Just The Caffeine Talking

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 3)

In my previous posts about Corsair, I mentioned that I have to expand my first draft to make it a proper book-sized book. Doing that revealed a structural problem. The original short story "The Barbary Shore" had extensive flashback sections, since it was simultaneously about Captain Santiago of Orbital Command battling Captain Black the Space Pirate and about the failed romance years earlier between Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz at M.I.T.

The structural problem was that while the short story divided neatly into the main action and the flashbacks, the novel didn't. There's a lot more stuff going on in the "present time" of the novel, while the amount of "back then" flashback material remains about the same. As a result, I had a story with a handful of flashback scenes scattered through the first few chapters, then no more. That felt clumsy.

So I decided on major surgery. I bundled all the flashback sections into a single chapter. So now the book's first chapter takes place "last year" when Elizabeth and David slug it out in space, then there's a chapter taking place "long ago" when they had their failed romance, and then the rest of the book is a straightforward chronological narrative.

I think the new organization will let me get away with using narrative scene-setting to tell when things are happening, until the actual launch of the pirate spaceship -- at which point I can put a little "mission clock" header at the start of each scene to make it clear that things are happening very fast for the rest of the book. 

Battleship (Part 3): Aliens

I write science fiction. A lot of my stories have alien beings in them. I like to think I'm pretty good at creating aliens and alien civilizations.

Which is why I am developing an irresistible urge to drive out to California and shout at every screenwriter who has used aliens in a film during the past couple of decades. For some reason, aliens in cinema have become the all-purpose excuse for lazy writing and slapdash plots. 

The failings of movie aliens fall into two main categories: motives and methods. Nearly every cinematic alien in recent years has completely nonsensical motives for doing what they do.

Battleship is actually one of the least bad offenders in this particular respect. The bad guys at least have a comprehensible motive: they apparently want to conquer the Earth. And they seem to be at least moderately suited for living on our planet -- they're nocturnal, but the Sun is down as often as it's up, and they appear to be amphibious.

Contrast the aliens in Signs, who turn out to be harmed by contact with water, which sucks for them because Earth is covered with water and its living things are basically made of the stuff. Why the hell would they want to come here?

Or the aliens in the otherwise enjoyable Cowboys and Aliens, who are on Earth to mine gold. Even the characters in the movie find this motive ridiculous when it's explained to them. When fictional characters start critiquing your writing, you should go back and revise what you've done.  

Or, stupidest of all, the bad guys in Battle: Los Angeles, who are here to steal our water. This is a howler which would have been barely excusable in 1961, but in 2011 we know that water is common in the Universe, and it would take about five minutes with Google for a screenwriter to find out that fact.

I'm not saying movie aliens should act just like humans. In fact, I'd love to see a movie alien with genuinely alien motivations. But alien motivations aren't the same as stupid motivations. The extraterrestrial big-game hunter in the 1987 Arnold Schwartzenegger action picture Predator was a fine example: it was here to hunt humans. It's weird, but it's not stupid.

And when they're not invading Earth for stupid reasons, the aliens seem to do it in stupid ways. I know why this happens: screenwriters have to build up the aliens as a big, powerful, scary threat, but they also have to build in an Achilles Heel to enable the humans to ultimately defeat them. Unfortunately, they tend to do this by making the aliens do blatantly stupid things, and then justify it by saying "Hey, they're aliens!" 

In the case of methods, the bad guys from Battleship are among the worst I've seen. They're totally inconsistent and, frankly, stupid. In personal combat they insist on attacking people with knives, like a pack of Assyrian soldiers from Sennacherib's army. A company of longbowmen could handle them pretty roughly. In naval enagements they are completely innocent of air power or gunnery, but insist on attacking by lobbing some kind of giant robot buzz-saws at things. (Said buzz-saws can chew through warship hulls at the speed of a running sailor, but can apparently be blasted into harmless puffs of vapor by a few rounds from an airplane's cannon.)

