Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

After six weeks at the Clarion West writer’s workshop, it’s finally time for the eighteen of us to wrap things up and head home. While I’m ready to get back to that which we call “real life,” it’s sad, too. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with a really wonderful group of people this summer. There’s no life like the life of the mind, and being fully engaged in writing for six weeks has really cracked my head open. I’m leaving here with a new perspective on what I write and how I write it, and I’ve met great people along the way.

I’ve also got a batch of stories I’m proud of, along with some intelligent advice on how to make them better. I’d be revising them for submission right now if I weren’t so damned exhausted.

Here’s some of what I learned:

• During Michael Bishop’s week, I got back on the path of beautiful writing. The workshop format for this week was to submit a bunch of short assignments, which would then be read allowed by Mike and given blind critiques. This stirred a bit of competitive spirit in me (which is a confession; they tell you not to do this). It got me ready to run hard and fast, and it gave the people who weren’t used to being critiqued a gentle entry into something that can be pretty rough for some to handle — having one’s work ripped apart.
• During Maureen McHugh’s week, I had a blinding flash of insight about how to structure novel projects, how to think about designing them. It wasn’t anything she taught directly, but Maureen is one of those people who’s so damned smart that stuff she says offhandedly can accidentally rewire your thinking. On my own initiative, I chose this week as a time to get serious about one of my main goals for Clarion — getting better with plot, dramatic tension, and narrative structure. Looking back on the stuff I’ve produced, I think I achieved this goal. No longer will the Spacecrafts workshop have to complain about my plotless narrative experiments! Ha!
• During Nnedi Okoraor’s week, I attained the realization that I am never going back to academia. Yay!
• During Graham Joyce’s week, I worked even more on matters pertaining to plot. Graham is seriously awesome at teaching this stuff. He has a series of great little 30 minute lectures he does on narrative structure that would benefit just about any writer.
• During Ellen Datlow’s week, I learned how to channel Ellen Datlow. So did some of my classmates (and it showed in the following week’s critiquing!). By “channeling Ellen,” I mean developing the ability to question and poke at my own writing during the revision process as if I were an editor trying to make it comprehensible to a reader.
• During Ian McDonald’s week, I stepped back, recovered, and tried to make sense of all I’d learned — and I found that it was good! We were also treated to some of Ian’s thoughts on screen writing and how the rigorous formats of screen- and teleplays can inform narrative structure in fiction.

I’ll probably write more about my Clarion experiences down the road, but the quick summary is:

1. I’m really glad I went.
2. If you’re someone who’s thinking about going, maybe you should. But you need to do it with an open mind. You need to go full of questions. You need to go with confidence in your own work but with a willingness to experiment and change.

I’m glad that I went at the time that I did, when I was mature enough (finally, ha!) to take some of the knocks and roll with  the unexpected, but not yet so set in my ways that I couldn’t use the experience to change and grow. I found the experience really encouraging and absolutely worth taking the time out of my life for.

Now: off to Gen Con!

Working on RPGs is not something you do for fame, and it definitely isn’t something you do for money, but… every so often, some recognition is nice.

So it was really cool to learn this morning that, hot on the heels of bringing home the 2010 Origins Award for Best RPG, Eclipse Phase earned four ENnie nods, including nominations for Best Writing and Product of the Year.

How cool. Ten year old me (who wanted nothing in the world more than to be a game designer at TSR — or an astronaut) would be pretty darn psyched. Heck, thirty-six year old me is happy about it, too.

Congratulations to my teammates. It’s sweet indeed when hard work gets a little recognition.

Left to right: Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Gary Wolfe, Walter John Williams, Connie Willis

I’ve been avoiding blogging during Clarion West, following the advice of our esteemed organizers to keep my eye on the ball. But here are some notes on a panel I went to at the Locus Awards today, which some might find interesting…

I’m at the Locus Awards, watching a panel with Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Walter John Williams, and Nancy Kress. The topic is researching for fiction.

