Explaining Aliens: SEALED IN BLOOD Excerpt

When reading SF and fantasy, I often find that the passages of exposition or extended dialogue explaining the biology and culture of the aliens are my favorite parts. As a writer, though, I know editors and readers want exposition interwoven through the story in subtle and intriguing ways. One method of getting around the problem is to include an essay in an appendix, laying out all the details not covered in the narrative itself. I always enjoy reading and rereading the appendices in S. M. Stirling's alternate histories, for instance. A way of incorporating this level of detail within the narrative is to have a character openly lecturing. In Suzy McKee Charnas' THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, Dr. Weyland, the vampire, delivers an ostensibly speculative lecture on "how nature would design a vampire." The female viewpoint character's suspicion of Weyland's vampirism and the professor's give-and-take with the audience keep the scene lively.

How do we integrate information feed directly into dialogue without having characters tell each other things they already know (the infamous "as you know, Bob" technique)? Often we can provide a character who serves as the reader's stand-in by being ignorant of the facts and having a plausible need to learn them. For example, Hugh, the protagonist of Jacqueline's HOUSE OF ZEOR, being new to Sime Territory, fills this role. That's the technique I most often use in my "vampire as alien" fiction. An ordinary mortal who has just learned that vampires (or werewolves, demons, etc.) really exist naturally wants to learn as much as possible about them (if she doesn't instantly run away in panic, but then she wouldn't be a suitable paranormal romance heroine, would she?).

As an example, this is part of the scene from my novel SEALED IN BLOOD in which the heroine first discovers that the hero is a vampire.

Excerpt from SEALED IN BLOOD (Amber Quill Press, www.amberquill.com):

The mugger let out a gurgle and released her. Sherri whirled around to see him stumble backward.

Impossible--how could he share her delusion?

The monster was flying straight at her. She threw herself sideways, landing on the leaf-strewn ground with a bruising thump to one hip. Instead of fleeing, the mugger brandished his knife underhand and rushed the winged creature. Maybe this thug had also decided the apparition didn't exist.

His defiant karate yell died in his throat when taloned hands grabbed his shoulders. He slashed the thing's chest. Its grip slackened. The man squirmed free and dashed into the woods.

With a loud moan, the creature sank to all fours. Sherri sat on the ground paralyzed, her head spinning, while she watched the wings shrivel up and disappear, the ebony fur melt away, the catlike ears shrink. The man levered himself into a crouch and stared back at her. His eyes gleamed crimson in the twilight.

"Nigel?" The ground lurched under her. Earthquake? *No, just my world-view turning upside down. No problem, folks.* He held out a hand. A chill swept over her. In the next instant it metamorphosed to a hot flush, as she realized his posture wasn't attack, but supplication. *Idiot, he probably saved your life! And you thought you were so open-minded!*

She scrambled to her feet and scurried over to Nigel. Squatting beside him, she took in the ripped shirt and the red patch spreading on it. "You're wounded."

"Excellent powers of observation." His voice slurred a bit, spoiling the sarcasm. When Sherri glanced nervously over her shoulder, he said, "Don't worry, he's long gone. Damn--didn't mean to scare him away. Wanted to question him. Clumsy."

"We'd better get you inside." When he grasped her outstretched hand, his weight almost overbalanced her. They both managed to stagger to their feet, though, and they trudged up to the house with his arm draped around her shoulders.

As they climbed the deck stairs, the cat hissed, then darted away to leap over the side. "Funny, Quark isn't usually shy of people," Sherri said.

"I make animals nervous," said Nigel as she opened the door. "Don't you lock it?"

"Just to go jogging? Don't be silly." She attempted a brisk tone to counteract her delayed reaction. Now that the crisis had passed, she felt the thudding of her heart and the cramps in her bowels.

"How do you trusting types survive?" He lowered himself onto the couch she steered him to. "Your cat's name is Quark?"

"Because he has strangeness and charm."

"Logical," he said. He closed his eyes.

"We have to get you cleaned up. Stay right there."

"I assure you, I'm not going anyplace."

Stumbling into the kitchen, Sherri realized her hands were shaking. She clutched the edge of the counter until they steadied. She drank a glass of ice water from the refrigerator dispenser, then refilled it for Nigel. After soaking a couple of washcloths in warm water, she carried them, with paper towels and the full glass, into the living room.

She glanced around at the newspapers on the floor and the galley proofs strewn on her desk. "I apologize for the mess."

Nigel opened his eyes and said with a sardonic quirk of his lips, "As well you should. Disgraceful--never saw such chaos. Don't know if I can bring myself to collapse in here."

"All right, it was a stupid remark," she snapped.

He leaned forward with a groan, resting his head on one hand. "Teach me to make inane jokes within minutes of getting knifed."

She perched on the arm of the couch. "Sit back and hold still." She unbuttoned his ripped shirt. "I'm afraid this is ruined." With his cooperation she drew it off. He winced at her touch and averted his eyes when she switched on the end table lamp. "Sorry, I have to see what I'm doing." He gulped down the glass of water as she swabbed sticky blood from his chest. After the second washcloth was stained red, she got a good look at the knife slash. The incision, closed to a thin red line, appeared hours old.

Mechanically patting his cold, white skin dry with paper towels, she said, "I do not see this."

"Sure you do," said Nigel, "just as you saw what happened outside. Don't lie to yourself; you're no good at it."

"Then those pictures of your sister weren't a special effect at all."

"No."

She withdrew her hand from his chest.

Something like sadness flickered in his eyes. "Relax, I won't bite. Not unless severely provoked."

Ashamed of fearing him, even for a second, after he'd rescued her, she finished cleaning the wound. "Doesn't even look like it needs a bandage. Nigel, how did you do that?"

"The change? A psychic skill we learn in adolescence. It's a purely superficial shifting of molecules, with more than a trace of illusion--how we look depends a lot on what the observer expects to see. That's why those last snapshots were foggy. The underlying body structures remain the same."

"Why did you do it?" she said. "The risk of being seen--"

"Error in judgment," Nigel sighed. "It seemed a good way to make sure he couldn't describe or identify me later. Besides, confound it, changing feels good." He touched the cut over his ribs. "I paid for it."

Reminded of how bad he must feel, Sherri jumped up with a guilty start. "What can I get for you? A drink?"

"Milk," he said. "Laced with the highest proof alcohol you have."

Since she seldom drank anything stronger than blush wine, she had to mull over her supplies for a minute. "Maybe Amaretto?"

Nigel grimaced.

"Oh, I just remembered the bottle of brandy I got for a present last Christmas--hardly been touched. Is that okay?" He nodded. Hurrying to the kitchen to pour the drink, she recalled first aid cautions against administering alcohol to an injured person. Nigel, however, ought to know better than she what his own metabolism could handle.

When she gave him the glass, he downed half of it without pausing for breath. "At least I should have taken off the blasted shirt first," he said. "Including clothes in the change takes a lot more concentration. It wasn't quite dark enough, either. I feel...drained. We're hypersensitive enough as it is when our molecules are in flux that way. That's why being stabbed hurt so much. In normal shape I'd have been able to suppress most of the pain."

"What else can you turn into?" she said. "Wolf, giant rat, glowing mist?" She sat beside him, forgetting all nervousness in her fascination.

He emitted a weak laugh. "Sorry, that's it. Aren't you satisfied with a six-foot bat-winged panther? And a singularly useless skill it is, most of the time."

"How can you be sure nobody saw you on the way here?"

He laughed harder, ending on a groan. "My dear girl, did you think I flew up from Berkeley? I am not Superman. My car's parked at the bottom of your lane."

"Oh," she said sheepishly. For a moment she silently watched him sip his drink. The superhero reference reminded her of other aliens in films and TV shows, and the planets they hailed from. She decided she had to ask. "Nigel, where are you from?"

"Nevada."

"What?"

"That 'alien' label was Brewster's guess," Nigel said, "and he was wrong. We're not interstellar invaders; we've shared your world for millennia. I'd be glad to give you the complete lecture and answer all your questions--later. We have more immediate problems. I've discovered a few things about Brewster. Pooling what little knowledge we have might enable us to end this harassment you're suffering."

"Have you considered giving my anonymous caller what he wants and washing our hands of it?" Sherri said.

"No longer an option," said Nigel. "I don't have the photos either. I turned them over to a friend in L.A., who will certainly destroy them. He's probably done so already."

An almost forgotten detail from the snapshots floated to the surface of Sherri's mind. "If your sister's shape-changing wasn't a special effect, then neither was anything else, was it? Including the blood-drinking."

Nigel turned his head to meet her eyes. "If you're suggesting that milk punch wouldn't be my first choice, you are right."

Her gasp held more delight than fear. How other fans would envy her if they knew what she'd stumbled into--not that she could tell anyone. "You're a vampire!"

