I don't really know about "mammoth-punk"; I went with alliteration.
Science fiction and science fiction romance embraces "steam punk" and "cyber punk". What would (or do) we call alternate history dating back 800 years, or 35,000 years or even 75,000 years?
Suppose for a moment that the theoretical Toba catastrophe never happened. This theory suggests that a massive volcanic eruption on Sumatra covered the Indian subcontinent in 16 centimeters of more of ash, compounded an ice age and reduced mankind to perhaps as few as 1,000 "breeding pairs" thus creating a "bottleneck" in human evolution.
By the way, this theory seems to be at odds with Spencer Wells's study of Y chromosomes in Central Asia (see article published in the December 2004 issue of Discover magazine) which latter appears to suggest that the first humans moved out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.
Suppose for another moment that Genghis Khan (800 years ago) and described by Discover contributor Robert Kunzig as "a prodigious fornicator" was impotent.
How might our world be different?
Apparently, Genghis Khan's breeding territory cut a broad swathe across Asia, from Iran to the sea of Japan, and he had a woman in every port (and village along the way) and 500 wives. Allegedly, there is a microsatellite ("a short, repetitious sequence of DNA in which the number of repetitions can change from one generation to the next") that appears to suggest that Genghis Khan's male descendants are all across his former empire.
Robert Kunzig's "The Hidden History Of Men" (about Wells's "Human Genome Diversity Project") is a fascinating article, illustrated with three excellent maps. I love maps for world-building and inspiration! One map shows Genghis Khan's stomping ground. Another shows where Spencer Wells and his team took blood samples from men. The best map of all looks like a tattoo on some guy's back and shows little flags with genetic markers, tracing mankind's migrations after leaving Africa.
This map on Wikipedia shows a mitochondrial-related migration map. Mitochondrial mapping relies on female chromosomes.
Scientists seem to agree that all of us originated in Africa. I'd like to think that some of us didn't, that some of us originated on another planet or were seeded here by an interstellar Genghis Khan. But why Africa? Why not South America, or Australia, or India, or France?
I asked Google "Why did mankind originate in Africa?" and found plenty of How-and-why-we-now-know-that-we-did..." but if someone knows the Why of it, it's not at the top of the search results.
Was it because the Sahara back then (before life left the sea) was the perfect warm, shallow, primaeval soup?
Freshwater lakes.
There is a theory about why some people left Africa. Mega-Drought. Climate change! http://geology.com/news/2007/lake-malawi-coring-may-rewrite-out-of-africa.shtml Paradoxically, there's also a theory that the Sahara desert will once again become lush and fertile as a result of global warming. Geology.com is an absolute treasure trove of links, for those fascinated by our planet.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
In the Dollhouse
Have you been watching Joss Whedon’s TV series DOLLHOUSE, now in its final episodes? The Dollhouse is a secret facility where “dolls,” people who have bound themselves into a kind of indentured servitude for five years, have their memories erased and receive “imprints” of artificially created personalities at the request of wealthy clients. At the end of an assignment, an employee’s imprinted personality is wiped, and he or she returns to the Dollhouse in a sort of neutral mode until the next assignment. The speed and ease of erasing personae and implanting new ones make the process look more like magic than science, but it does raise some classic SF questions.
When a doll (or “active”) receives an imprint, the false memories feel as authentic as real-life ones, and he or she experiences the new personality as completely genuine. In effect, the procedure creates temporary manifestations of serial multiple personalities. Are these personae “real people”? When one is erased, is someone being murdered? The protagonist, Echo (played by Faith from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), eventually develops a new self with access to all her old imprints, even though dolls are supposed to be essentially blanks. If her original personality were implanted (as is standard at the end of the five-year contract), would that constitute killing Echo? One character, not a doll, recently suffered severe brain damage, which was repaired by having his own personality (fortunately on file) re-imprinted. Is he still the same person?
I’m reminded of the familiar SF trope of achieving immortality by uploading one’s mind into a computer. Is a computer program that duplicates an individual’s mind in every detail really the same person—or merely a copy in the same sense that a Xerox of a document isn’t the original? Also, Dr. McCoy’s misgivings about the transporter in STAR TREK—if the transporter transmits only information, not matter, and creates a duplicate of the traveler at the other end, is the original traveler still in existence? Or has he been destroyed and replaced by an exact copy? And does that question have any practical meaning?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
When a doll (or “active”) receives an imprint, the false memories feel as authentic as real-life ones, and he or she experiences the new personality as completely genuine. In effect, the procedure creates temporary manifestations of serial multiple personalities. Are these personae “real people”? When one is erased, is someone being murdered? The protagonist, Echo (played by Faith from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), eventually develops a new self with access to all her old imprints, even though dolls are supposed to be essentially blanks. If her original personality were implanted (as is standard at the end of the five-year contract), would that constitute killing Echo? One character, not a doll, recently suffered severe brain damage, which was repaired by having his own personality (fortunately on file) re-imprinted. Is he still the same person?
I’m reminded of the familiar SF trope of achieving immortality by uploading one’s mind into a computer. Is a computer program that duplicates an individual’s mind in every detail really the same person—or merely a copy in the same sense that a Xerox of a document isn’t the original? Also, Dr. McCoy’s misgivings about the transporter in STAR TREK—if the transporter transmits only information, not matter, and creates a duplicate of the traveler at the other end, is the original traveler still in existence? Or has he been destroyed and replaced by an exact copy? And does that question have any practical meaning?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Worldbuilding For Science Fiction Romance
As I've pointed out in many posts on this blog, the sift-sort screen a writer uses to pull a second draft out of a first draft is built on the warp and woof of composition.
Composition is the essential ingredient that transforms Reality into Art.
Composition is created differently in different art forms, but the principles are always the same. If you know one art form, you can at least appreciate if not practice the others. And you have a leg up on learning the others.
"Business" and "Marketing" are two other art forms that today's writers really need an appreciation for.
Healing or Medicine are art forms where the medium is actually "science," or as in oil painting, the pigment is science and the canvass is the unique human being.
In say, interior decorating (something a writer must do with every interior scene) you choose a key color and come off that key color with compliments, contrasts, and tones to create a palette. Colors are associated with emotions and with various mystical functions. So what's happening in the scene, the subtext and plot movement dictate the choice of color of carpet and drapes.
The room's decor all stands or falls on the exacting relationships between the key color and everything in the room. You can (as a writer) choose color combinations to convey the mood of the scene set there. For example, if a main character is conducting a conversation in his living room, you can dress the main character to match or clash with his room's decor to convey a subtle mood to keep the visitor off balance.
In say, figure skating or ballet, choreography is composed to fill the display arena or stage, and costumes are colored to underscore the mood of the music.
In photography, an angle is chosen to follow the "perspective lines" you've seen oil painters trace in charcoal on a bare canvass -- to draw the viewer's eye precisely to a given focus spot. The good photographer will hang upside down from a tree limb to get that view.
In music, "scales" are created by the relative pitches of a set of notes, while other notes are excluded. From those notes on the scale, the composer creates a mood and plays the emotional tension up and down to thrill the audience.
Human emotion is rooted in the perception of the relationships of things to other things - sensory input to other sensory input. Pattern recognition is our survival mechanism.
The term "black velvet" for example calls forth color perception and tactile perception - add "voice" for sound, "A voice like black velvet" -- in truth such a phrase makes absolutely no sense. In Science Fiction Romance, it conveys a world of meaning, very precisely.
How you as a writer arrange things in relationship to other things in your fiction conveys your theme -- and the most powerful themes are the ones that are never stated in words.
The theme of a story is the key color, the key note of the scale, the defining edges of the skating arena or stage, the universe of discourse and all its unconscious assumptions.
The theme of a story is not just repeated. A motif is repeated, but the motif is chosen from the theme -- it is not the theme.
The theme is echoed or exemplified in every single element, every relationship of one element to another -- in the composition of the worldbuilding.
If something doesn't fit the theme of the story, fit into the arena or stage, inside the edges of the photograph, or onto the scale, the writer must delete that thing or change the "angle" (for example, choose a different main character or combine two characters, or separate one character into two.)
Sometimes, the element that's been deleted must be replaced by something to perform a plot function. The replacement must be chosen from the theme to complete the composition.
The deleted element may (in fact usually does) belong to some other story the writer has incubating in the subconscious. Usually what must be deleted is just plain GOOD, sometimes even GREAT -- very often the scene or character that has to be deleted is the one which first popped to mind bringing along with it the story that is now being told.
Just because it came to mind pulling this story with it - does not mean it belongs to this story.
A story has a composition that the reader will be looking for.
An element the writer feels is important might actually betray the reader's trust that this universe has a composition. That betrayal of trust will throw the reader out of the story, leave them bewildered and disappointed.
Writers Need Editors
Testing the "composition" and searching for any intrusive element (character, plot twist, ending point, beginning scene, mid-point, setting, McGuffin, backstory, background exposition) is a job for another pair of eyes besides the writer's eyes.
That's why writers need beta-readers, preferably not friends but acquaintances the writer knows have an appetite for the kind of story this is supposed to be.
Beta readers don't necessarily need a conscious mastery of composition.
That's really the writer's and editor's job. The beta reader however will squirm or point at something that doesn't work. "I didn't like this character" or "I just didn't understand this." "It would be better set in Italy." "This is boring." "The ending isn't satisfying."
Beta readers untrained in composition and the craft of writing will squirm and use non-quantitative (and very unhelpful) language. They will use subjective measures of how "good" a story is, not the objective measures I've been focused on in these posts. They don't know what they like, they just know the feeling of liking. (which is fine if they'll pay you!)
The writer's business is to know that what the beta-reader is pointing at may not actually be the source of the reader's problem.
What's being pointed at is not necessarily the source of the problem in the manuscript.
If a writer is professional enough to know this about beta-readers, a bad opinion from a beta reader won't "hurt" or dismay or evoke any particular emotional reaction. It will merely trigger an alert re-evaluation of the composition, searching for the source of the reaction (without asking the beta reader any further questions). Composition is always the source of the reader's reactions -- almost nothing else, really, but composition speaks directly to the reader's innermost nerve.
The reader may say the ending was unsatisfying while the writer knows that what made the ending unsatisfying was a missing scene that should have formed the middle of the story. But during writing, the writer didn't know what to put there in that scene, so didn't write it (or maybe cut it because it seemed to corny).
How do you compose that missing scene? Look at the composition as a whole, and check everything against the theme, and the bit that punches up the ending will be apparent.
This is much easier to achieve when you are not mixing genres.
But my favorite stories are all mixed-genre!
What Makes Science Fiction Romance into both Science Fiction and Romance without ruining either genre's punch?
Composition. That's it in a word, and Linnea Sinclair has noted that it's a hard struggle to get that balance right. This editor says that, that reader says something else, this audience wants more this, that audience wants more that.
Linnea and this phalanx of brave new writers are creating A NEW COMPOSITION.
Once created, other artists will be able to use that composition to hit the mark every single time.
At the moment, both readers, writers and editors are groping. Readers have to have their tastes expanded and the expectations trained. Writers have to learn a whole new set of no-no's. Editors have to understand the risks of exploring new territory also come with rewards.
So let's look more closely at the problem of composition with two genres, equivalent to jumping double-dutch, and see if we can find some rules to test.
Science Fiction has never been adequately defined, but for our purposes think of it as fiction about the scientific way of investigating the world, "going where no man has gone before." Think of Roger Bacon's "scientific method." Think of empiricism. Think about hypothesis, theory and fact. Think about well proven facts suddenly being demonstrated to be untrue.
ITEM: Evidence is mounting about Dark Matter and the Big Bang theory. The universe is actually not behaving as if there had been a Big Bang, at least as far as we can see now. NEW HYPOTHESIS has it that this is due to the Dark Matter strewn about the universe. But wait - it was an old hypothesis that Einstein came up with and then decided couldn't be true.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0106/New-findings-on-dark-energy-back-discarded-Einstein-theory
So "Science" is all about doubting what you know to be true, and the scientific method is all about knowing that you don't really know what you actually know for sure. In fact the more positive you are, the more likely you are to be wrong. But wait! Once you figure out that you were wrong, you know for sure that what you think now is also probably wrong!
That's the scientific method. Doubt, investigate, prove, and doubt some more. Never cease questioning.
Remember my blog post on Theodore Sturgeon's ASK THE NEXT QUESTION. That's the scientific method.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html
And so that's the plotting method of SCIENCE fiction.
Take something that is so relied upon that it is never questioned. Question it. What if? If only...? If This Goes On ..." Create a world based on something we know for a fact turning out to be not-true.
Romance is a story about the initial phase of forming an idealized and permanent relationship.
Science Fiction Romance is a Romance (primarily) that occurs during, in spite of, or because of, some "built world" which exemplifies the scientific way of looking at things by discarding a belief that has been well proven and well supported.
In SFR, the SF should be the background and the Romance the foreground (in artistic composition terms).
That means all the worldbuilding has to be shown not told as background elements.
BACKGROUND vs. FOREGROUND
"Background" and "Foreground" are composition concepts
We've discussed back story, background, and foreground at length in previous posts here. So let's simplify the definition we'll work with.
Think of a painting or photograph.
We see a tennis player, wearing pristine whites, positioned in the front of the frame, racket raised, ball standing still in front of the player, free hand under the ball. Off to the right is the suggestion of a net. Off to the left is the suggestion of people in the stands. Beneath the player's feet is astro-turf. Way back is a woman on a tall chair painted white. Behind her is some blurry greenery. Above is bright blue sky. The shadows are long to the left of everything.
Can you tell what's foreground and what's background?
If I did it right, the player is obviously foreground. The player is described FIRST, and in great detail. You should be able to tell that the player is about to SERVE THE BALL (it's an action in progress which is where you always start a story). You can tell it's pretty formal by the player's dress and the referee. You don't see the opponent at all. Everything else is "suggested" at varying degrees away from THE PLAYER. Everything that's described is positioned RELATIVE TO THE PLAYER.
The player is the foreground, the rest is background.
You do the same thing when you write any story. What you put first, what you describe in detail, what you describe everything in reference to, is the foreground.
The foreground is the focal point, the point the artist wants to draw the reader/viewer's eye to. It's the important thing. The thing ABOUT WHICH this story is. Everything else is chosen to support that focal point.
The PLOT is the development of the Relationship in the foreground.
The COMPLICATION to the plot is the development of the scientific puzzle in the background.
In ROMANCE, the foreground is the lovers and their relationship.
In SCIENCE FICTION the foreground is the single scientific principle that has been called into doubt, and the resolution of that doubt by investigation.
So how do you compose a blend of Romance in the foreground with Science Fiction in the background?
What works best, because the Romance readership is not totally composed of those trained in the rigors of the scientific method (or who are not wholly bemused by scientific thinking processes) is what's often called SOFT SCIENCES.
Sociology, psychology, parapsychology, politics, religion, economics, archeology, anthropology (maybe not paleontology which is mostly hard science).
But those are still sciences and make dandy SF backgrounds for real Romance.
So let's watch how a composition of these two genres can be created from scratch using the principles of composition so familiar in all artforms. This principle works for any genre combination.
For Example
Think of the art of fabric weaving and putting a pattern into a weaving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weft
The whole universe is often referred to as the product of a goddess that weaves the tapestry of events.
When you start out to build a "composition" you won't succeed if you apply your creativity to the principle behind the construction. Creativity has to be applied to the part of the composition that shows, the part that varies from one universe-fabric to another.
So look at the illustration of fabric weaving. The principle is that a warp is constructed of parallel strings that are made of a strongly spun yarn, and a softer, maybe weaker yarn is twisted between the verticle strings, over and under, now you see it now you don't.
The creativity of the artist is in the pattern, not in the concept of over-and-under.
The craft of the artist is in the clever way this thread and that thread are chosen for strength, for "hand" or for size. Make those choices wrong, and the "fabric" won't be a fabric -- it'll just unravel or fall apart.
The seamstress won't be able to make garments from the fabric because the seams will unravel if the craft of fabric-weaving isn't well applied.
You can, however, weave a wondrous fabric by combining different types of yarn, or making yarn out of more than one kind of fiber. Still, ultimately, over and under, strength and flexibility, are matters of craft.
How is that analogous to a story?
The Theme is the warp of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.
You choose what theme you want to use via your art, but you do have to have one or the fabric will fall apart.
A short story can have a theme and 1 sub-theme, the over and under of the warp, now it shows now it doesn't, to make a pattern.
The story's Setting is the weft or woof of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.
The theme is what your story says. The setting is how you say it.
You can use the same theme in different settings: a historical, a Regency Romance, a Roman Legion Romance, a Western, a Contemporary, a Paranormal, or Futuristic.
You can use the same warp with different woofs to get totally different fabrics.
The Setting is woven through, around, over and under the Theme of the fabric until they are of one piece.
