Guest Post by Jean Johnson on her Science Fiction Romance The Terrans

Guest Post
by
Jean Johnson
First Salik War:
The Terrans

I discussed some of Jean Johnson's science fiction and SFR in previous posts and will rave more about her work in the future.  But now you should listen to what she says was behind the science concepts she has used.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/11/reviews-20-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-18-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html
-------------GUEST POST BY JEAN JOHNSON-----------

Science and Romance in Fiction

http://www.JeanJohnson.net

Greetings, Dear Readers!

Does everyone have their safety goggles and lab coats?  Excellent.  Today’s session is on blending science and romance into fiction, and why entangling the two is actually a pretty good idea.

Now, there have been plenty of debates on where the dividing line is between things like paranormal/fantasy romance versus urban fantasy.  The conclusion which myself, Kat Richardson, Shannon Butcher and Jim Butcher all came to during Norwescon 34 (April 21-24, 2011) was that the focus of the story is what determines whether it’s paranormal romance set in a fantastical contemporary setting, or urban fantasy with romantic elements.  But we’re going to talk about how you can blend science and romance, not just fantasy and romance.

Fantasy romance has been around since the first fairy tales with hints of romance in them started circulating.  Whether it’s the brave lad wooing the princess or the plucky lass winning the prince, we understand those tropes and are familiar with them.  Science fiction, however, has been (rather wrongfully) considered more of a “boy’s thing” and so a lot of romance writers don’t try to blend it because they don’t feel their readers would be interested in it.

Or if they do, they may not be heavily into reading science fiction, and thus don’t understand it for its own merit; they’re looking for a fancy but quick backdrop in which to place the setting, somewhere new and exotic.  Or there are those science fiction writers who don’t read romance, but try to wedge some romance into their stories without really paying attention to how romances actually work, both as a genre and as an actual “how do romances actually work in real life?” kind of thing.

Thankfully, there are those of us who read both romance and science fiction.  A lot.  I grew up cutting my literary teeth on Johanna Lindsay and Alan Dean Foster.  I’ve read Dara Joy and Andre Norton.  I’ve cuddled up with Catherine Coulter and Anne McCaffrey.  In fact, I figured I could write in my three favorite categories as a reader, science fiction, fantasy, and romance, because Alan Dean Foster has had a successful career writing science fiction, fantasy, and books based on movies. My life goal is to write as many stories or more as the 150 which Andre Norton got published over the span of her own career.

So when I set out to write, I knew that I’d be hopping from genre to genre.  I knew that I wanted to write science into my science fiction, too.  I also learned fairly quickly that I suck at contemporary romance; I just have to put in some sort of fantastical element, or it’s just not a story I want to write.  Other people have other experiences, but hey, plenty of room for plenty of different sorts of stories, right?  Right.

My latest release, THE TERRANS, which is the first novel in the First Salik War trilogy, is predominantly a science fiction First Contact novel.  The startlement, surprise, irritation, humor, aggravation, bewilderment, and wonder of trying to figure out how to deal with an alien culture, an alien lifeform, is a fun plot to map out and follow.  There is lots of room for political intrigue, social gaffes, cultural misunderstandings, and potential conflicts all over the place.

(For those of you interested, THE TERRANS can be found at at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-terrans-jean-johnson/1120853148?ean=9780425276914
and
  http://www.amazon.com/Terrans-First-Salik-War/dp/0425276910/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1438550621&sr=1-1&keywords=the+terrans

as well as through Black Bond Books up in Vancouver, BC, Canada, et cetera.

At the same time that I figured out I wanted to write a First Contact story, I knew I had to find a way to draw the readers in and get them not only interested in reading the plot, but involved in the struggles of the characters.  Politics is kinda boring for a lot of people, so why should anyone care?  Well, in this particular universe, I developed a logical way for psychic powers to exist (“Aliens!”), and developed the science-y stuff on how it all works, because I like my science fiction to have an attempt at science in it.  (Remember, it doesn’t have to be right if it’s just a theory; once the theory is out there, then experiments can be devised to test the theory to see if it holds water or not.)

