to a new level of understanding of "Life, The Universe, And Everything."

The Thunderbolt Affair lacks this commonality of structure created by THEME.

It is as if the author had this IDEA -- "write a steampunk that could actually have happened" -- and then said, well I need a love affair and the Hero has to get his girl, and there's no action after the opening on the theft of the submarine so I'll toss in some spies.  Well, how should this thing end?  The Hero has to do something GRAND (it is steampunk after all; he's got to have some punk in him, break some rules?)  So the author cooked up the spies and a grand plot to steal the submarine again so the hero could save the country from a war.

It's very common to see this kind of thing done by new writers.  Here's "my book" but it's not good enough yet, so "grab this from this other book and throw it in," then grab something else from some other book and toss that in just to keep the plot moving.  And the parts just do not go together because they did not arise organically from a single, central, theme.

Very talented writers do this "theme integration" thing that we've been discussing at such length by innate instinct, never consciously considering theme at all.  Others (like me) have to sort out the threads of ideas, and focus and re-focus on the particular theme I really want to talk about.

So what's the theme in The Thunderbolt Affair?  Don't steal because it'll always come to naught?  Or maybe "If you really need to win, steal first and often?"  Or "Hire the best genius inventor around?"  Or "Genius inventors are all very fine, but you'll lose crown and country if you don't have a daring-do-Hero on tap?" 

Frankly, after reading this book closely, I have no clue what the theme is or what the author wanted it to be.  It says contradictory things all at once, and ends up saying nothing. 

Why do the 3 plots not crystallize, forming a single articulated work of art?  Why is the theme (which I believe the author knows, but doesn't know he hasn't stated) so invisible?

This book has 3 plots -- and not 1 conflict.

The STORY is that of the Captain who succeeds in a) getting a promotion to the new Submariner Service b) getting the girl and c) saving crown and country.  BUT WHO IS TRYING TO PREVENT HIM FROM DOING ANY OF THAT? 

No preventing force, no plot.  There's a great story and no CONFLICT -- without conflict there's no plot.

The author tried to disguise the lack of conflict by tossing in 2 extra plots that shouldn't be there, but those 2 extra plots (whichever 2 of the 3 are the extras) won't mix in properly because they explicate different themes destroying the "composition" of this book.

I can't tell which plots are "extra" because all 3 have equal weight.  In a well constructed work of art, one element dominates all others, each of the other elements supports and explicates the details of the main one, illuminating it from all angles.  The subordinate elements must have lesser "weight" (fewer words) than the unifying and dominating element.

Yes, the spies are trying to prevent launch of the new submarine, and/or to steal it or the new technology (their goal is never made clear), but that's not preventing our Hero the Captain from attaining his goal -- which goal is never made clear.  The Captain doesn't know he has a goal regarding the woman he falls for until way into the book, and nobody is trying to thwart him from "getting the girl."  When she is kidnapped, it's by the spies who want her for her expertise, not to thwart The Captain. 

And so it goes throughout the entire book -- every place there should be a conflict, there is a complication substituted for it.  That's why the thing wanders into loving description of technology during which all progress on all the story lines just stops.  There's no development of an urgent necessity to know how the technology works, and the technology is presented in indigestible lumps of exposition.  Cutting that down won't help.  It would be fascinating reading if we needed to know it -- if there were any suspense causing us to barrel through those explanations determined not to miss the essential clue to the mystery and not let The Hero solve the mystery before The Reader! 

You will find this thematic structure I've been describing above in every great novel that's lasted for generations -- though the older ones are much harder to discern because this structural trick was just being invented when they were propagated.  Reading from Ancient Greece onwards through the Middle Ages, you can see how the rules of this structure were developed stepwise. 

Here are some previous posts with links to other previous posts to study if you haven't followed this.  Also you may, in the course of analyzing The Thunderbolt Affair, discover that you have found an even better way to get your novel to "crystallize" -- to create a unified matrix of artistic statements that move your reader to the core.  If you do, be sure to teach your method.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-5.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Ancient Egypt & Steampunk

Attention Steampunk writers.  There may have been ANOTHER Victorian Era on Earth, 39,000 years ago and more. 

As you all know, I tend to connect dots most people can't see a connection between, at least not at first glance.  This is an exercise for writers somewhat akin to a musician practicing scales. I do it incessantly, habitually, and sometimes even fruitfully. 

I review Science Fiction and Fantasy - plus all the cross-genre mashups you can think of - for a paper magazine.  Therefore I read a lot of fiction. 

