Urban Flight, Epidemics, and Demographic Change

In recent weeks, many people who can afford to do so have fled the congestion of cities for suburban, rural, or resort areas. Some such prized destinations have taken aggressive action to exclude non-residents:

Second Homes

It's being speculated that the flight from cities may lead to a permanent shift from urban to suburban living, for those who have the luxury of choice. The work-at-home trend may continue and accelerate after the present crisis ends. One commentator (see "Great American Migration" below) says, “You’ll still have urban centers. But they’ll be less intense and more dispersed. You’ll no longer have to choose between unaffordable, overcrowded cities and incredibly boring countryside. There will be a more attractive middle ground.”

Great American Migration

Other observers point out that the 1918 flu pandemic didn't cause the downfall of cities, and predictions that people would retreat from large urban centers after 9-11 didn't materialize. In fact, most cities have continued to gain population regardless of these and similar crises. Cities may have to adapt, but they aren't likely to empty:

Will the Pandemic Empty the Cities?

During the plagues of the past, people frightened of disease have often tried to escape the lethal overcrowding of cities. Boccaccio's 14th-century DECAMERON introduces a group of young, wealthy gentlemen and ladies who flee from the Black Death to a villa outside Florence. In antebellum New Orleans, upper-class families annually retreated from the city to country homes during "fever season." Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" portrays the gruesome fate of a prince who barricades himself and his cronies in his palace for a nonstop orgy while taking refuge from the titular epidemic.

As Arno Karlen explains in MAN AND MICROBES, his book on the evolution of infectious diseases from prehistory to the era of AIDS and Ebola, the phenomenon of epidemics began with the invention of agriculture and cities. Agriculture allowed the same land to support a much higher population than in hunter-gatherer or nomadic societies, but with negative trade-offs. People eating a monotonous diet of mostly grain tend to be less healthy than hunter-gatherers (as archaeology confirms). The resultant overall decline in health impairs the immune system. Moreover, by living in close quarters with domestic animals, they fall victim to animal diseases that mutate to prey on human hosts. With the growth of cities, for the first time in human history enough people lived together in a congested environment for epidemic diseases to flourish. Before modern sanitation and medicine, cities were deathtraps compared to the countryside (for the poor and working class at least).

We think of our contemporary world as being dominated by urbanization. Yet rural, agricultural communities still flourish, too. Herding and hunter-gatherer societies still exist, even if pushed to the margins by industrialization. Some people enjoy cutting-edge, high-tech conveniences and comforts, including smart houses, while others don't yet have indoor plumbing. This subject reminds me of a weakness in much SF that depicts contact with extrasolar planets. Too often, the alien world seems to have only one level of cultural and technological development that's uniform all over the planet, as well as one religion, a universal language, and, sometimes, a single ecology (the ice world, the desert world, the jungle world, etc.). Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover offers an example of doing it right; we see a variety of languages, climates, landscapes, and cultural customs on Darkover. Think of what different impressions of Earth extraterrestrial explorers would get if they landed in New York, Tokyo, Yellowstone Park, central Africa, the Australian outback, or northern Alaska and didn't bother to look any farther than their initial touchdown point.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

SF Seasons

Happy New Year! The days begin to lengthen, even if imperceptibly at first, but nevertheless I have to brace myself for over two months more of early darkness and damp cold. We temperate-zone residents are used to a year divided into the conventional four seasons, recurring in a predictable annual rhythm. My family had a funny encounter many years ago at King's Dominion (an amusement park) in northern Virginia, while standing in line to check out of the hotel adjacent to the park. This happened on a day at the height of summer, and the weather was as expected in a Virginia summer, high humidity with temperatures in the eighties or low nineties. An apparently British couple in line with us asked whether "it was always this hot" all year around. Mentally (not aloud, of course) I collapsed with laughter. In this area we have four seasons just like most other locations in North America, with pleasant springs and falls and miserably cold winters. If our family's experience of living in Hawaii in the 1970s was typical, tropical regions have two basic seasons, rainy and dry, with little variation in temperature or length of daylight.

Science fiction and fantasy often feature imaginary worlds with seasons different from those familiar to us Earth dwellers, but the stories don't always take full advantage of the possibilities. The setting of the Game of Thrones saga famously suffers winters that last for years, whose timing and duration vary. Yet I don't remember noticing in either the novels or the TV series an explanation of how human civilization in Westeros survives those ordeals. How could enough food possibly be stored to sustain entire nations over a multi-year winter, especially with no way of knowing when the cold season will descend upon them? Maybe the southern regions of the inhabited world escape mainly unscathed and supply provisions for the affected areas? The economic effects would be calamitous, though, even if most people managed to scrape by. Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall" takes place on a planet in the middle of a cluster of stars, so that it experiences full darkness only once in several centuries. Although a short story can't cover every aspect of worldbuilding, admittedly, even in the story's later novel-length expansion I don't recall any consideration of how different a culture that develops in perpetual light would be from ours. Agriculture alone would evolve in ways strange to us, wouldn't it? Recently I read SHADOW AND LIGHT and SHADOW RISING, the first two books in an excellent fantasy series by Peter Sartucci. They're set on a planet that revolves around a double star. No results of having two suns, in terms of either circadian rhythms or climate, are developed. As in "Nightfall" with its planet of multiple suns, not only weather but seismic phenomena would surely be affected. With more books to come, however, maybe this aspect of the setting will be elaborated later.

One novel I've read within the past year takes full advantage of its setting's weird seasons, as the title indicates: THE FIFTH SEASON, first book in the Broken Earth series by N. K. Jemisin, offers a devastating, in-depth portrayal of a world periodically ravaged by geological disasters of apocalyptic scope. Fifth Seasons appear at unpredictable intervals and can last from a few months or years to an entire century. At those times, worldwide tectonic cataclysms cause earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, with side effects such as climate change, crop failures, poisonous fungal growths, etc. Appropriately, this world's cultures are crucially shaped by the Fifth Season phenomenon, which includes the ambiguous role of the few people with the gift of controlling seismic events.

Here's a page that lists eight SF novels about climate change:

Sci-Fi Books That Highlight Climate Change

And here's a different list of fourteen novels focusing on climate catastrophes (including some overlap with the previous one, naturally):

Sci-Fi Books for Earth Day

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Worlds with Depth

The Fall/Winter issue of MYTHLORE includes an article by Katherine Sas on creating the "impression of depth" in a work of fiction (specifically, in this case, in the backstory of the Marauders in the Harry Potter series), a term coined by Tolkien in his classic essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." One of my favorite themes in fiction is the overshadowing of the present by the deep past. That's one reason I find Stephen King's IT enthralling, a feature that the new movie tries to present a bit better than the old miniseries, but still not adequately. So I'm glad to have an official name for this theme. Sas herself paraphrases this effect as "a sense of antiquity and historical reality."

The essence of the "impression of depth" consists of a feeling that the author "knows more than he [or she] is telling." Tolkien refers to the creation of "an illusion of surveying a past...that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity." He mentions the crafting of this effect in BEOWULF by "allusions to old tales." In his own work, Tolkien uses invented languages, frame narratives, references to ancient tales and lost texts, and "hypertextual layering" (i.e., metafictional features that draw attention to the text as an artifact). Such techniques produce the illusion of a world that has existed for a vast expanse of time before the present action and contains places, peoples, and events glimpsed at the edges of the main story.

Within a more limited physical setting, King's IT creates an illusion of deep time by the gradual revelation of how the monster originally introduced as merely a supernatural killer clown has haunted Derry since the town's founding—revealed by Mike's research into the generational cycle of the entity's periodic return and hibernation—and, eons before human settlement, came through interstellar space from an alien dimension. Likewise, the TV series SUPERNATURAL begins on a small-scale, personal level and expands to encompass an entire cosmology. At the beginning of the series, all we know about the background of Sam and Dean Winchester is that their father is a "Hunter" (of demons and other monsters) and that their mother died in a horrific supernatural attack when Sam was a baby. The brothers themselves know little more. We, and they, soon learn that their father made a deal with a demon. Eventually it's revealed that Sam and Dean were destined from infancy, not to save the world, but to serve as "vessels" for divine and diabolical entities. As they strive to assert their free will against this destiny, they uncover secrets of their family's past and the worldwide organization of Hunters (along with its research auxiliary branch, the Men of Letters), they clash (and sometimes ally) with demons, angels, pagan deities, and Death incarnate, and, incidentally, they do save the world and visit Hell and Purgatory several times. They learn the real nature and purposes of Heaven, Hell, and God Himself. The hypertextual (metafictional) aspect of the series is highlighted in episodes such as a visit to an alternate universe where the brothers are characters in a TV show and their discovery that a comic-book artist who turns out to be a prophet (as they believe until he's revealed as the very incarnation of God) has published a series that chronicles their adventures.

Tolkien's colleague and close friend C. S. Lewis reflects on the literary impression of depth in two articles reprinted in his collection SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism" and "The Anthropological Approach." In both pieces, he concludes that the ideas of hidden, half-forgotten, multi-layered dimensions in place or time and disguised remnants preserved from the ancient past are alluring in themselves. We're fascinated by the suggestion of "the far-borne echo, the last surviving trace, the tantalizing glimpse, the veiled presence, of something else. And the something else is always located in a remote region, 'dim-discovered,' hard of access." We're thrilled to enter "a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history" than expected. Many readers (although admittedly not all) enjoy the idea "that they have surprised a long-kept secret, that there are depths below the surface." Tolkien's exposition of this effect, as well as the creation of it by him and other authors who use similar strategies, offers valuable hints to writers who want to produce that kind of impression.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Evolution of Civilization

An interesting short article answering this question:

Why Haven't We Found Civilizations Older Than 7000-8000 Years?

The questioner wondered why, if our species evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, it took so long for human cultures to make the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a civilized one.

Here "civilization" means the standard definition of settled city life with classes of people who specialize in various occupations. Several conditions are required for civilization to develop:

Most importantly, agriculture is necessary to produce enough of a food surplus to free some subsets of the population to specialize in other skills and be supported (through trade, patronage, etc.) by the farming class. Agriculture needs at least two preconditions, as outlined in the article—favorable climate and a critical mass of population (for agriculture to have a significant advantage over hunting and gathering; if a society is small enough that it can feed itself by hunting and gathering, there is no incentive to switch to the harder work of farming). Both of those conditions were fulfilled after the last Ice Age gave way to the present "interglacial" period we're living in.

"Civilization" in this sense is probably a prerequisite for advanced technology. To produce the kind of high-tech society we now have, you need people free to work full time in highly specialized fields of research, engineering, and manufacturing. Therefore, an SF author creating a space-faring alien culture has to give the aliens a home world and an evolutionary history that allow for agriculture, settled living, and vocational specialization (even if that worldbuilding never explicitly gets into the story). If the aliens come from a radically different kind of background, how they developed the capacity for space travel probably needs to be explained.

That article links to a Quora page exploring another intriguing question: Why haven't other animals evolved intelligence equal to ours?

Why Didn't Other Animals Develop Intellect Like Apes?

What are the minimum prerequisites for developing intelligence (once you get past the hurdle of defining "intelligence," of course)? As far as we can tell from observing ourselves and other animals with an intellectual edge over their closely related evolutionary counterparts, some of the factors seem to be belonging to a social species, having manipulative organs to interact with the environment, having access to abundant nourishment to support a big brain, and possibly being omnivorous (because having to search for food and determine what's good to eat encourages problem-solving). When constructing a sapient alien species, it's desirable to consider how they evolved to become intelligent, keeping these factors in mind.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mediacracy

Did you know that the word "mediacracy" exists? It does, although the Blogger spell check, and the AOL spell check put red squiggly lines under it.

References were reluctantly revealed by a Google search, after helpful suggestions that I might really be looking for "mediocrity" or perhaps "mediocracy" (which latter, btw, contained politically biased suggestions that mediocracy referred to the most recent Republican administration.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediacracy
Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mass media effectively has control over the voting public.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mediacracy

Noun[edit]. mediacracy (countable and uncountable, plural mediacracies). Rule by the media; a situation in which the media dominates or controls the populace...

 

www.unwords.com/unword/mediacracy.html

Definition of mediacracy :. 1. (n.) Government, usually indirectly, by the popular media;

 

And there were three or four more sources. Apparently, great thinkers have been opining about the media controlling the voting public for several years. In former times, the great newspaper barons were allegedly thought to be potentially dangerous opinion makers and kingmakers.  

If newspaper barons interest you, there are some vigorous discussions of the part played in UK political elections using this search   However, I'm more interested in the types of social order that might inspire world building in a steam punk, cyber punk, science fiction, futuristic or fantasy novel. 

 

In a past blog post, I've opined about a Pharmacracy, and for a compendium of almost all the forms of government from acracy to xenocracy, go here:http://phrontistery.info/govern.html

I particularly like Stephen Crisomalis's term "kakistocracy" and the excessively polite explanation for a word surely derived from "poop". 

(See http://www.heptune.com/poopword.htmlhttp://www.heptune.com/poopword.html )  And, by the way, the top ten pages of a Google search led me to a Brazilian football player. I had to know the scatological synonym for "kaka" and search for "kaka + ...." in order to find the poop-word site.

 

It must be said, the phronitistery site's excellent list does not include "Pharmacracy", nor does it include "Mediacracy", but "pharma-" and "media-" may be of Latin origin, and "-cracy" is Greek.

 

 How did I get onto this train of thought? A confluence of blogs. One was a blog post by Chris Castle which discusses the power of Search, and asks how far, in theory, a search engine with a monopoly and flexible morals could influence an electorate.

https://musictechpolicy.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/the-devils-greatest-trick-after-canada-could-google-throw-a-u-s-election/

 

One of many interesting speculations in the piece is what would happen if, for example, a search engine gave users the option to filter out the name of a political candidate that they disliked. Such as "Trump".  What if the Search engine imposed a filter without being asked... such as making rapid encounters with "kaka" of the excremental kind  hard to find?  Or the helpful attempts to direct me to "mediocrity" or "mediocracy".

Chris Castle's blog post also discusses the power of the media to influence pharmaceutical drug taking by a suggestible populace. Drug marketers create a drug, and then create a need (or the perception that there is a need), for what the drug does. A solution in search of a problem!

 
http://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CJR-2005-07-Bitter-Pill.pdf

 

The next article was Philly Law Blog, ostensibly partly about the erosion of The First Amendment, or at least of free speech. (I usually follow the law blog for information on current doings relating to copyright matters.)

 

https://phillylawblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/this-is-the-article-central-high-school-doesnt-want-you-to-see/

I googled The First Amendment: 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Perhaps the loophole is the word "Congress".  It seems that the press itself, also various universities, and a State department of education or two are able to abridge freedom of speech without the assistance of Congress.

As a writer and a logophile, I am bemused and offended by the continual banning of words, and dictionaries dropping words, and the touchy feely folks who tinker with politically incorrect words in the worlds' most important religious texts. There is quite a difference between forgiving "trespasses" and forgiving "debts"  for instance.

 

The final blog article was by Richard Russo for the Authors Guild, among other things comparing the permissionless innovativeness of Google to that of the scavenging seagulls in Finding Nemo.

https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/richard-russo-on-authors-guild-v-google/

Not only does the word mediacracy exist. Some might suspect that a mediacracy has been established, and we never noticed.

 

Rowena Cherry

Settings, SFR, and Spiffyness

I've been absolutely thrilled to see the responses to The Galaxy Express' SFR Holiday Blitz. I've also been absolutely slammed with computer troubles and flu/cold/bronchitis, which is why you've not seen me here in a good while (all this befalling me, yes, after a triple-deadline). Bronchitis I'm rather used it--it's something that's plagued me (pun intended) since I've been in my twenties. More than twenty years ago. Computers invaded my life at about the same time (hmmm, wonder if there's a correlation?) but those troubles have become worse with age, while the bronchitis has rolled merrily along without much change.

I sometimes wonder if the computer troubles I face aren't yet more fodder for my plots and characters. As one reviewer said about my Finders Keepers:

[T]he vast majority of this novel is classic space opera, the sort of story in which rough-hewn pilots of either gender chug along space lanes in rickety old ships held together with duct tape, and sinister galactic empires plot against all and sundry for power. Not for Linnea Sinclair the spiffy, cutting edge man-machine futures of Ken MacLeod, Greg Egan or Charles Stross.

Maybe one of the reasons I don't do spiffy is that I've yet to meet a chunk of technology that permits me to experience spiffy. I have no faith that any universe--future or otherwise--with be trouble-free when it comes to technology. Okay, I'll 'fess up. I do have things break down on board the ships in my books because it ramps up the conflict. But I also have them break down because I'm fairly confident that's an event to which most of my readers can relate. (If you've never had a computer melt-down, please tell me where you live so I can move next door to you. Which means one of two things will then happen: either my computers will work flawlessly from that point, or yours will crash with gleeful regularity.)

This latest crash (maybe the motherboard--we're still not sure) resulted in a computer that refused to function under Windows XP but is chugging along nicely (so far) under Windows 7. I can't believe it's solely because Mr. Gates needed my $300 last week.

But I digress. I wanted to touch on settings in SFR because of a blog Heather from The Galaxy Express noted a week or so back, in which several readers commented on why they did--or didn't--read SFR. One poster noted that in reading the opening chapter of my Shades of Dark, she found technology was far too evident and took up much descriptive space.

Which, of course, made me sit back with my usual WTF? I wanted to post and ask her--I didn't, for a variety of reasons, two being bronchitis and limping computer--if she would have been equally as disconcerted by the description of the castle in a medieval romance, or the scent of leather and the snuffle of horses in a western romance? If she reads chick-lit, would an opening scene listing the character's designer shoes overflowing her closet bother her? If she reads mystery, would she prefer the details of the murder scene to be left out?

In SFR, the description of a ship's bridge or command consoles are my character's closet full of Gucci and Prada products, they are the flickering torches set into the rusty metal sconces angling out from the moss-covered stone wall.

Here's the opening paragraph from the prologue in Mary Jo Putney's Silk and Secrets:

Prologue
Autumn 1840

Night was falling rapidly, and a slim crescent moon hung low in the cloudless indigo sky. In the village the muezzin called the faithful to prayers, and the haunting notes twined with the tantalizing aroma of baking bread and the more acrid scent of smoke. It was a homey, peaceful scene such as the woman had observed countless times before, yet as she paused by the window, she experienced a curious moment of dislocation, an inability to accept the strange fate that had led her to this alien land.

Now, Putney is not only one lovely and classy lady, she's one helluva fabulous and well-known author. She writes--among other genres--historical romances. If she puts in the cloudless indigo sky, the tantalizing aroma of baking bread, and the acrid scent of smoke, it's because these details are not only important, they're expected.

Why, then, the problem with:

A stream of red data on a blue-tinged screen to my left snagged my attention. We were on the outer fringes of an Imperial GA-7's signal—a data relay drone normally not accessible to renegade ships like the Karn, and definitely not at this distance. But this was the Karn, Sully's ghost ship that routinely defied government regulations and just as routinely ignored ship's specs. So I slipped into the vacant seat at communications and executed the grab filter with an ease that even Sully would have been proud of.

Captain Chasidah Bergren. One-time pride of the Sixth Fleet and staunch defender of the Empire, illegally hacking into a GA-7 beacon.

Okay, maybe you've never seen a GA-7 beacon. But I've never seen a muezzin. So therein resides my rationale behind my usual WTF when I read comments that "SFR terms are too confusing."

As I've also often noted, I still haven't a clue in a bucket how to pronounce reticule. But it doesn't stop me from reading historicals and I don't ask the author to replace it with the word pocketbook.

Someone enlighten me as to why muzzein is acceptable and GA-7 beacon isn't. Please.

~Linnea

Linnea Sinclair
// Interstellar Adventure Infused with Romance//
Available Now from Bantam: Hope's Folly, Book 3 in the Dock Five Universe
Coming March 2010: Rebels and Lovers (Book 4)
http://www.linneasinclair.com/

World Building For Writers: POLITICS

World Building For Writers, Or Why Everyone in the Galaxy doesn't Speak English

TOPIC: Politics

(again, from a course I taught in 2008)

Contemp? Sci Fi? Regency? Police Procedural? It doesn’t matter. If you write commercial genre fiction, then the political climate of your story world is important. It’s important because your character(s) relates to it in any way no way else does. I don’t care if it’s January 4th, 2005 or Solstice 1352 or Yelbragh 19498th . Whatever is going on politically in your story world has some impact on your story.

Some more than others. Let’s play with some ideas:

• A war or change of command destroys a long-standing monarchy
• Gay marriage is legalized globally
• Polygamy has never been a crime
• Women lose the right to vote
• Sorgs (a third gender long cast in to the role of caretakers) obtain the right to own property
• Gun ownership is banned in the US
• Legalized time travelers create a new level of citizenship…

It doesn’t end. Its limits are your creativity. Your plot. Your conflict.

Unless your story has a political plot line (Princess Leia has to find a way to stop Darth Vader and the evil emperor), the politics may be very much in the background. For the READER. But you, writer, need to know the political climate of every novel you pen, from a contemporary romance to a medical thriller to an outer space saga.

“But in a contemporary romance?” you squeak.

“Yep,” I bellow back.

Let’s say your characters, Josh and Jillian, are destined to fall in love. You, writer, know something must keep them apart in the beginning. ‘I don’t like you yet’ isn’t sufficient conflict. What is? Judging from contemps I’ve read, often is a subtly political issue: she’s a tree-hugger, he’s a corporate mogul paving paradise and putting up parking lots. She’s a nosy news reporter. He’s a secretive cop. Whatever.

The problem with writing in our current time period (give or take a dozen years) is that we’re so used to our “world” we forget the elements that build it. We forget that from the city councilwoman right up to POTUS, politics shape what we do daily, even if it’s the approval of a new skateboard park down the street, or a zoning decision that permits larger signs. Traffic lights exist at the intersections they do because at some point, some politician or political (regulatory) body decided those were the intersections that needed lights.

How do your characters feel about the mayor of their town, the governor of their state? Are your characters politically liberal or conservative? Again, this can be subtle in a contemporary novel—very subtle—or it can be a main issue. But you, writer, need to answer those questions.

Do you need those answers before you write? Depends. Are you a plotter or a pantser? Your writing style is your own. Just remember that the political climate—and your characters’ response to it—is a question that must, eventually, be answered.

If you write urban fantasy, you likely are inventing an entirely new political system, one where vampires or demons or werewolves have their own political agenda, and possibly even political party. If you write fantasy—what are the politics of magic? Would the use of magic be regulated? Taxed?

If you write outer space sagas than span star systems, you need to create a multitude of political and regulatory entities. No, one person cannot rule the galaxy, solo. It’s logically illogical. One person ruling an entire planet is even a stretch. There would be sub-governments, divisions, deputies, factions and more.

Why?

Because the entire planet, the entire star system, the entire galaxy doesn’t speak English.

Good world building must have two key elements as a base:

1 – Logic
2 – Plausibility

Where a lot of amateur SF and F writers fail is they ignore logic and plausibility in world building. The entire galaxy speaks English. All sentients look (relatively) the same and breathe oxygen. One being rules the universe.

A solar or star system is a very large physical area. A galaxy is gi-normous. The universe is, well, beyond galactic proportions. Logically, keeping in touch with and track of beings across the galaxy would not be an easy feat. Look at our own technological failures on our one planet and multiply that by thousands. “Can you hear me now?” is still the annoying war cry of cellular telephone customers. Computer systems crash. Computer systems get attacked by viruses. Yes, certainly, a civilization that is capable of star travel will have advanced communications system but they won’t be any more perfect than ours are today. They will break down, there will be dead zones, there will be technological limitations.

So the Universe’s OverLord can NOT transmit his proclamations instantaneously to his subjects, galaxy-wide. It just ain’t gonna logically happen.

The larger the scope of your novel, the more governmental and regulatory entities you’ll have populating it. As James Bond traverses the globe, he deals with the Russians, the Afghans, the French, the Bahamian government, the CIA, FBI, FAA and God only knows who and what else.

But you, writer, should know.

The diversity on our own planet is the template you can use to create your cities, states, countries and worlds, whether you’re populating a distant galaxy or recreating New York City in a demon-run urban fantasy. We have the FAA and the CIA. We have school boards and zoning boards. We have steelworker’s unions. Some countries have presidents. Some have kings or queens. Yes, it could mean dragging out your old college Political Science textbook, but you need to do that when you build your story world.

Who would hold the power in your story world, and why? In many of CJ Cherryh’s SF novels, space captains and pilots hold a lot of power because they’re the necessary link in supplying the various worlds. Economics drive politics in those books. But in her FOREIGNER series, lineage and legal assassination fuel the political parties.

In my AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS, religion heavily influences politics. Just as it does in the Middle East on our own planet. The Taliban, anyone?

Politics also influences the creation of law enforcement agencies and militaries. A space based fleet will be of little help with a riot at a dirtside spaceport. Is local law enforcement independent or a puppet agency of a dictator? How are jurisdictions established?

Politics in your story world can be a driving force or it can be a subtle influence. But you, writer, must have it structured in your mind and in your notes, or you’ll be shortchanging your reader and your characters.

Some useful links:

Patricia Wrede’s Fabulous Questions
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding1.htm

WEBSITES:
World building:
http://www.writesf.com/00_Course_Outline.html
http://www.sfreader.com/authors/DavidWalton
http://www.specficworld.com/resources/world.html
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/baxter.htm
http://www.sff.net/people/julia.west/CALLIHOO/webwriter.htm#worldbuilding

Historicals:
http://www.literary-liaisons.com/articleshome.html
http://www.literary-liaisons.com/resources.html

Some useful books for learning more about military/police:

Air Force Officer’s Guide, Col Jeffrey C Benton USAF, Stackpole Books, 2002
She’s Just Another Navy Pilot, Loree Draude Hirschman, Naval Institute Press, 2000
When You’re The Only Cop in Town, Jack Berry & Debra Dixon, Gryphon Books, 2002
Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, David Simon, Ballatine, 1993
True Blue, Lynda Sue Cooper, Gryphon Books, 1999

~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com

This wasn’t Fleet. This was at best a rogue’s gallery—an uncertain and desperate attempt at salvation and justice… Hope’s Folly suddenly sounded all too accurate.

World Building For Writers, Or Why Everyone in the Galaxy doesn't Speak English

(Lecture #1 from a class I taught in 2008)

Lesson One: Building Your World Where Everyone Definitely Does Not Speak English (even if they do…)

There’s a misconception out there in the galaxy and I want to correct it. The misconception is that world building is only for science fiction and fantasy writers. See, you thought I was going to say it was that everyone speaks English. Thanks for reading the title, but that’s not the misconception I’m going to start with. It’s that world building is a sci fi geek’s playground.

It is. But it’s also yours, no matter what genre you flail around in.

“But I write chick-lit,” you wail as you flail. “And she writes police procedurals. And he writes horror set in Chicago.”

“I don’t care,” sez Linnea. “If you write commercial genre fiction, you need to pay attention to world building.”

And the reason you need to pay attention to world building is because writing guru Dwight V. Swain ::Linnea genuflects:: said we need to. And he’s right. (If you’re not familiar with Swain, you should be. His Techniques of the Selling Writer, first published around 1965, is dang near the bible for most of the published authors I know.)

The reason every fiction writer needs to pay attention to world building is because every fiction piece is set in a “story world” and that story world—even if it is based on a real place—is still being interpreted through the characters’/author’s eyes.

Let’s take West Long Branch, NJ. Never been there? I was born and raised there. It’s a sleepy little town a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean just where the state of New Jersey dinks in. I know it really well but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the way I knew West Long Branch isn’t exactly the same as the way my best friend Claudia knew it. For one thing, I was an only child of financially comfortable parents. Claudia was the middle child in a divorced family. She was about a year younger than I was, and was a grade behind. Her heritage was Italian. Mine was Polish.

The reality is that even though we lived across the street from each other for almost twenty years, how she processed her experiences were different than the way I did. She had to deal with parental discord, as her mother usually pulled some stunt every time Claudia’s father came for visitation. I never experienced that—I watched it as it happened to Claudia but the emotional impact wasn’t mine. However, I had parents who owned a business. I was a “latchkey kid.” Claudia’s mother was always home.

So my experiences of my “world”—West Long Branch, circa 1965—were affected by my background, family and heritage, just as Claudia’s were. Loud voices in her house were common (she had a larger family that included two brothers and her parents were often fighting). Loud voices in my house would signal something unusual. I didn’t like to watch monster movies because I was often alone at home. Monster movies never bothered her because she had the company of her brothers. Thunderstorms, honking horns, the love or hate of going to school differed between us. Yet we grew up across the street from each other, breathing the same air, drinking the same water.

Which brings me to what Swain teaches about a story world:

a. Your reader has never been there.
b. It’s a sensory world.
c. It’s a subjective world.

It is critical you understand these three points as you world build. Even if your reader has been to that exact town or city, the reader has never been there INSIDE YOUR CHARACTER’S SKIN. Your reader may be a Claudia and the character is a Linnea. Or the other way around. The key here is that your character(s) bring their own unique viewpoint and interpretations into every locale, setting, scene, place, planet, space station, level of hell, heavenly cloud or whatever—and that character’s viewpoint will literally color the scene.

If you write it well.

If you cheap out and go for generic Manhattan or generic West Long Branch or generic Rigel IV, then you’re failing in your duty as a writer and a world builder.

Remember that no matter where you place your story, the reader has never been there, it’s a sensory world and it’s a subjective world. You need to use those three parameters for every book, every locale, every world you build.

For even if you’re a triple PhD scientist and you can describe in minute and excruciating detail the geo-thermodynamics of a particular distant star…it don’t amount to a hill of beans (to the reader) until that particular distant star is SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHARACTER. And the character has some opinion—some reaction, some response, some interpretation—of that star. Or of that city. Or of that office. Or of that castle dungeon.

Good world building is not just an accurate travelogue or detailed list of the flora and fauna. Those kinds of things—while necessary—are static and impotent until your drop your character(s) into the story.

Your character makes your world come alive. Your reader sees the world through your character’s eyes, hears its sounds through your character’s ears, deems a thunderstorm or ion storm good or bad through your character’s opinions and experiences.

Your character also influences how the story world is experienced in the sense that a twelve-year old’s take on Manhattan would not be the same as a forty-three year old’s. A twelve-year old might marvel at all the sounds and the lights and the cars. A forty-three year old might see another goddamned gridlock.

Unless the forty-three year old was a forty-three year old Amish farmer.

Ah, see the difference?

Your story world is a subjective world.

Linnea’s first key to great world building is personalization.

Linnea’s second key is Dwight V. Swain’s item b: it’s a sensory world. But that should come naturally when you’re immersed in character.

For all my time being alone as a child, for all my fears of monster movies, I love thunderstorms. I find them invigorating. I know they terrify a lot of children (and dogs).

One’s man trash is another man’s treasure. When we get to the sensory aspect of world building, it’s the stench of the trash and the glitter of the treasure the reader wants to experience. The easiest way, the very best of bestest ways to bring a reader into whatever world is your story world is through the senses. What does the space station Cirrus One SMELL like? What does your character HEAR on the streets of Manhattan at three in the afternoon? At three in the morning? What does the sand FEEL like under your character’s bare feet as she trudges down the beach towards the dead body? The sand in St. Petersburg, FL—so soft and fine it’s referred to as “sugar sand”—is different than the blacker, grittier sand on the Atlantic beaches of Ft. Lauderdale.

If your character grew up in St. Pete, she might not give much thought to the sugar sands there. She’s used to it. However, if she grew up on the Jersey Shore (like I did), she’d notice the difference immediately.

You cannot separate world building and character building. IMHO.

And it’s through character that you reveal your story world.

In the opening scene of THE DOWN HOME ZOMBIE BLUES, I have my female protagonist, Commander Jorie Mikkalah, find herself in an unfamiliar world. No big deal for Jorie. She’s an intergalactic hunter. She constantly finds herself on strange worlds. But ah, this strange world is Bahia Vista (ie: St. Pete), Florida. USA. Earth.
So familiar to me, author. So unfamiliar to Jorie, character.

In ZOMBIE BLUES I had to erase everything I knew about a town I’d lived in for over ten years. And I had to see it, fresh and unfamiliar, through Jorie’s jaded eyes. I’m adding some snippets here, snippets I spent some time on as I built JORIE’S world out of my own. Do you recognize things that are commonplace—to you—and foreign to my intergalactic heroine?



Chapter 1

Another dark, humid, stinking alley. Another nil-tech planet. What a surprise.

Commander Jorie Mikkalah cataloged her surroundings as she absently rubbed her bare arm. Needle pricks danced across her skin. Only her vision was unaffected by the dispersing and reassembling of her molecules courtesy of the Personnel Matter Transporter—her means of arrival in the alley moments before.

The ocular over her right eye eradicated the alley’s murky gloom, enhancing the moonlight so she could clearly see the shards of broken glass and small rusted metal cylinders strewn across the hard surface under her and her team’s boots.

Another dark, humid, stinking, filthy alley. Jorie amended her initial appraisal of her location as a breeze filtered past, sending one of the metal cylinders tumbling, clanking hollowly.

She checked her scanner even though no alarm had sounded. But it would take a few more seconds yet for her body to adjust to the aftereffects of the PMaT and for her equilibrium to segue from the lighter gravity of an intergalactic battle cruiser to the heavier gravity of a Class-F5 world. It wouldn’t do to fall flat on her face trying to defend her team if a zombie appeared.

She swiveled toward them. “You two all right?”

Tamlynne Herryck’s sharp features relaxed under her short cap of dark red curls. “Fine, sir.”

Low mechanical rumblings echoed behind Jorie. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder, saw nothing threatening at the alleyway opening. Only the expected metallic land vehicles, lighted front and aft, moving slowly past.

Herryck was scrubbing at her face with the side of her hand when Jorie turned back. The ever-efficient lieutenant had been under Jorie’s command for four years; she knew how to work through the PMaT experience.

Ensign Jacare Trenat, however, was as green as liaso hedges and looked more than a bit dazed from the transit. ….[snip]….

“Transportation.” Herryck thumbed down Danjay’s data on her scanner screen. “Land vehicles powered by combustion engines. Fossil petroleum fueled. Local term is car.”

Jorie had read the reports. No personal air transits—at least, not for internal city use. Damned nil-techs. A four-seater gravripper would be very convenient right now. She resumed her trek toward the alley’s entrance, waving her team to follow. “Let’s go find one of those cars.”

“City population is less than three hundred thousand humans,” Herryck dutifully read as she came up behind Jorie. “The surrounding region contains approximately one million.”

…[snip]…

The stickiness of the air and the sharp stench of rotting garbage faded. Jorie paused cautiously at the darkened alley entrance, assessing the landscape. The street was dotted with silent land vehicles, all pointing in the same direction, lights extinguished. Black shadows of thin trees jutted now and then in between. The uneven rows of low buildings were two-story, five-story, a few taller. Two much taller ones—twenty stories or more—glowed with a few uneven rectangles of light far down to her right.

Judging from the brief flashes of light between the buildings and tinny echoes of sound, most of the city’s activity appeared to be a street or so in front of her. At least Ronna’s seeker ’droid had analyzed that correctly. Materializing in the midst of a crowd of nil-techs while dressed in full tracker gear had proven to be patently counterproductive.

A bell clanged hollowly to her left. Trenat, beside her, stiffened. She didn’t but tilted her head toward the sound, curious. As the third gong pealed, she guessed it wasn’t a warning system and remembered reading about a nil-tech method of announcing the time.

She didn’t know local time, didn’t care. Unlike the Tresh, humanoids here had no naturally enhanced night sight. It was only important that it was dark and would continue to be dark for a while yet. She and her team needed that, dressed as they were, if they were going to find out what had happened to Agent Danjay Wain.

The bell pealed eight more times, then fell silent. A fresh breeze drifted over her skin. She caught a salty tang in the air.

“…is situated on a peninsula that is bordered on one side by a large body of water known as Bay Tampa.” Herryck was still reading. “On the other…”

Gulf of Mexico, Jorie knew, tuning her out. Data was Herryck’s passion.

Zombie hunting was Jorie’s.

But first she had to appropriate a car and locate Danjay Wain.


Let’s go over some of the things in this opening scene. A PMaT, an ocular, a F-5 world are all things that are commonplace to Jorie. So as an author, I need to have them FEEL commonplace to the reader because the reader is Jorie at this point. But I also, as author, know my readers don’t have a clue in a bucket what a PMaT is. Or an ocular.

So rather than info-dump—a huge no-no—I show these items in action as best as possible:

The ocular over her right eye eradicated the alley’s murky gloom, enhancing the moonlight so she could clearly see the shards of broken glass and small rusted metal cylinders strewn across the hard surface under her and her team’s boots.

So the reader, while not familiar with a Guardian ocular, at least understands it’s something to do with vision, something that helps the character see in the dark.

I could have written:

The ocular over her right eye was invented forty mega-years before by a gifted scientist who was hired by the intergalactic government to produce vision-enhancing equipment for the Guardian Forces. The ocular used reverse optometric filtration technology to… and so and and so forth.

But that begs the question: would Jorie really know all this? Would she care? Would she be THINKING THAT RIGHT NOW?

Do you know who invented the microwave oven? Do you THINK OF THAT PERSON every time you make popcorn? Do you CARE?

No. At least, I don’t. I can’t even tell you who first created the QWERTY keyboard. And even if I did, I’m more concerned with the keyboard on my laptop functioning properly than I am with its inventor.

One of the biggest mistakes writers make with world building is to drop into an Encyclopedia Brown persona when writing, believing the reader NEEDS TO KNOW the technology when all the reader needs to know IS WHAT THE CHARACTER KNOWS. Jorie doesn’t know who invented the ocular. She doesn’t care. She only cares that it works as it should.

Isn’t that true with most of us and our technology?

Show your “unfamiliar ” (to the reader) in action. Do not lecture the reader. Put the damned ocular on the reader’s eye and let them be the character, experience the experience. The unfamiliar to the reader is the ordinary to the character. We don’t—at least most of us don’t—stand aghast and a-goggle at the microwave as it cooks. At the radio when sound comes through the speakers. We take it FOR GRANTED.

Be very aware of what’s normal to your characters and have them take it—if not for granted—at least comfortably.

Be very aware of what to your character is not normal. Let the “sensory” and “subjective” tell the story there.

Here’s a snippet of what happens when Jorie and her team steal a car:

Tam Herryck, rummaging through the vehicle’s small storage compartment on the control panel, produced a short paper-bound book. “Aw-nortz Min-o-al,” she read in the narrow glow of her wristbeam on her technosleeve.

Jorie leaned toward her. Tam Herryck’s Vekran was, at best, rudimentary. “Ow-ner’s Min-u-al,” she corrected. She took the book, tapped on her wristbeam, and scanned the first few pages. It would be too much to ask, she supposed, that the entire universe be civilized enough—and considerate enough—to speak Alarsh. “Operating instructions for the vehicle’s pilot.” As the engine chugged quietly, she found a page depicting the gauges and read in silence for a few moments. “I think I have the basics.” She tapped off her wristbeam, then caught Trenat’s smile in the rectangular mirror over her head. “Never met a ship I couldn’t fly, Ensign. That’s what six years in the marines will teach you.”

The vehicle’s control stick was between the two front seats. She depressed the small button, eased it until it clicked once.

The vehicle lurched backwards, crashing into one parked behind it.

“Damn!” She shoved the stick again and missed a head-on impact with another parked vehicle only because she grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the left.

Herryck bounced against the door. “Sir!”

“I have it, I have it. It’s okay.” Damn, damn. Give her a nice antigrav hopper any day.

Her feet played with the two pedals, the vehicle seesawing as it jerked toward the open gate.

“I think,” Herryck said, bracing herself with her right hand against the front control panel, “those are some kind of throttle and braking system. Sir.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. I know that. I’m just trying to determine their sensitivity ranges.”

“Of course, sir.” Herryck’s head jerked back and forth, but whether she was nodding or reacting to the vehicle’s movement, Jorie didn’t know. “Good idea.”

By the time they exited onto the street, Jorie felt she had the nil-tech land vehicle under control. “Which direction?”

“We need to take a heading of 240.8, sir.” Herryck glanced from her scanner over at the gauges in front of Jorie, none of which functioned as guidance or directional. “Oh.” She pulled her palm off the control panel and pointed out the window. “That way.”

They went that way, this way, then that way again. Jorie noticed that Trenat had found some kind of safety webbing and flattened himself against the cushions of the rear seat.

“What do you think those colored lights on their structures mean?” Herryck asked as Jorie was again forced to swerve to avoid an impact with another vehicle, whose driver was obviously not adept at proper usage of airspace.

Jorie shrugged. “A religious custom. Wain mentioned that locals hang colored lights on their residences and even on the foliage this time of the year. Nil-techs can be very supersti—hey!” A dark land vehicle appeared on her right, seemingly out of nowhere. Jorie pushed her foot down on the throttle, barely escaping being rammed broadside. There was a loud screeching noise, then the discordant blare of a horn. A pair of oncoming vehicles added their horns to the noise as she sped by them.

“Another religious custom,” she told Herryck, who sank down in her seat and planted her boots against the front console. “Their vehicles play music as they pass. And they’re blessing us.”

“Blessing us?”

Jorie nodded as she negotiated her vehicle between two others that seemed to want to travel at an unreasonably slow rate of speed. “They put one hand out the window, middle finger pointing upward. Wain’s reports stated many natives worship a god they believe lives in the sky. So I think that raised finger is a gesture of blessing.”

“How kind of them. We need to go that way again, sir.”

“I’m coming up to an intersection now. How much farther?”

“We should be within walking distance in a few minutes.”

“Praise be,” Trenat croaked from the rear seat.

Jorie snickered softly. “You’d never survive in the marines, Ensign.”



Jorie is doing the best she can—based on her previous experiences and personal knowledge (remember Claudia and Linnea?)—to interpret the world she now inhabits. And she’s doing it in a race-against-time scenario (always useful) so there’s not a lot of time to ask questions or find out answers. She’s learning on the fly, in a subjective, sensory manner. And so is your reader.

So to recap Lesson One, remember the three things the are the foundation of all good world building:

a. Your reader has never been there.
b. It’s a sensory world.
c. It’s a subjective world.

Questions? Comments? Please don’t be silent or I will come a-hunting.

~Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com

So what's Dock Five really like?

One of the most fun, writerly things is inventing and describing alien (as in, not where you're sitting right now) settings and places in SF/SFR books. One of the toughtest writerly things is inventing and describing alien settings and places in SF/SFR books.

Mugwump much, Linnea?

One of the things I've wondered about since I was a wee kidling (and yeah, I really did think about this stuff) is whether the color I deem to be "red" is the color you see. That is, I know we have an agreed upon experience called "this is the color red" but do my eyes and brain process and interpret that color the same way you do? We've been told that cats and dogs only see in shades of gray. So if I asked Daq-cat to point out something "red" (ie: the cover of SHADES OF DARK), though we both would agree the cover was red, what he sees is different than what I see. His "red" would be, we're told, a shade of gray. Mine is, well, what I call "red." (And who's to say I'm right and he's wrong?)

Lost yet?

Have another cup of coffee.

I think about things like that when I write my settings, my worlds, my ships. Which is why I get into arguments with myself as to how much to describe in some level of detail, and how much to describe in concept and let you all come to your own interpretations. Especially when I'm describing or dealing with something that has no exact counterpart in our current experience.

So what is Dock Five--that seedy, disreputable conglomeration of mining rafts in deep space somwhere near the Aldan-Baris border--really like? What is the Boru Karn, Sully's personal ship, really like? Is Admiral Mack's Cirrus One Station the same as Chaz Bergren's Moabar Station? Well, no. Cirrus One has parrots. But other than that, does Linnea have a stock space station she drops into each story?

In my mind, no, oddly enough. My mind's eye sees Moabar Station and Dock Five and Cirrus One in completely different colors and styles. To a great extent, it's as if I drop myself into my character's skin and see his world exactly as he sees it. (Which adds another layer of personal interpretation...oy!). But all--since I'm still me--have to have a constant basis of information and experience.

For me it's cruise ships. As many of you know, that's been an addiction of mine for several decades. The feeling of being isolated, dependent and yet with pretty much everything you need (including a full hospital) is something I've drawn from being on cruise ships. But what if my reader has never been on a cruise ship, or never served on a naval vessel? What if my reader is a land-locked Kansas farm-dwelling reader from a long line of land-locked Kansas farmers?

How do I make them understand what Dock Five or the Boru Karn is really like?

I think this is one of the problems non-SF readers have with coming in to SF or SFR: this flow into and acceptance of the never-experienced. Reading SFF trains the mind to reach for analogies and find a workable interpretation--even if perhaps that interpretation isn't what the author had in mind. SFF readers don't mind not fully getting everything at first. They're willing to go along for the ride and figure it out as it happens.

But if a reader's experience on the pages has been predominantly the known and familiar: a supermarket, a television, a Chevrolet pick-up, it can require a little more work, a little more "suspension of disbelief" to envision the bridge of a starship. I see this happening most often when my books are reviewed by a romance site and a reviewer who admits s/he's never read SF before or much SF. The reviewer may note: loved the book but wish Sinclair added more description of the starship bridge. The same book reviewed by an SF or paranormal romance site will state: loved the book and her descriptions were so spot-on I felt as if I were there!

One of the keys, obviously, is that everything is experienced through the characters. But keep in mind that to my characters--other than Theo Petrakos in The Down Home Zombie Blues--their "normal" is our "unreal." Starship bridges, faster-than-light travel, Stolorths, telepathic furzels and bio-cybes are their norm.

So what is Dock Five really like? It's seedy, run-down, cramped and smelly. Yet it functions; for the most part, its inhabitants aren't in fear of their lives from the facility (the denizens are another matter). Is it the same as a back-alley in some derelict New York City neighborhood? If you want it to be, sure. But it's different that that. For one thing, there's no sky. And you can't eventually run away from the area--there's really no escape (unless you can breathe vacuum). Dock Five--to me--has something of the feel and smell of subways tunnels. A factory or warehouse basement. But without the brick/stone moldy smell. It's all metallic. It's small enough to be familiar to its inhabitants (something that makes them feel secure) but large enough and, moreover, convoluted enough in design to make getting lost a very real possibility. (corridor image from DAZ3D)

A maze? Kinda sorta. But not quite.

It goes back to whether or not the red I see is the red you see.

So how much do you bring your own experiences into what you read, and how much are you willing to let the author take you on an unfamiliar journey?

~Linnea

SHADES OF DARK, the sequel to Gabriel’s Ghost, July 2008 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

The Karn jerked hard, alarms screaming in triplicate, overload warnings flashing. The grating sound of metal wrenching echoed off the bulkheads. Snapped power lines whipped past the front viewport as something thumped, hard, and something else thudded, once, twice. The ship lurched then we were thrown sideways, my armrest catching me in the ribs in spite of my safety straps.

“Full shields!” I said hoarsely. God damn, that hurt. “Verno, don’t let her spin. Marsh, crank those sublights higher.”

We dove away from station—a hideously ugly departure. Narfial controllers cursed the Fair Jeffa, assuring us the freighter was back on course and was never a threat to us at dock.

“Bite my ass,” Sully intoned.

How Much is Too Much (World Buliding & Balance)?

Since I'm essentially brain dead after completing a twenty-five+ page "author questionnaire" for Random House (and it could have gone more than twenty-five pages...I just gave up out of exhaustion)... I'm going to piggyback a post that's going on today at The Galaxy Express about world building, or as Heather delightfully puts it: The 7 Unnecessary Science Fiction Worldbuilding Details.

Jacqueline's done some great posts on info dumping before:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

But Heather neatly broke down those things that irk her and to a great extent, rightly so. There are certain 'givens' in genre fiction. The trouble to me come when you're dealing with cross-genre fiction. How much does an author do to bring a new reader "up to speed?" What kind of assumptions can we make about our readers coming from two different camps?

Just to torture myself, I have a Google-search on my name that brings to my inbox daily a list of blogs that mention me. I've found some pretty neat reviews that way and met lots of new fans. But I've also read a number of "back fence" conversations by both SF and Romance readers who find huge fault with SFR--and usually for the opposite reason (or the other side of the same coin...bear with me, I'm really tired.)

The SF readers for the most part don't get the 'required HEA' in SFR and express distaste to displeasure on the amount of time spent on the romantic relationship. To them, going into the hero's or heroine's thoughts about the other is rather like noting that chairs are decklocked. That's something they simply don't want to know. Yet if it's left out, the romance readers riot.

The SF readers don't particularly care that much about things romance readers look for: descriptions of anything from clothing to the hero's apartment/cabin/house. Where to romance readers, setting can "set the mood" to SF readers, setting is...setting.

On the other hand (are four fingers and a thumb...oh, wait, I'm blogging) I recently read an interesting post on Goodreads where a romance reader decried SFR for it's use of "futuristic names" (what's wrong with Jack, she asked?). I knew what she was getting at but I wondered if it wasn't more a stereotype than actual occurrence. My characters aren't named Jack but they are named Philip, Mack, Branden, Sully and Theo. For starters. I think the day of the main characters in SFR or futuristics being T'Kwee'gre'sha and Perr'k'ray-roo are long gone, if they ever were. But because "alien sounding names" are often used for worlds or items, I think there's a general belief that SFR is chock full of T'Kwee'gre'shas. (And by the way, as a Yank originally from New Jersey, names like Padraig, Siohban, Ceallach and Sinéad confuse the heck out of me and they're all names from right here on this planet.)

So the question becomes, how much is too much--to which part of your readership? What assumptions can you make about SFR readers? How do you keep one half entertained without insulting the other? Can we assume everyone knows what an airlock looks like and does? That's like assuming I know how to pronounce reticule, a word often found in historical romances. It's part of my history, I should know that, eh?

I don't. Even when I'm not totally tired. ~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

But, yeah, get shot by a Surger, and it still hurt like a bitch and could put you flat out dead if someone’s aim was good. Not center mass, as they were taught. That only worked on the good guys, but it wasn’t the good guys who needed shooting. It was the bad guys, and they were smart enough to wear body armor. Good luck getting a standard Surger to penetrate that.

Okay, maybe at point-blank.

But at point blank, the bad guys had already shot you dead with their nice powerful Carver-12s.

Vid Interview: World Building and Personalities

Linnea Sinclair - World Building and Personalities from Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Vimeo.

~Linnea

AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS by Linnea Sinclair, A Romantic Times Gold Medal Top Pick!

That thought jolted her. What if… what if she spent the rest of her life here, being just Gillie? Not the Kiasidira. Not a Raheiran Sorceress. Not anyone’s Goddess or consort. Not even a captain in the Raheiran Special Forces. But just… Gillie. Just Gillie and Mack. - http://www.linneasinclair.com

Speaking and Swearing in Alien Tongues: Reprise

For those of you with little time to go poking through the archives here, and in keeping with Jacqueline's posts on dialogue, here are the two posts I did eons ago on speaking and swearing in (intergalactic) alien tongues:

PART UNO: SPEAKING IN [ALIEN] TONGUES


There's an old-- and somewhat disparaging-- anecdote in which Mr. Average American travels to Paris, France and complains to his wife, "Know what's wrong with this place? Too many durned furrinners who can't speak English!"

The problem with some of speculative fiction and science fiction/fantasy romance is the opposite one. For some unknown reason, everyone in the universe speaks English. American, Canadian or British version, but they all speak English.

Maybe this is a reaction to too many visits to Paris (can there be too many visits to Paris?). More likely, it reflects an author's fear of not understanding how to build a realistic language or of confusing the reader with alien phrases or terms.

Fears well founded. On the other side of the intergalactic literary coin, there are those spec fic and SFR novels in which the use of an alien language is a jarring distraction. It's overdone, comically done (and the intention is not to be comical) or snobbishly done (what, you mean you haven't memorized the Klingon dictionary?).

One of the necessary parts of world building, one of the necessary parts of crafting a believable spec fic novel, is the inclusion of alien concepts, religions, cultures and terms. Words.

“I want you. Yav chera.” His hoarse whisper filled her ear. “Yav chera, Trilby-chenka. Tell me you want me.”

She turned her face slightly to look at him. There was a softness in the lines of his face she’d never seen before. An openness. A vulnerability. It tugged at her heart.

“Yav chera,” she replied softly.

His thumb covered her lips. “Yav cheron. If you want me, it is yav cheron. When I want you, which is all the time, it is yav chera.”
He moved his thumb and brushed his lips against hers.

“Yav cheron,” she told him. She laced her fingers through his hair and pulled his face back to hers. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair)

The trick is to make the inclusion of the words, the phrases, the names, the terms as natural and effortless as possible for the reader. The reader will be reading/hearing this language for the first time. But that's not a unique situation in spec fic. The reader is also encountering sickbays and starship bridges for the first time, or alien city streets, or space station corridors. Or forests thick with flora and fauna heretofore unknown and unimagined.

If you can make a reader see those things-- those station corridors, those lofty forests-- you can make them hear and understand your alien language.

One of the easiest ways I used above: make one person explain the language to the other. “I want you. Yav chera,” Rhis says to Trilby, thereby informing the reader of the meaning of the words 'yav chera'. He goes further by correcting her: Yav cheron is what she should say to him. So the reader begins-- consciously or unconsciously-- to see a pattern: chera/cheron. Female/male.

I use this same template for Rhis's language Z'fharish, through the rest of Finders Keepers. But it's not a template I invented. I gleefully filched it from two workbooks I have on my bookshelf: Italian Made Simple and Vamos Apprender Portuguese.

And I've just taught you something else: you may not speak a word of Portuguese, but by comparison, by equivalency, you're going to at least figure that Vamos Apprender Portuguese is a book with the same function as Italian Made Simple.


“Ground forces. Like your marines,” he said, plucking at the insignia of crossed swords on his chest, “but we call ourselves Stegzarda. ‘Stegzarda’ means perhaps ‘strength command’ in your language. We assist the Imperial Fleet when it comes to border outposts.”

Farra nodded. “Especially with recent jhavedzga—”

“Aggression.” Mitkanos corrected her. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair.)


Farra says the word in Z'fharish (Trilby's at the table listening to all this). Mitkanos, her uncle, corrects her. He also, conversationally, defines another term for Trilby.

Just as a good writer weaves in essentials elements and clues through dialogue (never, never using an info dump!), so a good spec fic writer can weave bits and pieces of a language into conversation.

But let's get back to using Vamos Apprender Portuguese as a template. You don't have to use 'We're Going to Learn Portuguese' (which is what that title says). You can use Russian or Japanese or Swahili as a template. Or you can combine templates of several languages. The point is, start with a basic linguistic template and it'll make your language-world building go so much smoother.

In Vamos, we learn o amigo and a amiga both mean 'friend'. We also see that our amigos are male and our amigas are female. (And yes, this is the same as Spanish and Italian - which is another point to keep in mind). We also see that the subject pronoun is often dropped (I, she, we) and the ending of the verb denotes the subject pronoun: Eu falo (I speak) is the same as Falo (I speak). Falamos is We speak. Same as Nos falamos.

Bear with me. I'm not trying to prep you for a trip to Rio de Janeiro, nice as that would be. I'm trying to show you that if it's done on this planet, you can do it on your planet.

Find a language template and use it. In Finders Keepers, I used Portuguese, Polish/Russian and un petite peu of French. Not the words - but the structure and conjugations. The sequence of words. And obviously, the sound of words.

Which brings me to another point about language-world building: not everyone sounds the same, even if they speak the same language.

Drogue’s bright-eyed gaze ran up and down my length, or lack of. “Captain Chasidah Bergren. Yes.” He stuck out his hand.

I accepted it.

“You are well?” he asked.

I tried to place his accent. South system, Dafir? Possibly. “All things considered, yes.” Some of my wariness returned. The Englarians were invariably cooperative with the government. I still had visions of a firing squad as a reception committee, Sully’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. (from Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair.)

When I was a wee kidling, my parents gave me this enormous dictionary that contained a number of appendices, including 'Regional Variations In American Pronunciation' by Charles K. Thomas, PhD. Of course, even at 11 years old, I knew not everyone sounded alike. My grandmother, from Poland, spoke nothing like my teachers at school. And my neighbor Patty's parents, who were from Tennessee, sounded very different from anyone in my small town in New Jersey. But I'd never before seen those differences in writing. Dr. Thomas delineated ten different speech regions in the US of A. Ten! Eastern New England, North Central, New York City, Middle Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Mountain, Southern, Central Midland, Northwest and Southwest.

And yet we have spec fic novels that while, yes, they include an alien language, all the aliens in the entire galaxy sound the same. No, they won't. They may read the same to the reader but they won't sound the same to your characters. Someone-- like Chasidah, above-- will notice the difference. You want your character to notice the difference. Different languages are as essential to world building as different religions, customs and even climate.

And just as with the weaving in of your alien culture or climate, use of an alien language must be done with a delicate touch. You're still writing for an English-speaking audience (or whatever other language your novel is written in). You must provide your reader with enough of a story they can understand or they won't slip into your fictional world.

Pick five or six key phrases; eight or ten key words, sprinkle your dialogue with them just enough times for the words to feel familiar. You don't jump when you walk into a French restaurant and are greeted with "Bon soir". The words, the sound, the accent belong in the setting. Your alien language should work the same way. Make the language flow easily with the scene any time you use it. Don't force your reader to stop and puzzle over it, or it might draw him out of the story. And then he'll put your novel down, grumbling… "Too many durned aliens in that book!"

REFERENCE:
Conceiving The Heavens by Melissa Scott
How to Writer Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

ONLINE:
The Language Construction Kit - http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
Pegasus Nest // games // languages in role-playing games - http://pegasus.cityofveils.com/rpglang.phtml
Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions - http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding5.htm#Lang

PART DEUX: SWEARING IN ALIEN TONGUES

Is everything okay?

An innocuous question; one posed daily, if not hourly in our society. Yet several years ago, answering that question almost put a friend of mine in the midst of a full-blown melee.

You see, he was in a restaurant in a foreign country and was asked by the restaurant owner (via an interpreter) if “…everything (meal, wine, service) was okay.”

Not being fluent in the local language, my friend responded by making the good ol' American 'okay' sign: his thumb and index finger forming a circle, the other three fingers extended.

As the proprietor bellowed and tables almost overturned, my friend realized he'd evidently made a big mistake. He had. In his present locale, that hand gesture was synonymous for a lower body orifice, and not a pleasant orifice at that.

For all intents and purposes, he'd just called his host an… well, you know what he'd called him.

When I write my science fiction romance novels, I think about things like that. Not lower body orifices, mind you. I think about what we in this country, on the planet, deem as insulting. And how that might translate to the culture I've built for my novels.

The first lesson I've learned from the above example is that profanity is not planet-wide. What's okay in America may well be a reason to riot in Rio. Though admittedly, it was what the gesture stood for, and not the gesture itself, that was found so offensive.

Which brings me to the question I always ask myself when I'm world building: Self, what would this alien culture find offensive, and why?

It's rather a nice question to ask yourself as well, as you embark on your SF&F world building. Because answering it will make your worlds and your characters that much more complete, that much more alive to your readers.

In general, those that reside on this planet we call Earth find the following categories offensive and fertile fodder for foul language: blaspheming a revered deity, excrement, sexual acts, illegitimacy, body parts relating to excrement and sexual activity, and sexual activity with culturally unacceptable participants, including oneself.

All fairly obvious and self-explanatory to us here on Earth (and if you want to explore the matter further, the tome most oft cited is Geoffrey Hughes' Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, (Penguin USA). But we're not writing about here on Earth. We're writing about Rigel-V and Tatooine and the Skolian Empire and Moabar. Or maybe the Vash Nadah or the Khalar.

So we need to understand what those people in those places value, or don't, in order to understand how they swear.

Couldn't they value the same things we do? Sure. But why stop there? Moreover, why would they value exactly the same things we do? If the fictional culture you're creating is a carbon copy of Freehold, New Jersey set but set on the planet Gryck-2, then, in my humble opinion, you're cheating your readers. People don't read SF because they want to be immersed in the common. They read it to explore the uncommon.

If you read C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series, you'll see that one of the most common insults the feline race known as the Hani has is to call another Hani “an earless bastard.” And it isn't the bastardy that's the serious part of the insult—it’s the earless-ness. Ears, and the adornment of ears, are symbolic of success. (Being owned by cats myself, I can confirm that ears and tails are sources of great pride.)

So what does your fantasy or sci fi culture hold dear, and what do they disdain?

If parentage is taken lightly, then calling someone a bastard will most likely not be effective (this is true of some aboriginal cultures here on this planet). If there are no restrictions on sexual practices or partners, then perhaps your character could start a fistfight by calling the bad guy a monogamist.

How would those who spend their lives in the space lanes—perhaps are even born in space—view those who've never left the planet? “Dirtsuckers” is a term I've used derisively in my books, showing a prejudice by the space-born against the planet-born.

The entire issue of prejudice fueled the culture, and many of the insults, in my Gabriel's Ghost. The Taka are a furred race that, for the most part, work only in the lowest-paying and demeaning jobs. Prejudice against them, by humanoids, is common in the world of Captain Chasidah Bergren and Gabriel Ross Sullivan:


Sully stepped up to the worker. “Pardon, brother. We seek a Takan brother with urgent family news.”

The man barely glanced at Sully as he ran his hand through his thinning hair in an exasperated motion. Chatter still came from the podium speaker.

“What’s that? Hang on, I got some religious guy here needs to find a furry.”

The term 'furry', inoffensive to us, is a slur here.

But the Takas aren't the only species looked down upon in Gabriel's Ghost, as Chaz knows when she's speaking to Captain Philip Guthrie:

[Guthrie]: “No. The Farosians. With a Stolorth Ragkiril. We know that. How you would get involved with them, how you would get involved with that I cannot understand.”

‘That’ meant a Stolorth. A Fleet-issue sentiment of disgust.

As readers of Gabriel's Ghost learn, Stolorths are feared. Takas are simply dismissed as lesser beings. But both are recipients of prejudice, and often out of prejudice are insults born.

Blasphemy is born out of devotion. What gods or goddesses do your characters revere? What edicts has their religion placed on them? Is there a place, like hell, that your characters long to send their enemies? Or, if your characters are star-travelers, is it sufficient simply to sneer, "Oh, go suck dirt!" in order to be insulting?

A caution on using invented words: Oh, grzzbft! tends to sound more comical than threatening to English-acclimated ears. That doesn't mean you can't utilize your alien language in order to create alien profanity. Just try to anchor it to something the reader can identify with—an alien word or concept already used in the story, for example. Or use the 'comparative' method I noted in my previous article on constructing alien languages.

I used both methods in my Games of Command— which is, by the way, considerably lighter in tone than Gabriel's Ghost—so I wasn't quite as worried about the giggle factor:


She heard the smart click of the cabin door lock recycling. She dove under the desk, fitting her small form into the kneehole, and shoved her com badge down the front of her shirt. If it beeped now, she was toast.

Cabin lights flicked on. Heavy footsteps moved across the carpeted floor as the door swooshed closed.

Damn! Shit! Sonofabitch! Sass ran through every swearword she knew in five languages. Frack! Grenzar! Antz-k’ran! Trock!

And


“I’d love to launch a raftwide mullytrock, but then we’d have every other damned jockey in straps burning bulkheads. ’Course, that would work too. RaftTraff wouldn’t know which one of us to send the sec tugs after first.”

Mullytrock. Definitely Lady Sass. He remembered Ralland at fourteen getting his mouth washed out with soap for saying that.


Don't ignore the foul-language factor when creating your world. Take some time to see how and why and when we on this planet swear (references below cited to assist you with that), and integrate that knowledge with your alien or fantasy culture. Your readers-- and your characters-- will thank you. After all, your heroine does need something appropriate to say when she drops a sonic-wrench on her toe.


For Further Study:

Four-Letter Folk Etymology and the “Bald Anglo-Saxon Epithet" by Lauren Mahon
http://students.washington.edu/laurenem/fourletter.html

Constructed Human Languages
http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html

Maledicta Press - Uncensored Language Research
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/index.html

Elizabethean Insult Generator
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/quickies.4.html


~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 24, 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com

“If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” —Admiral Philip Guthrie