Some interesting points that were brought up:

• Ursula: A lot of people think if they just do a ton of research, they’ve got a story. But that isn’t so.
• Walter: Travels a lot as research, but bemoans that it doesn’t impress anyone anymore because of the Net.
• Connie: One really important type of research is the way in which overheard conversations spawn story ideas.

The moderator, Gary Wolfe, asked: how do you keep your research transparent?

• Nancy: It’s okay to do an info dump (i.e., big expository section), if you earn it. Make the reader care, and then they’ll sit still for it.
• Ursula: Utopianist readers have greater patience for exposition, because they want to know how the utopia works. (Personally, I’d guess this could be extended to dystopianists, too).
• Connie: When you’re writing exposition, beware of writing beautifully. You might be indulging yourself.
• Ursula disagreed: You shouldn’t always kill your darlings. If a piece of exposition is beautiful, keep it.

On obsessive detail:

• Connie relates an irate letter she got from a fan who was upset that she’d mentioned the Molasses Swamp card in a Candyland game – a card that doesn’t exist in the game. This made her into an obsessive researcher. (There but for the grace of God go I? Oh, wait… I’m already this obsessive. Crap.)
• Walter: Nothing prompts nitpicking letters like getting a firearm wrong.

Inventive research:

• Ursula: Sometimes we invent things we can’t research. She mentions a marriage system she invented that was so complex it created continuity problems. Essentially, she had to research within her own writing. She takes Phillip Pullman to task for this – changing the metaphysical rules in the middle of his trilogy.
• This prompted a divertimento on magical/metaphysical systems and how they must have internally consistent rules.

On getting people right in a different time period or world:

• Connie: getting the mindset of people during the Blitz right was hard.

Maureen [McHugh, from audience]: do you ever put in the inexplicable?

• Ursula: Yes. In the last book of the Earthsea trilogy, she dealt with the fact that the wizards really had no idea what they were doing and hadn’t for some time.
• Kress: Got a lot of flak for Steel Across the Sky for combining genetic engineering with a metaphysical afterlife.
• Walter: Sci-fi readers have less tolerance for the inexplicable than fantasy readers. But it might also be that if someone thinks they’re reading a sci-fi novel, they’ll be annoyed if things go unexplained. Urban fantasy works when it plays on the tension between these two things.

Cool panel. And it’s pretty neat seeing sci fi’s grande dame still sharp as a tack!

This weekend I’m a redshirt at PAX East in Boston, and I’ll be running Eclipse Phase. If you’re coming to the show, I’m doing a two hour demo Saturday at 10 am & a full 4 hour game Sunday at 10 am. Check @EclipsePhase on Twitter for location info (as I’m not sure yet where the table will be).

More info here.

I’ve been obsessed with labyrinths for a long time. Some of this can be blamed on Jorge Luis Borges, but even without his writing, they pull me in, both visually and philosophically. Thinking about what I wanted to play in the D&D game I was recently invited to join, I decided to look at minotaurs and see if there was anything I could work with there.

I liked the material on minotaurs from the old D&D Taladas setting (the obscure opposite hemisphere of the Dragonlance world), and I also like Blizzard’s take on minotaurs (sorry, “Tauren”) in World of Warcraft. But both of these settings downplay what is to me the most fascinating aspect of minotaurs: their connection with mazes and labyrinths. (You knew mazes and labyrinths were two different things, right? Yep, sure are!).

So I’ve come up with my own take on civilized minotaurs for use in our as-yet-unnamed D&D world. Here’s what I send our DM on the character I developed, Jholi Narrh…

The minotaurs of Professor Lostcarriage’s World fall into two distinct populations: the Keepers and the Wanderers (sometimes called “Savages” by the Keepers). Wanderers are your typical D&D world minotaurs: unpleasant, savage humanoids feared by civilized races. Keepers are civilized. They dwell in enclaves bordering or in some cases completely surrounded by the nations of other races.

Keeper enclaves are called mazes. Each is a settlement completely enclosed by a maze, ranging in size from small hamlets up to minor city-states. The mazes are almost always magically grown hedge mazes, although in major settlements, some of the mazework may be of stone (particularly if strong fortifications are needed). Far-flung mazes may be of other materials, though these are less common. In places where plants won’t grow, such as the arctic, the maze might be of ice; in the underworld, of cave walls and dense fungal growths; in a jungle or desert, of vines or cacti. In some regions, the minotaurs cultivate fields or maintain pastures outside the maze; in others, they fish, hunt, or trade for food.

Minotaur life revolves around maintaining and enlarging their mazes (and the structures found within them), contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries (see below), artisanry, and trade with the outside world and other minotaur enclaves. The organization of a minotaur community is somewhat monastic, which is why such a large, fearsome-looking people can co-exist among other races: their attentions and aspirations are focused inward. However, young minotaurs are encouraged to travel the outside world to hone their skills, learn the ways of other races, and if the opportunity arises, to convert the heathen Wanderers.

Minotaurs have two equally important spiritual traditions, a bit like the Japanese adherence to both Shinto and Buddhism. On one hand, druids are very important in their communities as representatives of the natural world (and to grow labyrinth walls). On the other, the minotaurs worship a human god, Parn, god of labyrinths. Parn has almost no human worshipers; the few who do exist treat minotaur mazes as holy sites and may visit them as pilgrims. The minotaurs believe that their ancestors were human, but were cursed for some now-forgotten sin to be part beast. They do not believe that their condition can ever be reversed (nor would they wish this), but they do believe that moderation and contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries, as taught in Parn’s scriptures, keeps their lives in balance.

Jholi Narrh is the lowest-ranking warden of the Maze of Xiphin (pron. “ky-fin”), a small (village-sized) minotaur enclave not far from Haven (the main city in our game world). His elders have sent him out to wander, explore, and learn. Jholi’s maze is known locally for producing honey, mead, ink, and cloth dyes. Xiphin is nicknamed the Flower Maze by other races; the hedges themselves bloom riotously throughout the warm months and are the source of many of the town’s products. Couples of all races may visit in Spring to receive blessings of fertility from the local druids. The town’s standard is a stylized beehive set within a maze of hexagons (like a honeycomb).

I had fun with this character in the first session I played  him. There was some misunderstanding when he first joined the party; he naively translated “Warden” as “Beekeeper” because of his role back home in the maze. It was a good time playing a big, humanoid beastie with a contemplative side — without falling back on the now-too-familiar shamanism of WoW’s Taurens.

1. If the electromagnetic radiation on this planet is fierce enough to make mountains float and radar useless, shouldn’t it also have prevented the humans from remotely controlling their avatar bodies?
2. You have to grow an avatar body with human DNA to enable a human mind to control it. In fact, it has to be compatible DNA. This implies that human and Na’vi neural architecture is substantially different. Yet humans in avatars are able to use their neural interface hair tendrils to link with native animals with no more difficulty than the real Na’vi do. This was kind of a stretch.

Where’s my Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers?
(And Other Failed Predictions from the Annals of Science Fiction)

Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.

 
Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers
Brave New World

A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?

Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!

As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.

 
Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them Average
Harrison Bergerand

Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!

Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.

 
Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)
2010: A Space Odyssey

Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system.  Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.

How embarrassing.

 
Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most)
The Handmaid’s Tale

Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.

I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…

 
Food Pills
The Jetsons

I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.

 
Absurdist Totalitarianism
Brazil

The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.

 
Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter
Flowers for Algernon

Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket.  The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say,  virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.

And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.

 
So There You Have It
Quit snoozing, reality, and try to keep up.

Dear Law Enforcement Personnel,

I’m not sure why you expect an honest, man to man answer about the Gates incident from a guy whose car or luggage you may or may not be about to search. Yet every time you see I live in Cambridge, you ask… as if I’m really going to tell you what I think while you’re inspecting my passport at the border or checking my boarding pass. And if you’re not looking for an honest answer, then you can go jump in a lake. Either way: please stop asking.

(This was mostly written last night.)

In an hour I’m heading to the Hugo Awards, then driving home to Cambridge immediately afterward. (Holy gonna be cracked the frak out at work tomorrow). I’m excited to be going to sci-fi’s version of the Academy Awards; hooray for being in a field where this kind of stuff is accessible to anybody who wants to show up! My head’s spinning with all I’ve taken in during the last few days, so this post is an attempt to assimilate some of it.

First off, I’m incredibly happy I came and feel very fortunate Worldcon happened to be nearby in one of my favorite cities this year. It made traveling up and giving it a shot with no real idea what to expect a much easier leap to make. My entire experience of cons to date had been with gaming conventions (Gen Con, Origins, and a few minor ones), and while there are similarities, Worldcon is a very different animal (and I gather the same is true of SF cons generally). Sci-fi fandom is a more cohesive, close-knit subculture than gamers, with a lot of traditions and odd little rituals. (Example: They have a thing for collecting as many stick-on ribbons as possible and hanging them from the bottom of their con badges, which are kind of huge to begin with. At Gen Con, you get to be awesome if you have an exhibitor’s badge, and that’s about it).

This was a working trip for me, but it was fun work. I went to a lot of panels, took voluminous notes, gave away a lot of chapbooks, visited all of the publishers in the dealer’s room, schmoozed, and listened to what a lot of sci-fi editors had to say. So. Much. Information. As far as the writing and editorial panels, the one person I didn’t get to listen to that I regret missing was Gordon van Gelder from Fantasy & Science Fiction. I also didn’t go to any of Tom Doherty’s panels, but I’m not trying to sell novels yet, so I can live with having missed that. I was hoping to see more workshops about electronic publishing, but the one I did sit through was excellent. Bottom line: if you’re a writer, go to a Worldcon or another major SF con that has all the wheels doing panels. I feel like my knowledge of what’s really going on in the field is parsecs ahead of where it was five days ago.

The science and culture panels I went to were uniformly outstanding, and I wish I’d been able to go to more of them. Too often, though, they either conflicted with each other or with editorial panels I needed to attend. Get a bunch of sci-fi writers and fans with the appropriate real world credentials talking, and, well, how can it not be awesome? I’m going to devote another post to the panels (hopefully later this week, although Gen Con preparations might contravene that).

Finally, I met some really excellent people (which I figured I would, I mean, they’re SF fans, they’ve gotta be cool, right?). I finally got to meet Jacob Weisberg of Tachyon, whose web site I redesigned several years back, although his awesome managing editor, Jill, wasn’t there. My roommate, David O’Neill, who I met on the internet at the very last minute, turned out to be an excellent fellow. He’s doing a cell phone startup out in Seattle; if I were a rich investor, I’d trust him to do good things with my money. I met James Bacon, a charming Irishman who seems to be something of a mover in British fandom. And I got shnoggered Saturday night with the absolutely delightful Camille Alexa, who edits flash fiction for Abyss &  Apex. I haven’t gotten to read her writing or anything she’s edited yet, but I’m now very eager to do so. I’m going to take a risk and say that you should go out and buy anything with her name on it, anyway, because after hearing her talk in panels, I highly doubt it sucks.

I met a zillion other nice, awesome people, too, and if I yammered on about all of them, this post would get really long, so I’m going to stop now.

In summation, yay Worldcon! Now I just have to figure out where the hell I’m going to get the energy to make it through Gen Con next week. Ha. Who am I kidding? I’m already vibrating with excitement for Gen Con, which is good, because I need to stay awake for a five hour drive after the Hugos.

Aujourd’hui Montreal, Demain la Système Solaire!

I Twittered the Hugo results as they came out. If you haven’t seen them yet, they should be visible on my Twitter feed if you’re reading this within a few days of posting.

Fire, flood, plague, famine, inbreeding, mass extinction events, infertility, supernovas, celestial cataclysms, germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, mass habitat destruction, voluntary omnicide, killer robots, hyperevolution, hard take-off singularities, apathy. The universe offers an impressive array of ways for a species to kick the bucket, and, not content to torment individual characters, I’ll be inflicting every single one that I can think of on humanity in this ball of yarns. For a taste (the first extinction is always free), I invite you to Extinction 1: Genetics.

Photo (pre-manipulation) by Lasse Czeloth (Robotnok) via Stock.Xchng.