Most startling, they are capable of surrounding the entire state of Hawaii in an impenetrable forcefield dome, but don't bother using any similar protection on their spaceship gunboat things. At one point the heroes shoot out a window on the spaceship with rifles!

Everything they do is determined by what the moviemakers thought would look cool and scary, rather than what would actually be effective. The audience is apparently supposed to be so dumb we think a giant buzzsaw is a more deadly weapon than a dinky little cruise missile.

There's one other complaint I have about cinematic aliens: their appearance. For sixty years now, visitors from other worlds in movies have been humanoids. Two legs, two arms, a head on top, proably two eyes with a mouth underneath them.

People, in other words. People who wear funny clothes and may have funny rubber prosthetic appliances on their foreheads. 

Why? In written fiction, H.G. Wells had blobby tentacled Martians driving big tripods invading south England in 1898! We've had freaky weird-shaped aliens for more than a century in science fiction novels and stories, but cinema clings to the human form with limpet-like tenacity.

This was excusable in 1953, or even 1987, when your aliens ultimately had to be built around an actor or stuntman. But in the age of computer animation (when every spaceship in a sci-fi movie is an eye-straining mass of shifting pieces and fiddly bits) it's practically a crime. Where are the giant bugs? Where are the squids? Heck, just give me some centauroid aliens or some guys with three legs. I can't quite blame the writers for this, because of course production designers and costumers bear a lot of the responsibility.

I think it comes back to my perennial problem with moviemakers. They think we're stupid. They think audiences can't recognize a non-humanoid creature as intelligent. They think audiences won't think about why the alien villains are doing the things they do. I don't know how to fix this problem. But I do wish some moviemaker would take a chance and make a movie with believable aliens -- he might be surprised by how well it works out. It just so happens I've got some stories with aliens . . .  

Battleship (Part 2): What Could Have Been

I'm going to continue posting my reactions to watching the movie Battleship. Today I want to talk about a startling thought I had when it ended:

It could have been a good movie.

In fact, I have a strong suspicion that it began as a much better movie than it ultimately became. I don't have any way to see a copy of the original screenplay, but there are some odd bits which survived into the final version which hint at better things.

What's the focus of the movie? What's it about? Specifically: what's the title? It's called Battleship, and yet mysteriously the actual battleship Missouri gets much less screen time than the AEGIS destroyer John Paul Jones. How come? Pirates of the Caribbean has pirates doing stuff in the Caribbean. Citizen Kane has Charles Foster Kane in almost every scene. But Battleship doesn't have much battleship in it. 

There's also the curious presence of a Japanese warship, which gets sunk by the aliens, and her captain, who teams up with the boring young hero of the film. I owe my daughter a dollar because I bet her that the Japanese guy was in the movie so that at some point he could fight one of the blade-wielding aliens with a katana. I believed that because the movie was so blatantly dumb I couldn't think of any other reason they'd include a Japanese character. And yet, against all odds, he never once picked up a sword. Don't all Japanese guys in action movies use swords? What's the world coming to?

I'm going to advance the thesis that the Missouri and the Japanese guy are the last traces of a much better original screenplay. In this hypothetical Battleship, the focus isn't on Taylor Kitsch's irresponsible jerk of a junior officer. He's either a minor character or doesn't appear at all. Instead, the focus is on an elderly Navy veteran who serves as one of the volunteers aboard the museum ship Missouri. He's starting to feel as though he's lived too long -- most of his friends are gone, his family are off somewhere else, and the tourists who come to visit the Missouri don't seem to know or care anything about the ship and its history. The world apparently has no use for either the man or the ship.

Cue the aliens. They surround Hawaii with their forcefield and annihilate the remaining navy and National Guard forces inside the bubble. Our Japanese commander and his ship go down fighting but are rescued. A rag-tag bunch of surviving sailors from half a dozen countries converge on the Missouri as the only chance to stop the aliens. The Japanese officer must work with the elderly veteran to get the Missouri seaworthy in time. Instead of a two-minute montage set to AC/DC this would be the entire middle act of the film. We would see the desperate improvisations and know that the Missouri is underarmed, undermanned, and barely seaworthy. When the ship sets sail the audience and the characters know it's probably a one-way trip. 