The writer tamps the theme and setting down snug so the viewer/reader/audience can't tell the difference between Setting and Theme. Well tamped, the two together form a single, solid whole upon which the pattern is visible.
But the warp and woof of the fabric MUST NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION, or you spoil the effect for that "beta reader" type of reader (the ones who pay you).
The reader is the seamstress, cutting and sewing a garment from your fabric and its pattern for her own pleasure. If a seamstress likes working with your fabric (it holds shape, doesn't bunch when sewn, doesn't fade or pill) she'll buy more from you in a different color.
As Marion Zimmer Bradley quoted often, "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote."
The reader creates their own story by turning the material this way and that, cutting, pasting, (editing mentally).
The writer's job is not to impart the writer's story to the reader but rather to incite the reader's imagination to create their own garment from the material. The writer's stock in trade is fun, enjoyment, pleasure.
To test my analogy, just ask someone who has read the same book you have read to describe what they read. The book you read will likely be barely recognizable in the description.
Ever seen a post on a forum asking if anyone can identify "A book where ..." because they can't remember the title?
Each reader remembers something different about the story and fills in the gaps with their own creativity.
So in our example, first let's choose a theme (sometimes in actual writing, the theme is the last thing you discover about the story you've written -- it doesn't matter as long as the finished product holds together good and tight).
THEME
"Only Age Brings Wisdom." A corollary of Experience Teaches in the School of Hard Knocks.
We could tell the story of acquiring Wisdom in any Setting.
Acquiring Wisdom makes a great Romance theme because it is a logical extension of "Love Conquers All."
Since this is SFR, let's say our Setting is The Near Future -- a futuristic sociological SF Romance.
It's a Romance, so IN THE FOREGROUND (Tennis Player) we have two Classic Characters refusing to fall madly in love with each other because they are on opposite sides (over and under) of the thematic proposition, Only Age Brings Wisdom.
Our Hero is an advertising writer. He thinks up those annoying commercials that pitch products you don't want and makes you want them even if they're too expensive.
He's a Confidence Man at heart. He makes you do foolish things because you don't have Wisdom (yet). And he's proud of that ability.
He's spent lifetimes perfecting the ability to make anyone do anything. (BACKSTORY THE READER DOES NOT NEED TO KNOW: In past lives he ran the racket on rich widows, or he's done heiresses out of fortunes.)
But in this life, he's gone straight. All he's ever done in this life is to pick up women in bars and get them into bed. So he has absolute confidence in his ability to make any woman groan "I love you" within 3 days of meeting her. His ad campaigns are famous. They work.
And so he has no respect for women.
Our Heroine is one tough broad with an attitude.
She's spent lifetimes (as man or woman) building and holding a family together against all odds, often violent odds. She has decided that The Government is the enemy of The Family because of 18, or even 21 being the voting age. Youth has bad judgment. (Illustration - all the young people who fell for Country Wide's 0-down mortgages.) They marry the wrong people mistaking infatuation for love; they don't save enough money; they choose the wrong majors in college; they party before studying; and are apt to try drugs from peer pressure. She feels law shouldn't grant that much freedom before the age of Wisdom because it weakens society.
Betty Friedan is her heroine. An individual can cure the ills of society.
SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE: recent NEWSWEEK ARTICLE
http://www.newsweek.com/id/230061
shows that the Baby Boomers who tried drugs in the Woodstock Summer of Love are now coming down with Hepatitis C which takes 30 years or more to incubate.
So instead of getting married and raising boys to march off to war, she's a career woman who has finally been appointed CEO of a Polling Organization that's made a name for itself using a computer algorithm she has created.
Contracted by an online Match Making Service, her company has been doing statistics on marriage and divorce, and the life-courses of children through variations of the situations of their parents. She's investigated (maybe won some kind of prize for?) the grandchildren of divorced parents, and the grandchildren of unhappy marriages (that should have ended in divorce), and how to match up people with such a history to create a solid marriage that will last. She has statistics on children pushed out on their own too young.
It's Election Year. She's out to change the world because all this family pain she's been researching is just too much to bear (echoes of past life stresses). She applies for and gets a contract to do political polling for, say, a major online presence - or possibly a TV network.
She's going to prove, scientifically, that advertising chooses the winning candidate, regardless of the real heartfelt views of the voters.
In other words, she's going to prove that the world is being run by advertisers -- like Our Hero, people who are only grifters twisting people's minds against their will.
The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertising damages families by pitting the opinions of youth against those of the family elders, splitting families with acrimony.
And now, at last, she has the computer power, the surveying power, the money and corporate power to achieve her goal of scientific proof and present her personal solution.
She wants to get Congress to raise the voting age to 45, which has been scientifically proven to be the upper limit of the effectiveness of advertising. People over 45 do not change their buying habits in response to seeing a commercial or online advertisement.
(That's why TV, movies, and even books are aimed at younger people.)
Her objective is to remove advertising from all political campaigns since it would be a waste of money if those who can be influenced by advertising are not allowed to vote.
Our Hero is of course hired by one of the political parties to create the best, most persuasive political ads ever.
If she succeeds and the voting age is raised to 45, he will essentially be impoverished because his only clients would be makeup and Slimfast manufacturers, maybe jeans makers. Maybe government anti-drug use commercials. He's scared of her. He likes his Manhattan penthouse and chauffeured limo lifestyle.
So as the campaign develops, her polling reveals the upper limit to the effectiveness of his ads. He desperately brings online more and more unproven jazzy techniques trying to push his effectiveness age higher, succeeding a few months at a time in persuading older folks to believe whatever nonsense he's peddling.
Worldbuilding
Think of every sort of change that will be wrought on our society as digital TV enters the market. We have a 3-D set coming onto the market this year, and a 3-D channel being launched. On Demand movies, series episodes, and anything you can find online now will be on your living room set (along with all the games that are online, probably console games too).
All the data sites like Google collect on you will make you the target for ads specifically crafted to make you do things against your better judgment, and these visuals will be very, very powerful because they really are aimed directly at your weakest spot.
Nothing like that exists today.
This is SFR. You can be manipulated and the technique does not even involve "subliminal advertising."
The hardware is evolving to where you'll even do email, twitter, Facebook etc on TV screens hung on various walls around your dwelling -- you'll never be out of eye-shot of such a device, and much of what it does may be 2-way interactive, tracking your behavior and feeding you advertising tailored to your behavior. Think of images that project into the air in front of you.
Think of how many of the changes in society sparked by cell phones were completely missed by futurologists of the 1950's (except Robert Heinlein; he got it).
Now, build a world, warp and woof, Theme and Setting tamped down to make one solid pattern. Build it out of the changes that computers, polling, and advertising psychology will have created in society by -- oh, say 2025. Add in human nature's never-changing traits (like the age of Wisdom; and question what age that might be.)
Polling and Advertising are natural allies against the you as a member of the population. Already, polling and advertising's single biggest client is government in the form of political campaigns.
Polling and Advertising are all about mass movement among people, all about crowd control and predicting and directing the majority of people to do this, think that, believe the other. Polling is the eyes and ears of Advertising, just naturally so.
But the internet, Web 2.0, social networking, are all about communication between individuals with no third orchestrating party, no gatekeepers.
At the moment, the third controlling orchestrating parties are struggling mightily with every scientific tool to get on top of this unruly population of social networkers. (Think e-publishing, self-publishing, blogging the news.)
Human nature is winning in the world where your readers live.
A very controlled and well edited, fact-checked world of journalistic ethics hard won in the early 1900's has suddenly turned back into the world of rumor-driven news as people talk directly to each other instead of through an editorial filter of journalists and fact-checkers. People hardly know the difference between opinion and fact already, and cell-phone-video and YouTube are confusing the issue even more. Seeing is believing, right? (That plane never crashed into the Pentagon -- see the video?)
What will happen next?
Well, the major theme of all Romance is Love Conquers All, and in our example here we're exploring Wisdom being gained only with Age. Romance is normally the business of the very young. The thrice divorced are not so susceptible to being swept off their feet.
Our Hero and Our Heroine, one in Advertising and the other in Polling, are at each other's throats with opposing views and equivalent computing power.
It's war.
What happens after they fall into bed for one wild night of carnal sexuality? (that's the PLOT)
Will they form an alliance, expose the winners of the election for the incompetents they are? Show how they were chosen by a manipulated youth vote? Will they split the country into a generation-war? (Think Star Trek: TOS's "genetics war" of the 1990's.)
Or does the choice of the over-45's win the election, then prove to be incompetent demonstrating that age has even less judgment of character?
Does the choice of the under-45's prove to be wiser?
Or do we find proof that young and old voters alike are insightful judges of character who are able to ignore commercials, given some special training in grammar school?
Or will one destroy the other's business, humiliating their own Soul Mate?
How can Love conquer the Pollster vs. Advertiser face-off?
The answer to that question lies in the Worldbuilding, in the warp and woof, and the answer is the Plot of this story.
In today's world, as things stand for your reader, there is no solution, and so there's no way this story could happen now. It's a Futuristic.
You, as writer, must artistically and creatively choose what changes to make this plot resolvable. (and plant that element in chapter one)
The world you build is the Setting or soft, flexible woof of the fabric that weaves around the warp or inflexible Theme revealing then concealing the ultimate statement about reality, thus asking the seminal question your Theme addresses -- is Wisdom only available to a human beyond age 45? Or are younger people wiser?
This is SF Romance, so the science of the worldbuilding has to provide a solution that could not exist now, that could not work the way things are now, that stretches the imagination of the reader and astonishes and delights with surprise, that provokes thought, that shakes the reader's certainties in unexpected ways, but also delivers the satisfaction of a plausible Happily Ever After ending.
Take the condition of Advertising (and the psychological research behind it) and the condition of Polling (how accurately it predicts outcomes of elections even now 11 months before the actual vote), add the condition of Politics (the show-don't-tell of a President addicted to his Blackberry so the company had to invent a new security protocol so he could keep it!) and extrapolate into our future.
In building your world, don't forget the force of Religion (think about those Mega-churches and the financing behind them as well as the social forces creating them). Then there is international politics, and the explosive effects of terrorism on old-form established governments (Yemen brewing up a storm while Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran hold world attention -- anyone noticed how close Yemen is to Sudan? Is there a power-axis brewing there?) Given the political instability, unemployed scientists and engineers are racing to supply tech solutions to "Security" at airports and elsewhere.
What will those unemployed brains come up with that will change the world our children will live in? Maybe change them? (don't forget genetics modifications to cure diseases)
And then there's China desperately trying to keep its people off the internet, and Iran choking off access to twitter.
There's class warfare (it's OK to tax the rich because they're a minority and it's majority rules -- and the rich can't have lobbyists advocating for them in Congress because it's wrong to go against the will of the majority even if the majority wants to destroy you) -- and generational warfare (youth that doesn't see the point of buying health insurance when old people get all the benefits.)
Look at the whole picture here, not one issue at a time but as a whole pattern, and extrapolate a result of all this churning change when mixed with the person-to-person communication revolution.
You can use astrology or any other tool you prefer to create your extrapolation rules.
If the theme is "Only Age Brings Wisdom" -- then you need an ending where one or the other or both protagonists reach that age and gain Wisdom, or gain Wisdom without reaching that age and disprove the proposition.
Youth growing up swimming in high-powered advertising has a much better chance of becoming immune than their forebears ever had against advertising when it was a new technology. But that doesn't seem to be happening today.
Turn the issue around backwards, and visit an alternate universe where only those under 45 are allowed to vote? How would that work? How did it start? Who could overthrow it? Should it be overthrown? Argue all sides of the issue, each side with a character exemplifying the point of view.
If the majority of voters were under 45, they could pass a law against lobbying and then pass a law (Constitutional Amendment maybe) with a voting-age ceiling.
As you build your world, warp and woof, you need to consider all the different beliefs your readers might hold and create a powerful (and plausible) spokesman for each of those beliefs.
That means you must be able to understand and explain a belief that you, personally, think is utter blithering nonsense. And you have to do it with a straight face because some of your readers take that nonsense as gospel.
Before you can expect your readers to believe six impossible things before breakfast, you have to be able to do it yourself -- and convince the world that you believe them!
How do you organize all those characters that exemplify the sides of an issue you're writing about and their different beliefs?
COMPOSITION. That's it. That's the whole trick of this entire profession.
You anchor the composition in your foreground character (the Tennis Player) and describe and portray each of the other characters from that central reference point. Everything in your composition is relative to your central reference point, just like notes in a scale or colors on a palette.
In a Romance, typically, there are two "central reference points" -- your lead couple. Their center-of-gravity (a point somewhere between them, perhaps closer to the more vivid or powerful one) is your central reference point. Everything in the composition is measured, described, formulated, colored, keyed to that central reference point.
From that central reference point, you choose the fiber, dye lot, and gauge of your theme to form the warp, and the time, place, social level, and details of your setting(s) to form the woof. Tamp them together until the reader can't tell the difference, and the rest will unfold naturally.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Composition is the essential ingredient that transforms Reality into Art.
Composition is created differently in different art forms, but the principles are always the same. If you know one art form, you can at least appreciate if not practice the others. And you have a leg up on learning the others.
"Business" and "Marketing" are two other art forms that today's writers really need an appreciation for.
Healing or Medicine are art forms where the medium is actually "science," or as in oil painting, the pigment is science and the canvass is the unique human being.
In say, interior decorating (something a writer must do with every interior scene) you choose a key color and come off that key color with compliments, contrasts, and tones to create a palette. Colors are associated with emotions and with various mystical functions. So what's happening in the scene, the subtext and plot movement dictate the choice of color of carpet and drapes.
The room's decor all stands or falls on the exacting relationships between the key color and everything in the room. You can (as a writer) choose color combinations to convey the mood of the scene set there. For example, if a main character is conducting a conversation in his living room, you can dress the main character to match or clash with his room's decor to convey a subtle mood to keep the visitor off balance.
In say, figure skating or ballet, choreography is composed to fill the display arena or stage, and costumes are colored to underscore the mood of the music.
In photography, an angle is chosen to follow the "perspective lines" you've seen oil painters trace in charcoal on a bare canvass -- to draw the viewer's eye precisely to a given focus spot. The good photographer will hang upside down from a tree limb to get that view.
In music, "scales" are created by the relative pitches of a set of notes, while other notes are excluded. From those notes on the scale, the composer creates a mood and plays the emotional tension up and down to thrill the audience.
Human emotion is rooted in the perception of the relationships of things to other things - sensory input to other sensory input. Pattern recognition is our survival mechanism.
The term "black velvet" for example calls forth color perception and tactile perception - add "voice" for sound, "A voice like black velvet" -- in truth such a phrase makes absolutely no sense. In Science Fiction Romance, it conveys a world of meaning, very precisely.
How you as a writer arrange things in relationship to other things in your fiction conveys your theme -- and the most powerful themes are the ones that are never stated in words.
The theme of a story is the key color, the key note of the scale, the defining edges of the skating arena or stage, the universe of discourse and all its unconscious assumptions.
The theme of a story is not just repeated. A motif is repeated, but the motif is chosen from the theme -- it is not the theme.
The theme is echoed or exemplified in every single element, every relationship of one element to another -- in the composition of the worldbuilding.
If something doesn't fit the theme of the story, fit into the arena or stage, inside the edges of the photograph, or onto the scale, the writer must delete that thing or change the "angle" (for example, choose a different main character or combine two characters, or separate one character into two.)
Sometimes, the element that's been deleted must be replaced by something to perform a plot function. The replacement must be chosen from the theme to complete the composition.
The deleted element may (in fact usually does) belong to some other story the writer has incubating in the subconscious. Usually what must be deleted is just plain GOOD, sometimes even GREAT -- very often the scene or character that has to be deleted is the one which first popped to mind bringing along with it the story that is now being told.
Just because it came to mind pulling this story with it - does not mean it belongs to this story.
A story has a composition that the reader will be looking for.
An element the writer feels is important might actually betray the reader's trust that this universe has a composition. That betrayal of trust will throw the reader out of the story, leave them bewildered and disappointed.
Writers Need Editors
Testing the "composition" and searching for any intrusive element (character, plot twist, ending point, beginning scene, mid-point, setting, McGuffin, backstory, background exposition) is a job for another pair of eyes besides the writer's eyes.
That's why writers need beta-readers, preferably not friends but acquaintances the writer knows have an appetite for the kind of story this is supposed to be.
Beta readers don't necessarily need a conscious mastery of composition.
That's really the writer's and editor's job. The beta reader however will squirm or point at something that doesn't work. "I didn't like this character" or "I just didn't understand this." "It would be better set in Italy." "This is boring." "The ending isn't satisfying."
Beta readers untrained in composition and the craft of writing will squirm and use non-quantitative (and very unhelpful) language. They will use subjective measures of how "good" a story is, not the objective measures I've been focused on in these posts. They don't know what they like, they just know the feeling of liking. (which is fine if they'll pay you!)
The writer's business is to know that what the beta-reader is pointing at may not actually be the source of the reader's problem.