Sometimes I read non-fiction, and I even review non-fiction in my fiction review column.

Why do you suppose that is? 

Because it's all connected. By dots.  Tiny ones. 

So today I'm going to point readers of SFR who love the HEA, and especially alien romance and Steampunk  to a non-fiction book.

Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE by Edward F. Malkowski

Here it is on Amazon. 

Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE: The History, Technology, and Philosophy of Civilization X


I got it as a review copy from the publisher via twitter, but I've already mentioned it in my paper review column where the following discussion wouldn't fit. 

Here's the thesis Malkowski posits:

The Pre-dynastic period of Ancient Egypt is currently dated at about 5500 BCE. Malkowski explains how that number has been arrived at and why it could be in error because of the method. 

Malkowski marshals hard evidence (actual granit from the pyramids or found around the pyramids) to postulate a Civilization X that existed long, long before 5500 BCE that had the technology to work stone as well as we do, or better. 

He brings in evidence from other hobbyists obsessively investigating the questions mainline science avoids regarding the pyramids, speculates on the political and emotional reasons for that avoidance, and cites some very credible work by others that builds a good case that there's something wrong with the way we sketch pre-5500 BCE in the North Africa region. 

Then he grabs some astronomy and paleontology evidence about the mass die-offs of pre-history and at the end of the most recent Ice Age, speculating the reason for some of those die-offs might be a shower of cosmic rays (high energy neutrons maybe) that just killed off living things. 

Using an estimate for a cosmic ray shower, he figures Civilization X peaked before that shower caused the mass die off and heated the Earth's atmosphere causing the end of the most recent Ice Age. 

Recent research has shown our original carbon dating calculations have been off because of such cosmic ray showers altering the carbon isotope balances. With that corrected, different numbers are being worked out.  

He concludes that a Civilization X that was as advanced as we are would be as fragile as we are, as "soft" or disposable as we are.  If we died off, there would be nothing left but Mount Rushmore to testify that we ever existed.  Nothing, that is, except perhaps some of the philosophical ideas, maybe scientific concepts, the few survivors might pass on as religious myths. 

That is what he postulates caused Civilization X to disappear leaving only the pyramids of Ancient Egypt as a clue they ever existed. 

He paints a picture very much like that used by SF writers describing a "lost colony from Earth" that has forgotten they were lost and think themselves native to their new world. He does not hint that humans might have come from another world. 

His thesis is that there was a higly developed civilization (Atlantis? He doesn't think so.) that built the pyramids for a very logical, practical purpose.  One of the hobbyist researchers he cites has discovered what the pyramids actually were for.  And it wasn't tombs.

An engineer did some scale modeling work and discovered that the lower chambers of the Great Pyramid actually form a huge-scale PUMP that can pump water without electricity (that's for real; not fantasy). 

Speculating from that, Malkowski notes the way the very top of the pyramid is constructed to hold long shafts of granit would cause the whole pyramid to make a sound and low level ion pulse when water was running through it (the Nile used to be closer so water could be run through the pyramids). 

Modern research is revealing that seeds germinate better and plants grow better with the right kinds of ionization. 

The region around the pyramids used to be fertile farmland. 

Malkowski concludes the pyramids were built to create the conditions for abundant crops, a practical use that would justify the ridiculous expense of the project. 

His focus is so tight on justifying the explanation he's come up with that he walks right by what seems to me (the SF writer) to be the most obvious explanation. 

------my alternate explanation--------
If the pyramids were built to pump water, electricity could be generated by that powerful moving water stream (erosion traces inside the chambers show the water moved HARD AND FAST in there).

If there were a really highly developed Civilization, they wouldn't build the pyramids to fertilize crops - there are easier ways to do that if you have the technology.

But the immense expense of building pyramids would be justified by -- LAS VEGAS!!!  Or the Victorian equivalent.  How about Macao?  Every geographical area and every era has one -- except Ancient Egypt.  

Malkowski notes that some of the pyramid facing stones are left rough, while others are polished highly. 

My explanation -- the sides of the pyramids were BILL BOARDS. The rough and smooth stones made pictures or words.  If the civilization was advanced enough to use electricity, they probably had lit billboards on the sides of the pyramids, and that material has disintegrated 10's of thousands of years ago, so maybe they had electronic-paper. Or maybe they were bright triangles that lit up the whole vista like "The Strip?" 