That story has actual conflict among the characters. We can have some characters trying to preserve the historic Missouri while others are eager to see the last battleship do what she was built for. We can have our elderly protagonist take the chance to do something meaningful again, even if the physical strain may be too much for him. We can have the historical irony of a Japanese commander on the flag bridge of the Missouri as humans put aside their differences to fight a common enemy. 

This idea even dovetails nicely with the film's existing subplot about the legless soldier who's the only one near the radiotelescope when the aliens take it over. It's all so tidy I can't escape from the suspicion that this was the original idea for Battleship, but at some point someone said "We can't have a summer blockbuster about a guy in his eighties! Make the hero a young guy -- kind of reckless and irresponsible so the morons in the audience will be able to identify with him."

Writing fiction has given me a bad habit: I can't resist going "under the hood" of just about every story I read or film I watch. It's particularly depressing when the story I write in my head is better than the one I'm reading or watching. I think that's one reason why I found Battleship so annoying in its badness: the sheer waste involved. With just a little originality it could have been a good movie.

So the second lesson from Battleship is this: don't be wasteful. Don't scrap a decent idea just to stay within the safe template of your genre.   

 

Battleship (Part 1): Not Stupid Enough

My family recently rented the awful big-budget action movie Battleship, which of course was based on the board game. I learned a great deal from watching Battleship, mostly about things that I don't like. Today I'll talk about the first thing that bugged me: stupidity.

Battleship was stupid -- in a Facebook comment I said it was "fractally stupid" because the stupid parts were made up of smaller stupid parts. But stupidity isn't enough to make a movie irritate me as much as Battleship did. I tend to like dumb action movies, because I realized a long time ago that all movies are stupid. Seriously: movies are good at manipulating the audience's emotions through visuals and swelling music, but are universally awful at actually discussing ideas.

When movies try to tackle ideas more complicated than "Nazis are bad" or "It's funny when a pompous person gets hit with a pie" they seldom succeed. The things movies do well -- images, movement, and music -- are simply not suitable for presenting complex ideas. So a movie which wants to tackle ideas winds up either just filming people talking to each other, which seldom works well, or it has to caricature one side to make a point. When people say they like a movie's presentation of ideas, they generally mean they agree with the ideas presented, and consequently don't mind the caricaturing.

This isn't a problem. Ballet is also a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Architecture is a terrible medium for presenting ideas. Pretty much all art forms that don't involve text or lectures are poor media for presenting ideas. That's okay. You don't have to present ideas all the time. As Samuel Goldwyn said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."

Anyway. Battleship. My problem with the movie wasn't the stupid parts -- the parts where Navy ships are fighting aliens, astronomers are fighting aliens, a legless veteran is fighting aliens, or the USS Missouri is fighting aliens. Those were the fun parts.

The problems came up in the parts where the movie tried to not be stupid. Because nothing reveals fundamental stupidity like attempts at sophistication. There's an interminable sequence at the beginning of the movie intended to show that the main character is an irresponsible, impulsive jerk. This undoubtedly comes from some story meeting at which a writer put down his much-loved copy of Robert McKee's Story and said "What's his character arc?"

At which point nobody else did the sensible thing and said "What character arc? It's a movie about battleships shooting at aliens! Shut up!" Instead they gave us twenty minutes of Taylor Kitsch being an impulsive jerk. It might matter if this had any connection to the rest of the movie, but it doesn't. 

Once the aliens show up and the computer-animated warships start shooting at them, none of this matters in the least. Kitsch's character is thrust into a position of command when his ship's captain is killed, and he does a decent job of shooting at aliens. Some other characters may doubt his fitness to command, but nobody acts on this. Sensibly enough, they're all focused on saving the world from alien invaders.

Which means Kitsch's character's background as an impulsive jerk is irrelevant. He could be a grizzled veteran who drinks to forget, or a rigid martinet who needs to loosen up, or a virulent racist who needs to respect others, or an incorrigible joker who needs to get serious, or a womanizer who needs to settle down, or a chronic nailbiter who needs a manicure. It simply doesn't matter. We spend a tedious twenty minutes watching him be a jerk for no reason.

So the first lesson I learned from Battleship is this: know when to be stupid. If you're making a stupid movie, have the courage to be really stupid. If you're stupid enough, you might do something clever. But if you try to do something smart, you pop the fragile bubble of entertaining stupidity. 

 

Where I Do It

I do most of my writing in coffeeshops. Fortunately, I live in an area with a good assortment of places. In Greenfield I can go to Greenfield Coffee, which is a dedicated coffeehouse so I don't have to feel guilty about occupying a table during lunchtime. The chief drawback is that the town of Greenfield has two-hour parking meters downtown, which means I can't stay as long as I'd like. Despite that I've probably spent more hours there in total than anyplace else.

In Montague there's the lovely Lady Killigrew Cafe, in an old mill building overlooking a waterfall. I think I'd live there but for two problems. The first is the big south-facing windows. On sunny days they make the main room very bright, which must have been great for underage textile workers spinning cotton in the 19th Century, but is actually kind of a nuisance when one is trying to read a laptop screen. So I only go to Lady Killigrew's on cloudy days -- which isn't much of a restriction in New England's climate.

The other problem with the Lady Killigrew is their lunch menu. It's too tempting. I wind up ordering a full lunch, which costs more in dollars and calories than I would wish. It also means that I can't just camp out and nurse my coffee if there are people who actually want to buy lunch.

Being too attractive and busy are problems most restaurants would love to have, but writers are strange people.

If I want to spend more time in transit I can go down to Amherst. My chief hangout there is Rao's, which is nearly perfect. The lighting levels are right, they're used to cheapskate graduate students and retirees holding down tables for hours at a time, and the baristas have pretty good taste in music.

Northampton is about the same distance, but parking there is always complicated, so I only write in Northampton if I have some other errand there -- like ferrying one or more kid to an activity, which happens at least twice a week. My favorite place in Northampton is Northampton Coffee, part of the same local caffeine empire as Greenfield Coffee. It also suffers from the drawback of metered parking. 

As a last resort there's a Starbucks in Northampton. I liked Starbucks when they first began appearing everywhere -- I lived in Chicago at the time and their coffee was better than the local standard. Then I went through a period of food-snob hipster sneering at Starbucks -- in my case the sneering was that of a New Orleanian irritated by these upstart Seattleites acting like they invented drinking coffee.

I eventually reconciled with Starbucks, chiefly as a result of noticing that persons unknown in Amherst and Northampton were vandalizing their stores. Nothing major -- just stickers for Dean's Beans or some other organic "fair trade" guilt merchandise plastered over the mermaid logo on the window. I decided that if Starbucks offends self-righteous leftist vandals, they must be doing something right. You can judge a man -- or a coffee chain -- by the quality of his enemies.* 

Why do I bother? Why not stay in my nice house? 

Well, there's three reasons. The first is stimulation. Sitting home alone is kind of dull. My brain goes into "sleep" mode like an unattended computer. Sometimes it's literal sleep, and sometimes it's just goofing off. (Interestingly, when the weather's nice and I can sit out on the porch to write, that isn't a problem. I guess listening to bird song and watching the chickens harass each other is as stimulating as sitting in a cafe full of wannabe intellectuals.)

The second reason is focus. When I'm out of the house I can't do chores, I can't play computer games (I suppose I could, but somehow it's embarassing to play Kerbal Space Program in public), and I can't hear the dog trying to get my attention. There's nothing to do but write. I may still be able to waste time, but it's wasted on things like 'blog posts or roleplaying games. Coffeeshops encourage higher-quality goofing off.

And finally there's the simple appeal of social interaction. I'm not the only person who likes to hang around in coffeeshops around the Pioneer Valley. There's a whole floating community of us. When I go to Greenfield Coffee I often take along some dog treats in case I run into the elderly deaf gentleman with the adorable service dog who turns up there. At Killigrew's I  occasionally run into local authors like Kelly Link or Mo Willems. I see the fathers of two of my daughter's friends almost every day. It makes me feel connected.

For a writer, this is actually rather important. If I don't get out of the house, the only people I interact with for days at a time are my immediate family and the dog. They're all very nice, but I know them too well. I don't learn much by observing them and overhearing their conversations. But strangers are an ever-flowing spring. I've already mentioned that I got one story out of an overheard coffeeshop conversation. It's also instructive just to hear how people speak to each other, even if they're not saying anything very interesting. 

Where do you do your best work?

*I tried to track down who said this. It's credited to Conrad, Wilde, Churchill, and Doctor Who. 

Gamemaster Appeal

There are any number of books and Web sites providing aspiring roleplaying game referees with hints on how to make a campaign appealing to players. The best is probably Robin's Laws, even though the author had to overcome being Canadian. 

But just recently I was jotting down some ideas for campaigns I'd like to run, and the thought suddenly struck me: what makes a game appeal to gamemasters?

Now, obviously, if you're a good "table gamemaster" who relies on published settings and adventures, the main thing is the quality of the product. Roleplaying game publishers stay in business by appealing to that market, so we can judge the gamemaster appeal of published products by sales. Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, the World of Darkness, Rifts, GURPS -- the commercial heavyweights obviously know how to appeal to gamemasters.

But if, like myself, you're the type who likes to write your own material, how do you make a game that you yourself will enjoy running? Because if the GM isn't having fun, it's unlikely the players will have much either.

My two longest-running campaigns were a Space: 1889 game I ran during the 1990s, and a World War II "occult OSS" game I ran during the 2000s. The 1889 game might count as a published setting, except that at the time I was writing tons of 1889 material for Game Designers' Workshop, so that campaign existed in a gray area between homebrewed and published setting.

In both games, I brainstormed long lists of adventure ideas right at the start. Some never got used, and of course I added to them over time. There was never a feeling of "what do I do now?" Instead my attitude was always "which cool idea can I use this time?" 

And I think that's the key: possibilities. A good campaign to gamemaster is one which opens up lots of possibilities in your mind. Obviously different settings hold inspiration for different people, so that you might be able to list dozens of ideas for a Wild West horror game, while I can go on forever with an interstellar espionage campaign. 

Note that both those examples are "mashups": it's not just the Wild West, it's the Wild West with monsters. It's not just interstellar adventurers, it's interstellar spies. Space: 1889 was the Victorian Era with spaceships. My World War II game was the OSS versus magic.

 I think the "mashup" works so well because it increases the possibilities. The cowboy monster hunters can also do straight-up Western adventures, plus you get the fun of melding fantastic elements into a genre everyone knows. Your "high noon" shootout takes place at midnight because the rival gunslinger is a vampire. You have two sets of tropes to play with, and simple mathematics indicates that the possible combinations of elements aren't just doubled, they increase geometrically.

So: go out and explore some possibilities.

  

Five Stories That Changed Everything: My Picks

A bit more than a week ago I drove to Boston in order to attend the venerable Boskone convention, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. As always, I spent a lot of my time either being on panels discussing things, or watching other people on panels discussing things.

This year one of the most interesting panels was "Stories That Changed Everything," on Saturday. The panel itself was a real Murderer's Row of modern science fiction scholarship: Paul DiFilippo, David Hartwell, James Patrick Kelly, Fred Lerner, and Michael Swanwick.

The topic challenged the panelists to name stories which revolutionized the field. The actual description included fantasy and horror, as well as science fiction, which in my opinion made the whole topic too broad. The panelists cleverly dodged that problem by breaking up the history of fantastic fiction into eras, so that they could pick the five most revolutionary stories in each era.

Now it's my turn. I'm going to limit myself to science fiction, and I'm going to concentrate on the period before the present century, as I don't think we've had enough time to see what stories published since then have revolutionized anything. I'm limiting myself to just five works. Note that these aren't necessarily what I consider the best stories of the century, merely the most influential -- though all of them are very good.

The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells: This is the taproot of the entire science fiction genre. You've got half the major tropes of science fiction packed into one short novel: alien invasion, giant mecha, death rays, post-apocalyptic settings, cyborgs . . . a sufficiently cynical person could make a case that all of science fiction has consisted of rearranging elements devised by H.G. Wells.  

"A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley Weinbaum: It's hard to find nowadays, and the writing style may strike modern readers as a little dated, but this is still a revolutionary story. It has the first alien environment, presented not as a land of danger to be survived and conquered, but simply as a place. And it has the first alien character (Tweel, the bird-like Martian) who is genuinely alien without being a monster. Before this story, aliens were either scary and dangerous things (like Wells's Martians) or humans with funny skin tones or weird hair. 

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," by Samuel R. Delany: Though it's not as well-known as the others, this short story had a profound influence. This is the true origin of cyberpunk fiction. It's got all the elements. There's a crowded, densely-described future. There's a roguish protagonist. There's a focus on characters at the margins of society. And it was written a decade before anyone coined the word "cyberpunk" to describe this kind of story. 

Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein: You can tell it's revolutionary because people are still arguing about it, five decades after it came out. One can trace the entire branch of "military science fiction" back to this novel, and it has had a tremendous effect on actual real-world military technology and planning. Even as I write the mad scientists of DARPA are beavering away trying to make the powered armor and other gadgets of Heinlein's story into battlefield reality.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon: It just barely sneaks into the 20th Century, and its influence is more commercial than literary. This is a straightforward comic book adventure story, with escape artists, the Golem of Prague, Antarctic Nazis, and the Golden Age of comics -- and it won the Pulitzer Prize. If something so jam-packed with genre elements could grab the big trophy, that means the walls around the "SF ghetto" have crumbled into dust. 

There's my five. Thoughts?

Sweringen and Spaceships

This past Thanksgiving I ventured to southern Maryland for a big family dinner. My host happened to live just up the road from St. Mary's City, the site of Maryland's first colonial capital.

It's a very interesting site: there are reconstructions of some of the original buildings and some excellent exhibits about how archaeologists combine field work and archival research to determine what the structures were used for and who lived where.

I was struck by one of the reconstructions, the Van Sweringen Inn and Coffee House. This was one of the first taverns in the colony, and it was built by a Dutch settler, Garrett (or Gerret) Van Sweringen. He had a long and active life, persevering in the face of numerous setbacks. (You can read about him here.)

Van Sweringen had a large family, and they spread widely across the United States over the next four centuries. The villainous Al Swearingen from the television show Deadwood is based on a real-life descendant. In the late 19th century the magnificently-named brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen were railroad tycoons in Ohio. Today there's a Swearingen aircraft company in Texas. If you Google "Sweringen" and "Swearingen" you get more than two million hits, spread from coast to coast.

All those Sweringens and Swearingens are descended from Gerret Van Sweringen. 

What does any of this have to do with spaceships? It illustrates the importance of getting there first. If humans ever settle other worlds, either within or beyond the Solar System, the first ones there will have a disproportionate influence on the subsequent history of any colony. (Assuming, of course, that they survive. The first English settlers in America had no influence on the country's history at all because that colony vanished without a trace.)

The columnist Mark Steyn once observed that the future belongs to those who show up for it. People and cultures are not interchangeable. If you believe, as I do, that humans will eventually establish themselves off of Earth, and that we have a long future ahead of us, then who goes first is an important question. 

Am I saying that America must settle Mars to keep the Commies off it? Well . . . yes, I am. Small things have big, long-term results. If you believe, as I do, that the ideals and habits of our culture are good things, then why leave them confined to one part of one world?

And when one is creating a culture for science fiction (or fantasy fiction, or a game setting), it's important to think about who the founders were, and how their influence has persisted over the years. A Mars colony established by anarchists will be very different from one founded by the DeBeers diamond consortium, or by the European Community. Even if the colonists have rejected their founders' ideals, that will have an effect on later history, too. 

The lesson is clear: if you want to make a big mark, it helps to get in on the ground floor.

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 2)

As I mentioned previously, Corsair had its origin in a short story for a pirate-themed anthology. So when I began to expand it into a novel, one of my guiding principles was that it had to remain a pirate story -- even though it's about a nerdish spacecraft hijacker 17 years in the future.

This in turn made me think about pirate stories, and what I realized is that most pirate stories aren't about piracy. Even the greatest classic of the genre, Treasure Island, isn't so much about pirating as about the aftermath. Even in pirate movies, the piracy mostly happens off-screen, as in Errol Flynn's Captain Blood, where the eponymous Captain's career as a pirate is crammed into a brief montage.

The most famous pirate film of recent years, Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, subverts the whole thing even more: it's about a band of pirates who are obsessively recovering stolen gold in order to put it back where they found it.

How did this happen? How can one have a genre in which the ostensible subject matter hardly ever comes up? It would be as if all Westerns wound up being set in New England or something. 

I think the tension in pirate fiction derives from two facts: 1) People think pirates were cool and romantic, and 2) Pirates were a horrible bunch of amoral sociopaths. The modern pirates of Somalia are following exactly in the tradition of their Jolly Roger predecessors, except that they use motorboats and AK-47s instead of fast sloops and cutlasses. So unless one wants to create a work of fiction which realistically depicts a bunch of amoral sociopaths in action (and now I wish someone would hire Quentin Tarantino to make a pirate movie), you kind of have to soft-pedal the looting, raping, and murdering in favor of rope-swinging stunts and buried chests of gold.

For Corsair I have tried to have my cake and eat it, too. David Schwartz really is an amoral sociopath -- and his eventual redemption is ultimately driven by the stripping away of all his romantic fantasies and self-justification.

But I also wanted to work in as many pirate movie cliches as possible. So there's the pirate haven of Tortuga (now a Disneyesque theme resort), a sea battle, a secret island, a rescue, a buried treasure, a duel (waged with keyboards instead of cutlasses), and an eyepatched villain. If I could figure out how to have someone swing on a rope at a key moment, I'd do it.

    

Arisia 2013, Featuring ME

Next week I'm going to be a program participant at the always interesting Arisia convention in Boston, held at the Westin Waterfront hotel. My schedule, in case you want to follow me around and bask in my brilliance:

Saturday (January 19) at 11:30 a.m.: Cambridge SF Workshop Flash Fiction Reading. The members of the coolest writing workshop on Earth read short works. My own story has never before been heard by mortal ears.

Saturday at 1:00 p.m.: Beyond Dice and Hit Points. A panel on roleplaying game design. Do we really need all the stuff that has become part of the standard kit for RPGs?

Saturday at 4:00 p.m.: Autographing. I'll sign anything you put in front of me, along with Walter Hunt and Dan Kimmel. 

Saturday at 7:00 p.m.: Innovation Starvation? A panel inspired by Neal Stephenson's essay "Innovation Starvation" about the role SF can play in bringing about ambitious technology projects.

Saturday at 8:30 p.m.: Zombies: Victims of Parasites? In which the panelists talk about horrifying real-life mind-controlling parasites, and how to use them in zombie fiction. 

Sunday (January 20) at 10:00 a.m.: Home-Based Business and Children. How can one balance working from home with raising kids? 

I hope to see you all at Arisia!