What's being pointed at is not necessarily the source of the problem in the manuscript.
If a writer is professional enough to know this about beta-readers, a bad opinion from a beta reader won't "hurt" or dismay or evoke any particular emotional reaction. It will merely trigger an alert re-evaluation of the composition, searching for the source of the reaction (without asking the beta reader any further questions). Composition is always the source of the reader's reactions -- almost nothing else, really, but composition speaks directly to the reader's innermost nerve.
The reader may say the ending was unsatisfying while the writer knows that what made the ending unsatisfying was a missing scene that should have formed the middle of the story. But during writing, the writer didn't know what to put there in that scene, so didn't write it (or maybe cut it because it seemed to corny).
How do you compose that missing scene? Look at the composition as a whole, and check everything against the theme, and the bit that punches up the ending will be apparent.
This is much easier to achieve when you are not mixing genres.
But my favorite stories are all mixed-genre!
What Makes Science Fiction Romance into both Science Fiction and Romance without ruining either genre's punch?
Composition. That's it in a word, and Linnea Sinclair has noted that it's a hard struggle to get that balance right. This editor says that, that reader says something else, this audience wants more this, that audience wants more that.
Linnea and this phalanx of brave new writers are creating A NEW COMPOSITION.
Once created, other artists will be able to use that composition to hit the mark every single time.
At the moment, both readers, writers and editors are groping. Readers have to have their tastes expanded and the expectations trained. Writers have to learn a whole new set of no-no's. Editors have to understand the risks of exploring new territory also come with rewards.
So let's look more closely at the problem of composition with two genres, equivalent to jumping double-dutch, and see if we can find some rules to test.
Science Fiction has never been adequately defined, but for our purposes think of it as fiction about the scientific way of investigating the world, "going where no man has gone before." Think of Roger Bacon's "scientific method." Think of empiricism. Think about hypothesis, theory and fact. Think about well proven facts suddenly being demonstrated to be untrue.
ITEM: Evidence is mounting about Dark Matter and the Big Bang theory. The universe is actually not behaving as if there had been a Big Bang, at least as far as we can see now. NEW HYPOTHESIS has it that this is due to the Dark Matter strewn about the universe. But wait - it was an old hypothesis that Einstein came up with and then decided couldn't be true.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0106/New-findings-on-dark-energy-back-discarded-Einstein-theory
So "Science" is all about doubting what you know to be true, and the scientific method is all about knowing that you don't really know what you actually know for sure. In fact the more positive you are, the more likely you are to be wrong. But wait! Once you figure out that you were wrong, you know for sure that what you think now is also probably wrong!
That's the scientific method. Doubt, investigate, prove, and doubt some more. Never cease questioning.
Remember my blog post on Theodore Sturgeon's ASK THE NEXT QUESTION. That's the scientific method.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html
And so that's the plotting method of SCIENCE fiction.
Take something that is so relied upon that it is never questioned. Question it. What if? If only...? If This Goes On ..." Create a world based on something we know for a fact turning out to be not-true.
Romance is a story about the initial phase of forming an idealized and permanent relationship.
Science Fiction Romance is a Romance (primarily) that occurs during, in spite of, or because of, some "built world" which exemplifies the scientific way of looking at things by discarding a belief that has been well proven and well supported.
In SFR, the SF should be the background and the Romance the foreground (in artistic composition terms).
That means all the worldbuilding has to be shown not told as background elements.
BACKGROUND vs. FOREGROUND
"Background" and "Foreground" are composition concepts
We've discussed back story, background, and foreground at length in previous posts here. So let's simplify the definition we'll work with.
Think of a painting or photograph.
We see a tennis player, wearing pristine whites, positioned in the front of the frame, racket raised, ball standing still in front of the player, free hand under the ball. Off to the right is the suggestion of a net. Off to the left is the suggestion of people in the stands. Beneath the player's feet is astro-turf. Way back is a woman on a tall chair painted white. Behind her is some blurry greenery. Above is bright blue sky. The shadows are long to the left of everything.
Can you tell what's foreground and what's background?
If I did it right, the player is obviously foreground. The player is described FIRST, and in great detail. You should be able to tell that the player is about to SERVE THE BALL (it's an action in progress which is where you always start a story). You can tell it's pretty formal by the player's dress and the referee. You don't see the opponent at all. Everything else is "suggested" at varying degrees away from THE PLAYER. Everything that's described is positioned RELATIVE TO THE PLAYER.
The player is the foreground, the rest is background.
You do the same thing when you write any story. What you put first, what you describe in detail, what you describe everything in reference to, is the foreground.
The foreground is the focal point, the point the artist wants to draw the reader/viewer's eye to. It's the important thing. The thing ABOUT WHICH this story is. Everything else is chosen to support that focal point.
The PLOT is the development of the Relationship in the foreground.
The COMPLICATION to the plot is the development of the scientific puzzle in the background.
In ROMANCE, the foreground is the lovers and their relationship.
In SCIENCE FICTION the foreground is the single scientific principle that has been called into doubt, and the resolution of that doubt by investigation.
So how do you compose a blend of Romance in the foreground with Science Fiction in the background?
What works best, because the Romance readership is not totally composed of those trained in the rigors of the scientific method (or who are not wholly bemused by scientific thinking processes) is what's often called SOFT SCIENCES.
Sociology, psychology, parapsychology, politics, religion, economics, archeology, anthropology (maybe not paleontology which is mostly hard science).
But those are still sciences and make dandy SF backgrounds for real Romance.
So let's watch how a composition of these two genres can be created from scratch using the principles of composition so familiar in all artforms. This principle works for any genre combination.
For Example
Think of the art of fabric weaving and putting a pattern into a weaving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weft
The whole universe is often referred to as the product of a goddess that weaves the tapestry of events.
When you start out to build a "composition" you won't succeed if you apply your creativity to the principle behind the construction. Creativity has to be applied to the part of the composition that shows, the part that varies from one universe-fabric to another.
So look at the illustration of fabric weaving. The principle is that a warp is constructed of parallel strings that are made of a strongly spun yarn, and a softer, maybe weaker yarn is twisted between the verticle strings, over and under, now you see it now you don't.
The creativity of the artist is in the pattern, not in the concept of over-and-under.
The craft of the artist is in the clever way this thread and that thread are chosen for strength, for "hand" or for size. Make those choices wrong, and the "fabric" won't be a fabric -- it'll just unravel or fall apart.
The seamstress won't be able to make garments from the fabric because the seams will unravel if the craft of fabric-weaving isn't well applied.
You can, however, weave a wondrous fabric by combining different types of yarn, or making yarn out of more than one kind of fiber. Still, ultimately, over and under, strength and flexibility, are matters of craft.
How is that analogous to a story?
The Theme is the warp of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.
You choose what theme you want to use via your art, but you do have to have one or the fabric will fall apart.
A short story can have a theme and 1 sub-theme, the over and under of the warp, now it shows now it doesn't, to make a pattern.
The story's Setting is the weft or woof of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.
The theme is what your story says. The setting is how you say it.
You can use the same theme in different settings: a historical, a Regency Romance, a Roman Legion Romance, a Western, a Contemporary, a Paranormal, or Futuristic.
You can use the same warp with different woofs to get totally different fabrics.
The Setting is woven through, around, over and under the Theme of the fabric until they are of one piece.
The writer tamps the theme and setting down snug so the viewer/reader/audience can't tell the difference between Setting and Theme. Well tamped, the two together form a single, solid whole upon which the pattern is visible.
But the warp and woof of the fabric MUST NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION, or you spoil the effect for that "beta reader" type of reader (the ones who pay you).
The reader is the seamstress, cutting and sewing a garment from your fabric and its pattern for her own pleasure. If a seamstress likes working with your fabric (it holds shape, doesn't bunch when sewn, doesn't fade or pill) she'll buy more from you in a different color.
As Marion Zimmer Bradley quoted often, "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote."
The reader creates their own story by turning the material this way and that, cutting, pasting, (editing mentally).
The writer's job is not to impart the writer's story to the reader but rather to incite the reader's imagination to create their own garment from the material. The writer's stock in trade is fun, enjoyment, pleasure.
To test my analogy, just ask someone who has read the same book you have read to describe what they read. The book you read will likely be barely recognizable in the description.
Ever seen a post on a forum asking if anyone can identify "A book where ..." because they can't remember the title?
Each reader remembers something different about the story and fills in the gaps with their own creativity.
So in our example, first let's choose a theme (sometimes in actual writing, the theme is the last thing you discover about the story you've written -- it doesn't matter as long as the finished product holds together good and tight).
THEME
"Only Age Brings Wisdom." A corollary of Experience Teaches in the School of Hard Knocks.
We could tell the story of acquiring Wisdom in any Setting.
Acquiring Wisdom makes a great Romance theme because it is a logical extension of "Love Conquers All."
Since this is SFR, let's say our Setting is The Near Future -- a futuristic sociological SF Romance.
It's a Romance, so IN THE FOREGROUND (Tennis Player) we have two Classic Characters refusing to fall madly in love with each other because they are on opposite sides (over and under) of the thematic proposition, Only Age Brings Wisdom.
Our Hero is an advertising writer. He thinks up those annoying commercials that pitch products you don't want and makes you want them even if they're too expensive.
He's a Confidence Man at heart. He makes you do foolish things because you don't have Wisdom (yet). And he's proud of that ability.
He's spent lifetimes perfecting the ability to make anyone do anything. (BACKSTORY THE READER DOES NOT NEED TO KNOW: In past lives he ran the racket on rich widows, or he's done heiresses out of fortunes.)
But in this life, he's gone straight. All he's ever done in this life is to pick up women in bars and get them into bed. So he has absolute confidence in his ability to make any woman groan "I love you" within 3 days of meeting her. His ad campaigns are famous. They work.
And so he has no respect for women.
Our Heroine is one tough broad with an attitude.
She's spent lifetimes (as man or woman) building and holding a family together against all odds, often violent odds. She has decided that The Government is the enemy of The Family because of 18, or even 21 being the voting age. Youth has bad judgment. (Illustration - all the young people who fell for Country Wide's 0-down mortgages.) They marry the wrong people mistaking infatuation for love; they don't save enough money; they choose the wrong majors in college; they party before studying; and are apt to try drugs from peer pressure. She feels law shouldn't grant that much freedom before the age of Wisdom because it weakens society.
Betty Friedan is her heroine. An individual can cure the ills of society.
SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE: recent NEWSWEEK ARTICLE
http://www.newsweek.com/id/230061
shows that the Baby Boomers who tried drugs in the Woodstock Summer of Love are now coming down with Hepatitis C which takes 30 years or more to incubate.
So instead of getting married and raising boys to march off to war, she's a career woman who has finally been appointed CEO of a Polling Organization that's made a name for itself using a computer algorithm she has created.
Contracted by an online Match Making Service, her company has been doing statistics on marriage and divorce, and the life-courses of children through variations of the situations of their parents. She's investigated (maybe won some kind of prize for?) the grandchildren of divorced parents, and the grandchildren of unhappy marriages (that should have ended in divorce), and how to match up people with such a history to create a solid marriage that will last. She has statistics on children pushed out on their own too young.
It's Election Year. She's out to change the world because all this family pain she's been researching is just too much to bear (echoes of past life stresses). She applies for and gets a contract to do political polling for, say, a major online presence - or possibly a TV network.
She's going to prove, scientifically, that advertising chooses the winning candidate, regardless of the real heartfelt views of the voters.
In other words, she's going to prove that the world is being run by advertisers -- like Our Hero, people who are only grifters twisting people's minds against their will.
The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertising damages families by pitting the opinions of youth against those of the family elders, splitting families with acrimony.
And now, at last, she has the computer power, the surveying power, the money and corporate power to achieve her goal of scientific proof and present her personal solution.
She wants to get Congress to raise the voting age to 45, which has been scientifically proven to be the upper limit of the effectiveness of advertising. People over 45 do not change their buying habits in response to seeing a commercial or online advertisement.
(That's why TV, movies, and even books are aimed at younger people.)
Her objective is to remove advertising from all political campaigns since it would be a waste of money if those who can be influenced by advertising are not allowed to vote.
Our Hero is of course hired by one of the political parties to create the best, most persuasive political ads ever.
If she succeeds and the voting age is raised to 45, he will essentially be impoverished because his only clients would be makeup and Slimfast manufacturers, maybe jeans makers. Maybe government anti-drug use commercials. He's scared of her. He likes his Manhattan penthouse and chauffeured limo lifestyle.
So as the campaign develops, her polling reveals the upper limit to the effectiveness of his ads. He desperately brings online more and more unproven jazzy techniques trying to push his effectiveness age higher, succeeding a few months at a time in persuading older folks to believe whatever nonsense he's peddling.
Worldbuilding
Think of every sort of change that will be wrought on our society as digital TV enters the market. We have a 3-D set coming onto the market this year, and a 3-D channel being launched. On Demand movies, series episodes, and anything you can find online now will be on your living room set (along with all the games that are online, probably console games too).
All the data sites like Google collect on you will make you the target for ads specifically crafted to make you do things against your better judgment, and these visuals will be very, very powerful because they really are aimed directly at your weakest spot.
Nothing like that exists today.
This is SFR. You can be manipulated and the technique does not even involve "subliminal advertising."
The hardware is evolving to where you'll even do email, twitter, Facebook etc on TV screens hung on various walls around your dwelling -- you'll never be out of eye-shot of such a device, and much of what it does may be 2-way interactive, tracking your behavior and feeding you advertising tailored to your behavior. Think of images that project into the air in front of you.
Think of how many of the changes in society sparked by cell phones were completely missed by futurologists of the 1950's (except Robert Heinlein; he got it).
Now, build a world, warp and woof, Theme and Setting tamped down to make one solid pattern. Build it out of the changes that computers, polling, and advertising psychology will have created in society by -- oh, say 2025. Add in human nature's never-changing traits (like the age of Wisdom; and question what age that might be.)
Polling and Advertising are natural allies against the you as a member of the population. Already, polling and advertising's single biggest client is government in the form of political campaigns.
Polling and Advertising are all about mass movement among people, all about crowd control and predicting and directing the majority of people to do this, think that, believe the other. Polling is the eyes and ears of Advertising, just naturally so.
But the internet, Web 2.0, social networking, are all about communication between individuals with no third orchestrating party, no gatekeepers.
At the moment, the third controlling orchestrating parties are struggling mightily with every scientific tool to get on top of this unruly population of social networkers. (Think e-publishing, self-publishing, blogging the news.)
Human nature is winning in the world where your readers live.
A very controlled and well edited, fact-checked world of journalistic ethics hard won in the early 1900's has suddenly turned back into the world of rumor-driven news as people talk directly to each other instead of through an editorial filter of journalists and fact-checkers. People hardly know the difference between opinion and fact already, and cell-phone-video and YouTube are confusing the issue even more. Seeing is believing, right? (That plane never crashed into the Pentagon -- see the video?)
What will happen next?
Well, the major theme of all Romance is Love Conquers All, and in our example here we're exploring Wisdom being gained only with Age. Romance is normally the business of the very young. The thrice divorced are not so susceptible to being swept off their feet.
Our Hero and Our Heroine, one in Advertising and the other in Polling, are at each other's throats with opposing views and equivalent computing power.
It's war.
What happens after they fall into bed for one wild night of carnal sexuality? (that's the PLOT)
Will they form an alliance, expose the winners of the election for the incompetents they are? Show how they were chosen by a manipulated youth vote? Will they split the country into a generation-war? (Think Star Trek: TOS's "genetics war" of the 1990's.)
Or does the choice of the over-45's win the election, then prove to be incompetent demonstrating that age has even less judgment of character?
Does the choice of the under-45's prove to be wiser?
Or do we find proof that young and old voters alike are insightful judges of character who are able to ignore commercials, given some special training in grammar school?
Or will one destroy the other's business, humiliating their own Soul Mate?
How can Love conquer the Pollster vs. Advertiser face-off?
The answer to that question lies in the Worldbuilding, in the warp and woof, and the answer is the Plot of this story.
In today's world, as things stand for your reader, there is no solution, and so there's no way this story could happen now. It's a Futuristic.
You, as writer, must artistically and creatively choose what changes to make this plot resolvable. (and plant that element in chapter one)
The world you build is the Setting or soft, flexible woof of the fabric that weaves around the warp or inflexible Theme revealing then concealing the ultimate statement about reality, thus asking the seminal question your Theme addresses -- is Wisdom only available to a human beyond age 45? Or are younger people wiser?
This is SF Romance, so the science of the worldbuilding has to provide a solution that could not exist now, that could not work the way things are now, that stretches the imagination of the reader and astonishes and delights with surprise, that provokes thought, that shakes the reader's certainties in unexpected ways, but also delivers the satisfaction of a plausible Happily Ever After ending.