Once I had that established, it occurred to me that if psychic abilities are the manipulation of energy and matter by the mind—itself a source of energy and matter—then it could be quite possible that two minds could become quantum entangled.  If you don’t know anything about quantum entanglement, it basically means that if you “entangle” two molecules into having a matching “spin” to them, you can separate them over great distances and they will still have the same interrelated spin.  You can try to change and measure one waaaay over here and know that the one waaaay over there has the corresponding measurement because they’re entangled.

So why not minds?  On the surface, telepathy would seem to be a great way to overcome obstacles in communication, right?  Alas, I believe Douglas Adams was far more accurate about the end results when he said, “Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”  Or to put it into more mundane terms, gentlemen know that the best verbal answer to “Do these jeans make my butt look fat?” is always, always, “No, dear,” or  “You look perfect to me in whatever you wear,” regardless of what they may actually think.

Mercedes Lackey, in a line from her Vanyel books in her wonderful Valdemar series, once remarked that “lifebonding” (her version of entangling two souls or two minds) is actually more awkward than awesome, because you constantly have to juggle the needs of both people; you have to work harder at getting along than any other pairing because you’re stuck with each other.

So thinking about all these things, I bwahaha’d a bit and wondered if I could get my heroine, Jacaranda Mackenzie, and her counterpart from the other faction, Li’eth, stuck in a quantum entanglement of their minds.  In my series, this is called a Gestalt (geh-sh-TALL-t), which is a lovely German word which boils down to “the end result is bigger than the sum of its parts”, or basically, 2+2=5 and not just =4, for sufficiently strongly enough reactive values of 2.

Now, there are several alien species in the universe of the First Salik War.  In fact, readers familiar with my military science fiction series Theirs Not To Reason Why (the first in the series, A SOLDIER’S DUTY, is found at  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/soldiers-duty-jean-johnson/1102164487?ean=9780441020638
and at
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/soldiers-duty-jean-johnson/1102164487?ean=9780441020638 )will have already met the Salik species because that story struggles with the problems of the Second Salik War.  But there were also two branches of humanity, the Terrans and the V’Dan, and I thought it would be more fun, and more plausible, to entangle the brains of two Humans.

That meant having to come up with the distinct and unique culture of the V’Dan, who—according to the history I drew up for that universe—have been cut off from Terrans for almost ten thousand years.  We don’t really get into the V’Dan culture in the series Theirs Not to Reason Why because it’s entirely from a Terran perspective.  It’s also had roughly two hundred years of contact with Terrans by that point, and like any situation where two cultures start interacting, they’ll have had an impact on each other, for better or for worse.

In the First Salik War series, however, I knew I could show these two Human empires being as alien and separate as they could get and still be a story about two branches of the same species interacting and clashing.  Throw in the other aliens and their reactions and interactions to the new players who “are not like the V’Dan we’re used to dealing with,” and you have a delightful recipe for lots and oodles and scads of expectations falling short, cultural misunderstandings, assumptions being made, and the whole making an “ass” out of “u” and “me,” so on and so forth.  Lots of fun, lots of room for a writer to work.

So I took this idea of a telepathic Gestalt, and poked and prodded at it from all angles.  Since I’ve been working on this series on and off for a couple of decades, I was able to iron out a lot of wrinkles, trim and tailor it this way and that, and I think have come up with a pretty good story.  We have Jacaranda MacKenzie, whose telepathy has been so strong, she’s never considered settling down with anyone.  This has made her an excellent civil servant as well as a former soldier, so on and so forth.

She is of mixed ethnicity, though she identifies strongest with her Hawai’ian heritage, and she is earnestly interested in finding solutions that will benefit the most number of people, not just a select few.  (Yes, authors will find a way to sneak our opinions into a story in the hopes it will inspire future generations.  Sometimes those opinions might even be good ones, but only time will tell.)  She is lucky to live in an era where skin-based prejudice no longer exists, where corruption in politics is rooted out ruthlessly, and your representative is actually trustworthy.  Do they still have problems in the Terran United Planets?  Oh my, yes…but they’re willing to acknowledge and work on them.

Then there’s Li’eth, a prince of his people, destined to serve in the military for a while because that’s one of the things extra children do when they’re not the primary heir.  He comes from a culture where physical maturity is displayed by jungen, which is a set of colorful markings which appear on the skin, the irises of the eye, and even the color of one’s hair can be changed.  This has led his entire culture into the “obvious correlation” of thinking that if you don’t have these marks, you must still be pre-pubescent, and thus still immature.  Add in the fact that his people treat psychic abilities as a mystical religious experience, whereas the Terrans treat it as a palpable science, and you have yet more awkwardness awaiting the pair.

I also decided that neither of them could be in their early twenties, let alone teenagers.  We don’t give political power to anyone under 25, and we certainly don’t hand over control of a First Contact situation to a teenager.  I didn’t even want to put them in their late twenties.  People need time to gain experience in life and in work, to figure out how to get things done, to be entrusted with a great deal of clout, if not actual power.  So mid-30s seemed about right.

So, we’ve got quantum entangled brains, check.  We have culture clashes over perceptions of maturity, check.  We have people who do understand politics and governance interacting in First Contact situations, check.  Wait…entangled brains.  They’re sharing thoughts.  Not like constantly, but very easily all the same.  So…how would these two react to that?  Should I put in some romance, or not?

Going back to that Mercedes Lackey quote, it occurred to me that if they could communicate in packets of thought with mental images and underlying subtext flavorings, it could be useful for communication, but it would also require constant mental adjustments to get along with each other.  Since neither one wants their respective governments to go to war with the other—most civilized cultures don’t—that means they would have to get to know each other, get familiar and friendly with each other, and…

Hm…are they both heterosexual?  (I rolled some dice, the dice said, “Yep!”)  Do they find each other attractive?  (Rolled more dice, again “Yep!” came up.  I can’t help it; I grew up playing D&D and other RPGs, and thus use a random number generator to help make up my mind when I’m ambivalent.  I like to think of it as injecting random potential for fun.)  Well, since they were both single, both forced to work together, both find each other attractive…oh, wait.  Li’eth is from a culture where if you don’t have the right sort of marks coloring your body, you’re, um…well, you have curves and stuff, and you’re thirty-five years old, but…society says you’re a child.  Ahah!  Another source for culture clash!

Plus there’s that whole thing about “exerting undue influence” that crops up whenever two people on opposing sides of a debate or a treaty or whatever start dating each other on top of everything else.  So how would a career representative and an imperial prince balance everything?  The needs of their people?  Their own brains becoming psychically entangled to the point where they suffer when they’re separated?  Their interest in each other?  The ethical and moral quandries of “sleeping with the as-yet-not-firmly-stablished-ally” if not “sleeping with the enemy”…?

Well, the focus of the story, as I said, is more science fiction than romance.  But you can put romance into science fiction.  You can put science fiction into romance.  The plot can be X and Y and even Z…but how the characters deal with all of that, how they change and grow and struggle, that is what makes the plot into a story that grips you and pulls you in.  Because you want to know how they deal with all of that.  Because it allows you to journey with them as they try to manage love life and career and complications.

As a reader, you become all the more invested in their struggles.  You become a sympathizer for their failures.  You become a cheerleader for their triumphs.  You become, Dear Readers—if just for a little while—entangled in the spinning of their lives.

Enjoy!
~Jean

If you have any questions, you can always contact me via:
My website, http://www.JeanJohnson.net
Twitter: @JeanJAuthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fans-of-Author-Jean-Johnson/180367135307085
Tumblr:  http://jeanjauthor.tumblr.com/

…And I also have a Patreon which gives sneak advanced peeks at book covers, chapter and scene selectsion, so on and so forth:  http://www.patreon.com/JeanJAuthor

Reviews 20 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg -- Jean Johnson's The First Salik War Book 1 The Terrans

Reviews 20 

by

 Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The First Salik War
Book 1
 The Terrans 

by

Jean Johnson

Previously, I reviewed Jean Johnson's ...
http://www.jeanjohnson.net
...mostly Military Science Fiction series, 5 books collectively called Theirs Not To Reason Why about a precognitive, half-human time-traveling woman.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-18-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

I told you to read those books, even though they are not specifically or ostensibly "Romance Genre" -- there is a love story in there, and it does affect the story but not the plot.

Now I'm going to tell you to read her new, prequel-series, THE FIRST SALIK WAR, (1st book THE TERRANS), set centuries prior to the events of THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY, and I'm going to tell you why you should read The First Salik War saga (which is hot-Trekfic-Style-Romance).  When you get done, you'll see the ROMANCE inherent in Theirs Not To Reason Why.

 
She is working on a huge, gigantic, multiplex canvas to display an artform to the mass market that hasn't actually been created yet.  She's at a forefront of things to come.  

Last week,...

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/11/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

...we discussed the impact of online fanzine distribution, particularly Star Trek, via a Guest Post by Kirok of L'Stok, and as an introduction to what he had to say, I pointed to The Terrans and how Jean Johnson had blended the writing craft styles of Romance into Science Fiction, bringing one to the fore and then the other.

To see where this is coming from and how it is not only changing the online fanfic market, but also the mass market paperback market, we have to look deeply at The Terrans.

Jean Johnson has made a good reputation as a Romance writer.  I met her on Facebook, and did a #scifichat with her on Twitter.  She's a good conversationalist, as well as a good writer.

She says she was writing Harry Potter fanfic and got a request from an editor at a mass market publisher for a Romance.  She had a book already written (see? that's the key -- write and keep writing, develop a file of stuff you have written), and "dusted it off" and sent it in.

That's another key.  You have to have a file full of material you've written a while ago, and when requested for something designed to mass market to a specific market, you have to be able to "dust it off" -- to update the writing techniques, rephrase things, scrub typos, and generally conform the raw artistic sketch to a specific market as requested.

And you have to be able to do that lickity-split -- it has to be just a few days between request and produced manuscript. Markets flow fast, reshape, open and close.

Publishers work a conveyor belt operation with specific dates set years in advance, a wide variety of different departments all producing pieces of the work (cover art, cover copy, copy-editing, publicity reserving ad space, all sorts of things you've never heard of if you don't work in publishing).

And budget - budget is the biggest item.  The longer a thing takes to do, the more it costs.  Readers will buy at a certain price, and balk at a price just 25 cents higher, and publishers know where the break-point is.  And they know their warehousing costs, trucking costs, etc.

As a writer, you have to produce an item that fits their conveyor belt within the time-slot of when their empty slot moves by the editor's desk.

Timing is everything.

In fact, that is exactly how we sold the non-fiction book STAR TREK LIVES! that blew the lid on Star Trek fanfic.

Prior to publication of the Bantam mass market paperback, STAR TREK LIVES!, reviewers for the large magazines and reporters for newspapers had never, ever, heard of fan fiction and had no idea what it was!  Now there are lots of books, academic and mass market about fanfic, and it is casually referred to in news stories and by Characters on TV Shows.

We are Marketing Fiction in a totally Changed World, that is still changing fast.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

We sold STAR TREK LIVES! to Bantam (Fred Pohl being the editor at the time, and he knew me because he'd bought my first story, set in the Sime~Gen Universe but he didn't know the connection between Sime~Gen and Star Trek).  At Bantam, they had a conveyor belt filled with pre-contracted books, contracts with reliable professional writers with selling track records.

As happens, but rarely, one of the writers failed to deliver on time, but as with professional writers, enough warning was given so the panic in the offices was muted to, "We can handle this."

In midst of "handling this," Fred Pohl met one of my co-authors, Joan Winston, at a Meet The Authors event at a Star Trek Con in Canada, mentioned his problem with a vacant conveyor belt slot, and asked if the book he had turned down previously was still available.  It was, and had been rewritten a couple times since -- and it didn't have a title.  Fred chose the title STAR TREK LIVES!

And the reviews fastened on the FANFIC element we presented.

Sondra Marshak went on to compile the VOYAGES series of fanfic professionally published.  That went best-seller, and little by little, changed science fiction as a field and the thinking behind publishing.  Of course, all during that time, online publishing was rising, and computer-data-feedback from stories grew, and Amazon launched obliterating brick-and-mortar Indie Stories, and the world changed.

Into the aftermath of this melee in the business side of things, around 2007, Jean Johnson started publishing in the Romance arena, capitalizing on all the change rooted in Star Trek, carried forward by B-7 (which also had telepaths), and then transmitted to a whole new generation via Harry Potter.

And of course, the Fantasy arena likewise morphed, and some serious contributions have been made there.

The confluence of all these influences is launching us into a new epoch in publishing, in science fiction, in romance, and in science fiction romance.

Jean Johnson may be one of the leaders in this new Epoch.

It may not be on purpose, but I can easily see that she is writing to change the world.  Or at the very least, my world.

With Theirs Not To Reason Why, she presented a blend of the Fantasy ESP premise of the precognitive ability originating in an energy-based (shades of ST:ToS) beings mating with humans (shades of Greek Mythology), all seamlessly integrated into an interstellar war.

She billed that war as The Second Salik War, with only hints of what dire events had transpired in The First Salik War.

In 5 large volumes, she painted a mural of future-history.

Now in The First Salik War, she is taking us through the details of how Earth made First Contact with that galactic civilization filled with a panoply of species, fought in the war, and survived.

The writing style of The Terrans is mostly all tell, very little show.  It is, as I said last week, one huge expository lump after another, painting an enormous picture of Earth's history, and "current" mode of governing.

That violation of all science fiction structural "rules" has a certain validity, and it has a target audience.

The payload for wading through all that exposition is enormous.

Just barely arriving at the story/plot beginning at the 3/4 point of the novel, the book turns into the quintessential reason why Star Trek fanfic exploded out of an audience that would never touch a "science fiction novel."

It's the Romance.  That's it, pure and simple.  Adding Romance, in all its facets, to a life-or-death war situation complicated by clashing governmental forms, by laws, rules, unconscious assumptions, and RELIGION.

The Science Fiction Romace field has two requirements that few writers can meet at the same time in the same work:

1) the Aliens have to BE ALIEN
2) the Human/Alien Romance requires the ALIEN to be HUMAN (but still alien).

In both Theirs Not To Reason Why and The First Salik War, Jean Johnson has managed to fit both criteria without straining the underlying worldbuilding.

I've just barely met her, so I don't know how deeply and consciously she has thought through her worldbuilding.  She did tell me that she had been mulling and imagining this universe for many years, and that shows in the overwhelming plethora of detail she presents about it.

So I want to look more closely at the Content of The Terrans, as separate from the structure and writing craft choices, or even the artistic choices leading into using enormous expository lumps disguised as conversation, and telepathic conversation.

There are so many other ways to style the crafting of such a tapestry against which to fling an interstellar war Romance, a Helen of Troy With A Twist Romance, that you can read these novels, mull over what Jean Johnson has extracted from the Potterverse fanfic, combined with her audience's everyday experience of the world, and morphed into an interstellar war, and then use that same technique to create something vastly different.

If you can pick up what Jean Johnson has done, why she's chosen the tools she has chosen, what she injected into the blended field of science fiction romance with fantasy elements, and re-cast it into your very own, original concept, I think you can carry this New Epoch of the world of publishing forward yet another step.

So don't miss any of these books.

Meanwhile, think about this quote from STAR TREK:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084726/quotes
STAR TREK II THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)
----------QUOTE-----------
McCoy: [Kirk runs in to the engine room and sees Spock inside the reactor compartment. He rushes over but McCoy and Scotty hold him back] No! You'll flood the whole compartment!
Kirk: He'll die!
Scotty: Sir! He's dead already.
McCoy: It's too late.
[They let go and Kirk walks to the glass and pushes the intercom button]
Kirk: Spock!
[Spock slowly walks over to the glass and pushes the intercom]
Spock: The ship... out of danger?
Kirk: Yes.
Spock: Do not grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many, outweigh...
Kirk: The needs of the few.
Spock: Or the one. I never took the Kobayashi Maru test until now. What do you think of my solution?
Kirk: Spock.
[Spock sits down]
Spock: I have been, and always shall be, your friend.
[he places a Vulcan salute on the glass]
Spock: Live long and prosper.
[Spock dies]
Kirk: No.
-----------END QUOTE-------------

Science Fiction and Fantasy-Action Romance stories require Heroism in the main character.

Many novels today, especially Fantasy, portray the main Character as a victim, not a Hero.  That's fine if the writer does it on purpose, having chosen deliberately for artistic reasons and telegraphed the reason for that choice to the reader.  But that fine-point is often overlooked.  It is a sophisticated technique many new writers haven't mastered when they first break into print.

I discussed "The Hero" a little in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/reviews-9-sex-politics-and-heroism.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/10/strong-characters-defined-part-1.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

Creating a "strong" character and casting that character into a Situation that is "beyond him/her" -- so that the Character is tested to destruction and rebuilt anew by the end -- requires a great deal of study of Human Nature -- psychology and all of its manifestations.

Jean Johnson says, on her Facebook bio, that she studied Religion in college.

In Theirs Not To Reason Why and now The First Salik War, Jean Johnson portrays some characters with a sense of the spiritual, but who eschew Religion, and some who are deeply steeped in their own (non-Terran) religious texts.

She deals with Prophecy -- one of the elements that make the Bible such essential reading for writers looking for hot-plots.

I discussed Prophecy and its plot-potential in the context of reviewing Jennifer Roberson's novels -- which I recommend across the board. Read anything by Jennifer Roberson you can lay hands on.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/reviews-1-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/doranna-durgin-on-changes-in-publishing.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/original-thinking-in-romance-part-1.html

Strong Characters meeting Prophecy often brings some element of Self Sacrifice into the plot.

Heroism is often defined in the popular culture as self-sacrifice.

Some people regard self-sacrifice as noble.  Others think it's a stupid way to behave.

Both kinds of people, religious and anti-religious, shed a tear or two or three at Spock's (first) death scene.

We didn't know he'd be resurrected, and neither did those in charge of making contracts to get Leonard Nimoy to portray Spock again-still-once-more-forever.

In few other genres can writers resurrect characters and make such a wide audience believe and accept.  The Genesis Planet used science.  Alternate Universe travel, time travel, all sorts of nonsense Fantasy premises are turning into science now.

While the audience was held in the limbo of having lost Spock to a graphic death, we were all left to ponder this philosophy.

As usual Roddenberry put his finger on the central theme of the philosophy -- graphically depicted in prevailing religions -- of Self-Sacrifice.

More than 30 years ago, Roddenberry stated the conundrum of the confluence point of Government and Religion without apology.

Self-sacrifice is taken as a sign of heroism.

It is the eternal tension between the individual and the group, or in astrological terms, 1st House vs. 7th House which is discussed in these posts on Astrology Just For Writers where Character Development is also addressed.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

The struggle between the rights of the individual and the rights of the groups supporting that individual's right to individuality continues today.

It is being worked out on the world stage via ISIS or ISIL or whatever they're calling themselves these days, the attempt to reinstate the Caliphate -- a theocracy.

Their particular theocracy is based on the idea that the highest spiritual reward, the most exalted heroism, is achieved by dying to kill those who refuse to adopt their religion.  Dying while killing earns a higher reward than saving a life.

In that theocracy, the force of government is brought to bear on those who disagree with government, and the religion is the government you must agree with or die.

The U.S.A. was founded on the Legal Philosophy rooted in the idea that a Monarchy (England) could not use Government to enforce conforming to a Religion (the Church of England).

American Government is a limited government designed to protect the rights of the few or the one from the power of the many or the majority.  In this philosophy of law, government does not impose the will of the majority on the individual but protects the individual from being bullied by a majority.

In other words, Spock cited a principle in diametric opposition to everything America holds sacred.

The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.  That's the political philosophy behind the modern concept of Human Rights, and most of the Legal Philosophy behind our concept of Justice.

Spock's voluntary sacrifice re-defined and/or confirmed the Spock Character as a Strong Character, a Heroic Character.  His reason for it posed the kind of salient question Roddenberry was always famous for.

In America, the rights of the individual outweigh the rights of the many -- UNLESS that individual voluntarily and without coercion (sword at the neck, ISIL style), and with informed consent, offers to wave a right for a specified time (such as in joining the Armed Services or taking an Oath for an elected Office.)

Jean Johnson showed us an individual in Theirs Not To Reason Why who made the sort of voluntary contribution that Spock made by giving his life.  (really, I'm telling you, you must read those books even if they aren't Romance -- really!)

The Hero of those novels had to fight her government to achieve a position where she was able to make that self-sacrifice.

In The First Salik War, The Terrans, Jean Johnson shows us another kind of sacrifice - a circumstantial and inevitable one, very much like the dilemma that Spock faced in entering the radiation-hot chamber to twiggle a device to avoid the ship blowing up.

In The Terrans, we meet this Character who has been embedded in the Political scene, working as a representative in Earth's world government.

Go read that novel, and we'll discuss more about the content in another post on this blog.

It raises questions.  Gene Roddenberry taught that good fiction doesn't answer questions, but rather asks them.

Posing a question in a form that depicts a problem that can be worked is an artform.

The art of posing questions is not taught in the early schooling in America today.  Schooling has also become political, a matter for a central government not parents.

There are good arguments on both sides of that dilemma, rich fields for Romance novels to find conflict.  How easy is it for parents to agree about how their children should be educated?  How much discussion of the High School education of children goes on during a hot Romance?

Yet, how many good marriages founder on a point of this sort -- how to educate children, how to pay for it, how many children to have and whether to choose the number of children or let God decide?

Yes, Religion invades education as well as Romance.

Religion is a bedrock component of Romance.  As I've pointed out,  you aren't likely to bond with a Soul Mate if you don't have a Soul.

The are of question formulation leads one to the obvious problem: if you have a Soul, must you also adopt a Religion?

And what has having a Soul, and a Soul Mate, got to do with good governance?  With choosing a form of government that is "scalable" -- that is can be scaled up to govern a humanity flung to the stars and beyond?

How do you govern Earth in such a way that we can become part of an Interstellar ciivilization that's already "out there."  What if our political philosophy clashes with that which we find out there?

What if their idea of where religion and prophecy belongs in the scheme of the Philosophy of Law differs from ours?  What if the ideas are incompatible?

What if the two people who make First Contact will die (or worse) if they obey the law?

Is there any such thing as a sacrifice that is not a self-sacrifice?

What is a sacrifice?  What is it if I sacrifice your life to my benefit, turn around and walk away happy that I have gained so much for so little?  Is it possible to "sacrifice" someone else?  If it is, what is the person who sacrifices another for the greater good?  Is that a Hero?  Can a villain be a Strong Character?

Where do ethics and morals intersect the Philosophy of Law, and what has Law to do with good governance, with global governance, with interstellar government forms?

If you've read Jean Johnson's novels so far, you can ponder those questions and see why a degree in Religion equips you well for a career in fiction writing.

For contrast check out the book I reviewed here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/05/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/05/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding-part.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world_26.html

When I find one of these writers, I just go on and on about them!

This is important work.  This is writing to change the world.  This is the kind of writing that can change the world.

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword.

War is nothing in the face of fiction.  Fiction reveals the "truth" of politics, law, philosophy, religion and opinion by examining the various shadow governments we can imagine espousing various religions, with and without the bullying of the minority by the majority, with or without the informed consent of the bullied.

Study this image again.  Think hard about it.

 

How do you pose such ineffable questions to build a world around the story that you want to tell?

These are the sorts of questions Jean Johnson has chosen answers to in her First Salik War saga.

Read the books, consider other ways to answer those questions and write your own novels rooted in such profound questions which your Characters answer in their own Characteristic ways.

This is content, not structure. Structure aims a novel at a given audience.  Content can be carried to any audience if you choose the correct structure, the structure that audience prefers. The structure is your vehicle.  The content, or payload, you put into your vehicle is your theme, what you have to say.

First, question everything you think you know.  The more positive you are that what you think is true is actually The Truth, the more likely you are missing something important.

Aliens may have that something important, and be missing something we think is obvious.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com