"Close enough," he said. "We use the term for ourselves, though it's misleading in some ways. As you must have figured out, we aren't corpses animated by the Devil. We're a long-lived species with a few peculiar habits."

How long-lived? she wondered. "How old are you?"

"No more than I claim--forty-two, still in my first youth. And Laura's even younger. Good grief, can you imagine someone with centuries of experience getting into the trouble she's in?"

"So you're convinced she isn't in the coven voluntarily?"

"She was at first," he said. "I have a feeling things have gotten out of control."

"I suppose you're planning to play detective and rescue her?"

"What else?" He shifted position and winced again. "As soon as I've had a few hours to recover."

"You can stay here tonight, of course. You don't look in any shape to drive. You're still hurting, aren't you?" He averted his eyes from hers. Drawing a deep breath, she laid her head on the back of the couch, exposing the smooth arch of her neck. "Well, go ahead, I guess I owe you."

"No, you don't; I got you into this in the first place. My dear, you look like a martyr presenting herself for the headsman's ax!"

She raised her head and glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. His head was bowed, one hand shading his own eyes. "Sherri, I can't afford to turn down your offer. But it doesn't have to be like that."

"Why won't you look at me?"

"Because I don't want to be tempted to use hypnotic coercion on you." He clasped her left hand and raised it to his lips. Again she noticed their feverish heat, in contrast to the overall coolness of his flesh. Still holding her hand, he put his free arm around her shoulders. To her surprise, she felt him trembling. "Relax for me, Sherri. I won't force you to; I want you alert."

"I want to stay alert, too. I don't want to miss a single detail."

He responded with a shaky chuckle and began licking the inside of her wrist. A shiver coursed up her arm. "What's that for?"

Giving her palm a light kiss, he paused to answer, "Our secretions contain a mild anesthetic, to which we ourselves are immune, of course. The last thing I want is to cause you pain." His tongue resumed its tantalizing strokes. The delicate skin of her wrist tingled with a warmth that slowly seeped up her arm and settled between her breasts. She noticed the nip of his teeth only as a painless prickling like a mild electric shock. He didn't suck the wound like a film vampire, but continued to lick. In the midst of the lassitude creeping over her, she managed to remember her scientific curiosity about the process and fixed her gaze on the cuckoo clock on the opposite wall. No more than three minutes passed before Nigel released her and sat back, closing his eyes with a long sigh.

She sat frozen, gaping at the minute, painless incision from which blood still trickled. After a moment he opened his eyes and said, "Are you sure you want to bleed all over the couch?" Digging a handkerchief out of his side pocket, he pressed it to the wound.

"Thanks." She closed the fingers of her right hand around the makeshift dressing. "I didn't see any fangs."

"What do you think I am, a rattlesnake? An object needn't be pointed to be sharp. Like a razor cut, that will be scarcely visible by tomorrow."

"Convenient. No punctures to hide." She studied his face. Still pale--naturally pale, no doubt, but the blue tinge had faded from his lips. "You do feel better, don't you?"

"Oh, yes. God, yes." He squeezed her hand. "It's just that I'm worn out. All this--the change, the instant healing--is a hell of an energy drain."

-end of excerpt-

Kiss Me Deadly trailer

To advertise my latest book, I decided to make my own video trailer. You can watch it at www.susankearney.com. It turned out to be a family affair. My daughter Tara acted in part of it. She's the girl thrown against the wall. My son played the villain and my husband drove the truck. My daughter did the text and a friend shot the actors. I wrote the script and helped edit. For about 40 seconds of film, it took two months of work. Not a solid two months--I was writing a book at the time, too. Anyway, this book, Kiss Me Deadly is a romantic suspense. I have found that going back and forth between genres, romantic suspense and my futuristic romances helps keep the writing fresh and the mind sharp.

But to answer the questions I'm asked most often:
1) Will I write more futuristics? Yes. In fact, Solar Heat is already finished and will be out next February. My daughter shot the cover photograph.
2) Will my books return to space? Yes.
3) Will I be writing more Rystani warriors? I hope so. The plan is to connect the Rystani series with the Heat series in a few more books.

For those of you who love paranormal, you've probably noticed that more of them are in stores than ever before. And this is due to readers buying these books and recommending them to their friends. Please keep up the good work. Your support means our publishers will keep buying these stories. So please, please keep recommending them to your friends. And if you like romantic suspense as well, please give Kiss me Deadly a try. It will be out in stores June 26 , 2007

Susan Kearney

Granddaughters And World Building

Folks:

I agree with Linnea about Magic Lost, Trouble Found -- it's a page-turner with everything and the kitchen sink tossed into the worldbuilding mix.

I got my computer fan replaced and I'm back in the saddle again! (remember Roy Rogers?)
I've been talking about worldbuilding -- the writer's tool for creating an alternate reality background for the story to unfold in front of, for some time now.

Many writers just hurry through that part of preparing to write, because it's tedious, often irrelevant, and will never collect them any money or glory.

But the truth is -- world building is the writer's tool for drawing a reader into a story, especially a romance, and doubly-especially a romance that involves star-crossed lovers or the divinely inspired love that can reach across a cultural gulf, or in our case a species gulf.

The Alien Romance genre actually goes farther to define LOVE in an operational way that readers can use in their mundane lives than any other genre I know of. Love isn't "human" -- love transcends humanity.

That lays a big responsiblity on the romance writer who's just trying to make a living.
Think! As you craft this story, think about the young women and men who will read this story, who will feel these emotions with the characters, who will remember those characters' names their whole lives long as "symbols" of the philosophies they stand for.

Think about the lessons they will derive from walking a mile in this character's moccasins.
Yes, the background world building carries the thematic message of the story more strongly than the characters themselves. It's not BECOMING the character that impresses a story on the readers' dreams -- it's that mile they have to walk in the character's moccasins, feeling every stone through the thin soles.

What draws a reader deep, DEEP, into a story is the philosophical match between the character, his/her internal conflict, clearly reflected in his/her external conflict, crystal and pristinely reflected in the world surrounding the character.

The way all these levels of the artistic creation match, go-together to bespeak a certain view of Life The Universe And Everything -- matters of ultimate concern -- (astrologically 12 House matters) -- that makes that world real to the reader.

For an artist to pull that trick off, the artist must be aiming his/her creation at a very specifically defined audience, readership, market. Just as in conversation, you must take into account what the other person is thinking, feeling (mood), wanting, needing, believing, before you phrase your utterance.

Ask the boss for a raise when you've just spilled hot coffee in her lap and see what happens next! Take her clothes to the cleaners and have them back spotless in an hour and you won't have to ask.

Do the same when you create a story -- take into account who you're talking to and what else they have distracting them and craft your story accordingly.

Most romance readers are either young and dreaming of creating their own family -- or currently raising kids and dreaming of ways to make it easier.

When you craft a story and build the world to house that story, you are talking to that audience, just as you talk to your boss (and make no mistake, the reader is your boss, the reader signs your paycheck.)

So you want to start with a statement or image that makes sense to the reader before you dive off the deep end into aliens and falling in love across vast gulfs.

That one thing that almost all Alien Romance readers have in common -- almost all readers, actually, -- is FAMILY.

Now, here's an aspect of worldbuilding we haven't discussed at much length. FAMILY.
Note that Star Wars is a multi-generation family drama not unlike Dallas, the TV show was.
A popular Romance sub-genre was the Gothic -- where some young woman down on her luck inherits a haunted house with a tall dark stranger next door.

INHERITS being the operative word -- grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. Where there's a past, there's a future. Romance is really all about potential family.

So I have a real-life story to tell you to make my point here about how to make any alien environment you build accessible (understandable on an emotional level) to your readers.
Read this story with an awareness of WHAT you already know that you use to interpret and visualize what this story means. And simultaneously consider WHAT to invent for your alien world to fill the niches of these things you already know about our reality.

What you choose to put in those niches will delineate the philosophical statement which is the theme of your work.

Remember, your readers will use what THEY already know to interpret what you write, to interpolate facts between your words as you do when reading this story. Leave the gaps they need, but also fill ones that tickle the mind with a new way of looking at the world.

This morning, my daughter called while driving her daughter (4 3/4 yrs old) to an appointment.
My daughter said right off that she had just heard The William Tell Overture on her car radio and she instantly thought of me and how it was past time she should call me.

Why did she think of me? Because I'm a Lone Ranger Fan of the first water, and she grew up well aware of that (as well as Star Trek -- her first word after Orange Juice was Captain Kirk).
So we talked, and she told me several too-too precious stories about my granddaughter who had been nagging her to talk to grandma and grandpa. I won't lay them on you.

Then she told me that at a garage sale a couple weeks ago she picked up for $5 a video camera you can hook to the TV set and see yourself. Immediately, MY GRANDDAUGHTER (here is absolute proof of the relationship!) seized on the camera, set up a vanity table chair as a stage and pretty backdrop, put her Barbie Dolls on it and proceeded to move them around watching on the TV and telling Princess stories.

At her age, I wrote words on paper (even if nobody but me could read the squiggles I thought were writing), my granddaughter tells stories in video! But stories are stories -- I've spawned a PRODUCER!!! Maybe she'll produce one of my unsold scripts she finds when cleaning out my house after my funeral. (Now there's a Gothic tale untold!)

Then we discussed what to get this kid for her birthday. One of my presents to her is this blog which occurred to me when I spoke to her on the phone. Maybe she'll stumble over it when she's a teen surfing the web for romance novels.

Jacqueline Lichtenberghttp://www.simegen.com/jl/

Raine-ing Praises (on Magic Lost, Trouble Found)

I try to compete with Rowena Cherry's unparalled abilities for puns and turns of phrase and always feel I fall short (could be the differences in our heights as well...).

Be that as it may, Raine-ing Praises today is all about Raine Benares. She is a fictional character in Lisa Shearin's MAGIC LOST, TROUBLE FOUND, a rip-roaring good fantasy novel that's also Shearin's debut book:

My name is Raine Benares. I'm a seeker. The people who hire me are usually happy when I find things. But some things are better left unfound...

The book has elves, it has goblins, it has sorcerers and sorceresses (sorceri?). It has smugglers and thieves and magic spells. It even has a strong romantic subplot--yay!

Not only is the book a terrific fun read, but Shearin's query letter to literary agent Kristin Nelson has obtained almost cult-status, as it's been quoted as one of the best queries around:

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2006/08/queriesan-inside-scoop-lisa-shearins.html

What if you suddenly have a largely unknown, potentially unlimited power? What if that power just might eat your soul for breakfast, lunch and dinner? What if every magical mobster and sicko sorcerer in town wants that power? And what if you can't get rid of it?

I had the pleasure of reading MAGIC LOST in ARC (Advanced Review Copy) form months back. I've been anxiously awaiting its release ever since so I could tell you all about it. Go buy this book. It's fun, fast-paced, kick-ass, snarky, beautifully written and exciting. And there's a sequel.

What this has to do with alien romances and what this has to do with exploring my recent theme of love across (or did I say beyond?) boundaries, is that MAGIC LOST is populated by every non-human paranormal being you could think of. How they relate-or don't--what their issues are, what their prejudices are, and what their loves, fears and failing are become underlying themes in this book.

Now, of course, you can read it just for fun. I highly recommend reading just for fun because it's not one of those angst-y, esoteric doom-and-gloom speculative fiction tomes that preach and lecture and make you feel miserable at book's end. It's a freakin' fun book. But the characters and their relationships form a huge part of the book's engine. If you want to see Intimate Adventure at work, you'll see it here. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I have.


~Linnea


PS - FYI, I've reworked my website and added some new things to the Intergalactic Bar & Grille-including a chance to win free t-shirts! Check out my revamped website: www.linneasinclair.com

Naked and Armored

"Naked and Armored" isn't intended as a cheap shot... but my title reflects my love of the oxymoron, the "grabber" that turned a social moment into a minor quest, and my delight in discovering The Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc.

http:www.sca.org

Yesterday, I took my child to a birthday party, and stayed. (I always stay, because she is multi-allergic and I can't expect a party-giver to wield an Epipen). I'd planned to spend two hours in a shady corner of their garden researching plot elements for my next alien romance, but a Michigan thunderstorm drove me inside with other temporarily superfluous parents.

Absorbed as I was with trying to decide whether the Tarot card that best fits my next hero's character and fortune should be Judgement, Temperance, or Knight Of Swords, I commented on a known hobby of one of the fathers.

I thought that he dressed up like d'Artagnan or Richard the Lionheart (or Robin Hood) and reenacted famous Medieval European battles on American soil. It turns out that his society improvises battles. Some of them wear full armor, and some don't.

I was astonished to learn that costumed battles take place in August, and asked how on earth they coped with the heat. Apparently some warriors rely on the ubiquitous water bearers and on creative choices of what to wear --or what not to wear-- under the armor.

Contrary to what I expected (although my metal-clad experience is limited to sitting in a silver-painted car in a parking lot) it never occurred to me that the modern fencers would suffer more that the knights in armor because of the way epéeists and sabreurs have to dress to do battle.

Apart from issues of heat and nudity, I was interested in the conventions of killing each other --a tap on the shoulder from behind-- the detail that the "dead" take a time out to avoid being trodden on by those who are still fighting, the fact that battles are worth points towards winning the season-long war, so killing the King (although fun, and something everyone wants to do) does not mean that the dead King's men stop fighting and run away in leaderless confusion.

Isn't the human element fun?

At RT, I was on several panels where authors revealed what inspires and informs them. A recurrent tip was the value of talking to strangers. As Cathy Clamp said, (and JA Konrath made the same point) someone you meet will possess exactly the insight you are looking for (even if at the time you don't know what it is).

A few posts ago, Jacqueline recommended that you start with your world's Sun when you begin to build a world. (Great and cool advice!). For a great short cut to building a society --if for some reason you don't have time for complete evolution-- a few hours on the Society for Creative Anachronism website might be time well spent.

Their articles on picking a SCA name are fascinating. Names have to have a logic, a consistency, and a purpose. Titles, too. A Welsh King might be a Teyrn. Doesn't that sound like "Tyrant"? A Welsh Lord might be an Arglewydd. (I love that!)

In my own reading, I'm impressed by the power and romance of really cool, and "thus"-sounding names for characters in SF and Fantasy. In LOTR, Aragorn was known by different names... that he had an Elf name, an alias while he was a Ranger, and the heraldic "Aragorn son of Arathorn son of..."

I liked that his lineage was recited as if it were a list of titles of nobility, didn't you? As for Star Wars, I enjoyed the cultural differences in names.

Jabba The Hutt sounds Welsh!
Queen Amidalah was also Padme
Darth was like a title, except that Darth Vader was also addressed as Lord Vader.

I could go on, but I won't. I've got a deadline looming!


Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

Star Wars

Happy Birthday Star Wars. It's hard to believe that it has been thirty years since you hit the screen.

I will never forget my first viewing. The sheer magnitude of the Emperial Cruiser as we got the underneath shot. Absolutely blew me away. And the concept of A long time ago in a Galaxy far far away....mind boggling.

Star Wars blazed so many trails. The sassy heroine. The ne'er do well hero. The conflict between father and son. The special effects. The sheer scope of everything. It pretty much changed the movie world as we know it and opened up tons and tons of possiblities.

There's nothing like the first three (or the last three for you purists) The first three chapters just didn't compare because it was more about the speical effects than the story. But Han, Luke and Leia will live forever.

Now if someone would just get this walking carpet out of my way. I'm going to have a StarWArs dvdathon....

"Tentacles of Love"

Yesterday Ellora's Cave (www.ellorascave.com) released my humorous erotic Lovecraftian romance "Tentacles of Love" in their "Naughty Nuptials" Quickie series. This story was inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's classic tale "The Dunwich Horror." Since the premise of the June "Naughty Nuptials" promotional series is weddings, I played with the concept of how an ordinary woman would react to discovering she's about to marry into a family that has interbred with the "gods" of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Suppose Wilbur Whateley and his huge, invisible, monstrous brother in "The Dunwich Horror" were actually nice guys looking for love? Distinguished SF author and editor Marion Zimmer Bradley expressed her dislike for Lovecraft's story, outraged that a "poor deformed boy" would be treated as an object of loathing and horror. After all, don't a person's inner qualities matter more than a few tentacles? Coincidentally, a few days ago I read a "Dunwich Horror" sequel by Stanley C. Sargent, "Black Brat of Dunwich," wherein Wilbur Whateley's former tutor reveals that Wilbur, despite his grotesque appearance, wasn't evil, just a lonely misfit. He wanted a copy of the NECRONOMICON to control his monstrous twin, not unleash him on the world. This story appears in Sargent's collection THE TAINT OF LOVECRAFT and has also been anthologized. It's much darker than my novelette, which (I hope) comes across as funny and sexy. Here's an excerpt from the heroine's first meeting with her fiance's twin. Those who've read Lovecraft's story will recognize the allusion in the line, "he looks more like our father than I do."

Excerpt from "Tentacles of Love," copyright 2007 by Margaret L. Carter:

“What? Who? Since when?” Hitching up the straps of her sundress, Lauren glared at Blake. “All this time, you somehow forgot to mention you had a brother?”

He flinched at her accusing tone. “We’re twins but he looks more like our father than I do.” He hardly ever talked about his parents. His mom, who’d died before Lauren had met him, had been a single mother. Other than mentioning that the pregnancy had resulted from a brief fling, he’d said nothing about his father. “Wilbur lives here. He never goes out.”

“Wilbur?” She couldn’t help associating the name with a pig in a children’s book.

“Named after one of my mom’s relatives a couple of generations back.” He stepped behind her to zip up the dress.

She dug a comb out of her purse and hastily whipped her hair into shape. “You’re saying he’s in the house now? Good grief, why did you let me scream?”

“Don’t worry, the walls are thick.”

“Why doesn’t he go out?”

“He’s—not like other people,” Blake said with a nervous clearing of his throat. “One thing I love about you is how open-minded and compassionate you are. Nothing seems to faze you.”

“Such as the fact that your family’s a little strange? No biggie. My aunt collects velvet Elvis paintings. I’ve had plenty of practice in open-mindedness.”

“Seriously, you rescued me from terminal geekhood. Miskatonic University alumni aren’t noted for our social graces.”

“Hey, before you, I’d never met a guy who could quote Plato in the original Greek and Olaus Wormius in medieval Latin. Major turn-on.” Although she still didn’t know Olaus Wormius’ claim to fame, the quotations had sounded impressively ominous.

“See, you have a talent for taking weirdness in stride. That’s why I thought you might be able to accept us. Even Wilbur. But I was still scared enough to put off introducing you.”

She folded her arms. “So this is the big secret you’ve been hiding? You thought I might break our engagement because you have a brother who’s a little different? God, do you really think I’m that shallow?”

“No way!” He strode over to her and clasped her shoulders. “It’s not that simple. You’ll see. But I have faith in you.”

Retreating from him, she said, “Okay, let’s get this over with.” She still simmered with indignation that he had hidden such vital information.

“Guess I can’t blame you for getting angry. Just bear with me ‘til you know all the facts, okay?”

She responded with a grudging nod.

“We have to go upstairs.” He led her to a door where the hall dead-ended and opened it to show a narrow flight of steps. He flipped on a light switch.

“Your family makes him live in the attic?”

“He likes it up there. It’s arranged to suit his special needs.”

Still barefoot, she followed Blake to the top of the stairs, where a bare bulb on the ceiling showed a long, well-swept room lined with stacks of boxes, miscellaneous furniture and the gable windows she’d noticed from outside. At the far end a wall with a closed door blocked off part of the space. “Hold on, does that lead to the window that’s boarded up?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t keep a wife locked in the attic, just a brother?”

“Before you go all ballistic about how we’re mistreating him, wait until you’ve seen the whole picture. His room is customized for him and part of that involves covering the window.” Knocking on the door, he said, “Wilbur? I’ve brought Lauren to meet you, the way I promised.”

A whistling noise, like wind howling through a cavern, emanated from the other side. “Well, here goes.” He clasped her hand and opened the door.

Splinters of rainbow light, like the inside of a kaleidoscope, struck her eyes. After blinking a couple of times, she realized she was seeing the colors through a shimmering curtain of mist. Blake stepped across the threshold, pulling her with him. A chill shuddered through her at the moment she entered the room. The floor tilted, then straightened. She clutched Blake’s arm and waited for the vertigo to fade.

Why did the room seem to stretch twenty feet or more ahead of them? “There can’t be this much space up here. Is it some kind of optical illusion?”

“This room isn’t exactly all here. All in this world, I mean. That’s one reason we covered the window. People got too curious about the weird lights.”

She stared at the—object or creature?—that occupied the other end of the chamber. A floor-to-ceiling translucent mound of rainbow-colored bubbles filled the space, emitting blue and violet sparks whenever its surface rippled. A pseudopod oozed outward for a second, then withdrew into the mass, leaving a glittery trail on the floorboards.

“What is that? Is it alive?” The thing struck her as beautiful in an alien, mind-wrenching way. Maybe the family secret was that the mysterious Wilbur performed mad-scientist illicit DNA experiments.

Blake put his arm around her waist. “That’s my brother.”

“What?” she yelped. “Where?”

The mammoth rainbow-bubble cluster extended six tentacles like the tendrils of a jellyfish, and four eye-stalks popped up at random spots on its surface. “Welcome, Lauren.” The voice vibrated through the floor and resonated in the pit of her stomach like organ music. “I’m so happy to meet my new sister.”

Gray spots clumped in front of her eyes. Her head reeled, her knees wobbled and the floor lurched up to meet her.

When her vision cleared, she found herself leaning on Blake with only his snug embrace holding her upright. The conglomeration of bubbles and tentacles hadn’t disappeared.

She screamed and hid her face on Blake’s chest.

He patted her on the back. “Calm down, love. He’d never hurt you. You see why I tried to prepare you for a little shock?”

“Shock?” she shrieked. “Little? You’ve just told me your brother is a giant, glowing blob.”

-end of excerpt-

Writers And Backup

Yep, here we go again with the one thing writers never do and always must do.

My computer fan burned out and I have another fan on order (a feat
that took 2 whole work days from writing -- because of course the fan
went on Memorial Day weekend).

My computer is a Dell Precision 350 -- only 4 years old but you can
only get refurbished parts for it from Dell -- it's off warranty and
barely supported at Dell -- but not supported at all at normal stores
like Best Buy and Frys Electronics.

It took two geek friends two days to get me this far -- really, in a
normal world I could just buy a fan, stick it in, and the computer
would work again. Dells aren't designed for that -- or maybe they are
now but weren't 4 years ago.

At any rate my "whole life" is backed up on an external harddrive that
is unplugged most of the time.

It is unlikely that any of the data on my computer's internal hard
drives (2 huge ones) is affected in any way because the software
caught the problem and refused to boot the machine normally. I don't
have an overheat or catastrophic thermal event (i.e. dead CPU to deal
with) -- I hope. If I'm wrong, then I've lost a couple months worth
of data since my last massive incremental backup.

I SHOULD have done the all-night job of another backup to the external
hard drive when I first heard the fan making an odd noise. I didn't
because I was working hard on a story (which is backed up on an
external floppy disk -- but in software that my husband's machine
doesn't have). I worked too late to have the time to start the backup
running then check all night to see if it crashed.

Meanwhile, though I'm using my husband's much smaller machine that
can't run all the software I normally use in my daily grind.

So although at this moment I don't think I have a data disaster on my
hands, I am crippled for lack of that hefty machine I work on.

But this lesson is worth learning and re-learning and somehow creative
people just have to be force-trained into the backup habit perhaps by
the age of 6 or the habit just won't "take."

Really, backup runs counter to everything in an artist's personality
-- you don't make COPIES, you make unique ORIGINAL stuff, one of a
kind. It gets "copied" only when you've finally got it right.

Well, this world is different. There are whole businesses (several of
them in my phone book) that advertise "data recovery" for just exactly
this reason!

The computer world isn't yet configured for human habitation.

JL


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

Crafting Challenging Relationships in SFR - David Speaks Out

An author is blessed not only when fans read her books, but when they actually become interested in--and excited by--the creation of a novel...the characters, the world building, the behind-the-scenes stuff. David Gray is such a fan. He's fascinated by the whys and wherefores, not only because he likes my books and the science fiction/science fiction romance genres in particular, but because he's crafting his owns worlds, his own characters. So I asked him to share some of his thoughts in this blog as to what he's doing with the emotional machinations and "intimate adventures" of his characters. I think you'll find it as thought provoking as I did (and yeah, writers do play with the strangest ideas!) ~Linnea

Hi, all! And thanks, Linnea, for inviting me over to guest-blog on Alien Romances!

Last monday, Linnea posted a blog -- Love Beyond Boundaries -- and continued on the topic of barriers that challenge the development of romantic relationships between individuals -- a ready source of the very conflict that makes a story work. I found this particularly relevant to my own fictional work-in-progress. Linnea cited several examples of society's traditional taboos, and in my story, set a century and a half into our future, these still hold stubbornly true in one form or another.

Take my main character and his love interest, for example. Daie Fahr is a commoner with ambiguous religious beliefs. He was born and raised on an agricultrual colony planet in another solar system. His accent, his idiomatic expressions and slang, all mark him as an outsider. Anya, the apple of his eye, comes from a well-to-do family on Earth. She's well educated, dresses in the current fashions, and adheres to a fairly rigid belief system. Anya has never left Earth. She's also never met an alien in person, while Daie spent a couple of years on a commercial hub space station -- he ran into them all the time. Daie's immediate environments have always been fairly remote as well. Anya lives on a planet teeming with people. Even aside from these obvious things, Daie's lack of inherent bias against those different from himself, particularly aliens, makes him a potential outcast even among his own kind.

At great odds with these two is the nearly symbiotic relationship between two of my alien species. The one is indigenous to their now-shared home-world while the other is a long-ago transplant -- in essence, an invader. If ever there was a barrier, that ought to be one. Moreover, the indigenous race is corporeal while the other, in its adult stage of life, is ethereal. Nevertheless, over time the two have crossed the boundaries that separated them and learned to coexist so well together that neither would now dream of an existence without the other. Moreover, this hybridization of their cultures has allowed them to advance their knowledge and expand their reach to the point that they have long since become the dominant species in this particular universe. Ironically, that in itself is enough to cause resentment on behalf of other species, humans included.

As you may have surmised, I like to tinker with things. I think Linnea calls it what-if-ing. It's like playing with a chemistry set made of characters and settings. Mix, stir, BOOM! Stuff happens. Whether reading or writing, this is the appeal for me of SFR as a sub-genre -- the maximum potential for situational diversity, by way of a science fictional universe, combined with the exploration of personal relationships, by way of romance. And, of course there's the HEA factor. Yes, guys like HEAs, too. Given such widely variable perspectives amongst the characters, is it any wonder why SFR/RSF is so exciting to read? Every one of these people is embarking on their own Intimate Adventure, about to be afforded an opportunity to walk a mile in another's shoes and maybe see if they should re-examine what they believe and why. They might just get a whole new slant on what unconditional love really is.

Cheers,
David Gray

Insufficient Mating Material's trouble-making heroine

Insufficient Mating Material has just been launched in the UK as of May 25th 2007. I'm told that it can be found in Tesco, WHSmith, Waterstone's, and Blackwell



"Be good..." they say. "And if you can't be good, be careful!"

It must be almost impossible to be careful when all the worlds are watching all the time, and not always sympathetically.

Princesses and celebrities have everywoman's problems, but their problems are magnified a hundredfold by the telephoto lens of public scrutiny. Everyone wants to know who they are seeing, what they are drinking, what they did in bed and with whom, whether or not they are pregnant...

A single alien princess might precipitate a constitutional crisis if an unflattering camera caught her just as a breeze was bellying out her bathing costume... especially if it was common knowledge that she'd slept with a foreign terrorist for kicks.

Princess Martia-Djulia has all the problems of a youngest child (the third child) but more so. It seems pointless to compete with her brilliant older brother and sister. Until senility overtakes them, they will always be older, wiser, better-read, more experienced, more athletic, more powerful.

In a world of feudal primogeniture, the older she gets, the lower her status. She is only interesting if she is scandalous.



Insufficient Mating Material's heroine was introduced in FORCED MATE, where she got a great deal more than she bargained for when she flirted with a handsome --and most unsuitable-- commoner.

She also went through her brother's private "stuff" and got caught, did the gustatory equivalent of spiking the drinks at her brother's wedding banquet, made a compromising video of herself in bed with a tattooed stranger, and fell hopelessly in love with a hunk who was honor-bound to marry someone else.


She makes her dramatic appearance in Insufficient Mating Material as the Royal bride at an Imperial shotgun wedding. As she surveys the throngs who have come to see her married to the mate of her dreams (who has miraculously been relieved of the fiancee he intended to marry and brought back to her) her happiness seems complete...


CHAPTER ONE

Never in all Great Djinn history has any Imperial Princess had such a Mating Ceremony on such short notice, and to a mate freely chosen by the Princess!

Princess Martia-Djulia savored her unique happiness. The second best part was that she was going to get away with it. By taking an alien and a commoner like Commander Jason to mate, she poked a defiant finger in the eye of Imperial tradition.

“You’re glowing,” her tall, grimly magnificent brother commented as he joined her on the raised throne-stage and offered her the support of his bent arm for the slow, gyring descent of the stage into the Throne Room below the Imperial suite.

“I’ve a lot to glow about,” Martia-Djulia retorted. She could have made a barbed remark about how Tarrant-Arragon had tricked his own cold, pale bride into saying the irrevocable Imperial Mating Vows, but she didn’t.

After all, Tarrant-Arragon had hunted down Commander Jason, and brought him back to her.

Her thoughts returned to her Jason who shared her taste for subversion and mischief-making. He was the Mate who would change her sad, lonely life; her boring, bottled-up life. He was her rescuer, her lover, her private hero, the warrior who made her feel young and beautiful, and who awed the Fewmet out of her insolent, uncontrollable sons.

He was the only male in all the forty-two gestates of her life who had ever given her an orgasm.

Martia-Djulia took a deep, happy breath as the last notes of the Fanfare Royal drifted up from the balconies of the Throne Room, and the Crown Prince’s throne stage —its stark, craggy contours pleasingly draped for the occasion in her favorite colors of dusk-sky mauve and midnight-purple— descended silently, like one of her brother’s deliberately placed chess pieces, only fortress-sized.

“I can hardly believe it,” she whispered to herself as she nodded graciously to the crowd below. “I’m about to be Mated to the only male who has the physical strength to pick me up and sweep me off my feet, and the desire to do so.”

Tarrant-Arragon lifted an eyebrow at her.


“Oh, when I think of Jason’s passion--” she said, "When I think of how violently he knocked the ceremonial headmask off an interfering Saurian Ambassador, and of the wicked, sexual insults he threw….”

“You liked that, didn’t you?” Tarrant-Arragon teased. “But, I hope you don’t expect your new Mate to pick you up, attack Saurian Ambassadors, and hurl sexual insults in front of our distinguished guests.”

Martia-Djulia took in the carefully orchestrated tableau where she stood on the stepped stage, waiting for Jason to make an entrance through one of the Throne Room’s soaring central portals.

What would he be thinking? Would he remember how they met at a Virgins’ Ball in this very Throne Room? Would he mentally undress her with his strange, dark-nebula eyes and notice that she looked better than he remembered?

Surely, even a fashion hawk like Jason would approve of her sense of style. For her second Mating, she could hardly usurp the pallor of a Royal Virgin bride. She had chosen the subtle, shifting colors of a fast-frozen sea, glittering with the palest, most precious gemstones aligned in all the right places for the most flattering effect.

“They all came back!” Martia-Djulia breathed, gazing out at the heads of state, ambassadors, military leaders, and subject royalty who had been hastily recalled, some before they had returned home after her brother’s nuptials.

“Of course,” Tarrant-Arragon murmured. “On occasions like this, no matter how lofty the ceiling, it is never high enough, is it?”

The pentagonal Throne Room shimmered with the warmth rising from the thronged guests. Massed body heat made the vast room a battleground of assorted perfumes and less intentional odors that only Djinn nostrils might identify.

Suddenly, Martia-Djulia was conscious of emerging mature notes from her own signature perfume.

“Tarrant-Arragon,” she whispered anxiously. “Did I overdo the Queen of the Night?”

“You seem to have put it absolutely everywhere,” he drawled, and grinned, confirming that his Djinn-sharp olfactory senses were as embarrassingly acute as those of a sea-predator.

“I’ll let Jason lick it off,” Martia-Djulia quipped brazening out her secret embarrassment.

“If he’s got any Djinn in him, he might find that joy a little overpowering,” Tarrant-Arragon said.

Martia-Djulia felt a vague, fleeting apprehension. Was it a certain enigmatic tone in her brother’s voice? Something wasn’t right. Tarrant-Arragon had once threatened to kill Commander Jason if her lover turned out to be of rogue Djinn lineage.

Why was Jason late?

Her anxious gaze searched the double avenues of ground-lighted, living trees which flanked the four grand entrances.

“Ah. The so delightful Henquist and Thor-quentin.” Tarrant-Arragon jerked his head to indicate the upper level balcony where her two tall sons leaned negligently on the elaborately carved stone balustrade. “They look pleased.”

Martia-Djulia smiled hopefully at her usually sullen, sulky sons, until she realized that Tarrant-Arragon was being ironic.

...

“Nervous?” Tarrant-Arragon asked mockingly.

Before she could retort, a loud fanfare made further conversation impossible. The pentagonal room vibrated with the thunder of massed war-drums. Colored plumes of scented smoke surged up and tumbled from the Imperial throne-space, reminiscent of an ultraviolet tinted, pyroclastic cloud. The Emperor’s throne-stage thrust up through the smoke like a coldly gleaming, ice-volcano rising out of a swirling fog.

Her father, The Emperor Djerrold Vulcan V, appeared to stroll on the pinkish-purple vapor trails, high above his guests. Martia-Djulia tried to imprint on her memory every detail of this splendid, dramatic illusion.

“Dear friends, welcome back,” the Emperor began with his customary, affable menace. “You are now here to witness the exchange of vows between my younger daughter and her new mate. Since The Princess Martia-Djulia is a widow, and a mother, and since this is her second marriage, there will —obviously— be no display of proofs of virginity.”
He pointed his Fire-Stone-Ringed forefinger around the room, his guests shrank in their seats, and he smiled tigrishly.

“There will come a point when my dear daughter will ask anyone who objects to her choice of mate to speak out. Anyone who dares to do so will be incinerated.”
Star-blue lightning sizzled and flashed from the Emperor’s finger. Regrettably, her father had flatly refused to even try to color-coordinate his laser ring’s fire for this one occasion.

“Out of consideration for your fellow guests’ nostrils,” Djerrold Vulcan V continued pleasantly, “I advise against any interference. Proceed!”

High above, another fanfare blared from long, deep-noted instruments. The massive central doors at the far end of the Imperial throne room opened.

“I kept my promise,” Tarrant-Arragon said quietly, “…to bring back Jason, if he agreed to come, or to find you a mate like your Commander Jason.”

She wasn’t paying attention, though it was an odd thing to say. Unseen, a massed male voice choir roared out the Mating Anthem... usually heard only once in a generation at the Mating of an Emperor or the Emperor's male heir.

This, too, was her due. She’d been promised that her Mating would be as splendid as the one she had organized for her big brother. And so it was. Only prettier.

“Here he comes!” Martia-Djulia whispered, trembling.

A tall, broad-shouldered silhouette limped from the darkness beyond the doorway.
His beloved, scarred face was a shadowed, distant blur… but something wasn’t right. Had Tarrant-Arragon tortured and starved Commander Jason into agreeing to Mate with her?

“What is wrong with him?” she hissed accusingly. Time stretched out. A sense of creeping horror chilled her vitals. “You promised not to force him.”

Her thoughts raced back to three Imperatrix cycles ago.

She vividly remembered what they’d agreed, just before Tarrant-Arragon left to exact terrible revenge on the unknown villains who’d tried to assassinate him on his honeymoon.

I want him to be happy, she’d protested when Tarrant-Arragon caught her trying to erase compromising footage of Jason on top of her. Jason’s happiness hadn’t been on her mind when she triggered the surveillance systems.

Do you think he’d be happy with me if I force him to be my mate? she’d asked her brother, who had no scruples when it came to mate appropriation.

No, Tarrant-Arragon had bluntly told her, dashing any lingering hope that she could blackmail Jason into returning to her bed permanently.

At the Virgins’ Ball, Commander Jason had made it clear that he’d rather be searching the rim worlds for his errant mate-to-be, but he was on duty. Since he had to be at the Ball, he’d been in the mood for a revenge dock in any bay that would accommodate him.

Martia-Djulia had only wanted illicit excitement — until Jason gave her so much, she wanted him to do it for the rest of her life.

“Did you force him? Did you torture him?” Martia-Djulia demanded urgently.

“Not really,” her appalling brother replied.

Something was wrong. Martia-Djulia's heart thumped. She clasped nervous hands to her glittering breast, and glared in an effort to get a better look at her promised Mate. At this distance, across the Throne Room, it was hard to tell…. Closer he came. Closer.


I hope you enjoyed this glimpse of Martia-Djulia.
Read her story in Insufficient Mating Material

Pirates 3

I have to gush about this movie because we saw it last night and unfortunately it's filled my brain so much that I can't think about anything else. And why the picture of Orlando and not Johnny Depp? Hey I wrote the book Obsessing Orlando under the name Kassy Tayler. That should pretty much explain it all.

Great special effects. Great battle scenes! Depp was hilarious. Rush thoroughly enjoyed his turn as Barbossa. Keira got to be a kick ass heroine. And Orloando got to be heroic and romantic and give us more of those great movie kiss scenes.

The ending kind of made me sad. But it left the potential for more movies. But I have to say my favorite scene (and this does not give away any plot points) was where the ship was sailing on a sea of stars. It was one of the most visually stunning things I've ever seen. Almost as if they were in deep space just drifting along. So see it even relates!

ALIEN NATION

Last week's issue of NEWSWEEK had a cover story on gender identity. I was a little disappointed in it, because it dealt almost entirely with people who choose to transform from their physical sex at birth to the opposite sex (the transsexual or transgender phenomenon). The article made only one brief reference to individuals who possess external genitalia different from their chromosomal sex. I'd hoped the magazine would discuss the many varieties of ambiguous sexuality, more common than most people realize. The Wikipedia article "Intersex" goes into considerable detail and makes a good place to start on this topic.

In science fiction, sexual varieties other than the binary male and female can be normal and typical of a species, rather than a rare anomaly as in human beings. I just bought a DVD of the first season of the excellent TV series ALIEN NATION, whose Newcomer species has, in effect, three sexes. In addition to the male and female as we know them, Newcomers include another type of male called "binnaum" (if I have the spelling correct). These men don't fertilize female ova, but their intervention is necessary to prepare the female for conception. This act of preparation is a solemn and joyous ritual, and the husband feels no jealousy over the binnaum's coupling with his wife. Moreover, among Newcomers husband and wife share the process of gestation. Part-way through pregnancy, the pod containing the fetus is transferred from the female's body into the male's pouch. The Newcomer detective in the series, George Francisco, becomes a father, and his human partner has to deal with the mind-boggling situation of working with a pregnant man.

Because the Newcomers' culture has been crippled by slavery, and now they are trying to fit into our society, this show doesn't give the full impact of the potential effects upon society of the sharing of pregnancy by men. What if human males, like Newcomers and seahorses, bore the babies? Throughout the world, the biological fact that women bear and nurse babies has shaped women's position in society. There's a famous essay (I think it appeared in an early issue of MS) about what would happen if men menstruated and women didn't. The essay, building on the premise that anything men do (including having periods) would be glorified, envisions men bragging about their periods, barring women from the priesthood because only someone with monthly bleeding can reenact Christ's sacrifice, etc. I'm not so sure about these conclusions, though. Isn't it possible that the very fact of monthly bleeding is one of the phenomena that historically contributed to women's marginalization in the first place? For a contrary view, however, I once read a feminist utopia (or dystopia) framed as another voyage by Gulliver, who ends up in a country where women dominate, in a satirical reversal of the middle-class family structure of the 1950s. Whereas in our real-world society, women's biological functions of pregnancy and lactation result in their being assigned the child-care role, it works just the opposite in this novel. Because women bear the burden of pregnancy, birth, and nursing, men stay home and do all the other child care as well as the housework. (I kind of like this idea!)

Octavia Butler wrote that her story "Bloodchild," in which young human males allow centipede-like aliens to lay eggs within their bodies, was her "pregnant man" story. In this tale she explores the emotional complexity of the young protagonist's both loving and fearing the alien female whose reproductive process might kill him if the grubs growing inside him aren't removed in time.

Ursula LeGuin's classic novel THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS attacks the problem from a different angle. The natives of her alien planet are sexless (not hermaphroditic) most of the time. Only during the periodic heat period called "kimmer" do they feel sexual desire and develop external sexual characteristics and the ability to reproduce. Whether a person becomes male or female during any particular kimmer period is purely random, except that if exposed to an individual expressing one sex, the second individual automatically responds by becoming the opposite sex. So anyone can become pregnant. In fact, the novel begins with the unforgettable line, "The King was pregnant." Whatever caste and class distinctions exist on this world, they have no relation to sex roles, because there aren't any.

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series includes an alien, elf-like species called the Chieri who are hermaphrodites. Enchanting, androgynous figures, they express either male or female traits depending on the partner they're with. In THE WORLD WRECKERS, a man from Earth falls in love with a Chieri whom he first meets in female form. When her hermaphroditic nature becomes obvious, he realizes he loves her regardless of her (by Earth standards) ambiguous sexuality. This plotline was very daring for its time and would stand out as a provocative exploration of inter-species romance even today.

I'd like to see more spec-fic romance exploring such themes as multiple sexes and male pregnancy. Earlier posts have talked about the concept of "soul mates." How much of falling in love is purely emotional and spiritual, and how much depends upon physical compatibility? How far can love go to overcome what might seem insurmountable differences in biology and family structures?

Intimate Adventure

Linnea defined Intimate Adventure very well:

You'll find my view at
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html

Linnea Sinclaire wrote MAY 21 2007:
------------
What does it take to push beyond those boundaries? What does it take to tell your parents, your village, your society to take a hike, get lost, leave me alone and let me love? What does it take to risk it all, to throw away everything that has heretofore defined you as a person? What does it take to open your heart, fully expecting rejection?

What kind of person is that?
-----------------
That is a hero on the road to Intimate Adventure, that's what kind of person that is.
It takes more courage to be emotionally honest (especially with yourself about WHO and maybe WHAT you are) than it does to be physically honest -- to admit mistakes, wrong-doing, or bad judgement, or to impose your idea of right upon others by your mighty sword.
--------------
Kimber An commented on Linnea's blog entry of Monday May 21, 2007:

I wondered what would drive a girl to do something she knows will get her killed if she's caught? My thought is that her home life must be so devoid of love and joy that when she finds it somewhere else, she grabs it for all she's worth. All human beings need love.

I wondered why would it be the death penalty for a girl to fall in love with someone? My thought on that is that a girl represents an unused sexual object. Men are terrified of being rejected by those they want to have sex with. Most men develop the courage to cope. In some societies and individuals, they don't. Rather than risk rejection, the girl's basic human right to choose her own sexual partner is taken from her. Like a non-sentient animal, she's not allowed control over her own body. To say nothing of her heart. This is rape, but some people dress it up in a religion or whatever.

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

Kimber An has the makings of a field-changing author! (not just writer; AUTHOR).

This is the kind of thinking we all need to be doing on so many levels.

Deep inside what Kimber An has said here lies the key to World Peace.

And that really has nothing whatever to do with sexuality or choosing a mate. It has to do with taking an idea (such as Linnea tossed out for discussion) and turning it over, inside out, analyzing Linnea's idea and synthesizing it with other bits acquired elsewhere, to create another idea.

Science Fiction is the Literature of Ideas.

Science is nothing more than the organization of knowledge that's been verified by cross-checking (peer review journals being an example). Ideas can't just sit there. They get organized, rearranged, strangely juxtaposed, and turned upside down.

Fiction is all about finding the invisible shape of things that lies within the interlaced and overlapping fog of tiny ideas and facts. We swim in a sea of trivia, bits and pieces and shards and pebbles of nothing much all clumped around and thus hiding nuggets of Infinite Joy.

The writer's job is to pare away the dross and expose that underlying, intrinsic, meaningful pattern of true joy. That is, generally speaking, what art is for, what artists do.

The universe is such that the bits of dull matter and negative energies (which includes most acts people tag as evil) we swim in are attracted to the bright Joy, clump around Joy, cling to it and disguise it -- not destroy, disguise. As a result, it's very easy to live your life convinced the world is nothing but angst, boredom, overbearing men, and pointless toil because that's what you see on the surface.

It takes the penetrating gaze of the mystic to spot the hidden Joys. And then it takes the Artist to portray that Hidden Joy emerging from hiding in such a way that ordinary people can go out and about their lives and actually SEE Joy they never knew was there.

From there, it's possible for the oridinary person to internalize and experience that Joy for themselves.

That's why we read Romance Novels -- in any sub-genre. We know that our lives can be changed if we can SEE what's really there rather than the husks of dullness and negativity accreted around our joys.

Finding the right mate is only one of those many Joys in life, but let's look a little closer at what Kimber An has said.

Now why would a girl (woman even, maybe) be willing to risk her very life for something different than she has right now? How terrible does it have to be for you to prefer death to continuing?

That might be the wrong question.

It isn't how bad conditions are here and now that drives people to risk death. It's how GOOD they think it MIGHT (fantasy-romance?) be elsewhere.

Look at the Mexican and Hispanic illegal immigrants -- they come seeking a BETTER life, not fleeing the life they have. If the USA weren't their northern neighbor, dangling all that forbidden fruit before them on TV signals, would they be flooding north?

But look at Iraq - it's bleeding population to every surrounding country, people walking out with what they can carry, desperate for a place to live that isn't exploding all the time.

But though they are refugees, they aren't moving because conditions are horrid where they are.

They are moving because they believe conditions are better WHERE THEY ARE GOING.

If the other countries were in the same or worse shape, they wouldn't move.

They are trying to "get away from" horrid conditions -- and that means being able to imagine that conditions are better where they are going. Look at all those still sitting in the mud. They're the ones who can't imagine conditions are better elsewhere.

Look at those who are sticking it out in Iraq, (likewise the Balkans, Northern Ireland, various African countries, Darfur comes to mind). Horrid conditions don't make them move. Why? Things will get better here by and by, and then things will be horrid "there" (wherever there might be) eventually. Home is always better. For some people.

Some people can imagine the Joy hidden within the layers of angst in their current position. Sometimes that Joy isn't really there -- but people are more motivated by imagination than by facts.

People are more sensitive to LURES than to GOADS.

It's a psychological principle. You get people to alter behavior faster by offering rewards, not punishments. Even works with dogs.

Confidence Operators use that principle.

So women denied the right to choose their own mate won't leave, won't murder the power-mad whip-wielder, won't murder the unwanted husband or legally licensed rapist, and won't strike against the system.

Why? Because conditions are horrid in the marriage system? No. Because they can't see that it's BETTER anywhere else, or how any other system might work better. "All men are the same."

However, because of TV, photos, the internet, tourist travel, telephone etc. etc., women the world over are being exposed to other ways of looking at the problem, other solutions, places where things work better, where they can imagine it's better, where they can imagine Joy exposed to their sight.

And so the world is changing. That change is causing a backlash against "Western Civilization." There are those who are striking out hard against freedom to choose, even to choose wrongly.

But make no mistake. In the animal -- birds, squirrels, dogs even -- it's always the female who gets to choose the mate.

Just watch in your yard or in the park at this time of year and you'll see female birds rejecting randy males, just flittering away before they can mount. And the poor male has to sit there and watch her fly away. (saw this the other day and felt so sorry for that piteously drooping male bird -- then he went after a different female.)

Human civilization will swing back to accomodate this pattern because it's inherent.

So as SF writers, we should be wondering what would happen if some Alien Species landed on the UN Plaza and offered women something BETTER. What if so many women left Earth that it put the species in danger?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

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

Love Beyond Boundaries

Continuing a subject touched on by Margaret in a previous blog...

Love beyond boundaries. A romantic relationship, a deep romantic committment that pushes past the edges of the ordinary envelope. The grist of many science fiction romances (and futuristics and RSFs, to be sure) but is it really all that foreign?

Centuries ago, on our planet, a romance between a high-born person and a commoner, a peasant and a landowner, was scandalous in many socieities. Unthinkable. For even longer, different religions didn't mingle, let alone marry. To marry outside your village, sect, caste, religion or region was cause for banishment.

We've come farther--but not vastly so. In my grandparents' and even my parents' worlds (1900s-1940s), it was still expected that a nice National Catholic Polish boy marry an nice National Catholic Polish girl. My mother is part Swedish, part German, part Polish and Roman Catholic. My Polish grandmother never fully accepted her.

There are still countries today where marrying outside your religion--or marrying someone not chosen by your parents--is tantamount to a death penalty. Interracial marriage has gained some acceptance but still has a way to go. Same sex marriage is a hot-button topic.

And some people look oddly at me when I say I write science fiction romance. And then wonder where I get my ideas.

How and why we--or a society--define love, and how and why we--or a society--permit love tells me a tremendous amount about us and about that society. Love is just the other side of the prejudice coin, and in many instances, is woven into the prejudice coin. Loving, liking, having sex with, working with, admiring, supporting this person is acceptable. That person is not and must be shunned.

Gabriel's Ghost is the novel where I address that situation most directly, both through the characters of Ren--an empathic Stolorth whose telepathic, pacificistic culture is viewed with suspicion by the human-controlled Empire; and through the Takan characters, who are forced into an almost child-like state and belittled by a religious system that purports to 'care' for them. It also forms the basis of the relationship between Sully and Chaz: can Chaz love someone she was taught to hate?

Because I do write romance, the theme of who and what and why and how we love someone is constant in my books. One of the male protagonists in Games of Command is a cybernetic human, stripped of the ability to love--or so his creators believe. Or so everyone who encounters him believes. So Branden Kel-Paten has to struggle to overcome not only his internal anti-love programming (and how many of us feel we're unworthy of love because of our own "internal" programming?) but also chance disbelief and ridicule from those around him when he finally admits that, yes, he has feelings.

What does it take to push beyond those boundaries? What does it take to tell your parents, your village, your society to take a hike, get lost, leave me alone and let me love? What does it take to risk it all, to throw away everything that has heretofore defined you as a person? What does it take to open your heart, fully expecting rejection?

What kind of person is that?

I write about those kinds of persons. Chances are, you read about them (since you've found this blog). And if you read about them, then you know that emotional heroism can be the most gripping, terrifying, most poignant and most rewarding experience on the page. Moreso than laser pistol battles. Moreso than cars hurtling over cliffs. Moreso than the secret spy trapped in a locked room. The severed arm will heal (and more quickly in SF). The lost secret formula will at some point be recovered (or recreated). Political scenarios shift with the wind.

But the instinct to love--and I do believe in humans and in many other species, it is instinct--cuts deeper than any light-sabre. A broken heart may never heal and a lost love may never be recovered. When you add the cultural or societal pressures on top of that--can a human love a shape-shifter? A cybernetic half-man, half-machine?--you, as writer or reader, venture into a vastly more dangerous landscape.

It's the landscape from which my books sprout.

And I hope this answers one recent question posed to me, and also a general comment I read recently on a blog.

The question was whether I'd ever write science fiction without a romance element. The answer is no. I can't conceive of a world without emotions as one of the driving forces in the story.

The blog comment--in a thread about Linnea Sinclair's books but addressing science fiction romance in general--was that SFR was "the kind of crap" the blogger "could write in my sleep." My comment back is go ahead, do it. Pen a really good, gripping SFR novel. Explore the depths of love beyond boundaries in a fully invented world, an unfamiliar landscape. Put your characters--and yourself--through the paces. Then submit it to my agent. She constantly gets queries from publishing houses looking for "more books like Linnea Sinclair's."

Namaste, ~Linnea

The forbidden underbelly of alien romance

Twelve hours ago, at three in the morning, I "Twittered" about whether or not my alien romances blog today would be about aerodynamic snot.

When one's husband is a car guy, one's daughter is multi-allergic, Elm pollen is in the air, and juvenile coughing wakes the family so it is necessary to get out the nebulizer, then the pre-dawn conversations sometimes sink to a rather low --but terminologically precocious-- level.

I venture to say that being a mother is a brutalizing influence. Pre-motherhood, I doubt that I'd have laughed with malevolent glee at the thought of a burly dustman fainting over the whiff of someone else's thoroughly-used diaper (nappy) in the trash.

Snot. Allergies. Aliens.

There's a long literary tradition of aliens succumbing to Earthly ills. It's not surprising. In the olden days, missionaries and colonists unintentionally killed off isolated, "primitive" communities by exposing them to "civilization's" diseases.

If this happens on our own planet, imagine how an alien would suffer if he visited us and encountered airborne irritants and allergens which were new to his immune system.
I've read that allergies may be worse in the modern western world because we keep our homes too clean, and our toddlers no longer hunt, gather and consume worms fresh from the soil.

Contact suits would protect the alien from the dreadful spores, fibres, chemicals, dander, powders, and other bits and bobs that fill the air we breathe, but how many hunky aliens wear them?

How many hunks walk about sporting a surgical mask? In Japan, out of courtesy, people who have a cold wear surgical masks in public to help keep their germs to themselves. That would make Japan a very good beach-head for a stealthy alien invasion, wouldn't it?

Sneezing and coughing isn't romantic, so we alien romance authors are encouraged to gloss over it, just as Regency Romance authors are not pressed to talk about the logistics of chamber pots, the driveway hazards of collapsing cess pits, and the summer stench of the Thames.

I was looking at someone's wonderfully romantic MySpace site the other day. It showed image after image of tall (usually hirsute and unkempt) knights in armor, clutching swooning and flimsily clad females to their steel-breastplates... and (apparently) persisting in an attempt to inflict a french kiss --do you think the French call it that?-- on the insensible lady. I couldn't help wondering whether the ladies were fainting because the Knightly breath was devastating.

My own olfactory senses are quite acute, so are those of my aliens. The notion --mentioned on television last night-- of "smellyvision" appalls me. Life is quite enough of an intrusion without adding compulsory smells to the entertainment media! But, I'm giving further serious thought to a hayfevered alien heroine.

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry

Insufficient Mating Material (release in the UK 5/25/2007)
Heroine with rash, alien berries.

Forced Mate
Heroine with smoke sensitivity, nicotine allergy

Great Read

I just read a book called The Silver Spoon for a quote. It's kind of a Starman, V type story with a really sweet hero name Caelen and a feisty heroine named Zara.

Here's my quote. "A fantastic story that captures you from page one. I loved it." Colby Hodge

You can get it here at echelon press http://www.echelonpress.com/

Aliens Among Us
Zara Mitchell's nightmares began when the Observers landed. These strangely vivid visions still haunt her nightly and leave her terrified of the silver-eyed visitors and their true intentions. When one of the eerily beautiful beings shows up at her diner with the local sheriff, her world changes forever. The Observer insists that she come with him. He claims her life is in danger. But can he be trusted?

A Prophecy Fulfilled
After two years, Caelan's search is finally over. He's found her, the human female from the prophecy. She is the one thing he recognizes from his life before Earth. His only link to the truth. Now all he has to do is keep her alive long enough to find the clues to a past he can't remember and a future she fears.

Meet the Jetsons

One of the faithful visitors to this blog recently posted a comment that referred to the "suburban housewife on Mars" motif. The phrase reminds me of the old TV series THE JETSONS. Aside from the robot maid and gadgetry such as personal space shuttles instead of cars, the Jetson household looked like a stereotypical middle-class American family of the 1950s, as seen on dozens of mundane sitcoms. It effect, it simply projected that family structure forward in history just as THE FLINTSTONES projected it backward. In earlier decades, classic SF writers didn't always use any more imagination in this area. The original STAR TREK fell short of its potential in this regard. Except for the occasional standout character such as the Vulcan matriarch in “Amok Time,” many of the adult alien females encountered by the Enterprise seemed to exist mainly for Captain Kirk to seduce. In Robert Heinlein's HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, Earth has a permanent settlement on the moon, but the teenage protagonist's mother appears to be a fifties-style housewife. In Heinlein's PODKAYNE OF MARS, Podkayne's mother is a career woman, but female spaceship officers seem to be relegated to supporting rather than commanding roles. His later work allows more scope for experimentation in family structures, however; in the former penal colony of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS and the distant future of TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, all careers are open to both sexes, and various forms of marriage in addition to traditional monogamy are common.

I have no doubt that as long as our species remains recognizably human, we'll have marriage and family in some form, for the mutual emotional and financial support of adults and the care of offspring. The evolution of the Israeli kibbutz system has shown that, given a choice, most people do want to bring up their children in family units rather than a communal arrangement. The biblical book of Genesis contains stories of love and marriage that we have no trouble identifying with. If those social institutions haven't become unrecognizable or extinct over the past three or four thousand years, they aren't likely to vanish in the next century or two as a result of technological changes that are trivial compared to the shift from an economy of desert nomads to the global computer culture of our time. Still, it seems unlikely that marriage and reproductive patterns of future eras will look exactly like those practiced by our parents or grandparents, or even ourselves. In today's Baltimore SUN there's a story about a court decision allowing a birth certificate to be issued with the mother's name left blank (analogous to the way it has been possible to leave a father unidentified all along). A single man had hired an egg donor to conceive and a surrogate gestational mother to bear his baby, and both he and the surrogate wanted to ensure that she would have no legal obligation to the baby. So part of the BRAVE NEW WORLD reproductive future has already arrived. In the imagined future of PODKAYNE OF MARS, it's not uncommon for young parents to conceive and gestate babies as close together as the mother's health allows, then have them frozen (placed in cryogenetic suspended animation) until the parents' career patterns allow them to provide the children with optimal amount of attention as well as material resources; as Heinlein's narrator puts it, this plan resolves the conflict between the best biological stage to bear offspring and the best social and economic stage to rear them. I doubt that any such technological innovations will become the norm for the majority. Compared to the old-fashioned way of pregnancy and birth, they're too much trouble and, for the foreseeable future, will probably remain too expensive for many working parents.

What about alternate marriage patterns? In pre-industrial centuries, "family" comprised all the inhabitants of a household, including apprentices and slaves. We tend to define "family" as the nuclear household unit of parents and children, so we invented the phrase "extended family" to talk about grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. Polygamy has been legal throughout history over much of the world, usually polygyny (one man with several wives), although a few cultures practice polyandry (a woman with two or more husbands, typically a pair of brothers). In an earlier post I mentioned the potential economic and reproductive advantages of legalizing polyandry in our own culture (not likely to happen outside an SF novel!). Wyo Knott in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS was formerly married to a pair of brothers. Heinlein's futures include a variety of line marriage and group marriage patterns. Suppose your hero or heroine becomes involved with a lover who belongs to an even more complicated type of household? In the Sime-Gen series of Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah, anyone who falls in love with a Companion knows that the Channel whose need the Companion serves has priority. The Channel-Companion transfer relationship doesn't necessarily involve sex (indeed, it seems that more often than not each partner in the transfer relationship has a separate love interest), yet in a way it can be more intimate than a marriage. Octavia Butler's short story "Bloodchild" takes place on a world where human colonists, to survive, have accepted a symbiotic relationship with the natives of the planet, who look something like giant centipedes. Typically, a human household gets adopted by an alien female, who lays her eggs within the bodies of the young men of the family, to be removed (if all goes well) before the newly-hatched grubs can devour their host.

Other aliens might look humanoid but have three or more sexes instead of our standard two. Or they might change sex over a lifetime, as Heinlein's Martians in RED PLANET and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (and some Earth species of fish) do. How would a human hero or heroine in a romance handle falling in love with one of these people? The difficulties in loving a member of the symbiotic species in the STAR TREK universe, where the symbiont switches between male and female bodies several times over its very long lifespan, look simple in comparison.