Take the condition of Advertising (and the psychological research behind it) and the condition of Polling (how accurately it predicts outcomes of elections even now 11 months before the actual vote), add the condition of Politics (the show-don't-tell of a President addicted to his Blackberry so the company had to invent a new security protocol so he could keep it!) and extrapolate into our future.
In building your world, don't forget the force of Religion (think about those Mega-churches and the financing behind them as well as the social forces creating them). Then there is international politics, and the explosive effects of terrorism on old-form established governments (Yemen brewing up a storm while Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran hold world attention -- anyone noticed how close Yemen is to Sudan? Is there a power-axis brewing there?) Given the political instability, unemployed scientists and engineers are racing to supply tech solutions to "Security" at airports and elsewhere.
What will those unemployed brains come up with that will change the world our children will live in? Maybe change them? (don't forget genetics modifications to cure diseases)
And then there's China desperately trying to keep its people off the internet, and Iran choking off access to twitter.
There's class warfare (it's OK to tax the rich because they're a minority and it's majority rules -- and the rich can't have lobbyists advocating for them in Congress because it's wrong to go against the will of the majority even if the majority wants to destroy you) -- and generational warfare (youth that doesn't see the point of buying health insurance when old people get all the benefits.)
Look at the whole picture here, not one issue at a time but as a whole pattern, and extrapolate a result of all this churning change when mixed with the person-to-person communication revolution.
You can use astrology or any other tool you prefer to create your extrapolation rules.
If the theme is "Only Age Brings Wisdom" -- then you need an ending where one or the other or both protagonists reach that age and gain Wisdom, or gain Wisdom without reaching that age and disprove the proposition.
Youth growing up swimming in high-powered advertising has a much better chance of becoming immune than their forebears ever had against advertising when it was a new technology. But that doesn't seem to be happening today.
Turn the issue around backwards, and visit an alternate universe where only those under 45 are allowed to vote? How would that work? How did it start? Who could overthrow it? Should it be overthrown? Argue all sides of the issue, each side with a character exemplifying the point of view.
If the majority of voters were under 45, they could pass a law against lobbying and then pass a law (Constitutional Amendment maybe) with a voting-age ceiling.
As you build your world, warp and woof, you need to consider all the different beliefs your readers might hold and create a powerful (and plausible) spokesman for each of those beliefs.
That means you must be able to understand and explain a belief that you, personally, think is utter blithering nonsense. And you have to do it with a straight face because some of your readers take that nonsense as gospel.
Before you can expect your readers to believe six impossible things before breakfast, you have to be able to do it yourself -- and convince the world that you believe them!
How do you organize all those characters that exemplify the sides of an issue you're writing about and their different beliefs?
COMPOSITION. That's it. That's the whole trick of this entire profession.
You anchor the composition in your foreground character (the Tennis Player) and describe and portray each of the other characters from that central reference point. Everything in your composition is relative to your central reference point, just like notes in a scale or colors on a palette.
In a Romance, typically, there are two "central reference points" -- your lead couple. Their center-of-gravity (a point somewhere between them, perhaps closer to the more vivid or powerful one) is your central reference point. Everything in the composition is measured, described, formulated, colored, keyed to that central reference point.
From that central reference point, you choose the fiber, dye lot, and gauge of your theme to form the warp, and the time, place, social level, and details of your setting(s) to form the woof. Tamp them together until the reader can't tell the difference, and the rest will unfold naturally.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Flowers as Worldbuilding: The Book Of Dreams
What's on your bedside reading table?
I seldom publish reviews, and I'm not sure that I've ever before made a list of what is in and around my bed. However, it's rather important in my little family that we each stay healthy, so we are all washing our hands and gargling with salt water a lot... and sleeping in different parts of the house.
Why? My husband will be showing his hot rod, the VSR, at the Grand National in Pomona next month. Right now, we're creating his "build book" which is a glorified scrap book showing some of the best photographs from early sketches to men with small knives working on the clay model to showing the car on the carpet of the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island.
I've just ordered some promo postcards from Vistaprint... my author-promo skills come in handy... and we are highly amused to see that one of the Vistaprint cards that was picked up from the SEMA stand is being auctioned on EBay.
Make of it what you will, around my bed are the following:
I'm reading "The Book Of Dreams". The subtitle --"The fifth and final Demon Princes novel" and also a couple of lines in the back cover copy intrigued me.
THE LAST DEMON PRINCE
The back cover is a little hard on the eyes! I think it was the "Princess Bride" element (Treesong's implied immunity to poison) that appealed to me most -- apart from Demon Princes. Disappointingly, the "demon princes" don't appear to be demons, and they aren't princes, either. They're powerful intergalactic criminals. The Sopranos in outer space? I'm not averse to "suspenseful galactic manhunts", either.
It should be noted that this book was first printed in 1981. So it was before The Sopranos (first aired 1999), but Princess Bride was published in 1973.
I should also add that I'm a slow reader, and I'm only on page 37 of 235. I'm savoring this book, but it's not (for me) a fast-paced page turner. That may change.
The hero, Kirth Gerson, is revealed to be an intergalactic newspaper magnate. Not quite Clark Kent-like, Kirth Gerson lives a double life, posing for much of the time as Henry Lucas, "Special Writer" a lowly investigative reporter and op-ed writer at one of his own newsdesks.
One day, he is fumbling around among the paper files when he comes across a photograph marked "Discard". In other words, it might have been shredded if he hadn't found it. In an intergalactic world when a paparazzo could be murdered for taking a picture of the wrong supercriminal, this photograph of ten people at a banquet is a very big deal. Someone has written "Treesong is here."
Nine of them are probably dead, if one can trust back cover blurb. While the supervillain, Howard Alan Treesong, might be assumed not to be one of the two women seated at the table, Kirk Gerson's first mystery to solve is, who is whom and which is Treesong?
Being the cosmic Murdoch that he is, Kirk Gerson decides to launch a new magazine with interstellar if not intergalactic distribution, publish the photograph on the front page of the inaugural issue, and make it into a "Name the Celebrities And Win" contest.
I am enjoying Jack Vance's world building, and especially the little swipes he takes at our modern world!
Apparently:
Colonising monastic orders haven't done too well, either.
I find myself stopping to wonder "What's the deal with the lists of flowers?" It bothers me. This appears to me to be a book by a man, written for men. I infer that because a colleague of the hero (who does not at this point in the story appear to be a villain) owns a vegetarian. He dresses her in a short smock and nothing else. When she bends over, we can see that she has no underwear. We are told that vegetarians bite and hiss to protect their virtue, but that groups of men get around that by offering the vegetarians molasses candy. Vegetarians cannot bite to defend themselves when their mouths are full.
In every list, Vance names several names (or items) that are familiar to all of us, and mixes in made-up names without explanation (none is necessary) to show that we're in another place and time. "Giotto and Gostwane; William Snyder and William Blake..." "... wallflowers, pansies, native bulrastia, and St. Olaf's Toe..." Another interesting and economical use of plantlife was "green mematis" (obviously derived from clematis).
I do wonder what it is about wallflowers that do as well as they do on so many faraway future worlds. So, I looked them up. Plausible. Interesting choice. Any relative of the cruciferous family is all right with me. I'd have chosen a geranium, though. Wallflowers feed and attract all manner of insects from weevils to butterflies. Geraniums repel them.
However, the more I think about Jack Vance's world-building, the more I appreciate it. I love his casual throwaway lines about three moons, and about the religious orders who first colonised his worlds. I am definitely going to have to go back to the beginning, and read the series from the beginning.
The "Demon Princes" novels are: (quoted from Wikipedia "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;)
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
I seldom publish reviews, and I'm not sure that I've ever before made a list of what is in and around my bed. However, it's rather important in my little family that we each stay healthy, so we are all washing our hands and gargling with salt water a lot... and sleeping in different parts of the house.
Why? My husband will be showing his hot rod, the VSR, at the Grand National in Pomona next month. Right now, we're creating his "build book" which is a glorified scrap book showing some of the best photographs from early sketches to men with small knives working on the clay model to showing the car on the carpet of the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island.I've just ordered some promo postcards from Vistaprint... my author-promo skills come in handy... and we are highly amused to see that one of the Vistaprint cards that was picked up from the SEMA stand is being auctioned on EBay.
Make of it what you will, around my bed are the following:
Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer
Flowercraft by Violet Stevenshon
Zoobooks Magazine (the Elephants issue) The Sharks issue isn't far away.
Silk and Shadows by Mary Jo Putney
The Business of Winning by Robert Heller
Logic Problems by Penny Press (in fact, I have three of them)
Birds, from the Usborne Discover series
Tempting Fortune by Jo Beverley
Super Sudoku
The Evening News by Arthur Hailey
Explore the World of Prehistoric Life by Dougal Dixon
The Columbia Encyclopedia Vol 3
Sex - A Man's Guide from Men's Health (Rodale Press)
An Ellora's Cavemen anthology with CJ Hollenbach on the cover
Another Ellora's Cavemen anthology with Rodney Chapman on the cover
The Book of Dreams (The fifth and final Demon Princes novel) by Jack Vance
I'm reading "The Book Of Dreams". The subtitle --"The fifth and final Demon Princes novel" and also a couple of lines in the back cover copy intrigued me.
THE LAST DEMON PRINCE
HOWARD ALAN TREESONG
gave a banquet to ten friends. All died in agony, save himself.
HOWARD ALAN TREESONG
went to his old school reunion to teach his former classmates the meaning of horror.
HOWARD ALAN TREESONG
was the most elusive of the five Demon Princes upon whom Kirth Gerson had sworn vengeance. A galaxy-wide guessing game proved his undoing.
HOWARD ALAN TREESONG
wrote his own holy book and called it The Book of Dreams.
JACK VANCE
penned the book of Revelations for that pseudo-bible and thereby brought the most suspenseful galactic manhunt series ever written to a smashing conclusion.The back cover is a little hard on the eyes! I think it was the "Princess Bride" element (Treesong's implied immunity to poison) that appealed to me most -- apart from Demon Princes. Disappointingly, the "demon princes" don't appear to be demons, and they aren't princes, either. They're powerful intergalactic criminals. The Sopranos in outer space? I'm not averse to "suspenseful galactic manhunts", either.
It should be noted that this book was first printed in 1981. So it was before The Sopranos (first aired 1999), but Princess Bride was published in 1973.
I should also add that I'm a slow reader, and I'm only on page 37 of 235. I'm savoring this book, but it's not (for me) a fast-paced page turner. That may change.
The hero, Kirth Gerson, is revealed to be an intergalactic newspaper magnate. Not quite Clark Kent-like, Kirth Gerson lives a double life, posing for much of the time as Henry Lucas, "Special Writer" a lowly investigative reporter and op-ed writer at one of his own newsdesks.
One day, he is fumbling around among the paper files when he comes across a photograph marked "Discard". In other words, it might have been shredded if he hadn't found it. In an intergalactic world when a paparazzo could be murdered for taking a picture of the wrong supercriminal, this photograph of ten people at a banquet is a very big deal. Someone has written "Treesong is here."
Nine of them are probably dead, if one can trust back cover blurb. While the supervillain, Howard Alan Treesong, might be assumed not to be one of the two women seated at the table, Kirk Gerson's first mystery to solve is, who is whom and which is Treesong?
Being the cosmic Murdoch that he is, Kirk Gerson decides to launch a new magazine with interstellar if not intergalactic distribution, publish the photograph on the front page of the inaugural issue, and make it into a "Name the Celebrities And Win" contest.
I am enjoying Jack Vance's world building, and especially the little swipes he takes at our modern world!
Apparently:
Human vegetarians, for instance, have become graceful, slender, beautiful idiots. They've evolved into deer-like creatures that forgetfully abandon their babies, so the omnivore humans pick up the babies and raise them to be domestic servants (or slaves)."Jack Vance is one of the truly important science fiction writers of our day." --Los Angeles Times Book review
Colonising monastic orders haven't done too well, either.
I find myself stopping to wonder "What's the deal with the lists of flowers?" It bothers me. This appears to me to be a book by a man, written for men. I infer that because a colleague of the hero (who does not at this point in the story appear to be a villain) owns a vegetarian. He dresses her in a short smock and nothing else. When she bends over, we can see that she has no underwear. We are told that vegetarians bite and hiss to protect their virtue, but that groups of men get around that by offering the vegetarians molasses candy. Vegetarians cannot bite to defend themselves when their mouths are full.
Jack Vance doesn't list only flowers... I pick on that because so far, there have been three of them. He also lists artists, artifacts on display in shop windows, objects in rooms. It's quite effective, and reminds me of a screenplay.
"Vance's descriptive eye is sharp, and his ear for the language is close to infallible."--New York Newsday
In every list, Vance names several names (or items) that are familiar to all of us, and mixes in made-up names without explanation (none is necessary) to show that we're in another place and time. "Giotto and Gostwane; William Snyder and William Blake..." "... wallflowers, pansies, native bulrastia, and St. Olaf's Toe..." Another interesting and economical use of plantlife was "green mematis" (obviously derived from clematis).
I do wonder what it is about wallflowers that do as well as they do on so many faraway future worlds. So, I looked them up. Plausible. Interesting choice. Any relative of the cruciferous family is all right with me. I'd have chosen a geranium, though. Wallflowers feed and attract all manner of insects from weevils to butterflies. Geraniums repel them.
However, the more I think about Jack Vance's world-building, the more I appreciate it. I love his casual throwaway lines about three moons, and about the religious orders who first colonised his worlds. I am definitely going to have to go back to the beginning, and read the series from the beginning.
The "Demon Princes" novels are: (quoted from Wikipedia "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;)
- Star King (1964). The antagonist is Attel Malagate, a renegade from a species called the Star Kings, who are driven to imitate and surpass the most successful species they encounter; with their contact with humanity in antiquity, they began consciously evolving into imitations of human beings. The bait Gersen uses to trap him is an undeveloped and fantastically beautiful planet whose location is known only to Gersen, which Malagate covets to become the father of a new race that can outdo both humans and his own species.
- The Killing Machine (1964). Kokor Hekkus, a 'hormagaunt', has prolonged his life by the vivisection of human beings to obtain hormones and other substances from their living bodies. But eternal life can be boring, and so he has converted the lost planet Thamber into a stage wherein he acts out his fantasies.
- The Palace of Love (1967). Viole Falushe, an impotent megalomaniac ironically fixated on sex. He was so obsessed with a girl in his youth, he created a number of clones of her in a vain attempt to get one of them to love him back. This novel contains some of Vance's most compelling and unforgettable characters, such as the mad poet, Navarth, who has a central role.
- The Face (1979). Lens Larque, a sadist and monumental trickster. In the course of the novel, the protagonist experiences some of the same outrages that motivated the villain to concoct his most grandiose jest, leading to one of the most humorous endings in all Vance's work.
- The Book of Dreams (1981). Howard Alan Treesong, a 'chaoticist', who embodies elements of all the foregoing, and has the most imaginatively ambitious plans of all.
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
Thursday, January 07, 2010
The Will to Write
Happy New Year, bah humbug! Well, not really. :) But I do find January depressing in many ways. It’s the Monday of the year (unfair to Mondays, which I rather like during the part of the year when I’m off work on Mondays). The Christmas season ends, with the house looking a bit bleak when the tree and other decorations are suddenly removed. There are no holidays in this month. (New Year’s Day is effectively part of the Christmas season, and Martin Luther King Day doesn’t count for us because that’s a work day for General Assembly employees.) Legislative session starts, the busy 90-day stretch at our day job, and the last half of January and the first week of February constitute the most grueling period. And this happens during the worst weather of the year—late nights, weekend work, waiting for the parking shuttle in the face-freezing cold, and a chance of dangerously icy streets.
Although I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, the first day of the year being an arbitrary date anyway (the Romans considered the new year to start in March, for instance, not a bad idea since that’s the threshold of spring), I do have some modest goals. First, I need to finish a short Lovecraftian erotic romance I plan to submit to one of Ellora’s Cave’s “theme” months, the theme being music in this case. In the long term, I’ve resolved to write a vampire story for submission to Silhouette Nocturne Bites (maximum 15,000 words). I haven’t had any luck with Bites yet, but Silhouette did publish a vampire romance novel of mine several years ago, so there is hope, right? Because the novella seems to be my natural length, I’ve been focusing more on stories of that size rather than novels lately, now that electronic publishing has provided us with lots of novelette and novella markets. A great improvement over what Stephen King called the novella in his notes to DIFFERENT SEASONS—the “banana republic” of publishing.
I’ve recently recognized the source of an occasional impediment to my writing, however, not exactly a block, but a drag on productivity. A comment in the latest issue of the RWR, Romance Writers of America’s organizational magazine, brought this point to mind. An author said that she finds writing a welcome escape from the stress of real life; when problems weigh on her mind, she enjoys turning to her fiction, an area where she has complete control. I realized that my reaction to real-life problems and crises tends to be the opposite. When something goes wrong, the problems of my characters suddenly feel flat and uninvolving by contrast. Oddly, this reaction doesn’t in the least discourage me from writing something fun and frivolous. It’s the dark, painful character situations that seem, in contrast to real-life suffering and difficulty, hollow and artificial. In the face of real pain (mine or that of someone close), it’s hard to render the troubles of my imaginary people (usually troubles that are “impossible” anyway, since I write fantasy) believable to myself. No, I don’t have that feeling about reading other people’s dark fiction. I just envy them for the ability to make fictional difficulty, pain, and fear believable. Yes, I know the basic answer is to work harder at channeling my own emotions into my story people’s lives, easier said than done (because real-life worries tend to lead to depression, and depression saps energy). Any thoughts?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Although I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, the first day of the year being an arbitrary date anyway (the Romans considered the new year to start in March, for instance, not a bad idea since that’s the threshold of spring), I do have some modest goals. First, I need to finish a short Lovecraftian erotic romance I plan to submit to one of Ellora’s Cave’s “theme” months, the theme being music in this case. In the long term, I’ve resolved to write a vampire story for submission to Silhouette Nocturne Bites (maximum 15,000 words). I haven’t had any luck with Bites yet, but Silhouette did publish a vampire romance novel of mine several years ago, so there is hope, right? Because the novella seems to be my natural length, I’ve been focusing more on stories of that size rather than novels lately, now that electronic publishing has provided us with lots of novelette and novella markets. A great improvement over what Stephen King called the novella in his notes to DIFFERENT SEASONS—the “banana republic” of publishing.
I’ve recently recognized the source of an occasional impediment to my writing, however, not exactly a block, but a drag on productivity. A comment in the latest issue of the RWR, Romance Writers of America’s organizational magazine, brought this point to mind. An author said that she finds writing a welcome escape from the stress of real life; when problems weigh on her mind, she enjoys turning to her fiction, an area where she has complete control. I realized that my reaction to real-life problems and crises tends to be the opposite. When something goes wrong, the problems of my characters suddenly feel flat and uninvolving by contrast. Oddly, this reaction doesn’t in the least discourage me from writing something fun and frivolous. It’s the dark, painful character situations that seem, in contrast to real-life suffering and difficulty, hollow and artificial. In the face of real pain (mine or that of someone close), it’s hard to render the troubles of my imaginary people (usually troubles that are “impossible” anyway, since I write fantasy) believable to myself. No, I don’t have that feeling about reading other people’s dark fiction. I just envy them for the ability to make fictional difficulty, pain, and fear believable. Yes, I know the basic answer is to work harder at channeling my own emotions into my story people’s lives, easier said than done (because real-life worries tend to lead to depression, and depression saps energy). Any thoughts?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Astrology Just For Writers Part 9 - High Drama, Pluto And Politics
The intent in Astrology Just For Writers is to be very non-technical about astrology and somewhat technical about writing. Part 9 provides writers with an exercise in writing dialogue.
The previous 8 parts in this series can be found by following the links back in the post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
------------------
There's a very old adage, "If you don't understand what's happening, follow the money and you will."
This is a great principle for plotting Mystery and Intrigue novels. It works gangbusters in Romance because the pursuit of wealth fuels our deepest motivations. It's a fabulous tool for plotting Time Travel stories, too.
Finance is the key a writer needs to build a world that seems real to readers, no matter what ridiculous stuff might be there too.
And as we've discussed, successful worldbuilders always echo our "real" world in such a way as to (Artistically) reveal some form or shape in our reality that we ordinarily don't notice.
So what's happening in 2010 that is fodder for the worldbuilding writer of today? (this principle works for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Romance, plus any blend of those three with some other genre (detective, mystery, intrigue, western, etc).
Today the Federal Reserve (US Central Bank) is pondering how to get out of the trap they've dug themselves into, and what to advise the US Congress to do to prevent the kind of collapse we experienced in 2008, 2009 from happening again.
There's only one drumbeat I keep hearing.
This is a drumbeat you would hear on any planet populated by any sort of beings involved in any sort of commerce or business. This is the drumbeat of interstellar commerce, too.
Just listen to the drumbeat -- not the flute, not the violin, not the woodwinds, not the Hallelujah Chorus, just the drumbeat.
What is that drumbeat? Can you hear it? Can you understand what's actually going on in this world, and reveal it by creating another world where the drumbeat is louder, more distinct, reverberating with a more identifiable tone?
The drumbeat that I'm hearing is the rhythm of the transit of Pluto.
The "planet" Pluto was recently demoted from planetary status by astronomers; and don't forget the whole issue of Pluto being a "capture" maybe a comet from another solar system, not formed from the material of our own Sun as the other planets are.
Pluto is an element we've discussed in this series on using Astrology for plotting and worldbuilding.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html -- has a primer on Astrology and mentions how the current financial crisis coincided with Pluto transiting the USA Natal Chart 8th House Cusp (other people's money) which is according to the chart I've been using, 0 Degrees Capricorn.
It's even relevant to marketing as you can use it to figure out what each age group wants more and more of.
The 2000's were characterized by excess in finance as in other areas of life, and that excess (of debt and spending and mad chase after luxury or the satisfaction of "beating" the opposition to an ever bloodier pulp) is blamed for the current situation of cascading bankruptcies.
This first week in 2010, the financial news is chock full of warnings by pundits that the USA faces bankruptcy (not paying our debts - defaulting on Treasury Bonds - the way Brazil did so many times over the last few decades).
Scroll way down in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
to find the table of where Pluto has been transiting during the last few generations.
PLUTO IN SAGITTARIUS generation 1995-2008
PLUTO IN CAPRICORN (2008-9 - 2023)
Now the transit of Pluto through a sign of the zodiac doesn't just affect those born during those years. As a planet moves from the point where it was when a particular issue, affair, relationship, or event begins, it marks the beat of maturation of the affair one step at a time -- in an orderly and fairly predictable fashion, or what I've called "the because line" of the plot.
Astrology can NOT predict "the" future, but it can pinpoint certain blocks of weeks, months or years when an affair begun at a previous point will now reach a crisis of change, of stress, of culmination or confrontation. (those are keywords for certain "aspects").
In other words, Astrology sets the drumbeat to which affairs dance.
There are at least 10 such "drumbeats" rattling through our senses at any given time. The writer/artist's job is to separate them into meaningful sequences.
Astrology can not predict what will happen. The things that make a difference to us, that distinguish one novel from another, aren't coded into the drumbeats.
But in that drumbeat you can find what joins one novel to another to make a genre. Astrology is about what makes all humans the same, not what makes us different.
So, from 1995 through the Tech Bubble crash, and 9/11, we saw affairs of the world inflected by actions of the US Federal Reserve to plunge interest rates way too (Pluto is too) low and keep them there way too (Pluto) long, exaggerating the next bounce so that we went way too (Pluto) high on the debt curve.
1995 through 2008 saw Pluto transiting Sagittarius.
On another planet somewhere else in the Galaxy some other "clock" or drumbeat influence would be visible to time the excesses that would lead to what we're plunging into now. If you build your world to have such a rhythm at the foundation of it, Earth based readers will be able to believe in whatever Relationship Story you want to tell against that background.
OK, so what is Sagittarius? It's the 9th House (law) and ruled by Jupiter, inclusion, expansion, gaining too much weight, being round and jolly and truthful and accepting and out-going and charitable (Madoff comes to mind).
Sagittarius when constrained is HONESTY and JUSTICE.
Sagittarius can't tell a white lie. Sagittarius blurts out truths nobody really wants to hear stated.
When released from constraints (Pluto busts out of all constraints) Sagittarius is THE PLAYBOY HEIR TO THE THRONE, the wastrel, the drunken gambler, and in the Charity aspect becomes something like Barney Madoff's ponzi scheme (where he defrauded a whole lot of really big and ever-growing Charities out of the best and most urgent of motives, to do good for those who trusted him, and became trapped in escalating excesses.
And this pattern repeated all over the world (9th House is foreign travel, foreign countries, international affairs). The Mortgage excess started with some bright fellows in London who created the securitization of US mortgages and sold them internationally.
So in 2008 when Pluto finished with Sagittarius and tickled the edge of Capricorn, the whole world of connected Nations collapsed in agony.
This is the drumbeat, and you see it in personal lives as well as in the lives of Nations.
Excess, explosion, great unbridled violent BEAT, huge tsunami sized waves of good things in vast excess, hugely over-emphasized like the new tallest building in the world opened in Dubai this week, (a loud crash of the drum) followed by SILENCE in which to absorb the shock of that sudden blast of sound.
The SILENCE is as shocking as the SOUND of the beat, and silence is part of what it means "beat" (as in Beat Sheet). Silence is the pure essence of music. Stillness is the purified essence of dance. Empty white space is the defining essence of a printed page. Absence is the art form.
For the last 18 months or so Pluto has diddled around 0 Capricorn, up to 3 degrees, back, and now up again heading for a station at a new degree - 4 degrees of Capricorn. That's still the beginning.
So what comes after the SILENCE of the drumbeat? It's not a rhythm unless something comes NEXT.
Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio, the hidden, clandestine, underworld -- in Fantasy think the other dimension where Magical creatures and demons come from. Pluto is the planet of POWER. Uranium is attributed to Pluto for the Atomic Bomb association; as per my previous blog entry here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/thorium-real-hope-for-e-books.html
Think about Thorium.
Capricorn is the Natural 10th House, ruled by Saturn (restraint). Capricorn is the Prime Minister while Leo is The King. Capricorn is the administrator, the manager, the real decision maker, the down-to-earth firm and reliable ADVISER. Capricorn is the disciplinarian (the school Head Master), and in symbolism the 10th House also represents The Father - the source of discipline in the family.
Capricorn represents the rules of order by which society functions. The Father is the parent who introduces the child to the "realities" of the world.
You want the keys to the car? Show proficiency in the written Driving Test as well as the actual operation of a vehicle. Just because you can corner fast doesn't mean you're exempt from signaling first. Saturn takes all the fun out of everything.
That's Capricorn's mystical initiation - the Rite of Passage into adulthood. Staying up late at night isn't a privilege or fun, but an arduous chore that comes with a big price the next day. Jupiter is the party; Saturn is the hangover, and Pluto makes both bigger and more dramatic.
Theoretically, Earth might have to pass such a Saturn style rite of passage test to gain entry to the Galactic Union. Maybe we just flunked.
Saturn which rules Capricorn is Tough Love. It's Daddy arriving at the teen's unauthorized house party and taking away the highly spiked punch bowl. "You're grounded for LIFE!" Daddy roars, red faced.
So what we can expect for the next "beat" is an "Excess" of "Rules" -- Pluto through Capricorn.
---------EXAMPLES----------------
1) Here's an AP item on new regulations for Tax Preparers I found on Twitter:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/04/irs-regulate-paid-tax-preparers/
And this week the Chairman of the USA's Central Bank is jawboning about THE ONLY SOLUTION IS MORE AND TIGHTER REGULATION.
2) Here's another item, a gem of an example of this pattern, which I found via twitter in The Charleston Gazette
http://wvgazette.com/News/200912280398 which is a URL that was there yesterday and gone today. It's a revival of a very old item.
The news article says:
====
C8 is another name for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. It is one of a family of perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs. In West Virginia, DuPont Co. has used C8 since the 1950s at its Washington Works plant south of Parkersburg. C8 is a processing agent used to make Teflon and other nonstick and stain-resistant products.
Around the world, researchers are finding that people have C8 and other PFCs in their blood at low levels. People can be exposed by drinking contaminated water, eating tainted food, or through food packaging and stain-proofing agents on furniture or carpeting.
Evidence is mounting about the dangers of these chemicals. But regulators have yet to set binding limits for emissions or human exposure.
=====
And it goes on to state that though the correlation is small, further studies are needed and we should "monitor liver enzymes" in people with low exposure.
Needing further studies is so very Capricorn, investigating, keeping records, holding the potential of regulation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for regulation. What I'm pointing out here is the demarcation of an exaggerating effect by Pluto's cycle. Or put another way, "The Pendulum Swings."
Pluto doesn't produce the urge to regulate. Saturn and Capricorn are associated with the imperative urge to regulate. Pluto takes that urge and exaggerates it to melodramatic proportions - a loud beat followed by a louder silence.
=====
3) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_02/b4162024080832.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories
Is a long article on the politics seething behind "reform" of the financial system to prevent this kind of collapse from happening again.
One proposal is to re-institute the separation financial system of investment banks from savings banks. The flow of mortgage securitization from local savings banks to international investment banks flooded the USA with cheap mortgage money, so there's a rationale behind that idea, but look at it another way and you see that in one era "regulation" was irradiated because it was the problem - regulation strangled growth. In another era, the exact same regulation is looked on as the solution to the problem of excessive growth.
Keep clamping your mind onto the idea here that this blog post isn't about which political policies are "right" or "should" be followed.
I'm not arguing any side of this issue. I'm pointing out that to engineer a solid conflict for the foundation of a novel, a writer must be able to argue passionately for any and every side that we have in our own world and then add a NEW SIDE to the argument. Each side is a character in whose moccasins you must walk your mile.
Many writers are bewildered when critics jeer at their "dialogue" -- and think they can take lessons in how to write dialogue. You can't. There are no lessons. The cure for bad dialogue is to be able to believe, truly and really and in your gut, the exact opposite of what you do believe. When you express that passionate belief your dialogue will shine.
So read this article in Business Week (a dull subject) and adopt the belief that's opposite to what you believe, then express that belief in passionate dialogue. That's the way to learn to write dialogue.
-------END EXAMPLES---------
The answer to any problem for the next few years will be regulation, throttle, control, impose accountability (Capricorn) - and do it all to a previously unknown extreme (Pluto).
That's it. Follow the money. REGULATION of monetary supply, fiscal policy, businesses handling money, regulations and more regulations and more and more and more because with Pluto there is never, ever ENOUGH.
If you've been reading this series on Astrology Just For Writers, you have a good grasp of how Pluto represents HIGH DRAMA, the very stuff of life that fuels the conflicts at the heart of all fiction.
Pluto influences bring on the dramatic, larger than life disasters that catapult your Hero into situations where he/she must exceed personal design specifications and perform at World Class levels, if only once in a lifetime.
And that "once in a lifetime" achievement is very typical of Pluto in the lives of those who are not "rich and famous" but just us average folk. In the lives of the Michael Jacksons of the world, Pluto wreaks its havoc repeatedly every time it contacts another natal planet because of the way Pluto was placed in the natal chart.
So until 2023, your readers will be living in world of increasingly intrusive regulation of every part of their lives, taking away all the "fun" they grew up enjoying.
The age group most severely affected will be those just starting their adult lives, those born with Pluto in Scorpio, 1985 to 1995.
The peak of that generation (and there was a baby-boom in the USA during the mid-1990's) will be 20 years old now, getting out of college or trying to.
They may have had their college education SMASHED (Pluto is the violent smashing of structures that have resisted Saturn) by the crash (parents losing everything, job, house, etc.) and college costs skyrocketing, scholarships disappearing because charity giving (Sagittarius is Charity) is GONE.
These 20 year olds are your audience, your readership.
Remember what we discussed in the entry on Targeting an Audience using the generational analysis,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
The Pluto in Scorpio generation is Power Used In Excess (ever more vivid video games where everything in sight is destroyed -- BEAT THE ENEMY being the theme- beat-beat-beat). Pluto rules Scorpio, so that entire generation (no matter how the rest of their natal chart is deployed) has an extra-strong, extra-emphasized Pluto, whatever Pluto may represent personally.
Pluto is obsession (excess interest). Scorpio is hidden things such as government conspiracy, great secrets kept from mankind (Demons from another dimension; the revival of the TV series V where the aliens have SECRETS and there are conspiracies within conspiracies, 5th Column and Resistance fighters, secret sexuality, exaggerated sexuality, purely carnal sexuality).
Also note Al Queda conducting operations to "take over" (excess revolution by force; "terror" is exaggerated fear) is peopled largely by the current 1985-1995 20-something generation, the fighting age folks, whose age is appropriate for wanting to change the world and who live with an extra-strong Pluto influence. Pluto is also related to religion as it is associated with the Unseen and Unknowable.
The main tactic deployed against terrorists will have something to do with regulating finance. As I recall from a recent conversation, the Inquisition was ended basically because the Pope leading it needed money.
-------TECHNICAL ASIDE -------------
TIGER WOODS
Here's a chart posted online for Tiger Woods that makes sense of what he did in terms of the Pluto transit.
http://www.chartplanet.com/famous/charts/tiger.html
When Pluto transited over Woods' natal Moon, he got himself into excess (Pluto rules Scorpio, secrets and irresistible carnal sexuality) trouble by overly intense obsession on fulfilling some sort of subconscious personal NEED (Moon is the reigning need of the lifetime - what a person gropes for in life, the thing you don't have that you will do anything to get and even when you've got more of it than anyone else you're still not satisfied, can't feel that you have it because it's the innate, in-built NEED).
He melted down PUBLICLY (Moon is The Public) when Pluto transited across the Mid-point of his Moon and Sun.
In his Natal Chart Pluto is pretty much opposite Jupiter, thus his exaggerated FAME and his monstrous meltdown. As Pluto transits his Sun, (probably mostly 2013-2014) he'll learn his lesson on a deep spiritual level, or not.
Religious conversion often happens under the transit of Pluto over the natal Sun.
If he had not built up such a secret, the revealing of it in pubic wouldn't have resulted in a catastrophic loss. Catastrophe is Pluto.
He's lost a lot of endorsement contracts -- remember the subject here is FOLLOW THE MONEY. He lost endorsements not because of what he did, but because of the politics ignited by it being made public -- politics and money.
Without that public revelation, the manufacturers would have been happy to have him as endorsing spokesman in any number of commercials.
Pluto transits reveal the hidden with catastrophic consequences.
---------- END TECHNICAL ASIDE -----
Tiger Woods' public melt-down is a perfect textbook example of the EXPLOSIVE action of Pluto in transit. Pluto touched off the explosion revealing something hidden by contacting both sources of energy in his personality (Sun and Moon).
Nobody could have predicted it would be infidelity that would bring him down, nor even that "down" was the direction Pluto's catapult was pointing.
He might have won some huge, unique honor. He might have quit sports to become a monk. He might have created a charitable foundation. He might have suffered a terrible bereavement or some horrible disease which he'd then become the champion of and finance the finding of a cure.
The only thing you can say for sure is that whatever the Event would be, it would be bigger than anything else in his life to date (which is huge), and very likely would "reveal" something very "private" to the "public." It would be something Woods himself would be able to see coming, see as inevitable, but refuse to look at squarely until this blast shattered his certainties.
See what I mean about drama?
So Pluto, Politics and Follow The Money.
Pick up the drumbeat of the Money, the ebb and flow of currency in the veins of the world, and hear the CRASH of the beat, and the SILENCE that follows, stretches, and eventually is broken by another CRASH.
What will be the next CRASH of that beat? Until 2023, the folks who grew up reveling in ever-more-intense video games will be under a harsh, severe, restrictive discipline, a noose that tightens around the neck the harder they pull on their leashes.
But that won't change their essential personalities. They are Pluto In Scorpio (and Scorpio has earned its sexual reputation, too).
In 2023, when Pluto enters Aquarius (freedom, innovation, technology, rebellion) the then-thirty-somethings will be taking over the reigns of Power (Pluto is power) from Regulators (Saturn) and will break the chains of regulation, intrusiveness into private lives (Scorpio obsesses on ultra-privacy; Scorpio is the most private sign of the Zodiac; Scorpio doesn't air dirty laundry in public but makes plenty).
So we had excesses in spending, now we'll have excesses in regulation to prevent spending, and eventually we'll get excesses in de-regulation again.
Remember Aquarius is "The Age Of Aquarius" the Flower Children, Beatniks, Hippies, Drop-Outs. Imagine that amplified by Pluto.
This generation that needs excess to feel anything will break out of any regulatory structure that can be built at this time.
On the other hand, the USA could go "isolationist" and withdraw from the international monetary flow entirely as the Flower Children dropped out of "society" to "find themselves."
Achieving Energy Independence with say, Thorium or Fusion power, could lead to instituting every other sort of "independence" -- which might afford the USA more privacy. The babyboomers of the 1990's will demand unfettered freedom and have the obsessive dedication to that goal to achieve it.
Write the fiction that will entertain people in such a mood and explode into the top echelons of the entertainment profession.
Now how will other countries react to Pluto through Aquarius? You know your country better than I do. Drop a note here about how your culture will respond to the pervasive conviction that more-more-more regulation is the solution to more-more-more acquisitiveness.
Use that beat of generations to build a World -- somewhere out in space, in another galaxy, or another dimension, but make it plausible by revealing the heartbeat that rams MONEY through the arteries of that people's economy.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
The previous 8 parts in this series can be found by following the links back in the post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
------------------
There's a very old adage, "If you don't understand what's happening, follow the money and you will."
This is a great principle for plotting Mystery and Intrigue novels. It works gangbusters in Romance because the pursuit of wealth fuels our deepest motivations. It's a fabulous tool for plotting Time Travel stories, too.
Finance is the key a writer needs to build a world that seems real to readers, no matter what ridiculous stuff might be there too.
And as we've discussed, successful worldbuilders always echo our "real" world in such a way as to (Artistically) reveal some form or shape in our reality that we ordinarily don't notice.
So what's happening in 2010 that is fodder for the worldbuilding writer of today? (this principle works for Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Romance, plus any blend of those three with some other genre (detective, mystery, intrigue, western, etc).
Today the Federal Reserve (US Central Bank) is pondering how to get out of the trap they've dug themselves into, and what to advise the US Congress to do to prevent the kind of collapse we experienced in 2008, 2009 from happening again.
There's only one drumbeat I keep hearing.
This is a drumbeat you would hear on any planet populated by any sort of beings involved in any sort of commerce or business. This is the drumbeat of interstellar commerce, too.
Just listen to the drumbeat -- not the flute, not the violin, not the woodwinds, not the Hallelujah Chorus, just the drumbeat.
What is that drumbeat? Can you hear it? Can you understand what's actually going on in this world, and reveal it by creating another world where the drumbeat is louder, more distinct, reverberating with a more identifiable tone?
The drumbeat that I'm hearing is the rhythm of the transit of Pluto.
The "planet" Pluto was recently demoted from planetary status by astronomers; and don't forget the whole issue of Pluto being a "capture" maybe a comet from another solar system, not formed from the material of our own Sun as the other planets are.
Pluto is an element we've discussed in this series on using Astrology for plotting and worldbuilding.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html -- has a primer on Astrology and mentions how the current financial crisis coincided with Pluto transiting the USA Natal Chart 8th House Cusp (other people's money) which is according to the chart I've been using, 0 Degrees Capricorn.
It's even relevant to marketing as you can use it to figure out what each age group wants more and more of.
The 2000's were characterized by excess in finance as in other areas of life, and that excess (of debt and spending and mad chase after luxury or the satisfaction of "beating" the opposition to an ever bloodier pulp) is blamed for the current situation of cascading bankruptcies.
This first week in 2010, the financial news is chock full of warnings by pundits that the USA faces bankruptcy (not paying our debts - defaulting on Treasury Bonds - the way Brazil did so many times over the last few decades).
Scroll way down in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
to find the table of where Pluto has been transiting during the last few generations.
PLUTO IN SAGITTARIUS generation 1995-2008
PLUTO IN CAPRICORN (2008-9 - 2023)
Now the transit of Pluto through a sign of the zodiac doesn't just affect those born during those years. As a planet moves from the point where it was when a particular issue, affair, relationship, or event begins, it marks the beat of maturation of the affair one step at a time -- in an orderly and fairly predictable fashion, or what I've called "the because line" of the plot.
Astrology can NOT predict "the" future, but it can pinpoint certain blocks of weeks, months or years when an affair begun at a previous point will now reach a crisis of change, of stress, of culmination or confrontation. (those are keywords for certain "aspects").
In other words, Astrology sets the drumbeat to which affairs dance.
There are at least 10 such "drumbeats" rattling through our senses at any given time. The writer/artist's job is to separate them into meaningful sequences.
Astrology can not predict what will happen. The things that make a difference to us, that distinguish one novel from another, aren't coded into the drumbeats.
But in that drumbeat you can find what joins one novel to another to make a genre. Astrology is about what makes all humans the same, not what makes us different.
So, from 1995 through the Tech Bubble crash, and 9/11, we saw affairs of the world inflected by actions of the US Federal Reserve to plunge interest rates way too (Pluto is too) low and keep them there way too (Pluto) long, exaggerating the next bounce so that we went way too (Pluto) high on the debt curve.
1995 through 2008 saw Pluto transiting Sagittarius.
On another planet somewhere else in the Galaxy some other "clock" or drumbeat influence would be visible to time the excesses that would lead to what we're plunging into now. If you build your world to have such a rhythm at the foundation of it, Earth based readers will be able to believe in whatever Relationship Story you want to tell against that background.
OK, so what is Sagittarius? It's the 9th House (law) and ruled by Jupiter, inclusion, expansion, gaining too much weight, being round and jolly and truthful and accepting and out-going and charitable (Madoff comes to mind).
Sagittarius when constrained is HONESTY and JUSTICE.
Sagittarius can't tell a white lie. Sagittarius blurts out truths nobody really wants to hear stated.
When released from constraints (Pluto busts out of all constraints) Sagittarius is THE PLAYBOY HEIR TO THE THRONE, the wastrel, the drunken gambler, and in the Charity aspect becomes something like Barney Madoff's ponzi scheme (where he defrauded a whole lot of really big and ever-growing Charities out of the best and most urgent of motives, to do good for those who trusted him, and became trapped in escalating excesses.
And this pattern repeated all over the world (9th House is foreign travel, foreign countries, international affairs). The Mortgage excess started with some bright fellows in London who created the securitization of US mortgages and sold them internationally.
So in 2008 when Pluto finished with Sagittarius and tickled the edge of Capricorn, the whole world of connected Nations collapsed in agony.
This is the drumbeat, and you see it in personal lives as well as in the lives of Nations.
Excess, explosion, great unbridled violent BEAT, huge tsunami sized waves of good things in vast excess, hugely over-emphasized like the new tallest building in the world opened in Dubai this week, (a loud crash of the drum) followed by SILENCE in which to absorb the shock of that sudden blast of sound.
The SILENCE is as shocking as the SOUND of the beat, and silence is part of what it means "beat" (as in Beat Sheet). Silence is the pure essence of music. Stillness is the purified essence of dance. Empty white space is the defining essence of a printed page. Absence is the art form.
For the last 18 months or so Pluto has diddled around 0 Capricorn, up to 3 degrees, back, and now up again heading for a station at a new degree - 4 degrees of Capricorn. That's still the beginning.
So what comes after the SILENCE of the drumbeat? It's not a rhythm unless something comes NEXT.
Pluto is the ruler of Scorpio, the hidden, clandestine, underworld -- in Fantasy think the other dimension where Magical creatures and demons come from. Pluto is the planet of POWER. Uranium is attributed to Pluto for the Atomic Bomb association; as per my previous blog entry here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/thorium-real-hope-for-e-books.html
Think about Thorium.
Capricorn is the Natural 10th House, ruled by Saturn (restraint). Capricorn is the Prime Minister while Leo is The King. Capricorn is the administrator, the manager, the real decision maker, the down-to-earth firm and reliable ADVISER. Capricorn is the disciplinarian (the school Head Master), and in symbolism the 10th House also represents The Father - the source of discipline in the family.
Capricorn represents the rules of order by which society functions. The Father is the parent who introduces the child to the "realities" of the world.
You want the keys to the car? Show proficiency in the written Driving Test as well as the actual operation of a vehicle. Just because you can corner fast doesn't mean you're exempt from signaling first. Saturn takes all the fun out of everything.
That's Capricorn's mystical initiation - the Rite of Passage into adulthood. Staying up late at night isn't a privilege or fun, but an arduous chore that comes with a big price the next day. Jupiter is the party; Saturn is the hangover, and Pluto makes both bigger and more dramatic.
Theoretically, Earth might have to pass such a Saturn style rite of passage test to gain entry to the Galactic Union. Maybe we just flunked.
Saturn which rules Capricorn is Tough Love. It's Daddy arriving at the teen's unauthorized house party and taking away the highly spiked punch bowl. "You're grounded for LIFE!" Daddy roars, red faced.
So what we can expect for the next "beat" is an "Excess" of "Rules" -- Pluto through Capricorn.
---------EXAMPLES----------------
1) Here's an AP item on new regulations for Tax Preparers I found on Twitter:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/04/irs-regulate-paid-tax-preparers/
And this week the Chairman of the USA's Central Bank is jawboning about THE ONLY SOLUTION IS MORE AND TIGHTER REGULATION.
2) Here's another item, a gem of an example of this pattern, which I found via twitter in The Charleston Gazette
http://wvgazette.com/News/200912280398 which is a URL that was there yesterday and gone today. It's a revival of a very old item.
The news article says:
====
C8 is another name for perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. It is one of a family of perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs. In West Virginia, DuPont Co. has used C8 since the 1950s at its Washington Works plant south of Parkersburg. C8 is a processing agent used to make Teflon and other nonstick and stain-resistant products.
Around the world, researchers are finding that people have C8 and other PFCs in their blood at low levels. People can be exposed by drinking contaminated water, eating tainted food, or through food packaging and stain-proofing agents on furniture or carpeting.
Evidence is mounting about the dangers of these chemicals. But regulators have yet to set binding limits for emissions or human exposure.
=====
And it goes on to state that though the correlation is small, further studies are needed and we should "monitor liver enzymes" in people with low exposure.
Needing further studies is so very Capricorn, investigating, keeping records, holding the potential of regulation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for regulation. What I'm pointing out here is the demarcation of an exaggerating effect by Pluto's cycle. Or put another way, "The Pendulum Swings."
Pluto doesn't produce the urge to regulate. Saturn and Capricorn are associated with the imperative urge to regulate. Pluto takes that urge and exaggerates it to melodramatic proportions - a loud beat followed by a louder silence.
=====
3) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_02/b4162024080832.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories
Is a long article on the politics seething behind "reform" of the financial system to prevent this kind of collapse from happening again.
One proposal is to re-institute the separation financial system of investment banks from savings banks. The flow of mortgage securitization from local savings banks to international investment banks flooded the USA with cheap mortgage money, so there's a rationale behind that idea, but look at it another way and you see that in one era "regulation" was irradiated because it was the problem - regulation strangled growth. In another era, the exact same regulation is looked on as the solution to the problem of excessive growth.
Keep clamping your mind onto the idea here that this blog post isn't about which political policies are "right" or "should" be followed.
I'm not arguing any side of this issue. I'm pointing out that to engineer a solid conflict for the foundation of a novel, a writer must be able to argue passionately for any and every side that we have in our own world and then add a NEW SIDE to the argument. Each side is a character in whose moccasins you must walk your mile.
Many writers are bewildered when critics jeer at their "dialogue" -- and think they can take lessons in how to write dialogue. You can't. There are no lessons. The cure for bad dialogue is to be able to believe, truly and really and in your gut, the exact opposite of what you do believe. When you express that passionate belief your dialogue will shine.
So read this article in Business Week (a dull subject) and adopt the belief that's opposite to what you believe, then express that belief in passionate dialogue. That's the way to learn to write dialogue.
-------END EXAMPLES---------
The answer to any problem for the next few years will be regulation, throttle, control, impose accountability (Capricorn) - and do it all to a previously unknown extreme (Pluto).
That's it. Follow the money. REGULATION of monetary supply, fiscal policy, businesses handling money, regulations and more regulations and more and more and more because with Pluto there is never, ever ENOUGH.
If you've been reading this series on Astrology Just For Writers, you have a good grasp of how Pluto represents HIGH DRAMA, the very stuff of life that fuels the conflicts at the heart of all fiction.
Pluto influences bring on the dramatic, larger than life disasters that catapult your Hero into situations where he/she must exceed personal design specifications and perform at World Class levels, if only once in a lifetime.
And that "once in a lifetime" achievement is very typical of Pluto in the lives of those who are not "rich and famous" but just us average folk. In the lives of the Michael Jacksons of the world, Pluto wreaks its havoc repeatedly every time it contacts another natal planet because of the way Pluto was placed in the natal chart.
So until 2023, your readers will be living in world of increasingly intrusive regulation of every part of their lives, taking away all the "fun" they grew up enjoying.
The age group most severely affected will be those just starting their adult lives, those born with Pluto in Scorpio, 1985 to 1995.
The peak of that generation (and there was a baby-boom in the USA during the mid-1990's) will be 20 years old now, getting out of college or trying to.
They may have had their college education SMASHED (Pluto is the violent smashing of structures that have resisted Saturn) by the crash (parents losing everything, job, house, etc.) and college costs skyrocketing, scholarships disappearing because charity giving (Sagittarius is Charity) is GONE.
These 20 year olds are your audience, your readership.
Remember what we discussed in the entry on Targeting an Audience using the generational analysis,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
The Pluto in Scorpio generation is Power Used In Excess (ever more vivid video games where everything in sight is destroyed -- BEAT THE ENEMY being the theme- beat-beat-beat). Pluto rules Scorpio, so that entire generation (no matter how the rest of their natal chart is deployed) has an extra-strong, extra-emphasized Pluto, whatever Pluto may represent personally.
Pluto is obsession (excess interest). Scorpio is hidden things such as government conspiracy, great secrets kept from mankind (Demons from another dimension; the revival of the TV series V where the aliens have SECRETS and there are conspiracies within conspiracies, 5th Column and Resistance fighters, secret sexuality, exaggerated sexuality, purely carnal sexuality).
Also note Al Queda conducting operations to "take over" (excess revolution by force; "terror" is exaggerated fear) is peopled largely by the current 1985-1995 20-something generation, the fighting age folks, whose age is appropriate for wanting to change the world and who live with an extra-strong Pluto influence. Pluto is also related to religion as it is associated with the Unseen and Unknowable.
The main tactic deployed against terrorists will have something to do with regulating finance. As I recall from a recent conversation, the Inquisition was ended basically because the Pope leading it needed money.
-------TECHNICAL ASIDE -------------
TIGER WOODS
Here's a chart posted online for Tiger Woods that makes sense of what he did in terms of the Pluto transit.
http://www.chartplanet.com/famous/charts/tiger.html
When Pluto transited over Woods' natal Moon, he got himself into excess (Pluto rules Scorpio, secrets and irresistible carnal sexuality) trouble by overly intense obsession on fulfilling some sort of subconscious personal NEED (Moon is the reigning need of the lifetime - what a person gropes for in life, the thing you don't have that you will do anything to get and even when you've got more of it than anyone else you're still not satisfied, can't feel that you have it because it's the innate, in-built NEED).
He melted down PUBLICLY (Moon is The Public) when Pluto transited across the Mid-point of his Moon and Sun.
In his Natal Chart Pluto is pretty much opposite Jupiter, thus his exaggerated FAME and his monstrous meltdown. As Pluto transits his Sun, (probably mostly 2013-2014) he'll learn his lesson on a deep spiritual level, or not.
Religious conversion often happens under the transit of Pluto over the natal Sun.
If he had not built up such a secret, the revealing of it in pubic wouldn't have resulted in a catastrophic loss. Catastrophe is Pluto.
He's lost a lot of endorsement contracts -- remember the subject here is FOLLOW THE MONEY. He lost endorsements not because of what he did, but because of the politics ignited by it being made public -- politics and money.
Without that public revelation, the manufacturers would have been happy to have him as endorsing spokesman in any number of commercials.
Pluto transits reveal the hidden with catastrophic consequences.
---------- END TECHNICAL ASIDE -----
Tiger Woods' public melt-down is a perfect textbook example of the EXPLOSIVE action of Pluto in transit. Pluto touched off the explosion revealing something hidden by contacting both sources of energy in his personality (Sun and Moon).
Nobody could have predicted it would be infidelity that would bring him down, nor even that "down" was the direction Pluto's catapult was pointing.
He might have won some huge, unique honor. He might have quit sports to become a monk. He might have created a charitable foundation. He might have suffered a terrible bereavement or some horrible disease which he'd then become the champion of and finance the finding of a cure.
The only thing you can say for sure is that whatever the Event would be, it would be bigger than anything else in his life to date (which is huge), and very likely would "reveal" something very "private" to the "public." It would be something Woods himself would be able to see coming, see as inevitable, but refuse to look at squarely until this blast shattered his certainties.
See what I mean about drama?
So Pluto, Politics and Follow The Money.
Pick up the drumbeat of the Money, the ebb and flow of currency in the veins of the world, and hear the CRASH of the beat, and the SILENCE that follows, stretches, and eventually is broken by another CRASH.
What will be the next CRASH of that beat? Until 2023, the folks who grew up reveling in ever-more-intense video games will be under a harsh, severe, restrictive discipline, a noose that tightens around the neck the harder they pull on their leashes.
But that won't change their essential personalities. They are Pluto In Scorpio (and Scorpio has earned its sexual reputation, too).
In 2023, when Pluto enters Aquarius (freedom, innovation, technology, rebellion) the then-thirty-somethings will be taking over the reigns of Power (Pluto is power) from Regulators (Saturn) and will break the chains of regulation, intrusiveness into private lives (Scorpio obsesses on ultra-privacy; Scorpio is the most private sign of the Zodiac; Scorpio doesn't air dirty laundry in public but makes plenty).
So we had excesses in spending, now we'll have excesses in regulation to prevent spending, and eventually we'll get excesses in de-regulation again.
Remember Aquarius is "The Age Of Aquarius" the Flower Children, Beatniks, Hippies, Drop-Outs. Imagine that amplified by Pluto.
This generation that needs excess to feel anything will break out of any regulatory structure that can be built at this time.
On the other hand, the USA could go "isolationist" and withdraw from the international monetary flow entirely as the Flower Children dropped out of "society" to "find themselves."
Achieving Energy Independence with say, Thorium or Fusion power, could lead to instituting every other sort of "independence" -- which might afford the USA more privacy. The babyboomers of the 1990's will demand unfettered freedom and have the obsessive dedication to that goal to achieve it.
Write the fiction that will entertain people in such a mood and explode into the top echelons of the entertainment profession.
Now how will other countries react to Pluto through Aquarius? You know your country better than I do. Drop a note here about how your culture will respond to the pervasive conviction that more-more-more regulation is the solution to more-more-more acquisitiveness.
Use that beat of generations to build a World -- somewhere out in space, in another galaxy, or another dimension, but make it plausible by revealing the heartbeat that rams MONEY through the arteries of that people's economy.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Monday, January 04, 2010
Rebels and Lovers Book Video
REBELS AND LOVERS is the fourth book in the Dock Five Universe, coming from Bantam end of March 2010. Devin Guthrie is my "non-hero" hero...a mega-wealthy techo-geek who finds himself thrust into a situation in which there are no easy answers. Only an option that may be unthinkable:
For these two renegades, falling in love is the ultimate rebellion…
It’s been two years since Devin Guthrie last saw Captain Makaiden Griggs. But time has done little to dampen his ardor for the beautiful take-charge shuttle pilot who used to fly yachts for his wealthy family. While his soul still burns for her, Kaidee isn’t the kind of woman a Guthrie is allowed to marry—-especially in this time of intergalactic upheaval, with the family’s political position made precarious by Devin’s brother Philip, now in open revolt against the Empire. And when Devin’s nineteen-year-old nephew Trip goes inexplicably missing, his bodyguard murdered, this most dutiful of Guthrie sons finds every ounce of family loyalty put to the test. Only by joining forces with Kaidee can Devin complete the mission to bring Trip back alive. Only by breaking every rule can these two renegades redeem the promise of a passion they were never permitted to explore. At risk? A political empire, a personal fortune and both their hearts and lives...
Pre Order from BN HERE
Pre Order from Borders HERE
Thanks!
~Linnea
REBELS AND LOVERS, March 2010: Book 4 in the Dock Five Universe, from Bantam Books and Linnea Sinclair—www.linneasinclair.com
Kaidee hated when her ship didn’t work. Dead in space was not a place she liked to be. Especially with an unknown bogie on her tail, closing at a disturbingly fast rate of speed that made her heart pound in her chest and her throat go dry.
For these two renegades, falling in love is the ultimate rebellion…
It’s been two years since Devin Guthrie last saw Captain Makaiden Griggs. But time has done little to dampen his ardor for the beautiful take-charge shuttle pilot who used to fly yachts for his wealthy family. While his soul still burns for her, Kaidee isn’t the kind of woman a Guthrie is allowed to marry—-especially in this time of intergalactic upheaval, with the family’s political position made precarious by Devin’s brother Philip, now in open revolt against the Empire. And when Devin’s nineteen-year-old nephew Trip goes inexplicably missing, his bodyguard murdered, this most dutiful of Guthrie sons finds every ounce of family loyalty put to the test. Only by joining forces with Kaidee can Devin complete the mission to bring Trip back alive. Only by breaking every rule can these two renegades redeem the promise of a passion they were never permitted to explore. At risk? A political empire, a personal fortune and both their hearts and lives...
Pre Order from BN HERE
Pre Order from Borders HERE
Thanks!
~Linnea
REBELS AND LOVERS, March 2010: Book 4 in the Dock Five Universe, from Bantam Books and Linnea Sinclair—www.linneasinclair.com
Kaidee hated when her ship didn’t work. Dead in space was not a place she liked to be. Especially with an unknown bogie on her tail, closing at a disturbingly fast rate of speed that made her heart pound in her chest and her throat go dry.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Science: Fact is funnier than Fiction
I'm always on the lookout for unusual, but plausible tricks to play on my heroes, although I balk equally at doing permanent damage, and at torments that result from stupidity.
Above all else, I require my SFR heroes and villains to be intelligent, effective and competent. Therefore, if my hero is going to suffer, it has to be a richly deserved come-uppance for his own arrogance, vanity, over-confidence, bad habits, or sexism. More often than not, I will strike him creatively below the belt, but my heroines… won't.
I love to start with a scientific fact, and weave it into an intelligent but humorous, character-driven Science-Fiction Romance plot. For instance, in googling "lightning" I was delighted to discover:
"Males are struck by lightning four times more than women."
Why is that? Scientists suggest this might be because males spend far more time in the great outdoors, swinging metal objects: swords, axes, hay forks, shotguns, rods (fishing rods), golfclubs… and thereby inviting disaster.
My own, more chaotic theory is that men bring Nature's wrath upon themselves owing to their size, physique, nature, and inclinations. They tend to whip out their whizzers and attempt to kill trees and offend dryads when Nature calls.
They do this standing up, creating a grounding arc of conductible matter, standing under trees (which is known to be ill-advised when a storm is brewing.) Ladies with a going problem on a golf course usually squat, if they cannot wait, which is considered a much safer attitude.
However… being of an inquiring mind, I proceeded to do a Boolean search [men struck by lightning while urinating OR men electrocuted while urinating]. My search was highly satisfactory, not to confirm or refute my theory (which it didn't, at least on the first two pages), but because my search led me to some fascinating bits of esoterica.
The burning question (more specific than mine) Has a man been struck by lightning while urinating off a cliff ... went unanswered. I'm sure that was asking for too much information, anyway!
Apparently, a child "was struck by lightning while urinating on an electric cattle fence in rural Texas". And the same happened to a man in Montana. Then, there are men who mow the lawn during a storm, while listening to their ipods, and when struck, sue Apple.
Now, that's conduct unbecoming of a compellingly attractive Romance hero (or Romance villain.)
I came across several eminently sensible Navajo Taboos about appropriate behavior during thunderstorms, and also about poetic justice for those who are cruel to very small animals.
http://www.navajocentral.org/navajotaboos/taboos_nature.html
"Do not do a rain dance during a rainstorm because you will be struck by lightning."
In fact, I am working on a twist to this one for my next alien Djinn romance "Grand Fork". My heroine does the equivalent of a rain dance. The hero is struck.
"Do not urinate on an anthill because you will have trouble going to the bathroom."
If there were any truth to that, maybe as part of Health Care reform, patients might be required to wash away a few anthills before their treatment could be escalated to a prescription for Flowmax (or whatever it is called!)
PETA might object. So might the EPA…(please follow this link for news of the EPA granting a Presidential award to someone who came up with a way to stop animals urinating on trees!) Imagine! Perhaps you can see why my imagination has been described as Monty Pythonesque on more than one occasion. Science is such fun!
Even more to my taste is this site:
http://www.thenewz.com/weird-people.htm
WISCONSIN – "A man will spend 20 days in jail for urinating on an ATM machine. Apparently [the gentleman] became frustrated when the machine wouldn't give him any money and proceeded to pee all over the machine. Unfortunately, for [the gentleman], a security camera recorded the whole thing...."
He was lucky. A skinny dipper in New York State came away with less than a whole "thing" when
"… a giant snapping turtle used part of [the gentleman's] anatomy as a meal. [The victim] later stated, "I felt this excruciating pain in my groin and when I got my bearings, I realized a turtle had bitten my testicles and swam away with them…."
Naturally, I cannot introduce a successful snapping turtle into a Romance novel, because his happiness would tend to interfere with the traditional Happy-Ever-After of a Romance, which ought to involve marriage and the prospect of children.
However, there was a dangling bait element in Insufficient Mating Material (my second alien romance novel in the god-Princes of Tigron series).
I'd been intrigued by Discovery Channel documentaries about candiru (a bloodthirsty little fish from the Amazon river) being attracted to urea and mistaking a man's equipment for the gills of its normal prey.
The true science inspired me to write the "a fish nibbled me" scene. Now, I don't approve of doing permanent harm to my heroes, so I might as well tell you that the teeny weeny willie fish was a plot device, dreamed up by the hero because he wanted the heroine to take a close look at his wedding tackle… He had a very good reason for that.
Djetth, hero of Insufficient Mating Material, faced a lot of challenges, including a broken jaw at the beginning of the book, and being marooned with the heroine on an island without running water or toiletries, and being hunted by a swat team of assassins. His story was immense fun to write, and although the book was categorized as a fantasy, there's a great deal of hard (well, sound) science in it.
Tarrant-Arragon led pretty much a charmed life, but he did experience an unpleasant moment, thanks to an alien version of the "Teddy Bear" cactus, which I learned about on a corporate team-building trip to Arizona. (I also discovered on that trip that I am a fantastic shot with a six-gun.)
The cactus's fruits have papery spines that are attracted to liquid, and it can kill a rabbit or any other animal by sinking deeper and deeper into the flesh. If you remove the spines and peel the cactus –which our guide did—it tastes a bit like kiwi, and is a very good source of Vitamin C. We were also told (after I'd been the group member who volunteered to sample it) that it was simultaneously a powerful aphrodisiac and laxative.
Since I cannot possibly leave you on a low note, I shall end with a scientific term for a phobia.
Keraunophobia : an abnormal fear of being struck by lightning.
I wish you all a very safe, happy, healthy, prosperous New Decade.
Rowena Cherry
Originally posted (with fewer scientific links and references) as part of a two-week-long contest (ending today, Sunday 3rd January) at http://lasrguest.blogspot.com/2009/12/guest-blog-rowena-cherry.html
(Visitors who leave comments on ALL posts have a chance to win a bundle of prizes)
Thursday, December 31, 2009
White Christmas
Did any of you share our record-setting pre-Christmas snowstorm? Any significant amount of snow before January is rare here. Last Saturday we got about two feet, and the roads were so inadequately cleared the next day that our Sunday services were canceled, which has never happened at that church before. Interesting how the conventional images from "White Christmas" and Currier-and-Ives art override reality in the popular mind. We visualize Christmas with snow even in areas like this one (mid-East-Coast) where it seldom appears on schedule for the holidays. My late stepmother, who grew up in the tidewater region of North Carolina and lived all her adult life in Norfolk, Virginia, both with a very slim chance of snow on Christmas, nevertheless held a fanatical devotion to the whole "White Christmas" ideal. Well, this year we had one, with plenty of inches still left over on Christmas from the snowfall almost a week earlier. I'm reminded of a story by Connie Willis—not in the MIRACLE collection I mentioned last week—from ASIMOV'S, called "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know.” The collective unconscious, primed by constant hearing of that song, causes snow to blanket the entire country, including Florida and Los Angeles. You can read the story here:
Asimov's
Has anyone here produced some holiday fiction? I've had only one actual Christmas story published. It's in the Jewels of the Quill anthology CHRISTMAS WISHES:
Christmas Wishes
Called "Little Cat Feet," it's based on the legend that animals can talk on Christmas Eve. A teenage runaway on Christmas Eve meets a stray cat who helps her out of a desperate situation.
However, I do have a vampire novel that takes place during the Christmas season, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, sequel to DARK CHANGELING:
Child of Twilight
The cover shows my twelve-year-old, human-vampire hybrid girl—also a runaway—feeding on a rabbit in the snow. I'm rather fond of it.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Asimov's
Has anyone here produced some holiday fiction? I've had only one actual Christmas story published. It's in the Jewels of the Quill anthology CHRISTMAS WISHES:
Christmas Wishes
Called "Little Cat Feet," it's based on the legend that animals can talk on Christmas Eve. A teenage runaway on Christmas Eve meets a stray cat who helps her out of a desperate situation.
However, I do have a vampire novel that takes place during the Christmas season, CHILD OF TWILIGHT, sequel to DARK CHANGELING:
Child of Twilight
The cover shows my twelve-year-old, human-vampire hybrid girl—also a runaway—feeding on a rabbit in the snow. I'm rather fond of it.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thorium - The Real Hope For E-books?
Thorium
The Real Hope For E-books
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Green's the thing.
This blog entry originally published in December 2009, is still valid in 2019. Much work has been done with Thorium, and in 2018, the BBC did a story on India mining beaches for Thorium. And, in 2018, I'm seeing comments by owners of all-electric cars (LEAF in particular) saying they pay less per mile than with gasoline.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181016-why-india-wants-to-turn-its-beaches-into-nuclear-fuel
Notice the black background on this blog? Black with white letters takes less electricity to render on your monitor than white with black letters. Read green!
The problem of e-books vs traditional publishing isn't just a green issue -- it's a writer's worldbuilding paradise!
Devon Monk, the author I raved about last week got me thinking about electricity, magic, technology and worldbuilding.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/recommending-devon-monk.html
And before that I pointed you to a twitter-based worldbuilding exercise by a group of writers and a publisher creating an anthology.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html
Then I ran into an article I will point you to at the end here. It crystalized a vision of "the" future for me, and I think you can use this to build backgrounds for your own fiction.
My blog entries on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com give glimpses into the mechanism of a writer's mind, so let's retrace my reasoning a step at a time to look at the whole seething, bursting phenomenon of the e-book infrastructure and its ecological sense.
This applies to all the information available via the internet and to it's "green" component and a thousand questions SF/Romance has not yet addressed that I know of (please drop references to great SF/Romance on the comments here!).
It's still very problematic whether the budding trend toward e-books, e-music downloads, feature film downloads, the indie film makers distributing free downloads on the internet ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091226/wl_time/08599195000500 is a Yahoo news story about this phenomenon) the whole web 2.0, cloud computing direction and the changing business model of writers which I've written about here ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html
...along with the "paperless office" writers and publishers are adopting, is actually greener than the old fashioned method of hauling paper around the world.
On Cloud Computing, see this page (in an article on failing to succeed) which shows graphically how the business decision making process can go awry (look at the table under the picture of the black box):
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_oracle/3/
And remember as I indict government decision making below, I'm NOT advocating the decision making system used by bussiness either. Focus your mind on the decision making processes used in our world, and how any little change in those processes might change the world you set stories within. This is basic sociological science fiction using futurology.
In the Worldbuilding By Committee article linked above, the Twitter group kept coming back to the idea of replacing government with a corporation, i.e. a Company Town for the venue for these stories. That has been done, and well done, so here, I'm trying to get writers to think outside the box we normally don't even know we're inside of.
Ask the next question. That was Theodore Sturgeon's motto when it came to SF writing (he wrote the Star Trek episode Amok Time that started the whole Spock phenomenon). He was a good friend of mine and an influence on my SF writing. Here's where I discussed that.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html
So when doing futurology, you need to "ask the next question" not just find an answer and stop thinking. E-books and green tech are fraught with next questions to ask because both are driven by government decision making (e-books and copyright; green tech and our power supply).
If not government as we know it, or corporations as we know them, then what? To find "then what" take a close look at what has gone on in this world since 1950 and the rise of the buzzword ecology (yes, the SF magazines of the 1950's obssessed on "ecology").
The problem with all "green" tech is electricity and what it takes to get enough of it to make the products that are supposed to be greener. E-book reader screens are very dirty to make. Batteries are worse! (you gotta read Devon Monk's novels)
The carbon footprint of say a KWH of electricity produced by a solar panel has to include what it took to make the solar panel array, transport and install it and maintain it (every time the service guys come out, it costs gas for their truck, etc) PLUS how fast the panel wears out (like lightbulbs, a solar panel only lasts the time the manufacturer builds into it on purpose).
I found out a shocking thing when shopping for additional attic insulation.
The solar panels they sell in the USA (as of 2009) are (by Fed law) not allowed to be as efficient and long-lasting as the ones sold in Europe.
The ones sold in the USA lose (I think it was) 20% of their ability to produce electricty in (I think) 10 years but are rated to last a longer than 10 years. Whatever the figures were, they're different in 2010. The exact figures are unimportant. The point here is that government makes these decisions and shapes our world in ways that most people don't know about. (that insulation salesman wasn't supposed to tell me that fact because he also sells solar panels).
In other words, you'll be thrilled the year you install a solar panel and probably won't notice the gradual fall-off of production of electricty you can sell back to your utility (if your local utility is set up to buy it back) over time. But the good deal you got on install turns into a real bad deal with time, and you never know that if you lived elsewhere you could have gotten a better deal.
You never see the carbon footprint (or any of the other exotic and seriously toxic pollutants) generated when the panel and its components are created, assembled, transported to a warehouse, sent to another distribution point, etc etc until it's installed on your property. Then of course there's the gasoline needed to tote it away when it dies. Then landfill problems. Recycle doesn't always recover as much as is expended doing the recycle; it depends what you include when you calculate.
The whole idea of plug-in commuter cars depends on CHEAP electricity that's cleaner to produce than what we have now.
At the moment it costs more for enough electricity to commute to work than it costs for enough gasoline to commute to work, and running cars by plug-in electricity is dirtier than gasoline.
The Obama initiative to create the "smart grid" and replace our electrical distribution system is really great, and I'm all for it no matter what it costs (frankly been irked that it wasn't done 20 years ago, but we have better computer controllers now).
That smart grid will reduce the cost of electricity, but Big Brother will be able to deny you electricity if you misbehave (brown-out a single house that's over-using, and nevermind that they have someone on hospice life-support equipment).
But we do need to rebuild the grid, and smart-grid is the way to go.
If you read Devon Monk's novels, you see why I'm thinking about the grid! You have no idea how romantic this grid-tech stuff can be if you don't read novels like Monk's!
But which way to build a "smart grid" is a decision that will be made by the same government process that gave us the decision to disallow U.S. residents from having the same high efficiency solar panels Europeans can buy. Will our grid be as smart as other countries? (build that world, don't argue for or against my assuptions here. Don't get distracted by your opinions. Ask The Next Question and build a fictional world from those questions.)
Yet smart grid is not enough. We need to be able to feed that grid with a lower pollution footprint. (Yay, Magic!)
Next Question: Do we really need a cleaner power source? What if we don't find one?
Well, 2010 is (in the USA) a census year, but population actually grows every year.
And that's what's been happening. Population has out-grown our energy production capacity, not just because each individual pulls more from the grid but because there are more of us. Substantially more! (some undocumented; some with pirating taps into the grid too -- smart grid will find them and cut them off).
The 2010 census may find 330 million of us in the USA. In 1960, there were just over 179 million in the USA.
http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_popl.html
I haven't tried to hunt down the stat on how many KWH/year each USA person used in 1960, but just looking at my own life, it was a LOT less than today, however frugal I attempt to be. I use an electric toothbrush that's got a rechargable battery. An unthinkable concept (even in SF novels) in the 1960's. And back then, I had a manual typewriter.
I have seen stats bandied about that indicate how our gasoline and electricity use per person has risen over these decades. The USA is really shamefully profligate in usage.
But what do we use, and what do we get for it? Is our usage worth it? Do we produce a profit from all this convenience? And how do we reduce our total footprint in absolute terms while still increasing our population at this rate? Because the world can't support this current world population (nevermind the growth) if we all use power the way the USA folks currently do.
I saw a TV feature retrospective last week showing that the world population will reach a full 7 billion by 2012 and rise to 8 billion only 16 years later. That's a 1 Billion population increase in 16 years. Population increase is geometric, you know. The interval it takes to produce a billion more people will get shorter and shorter.
In the 1950's collapse of the entire world ecology was predicted by 2050, due to overpopulation and that was without the intense rise in usage of gasoline and electricity.
Today the boogey man is Global Warming. Tomorrow it will be something else, food crop fungus, the extinction of the bees, -- remember acid rain?
With more people, "human activity" will have greater and greater effect on ecology.
It doesn't matter (for a worldbuilding writer) what aspect of global resources maxes out first - collapse is collapse and our population growth and increasing technology has us headed right for total collapse because of our primate-based habit of tossing our trash (pollution from energy use, non-biodegredable packaging, or even just sewage) aside and expecting it not to come back to haunt us (like dropping a bananna peel from a tree and forgetting about it).
I've seen bragging statistics about how much manufacturing has increased the efficiency of gadgets and cars so they do the same but use less electricity. Oh we are so good! But, there are so many more of us that the total amount of oil and electricity we use is still growing at a rate that will reach a maximum and not be able to grow any more even though the population still grows.
We either have to drastically reduce population or reduce our standard of living.
SFF/R writers find neither alternative acceptable. Love is. And the less time we spend working, the more time there is for love.
So since Love Conquers All, it better get conquering real fast.
We need a cheap, abundant, non-polluting, non-nuclear waste-to-store-forever, non-weapons grade Uranium producing, non-fetus-mutating, source of POWER.
And the astonishing fact is that we have indeed had that magical source of POWER since the 1950's and have turned away from implementing that magical technology for political reasons (according to the article I found).
Maybe this article nails the causes for that turn-away from the "real" solution, maybe not. Maybe this scientific article is actually pure fantasy. I don't know and for the purposes of this worldbuilding excerise it doesn't matter.
But I do vaguely remember reading probably in the 1970's that the Thorium nuclear power plant technology had failed, and it would be impossible to use.
According to this article that I just found last week, that was not true. According to this article the choice to fuel atomic power plants with Uranium was made because the government wanted to make war not love in the 1960's, and that statement itself could be politically slanted. It doesn't matter. We're thinking SFR here.
Personally, I enjoy love more than war, even in fiction. I do know there are those who don't feel that way, and huge lucrative industries (such as video games) are founded on feeding the lust for destruction. But maybe there's marketing room for another industry based on SFR?
If this article explains what happened in the 1950's to the 1970's correctly, the huge power-crunch we are in right now could have been avoided if government hadn't meddled in the business decisions of the power industry.
Here's the article for you to judge for yourself (there are some other articles you might want to look at linked on that page too), and while you're reading think about the the consequences of allowing government to decide the direction of the health care delivery system by the same mechanism used to decide the direction of the power-delivery-system's development. Remember, conflict is the essence of story.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
And a prior ABC News story on the topic of using Thorium instead of Uranium in nuclear power plants:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200604/s1616391.htm
See? It doesn't matter which party or which politicians are in charge. It's the decision mechanism that needs a "next question," more than politics or ideology.
As a voter, would knowing about the law against you having an efficient solar panel installed on your house, or about forcing you to use nuclear power from Uranium rather than from Thorium to power your house or car, make a difference in what you say to your congressman at town hall meetings? Conflict is the essence of story. Marriages are made and broken by these kinds of conflicts involving larger world-girdling issues (population explosion; pollution; political ascendancy).
The worldbuilding writer can slice and dice that decision mechanism and create whole new political systems. Devon Monk just used the usual, ho-hum corporate structure and barely acknowledged the government structure that supports the corporation's rights to patents and profits.
The only innovative thinking in the Allie Beckstrom universe is the idea of conduits of magic akin to the electrical grid, and the magic grid isn't even "smart."
The SF of the 1960's would not have accepted worldbuilding that was so rudimentary.
I'm still searching for writers of today who will not stop short of asking the next question like that. When you build a "world" you can't just change ONE thing about our current world and call it Fantasy or SF.
Why? You saw how there's a connection between the kind of solar panel you can buy, the health care system, and nuclear war potential connected to power generation. That's our real world. Any fantasy world must have that property too -- connections. If one thing changes (magical conduits beneath certain neighborhoods in the city), that will change everything else a little bit.
Devon Monk hit on a lot of the changes that her magic-technology would bring about, but left out other things that would be impacted. In defense of her work, I have to say that she is less than a generation into the new technology. However, if you think back only 20 years to 1990, and the attitude of publishers toward the field of e-books then as compared to now, the attitude of retailers toward amazon and online merchandising then as compared to now, you see that the changes created by a single technological innovation come faster, and are more pervasive than depicted in the Allie Beckstrom novels.
When you're building your world, don't stop thinking. Ask The Next Question.
Understand the links between apparently disconnected trends and forces in our real world, and create a pattern of links just like our real world pattern among the postulates of your constructed world.
Revealing those hidden connections and patterns of links is what Art is all about. Show don't tell how the real world is connected by building your world to reveal that pattern.
Here's an exercise, just for fun.
Delve into the issues of human nature that produce the kinds of people who end up in charge of those government and business decisions, and the kinds of motivations that drive people into politics. Create a character with 6 problems to solve.
Now postulate an alternate universe where the Thorium - Uranium choice was made by a different mechanism toward a different objective from different motives than the articles I've mentioned show in our everyday world.
Postulate a world where there's no pollution, and no real difference in energy usage and convenience gadgets between USA and the poorest tribal regions of Afghanistan. What happens when everyone in China can freely access the internet and all the opinions rampant around the world?
Would we have a drug and slave trade grossing enough cash to buy governments if thorium power plants were the standard around the world?
Would human population have exploded even faster and be at just as great a risk of destroying the world as we are now? What resource would we max out instead of energy? Space to live? Oxygen? A lot of people today are worried about the drinking water supply. Do we drink enough water to keep our kidneys healthy or grow plants to ward off vitamin deficiency?
Do this exercise a few times. You have plenty of time. You can do it in the shower.
I think there's a feature film script here for a political historian writer, tracing the decision making process that went on between 1950 and 1970 (McCarthy Hearings; Korean War; Viet Nam War; Feminism (talk about genies and bottles, but your constructed world needs a set of macro-issues and trends like that).)
In that atmosphere of the '50's to '70's, the road of human history forked in a sharp V, and we went down the Uranium branch of that V.
Remember the fabulous film about Madam Curie, a woman physicist with a real, original discovery, and how politics buried that discovery for so long? How could it be that Weinberg's life so focused on the technology of thorium use hasn't been made into a similar movie?
Why did Al Gore win the Nobel prize for An Inconvenient Truth? Shouldn't that inconvenient truth be that this global warming issue could have been avoided had the Thorium - Uranium decision gone for Thorium?
Wouldn't a movie about Weinberg's life have been a Nobel type subject? Who better than a politician to implement the creation of such a deep expose of the political decision making process?
How did that Uranium - Thorium engineering decision happen in the political arena?
And of course the real burning question: Is It Too Late?
Can we rescue the world by going Thorium now?
Can love conquer political decision making?
Is it enough to "win" on the thorium issue? Don't we need to win on the issue of the kind of decision making process we rely on?
Just look what happened this past weekend with an attempt to bring down another passenger plane. After the attempt nearly succeeded, then (and only then) the authorities "decide" to increase security for the homebound holiday travelers. Talk about locking the barn door!
The terrorist objective is to wear the larger enemy down by luring them into wasting resources. One lone person making a single bold move, with the effluvium of an organization behind him, costs him a few hundred dollars and his life -- but costs the larger enemy millions of dollars. That's a successful terrorist move.
There's a 1950's novel with the same title that Marion Zimmer Bradley used, TWO TO CONQUER. It was by Eric Frank Russell and postulated an imaginary terrorist organization that cost a planetary government (of aliens who didn't know much about humans) enough to almost bankrupt it. In actuality it was only one human man cleverly planting "evidence" of a "movement" by spreading slogans around. When caught and imprisoned he invented whole cloth out of pure imagination a non-material partner with nearly magical powers, and sold himself to his jailers as a powerful threat. It bought him enough time to get rescued.
The novel (written by an author with real world experience in these matters) explained the tactics of the terrorist as clearly as several currently popular (and old classic) TV shows explain the confidence rackets so you can armor yourself against being taken as a mark. (Mission: Impossible, Remmington Steele, and today White Collar).
Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to increase security after a terrorist feint, rather than before an actual move?
------------
Here is a quote from a comment posted on a Newsweek article about the US Terrorist Databases at
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2009/12/28/what-u-s-intelligence-knew-about-the-underpants-bomber.aspxHere's the comment:
I invented a holistic semantic system that is far superior to what the U.S. Government is using -- in the words of many of their own specialists, and leading scientists in CS, but to date we have had no luck in overcoming the adoption barriers facing small and emerging technology companies attempting to resolve serious problems. One recent blog post of mine might be of interest:
How to prevent the Fort Hood tragedy, by design.
http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/">http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/
Another paper written in laymen's language is a use case scenario developed specifically for the DHS:
http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf">http://www.kyield.com/images/SCENARIO_3-_Roger_the_maintenance_man_at_the_hydro_dam.pdf
We've invented the solution, but it has yet to be adopted, despite a significant amount of direct communications at decision levels in the past three admins.
Mark Montgomery
Founder - Kyield
http://www.kyield.com
http://kyield.wordpress.com
---------------
See what I mean about worldbuilding from the patterns available in our real world? Keep asking the next question.
Why is it that government's decision making mechanism leads us to focus and expend resources on a failed attempt to bring an aircraft down rather than watching for a real thrust coming from the other direction? (haven't they ever read any classic romances where the pretty girl or a thrown stone distracts the castle guards and the miscreant sneaks right into the castle past the distracted guard? I loved the TV show, Zorro!)
The worldbuilder needs to look at the pattern of these breaking-news Events and analyze the forces causing the behavior of large institutions (government, corporations, or non-profits) just as the writers of those old TV shows make the behavior of individual guards clear.
So ask the next question. What does it take to go greener and accommodate a larger population? What happens if we don't go all-e-book paperless office? Why is there such resistance? What would have to change to melt that resistance? Why doesn't government trick us into going all e-book the way it tricked us into going all-Uranium? Where is the glitch in government decision making? Corporate decision making? Find it. Change it. Change everything in your universe to match. Write a story in that universe. Win the Nobel Prize for PNR!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
6 arguably greener e-book titles; 4 on Kindle
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