By my theory, the buildings at the foot of the pyramids were not temples, but gambling palaces. Steampunk writers think about the wastrel heir to a fortune made selling advertising on the sides of the Great Pyramid.  They guy is gambling it away, meets the "right" woman and changes his ways to live happily ever after until the cosmic-ray-doom is predicted.  Then he invents a way for his family to survive - perhaps under a pyramid? 

The whole pyramid alley was a huge entertainment complex and market that functioned at a profit via international tourism (which they had, according to other evidence).  The wide paved spaces are for circus acts and such "mid-way" pitches.  But it could have doubled as a kind of bomb-shelter if you shut off the water flow. 

Malkowksi walks right by the most obvious (to me, the SF writer) explanation for who built the pyramids. 

We don't need to posit an ancient Civilization X.  Concurrently (???not sure about that???) with the ancient pre-dynastic Egyptians, we had the Indus Valley and the southern tip of India running very advanced civilizations that traded everywhere and built in stone using hydrolic engineering.

If the Ancient Egyptians wanted pyramids, they could outsource the construction contracts to experienced building contractors from southern India.  They didn't need the technology themselves if they could pay for it, and they could finance the job because gambling has been profitable for the House for a lot longer than Las Vegas has risen from the sands. 

So by Occam's Razor (favoring the simplest explanation) we don't need to postulate a pre-5500 BCE Civlization X to explain the high tech of the pyramid builders. They bought the tech, financed it, ran gambling resorts, and paid their debts that way - or maybe didn't pay and got conquered for renegging on their debt. After all, if they didn't own the tech, they'd be pushovers in any war against those who did own it. 

------end of my alternative explanation------

Back to Malkowski's Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE.

He postulates that the survivors of Civilization X found the pyramids, sealed, and assumed they were tombs because they'd forgotten almost everything.  Then those survivors began using the area for burials. 

Over that period, the climate of North Africa had changed.  There was much more rainfall in the earlier time.  Using that (factual) information, Malkowski had a geologist re-date the Sphinx (the method is described, and it's good enough for me) using erosion rates.  This puts the Sphinx construction way before 5500 BCE.

There's a lot in this book, everything from mythology explained by astronomy to stone-cutting methods using a huge circular saw.  Malkowski consults expert machinists and stone cutters today and explains some deep slots cut into the region surrounding the pyramids as places where these huge circular saws were mounted, and scars on some of the stones as mistakes the saw operators made.  It all makes good sense, but raises questions an archeologist would not publish without answering rigorously. 

I can't say that you absolutely must own this book even if you're writing SFR or doing active worldbuilding.  But you probably won't find it in a library and I'll probably refer to it in the future.  It's full of provocative ideas.   

The book ostensibly has nothing to do with the main Love Conquers All theme of Romance that I talk about so much.  But oddly, it does. 

It paints a picture of Civilization X survivors valiantly attempting to preserve and pass on the essence of their humanity, their treasured philosophy and science, their tools for survival.  They love their children (which ultimately is you and me) and want to give them the best odds of surviving the periodic catastrophies that have destroyed earth time and again. 

Romance weeps from between every word in this book, if you know how to see it. It's about a passion for eternity, which is the reason why Love Conquers All. 

I highly recommend Ancient Egypt 39,000 BCE to all Steampunk writers.

It is not a scholarly work, and the author goes out of his way to emphasize that several times.  His idea of history and pre-history research is that the process is mostly the use of imagination to fill in the gaps between facts.

EXAMPLE: he mentions how many of the large animals in the mass die-off at the end of the ice age are now found as broken bones.  Then says they were killed off by cosmic ray shower -- which I can't imagine breaking bones. 

So when a fact seems interesting, he mentions it.  But if it's inconveniently not fitting his theory, he then discards it or ignores it.  That's not how you work this sort of puzzle, at least not if you're the main scientist in an SF novel about the exploration of a newly discovered or colonized world.

At one point he mentions that the X-Files TV Series was a favorite of his, and that could be why I find his style comfortable and familiar enough to enjoy reading right over the things I disagree with.  If you don't like this book, find one by someone who likes the same TV shows you do.

Malkowski hardly ever uses the word archeology to describe what he's talking about.  He calls himself a "historian" -- but his thinking process is more like that of the archeologists I've learned from.

This method of establishing hard facts then applying a leap of imagination is primary to the field of archeology, and basically forbidden in the field of history.

However, Malkowski does not pursue questions in the order or with the rigorousness I am accustomed to seeing among archeologists.  His main evidence supporting his thesis is the awestruck feeling he, himself, gets when viewing the pyramids or works of Ancient Egypt.  From that sensation of awe, he concludes that those ancient craftsman could not have accomplished this construction.  His evidence for that is his own emotional reaction.  Not scholarly. 

Checking out the amazon links, I found there's an entire social network, perhaps a culture, of hobbyist researchers pursuing such shadowy subjects.  That's a "market" and a resource a writer can draw upon for characters and conflict. 

Now here's how writers can learn from reading this kind of non-scholarly non-fiction.

Read this book listening to Malkowski's "voice."  Follow his thinking patterns.  FEEL his emotional committment to his thesis, and feel his excitement at finding factual evidence that supports his thesis. 

For a scholar, that's a backwards approach. Ordinarily, you look at the facts, then concoct a thesis, then test it experimentally. 

But if you want to create a character who is like Star Trek's Captain Kirk, an adventurer but one dedicated to the distant past, Malkowski's "voice" will give you a valid model for that character.

So this book can be helpful even if you are averse to Ancient Egypt as a subject -- maybe especially if you are averse to the topic.  You might "hear" that voice more clearly if not distracted by the hypnotic lure of the topic. 

But, myself, I've been fascinated by Ancient Egypt since High School.  I had an English teacher who introduced me to the Ancient writers, the Greeks, Romans, and so on -- and demonstrated the connections to Ancient Egypt.

He had a diagram on the classroom wall called a Histomap.  It's a verticle strip of velum with a colored strips showing the expansion and contraction of pre-historic cultures over millenia. 

This device disappeared for decades but Rand McNally has it out again.  Here's a picture on Amazon.  It's a graphic of a timeline chart. 

Rand McNally Histomap of World History (Cosmopolitan Map)

I became fascinated how one civilization co-existed with, fought, then expanded over another, then died out as another civilization swelled.

So I've always appreciated how Ancient Egypt was a foundation (and competitor) of much of what we have today. 

My mother was enamored of biographies and especially travel books, and she introduced me to Thor Hyerdah.  Astonishingly I actually remembered how to spell his last name and found this on Amazon.

Thor Heyerdahl

If you haven't read Thor Heyerdahl AND Alvin Toffler, and connected those dots, the Ancient World to the Modern World, oh, please do so!  These are the hammers and chisles of worldbuilders while Malkowski is the voice of the passionate explorer! 

If you know other such sources, please drop them as notes on this blog.

After reading Malkowski's Ancient Egypt book, I googled around a little looking for a book I vividly remember but can't find in my own library right now.  And I couldn't find it.  It was about a lost civilization that modern archeologists don't actually believe existed off the southern tip of India that mastered hydraulic engineering to build massive stoneworks. 

Google on Ancient India and Hydraulic Engineering and you'll find lots of material. 

As noted in my alternate explanation above, I don't recall the dates of that ancient civilization in India but all we have left of it are some huge stone structures as "impossible" to understand as the pyramids of Ancient Egypt.

I like the Civilization X explanation for fictional use.  It would make a nifty alternate-universe or Steampunk premise. Steampunk writers need to absorb Malkowski's book, and maybe root around in that culture of hobbyist researchers.  The Steampunk spirit lives in that corner of the universe. 

I've used Stonehenge in much the same way that Malkowski uses the pyramids in my novels, Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends (in paperback and e-book on Amazon. Stonehenge and similar structures interest me at least as much as the pyramids do, which is saying a lot. 

While I was reading Ann Aguirre's KILLBOX (the Sirantha Jax series; highly recommended SFR!) I picked Ancient Egypt out of my bookshelf to read again because Aguirre uses the pyramids as source material for her intersellar drive. 

So you see, all the dots are connected. Malkowski was writing SFR but it was mistaken for non-fiction. 

Now you want a real challenge?  This year marked the 50th anniversary of THE FLINTSTONES on TV.  And that sparked an extremely controversial article  with a lot of comments disapproving of the article's thesis.  See if you can find a trail of dots between Ancient Egypt, pyramids, Love Conquers All as a Romance theme, and The Flintstones. 

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/867804--kelly-why-the-flintstones-is-evil 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Alien Sexuality Part One - The Root Of All Conflict

You may want to review my September 21, 2010 post, "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA?"

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-your-lovers-live-hea.html

One would think that "Happily Ever After" isn't a locus for stories. Living "happily" isn't exciting. The "story" happens where a conflict erupts and is subsequently resolved at some cost, some price, a trade-off. All conflict resolution is painful by nature, and "happy" can't co-exist with "painful."

That's true in Romance genre, I suspect. There can be dramatic Events during the "Happily Ever After" part of a couple's life, Events which then become backstory for the children of that couple who go on to live their own "story" and resolve conflicts based on what they learned by watching their parents "live happily ever after."

But in Science Fiction, and especially Science Fiction Romance, SFR or Paranormal Romance, PNR, you can depict a "happy" and "peaceful" "ever-after" portion of a Relationship that nevertheless is fraught with conflicts and their resolutions that generate "story-galore."

How can this be done? It's done with Alien Sexuality.

We, the readers, already know most all there is to know about human sexuality, so a "happily ever after" stretch of a lifetime isn't filled with surprises, shock, dismay, challenges, and above all CHANGE.

But add Alien Sexuality and the "happily" part of "ever after" can be peppered with "learning experiences" that can change, redirect, and mature a Relationship via conflict and resolution -- without ruining the "happily" at all.

A writer can explore Alien Sexuality in a Human/Non-human Relationship in such a way as to illuminate aspects of human sexuality that most readers could never think of on their own. You can surprise, dismay, amuse, and teach readers with stories they'll talk about for years.

Some of the first Science Fiction stories I read hinted at such situations, but didn't address them directly. I saw so many stories that needed telling that I was determined to write them myself and get them into print. I am delighted to say that I succeeded, but that's because I had great teachers.

One of my writing projects exploring some of these threads is the Sime~Gen Universe, which is currently being reprinted on paper and as all formats of e-book by the Borgo imprint of Wildside Press.  That's "in progress" and so far only House of Zeor has appeared and only as a paper reprint.  As they appear, you'll find them listed here and then you can find them at fictionwise.com and other online bookstores. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg on Amazon


Long before I started writing Science Fiction professionally, long before I wrote the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! where I talk about Spock Shock and Vulcan sexuality, I read up on how the writers I admired the most "came up with those crazy ideas."

I was a serious fan of "crazy ideas" and walked my world wrapped in a Sense of Wonder that I wanted to share with everyone (even those not interested).

I found out, by comments from other writers, reviewers and fans, that Poul Anderson set the standard for creating "aliens" that other writers then strove to emulate. Anderson inspired an entire swath of the SF genre peopled with characters who lived in fascinating conflicts which could not ethically or morally be resolved by application of the principles that apply to humans.

What's the reason human ethics and morals can not be applied by these aliens to resolve their own conflicts? Surely, humanity in all its various cultures has produced enough systems of ethics and morals that a solution to any problem can be found within one or another human cultural structure?

But no. Human solutions only work for humans. How can that be?

Sexuality. Alien sexuality, that is. Purely and truly alien sexuality.

Human sexuality is the same in all cultures throughout time, but we have developed myriads of ways of coping with the social dynamic it produces. One theory has it that all human culture is really just a mechanism for taming sexuality so that groups can live in cooperation. Even with only one biological necessity to tame, we've invented hundreds of ways of dealing with it.

But what if you changed the biology?

Gene Roddenberry learned the power of that fictional conundrum about Ethics, Morals, and Biology from the swath of the Science Fiction field which had been originated by Poul Anderson.

Roddenberry created Spock by combining two characters, the female first officer "Number One" who had no emotions, and the non-human Science Officer Mr. Spock who was emotional enough but looked at the universe from a non-human perspective.

You can see Spock's emotional character in the pilot The Cage. In all other episodes, he's a different character.

Roddenberry knew that the non-human perspective was the key signature of science fiction, and stubbornly refused to delete the Spock character when the networks objected that it wasn't commercial enough.

The network executives also nixed Number One - in the 1960's, one simply could not have a woman giving orders to men in a combat situation. So you couldn't have a female First Officer, or Captain (they decreed).

So Roddenberry pulled off his famous compromise and combined the two characters. At the time he sold the show, I don't think anyone in charge had the least idea how "alien sexuality" would captivate a generation of people, mostly female, formerly uninterested in science fiction or the "action" genre in general.

The Spock character evolved as science fiction authors contributed scripts to the show (also an unheard-of practice). Most of the established science fiction authors who wrote for Star Trek were from Poul Anderson's school of alien sexuality.

Theodore Sturgeon, noted for his strange sexual aliens, came up with the Vulcan mating drive, pon farr, and with Sturgeon's script Amok Time, Star Trek's popularity exploded, much to the dismay of the network executives at the time.

Anderson's secret sexual weapon - SCIENCE.

Yep. Poul Anderson studied how the various creatures on this Earth "did it" -- and projected what that species would have been like if it had developed intelligence and become the dominant species on Earth.

How would that change Earth and Earth's history (and pre-history)?

When Anderson had a grasp of how that species would create a civilization, then he'd create another world "out there" somewhere among the stars, as Gene Roddenberry created Vulcan. Gene Roddenberry postulated the half-breed alien, a staple of science fiction for generations before the 1960's, because that creates a character with a ripe internal and external conflict and an ambiguous point of view.

As I read novels, I would research references and learn pre-history and history. I became golly-gee-whiz-goshwow excited by variations on the established themes in science fiction novels and stories. At that time, these ideas had not been touched by writers in other fields, while science fiction's treatment of them was superficial at best. I just saw so many new stories that needed telling, and had to tell some of them.

Of course, to write about them in a way that would interest people who were not interested, you needed a grounding in classical human literature akin to the grounding the target readership had. Turns out, SF readers are very literate. More than very, actually. Roddenberry capitalized on that, too, by incorporating many Shakespearean elements in Star Trek's scripts.

Knowing that popular science fiction writers were experts in history, science, religion and literature, I set about acquiring both a grounding in classical literature and a scientific education (my degree is in Chemistry with minors in Physics and Math, but I'm self-educated in literature, though I've taken courses in archeology, linguistics, mythology, etc.).

I designed my education that way because all the best science fiction writers I knew were Chemists, and they talked about the classics but made their living in science. I so wanted to emulate that seamless blend of science, history, literature, and the wildest imagination in my own novels.

And apparently I have, at least according to the response of one fan who turned up on twitter and set me off thinking about exactly "how" a writer creates the sexuality of their aliens.

Here's part of an exchange between us on twitter. He's @booksbelow and I'm @jlichtenberg. The first name that appears is the originator of the comment, and the second name is the person who is being answered.

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

booksbelow: @JLichtenberg A few books/stories from youth I spent years looking for-yours were one. Another was Simulacron 3, breakthrough concept stuff.

jlichtenberg: @booksbelow It's that "breakthrough concept" stuff like Simulacron3 that I'm not seeing a lot of these days

booksbelow: @JLichtenberg I find myself rereading SF from the 60's and 70's a lot. SF writing has improved a lot, but lost some of sense of wonder.

jlichtenberg: @booksbelow Maybe it's not the writers or book that lost Sense Of Wonder, but the audience? Broader audience, lower common denominator?

booksbelow: @JLichtenberg I don't think can blame audience, there's always audience for innovative well written fiction. I Think New Wave derailed sf.

jlichtenberg: @booksbelow I agree "New Wave" swept the SF field into a new track -- see this month's LOCUS. Seems #STEAMPUNK is sweeping field aside again
-----------------

The September issue of Locus Magazine (the newspaper of the science fiction field) http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2010/Issue09_Toc.html features Steampunk and its influence on the SF field ever since the 1980's.

According to the various articles and interviews in this Locus Magazine feature, Steampunk has morphed and changed, even the definitions of the words have changed.

Cyberpunk was the first coinage of an SF genre using the meme "punk" and in that usage, it meant a person who was far out of the mainstream of the culture. A punk, a dropout, a recalcitrant objector to the norms of adult culture.

Today, the meme punk seems to have morphed into a usage that is more akin to "mashup" -- or a combination of one thing with another, a hybridization. And you see "punk" added to almost any other word to indicate some kind of alternative. Steampunk is usually in an alternate-universe-historical setting, most usually Elizabethan steam-powered technology and the culture based on that. But now it's morphing into other historical periods and locations.

Punk. A crossbreed. Like Spock.

As Gene Roddenberry said many times, the dramatic purpose of Spock as a character was to provide that external point of view on humanity's foibles that only an "alien" can provide. A "punk" is an external viewer.

There are young writers on twitter who proudly proclaim that they write Steampunk -- and emphasize that to them the term implies a romance element in the plot, a strong romance!

So Steampunk is becoming the home of a kind of SF-Fantasy-Romance mashup or hybrid-genre.

Usually, Steampunk doesn't involve aliens from outer space or galactic wars (watch how fast that will change), but it does involve the individual's mastery of the technology of the time to the extent of being able to invent things, jury-rig and prototype new ways to do things with "steam powered" technology that will solve the plot problem and often leap-frog over development and achieve what only our modern technology can achieve.

In other words, it's Robert A. Heinlein's typical hero building a space ship in his garage alone or maybe with a couple of friends to help.

Steampunk explores variations on society and history that allow the writer to create characters who understand the technology of their day, and their understanding is not beyond the comprehension of the reader.

Steampunk seems to be evolving into a literature of individualism, and that may actually give rise to a "conceptual breakthrough" such as @booksbelow was talking about.

In the 1970's, right after and during Star Trek's blasting onto the scene with Alien Sexuality (explored mostly in fanzines, not on TV) we had the conceptual revolution that said that women are not perpetual children in adult bodies. That revolution gave rise to the kick-ass heroine and the female Starship Captain.

Today, I often hear TV news anchors make offhand references to "Beam Me Up, Scotty" -- as if Star Trek had invented the matter transmitter that was so familiar to all science fiction readers who watched the original Star Trek. "Steampunk" often rewrites history freehand just like that. The authors may know our mainstream history, but I often wonder if the readers do.

Poul Anderson subscribed to the widespread notion that human civilization is primarily shaped, outlined or bounded by human sexuality, and propagated that notion among science fiction writers.

Today many never question whether all human psychology and thus culture is rooted in our sexual requirements.

In the 1970's, other feminist writers such as Joanna Russ, explored how women would run a world or get along in a world without men (or where men were no more self-aware or intelligent than animals). Roddenberry tried that in other series pilots, but it didn't fly.

History, anthropology, sociology and all of Literature reflect how we have analyzed ourselves through the lens of human sexuality.

If every element of a society or civilization is rooted in sexual dynamics (or at the very least reproductive drives), then if you make even the tiniest change in that basic dynamic drive, you change everything, even ethics and morals -- especially morals.

Since we "must" reproduce, anything that tends to prevent, limit or redirect that drive is a source of dramatic conflict that can be exploited by a writer to tell a story.

Apparently (to date as far as I know) all sexual reproduction on Earth seems to follow the same pattern. Make a change in that pattern - and don't just take an animal from Earth and create a dominant species out of it, but create a totally new kind of animal, and you may create the next "Spock" character -- the icon or archetype that will ignite the creative thinking of a new generation.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (for current novel availability)
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ (for complete biography & bibliography)
http://slantedconcept.com (for screenwriting projects)

Watchmen "The Incredibles Meet The Untouchables On Mars"

"Steampunk!" I thought when I saw "Nixon's Third Term" flash across the screen as I was watching "Watchmen" last night. I was expecting The Incredibles Meet The Untouchables.

"Whoa!!!"  was my reaction when I saw an actor who gave a whole new slant to the popular term for a computer, Big Blue. My husband commented that only because the guy was blue was so much full frontal male nudity allowed on television. If the character had been any other color, we would not have seen anything like it. Whoa, of course, is not a sub-genre of science fiction. Maybe it should be?

"Cool! Fantasy," was my reaction to Adrian's superhero costume. The guy who dressed up like a man-owl was certainly no Batman, and the superheroine costume was ludicrous. I find it hard to suspend disbelief when the heroine has long hair whipping around her head as she fights. (Which she did, often, in a series of superb Action sequences.) At least let her tie it up in a Lisa Shearin style, goblin battle braid. Even then, I am distracted by worry that a villain could grab the hair and use it against her. Moreover, unless she uses flame retardant hair care products, long tresses should be a liability when rescuing people from towering infernos. As for kicking butt in really high heels, okay. Be aware, though, that stiletto heels ought to get stuck in some villain's chest from time to time.

So much for wardrobe. No malfunctions.

Science Fiction! There was teleportation, not only of truly massive bits of equipment, but also of people. It was a nice gesture to sci-fi conventions that the heroine got queasy and threw up whenever Big Blue teleported her somewhere. There should always be some downside to magic or implausible technology.

With hindsight, it is a pity one of the Star Trek...  Oh well. If James T Kirk had blown chunks every time Scotty beamed him up, it probably wouldn't have been called "beaming", and it would be a cliché by now.

There was the superhero flying vehicle, reminiscent of Thunderbird Two, really, but on a smaller scale and garaged in a basement that gave onto an abandoned subway station which ran into a sewer outlet under some large body of water. Convenient, that. It could have been Fantasy or Science Fiction. A couple of odd things about it were that the general public never seemed particularly surprised to see it, and the members of the city's Finest never did get used to the idea that ordinary bullets were ineffective against it.

Science Fiction was the genre when the Blue Guy teleported himself to Mars and floated off the ground in a rather rude lotus position with his back to us, and even more so when he teleported the girl there and she had no trouble breathing or flying around on a very cool looking, red-gold glass, spiky, clock-like contraption.

It wasn't clear to me what she could eat, or drink, or do anything else that we all have to do from time to time but she was there to plead for life on Earth, but the effects were enjoyable and reminded me of Star Gate, and also of the clock theme in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

I should mention that there is a lot of really nasty, graphic, gratuitous, stomach-turning, Horrific violence in this movie, and no one really looks good (apart from Adrian in his costume, and his horned cat). On a scale of 1 - 10 for enjoyment, I gave it a 1. 1 being bad. However, I am still thinking about it today, and perhaps "enjoyment" isn't everything. Fascinating and deeply disturbing moral questions were raised.

Machiavellians should love it!

Did I give a nod to the Erotica? Apart from Big Blue's limp equipment, there was at least one lengthy sex scenes at a supremely inappropriate juncture in the action. There was also Murder, Mystery, Horror, Action, Tragedy...

So to my point. Here is a movie that appears to straddle a great many genres with a fair degree of comfort. I'm sure there are others that cannot be neatly boxed as this genre or that. That might be a good thing for those of us who write speculative fiction or alien romances.

As for my rating, I still give it a 1. I like happy endings, and I like my superheroes to be heroic.

Gunk punk (Looking back on America's auto industry)

I'm a Science-fiction Romance writer. I look at History (which repeats itself) also current events, and I wonder What If...?

Not that I write it, yet, but Steampunk is where the writer changes one invention from the time of the industrial revolution, such as H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine". That was the "age of steam", hence steam punk.

More recently, there is "cyber punk" which I suppose relates to choices made in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. One of the hallmarks of punk writing is that it explores the road not traveled and the consequences of a different decision whether made by a scientist, a businessman, or a politician (I assume).

I'm using "gunk" punk because if steam is what the Nineteenth Century machines are remembered for, then gunk might be what petroleum-driven cars leave behind. Or maybe I've been watching too many STP commercials.

Gratuitous decoration



This is a car made by my husband, with his own hands and the help of a few people he contracted with privately. He burned his hands on hot clay, he came home with his eyebrows covered in dust from sanding... he lost 10lbs from all the exercise. This photo was taken at SEMA by Jonathon Ramsey for Autoblog.com http://tinyurl.com/5kv9jf


So, what if... in the 1940s American didn't have a manufacturing industry and depended on Germany and Japan? I'd probably be blogging in German, right?

History is being made right now, that's why I'm laying claim to "gunk punk" (unless someone has already thought of it, or someone has a better name). Peter M DeLorenzo of autoextremist.com
http://www.autoextremist.com/current/ may have done so, but he doesn't write fiction as far as I know. He has a jaw dropping rant going on.

Peter is also selling an alarming book (non-fiction) titled "The United States of Toyota."

Alarming cover art.


I am now imagining myself as a writer in, say 2020 (hindsight pun!) looking back on the third week of November 2008 when Congress made a catastrophic vote NOT to make a loan to the last American car companies.

It's a "Mad Max" world now. Or perhaps it's Mary Doria Russell's "The Sparrow" world with a touch of "1984". The Jesuits and the Japanese rule. We have an Emperor. And a Pope. And a third Minister of some sort, because good things come in threes.

Onstar speaks to us in Japanese in our cars. We cannot turn it off. They got Murdoch, too. And Comcast. All our Direct TV has Japanese subtitles. We cannot turn it off. Big Brother looks a lot like Vladimir Putin with Botox to get rid of the ugly Western crease in his eyelids. He tells us what to think.

America is bankrupt. When the world bank foreclosed, one of the creditors took Hawaii, another took the island of Manhattan, another took the Great Lakes for the water. No one wanted Detroit... I could go on. In a grim way, this is rather fun.

Maybe my imagination is overactive. I hope so! I was having trouble fitting any kind of Romance into my budding novel of milieu.

My point is, pay attention to the information that is available, and store it up for future reference. (Thank goodness for flashdrive!). There's a massive dissonance right now between the truth and what people are saying in the media.

If interested in GM's version of car myth vs fact visit http://gmfactsandfiction.com/

Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry