Astrology Just For Writers Part 9 - High Drama, Pluto And Politics

The intent in Astrology Just For Writers is to be very non-technical about astrology and somewhat technical about writing. Part 9 provides writers with an exercise in writing dialogue.

The previous 8 parts in this series can be found by following the links back in the post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
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There's a very old adage, "If you don't understand what's happening, follow the money and you will."

This is a great principle for plotting Mystery and Intrigue novels. It works gangbusters in Romance because the pursuit of wealth fuels our deepest motivations. It's a fabulous tool for plotting Time Travel stories, too.

Finance is the key a writer needs to build a world that seems real to readers, no matter what ridiculous stuff might be there too.

And as we've discussed, successful worldbuilders always echo our "real" world in such a way as to (Artistically) reveal some form or shape in our reality that we ordinarily don't notice.

So what's happening in 2010 that is fodder for the worldbuilding writer of today? (this principle works for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Romance, plus any blend of those three with some other genre (detective, mystery, intrigue, western, etc).

Today the Federal Reserve (US Central Bank) is pondering how to get out of the trap they've dug themselves into, and what to advise the US Congress to do to prevent the kind of collapse we experienced in 2008, 2009 from happening again.

There's only one drumbeat I keep hearing.

This is a drumbeat you would hear on any planet populated by any sort of beings involved in any sort of commerce or business. This is the drumbeat of interstellar commerce, too.

Just listen to the drumbeat -- not the flute, not the violin, not the woodwinds, not the Hallelujah Chorus, just the drumbeat.

What is that drumbeat? Can you hear it? Can you understand what's actually going on in this world, and reveal it by creating another world where the drumbeat is louder, more distinct, reverberating with a more identifiable tone?

The drumbeat that I'm hearing is the rhythm of the transit of Pluto.

The "planet" Pluto was recently demoted from planetary status by astronomers; and don't forget the whole issue of Pluto being a "capture" maybe a comet from another solar system, not formed from the material of our own Sun as the other planets are.

Pluto is an element we've discussed in this series on using Astrology for plotting and worldbuilding.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html -- has a primer on Astrology and mentions how the current financial crisis coincided with Pluto transiting the USA Natal Chart 8th House Cusp (other people's money) which is according to the chart I've been using, 0 Degrees Capricorn.

It's even relevant to marketing as you can use it to figure out what each age group wants more and more of.

The 2000's were characterized by excess in finance as in other areas of life, and that excess (of debt and spending and mad chase after luxury or the satisfaction of "beating" the opposition to an ever bloodier pulp) is blamed for the current situation of cascading bankruptcies.

This first week in 2010, the financial news is chock full of warnings by pundits that the USA faces bankruptcy (not paying our debts - defaulting on Treasury Bonds - the way Brazil did so many times over the last few decades).

Scroll way down in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
to find the table of where Pluto has been transiting during the last few generations.

PLUTO IN SAGITTARIUS generation 1995-2008

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN (2008-9 - 2023)

Now the transit of Pluto through a sign of the zodiac doesn't just affect those born during those years.  As a planet moves from the point where it was when a particular issue, affair, relationship, or event begins, it marks the beat of maturation of the affair one step at a time -- in an orderly and fairly predictable fashion, or what I've called "the because line" of the plot.

Astrology can NOT predict "the" future, but it can pinpoint certain blocks of weeks, months or years when an affair begun at a previous point will now reach a crisis of change, of stress, of culmination or confrontation.  (those are keywords for certain "aspects").

In other words, Astrology sets the drumbeat to which affairs dance.

There are at least 10 such "drumbeats" rattling through our senses at any given time. The writer/artist's job is to separate them into meaningful sequences.

Astrology can not predict what will happen. The things that make a difference to us, that distinguish one novel from another, aren't coded into the drumbeats.

But in that drumbeat you can find what joins one novel to another to make a genre. Astrology is about what makes all humans the same, not what makes us different.

So, from 1995 through the Tech Bubble crash, and 9/11, we saw affairs of the world inflected by actions of the US Federal Reserve to plunge interest rates way too (Pluto is too) low and keep them there way too (Pluto) long, exaggerating the next bounce so that we went way too (Pluto) high on the debt curve.

1995 through 2008 saw Pluto transiting Sagittarius.

On another planet somewhere else in the Galaxy some other "clock" or drumbeat influence would be visible to time the excesses that would lead to what we're plunging into now. If you build your world to have such a rhythm at the foundation of it, Earth based readers will be able to believe in whatever Relationship Story you want to tell against that background.

OK, so what is Sagittarius? It's the 9th House (law) and ruled by Jupiter, inclusion, expansion, gaining too much weight, being round and jolly and truthful and accepting and out-going and charitable (Madoff comes to mind).

Sagittarius when constrained is HONESTY and JUSTICE.

Sagittarius can't tell a white lie. Sagittarius blurts out truths nobody really wants to hear stated.

When released from constraints (Pluto busts out of all constraints) Sagittarius is THE PLAYBOY HEIR TO THE THRONE, the wastrel, the drunken gambler, and in the Charity aspect becomes something like Barney Madoff's ponzi scheme (where he defrauded a whole lot of really big and ever-growing Charities out of the best and most urgent of motives, to do good for those who trusted him, and became trapped in escalating excesses.

And this pattern repeated all over the world (9th House is foreign travel, foreign countries, international affairs). The Mortgage excess started with some bright fellows in London who created the securitization of US mortgages and sold them internationally.

So in 2008 when Pluto finished with Sagittarius and tickled the edge of Capricorn, the whole world of connected Nations collapsed in agony.

This is the drumbeat, and you see it in personal lives as well as in the lives of Nations.

Excess, explosion, great unbridled violent BEAT, huge tsunami sized waves of good things in vast excess, hugely over-emphasized like the new tallest building in the world opened in Dubai this week, (a loud crash of the drum) followed by SILENCE in which to absorb the shock of that sudden blast of sound.

The SILENCE is as shocking as the SOUND of the beat, and silence is part of what it means "beat" (as in Beat Sheet). Silence is the pure essence of music. Stillness is the purified essence of dance. Empty white space is the defining essence of a printed page. Absence is the art form.

For the last 18 months or so Pluto has diddled around 0 Capricorn, up to 3 degrees, back, and now up again heading for a station at a new degree - 4 degrees of Capricorn. That's still the beginning.

So what comes after the SILENCE of the drumbeat? It's not a rhythm unless something comes NEXT.

Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio, the hidden, clandestine, underworld -- in Fantasy think the other dimension where Magical creatures and demons come from. Pluto is the planet of POWER. Uranium is attributed to Pluto for the Atomic Bomb association; as per my previous blog entry here

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/thorium-real-hope-for-e-books.html

Think about Thorium.

Capricorn is the Natural 10th House, ruled by Saturn (restraint). Capricorn is the Prime Minister while Leo is The King. Capricorn is the administrator, the manager, the real decision maker, the down-to-earth firm and reliable ADVISER. Capricorn is the disciplinarian (the school Head Master), and in symbolism the 10th House also represents The Father - the source of discipline in the family.

Capricorn represents the rules of order by which society functions. The Father is the parent who introduces the child to the "realities" of the world.

You want the keys to the car? Show proficiency in the written Driving Test as well as the actual operation of a vehicle. Just because you can corner fast doesn't mean you're exempt from signaling first. Saturn takes all the fun out of everything.

That's Capricorn's mystical initiation - the Rite of Passage into adulthood.  Staying up late at night isn't a privilege or fun, but an arduous chore that comes with a big price the next day. Jupiter is the party; Saturn is the hangover, and Pluto makes both bigger and more dramatic.

Theoretically, Earth might have to pass such a Saturn style rite of passage test to gain entry to the Galactic Union. Maybe we just flunked.

Saturn which rules Capricorn is Tough Love. It's Daddy arriving at the teen's unauthorized house party and taking away the highly spiked punch bowl. "You're grounded for LIFE!" Daddy roars, red faced.

So what we can expect for the next "beat" is an "Excess" of "Rules" -- Pluto through Capricorn.

---------EXAMPLES----------------

1) Here's an AP item on new regulations for Tax Preparers I found on Twitter:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/04/irs-regulate-paid-tax-preparers/

And this week the Chairman of the USA's Central Bank is jawboning about THE ONLY SOLUTION IS MORE AND TIGHTER REGULATION.

2) Here's another item, a gem of an example of this pattern, which I found via twitter in The Charleston Gazette
http://wvgazette.com/News/200912280398  which is a URL that was there yesterday and gone today. It's a revival of a very old item.

The news article says:
====
C8 is another name for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. It is one of a family of perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs. In West Virginia, DuPont Co. has used C8 since the 1950s at its Washington Works plant south of Parkersburg. C8 is a processing agent used to make Teflon and other nonstick and stain-resistant products.

Around the world, researchers are finding that people have C8 and other PFCs in their blood at low levels. People can be exposed by drinking contaminated water, eating tainted food, or through food packaging and stain-proofing agents on furniture or carpeting.

Evidence is mounting about the dangers of these chemicals. But regulators have yet to set binding limits for emissions or human exposure.
=====
And it goes on to state that though the correlation is small, further studies are needed and we should "monitor liver enzymes" in people with low exposure.
Needing further studies is so very Capricorn, investigating, keeping records, holding the potential of regulation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for regulation. What I'm pointing out here is the demarcation of an exaggerating effect by Pluto's cycle. Or put another way, "The Pendulum Swings."

Pluto doesn't produce the urge to regulate. Saturn and Capricorn are associated with the imperative urge to regulate. Pluto takes that urge and exaggerates it to melodramatic proportions - a loud beat followed by a louder silence.

=====
3) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_02/b4162024080832.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

Is a long article on the politics seething behind "reform" of the financial system to prevent this kind of collapse from happening again.

One proposal is to re-institute the separation financial system of investment banks from savings banks. The flow of mortgage securitization from local savings banks to international investment banks flooded the USA with cheap mortgage money, so there's a rationale behind that idea, but look at it another way and you see that in one era "regulation" was irradiated because it was the problem - regulation strangled growth. In another era, the exact same regulation is looked on as the solution to the problem of excessive growth.

Keep clamping your mind onto the idea here that this blog post isn't about which political policies are "right" or "should" be followed.

I'm not arguing any side of this issue. I'm pointing out that to engineer a solid conflict for the foundation of a novel, a writer must be able to argue passionately for any and every side that we have in our own world and then add a NEW SIDE to the argument. Each side is a character in whose moccasins you must walk your mile.

Many writers are bewildered when critics jeer at their "dialogue" -- and think they can take lessons in how to write dialogue. You can't. There are no lessons. The cure for bad dialogue is to be able to believe, truly and really and in your gut, the exact opposite of what you do believe. When you express that passionate belief your dialogue will shine.

So read this article in Business Week (a dull subject) and adopt the belief that's opposite to what you believe, then express that belief in passionate dialogue. That's the way to learn to write dialogue.

-------END EXAMPLES---------

The answer to any problem for the next few years will be regulation, throttle, control, impose accountability (Capricorn) - and do it all to a previously unknown extreme (Pluto).

That's it. Follow the money. REGULATION of monetary supply, fiscal policy, businesses handling money, regulations and more regulations and more and more and more because with Pluto there is never, ever ENOUGH.

If you've been reading this series on Astrology Just For Writers, you have a good grasp of how Pluto represents HIGH DRAMA, the very stuff of life that fuels the conflicts at the heart of all fiction.

Pluto influences bring on the dramatic, larger than life disasters that catapult your Hero into situations where he/she must exceed personal design specifications and perform at World Class levels, if only once in a lifetime.

And that "once in a lifetime" achievement is very typical of Pluto in the lives of those who are not "rich and famous" but just us average folk. In the lives of the Michael Jacksons of the world, Pluto wreaks its havoc repeatedly every time it contacts another natal planet because of the way Pluto was placed in the natal chart.

So until 2023, your readers will be living in world of increasingly intrusive regulation of every part of their lives, taking away all the "fun" they grew up enjoying.

The age group most severely affected will be those just starting their adult lives, those born with Pluto in Scorpio, 1985 to 1995.

The peak of that generation (and there was a baby-boom in the USA during the mid-1990's) will be 20 years old now, getting out of college or trying to.

They may have had their college education SMASHED (Pluto is the violent smashing of structures that have resisted Saturn) by the crash (parents losing everything, job, house, etc.) and college costs skyrocketing, scholarships disappearing because charity giving (Sagittarius is Charity) is GONE.

These 20 year olds are your audience, your readership.

Remember what we discussed in the entry on Targeting an Audience using the generational analysis,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

The Pluto in Scorpio generation is Power Used In Excess (ever more vivid video games where everything in sight is destroyed -- BEAT THE ENEMY being the theme- beat-beat-beat). Pluto rules Scorpio, so that entire generation (no matter how the rest of their natal chart is deployed) has an extra-strong, extra-emphasized Pluto, whatever Pluto may represent personally.

Pluto is obsession (excess interest). Scorpio is hidden things such as government conspiracy, great secrets kept from mankind (Demons from another dimension; the revival of the TV series V where the aliens have SECRETS and there are conspiracies within conspiracies, 5th Column and Resistance fighters, secret sexuality, exaggerated sexuality, purely carnal sexuality).

Also note Al Queda conducting operations to "take over" (excess revolution by force; "terror" is exaggerated fear) is peopled largely by the current 1985-1995 20-something generation, the fighting age folks, whose age is appropriate for wanting to change the world and who live with an extra-strong Pluto influence. Pluto is also related to religion as it is associated with the Unseen and Unknowable.

The main tactic deployed against terrorists will have something to do with regulating finance. As I recall from a recent conversation, the Inquisition was ended basically because the Pope leading it needed money.

-------TECHNICAL ASIDE -------------
       TIGER WOODS

Here's a chart posted online for Tiger Woods that makes sense of what he did in terms of the Pluto transit.

http://www.chartplanet.com/famous/charts/tiger.html

When Pluto transited over Woods' natal Moon, he got himself into excess (Pluto rules Scorpio, secrets and irresistible carnal sexuality) trouble by overly intense obsession on fulfilling some sort of subconscious personal NEED (Moon is the reigning need of the lifetime - what a person gropes for in life, the thing you don't have that you will do anything to get and even when you've got more of it than anyone else you're still not satisfied, can't feel that you have it because it's the innate, in-built NEED).

He melted down PUBLICLY (Moon is The Public) when Pluto transited across the Mid-point of his Moon and Sun.

In his Natal Chart Pluto is pretty much opposite Jupiter, thus his exaggerated FAME and his monstrous meltdown. As Pluto transits his Sun, (probably mostly 2013-2014) he'll learn his lesson on a deep spiritual level, or not.

Religious conversion often happens under the transit of Pluto over the natal Sun.

If he had not built up such a secret, the revealing of it in pubic wouldn't have resulted in a catastrophic loss. Catastrophe is Pluto.

He's lost a lot of endorsement contracts -- remember the subject here is FOLLOW THE MONEY. He lost endorsements not because of what he did, but because of the politics ignited by it being made public -- politics and money.

Without that public revelation, the manufacturers would have been happy to have him as endorsing spokesman in any number of commercials.

Pluto transits reveal the hidden with catastrophic consequences.

---------- END TECHNICAL ASIDE -----

Tiger Woods' public melt-down is a perfect textbook example of the EXPLOSIVE action of Pluto in transit. Pluto touched off the explosion revealing something hidden by contacting both sources of energy in his personality (Sun and Moon).

Nobody could have predicted it would be infidelity that would bring him down, nor even that "down" was the direction Pluto's catapult was pointing.

He might have won some huge, unique honor. He might have quit sports to become a monk. He might have created a charitable foundation. He might have suffered a terrible bereavement or some horrible disease which he'd then become the champion of and finance the finding of a cure.

The only thing you can say for sure is that whatever the Event would be, it would be bigger than anything else in his life to date (which is huge), and very likely would "reveal" something very "private" to the "public." It would be something Woods himself would be able to see coming, see as inevitable, but refuse to look at squarely until this blast shattered his certainties.

See what I mean about drama?

So Pluto, Politics and Follow The Money.

Pick up the drumbeat of the Money, the ebb and flow of currency in the veins of the world, and hear the CRASH of the beat, and the SILENCE that follows, stretches, and eventually is broken by another CRASH.

What will be the next CRASH of that beat? Until 2023, the folks who grew up reveling in ever-more-intense video games will be under a harsh, severe, restrictive discipline, a noose that tightens around the neck the harder they pull on their leashes.

But that won't change their essential personalities. They are Pluto In Scorpio (and Scorpio has earned its sexual reputation, too).

In 2023, when Pluto enters Aquarius (freedom, innovation, technology, rebellion) the then-thirty-somethings will be taking over the reigns of Power (Pluto is power) from Regulators (Saturn) and will break the chains of regulation, intrusiveness into private lives (Scorpio obsesses on ultra-privacy; Scorpio is the most private sign of the Zodiac; Scorpio doesn't air dirty laundry in public but makes plenty).

So we had excesses in spending, now we'll have excesses in regulation to prevent spending, and eventually we'll get excesses in de-regulation again.

Remember Aquarius is "The Age Of Aquarius" the Flower Children, Beatniks, Hippies, Drop-Outs. Imagine that amplified by Pluto.

This generation that needs excess to feel anything will break out of any regulatory structure that can be built at this time.

On the other hand, the USA could go "isolationist" and withdraw from the international monetary flow entirely as the Flower Children dropped out of "society" to "find themselves."

Achieving Energy Independence with say, Thorium or Fusion power, could lead to instituting every other sort of "independence" -- which might afford the USA more privacy. The babyboomers of the 1990's will demand unfettered freedom and have the obsessive dedication to that goal to achieve it.

Write the fiction that will entertain people in such a mood and explode into the top echelons of the entertainment profession.

Now how will other countries react to Pluto through Aquarius? You know your country better than I do. Drop a note here about how your culture will respond to the pervasive conviction that more-more-more regulation is the solution to more-more-more acquisitiveness.

Use that beat of generations to build a World -- somewhere out in space, in another galaxy, or another dimension, but make it plausible by revealing the heartbeat that rams MONEY through the arteries of that people's economy.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Rebels and Lovers Book Video

REBELS AND LOVERS is the fourth book in the Dock Five Universe, coming from Bantam end of March 2010. Devin Guthrie is my "non-hero" hero...a mega-wealthy techo-geek who finds himself thrust into a situation in which there are no easy answers. Only an option that may be unthinkable:

For these two renegades, falling in love is the ultimate rebellion…

It’s been two years since Devin Guthrie last saw Captain Makaiden Griggs. But time has done little to dampen his ardor for the beautiful take-charge shuttle pilot who used to fly yachts for his wealthy family. While his soul still burns for her, Kaidee isn’t the kind of woman a Guthrie is allowed to marry—-especially in this time of intergalactic upheaval, with the family’s political position made precarious by Devin’s brother Philip, now in open revolt against the Empire. And when Devin’s nineteen-year-old nephew Trip goes inexplicably missing, his bodyguard murdered, this most dutiful of Guthrie sons finds every ounce of family loyalty put to the test. Only by joining forces with Kaidee can Devin complete the mission to bring Trip back alive. Only by breaking every rule can these two renegades redeem the promise of a passion they were never permitted to explore. At risk? A political empire, a personal fortune and both their hearts and lives...

Pre Order from BN HERE
Pre Order from Borders HERE

Thanks!

~Linnea

REBELS AND LOVERS, March 2010: Book 4 in the Dock Five Universe, from Bantam Books and Linnea Sinclair—www.linneasinclair.com

Kaidee hated when her ship didn’t work. Dead in space was not a place she liked to be. Especially with an unknown bogie on her tail, closing at a disturbingly fast rate of speed that made her heart pound in her chest and her throat go dry.

Science: Fact is funnier than Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even more to my taste is this site:

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keraunophobia : an abnormal fear of being struck by lightning.


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

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


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

White Christmas

Did any of you share our record-setting pre-Christmas snowstorm? Any significant amount of snow before January is rare here. Last Saturday we got about two feet, and the roads were so inadequately cleared the next day that our Sunday services were canceled, which has never happened at that church before. Interesting how the conventional images from "White Christmas" and Currier-and-Ives art override reality in the popular mind. We visualize Christmas with snow even in areas like this one (mid-East-Coast) where it seldom appears on schedule for the holidays. My late stepmother, who grew up in the tidewater region of North Carolina and lived all her adult life in Norfolk, Virginia, both with a very slim chance of snow on Christmas, nevertheless held a fanatical devotion to the whole "White Christmas" ideal. Well, this year we had one, with plenty of inches still left over on Christmas from the snowfall almost a week earlier. I'm reminded of a story by Connie Willis—not in the MIRACLE collection I mentioned last week—from ASIMOV'S, called "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know.” The collective unconscious, primed by constant hearing of that song, causes snow to blanket the entire country, including Florida and Los Angeles. You can read the story here:

Asimov's

Has anyone here produced some holiday fiction? I've had only one actual Christmas story published. It's in the Jewels of the Quill anthology CHRISTMAS WISHES:

Christmas Wishes

Called "Little Cat Feet," it's based on the legend that animals can talk on Christmas Eve. A teenage runaway on Christmas Eve meets a stray cat who helps her out of a desperate situation.

However, I do have a vampire novel that takes place during the Christmas season, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, sequel to DARK CHANGELING:

Child of Twilight

The cover shows my twelve-year-old, human-vampire hybrid girl—also a runaway—feeding on a rabbit in the snow. I'm rather fond of it.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Thorium - The Real Hope For E-books?

Thorium

The Real Hope For E-books

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Green's the thing.

This blog entry originally published in December 2009, is still valid in 2019.  Much work has been done with Thorium, and in 2018, the BBC did a story on India mining beaches for Thorium.  And, in 2018, I'm seeing comments by owners of all-electric cars (LEAF in particular) saying they pay less per mile than with gasoline.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-why-india-wants-to-turn-its-beaches-into-nuclear-fuel
Notice the black background on this blog?  Black with white letters takes less electricity to render on your monitor than white with black letters. Read green!

The problem of e-books vs traditional publishing isn't just a green issue -- it's a writer's worldbuilding paradise!

Devon Monk, the author I raved about last week got me thinking about electricity, magic, technology and worldbuilding.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/recommending-devon-monk.html

And before that I pointed you to a twitter-based worldbuilding exercise by a group of writers and a publisher creating an anthology.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html

Then I ran into an article I will point you to at the end here. It crystalized a vision of "the" future for me, and I think you can use this to build backgrounds for your own fiction.

My blog entries on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com give glimpses into the mechanism of a writer's mind, so let's retrace my reasoning a step at a time to look at the whole seething, bursting phenomenon of the e-book infrastructure and its ecological sense.

This applies to all the information available via the internet and to it's "green" component and a thousand questions SF/Romance has not yet addressed that I know of (please drop references to great SF/Romance on the comments here!).

It's still very problematic whether the budding trend toward e-books, e-music downloads, feature film downloads, the indie film makers distributing free downloads on the internet ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091226/wl_time/08599195000500 is a Yahoo news story about this phenomenon) the whole web 2.0, cloud computing direction and the changing business model of writers which I've written about here ...

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html

...along with the "paperless office" writers and publishers are adopting, is actually greener than the old fashioned method of hauling paper around the world.

On Cloud Computing, see this page (in an article on failing to succeed) which shows graphically how the business decision making process can go awry (look at the table under the picture of the black box):

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_oracle/3/

And remember as I indict government decision making below, I'm NOT advocating the decision making system used by bussiness either. Focus your mind on the decision making processes used in our world, and how any little change in those processes might change the world you set stories within. This is basic sociological science fiction using futurology.

In the Worldbuilding By Committee article linked above, the Twitter group kept coming back to the idea of replacing government with a corporation, i.e. a Company Town for the venue for these stories. That has been done, and well done, so here, I'm trying to get writers to think outside the box we normally don't even know we're inside of.

Ask the next question. That was Theodore Sturgeon's motto when it came to SF writing (he wrote the Star Trek episode Amok Time that started the whole Spock phenomenon). He was a good friend of mine and an influence on my SF writing. Here's where I discussed that.

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

So when doing futurology, you need to "ask the next question" not just find an answer and stop thinking. E-books and green tech are fraught with next questions to ask because both are driven by government decision making (e-books and copyright; green tech and our power supply).

If not government as we know it, or corporations as we know them, then what? To find "then what" take a close look at what has gone on in this world since 1950 and the rise of the buzzword ecology (yes, the SF magazines of the 1950's obssessed on "ecology").

The problem with all "green" tech is electricity and what it takes to get enough of it to make the products that are supposed to be greener. E-book reader screens are very dirty to make. Batteries are worse! (you gotta read Devon Monk's novels)

The carbon footprint of say a KWH of electricity produced by a solar panel has to include what it took to make the solar panel array, transport and install it and maintain it (every time the service guys come out, it costs gas for their truck, etc) PLUS how fast the panel wears out (like lightbulbs, a solar panel only lasts the time the manufacturer builds into it on purpose).

I found out a shocking thing when shopping for additional attic insulation.

The solar panels they sell in the USA (as of 2009) are (by Fed law) not allowed to be as efficient and long-lasting as the ones sold in Europe.

The ones sold in the USA lose (I think it was) 20% of their ability to produce electricty in (I think) 10 years but are rated to last a longer than 10 years. Whatever the figures were, they're different in 2010. The exact figures are unimportant. The point here is that government makes these decisions and shapes our world in ways that most people don't know about. (that insulation salesman wasn't supposed to tell me that fact because he also sells solar panels).

In other words, you'll be thrilled the year you install a solar panel and probably won't notice the gradual fall-off of production of electricty you can sell back to your utility (if your local utility is set up to buy it back) over time. But the good deal you got on install turns into a real bad deal with time, and you never know that if you lived elsewhere you could have gotten a better deal.

You never see the carbon footprint (or any of the other exotic and seriously toxic pollutants) generated when the panel and its components are created, assembled, transported to a warehouse, sent to another distribution point, etc etc until it's installed on your property. Then of course there's the gasoline needed to tote it away when it dies. Then landfill problems. Recycle doesn't always recover as much as is expended doing the recycle; it depends what you include when you calculate.

The whole idea of plug-in commuter cars depends on CHEAP electricity that's cleaner to produce than what we have now.

At the moment it costs more for enough electricity to commute to work than it costs for enough gasoline to commute to work, and running cars by plug-in electricity is dirtier than gasoline.

The Obama initiative to create the "smart grid" and replace our electrical distribution system is really great, and I'm all for it no matter what it costs (frankly been irked that it wasn't done 20 years ago, but we have better computer controllers now).

That smart grid will reduce the cost of electricity, but Big Brother will be able to deny you electricity if you misbehave (brown-out a single house that's over-using, and nevermind that they have someone on hospice life-support equipment).

But we do need to rebuild the grid, and smart-grid is the way to go.

If you read Devon Monk's novels, you see why I'm thinking about the grid! You have no idea how romantic this grid-tech stuff can be if you don't read novels like Monk's!

But which way to build a "smart grid" is a decision that will be made by the same government process that gave us the decision to disallow U.S. residents from having the same high efficiency solar panels Europeans can buy. Will our grid be as smart as other countries? (build that world, don't argue for or against my assuptions here. Don't get distracted by your opinions. Ask The Next Question and build a fictional world from those questions.)

Yet smart grid is not enough. We need to be able to feed that grid with a lower pollution footprint. (Yay, Magic!)

Next Question: Do we really need a cleaner power source? What if we don't find one?

Well, 2010 is (in the USA) a census year, but population actually grows every year.

And that's what's been happening. Population has out-grown our energy production capacity, not just because each individual pulls more from the grid but because there are more of us. Substantially more! (some undocumented; some with pirating taps into the grid too -- smart grid will find them and cut them off).

The 2010 census may find 330 million of us in the USA. In 1960, there were just over 179 million in the USA.
http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_popl.html

I haven't tried to hunt down the stat on how many KWH/year each USA person used in 1960, but just looking at my own life, it was a LOT less than today, however frugal I attempt to be. I use an electric toothbrush that's got a rechargable battery. An unthinkable concept (even in SF novels) in the 1960's. And back then, I had a manual typewriter.

I have seen stats bandied about that indicate how our gasoline and electricity use per person has risen over these decades. The USA is really shamefully profligate in usage.

But what do we use, and what do we get for it? Is our usage worth it? Do we produce a profit from all this convenience? And how do we reduce our total footprint in absolute terms while still increasing our population at this rate? Because the world can't support this current world population (nevermind the growth) if we all use power the way the USA folks currently do.

I saw a TV feature retrospective last week showing that the world population will reach a full 7 billion by 2012 and rise to 8 billion only 16 years later. That's a 1 Billion population increase in 16 years. Population increase is geometric, you know. The interval it takes to produce a billion more people will get shorter and shorter.

In the 1950's collapse of the entire world ecology was predicted by 2050, due to overpopulation and that was without the intense rise in usage of gasoline and electricity.

Today the boogey man is Global Warming. Tomorrow it will be something else, food crop fungus, the extinction of the bees, -- remember acid rain?

With more people, "human activity" will have greater and greater effect on ecology.

It doesn't matter (for a worldbuilding writer) what aspect of global resources maxes out first - collapse is collapse and our population growth and increasing technology has us headed right for total collapse because of our primate-based habit of tossing our trash (pollution from energy use, non-biodegredable packaging, or even just sewage) aside and expecting it not to come back to haunt us (like dropping a bananna peel from a tree and forgetting about it).

I've seen bragging statistics about how much manufacturing has increased the efficiency of gadgets and cars so they do the same but use less electricity. Oh we are so good! But, there are so many more of us that the total amount of oil and electricity we use is still growing at a rate that will reach a maximum and not be able to grow any more even though the population still grows.

We either have to drastically reduce population or reduce our standard of living.

SFF/R writers find neither alternative acceptable. Love is. And the less time we spend working, the more time there is for love.

So since Love Conquers All, it better get conquering real fast.

We need a cheap, abundant, non-polluting, non-nuclear waste-to-store-forever, non-weapons grade Uranium producing, non-fetus-mutating, source of POWER.

And the astonishing fact is that we have indeed had that magical source of POWER since the 1950's and have turned away from implementing that magical technology for political reasons (according to the article I found).

Maybe this article nails the causes for that turn-away from the "real" solution, maybe not. Maybe this scientific article is actually pure fantasy. I don't know and for the purposes of this worldbuilding excerise it doesn't matter.

But I do vaguely remember reading probably in the 1970's that the Thorium nuclear power plant technology had failed, and it would be impossible to use.

According to this article that I just found last week, that was not true. According to this article the choice to fuel atomic power plants with Uranium was made because the government wanted to make war not love in the 1960's, and that statement itself could be politically slanted. It doesn't matter. We're thinking SFR here.

Personally, I enjoy love more than war, even in fiction. I do know there are those who don't feel that way, and huge lucrative industries (such as video games) are founded on feeding the lust for destruction. But maybe there's marketing room for another industry based on SFR?

If this article explains what happened in the 1950's to the 1970's correctly, the huge power-crunch we are in right now could have been avoided if government hadn't meddled in the business decisions of the power industry.

Here's the article for you to judge for yourself (there are some other articles you might want to look at linked on that page too), and while you're reading think about the the consequences of allowing government to decide the direction of the health care delivery system by the same mechanism used to decide the direction of the power-delivery-system's development. Remember, conflict is the essence of story.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/

And a prior ABC News story on the topic of using Thorium instead of Uranium in nuclear power plants:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200604/s1616391.htm

See? It doesn't matter which party or which politicians are in charge. It's the decision mechanism that needs a "next question," more than politics or ideology.

As a voter, would knowing about the law against you having an efficient solar panel installed on your house, or about forcing you to use nuclear power from Uranium rather than from Thorium to power your house or car, make a difference in what you say to your congressman at town hall meetings? Conflict is the essence of story. Marriages are made and broken by these kinds of conflicts involving larger world-girdling issues (population explosion; pollution; political ascendancy).

The worldbuilding writer can slice and dice that decision mechanism and create whole new political systems. Devon Monk just used the usual, ho-hum corporate structure and barely acknowledged the government structure that supports the corporation's rights to patents and profits.

The only innovative thinking in the Allie Beckstrom universe is the idea of conduits of magic akin to the electrical grid, and the magic grid isn't even "smart."

The SF of the 1960's would not have accepted worldbuilding that was so rudimentary.

I'm still searching for writers of today who will not stop short of asking the next question like that. When you build a "world" you can't just change ONE thing about our current world and call it Fantasy or SF.

Why? You saw how there's a connection between the kind of solar panel you can buy, the health care system, and nuclear war potential connected to power generation. That's our real world. Any fantasy world must have that property too -- connections. If one thing changes (magical conduits beneath certain neighborhoods in the city), that will change everything else a little bit.

Devon Monk hit on a lot of the changes that her magic-technology would bring about, but left out other things that would be impacted. In defense of her work, I have to say that she is less than a generation into the new technology. However, if you think back only 20 years to 1990, and the attitude of publishers toward the field of e-books then as compared to now, the attitude of retailers toward amazon and online merchandising then as compared to now, you see that the changes created by a single technological innovation come faster, and are more pervasive than depicted in the Allie Beckstrom novels.

When you're building your world, don't stop thinking. Ask The Next Question.

Understand the links between apparently disconnected trends and forces in our real world, and create a pattern of links just like our real world pattern among the postulates of your constructed world.

Revealing those hidden connections and patterns of links is what Art is all about. Show don't tell how the real world is connected by building your world to reveal that pattern.

Here's an exercise, just for fun.

Delve into the issues of human nature that produce the kinds of people who end up in charge of those government and business decisions, and the kinds of motivations that drive people into politics. Create a character with 6 problems to solve.

Now postulate an alternate universe where the Thorium - Uranium choice was made by a different mechanism toward a different objective from different motives than the articles I've mentioned show in our everyday world.

Postulate a world where there's no pollution, and no real difference in energy usage and convenience gadgets between USA and the poorest tribal regions of Afghanistan. What happens when everyone in China can freely access the internet and all the opinions rampant around the world?

Would we have a drug and slave trade grossing enough cash to buy governments if thorium power plants were the standard around the world?

Would human population have exploded even faster and be at just as great a risk of destroying the world as we are now? What resource would we max out instead of energy? Space to live? Oxygen? A lot of people today are worried about the drinking water supply. Do we drink enough water to keep our kidneys healthy or grow plants to ward off vitamin deficiency?

Do this exercise a few times. You have plenty of time. You can do it in the shower.

I think there's a feature film script here for a political historian writer, tracing the decision making process that went on between 1950 and 1970 (McCarthy Hearings; Korean War; Viet Nam War; Feminism (talk about genies and bottles, but your constructed world needs a set of macro-issues and trends like that).)

In that atmosphere of the '50's to '70's, the road of human history forked in a sharp V, and we went down the Uranium branch of that V.

Remember the fabulous film about Madam Curie, a woman physicist with a real, original discovery, and how politics buried that discovery for so long? How could it be that Weinberg's life so focused on the technology of thorium use hasn't been made into a similar movie?

Why did Al Gore win the Nobel prize for An Inconvenient Truth? Shouldn't that inconvenient truth be that this global warming issue could have been avoided had the Thorium - Uranium decision gone for Thorium?
Wouldn't a movie about Weinberg's life have been a Nobel type subject? Who better than a politician to implement the creation of such a deep expose of the political decision making process?

How did that Uranium - Thorium engineering decision happen in the political arena?

And of course the real burning question: Is It Too Late?

Can we rescue the world by going Thorium now?

Can love conquer political decision making?

Is it enough to "win" on the thorium issue? Don't we need to win on the issue of the kind of decision making process we rely on?

Just look what happened this past weekend with an attempt to bring down another passenger plane. After the attempt nearly succeeded, then (and only then) the authorities "decide" to increase security for the homebound holiday travelers. Talk about locking the barn door!

The terrorist objective is to wear the larger enemy down by luring them into wasting resources. One lone person making a single bold move, with the effluvium of an organization behind him, costs him a few hundred dollars and his life -- but costs the larger enemy millions of dollars. That's a successful terrorist move.

There's a 1950's novel with the same title that Marion Zimmer Bradley used, TWO TO CONQUER. It was by Eric Frank Russell and postulated an imaginary terrorist organization that cost a planetary government (of aliens who didn't know much about humans) enough to almost bankrupt it. In actuality it was only one human man cleverly planting "evidence" of a "movement" by spreading slogans around. When caught and imprisoned he invented whole cloth out of pure imagination a non-material partner with nearly magical powers, and sold himself to his jailers as a powerful threat. It bought him enough time to get rescued.

The novel (written by an author with real world experience in these matters) explained the tactics of the terrorist as clearly as several currently popular (and old classic) TV shows explain the confidence rackets so you can armor yourself against being taken as a mark. (Mission: Impossible, Remmington Steele, and today White Collar).

Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to increase security after a terrorist feint, rather than before an actual move?

------------
Here is a quote from a comment posted on a Newsweek article about the US Terrorist Databases at
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2009/12/28/what-u-s-intelligence-knew-about-the-underpants-bomber.aspxHere's the comment:
I invented a holistic semantic system that is far superior to what the U.S. Government is using -- in the words of many of their own specialists, and leading scientists in CS, but to date we have had no luck in overcoming the adoption barriers facing small and emerging technology companies attempting to resolve serious problems. One recent blog post of mine might be of interest:
How to prevent the Fort Hood tragedy, by design.
http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/">http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/
Another paper written in laymen's language is a use case scenario developed specifically for the DHS:
http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf">http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf
We've invented the solution, but it has yet to be adopted, despite a significant amount of direct communications at decision levels in the past three admins.
Mark Montgomery
Founder - Kyield
http://www.kyield.com
http://kyield.wordpress.com
---------------

See what I mean about worldbuilding from the patterns available in our real world?  Keep asking the next question.

Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to focus and expend resources on a failed attempt to bring an aircraft down rather than watching for a real thrust coming from the other direction? (haven't they ever read any classic romances where the pretty girl or a thrown stone distracts the castle guards and the miscreant sneaks right into the castle past the distracted guard? I loved the TV show, Zorro!)

The worldbuilder needs to look at the pattern of these breaking-news Events and analyze the forces causing the behavior of large institutions (government, corporations, or non-profits) just as the writers of those old TV shows make the behavior of individual guards clear.

So ask the next question. What does it take to go greener and accommodate a larger population? What happens if we don't go all-e-book paperless office? Why is there such resistance? What would have to change to melt that resistance? Why doesn't government trick us into going all e-book the way it tricked us into going all-Uranium?  Where is the glitch in government decision making?  Corporate decision making?  Find it. Change it. Change everything in your universe to match.  Write a story in that universe. Win the Nobel Prize for PNR! 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
6 arguably greener e-book titles; 4 on Kindle

Holiday Cheer

A merry Solstice, Yule, Christmas, and Kwanzaa and belated happy Hanukkah to all!

If you’re in the mood for SF and fantasy holiday fiction, I recommend MIRACLE AND OTHER CHRISTMAS STORIES by the inimitable Connie Willis (author of time travel novels DOOMSDAY BOOK and TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG). Here’s the Amazon link; I hope it works despite its length:

Miracle

Come to think of it, this season seems to lend itself to fantasy fiction. Telling ghost stories used to be a winter tradition in England. The best-known Christmas classic, after all, is a ghost story, and another one is a film about angels and alternate realities. Sunday night we watched the George C. Scott version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL again. That was my favorite adaptation until the Patrick Stewart version came out. They’re both excellent. There are so many retellings of the story in both the original and updated settings. I’m fond of AN AMERICAN CHRISTMAS CAROL, starring Henry Winkler, with the plot transplanted to a small town in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. A DIVA’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, featuring a female “Scrooge,” a black singing superstar named Ebony, is surprisingly good, IMO.

Well, we’re off to dinner and the “midnight” service, where my husband sings in the choir. We are wimps, I guess; our Christmas Eve “midnight” starts at 11 p.m. (with preliminary singing at 10:30), which is quite late enough for me.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Recommending Devon Monk

So yesterday I recommended a writer who's working the edges of publishing, without the Manhattan powerhouse behind her titles ( but she is easily a match for any of those writers).

That post is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-that-really-you.html

And today I'm going to point you at a writer who's doing Fantasy for RoC, which has become a dominant player in the adult Fantasy field which is toying with the edges of Paranormal Romance, believe it or not. Action Romance.

This is very much like Linnea Sinclair's mixture of Romance with Science Fiction, only with "Fantasy" instead of "Science".

There are fully developed characters with huge, complicated lives, interlaced into the affairs of "wizards" (the movers and shakers of their world). These are people whose actions make a difference, and their personal values and mores will have far reaching ripple effects. They are responsible enough to care and to move with an eye to that ripple effect.

Meanwhile, life brings these intense relationships that just change everything. Every time you turn around, you're tripping over issues your everyday ordinary action hero doesn't have to deal with. These characters' lives are not as simple as say, Indiana Jones' life, or Rambo's.

RoC Fantasy is cultivating this type of story, which is a genre-buster of a mixture, and it's my type of story! I'm so glad it's not so hard to sell anymore.

Devon Monk is going to be a major player in this field.

Here are 3 novels in a series by Devon Monk, and the first 2 meet my criteria for structure, story, and theme so well I've no reason to think the 3rd won't.

Magic to the Bone (Allie Beckstrom)


Magic in the Blood (Allie Beckstrom)


Magic in the Shadows: An Allie Beckstrom Novel

I finished reading Magic to the Bone and immediately started Magic in the Blood, and don't expect to pause until I've finished Magic in the Shadows.

I'm halfway through Magic in the Blood and still love it, though the Hunk-Soul Mate of our kick-ass heroine doesn't reappear until after page 100. Don't worry, the story doesn't sag at all since you know she can't survive this unless he does reappear. And when he does step onstage, Allie discovers something new about him we didn't know before (by using a Reveal spell) that raises all sorts of alarming questions.

For Alien Romance folks who like a solid science-fantasy plot with their relationship story, this is just the right meter. It's not all about sex. But the sex is not gratuitous. The action plot wouldn't hold together without it.

In the Allie Beckstrom universe Devon Monk has created, "magic" is a force or power, somewhat like electricity, that can be captured and distributed by conduits (a utility) beneath the city's streets. There are university courses in business magic. Science still works. Cell phones die in Allie's hands. The attitude toward using magic is scientific.

You "draw on" magic or use it by the usual spells, mantras, and symbols, but USING MAGIC COMES WITH A PRICE.

The "price" is some sort of physical illness or dysfunction that hits with the rebound. It can be magically diverted onto another person, (thematic moral complications there!). For Allie, the worst effect of using lots of magic is that she loses pieces of her memory. In the second book, she's lost a piece of memory that might include having sex with this Hunk -- or not. He knows. She doesn't. He's not telling.

Allie Beckstrom is the daughter (and heir) of the man who owns the patents on this technology. He had several wives after her mother divorced him. The latest, whom Allie is only now meeting, owns a quarter of the business, Allie owns more than half (but hasn't gained possession yet), and the other ex-wives split the rest. (this is sooo Robert A. Heinlien and sooo modern all at once!)

Allie is accused of her father's murder (there's magical proof she did it but she didn't.)

A man her father hired to tail her, (and who her current step-mother separately hired for other reasons) is a potential Soul Mate, our Hunk, but she doesn't know that. They are magically suited to one another very much like a certain kind of pairing of channel and Companion in my Sime~Gen Universe, called Match Mates.

( http://www.simegen.net not included in the 4 titles I have available on Kindle)

This guy is one luscious hunk you have got to meet! Mystery Man Extraordinaire. Allie has almost broken free of being dependent on her father whose morals she doesn't like when this Hunk appears, and she can't figure him out.

From there her life gets almost as complicated as mine!

OK, there you go. Find copies of these novels and devour them.

This is my kind of stuff - neither SF nor Fantasy nor Romance, but all three in nicely balanced proportions, with a main protag with dire and terrible complicated problems that are as much ethical and moral as they are physical (plenty people want her dead).

Allie reminds me of Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files novels that I rave about here and in my review column, but her love-life puts a whole new spin on it.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Is that really you?

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

This Monday post is not by Linnea Sinclair who is well, but frantically busy.

Today I ( Jacqueline Lichtenberg ) am posting for you a Guest Blog by Linda Welch.

I ran into her on Twitter as http://twitter.com/welch6331 (who knows how? That's how twitter works; connects the most improbable people in improbable ways!)

I became intrigued by her description of her current novel. I confess I didn't expect it to be any good because it wasn't from an editor or publicist whose endorsement I rely on.

OK, so I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to high standards in fiction.

I was not really surprised though when I discovered IT WAS TERRIFIC! These off-brand nooks and crannies of the spreading apron of publishing are "where" all the really really REALLY good stuff went. Today a few writers are fighting to get that good stuff back into the big bookstores, and I think we're winning. Where we're not winning, the little side-channels of publishing are expanding and reaching larger audiences.

So you can't ignore the edges of the publishing field. You have to mine any vein you find, and I found one!

Linda Welch is a byline to memorize. Linda Welch is a terrific writer. And what's more, Linda Welch is definitely on our wavelength with Alien Romance.

Here are links to her novels on Amazon so you can read about them, and then there's a few words by Linda you will want to pay attention to.

Along Came a Demon on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Along-Came-Demon-Whisperings-1/dp/1449590845/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258761746&sr=1-2

Along Came a Demon Kindle Edition
http://www.amazon.com/Along-Came-Demon-Whisperings-ebook/dp/B002HWSVIM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1247960486&sr=1-1

The Demon Hunters on Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Hunters-Whisperings-2/dp/1448697433/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260381056&sr=1-6

The Demon Hunters Kindle Edition
http://www.amazon.com/THE-DEMON-HUNTERS-Whisperings-ebook/dp/B002WYJPKI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1258423720&sr=1-2

-----------And Here's Linda!----------
The question I get asked most by my Twitter and Facebook followers? Am I the tall, slim, long-haired woman seen on my avatar? One Tweeter commented: “Your hair is beautiful.” A local journalist asked: “Is that really your butt?” followed by: “I find it very relaxing.” Much as I’d like to lay claim to having a “relaxing” bottom—or maybe not—sorry, no, that’s not me. She is Tiff Banks, the star of Along Came a Demon and The Demon Hunters, respectively books one and two of my Whisperings series of paranormal mysteries. I am nothing like her. Well, okay, the world of the supernatural is not foreign to me, but I don’t (at the moment) see Demons, and I haven’t seen a dead person in a few years.

I like to think Tiff is a little different to currently popular urban-fantasy heroines. Tiff knows nothing of the martial arts, and although she carries a gun, she’s no markswoman. Living as she does in the mountains of northern Utah, if she wore micro-skirts and revealing tops she’d freeze her butt off in winter. She’d break her ankle if she wore four-inch heels while trying to run down a suspect. Not that she’s homely; in fact six-foot-two Tiff with her long silver hair and pale skin is a striking figure, and a startling contrast to her new partner, a tall, copper-skinned Demon with glittering eyes and copper-gold hair. Detective Royal Mortensen will be a major player in Tiff’s life, but can an exotic Demon and a small-town Utah girl have a compatible relationship?

No, Tiff is not a butt-kicking, nerves-of-steel heroine, but she has a good head on her shoulders, unflagging determination, and an advantage other criminal investigators lack. She sees the dead victims of violent crime, who are earth-bound until their killer dies. To Tiff they look like regular people, and their whispering voices are the only means by which she identifies them. As they linger, waiting to pass over, their “life” consists of watching what goes on around them, and in return for a little of Tiff’s time, a little conversation, they’ll tell her what they see and hear. With the help of her spectral informers, Tiff will solve cases which leave the local police department baffled.

Having written the above, I realize I am something like Tiff Banks. From where does Tiff get her logical mind, if not from me? From where come her likes and dislikes, her opinions, her take on the world around her, if not from me? Like Tiff, I’m impatient and by nature suspicious. Like Tiff, I can be doggedly determined. Although I do not share my home with two dead people, I do know living people as irritatingly needy as Tiff’s roommates Jack and Mel, and my husband can be remarkably zombie-like when parked in front of the television. And I admit I might be just a touch cranky until I get my first cup of coffee in the morning.

If only I had Tiff’s figure, and her sexy Demon partner. . . .

In praise of underwear (in speculative romance)

Good quality underwear is absolutely essential to a speculative Romance writer. I am not talking about erotica, nor about everyone's grandmother's admonition to wear clean underwear for fear of being knocked down by an omnibus.

The best Fantasy underwear ever, in my opinion, was Frodo's mithril undershirt. We readers knew he had it, but by the time he needed it, we'd forgotten that he'd got it on. It allowed everyone to think that he'd been killed by the most dreadful, invincible weapon, and after we were emotionally wrung out over the loss, it allowed us to believe that he'd survived.

It could have supernatural qualities, and did, but because the Elves made it, and they were made plausible, and because it was underwear and therefore out of sight and out of mind, I found it plausible.

Magic underwear could be the modern and futuristic deus ex machina.

Certainly, Electra-Djerroldina's futuristic "chastity belt" was inspired by mithril (Knight's Fork). It allowed me to retain all the restrictions that my alien romance plot required, yet did not oblige my heroine to clank or rust. In the interests of coming clean with my characters' underwear, Djetth in Insufficient Mating Material sported trunk briefs very similar to what a seven foot tall basketball player might endorse. Tarrant-Arragon wore something half way between a loin cloth and a kilt.

In a waiting room the other day, I indulged in highly risky behavior and read a magazine. It might have been "People". Carrie Fisher gave a revealing interview, and disclosed her feelings when Star Wars wardrobing showed her the brown bikini she had to wear as Jabba The Hut's slave.

I remember what I felt when I saw it. I was not convinced. Why would a nudist like Jabba make his slave girl wear a bikini? What would a futuristic, tyrant Heff do? Of course, we couldn't have Princess Leia looking like she worked for Hooters. I understand the political problem. I think I might have draped her in veils...

Where are we going with underwear in sfr? It is going to change, I assume. Look how much underwear has evolved and changed in the last couple of hundred years. I cannot imagine thongs lasting into the future. Can you? They're neither comfortable nor functional, are they? And there's not a lot of room for magic.

If our bodies become more perfectly sculpted, will we need underwear? If we try to save more energy, will we wear more thermal underwear and look more like the heroes and heroines of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers?

By the way, will we wash less often? I saw in Discovery Magazine that unwashed, greasy hair absorbs harmful ozone. Making an environmentally responsible choice to wash less often also reduces water usage, and reduces the quantities of soapy reside and other chemicals going down the drain and ultimately out to sea.

Maybe we'll use more disposable tear-off strips. "Always" for his and for her gussets. What are you seeing your heroes and heroines of the future in?

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

I love writing Time Travels. Except for the fact that they give me a major headache when I'm working on the plot. Thinking of all the repercussions of going to the past to change the future is really difficult. Still I was thrilled to be invited to be a part of The Mammoth Book of Time Travel. (psst if the link doesn't work just look for it on Amazon.)

My story is about Rand Brock, a Texas Ranger investigating a mysterious death and disappearance in West Texas during the 1880's. Imagine his surpise when he's taking a bath in a stream and comes face to face with Shea, a Time Cop from the future. You must read the story to find out what happens but I will let you in on one part of the plot. Steam Punk Scorpions.

I hope you enjoy reading Time Trails as much as I enjoyed writing it.

"Allure of the Beast"

Amber Quill Press has just published my short, spicy werewolf romance, “Allure of the Beast,” in their Amber Heat line. Check out the fantastic cover:

Allure of the Beast

Amber Quill is also the publisher of my full-length werewolf novel, SHADOW OF THE BEAST, a horror story (with romantic elements) about a woman in her early twenties who discovers she inherited lycanthropy from her long-lost father. “Allure of the Beast” started as sort of a re-thinking of this premise. Erin, the heroine of this new piece, has known since her teens, when she began to transform, that her father is a werewolf, and she has been in touch with him. But she resents his leaving when she was a baby and wants as little as possible to do with her werewolf nature. When dashing lone wolf Raoul shows up to inform her that the new alpha male has killed her father, she is forced to deal with the pack and embrace her beast nature.

The motif of a character suspended between the human and nonhuman realms, like Spock in STAR TREK, has always enthralled me—hence my human-vampire hybrid protagonists in DARK CHANGELING, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, and “Night Flight.” Erin in “Allure of the Beast” is another of these.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Worldbuilding By Committee

Here is an AP news story I found on Yahoo. Look it up. It's relevant to the point here.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091215/ap_on_sc/as_australia_coconut_octopus

It sent me scrambling through my collectible Hardcover SF looking for one of my favorite books because I couldn't remember the author's name (probably a pseudonym and I probably knew it some years ago; might be Murry Leinster as he had many bylines used only once or twice).

The article is about Australian Scientists who have observed a species of octopus that collects coconut shells from the ocean bottom, selects ones broken in half, and carries them back to a specific spot, then constructs a shelter between two halves.

This shows tool use. There's a cognitive function revealed by the collecting for LATER USE. The octopus gains no shelter from a half it is in the process of carrying. It's only later that shelter can be provided, after manipulating two halves.

It doesn't sound like much, but the news story says that the octopus is among the most intelligent invertebrates, and this is a new discovery of tool use. I don't know how long its been considered "intelligent for an invertebrate."

I stared at this article in astonishment, vividly remembering one of my favorite books (from back in the day when there were no female characters in SF except as victims).

THE LOST PLANET by PAUL DALLAS (1956) is the novel, and there are a couple of used copies on Amazon.

Try this link.

The Lost Planet

The Lost Planet about a young boy who goes with his father to a planet where there are non-human natives who look like the octopus. They have an amphibious civilization. The boy makes friends with the child of the native ruler, and that changes the course of the relationship between the planets. Yeah, it's an old story, but this is an old book -- and one of the many influences on me.

At the time I read this book, nobody had yet told me that if "he" could do it, that meant "I" could not because I'm a girl. So as far as I was concerned I was the human making friends with the alien and fixing the mess the adults made of things.

But that's not what I remember about this book. I don't remember reading any OTHER SF novels that used the octopus as the model for an alien species.

And now it seems we've observed tool use by several octopuses.

Where is the SF written today that's predicting such impossible things?

Well, folks, TWITTER may be the place where you'll find such bold thinking turned into SF/F.

No, I'm not kidding. This is for real. It's here. It's now. You're invited.

For more on twitter, social networking, and how Web 2.0+ is changing the business of being a writer (an SF prediction of yore), check out my prior blog entries:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

And

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

So here is the latest installment on the impact of Web 2.0 and beyond (are we up to 4.0 yet?)

Last Friday afternoon, I participated in a twitter "chat" with a publisher who has asked a group of writers to build a world for a shared world anthology and then write stories for the anthology.

Twitter chat works like this.

On the right of your Twitter browser window there's a slot called search which searches all tweets posted on twitter, even those not from people you are connected to (i.e. people whose tweets you see) or people who are connected to you (people whose tweets you don't see but who do see your tweets).

You can search the whole public stream of twitter for a certain keyword, and then see a list of posts with that keyword. As new posts with that keyword appear, the list of posts you're looking at flows before your eyes, and you see whole conversations.

So tweeters invented "hashtags" and twitter accomodated them as keywords. A "hash" is the # mark, and "tag" is a word related to the subject somehow.

Now all kinds of domains are offering twitter utilities that make this "chat" function easier. I am exploring hootsuite.com

So this publisher who is on twitter as @DavidRozansky ( http://www.flyingpenpress.com/ ) has been running #sfchat as a Friday afternoon feature for some time, where his authors chat.

He's been playing with hashtags to create different streams of conversations, and came up with the idea for creating a shared world anthology via twitter hashtag chat. He named this chat-stream #sfchatworld, and held the first meeting Friday afternoon.

I hadn't attended the previous chats he'd held, but this concept (collaborative worldbuilding) was irresistible (see my Web 2.0 posts to see why it hooks me so). The working chat was to last only 2 hours. I cleared my schedule!

David Rozansky has posted the raw chat log at:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977943165

Right in the middle of this, when it got really creative, one of the chatters piped up with the suggestion that we enable this discussion as a "Wave" on google wave.

Google Wave may be the advent of Web 4.0, but it's still in beta and works irregularly for me.

People jumped on that idea of using Google Wave with JOY. A few minutes later the enabler called for people to give their google wave addresses and started a Wave where people could side-chat the chat.

Only problem is, I had barely paid attention to Google Wave. I didn't know what it was or how it worked or why it might be useful, and I didn't have the credential they wanted to sign me into their Wave, nor know how to get that credential (except I knew someone had to invite you to be a beta tester), so I continued to read and comment on the twitter thread.

At the end of 2 hours, the group of creative, well educated, amazingly talented, and broadly read folks had come up with the charcoal sketch of a "world" that they could build together and all find stories to tell within the boundaries of that world.

Here's the deal.

The worldbuilding chat sessions (another on Friday Dec 18, 2009) were started by David's invitation to about 60 writers, and they were open to anyone else on twitter. Since for the most part, our cryptic tweets went to all our followers (often over 1,000 people apiece), a number of non-participants watched this process, and a couple ducked into the thread to say it was very interesting. You can come watch the second chat session. Follow @DavidRozansky for the announcement of the hashtag, most likely #scifichat or #sfchatworld

David Rozansky intends to select from submitted stories so that the anthology he's creating will end up about 50% established professionals and 50% new voices.

The concept is that we collectively will create the world, then anyone who wants to submit to it will send him a story. When the world has been created, the story-length and anthology length and other terms will be determined. Just participating in the worldbuilding and submitting a story does not mean your story will be accepted. This is a "real" publisher, with the usual stringent standards.

So having seen that this suddenly created world-by-committee was actually something I could write a story in, and having "met" via twitter a couple of the very lively participants, and particularly one who apparently likes all the stuff we focus on at alienromances.blogspot.com (Star Trek, Marion Zimmer Bradley, C. J. Cherryh, Katherine Kurtz, etc etc) @PennyAsh then I decided I'd like to attend the next chat and keep up on the conversation. I'd like to frame a story that would dovetail into PennyAsh's story seamlessly, so they make a pair.

So on Sunday, I fished out the invitation to Google Wave that my friend Patric had sent me some weeks ago (it ended up in google's spam trap! they trapped their own mail!), and flung myself into Wave.

I still don't understand Google Wave well, and my display (it displays in a window in your browser) flicks up and down wildly, or won't respond to scrolling, sometimes doesn't accept my entries, and I type ahead of the cursor about two lines. It's slow, balky, and everything you'd expect of a beta version (which this is and google makes it clear they're working on it, so report problems but don't complain).

Google Wave does have some features that will make it an excellent collaborative tool, though. You can not only edit your own entries but you can edit someone else's entries after they've made them.

You can add a comment directly under someone's comment to make an exchange that makes sense, rather than the usual chat where every comment comes after the previous one even if it refers to one 10 comments before. You can do that on some blog comments lists, such as on Yahoo Buzz. But this is the first time I've seen it in chat (I generally only use AIM and IRC).

So a "Wave" is a constantly moving document you create on the fly, more like a mural than a thread.

Patric told me nicknames for the cells that contain your comment, and for the comments, but I don't remember!

Patric tells me the Wave stream's data resides on google's server, not your computer, so that's why you can cross-edit. This is a powerful concept that will probably spread. But I have broadband cable, zippity fast service, and still this thing lags beyond usefulness.

And yes, Google is much in the news for invasion of privacy, and apparently this is one of those invasive tools they are inventing.

So no matter what happens with the shared-world anthology (which doesn't have a title yet), I've gained a new dimension to my social networking.

The problem with that is simply that it is yet one more thing that soaks up time.

But if Google Wave takes over, everything we do on social networking will be gathered together.

I've been wondering if Google Wave works better in Google Chrome. I've been using firefox because I found IE8 absolutely unusable (probably because of my antique computer).

So now there is a public Google Wave inventing a shared world in which many authors will participate. You can check for the summary of this new world that's being built. The summary is called #sfchat on Wave. The discussion wave is called Contact List For

They're both public at the moment, but don't ask me how to access them. I'm not sure how it happened that the shared worlds chat appeared before my eyes!

See? Isn't that exactly what the boy hero of The Last Planet experienced upon debarking at his new abode? ADVENTURE! And a new chance to make cool friends. He had no idea how the spaceship worked.

The Shared World

As for the World that's the product of a committee, so far it lacks a certain cohesive polish, but it's broad enough to work within.

If you read the raw transcript linked above here, you will see how the different writers were pulling in different directions until the editor saw a consensus building and declared this or that element accepted.

If you're studying worldbuilding, you might want to look carefully at the point where I commented on the difference between world building and adding the societal and social tensions that would generate conflict and characters for a story.

Worldbuilding doesn't have to be the first step in writing a story, and in fact rarely is.

So many of the people diving into this exercise went right to stories they wanted to tell, and perhaps characters they were already writing that they thought might have an adventure in this "world" and wanted to do what I always do, build the world around the character and story.

But "worldbuilding" is a very different exercise than "storytelling."

A "world" doesn't have "a conflict" or "a theme" -- a "world" by definition has all conflicts and all themes within it, or it's not a world.

And yet, all the writers participating in this chat seemed to have their own story trope in the forefront of their minds as they suggested parameters for the "world."

Often "world" and "setting" were confused. The World includes all the Settings you can put stories against.

People wanted to start by inventing themes, motifs, (and one person even did contribute a REFRAIN that I can use that the editor grabbed onto -- "I'm tired of Jupiter" and someone contributed graphics on the Google Wave thread with "I'm tired of Jupiter because" and that went around through the twitter chat.)

So again, read the raw twitter feed to see all the different ways creative minds approach the charcoal sketch phase of writing a story.

It's all helter-skelter and criss-crossing dance steps, but you can see that most of these people actually have perfected their own personal ways of going about this.

"Worldbuilding" can be likened to dressmaking. What we were doing last Friday is the line-drawing sketch for the dress. What we'll be doing next Friday is very likely creating the tissue paper pattern that will be mass produced and handed out to contributing writers to create stories.

Finding the social and psychological and cultural CONFLICT, the THEME, the CHARACTERS, and even the specific SETTING, is very much like hunting through bolts of material and racks of notions for the specific colors and styles to generate a specific dress from this pattern. (you could make a wedding dress or a nightgown out of the same pieces of tissue paper).

If this shared world anthology works out, it could become something totally new, and could contribute that element I asked for above, the exploration of the edges of the laws of science, the extrapolations -- the "what if; if only; if this goes on" revealing the next 50 years.

Yes, you've seen many successful mass market paperback shared-world anthologies, often with big name writers participating. I was present when some of those shared-worlds popped into existence, effortlessly, during well lubricated SF convention conversations among writers and editors who knew each other.

But this Twitter thing has brought together people who barely know each other except by twitter-@ and have not all been trained by the same editors. They work in disparate media, and many have screencredits and music as well as a variety of podcasting projects behind them.

The "Art By Committee" label pretty much originated with the film industry as a way of novel writers scoffing at the thin, childishly over-simplified results of a story-in-pictures.

And it's still true that deep, complex, nuanced, incisive stories painted on a truly broad canvass, still do better in text than video. (that may be changing real soon now!)

Video and text story-telling seem to me (futurology here) to be evolving along a converging path. When I read The Last Planet I was already living in a world where novel type stories could be told on screen. To me, TV and text had to be used together to really tell a story. We saw that world start to emerge when Star Trek fans launched fanzine fiction, mostly stories that explained the contradictions we saw on screen.

Those contradictions were mostly just mistakes that happened because of the haste and budget limitations of a TV show, but an SF trained imagination could explain them given enough text words to elaborate. We reveled in dueling one explanation against another, generating whole splinter universes.

This twitter chat process I participated in on Friday was just like what a hired team of writers would go through when creating a TV show from scratch. So far the parameters are broad enough to accommodate stories from every genre ever invented or criss-crossed into another genre, except that because the "world" is set across the galaxy in the system of a gas giant and its moons, and involves at least one (probably more) alien lifeforms, most readers would force the stories into the SF genre. But today's audiences are more sophisticated. I don't think the audiences of the near future will assume that just because it's set in space, it's SF. Or just because it has a vampire in it, it must be horror.

If done right, this anthology could become a webisode series, or even a TV series, or video game using all media to tell a multi-faceted story. Each medium could add what it portrays best, all under David Rozansky's very capable hand.

We are participating in the birth of a new entertainment medium with new uses for our million year old skills.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

AN OFFICER AND...

2010 is going to be the start of a rather busy on-line workshop year for me. I’m starting by co-teaching a workshop on building space/fantasy militaries with a beta-reader of mine, Michael L. Helfstein. USNR (retired). You can find a complete list on my website in NEWS . But I want to talk about—and, yes, promo a bit—the upcoming class on building militaries and military characters.

First, I have absolutely no military experience. That’s what Mikey’s for. But I am and have been a consumer of military stories, from romance to SF to action-adventure, from Weber to Brockmann to Dees, and more. I think that in order to write a good military character it takes both parts: a knowledge of the “world” you’re building, and a knowledge of reader expectations.

Thanks to my new nook, I received as a freebie download a copy of David Sherman’s and Dan Cragg’s first book in their STARFIST series—essentially, the Marine Corps in space. I’ve only read book #1—just downloaded book #2 this morning—but as an avid Suzanne Brockmann fan I related to the military descriptions and authenticity, but the plotting and, oy, head-hopping didn’t work for me. The characters did, eventually, enough that I ordered book #2 and likely will read more in the series because I definitely respect Sherman’s and Cragg’s street creds as former military. And if I was simply a purist SF reader and had never read more character-driven genres, I wouldn’t have felt cheated by the way the book was crafted. Or rather, my reader expectations would have been different and, likely, satisfied.

You see, it’s all about reader expectations and that’s something I don’t think we’ve touched on as much when we talk about world building here.

And it’s not just the romance angle, so please don’t bring that out as the only tune a female can dance to. My expectations have been met by Huff’s VALOR series, Moon’s VATTA’S WAR series, Weber’s HONOR HARRINGTON series. Not one is romance. I’ve also had fun reading David Drake’s LT LEARY series. Again, no romance, though definitely lighter in tone than STARFIST.

The difference between the books is the emphasis on character vs. world building. Not that Sherman and Cragg don’t have some memorable characters: Charlie Bass is a terrific hero. But I kept looking for a key central protagonist to latch on to and by book’s end, realized there really wasn’t one. There was Dean, there was Bass, there were other characters I thought might be central who then—yikes!—ended up getting killed off.

Surrounding all that was a lot of military structure, some neat tech stuff, and some interesting song lyrics. There were lots of words spent on the authors telling the reader about military structure and why the characters were doing or doing to do something or the other. There was, sadly to my way of thinking, far less showing the characters doing those things.

That perhaps can be chalked up to reader expectations. The ubiquitous (and I do believe this is changing) sixteen-year-old male SF reader is more attuned to reading manuals than fiction. Character development is dropped in favor of technical detail.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As long as that’s what your readership wants.

And that’s why I think reader expectations must be inexorably a part of whatever world building you do. But to do that, you need to know your readership; you need to know the likes and dislikes of the readers who would pick up your book.

Writing cross-genre, that’s not always an easy thing to suss out. I would love to have Sherman’s and Bragg’s knowledge to integrate into my books, mostly for the verisimilitude but also to draw in the wider range of readers. But I know I’d risk losing some readers as well. While I eagerly soaked up much of the military techs and specs and routines early in the first STARFIST book, I found by mid-book I wanted, now, more of the characters. I wanted to see them arguing about mission strategy rather than being told that certain strategy launched an argument, with emphasis being on mission details rather than on character action.

Sherman and Bragg had built the world for me. Now I wanted to see and feel the characters moving around in it (and yes, the ending chapters were ones where they did, and they were great fun!).

On the other side of the spectrum has been the charge that many futuristics and SFRs fail in their depiction and execution of technical and military details. “Sloppy science” is the criticism I’ve often seen, but also a failure in accuracy in military elements. While it can be maintained that the average romance reader doesn’t care about such things (and I do believe this too is changing), I think failure in those areas does weaken world building. When I read a romance set in Victorian England, I want to hear, feel, smell, and taste Victorian England. When I read a romance set on a military battleship in some distant galaxy, I want to hear, feel, smell, and taste life on board that battleship.

So my upcoming workshop in January with Lt. Commander Helfstein will strive to hit that middle ground. Mikey will provide the Sherman- and Bragg-like details. I’ll do my best to help students turn that detail into page-turning, character-based action.

And then I’ll reward myself by reading the second STARFIST book.
~Linnea

REBELS AND LOVERS, March 2010: Book 4 in the Dock Five Universe, from Bantam Books and Linnea Sinclair—www.linneasinclair.com

Kaidee hated when her ship didn’t work. Dead in space was not a place she liked to be. Especially with an unknown bogie on her tail, closing at a disturbingly fast rate of speed that made her heart pound in her chest and her throat go dry.


PS: Yes, I love my nook but then, I’ve long been an e-book fan and was previously reading on a small Dell Axim X50.

PPS: More info on the workshop HERE.

SFR Holiday Blitz... and the Alien Romances winner is

Elorie Alton.

Elorie, congratulations! Please contact Rowena Cherry with your mailing address.
Leave a comment, which we will not publish, if you prefer.

Thank you very much to everyone who supported the "Blitz" and who left a comment.

Sincerely,
Rowena Cherry

Superior Species

The question of whether vampires would have the “right” to treat us as mere prey or livestock, which I touched on last week, is something I’ve thought about a lot, since the issue impinges on my fiction as well as forming a major theme in much of the fiction I read. I’ve never thought of, “I’m physically and mentally superior to you, not to mention immortal” as a valid excuse for “using” another sapient being. Dr. Weyland in Suzy McKee Charnas’ THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY regards Homo sapiens as livestock, while Miriam in THE HUNGER thinks of some human beings as pets, but in either case the prey or pet has no rights. Again, would we approve of extraterrestrials who treated us that way? The aliens in the TV series “V” and the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode “To Serve Man” eat human beings, and the audience is clearly expected to consider them villains for doing so.

Amusing twist on this point in Heinlein’s PODKAYNE OF MARS, by the way: The narrator mentions to an interplanetary tourist that Venusians have sometimes been known to eat Terrans. The other person exclaims in horror at the idea of Venusian “cannibals.” Podkayne says they aren’t cannibals—they don’t eat each other, just us.

That a superior species should feel free to use us the way we use most animals would imply that “superiority” within the human species would justify treating, for instance, people with below-average intelligence like animals. Cultures that have taken this attitude, such as Nazi Germany, are generally classified as evil. Controversial bioethicist Peter Singer, as a champion of “animal rights,” maintains that species should be irrelevant; intellectual and emotional capacity should determine the treatment to which an individual is entitled. Accordingly, he thinks a healthy chimpanzee should have more rights than a human fetus or a severely disabled human child. I don’t agree, but I have to admire the consistency of his convictions. At the same time, though I don’t think chimps should have “human rights,” I’m repelled by the idea of eating them (as some cultures do)—same with such complex creatures as elephants or dolphins.

Someone at the Darkover vampire panel suggested that if I were starving, I wouldn’t hesitate to eat a dolphin. That comment, naturally, brought up the topic of shipwrecked sailors and stranded pioneers devouring their human companions. Although such acts might be excused in cases of desperation, we don’t actually approve of them. Nor does our culture approve of slavery nowadays, another practice that used to be defended on the grounds of "superior" and "inferior" groups.

People who believe angels exist hold that they’re far above us in the chain of being. Yet they aren’t supposed to mistreat us. Angels who do that are called demons. C. S. Lewis in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS postulates that demons feed on life energy (especially negative emotions such as pain and fear), ours and that of lesser devils.

My vampires don’t have to kill when they feed on human prey (or donors). Those who do are condemned for drawing attention to their kind, and vampires who kill with sloppy conspicuousness, if caught by the elders, are punished. Still, most vampires do think of us as merely very intelligent, useful animals. The vampire heroes of my novels, of course, are the exceptions among their race. They’re capable of recognizing some human beings—or at least one, the beloved—as potential equals.

That kind of relationship brings up another ethical problem: If your vampire lover (or werewolf, demon, ET alien, etc.) treats you as an equal but still thinks of everybody else as lower animals, are you morally justified in overlooking this fact and embracing your status as the exception? Suzy McKee Charnas touches on this issue in the provocative essay “The Beast’s Embrace” in the “Byways” area of her website:
Suzy McKee Charnas

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt