Cuckoos

So, you want to take over a world. Are you sure? It's been done. No point reinventing the wheel.

Assuming that you have identified a suitable world, and are certain that it is right for you,

your first "tough choice" is going to be about the mess.

You're taking property away from those who already own the world.

They're not going to like it.

How will you handle their objections to being taken over?

Do you want to kill them, enslave them, infiltrate them, or assimilate them?

Does your choice depend on how easily duped your targets are? How docile? How useful? How many?

Will you pass yourself off as one of them, and destroy them from within?

(Cuckoo model. Convergence model. Sith.)

Will you conquer by force of arms and assimilate as far as pragmatic?

(Romans, Christians, Normans, European Empires)

Will you eradicate as many of them as possible, and settle the new land?

(War of The Worlds, Independence Day, Sauron. Conquistadors.)

Can you live side by side, making use of them?

(The Time Machine. Parasite model.)

Dhimmitude model

(Dhimmitude is a system of taxing aliens while encouraging aliens who wish to avoid taxation to convert.)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/exemptions.asp

Beauty/Beast model

Most babies are irresistibly cute, even babies of another species. Presumably, one could infiltrate and conquer

through love of the alien as a baby until the adoptive parents are vulnerable to tyranny.

(Tribbles. Gremlins. Cuckoos again?)

Washington Watch This

You may have noticed heated discussions about "COICA"

This is what it is:
S.3804 -- Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (Introduced in Senate - IS)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.3804:

I won't summarize it. It's not a long document. Moreover, as you read the bill itself, there is a function (look for the + sign in square brackets) so that you can submit your own comments.

There is also a comments page (2 pages, now) where copyright owners are voicing their opinions of pirates and their own suggestions for what needs to be done about internet copyright infringement.

http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/111_SN_3804.html?page=2#commentform

If you don't like the bill as written, suggest improvements! It's your right, and a unique opportunity.

Teens, Trekkies, and Heroic Ideal

I remember back when I was just a reader I thought authors knew everything about their worlds and how they worked.  Naturally, authors who’ve been around know a whole lot, but I’m a brand new baby author and, let me tell you, I feel pretty stupid most of the time.  Much of what I do know I learned right here on this blog, like Theme. 

Ophelia is a Trekkie.  She’s the heroine of my YA SFR, Sugar Rush.  Why is she a Trekkie?  It all comes down to Theme.  The story’s theme is Achieving the Freedom to Live.

Ophelia and her sister are obsessed with movies.  They live in a small, isolated Alaskan town.  Movies, via a massive DVD collection, and the Internet are their windows to the world.  Ophelia’s favorite movies happen to be Star Trek.  Ophelia went to a real movie theater in the big city when she was diagnosed with diabetes at age nine and her sister has never been to one. 

This brings to mind a hilarious movie starring Eddie Murphy, Daddy Daycare.  He’s an unemployed dad who opens a daycare with a friend. (I used to be a professional childcare provider, so I loved this movie.) 

After overcoming some initial bias against male childcare providers, they begin caring for a few children.  One little boy seems to speak only gibberish.  When Eddie must hire a new dad-care provider, the new employee, a Trekkie, immediately recognizes that the little boy is speaking Klingon, a fictional language from the Star Trek universe.  Very sweet, but I was most intrigued by the little boy who constantly wears a superhero costume.  He wears the costume of a superhero, because he’s working through his fear of the new daycare situation.  A superhero fears nothing, you know.  Once the little boy learns to trust his new caregivers, he takes off the costume. 

The bad guys have Ophelia cornered like an animal in Sugar Rush.  She’s a smart girl desperate to be free, but she hasn’t figured out her own strengths or how to use them.  Like the little boy wearing the superhero costume, she clutches a Captain Janeway Christmas tree ornament (her boyfriend gave it to her) at her father’s funeral in the first half of the book.  Her courage matures over the course of the story, however, and by the last battle she’s on her own.

A hero or heroic ideal helps even an adult focus and believe in themselves.  In the story, it’s not enough for Ophelia to have a perfect grade point average.  She needs to believe herself capable. 

And that is why Ophelia is a Trekkie.

Speaking of heroes, the authors of this blog helped me believe I could achieve publication too, and here I am!  A great, big, huge THANK YOU!

Kimber An

Technology Predictions

There's an article in the fall issue of the Phi Beta Kappa newsletter called "The Manifold Problems of Technology Forecasting," by Andrew Odlyzko. Two important points the author makes: That "what people do with technology differs widely from what inventors had in mind" and that instead of replacing old technologies, new ones "frequently serve to strengthen their predecessors." One example he cites is the relationship between railroads and horses. Contrary to expectation, the railroad didn't make the horse obsolete, because the need for transportation to the railheads created a bigger market for horse-drawn transportation. Referring to more recent developments, he refutes the prediction that faster communication would result in less need for transportation, for instance, that the Internet would enable telecommunication to replace physical presence and thus get traffic off the roads. So far, it hasn't happened. He argues against the belief that transportation and communication are "substitutes for each other." Instead, they're complementary.

The example that first comes to mind for me is television. Television didn't kill radio. Nor did it kill movies, as might have been expected. The movie industry found ways to use TV to its advantage. Similarly, I don't have any fear that new media will destroy the book, nor that e-books will make paper books obsolete any time soon.

As for the effect of new media on reading in general, Isaac Asimov pointed out decades ago that the percentage of the population who are dedicated readers (as opposed to reading when there's absolutely nothing else to do, or not reading at all except when forced to, for information) has always been a tiny minority. What changes from one era to the next is what kind of entertainment they choose instead of books. We might even argue that the rise of the Internet means more people are reading more than ever before, even if not the kind of sustained, long-format reading a novel invites.

As for new technology's being used differently from how the inventors had in mind, the Internet, of course, was first developed for military applications. And I wonder whether anyone who saw the first automobiles take to the road around 1900 would have predicted suburban "sprawl," the impact of oil on the global economy, or the car's profound effect on American courtship patterns?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window

It's OK if you don't want to read this because it's polluted with Glenn Beck.

But this is about a novel written entirely for commercial purposes targeting a very specific and huge audience that's been #1 on Amazon and NYTimes and gosh knows where else for weeks and weeks. It's about how and why that sales record was achieved, not about politics.

I have loads of opinions about the persona Glenn Beck shows on TV, positive, negative, neutral, plus professional opinions and a lot more opinions -- all of which are irrelevant to the point of this blog post, but let's get some of them out of the way first.

1. He says things I know to be true about American History
2. He says things I know to be false about American History
3. He says things I know to be irrelevant about American History
4. He says things I know to be uninteresting about current events
5. He says things I know to be highly commercial, very slick pitches
6. He says things I DO NOT KNOW and have to go look up.
7. He says things I forgot but really need to keep in mind.
8. He says things I need to create an opinion about, but don't have one
9. He says things I'd rather not create an opinion about
10. He does NOT say the things I would like to hear him say, and the lack puts his work in the "Failure of Imagination" category I've blogged about here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html

He digs up facts and carefully leaves out facts so the scattering of facts will seem to make sense and then lead people to a particular conclusion.

But if you include all the facts, you would come to a different conclusion.

I have opinions about the conclusions he appears to be leading his audience to but my opinions don't matter one whit.

If I understand the mechanism of what he's doing correctly, he's not leading that audience, he's following it by careful analysis of instant ratings of his shows. His techniques are worthy of careful study by anyone who wants to gather a pro-Romance readership into a coherent force in the commercial world.

Professional writers study like this for a living. Leave your opinions at the door like muddy galoshes and walk into someone else's life.

Glenn Beck's pick-and-choose facts to make a point is the technique used in every textbook I can think of offhand. I use it myself, on this blog, to clarify writing craft issues, and to put some spring in the springboards I build into story-ideas I hope someone will dive into.

Pick-n-choose is a technique which is fun and works fine if everyone is in on the joke, as I pointed out here where I discussed how history is being lost:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/emigrating-to-future.html

Glenn Beck and the organization behind him are really, really GOOD at "working" his audience. I can see that because sometimes on a couple of things I'm part of that audience. I'm just the sort who doesn't like to be "worked" so I wait to get the point, then flip the channel.

But the "Glenn Beck Phenomenon" is something to be studied, carefully.

It's not worth forming a political opinion about the content of Beck's shows. But it's worth studying that content because it reveals a great deal about audiences, not just his audience.

Read my post on targeting a readership, and the posts cited in it.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html

Here though we are focusing on finding and engaging an audience.  We are not focusing on "who" Glenn Beck is or wants to be.

Occasionally, I have the TV on when he's on and I comparison shop news broadcasts, surfing from one channel to another to avoid commercials or analyze commercials. Sometimes I watch most of his segments, though, and it is very instructive.

As a writer, I don't see or hear the same things readers and viewers do. I see an entirely different world, a world of mechanisms that produce illusions rather than the illusions themselves.

Beck produces and projects a powerful illusion which I'm certain has nothing at all to do with who he really is.

His technique would work for any subject. He's combined the "reality show" with the "news commentary" shows that have become so popular.

I could fill this blog with an analysis of the acting, directing, writing, and research on his TV show. But why bother? I'm not in the business of shaping your opinions!

I just want you to notice
a) that he's invented a genre
b) that he's popularized it just as we want to popularize SFR and PNR

I would recommend, though, that if you don't understand what that "Glenn Beck" TV show is, take a look at the spiffy, flashy glennbeck.com top page.

Also note they'll sell you, for about $75/year, access to exclusive web broadcasts of Beck's shows via Insider Extreme. His TV show in the late afternoon spot (it's rebroadcast later at night, too) pulls 3 million viewers, his radio show reaches more. It's amazing how many have turned away from TV to radio! Relative to other TV broadcast or cable shows' audience sizes, we're talking a major audience here. Sports pulls more, as do live-disasters, but for a boring lecture complete with blackboards, this audience size is huge. And they read. They buy books at amazon!

Note the masthead on Glennbeck.com --
THE FUSION OF ENTERTAINMENT AND ENLIGHTENMENT

Doesn't that sound like the mixed-genre PNR or SFR that we love so much?

THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND LOVE
THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND ROMANCE
THE FUSION OF ROMANCE AND LOVE (not the same thing, but few know that)
THE FUSION OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
THE FUSION OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
THE FUSION OF NORMAL AND PARANORMAL

Do you begin to see what fascinates me about this Glenn Beck Phenomenon?

We need to do that. So we need to figure out what he did and how. And why it works so well. We need to avoid having our imagination fail just because of the content of a message. We need to focus on how the message is delivered, to whom, and why they eat it up.

Notice the ART behind the graphic displays, the colors, the words, the images, and the html behind that display on glennbeck.com .

It takes tremendous art and technical expertise (I mean extremely expensive expertise) to achieve that trashy look. It's so expensive it looks cheap, which is its whole point. Glitzy. Slick. Ooozing money from every pixel.

You need to look rich to attract riches.

But riches aren't the point. Examine that top page closely, all the way to the bottom margin. The art of that page actually depicts the projected Glenn Beck persona (I don't know this man, or really anything about the real person. I am examining only the created persona, not the real person. Think of him as a character in a book you didn't like. Now figure out why you didn't like it (or why you did).)

Now go to amazon.com and check out Glenn Beck's books.

Glenn Beck Books

Next check out his 2010 novel, THE OVERTON WINDOW on kindle

The Overton Window

Note that The Overton Window by Glenn Beck has over 500 customer reviews (nevermind the fulminating - the number is what counts here)

Here's the link to the Hardcover page which has a "look inside" feature

The Overton Window by Glenn Beck

Check the Acknowledgements page, page VII.

Look at all the people - with names.

Note JACK HENDERSON "for pouring his heart and soul into this project"

I have read this book, every word, cover to cover.

I read it because of the title, and a sound-byte I heard in passing on Beck's TV show -- that he got this "Overton Window" concept from a think tank.

I went to the think-tank's web page:
http://www.mackinac.org/11398

And I googled and found via wikipedia that there is an entire mathematical branch devoted to calculating the behavior of large populations.  Well, I knew that, but not the research of the last few years. 

The Overton Window is an application of those mathematical principles which form the basis of "Madison Avenue" advertising (and all political advertising, especially now the YouTube videos). One of the founders of the Mackinac Center think tank named Overton codified the application to make it useful for politics.

The objective of the application is to MOLD PUBLIC OPINION - and then to MOVE PUBLIC OPINION toward the objective you have chosen.

It doesn't matter what the objective is, this principle and process applies to changing the behavior of large masses of people.

The think tank applies it to politics, as Beck's novel illustrates (but without the mathematical clarity that would allow you to use it yourself). I'm sure you've seen that Overton Window principle being aimed at you from your TV screen - magazine covers, articles, books.

It lends itself to use by those who use the technique I described Beck using - selecting certain facts from the mish-mosh of history in order to illustrate a point. The point may be true, but not the only truth worth considering. Having someone who sees such a point select the facts that describe that point is a convenient way to learn - provided you don't forget that there exist OTHER facts that might muddy the picture.

But this principle of the Overton Window is THE touchstone, gut-level, seat-of-the-pants intuitive knowledge used by all successful publishers and editors. Just read about it on the Mackinaw website. And note how THEY are yelling about Glenn Beck popularizing their technique! It was obscure and known only to scientists before Beck put it on TV and in a novel.

He reached down and selected this ONE technique that supports his overall point - that someone is manipulating you to a plan you didn't know existed.

But now many millions of people know the term OVERTON WINDOW (even if they have no clue what it means) and they didn't know it before.

The book is a best seller even though it's very badly scarred.  It's full of expository lumps, badly designed scenes, and rewrite scars.  I felt as I read it that there was a powerful writer involved who desperately wanted to say something, but had no idea how to SHOW DON'T TELL, and at least two other hands who tried desperately to tame that exposition into an actual plot.  There are flashes of brilliance squashed by exposition.  But there is a hand in it that is strong and experienced at "Intrigue" genre.  That hand plastered over the cracks so well very few readers would know or care that they're there.   The whole book would never make it without Glenn Beck's marketing machine behind it. It's just not good enough. 

This Overton Window technique is the primary tool of political campaign strategists. And that strategy is designed to get you to do what they want you to do, even if (or especially if) it is against your best interests to do that.

If you've heard of Glenn Beck's 8/28 gathering in Washington, you've heard of it because that event was formulated to illustrate The Overton Window technique, though I've never heard Beck say so (but I don't listen to every word).  

That's what happened with STAR TREK - it moved The Overton Window for the imagination of the American (and eventually worldwide) Public.

Understanding how "they" use this "Overton Window" technique to change the behavior of huge numbers of people, to create "movements" out of scattered opinions, clarified a lot for me about what happened when Star Trek hit the airwaves. Star Trek went on the air before color TV was widely distributed, before Cable TV was anything but a curiosity.

It's impossible for me to determine the cause-effect chain between Star Trek and coincident and subsequent events and technological applications, or even the flow of basic research dollars.

But in the Astrological view of the universe, cause-effect does not work along a time-line as it does in the scientific view of the universe.

In Astrology, effect can precede cause. It's called an "orb of influence" - and before the actual transit contact happens, an Event described by that symbolism can materialize as an effect caused by that whatever might happen at the contact.  That concept spooks scientists, but Fantasy writers and readers have no problem with it.

So leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, looking at the timeline of history from 1950 to 2010, you can see the sweeping eruption of creativity subsequent to Star Trek's being greenlighted for production.

20 years after first airing, when those in college when Trek first aired had achieved positions of power in the scientific community, technological innovation exploded. The basics were laid down by college age kids during the first airing of Trek.

We, as a culture, went through an OPENING OF A WINDOW INTO THE FUTURE - a glimpse of what we might do energized creativity and thousands of very intelligent people surged through that window into our future.

Star Trek opened the technological window into our future.

But Star Trek fans opened another window, a window into emotional maturity in Relationships, a window into Romance, Love, and what Gene Roddenberry kept expounding on, "Wisdom" -- he would say, "In the future, WHEN WE ARE WISE,..." we will do this and that differently.

It's now up to the Romance community which has embraced SF and Paranormal formats to pry open that Overton Window, and shove it along the track in the direction of HAPPILY EVER AFTER being a logical, reasonable, normal expectation of life.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Splatterpunk and "DRACULAS"

What does "Horror" have to do with "alien romances"? Not much! However, some Horror straddles other genres, such as speculative fiction, particularly if it involves vampires-as-aliens.

Draculas ("a novel of terror") by Blake Crouch, Jack Kilborn, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson doesn't involve aliens --although images from the Sigourney Weaver movies are used as comparisons-- but it does offer an interesting and heroic reinterpretation of Vlad The Impaler's motives.

Is an alternative historical fragment of backstory sufficient to reinvent "Splatterpunk", and confer upon it the same respectability that "Steampunk" and "Cyberpunk" enjoy?

Splatterpunk—a term coined in 1986 by David J. Schow at the Twelfth World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island—refers to a movement within horror fiction distinguished by its graphic, often gory, depiction of violence and "hyperintensive horror with no limits."^[1][2] It is regarded as a revolt against the "traditional, meekly suggestive horror story".^[3]

^{Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatterpunk}

Splatterpunk may also been called "Gross-out" or "Gore" Horror or "Extreme Horror" but not every horror aficionado agrees that the terms are synonymous.

I googled "splatterpunk and Konrath" just to see what I'd find, and found this on The Pontifications of Maurice Broadus:

Maurice asks: What's the difference between splatterpunk and extreme horror (or even gross out), and why is that sort of approach making a comeback?

JA Konrath: If the goal is to cause fear, it's straight horror. If the goal is to make you gag, then it's extreme horror. Or extreme something. It's possible to write a disgusting scene without blood or violence.

The written word is provocative. Always has been. If used properly, it can make people laugh, cry, think, get angry, or get ill.

As a species, we're fascinated by disgusting things. As writers, it's our jobs to make our readers feel something. Put the two together, and some writers are bound to go for the gross out.

 In the front matter of Draculas, JA Konrath warns the gentle reader:

"…And it's going to freak you out.

If you're easily disturbed, have a weak stomach, or are prone to nightmares, stop reading right now. There are no sexy teen heartthrobs herein.

You have been warned…."

  No romance, then. Expect extreme gore. Since Jeff Strand and JA Konrath are involved (Konrath uses his splattery alias, "Jack Kilborn" as a red flag), expect levity also.

I recommend watching this book for two reasons which have nothing whatsoever to do with its literary merit. Horror isn't really my cup of tea, (humor, however, is) and I may have been sent an ARC because I joined a particular GoodReads group. Or, it could have been because I reviewed "Afraid".

FWIW, I joined Horror Aficionados to support my online friend Guido Henkel in a discussion of e-book piracy.

Joe Konrath is well known for being tolerant of e-book piracy and copyright infringement.

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/steal-this-ebook.html

One of his collaborators, F. Paul Wilson, is rather less tolerant.

http://trueslant.com/fpaulwilson/2010/05/06/word-thieves-ii/

I will be fascinated to see whether and when this book is upped to the pirate sites, and who --if anyone-- writes DMCAs that are posted on Chilling Effects, and who --if anyone-- publicly learns from whom.

The other reason is "Draculas" groundbreaking response to pirates' exhortations that authors should not only write better, faster, cheaper, but should also add plenty of extra content. This ebook does it all. Well, almost all. I didn't see that it was "enhanced" in the sense of containing moving illustrations or sound effects.

Another caveat: I don't know if it is exactly "better" than individual works by Blake Crouch (www.blakecrouch.com),  J A Konrath (www.jakonrath.com),  Jeff Strand (www.jeffstrand.com), or by F. Paul Wilson  (www.repairmanjack.com), but from the timeline and transcripts in the back matter, this book does seem to have been written in about four months, and it is selling at the pirate-recommended price of $2.99 on Kindle.

Approximately half the book is bonus material, with free short stories, interviews, transcripts of the emails exchanged between the four co-authors as they plotted and edited the developing book, deleted scenes, and more. It's fascinating stuff, and I predict that it will one day be added to an academic syllabus somewhere.

As I wrote in my requested review, 

"DRACULAS" is worth its weight in gold for the bonus material alone.

FWIW, below is my review, which was solicited, and was written to satisfy a quid pro quo agreement (free read for review written and posted on amazon, goodreads, facebook, blogs).

DRACULAS by J.A. Konrath

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Upping The Ante On Nasty.

In the beginning, Joe wrote these words (among others)
"…And it's going to freak you out.
If you're easily disturbed, have a weak stomach, or are prone to nightmares, stop reading right now. There are no sexy teen heartthrobs herein.
You have been warned…."

I do have a weak stomach, I am prone to nightmares, and I don't enjoy fainting. But I also have a strong contrarian streak, so when Joe Konrath warns me that I'm probably not going to want to look at his collaborative effort with Jeff Stand, Blake Crouch, and F. Paul Wilson, curiosity will impel me to look.

But, I started cautiously at the back. Worth the entire $2.99 by themselves are the bonus stories, one of which begins with the awesome line, " The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker is finding one to pick up."

“DRACULAS“ is worth its weight in gold for the bonus material alone.

Curiosity, killed cats, and other red herrings aside there's another reason to devour every bit of this exceptionally well-written, highly entertaining and disturbing book.  Joe Konrath hangs ten on the crest of the most powerful waves and this book could be the way authors write faster, add extra value and thrive.

Here's how. Four first rate spec fic and occasionally hilarious authors put their heads together to horrific effect. Each chose their own hero/victim/evil-doer from a cast of characters, and each dashed off a parallel novella of approximately 20,000 words, then they sliced and diced and cobbled each author's bits together into the literary equivalent of a Frankenstein's monster. Only, it's Freddy on steroids. It gives a whole new dimension to sucking face, and not a nice one.

The dedication --"For Bram Stoker, with deepest apologies"-- is a perfect foretaste of what to expect from “DRACULAS“. Irreverence. Dark humor that is so wry, it's twisted. Offensive stuff, and indeed there is a scene involving bowels and a clown who likes to make rather different balloon animals…. Lots of "wet work", and they maybe ought to have offered apologies of some depth to Clint Eastwood, too!

The prologue (not that they call it that) contains the mother of all hooks.  Erroneously, I imagined the conversation those 4 bad boys of grim *might* have had, before I looked at Joe's generous back matter, and learned how it really was. Their conversations make entertaining reading!

"Let's dig up a head."
"Let's make it really old…"
"And evil. It must be evil."
"Let's attach something nasty to it. What?"
"A curse."
"Wicked teeth."
"Maybe we make those teeth like… like Sleeping Beauty's spindle."
"Dracula's deadly prick…"
"We need sex…"
"You can't have sex with a severed head…"
"Oh, yes you can!"
"Look, we'll call the person who gets hold of the head More Cock."
"And we'll give him an incurable disease."

The foregoing is my imagination. This conversation did not happen… but the gentle reader should remember that Joe Konrath aka Jack Kilborn once wrote a Christmas story about an amnesiac werewolf who discovered that his midnight snacking habit was abnormal after he noticed buttons and coins in his poop.

These "Draculas" have the compassion of hornets, the dentition of sharks, the voracious appetites of shrews and no respect for garlic whatsoever. If you can contemplate a rabid, blood thirsty Edward Scissorteeth in a maternity or pediatric ward, using a severed artery as a drinking straw, or lashing out among the blind… go for it, but with your eyes open.

Do not pay $2.99 merely to find out what's in “DRACULAS“ (and don't go looking for it on the pirate sites, either). There's more than enough in the free sample chapters to give you an accurate idea what to expect.
Here: http://www.amazon.com/DRACULAS-Chapters-...

Know before you buy that you're going to be ambushed by some of the grossest, sickest, most disturbed, politically incorrect and indiscriminate bloodlusty slash fest that four insensitive guys can think up.

Disclaimer. This is an author review. 4-stars is as low as I go.  Five Stars!

View all my reviews

 

For those who like promo tips, did you know that you can now cut and embed your GoodReads review wholesale with illustration and links to blogs and websites?

Apparently, you can.

Also good to know is that Amazon now does "teaser" pages before Kindle books go on sale.

Blake Crouch instructed friends:

ON OCTOBER 19, please post your review onto Amazon’s DRACULAS page:

http://www.amazon.com/DRACULAS-Novel-Terror-ebook/dp/B0042AMD2M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1284569826&sr=8-1.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY THE BOOK TO POST A REVIEW ON AMAZON, you just need an Amazon account. If you want to review the book on Amazon on the 18^th, you’ll have to post it to the DRACULAS teaser page, which is here:

http://www.amazon.com/DRACULAS-Chapters-Upcoming-Release-ebook/dp/B0042ANZBU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1287179930&sr=8-1

Another  promo tactic they are using is to have a special website for the launch:

The DraculasTheBook.com website will also feature all reviews, as well as a forum, which is now open….please stop by and say hello! Blake, Paul, Jeff, and Joe will be visiting frequently.

To our knowledge, this type of marketing experiment has never been attempted on this level. What is the power of a couple hundred reviews all appearing on the same day, and on Amazon? Is it enough take DRACULAS viral? To debut high in the Kindle store? That’s our hope.

  They resisted the temptation to make a "make a splash" pun with their splatterpunk novel of terror. So, I just did. Keep an eye out....

Groan!!!

The Value of Wolves

An intriguing angle on the benefits of restoring wolves to Yellowstone National Park:

Wolves

Here's the article's summary of the fascinatingly complex results of the disappearance of wolves from the region:

"When we exterminated wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, we de-watered the land. That's right; no wolves eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes and springs across Western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had once thrived."

The short version of the process explained in detail in the article: Without wolves, elks overpopulated their habitat. They fed on willow and aspen seedlings. Without those trees, beavers declined. In the absence of beavers, the rivers suffered, and so did all the creatures that depended on rivers and wetlands for food and shelter. The entire ecological "web" unraveled without the top predator.

These are the kinds of relationships writers have to consider when building their own worlds. The wolf example also illustrates how risky it is for our species to perform large-scale, forcible alterations of the environment to "improve" it for human use. As that old commercial used to say, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

In S. M. Stirling's wonderful series that began with DIES THE FIRE and just had its latest book published, HIGH KING OF MONTIVAL, the gods get fed up with heavy-handed human misuse of Earth's resources. To put things right, the Powers That Be cause all advanced technology to stop working instantaneously (in the first chapter of DIES THE FIRE) and permanently. The human race has to re-learn how to live with the natural world in a more hands-on way than most of us (Stirling's audience in the industrialized West) have ever experienced. One hint: Suddenly being a devotee of some "crazy" hobby such as the Society for Creative Anachronism becomes a valued survival trait.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Genetic Mechanism By Which Love Conquers All

Looking for an article posted online because I had browsed it in a waiting room in a paper copy of DISCOVER magazine, I got stuck reading this article:

http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/15-brain-switches-that-can-turn-mental-illness-on-off

See, that's the problem with being "a reader" -- doesn't much matter what words are stuck in front of one's nose, you'll read them. Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, 3 thousand year old grocery lists, doesn't matter. Everything is fascinating to a writer.

That's one of the ways you know you're a writer. Everything implies something that could make a story.

So I got stuck on this article on mental illness, a subject which bores me stiff, so of course I got all excited about the Romance story potential in it.

------Quote From Discover--------

Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.

Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism. Our experiences don’t actually rewrite the genes in our brains, it seems, but they can do something almost as powerful. Glued to our DNA are thousands of molecules that shut some genes off and allow other genes to be active. Our experiences can physically rearrange the pattern of those switches and, in the process, change the way our brain cells work.
------END QUOTE-------------

So then I read the beginning of the article which explains how lab experiments with mice show that a baby mouse that got attention from its mother (licking its fur) grows up to be harder to startle and more willing to explore while a baby mouse that didn't get attention grows up to be a scaredy cat.

Receiving affection changes you. 

I haven't found experiments on how giving affection changes you but I bet it does.

The article does describe how certain proteins stuck to or surrounding certain genes control whether that gene expresses in your body, or not.

GENES are not DESTINY.

Genes may set up the dropdown menu from which your life-choices are made, but experiences can "gray out" items on that dropdown menu.

In other words, they are getting close to solving the problem of "Nature vs. Nurture" and the solution they see right now is the one I've always thought the most likely -- it's not either-or, it's both-and.

Nature (your genes, your astrological natal chart, your starting conditions you can't change now) does set up parameters which govern the shape of your life. But nurture - the things that happen to you, that you draw from your environment by dint of being you - can alter the way your Nature expresses itself.

Then I saw this article on a Discover blog taking another "discovery" to task for being ill designed and executed:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/

----QUOTE blog--------

that around ~30% of the outcome of financial decisions are heritable. That is, that ~30% of the variation in financial decisions within the population can be accounted for by variation in genes within the population.

-----END QUOTE-------


The blogger challenges the connection between genes and financial decisions, and I don't buy that connection either.

BUT WHAT IF....?????

It makes a great SFR premise, doesn't it?  Your wealth is genetic? 

-------Quote blog--------
Over time shared home environment, what your parents model and teach you, tends to wear off, and gene-environment correlation increases the correspondences between particular genetic makeups and behaviors (i.e., identical twins resemble each other more at maturity than in their youth). For most behavioral traits heritability increases with age.
-------End Quote---------

The idea that your original nurture effect wears off with the years does not correlate well with the idea that these proteins wrapped around your genes can cause the genes to express or not express, and that can be determined by nurture - and changed later by experience or therapy.

In other words, human personality remains PLASTIC through life.

If that's true, then love counts. Finding your soul-mate can change everything. Finding your connection with the Divine can provide the strength to kick an addiction and change your life.

Back to the Discover article on mental illness.

Look at the last page of the article. "Epigenetic" is the term for the proteins bound around genes that control whether the gene expresses. 

-------Quote Discover---------
Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.
--------End Discover Quote------

The article then describes work on brains of deceased humans, some who lived out normal lives and some who committed suicide, showing a difference very similar to the differences found in defeated mice. The article ends with work done on mice that were depressed by being defeated. An injection into the brain caused the symptoms of depression to dissipate even in adulthood by changing the epigenetics. 

Now, nobody is going to investigate whether finding love in adulthood can change the brain chemistry of humans enough to vanquish depression or other such illnesses.

Nobody is going to investigate the effects on humans of just plain acceptance by others, or niceness in society.

But what is here does suggest that the great dust-up over bullying in school yards may have substance behind it. Being beaten up by mobs of kids can really change you and your chances of success in the world.

Some other kind of experience may predispose humans to diving into a cycle of poverty, gambling, or being unable to hold a job.

There may be more kinds of "assassination" than simply murdering someone, or "character assassination."

It may be that simple unkind words can destroy a life.

Speaking unkindly about anyone may in fact be an act of aggression that has dire consequences.  Maybe it might have consequences to the speaker.

If that's true, then a kind word may save a life, perhaps your own.

Do any of the writers here see the PNR applications to the novel structure element called CONFLICT?  If you write Urban Fantasy with magical rules, this kind of "magic" can make a great conflict source, thematic source, character quirk, or plot.  And we're not even touching on love potions and the ethics behind that.

Faith Healing is for real?

Can you heal yourself by changing your opinion of yourself?

How do you go about that? Do you need help from outside? Can the help of a clinician really do the trick? Or do you need true love?  Or will you resort to an injection into the brain? 

Is the real barrier to finding true love somehow in your brain chemistry itself? Do you need an injection into the brain in order to be capable of pair-bonding?

The SF possibilities for SFR are endless here.

What about kids decanted from artificial wombs then raised in a creche among mostly other kids?

What about kids raised in total isolation from other kids?

If you've been following the developments in nano fabrication, you can see how close we are to having brain implants that can do things like fix blindness and deafness caused by brain malfunctions. All kinds of nano-implants for various purposes are ridiculously close. Research money is currently pouring into projects to use nano-tech to bring solar-power up to where it's cheaper than say coal-fired power plant power.

The spinoff from that power research could be the brain implants, and other nerve replacements that could cure, say, paralysis.

Between implants and chemistry -- personalities can be engineered so that people grow up to have a "talent" and ability for specific jobs.  Do you want government deciding your career before you are born and tailoring you to it? 

Maybe stupidity can be cured? Maybe we can all be engineers?  Who decides? 

The question is, do we want these things imposed from outside, or are we as a society going to get busy and cure most of it with love?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

"Free" and "Freely Available" does not mean Legally Available

Yesterday, I wrote to the Government to offer my opinions on copyright and on what should be done about pirates.  I'd like to share what I wrote.

What I wrote is likely to be posted on the government website for the purpose in any case, and by the way, the public posting of protests by authors is one of the many ways that book pirates and their sympathizers covertly try to intimidate and silence those who are harmed by piracy.

To:  copyright-noi-2010@ntia.doc.gov

Dear Sirs,

Thank you for your focus on copyright protection and innovation on the internet.

I am an author and a rights holder, and my rights have been infringed by corporations, charities shielded by the Chafee Amendment, and by individuals both for profit and for popularity. Advertisers, advertisement aggregators, hosting sites, file sharing sites, auction sites, subscription sites, and individuals have benefited in a small way from the illegal distribution of my work without my permission and in violation of my rights.

Under the DMCA, many sites that facilitate copyright infringement are obliged to remove infringing works, but only if and when they receive a notice from the copyright owner herself. If the author is unaware of infringement, it continues unchecked.

As I see it, there is no real downside to piracy. The worst that can happen is that the pirate benefits (as does PayPal, for instance, from fees on payments made by individuals to "pirates") until the file is removed at the request of the author. Many times, the pirate then simply "re-ups" the file.

Here is one example of where just one of my books is being pirated. This novella costs $2.50 to $3.50 depending where it is purchased legally.
http://astatalk.com/release/9675/1/Rowena_Cherry_-_Mating_Net/

The copyrighted artwork has been "lifted" without my permission from my website, a further infringement.

You will notice that Astatalk provides instant sharing functionality, so that anyone at all with a click of a mouse can "share" the link to my work with all their contacts on Twitter or Facebook or any other site.

Please look at this page.
http://astatalk.com/community/top/p/1/

Here, you may see the "top" members of Astatalk, and how many works they have "shared".  Notice that this pirate site has more than 580,000 registered members. Note that the top member appears to have shared over 34,000 items.

If you look here http://astatalk.com/board/ you can view the wide variety of copyrighted works being "shared".

Astatalk is one of dozens of such sites.

In my opinion, there are many useful and reasonable measures that could be taken by the government to protect rights holders.

1. Part of the problem with piracy is lack of education and information. Many internet users "share" because they do not appreciate that what they are doing is illegal and harmful.

2. Terms should have a legal definition.

"Free" and "freely available" are used to describe in-copyright works that have been uploaded in violation of the rights of the copyright owner, thus misleading the honest public.

"Sharing" is a euphemism that suggests that the act of copyright infringement is socially acceptable, and benign.

"Information" is currently used to refer equally to fact and fiction. Works of fiction are "entertainment" not "information" or essential "knowledge". A distinction ought to be made. While individuals may have an intrinsic right to acquire "knowledge", they may not have an equal right to free "entertainment".

(It should be noted that public libraries provide legal, free access to works of fiction and also reference works.)

Other poorly understood terms with respect to e-books include "Fair Use", "Ownership", "First Sale Rights", "ReSell Rights", "Public Domain", "Library".

3. It is not helpful that the current law forces authors into an adversarial relationship with readers -- if the authors wish to protect their copyrights.

4. Rights owners are silenced by intimidation. If one sends a DMCA, one's private information is liable to be made public. The same standard does not apply to "pirates". Their anonymity is protected. Alleged infringers should not have a greater right to privacy than their victims.

5. If a person abuses equipment and breaks the law (a car, a gun etc) that abuser loses the privilege of driving, gun ownership, and sometimes their freedom, etc.

Use of the internet is not a human right, it is a privilege and a convenience. Chronic abusers of the internet should perhaps lose their "right" to privacy, and possibly be permitted only to use the internet via fee-based mobile devices and computers in public buildings such as libraries.

In the case of a confirmed and proven "pirate" a portion of the fees they pay for "Minutes" (on mobile devices) should be garnished to fund reasonable restitution to the copyright owners or else to fund a copyright enforcement body. The current fines upon conviction ($250,000 per work) are ridiculous and must tend to promote hostility and defiance on principle.


6. Copyright is the only retirement plan some creators have. Creators do not receive 401Ks or employer sponsored pensions, or matching contributions, or health care coverage, etc. Therefore, copyright protections ought to be long-lasting. (As they now are).

If we must agree to shorten copyright to achieve international conformity --so all Berne signatory nations enforce the same standards-- fifty years might be reasonable. Ten years is too few, since many times it takes more than ten years before a work comes to market and generates income for the creator.

If a creator cannot expect to make a fair return on the investment of expertise, time, and labor, creators will either produce work of lesser quality, or will turn to other endeavors. In either case, our culture is impoverished.

If "entertainment" is to be defined by the government as essential to innovation and growth, and if "entertainment" is to flow freely, then the government must compensate the providers of the "entertainment". It would be better NOT to so define "entertainment" and to leave entertainment to the private sector.

As the law currently stands, all vendors of e-book readers that permit limited "sharing" are in technical breach of copyright law. Patently, the law must change.

Owing to e-reader manufacturers' beliefs about what the public wants, authors are obliged to offer up to 10 e-books for the price of one without negotiation. Under some publishing contracts, an author may be permitted to "share" a mere 5 free copies of her own e-book. Any Nook owner may share up to 10 free copies of that same author's e-book. Surely, the owner of the copyright ought to have more rights than the man in the street.


While making copyright logical, fair, clear, comprehensible... it seems to me that the same rules should apply to schools and universities as applies in the real world.

For all their formative years, young people are taught the version of copyright that applies to educational institutions. What we would consider "piracy" is commonplace, and condoned within schools. Then, the young people graduate, and all of a sudden they are expected to understand and obey copyright rules that are very different from everything they've ever been taught or have experienced or have seen authority figures apply.

It's no wonder so many readers are skeptical, incredulous, and outraged by the DMCA.

Finally, as you work to

1. Generate benefits for rights holders of creative works accessible online and make recommendations with respect to those who infringe on those rights;
2. Enable the robust and free flow of information to facilitate innovation and growth of the Internet economy; and
3. Ensure transparency and due process in cooperative efforts to build confidence in the Internet as a means of distributing copyrighted works.

please consider that one of the most frustrating aspects right now is the violation of an author's right to negotiate and benefit from the reproduction and distribution of their work. An author may reserve valuable Audio rights, or E-Book rights from a print publishing contract because she intends to market them elsewhere.

If those rights are not available, they are simply taken (sometimes legally). Moreover, the author is judged upon the poor quality of those illegally obtained and illegally published and distributed results, adding insult to injury.

Sincerely,

Rowena Cherry

"Copyright is a writer's pension plan" (Allan Lynch)
EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday

For more discussions of piracy, please visit my personal blog http://www.rowenacherry.blogspot.com

Where I ask, "What would you think, if you saw this in your email?"

Another 54 Complimentary Books. 
Book Mix 20
  
Dear Members
We are sure you will find something of interest in this terrific mix of complimentary books!
Another 54 Free Books for Everyone! (Book Mix 20). When you click the link below, follow the simple instructions on the book page to arrive at the download links page. Easy!

Would you realize that you are about to become a thief? A receiver of stolen goods?

If you are told --twice-- that the books you are about to receive are "COMPLIMENTARY" and once that they are "FREE", you'd expect that the authors and the publishers had given permission for this.

Wrong.

The books have been stolen, pirated, illegally uploaded to a hosting site or pirate site in violation of the authors' copyrights... "shared".

You don't know this. You've no reason to suspect that you are doing anything wrong, so you click the link.

You see "FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE".

Sounds good. In fact, the books are only free to everyone who chooses to steal them. And they are not really free. You are about to get your computer loaded up with tracking cookies. Also, you will probably be asked to send $2.00 to PAYPAL (and PayPal will take at least 44 cents as their commission for being part of this sale of links to stolen goods), or you will be asked to click on a link to watch an advert.

Notice the instructions to "Skip Ad" after 5 seconds.

Its easy to collect all the books below for FREE!
Simply click the link below, watch the advert for 5 seconds, then click on the YELLOW BUTTON (Skip Ad) as it appears at the top/right of your screen and you will be directly taken to the main book page!

Scrolling down....

Please note that we are not the 'hosts' of any books, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply find links to books, that were freely available on the web and share our findings with our members!

Get a clue. This disclaimer is here because these people know that what they are doing is on the shady side of the law. Are they an "Online Service Provider"? If so, the DMCA applies to them, and the safe harbor provisions protect them.

Here's what Chilling Effects http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/ says about safe harbor

In order to qualify for safe harbor protection, a service provider who hosts content must:

• have no knowledge of, or financial benefit from, infringing activity on its network
• have a copyright policy and provide proper notification of that policy to its subscribers
• list an agent to deal with copyright complaints

But, are they hosting content? Is a list of links to illegal books "content"? Is a list of links a copyright infringement? You cannot copyright titles.

Ah! Here's the thing. They may not be hosting the books, but they are hosting the COVERS. Cover art is usually copyrighted. A lot of people think it is in the public domain, but they might not be right about that.

There's more... but this post is long enough. If piracy interests you, please check out my rowenacherry.blogspot.com blog, and scroll back a day or two to see what Cheryl K Tardif (Cherish) has to say on the subject.

Best,

Rowena Cherry

Public Domain

Cory Doctorow writes about public domain works in the latest issue of LOCUS:

Proprietary Interest

While I have reservations about some of Doctorow's opinions on copyright, I agree with this essay. Extending copyright protection too far leads to diminishing returns. For lesser-known authors, particularly, keeping works in copyright too long after the author's death doesn't protect the creator so much as doom the work to oblivion. I'm viewing the issue from the perspective of an editor, my first two books having been paperback anthologies (CURSE OF THE UNDEAD and DEMON LOVERS AND STRANGE SEDUCTIONS). In my opinion, the main purpose of reprint anthologies is to preserve in more permanent form worthy pieces of fiction that would otherwise languish in the obscurity of old periodicals or out-of-print story collections. Presently, print copyrights extend to 75 years after the author's death. If the editor can't determine when the author of an older story died, much less track down the current copyright owner, that story can't be reprinted. New readers who might enjoy it can never see it. Fortunately, in almost all cases a work that lapsed into the public domain before the 1978 accord took effect (before that, the maximum length of copyright in the U.S. was 56 years) can't be re-copyrighted, so an editor or publisher is safe in reproducing a story or book dated before about 1920. For materials published after that, they have to start worrying.

One positive effect of the Google digitizing project for "orphaned works": Books that might otherwise never have been seen or heard from again will become available to new readers.

If I'd been writing the law, I would have decreed that the copyright clock starts ticking on publication—a date much easier to determine—rather than depending upon the accidental and contingent factor of the author's death date. Make copyright last a century from publication date, if you must; then the longest-lived author won't outlive his or her own rights in the work.

Doctorow doesn't address this problem specifically but does point out other aspects of the public domain system I hadn't thought of.

The site he mentions, Vintage Ads, is fun to browse:

Vintage Ads

And here's their sister site, which displays hundreds of covers of pulp magazines and comics:

Cover Browser

The fact that copyright doesn't last forever makes possible books such as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, though some readers may consider this not necessarily a Good Thing. More unambiguously positive are books like DRACULA variations and sequels such as Fred Saberhagen's delightful THE DRACULA TAPE and Barbara Hambly's novel about Renfield, or Sherlock Holmes pastiches such as THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION. I wouldn't want to have missed those creations, and as long as copyright stays in effect, such "derivative works" can't be professionally published. As a fiction writer, I heartily support fair recompense to authors and the vigorous banning of piracy, but as a reader (and former editor) I wouldn't want to see those rights extended in perpetuity.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Star Trek: Voyager and Captain Janeway

On facebook, friend me at http://facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg/

I am in a Group titled Bring Back Kathryn Janeway, and some other Star Trek groups.

The Janeway group has a twitter account and on facebook has over 500 members.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366418642046

I happened to think of the Janeway Group recently because a fellow found me on facebook who had interviewed me years ago about Spock's popularity.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100000108289003

His article is now posted here:

http://mystartrekscrapbook.blogspot.com/2010/04/1976-article-spock-part-2-analysis.html

Click on the image and you can get it up to readable size print.

So as happens constantly, Star Trek is back in front of my nose, and I found myself thinking about Janeway.

If you poll an audience at a con panel about Star Trek: Voyager you get about half hating it and about half liking it or feeling it's "ok" but not the best of the bunch.

If you poll on Janeway as a character, the men reject her and the women like (if not adore) her.

What's going on there?

Star Trek: Voyager had an innate fatal flaw built into the very premise.

The flaw is the same flaw you often find in "SFR" (Science Fiction Romance) or PNR or Fantasy-Romance.

There is a GIANT PREMISE which is absolutely fascinating, energizing, and makes you anticipate watching.

The story starts, and something diverts attention from the premise onto a looming, maybe life-threatening problem, and then onto another problem, and another problem takes priority, and another problem explodes to top priority.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting and waiting for the PAYOFF - the original primise to be advanced, woven in, and eventually evolve into a conflict that can be resolved.

It's a pattern you see in Time Travel Romance, for example. The author worldbuilds us a nifty time-travel device, accident, premise. One lover-to-be falls or leaps through into another time or universe ---- and never looks back.

We don't find out how the time-travel device works, why it works, how to make it work on purpose and take us where we want to be, or anything interesting. I mean lovers can meet and bond anywhere, anywhen, but there's only ONE Time-Travel-Device that defies physics as I know it. If the device is introduced first, I need to know all about the device, not about the lovers.

If the lovers are introduced first, and the device is a support to that.

For example: one lover is stuck in our time and invents the device on purpose to get to the other lover stuck in some other time - maybe with a plan of fleeing to a 3rd Time - then the way the device works doesn't matter to the story.

But if a device exists, (first before we meet any people), and a person falls through it by accident, then if that person is worth my attention, that person will not rest a moment or think of anything else or feel anything else until they've figured out how the device works and how to command it to take them "home" -- no matter the lure of the current time.

Likewise, with Voyager and Janeway. Here is this SPACE SHIP (wow, a Starfleet ship that isn't THE Enterprise! Bring it on!), and here is this Captain -- (wow, a woman Starship Captain - bring it on!)

Then all of a sudden, they are swept to the back side of nowhere.

They turn around and start trying to figure out how to get home.  And they don't. 

Then this happens, that happens, nothing happens, around and around, and they're on a 70 year trek to home with incidents (incidents mind you, not plot developments) along the way.

They forget about striving to get home through most of the episodes -- where they may be fighting for their lives or for Starfleet principles -- but essentially it's episodic so the Situation is returned to the status quo at the end of each episode. Net-net -- nothing happened.

Well, "nothing happened" is still interesting but only if SOMEONE CARES that nothing happened. Someone has to be frustrated, striving against the barriers preventing something from happening, trying schemes and plots and theories - maybe failing but continually trying. Never for an instant forgetting the goal. 

But that isn't how it goes through most of Star Trek: Voyager.

You have the same plot problem that creates boredom in STAR GATE: UNIVERSE.

In Universe the Ancient relic of a ship is stuck out there and they can't even control it -- OK, they can communicate with home, but still they go from harrowing situation to disaster to this and that and the other thing - and NOTHING HAPPENS with the original premise which was interesting.

In Star Gate: Universe - the premise was there's this Earth outpost that gets attacked and the humans there evacuate onto this relic ship via stargate. Then -- so what? They're stuck as passengers just facing harrowing situations to survive -- not to MAKE PROGRESS mind you, but just to survive.

It's not a story. It's not a plot.

Now they've brought in some vicious aliens who want the relic starship, and they're playing cat and mouse with aliens on their tale, unable to control the ship. Nothing happens.

So you see the recipe for how to kill a series the higher ups in the network hate.

Take a premise guaranteed to sucker in the very audience you want to destroy, ignore that premise because of one emergency after another, and the audience will just wander off to watch White Collar.

If you present a premise first - then work that premise TO THE BEATS - don't bore the audience.

Now, back to Janeway herself.

Frankly, I think what "they" did to this character was the same kind of thing that was done to the show by tossing the premise aside.  They had a dynamite premise -- Kathryn Janeway, woman Starship Captain, Kirk watch out!  And they flipped it off and tossed it aside. 

JANEWAY as a character is exciting because of the potential she has for changing the Trek Universe, the politics and sociology of Star Fleet and interplanetary relationships.

The show's guardian angels recognized that potential, and cobbled onto the mess an ending that might have worked. They brought her back to Starfleet using new technology, time-travel, alternate-universe gimmicks, and she brought back data that changed things.

OK, that's good. So what's wrong with Star Trek: Voyager?

That ending was not INHERENT IN THE OPENING 5 EPISODES.

We were not sitting there anticipating that ending, knowing things the characters did not know, watching them figure it out, seeing their bravery, boldness, audaciousness, and heroism win the day. We didn't see them grow beyond all those heroic traits to bonding with each other despite the barriers to that.  We didn't see Love Conquering All.  We had no idea of what the "All" was that needed "Conquering." 

We couldn't see the overall shape of the VOYAGER story-line from the beginning because the writers didn't know it. The ending was not implicit in the beginning. That doesn't make for a surprise ending or a twist. It makes for a dull show with a deus ex machina ending.

The main character of this story is Janeway.

And that character only contributed to the "confusion" that drove half the audience away.

Yet look at all the Janeway-Chakotay fanfic -- (and other slashes and mashes!).

There's Trek magic in those characters, no doubt about it.

So why does half the audience shrug Janeway off as a non-entity? They don't "hate" her - that would be exciting! They don't even despise her. They think she's a bad Captain and a total wash out as a person.

Why do they think that?

Maybe a better way to phrase it is, "Why don't I think that?"

The answer is Kate Mulgrew.

Mulgrew was handed the short and very dirty end of the stick here.

Janeway was written to be one person in the first episode, another totally different person in #2, and opposite in #3, and skewed in #4, and different again in #5 and so on.

She was never the same person in two successive scripts.

Then as a weekly series must, the producers used different directors on different episodes.

So Janeway was directed to "be" different people - trying to "correct" the writing by directing and acting.

Little by little, Mulgrew created a character --

And that's why I love VOYAGER!

Mulgrew showed us what a real actor can do with an impossible situation.

Keep in mind STAR TREK: VOYAGER is "supposed to be science fiction" -- but as with all the other Treks, the fanfic shows us that it's not. It's really ROMANCE seen from another point of view.

Actually, that's the real difference between or among genres. Any story can be made into any genre by just changing the point of view character and sometimes the "narrative voice" (first person to third person narrative).

Mulgrew took the confused, conflicting, mutually exclusive Janeways she was handed and created a unified, whole, complete HUMAN BEING from the mishmosh.

She created a CHARACTER with depth, facets, inconsistencies that flesh out and illuminate the inner subconscious depths of character the way the very best classics show us character.

The one crippling lack in the material handed to Mulgrew was the lack of RELATIONSHIP. Kirk on-screen displayed relationships, but Janeway wasn't allowed to.

But the fans fixed that. The Fanfic shows us Janeway deep into complex relationships worthy of the complexity of character, the realistic complexity Mulgrew created from the contradictions.

However, Janeway was still a character in a TV show -- an anthology TV show not a really good ARC TV show like Babylon 5.

TV show characters are not allowed to be "classic" - rich, deep, multi-faceted.

Worse, Janeway was still a character in a science fiction TV show, and we all know science fiction is only for teenage boys who are squeamish around girls and basically nerds who will never be able to hold a relationship, right?

So despite the incredible job Mulgrew did, the accomplishment is unsung.

Now, just imagine if STAR TREK: VOYAGER were an actual SFR complete with rich, deep, conflict-ridden RELATIONSHIPS!

Imagine if the writers had actually had a plot for the series, as Babylon 5 had.

In that case, you might be able to see Janeway.

As it is, this gem of a character is encrusted and hidden beneath the rubble of failures of other creative people. All of those who worked on this show are, individually, not only talented but highly skilled and know better than to do this. But for some reason, upper management or whatever, they were not allowed to do what they know how to do -- or not inspired or properly rewarded.

So I say Bring Back Janeway - in another universe than the one we met her in, and let's see what happens with good writing, great directing, and an actual plot, some really Up In Space Romance (as opposed to Down To Earth Romance) and plentiful story-arcs like Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Romanticizing Punks

Glamorizing the common thief, and especially the uncommon thief, is not new. Who remembers Richard Green (real name Richard Greene) as "Robin Hood"?

"Feared by the bad, Loved by the good..." Legend would have us believe that Robin Hood was all about the forced liberation and redistribution of tangible wealth. Today, cyber piracy is about the liberation of, and free distribution of intellectual "wealth".

Are hackers the new "Robin Hood"?

Do hackers and pirates deserve a whole subgenre of romantic fiction devoted to their noble exploits? As Wikipedia states:

Cyberpunk is a Science fiction genre noted for its focus on high tech and low life. The name is a blend of cybernetics and punk and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk", published in 1983.

It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.
Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers and megacorporations....

Steampunk appears to be more "respectable", although it is closely related in the pantheon of science fiction subgenres (if "pantheon" is the right word, which it probably isn't). The hero of The Time Machine was a gentleman. Captain Nemo (20,000 Leagues Under The Sea) might have been piratical, but he was also an officer and a gentleman... at least as portrayed by James Mason, and latterly by Naseeruddin Shah as the fascinating Indian Nemo in the modern Victorian Superhero film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I'm not an expert or even a particular fan of steampunk or cyberpunk, but I am interested in science, history, the future, sociology, psychology, politics, and ethics.

This is beside the point, but I am also very concerned about the way society is going... the pressure upon members of Western society to use cellphones and other wireless mobile devices, and not just to use them occasionally for brief conversations, but to use them continually, and for sustained periods. What if they really do cause cancer, as Northern Europeans have been warning for some years? Where will those cancers form? Brains. Groins. Hands. What else might mobile media devices do to our minds?

As an internet radio talk show host, I have to ask my call-in guests to use landlines. The quality of cellphones may sound fine to the naked ear, but it doesn't re-broadcast well. I'm slightly alarmed that so many people these days don't have access to a landline, even as back-up. What happens if the satellites go down?

One of the modern Robin Hood types (in my personal opinion) that flew across my radar recently suggests that Peer-to-Peer should be monetized on mobile devices. (There's the link.) My reading of his plan --and my reading might be inaccurate-- is that he will decide what all forms of electronic content are worth, and enforce the collection and payment of that "fair" compensation. If content creators sign up with him, he will pay them what he thinks their work is worth, based on sales (I assume. I may be wrong). I infer that if creators do not sign up with him, their work will be reproduced and distributed anyway (and they won't be paid).

It sounds very "Google Book Settlement" to me.

Speaking metaphorically, and in the context of a notional hierarchy within the book industry, I've never thought of myself as an "Aristocrat" (and I still don't. I'm low list and out-of-print as of July 31st.) However, the vainglorious postings by pirates on Richard Curtis's blog about "good pirates" and "bad pirates" and pride in being part of "the revolution" makes me wonder.

http://ereads.com/2010/09/a-bootleg-e-book-bazaar-operates-in-plain-sight.html

This is Fair Use for the purpose of commentary and critique...

“Good pirates love the art, and often the artists, and they also love communication, creativity, social justice, networking, cooperation, fair trade, etc. They take pieces of art and make them available for free, not making any money off of it, gaining only a sense of satisfaction at participating in the revolution.”

So, according to persons who --one might reasonably infer-- think of themselves as "good pirates", there is a Revolution underway.

Presumably, the valiant, lone hackers are battling megacorporations, like their cyberpunk fictional heroes. That explains why the standard arguments to justify piracy focus on unnamed, greedy publishing houses that charge too much, or impersonal copyright organizations known by upper case acronyms, and seldom mention the very small, e-publishing presses, or named mid-list authors.

What is this Revolution? What is the purpose of it? What happens if the Revolution succeeds?

Instead of assembling in the streets, are disaffected unemployed people fomenting unrest and looting via their computers (and I hear that American welfare benefits include free internet access)?

Thinking of all the Revolutions of history, they're supposed to be good for whoever happens to be the underdog, and bad for the establishment. Often, they are also bad for those who might be considered collateral damage.

The British Industrial Revolution, and the Agricultural Revolution resulted in progress, automation, social change, migrations to bigger cities, a different form of exploitation for the producers and workers. The French Revolution might have been splendid fun for the sans culottes…. would one call the guillotining of aristocrats (including children) a form of populism?

Don't most revolutions end up with a different tyrant in charge, but those who were oppressed in the first place remain oppressed? Authors, photographers, artists, models and musicians who might, or might not be, exploited and oppressed by megacorporations will probably end up being exploited by the good pirate kings.

It's been a long time since I studied the rules of what I'm not supposed to write. Once upon a time, it was frowned upon for writers to write about heroes and heroines who are writers, but it seems to me, if one wanted to write a post-cyberpunk underdog story, the heroes and heroines ought to be writers.



Rowena Cherry

Robot Skin

Artificial skin to make it possible for robots to sense pressure may be produced soon:

Artificial Skin

It also shows promise for helping people with prosthetic limbs regain sensation.

Would a robot that can process several kinds of sensory input, including touch, and can pass the Turing test (carrying on a conversation that can't be distinguished from talking to a human being) -- a big step we haven't reached yet -- deserve to be classified as "human"? What would it take for an artificial intelligence to become entitled to "human rights"?

In one of Isaac Asimov's stories, a robot challenges the concept of "human being" in the Three Laws of Robotics. "He" decides that one of his fellow robots, having full sentience and superior intelligence, counts as "human." Therefore he is justified in obeying his robot comrade's orders in preference to those of flesh-type people.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt