Just The Caffeine Talking

Tolkien, Kipling, Lewis, and Wells

I recently received, as a birthday present from my talented wife, a copy of the 1909 edition of Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A.D." If you aren't familiar with the story, it's a fascinating -- and amazingly prescient -- work of early science fiction by one of the English language's greatest authors. Rather than summarize it, I'll just say read it -- here's the Project Gutenberg version of the edition I have.

Re-reading "With the Night Mail" made me think of some interesting parallels. Here's my thesis:

In the history of science fiction, Kipling is to H.G. Wells as J.R.R. Tolkein is to C.S. Lewis in the history of fantasy.

Let me explain. "With the Night Mail" and its sequel "As Easy as A.B.C." are great examples of what we in the trade call "worldbuilding." In fact, "Night Mail" does a fantastic job of what science fiction writers often honor more than they practice: writing a story in the voice of someone from the imaginary world of the story, without reference to the contemporary world of the author and reader.

"Night Mail" shows an almost obsessive attention to the details and the feel of Kipling's future world. He even includes appendices of advertisements and official notices from the year 2000. The story also implies huge changes in human society, mentioned in offhand remarks, never explained. (For instance, the narrator accepts reincarnation as a proven scientific fact, and the governments of the world are subordinate to the technocratic Aerial Board of Control.)

J.R.R. Tolkien was similarly obsessive about The Lord of the Rings and the body of poetry and literature he wove around it. We all know how he created entire languages for his dwarves, elves, and human cultures. Apparently Tolkien even went so far as to prepare a facsimile manuscript of the fragmentary chronicle his characters discover in the Mines of Moria -- complete with charred edges and bloodstains. That's immersion.

(I've often thought it's a good thing that H.G. Wells didn't invent roleplaying games when he devised his Little Wars miniatures rules in 1913. If he had, the Inklings would have had an awesome D&D campaign at Oxford in the 1930s, and Tolkien probably would have spent all his time on that instead of writing.)

If Tolkien and Kipling are the pole of immersive imaginary worldbuilding, Lewis and Wells are at the opposite end: fantasy and science fiction written as allegory or polemic, in which the fantastic story serves a particular purpose in the world of the author and reader.

Lewis's Narnia books are explicitly Christian -- although Lewis himself cautioned that they weren't intended as direct allegories. Apparently this difference in priorities was a source of some friction between Tolkien and his friend Lewis. Tolkien objected to Lewis tossing together such disparate elements as fauns and dryads from Classical mythology, dwarfs and giants from northern european legend, and even Father Christmas in the Narnia books. One can imagine him shaking a tense, nerdy fist: "You're doing it wrong!" 

Similarly, Wells's science fiction stories always had their polemical side -- sometimes rather curiously, as in In the Days of the Comet, where during his description of the humane new world that follows the events of the novel Wells spends about a page criticizing Victorian interior decoration. No less a personage than Jules Verne criticized Wells for his willingness to bend scientific rules and "play with the net down" for the sake of telling his story.

Significantly, both The Lord of the Rings and Kipling's two future stories are self-contained. The stories are entirely about people within the world of the story. Whereas the Narnia books -- and both Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes and Men Like Gods -- throw contemporary human characters into the fantastic world or the future. The imagined world exists in order to convey a message to people in the author's real world.

Tolkien and Kipling are doing worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding. Lewis and Wells are constructing stages for morality plays. Note that I am not trying to say one approach is better than the other: certainly all four writers were giants in their fields with tremendous influence even now. But it's possible to trace these two tendencies down through the history of science fiction and fantasy to the present day. 

How I Did It #11: "The Barbary Shore"

I love writing to an assigned theme. One of my longest-held beliefs about writing is that constraints improve one's creativity. There's something awfully daunting about a blank screen and the knowledge that you can write absolutely anything. It can cause creative paralysis, or a lot of abortive starts.

But put down some boundaries and the creativity flows like a river. This story is an example. Shimmer is a very well-respected small-press fiction magazine, and back in 2007 they invited the rising editorial star John Joseph Adams to guest-edit an issue devoted to pirates. Because everybody loves pirates.

John mentioned it to me, and I immediately started thinking about pirates. Now, at the time Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films were plundering the box office at movie theaters, so I knew there would be a lot of timbers being shivered and nautical blood and thunder under the black flag.

I decided not to do that, for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to stand out. If the submission pile was going to be filled to the gunwales with scurvy rats cruising the Spanish Main, I needed something different. Second, while I enjoy sea stories, I'm not especially knowledgeable about ships and sailing. I need a cheat sheet to tell a futtock-shroud from a mainbrace, and I've never been to sea under sail.

So instead of writing about historical pirates, I decided to write about space pirates. There's a long and colorful history of space piracy in science fiction. One of my favorite old magazine covers is a painting by Frank Kelly Freas of a bearded pirate climbing aboard a spaceship with a slide rule clutched in his teeth.

The trouble with space piracy is that it's completely ridiculous. Spaceships aren't sailing galleons. They can't heave to and be boarded. They can't change course in mid-voyage. There are no convenient islands in space where pirates can lurk. There's no place to hide, which means that everyone would know exactly where the pirates came from -- which makes piracy an act of war rather than a crime.

So I was faced with a choice: tell a fantastical space opera tale of piracy, consciously deploying old-fashioned tropes with a wink at the reader, or . . . try to make it work.

I picked the second option and applied my favorite technique of intellectual brute force. How could space piracy really work? Well, the first thing to do is get rid of the pirates. An unmanned vehicle is a lot cheaper and a lot more plausible than a beat-up old rocketship full of buccaneers.

Then I realized there is a place, one particular place, where pirates can lurk in space. If you're going from Earth to the Moon (or coming back), your flight path is almost certainly going to pass through the L-1 point.

What's the L-1 point? Back in the 18th Century the astronomer Lagrange was analyzing Newton's three laws, hoping to come up with a general solution of the three-body problem (which I don't have space to go into here). He couldn't -- because no general solution exists -- but he did discover some interesting special cases. When you have a body (like the Moon) orbiting a larger body (like the Earth) there are several places where their combined gravity produces stable points. These are known, inevitably, as the Lagrange points. One of them, the L-1 point, is the place where the Earth's and Moon's respective forces of attraction balance out. You can park a spaceship there and it'll remain in place with only minor station-keeping thrusts from time to time.

The L-1 point is also a low-energy "pass" on the way between Earth and the Moon. A minimum-energy trajectory must pass through it. (I am informed by no less than Gregory Landis that there are ways to avoid L-1, but they are much more round-about and time-consuming.) Rocketeers always want to save energy, because that reduces their fuel requirements, which in turn reduces the size of the booster they're using.

So there's my spaceborne equivalent of the Florida Channel, where pirates can lurk and valuable cargoes must go past them. All I needed was a suitably valuable cargo and a suitably colorful buccaneer, and the story was ready. David Schwartz, a.k.a. "Captain Black the Space Pirate" has a cheaply-built satellite at L-1 waiting to intercept payloads of expensive Helium-3 from the Moon. Meanwhile his nemesis Captain Elizabeth Santiago of the Air Force's Space Command tries to stop his depredations.

It was a fun story, and appeared in the special Pirate Issue of Shimmer in autumn 2007.

In fact it was so much fun I've been expanding it, turning it into a novel under the working title Corsair. So watch this space for more news about Captain Black the Space Pirate.

Arr! There, I said it.

 

 

 

Thoughts on Dyson Spheres

One of the more interesting panels I attended at Chicon was the one about Dyson spheres. (I know what you're thinking: how long is this guy going to keep gassing about some convention he went to last month?) I learned some new things and it made me think in some new directions. Let me share some of those thoughts with you.

First, are we all clear on what a Dyson sphere is? We're not talking about a vacuum cleaner. Back in 1960 the legendary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that advanced civilizations might eventually surround their home star completely with energy-collecting devices, creating an object with the luminosity of a G-type star but with its emissions shifted into the deep infrared because all that would escape would be the civilization's waste heat.

Dyson may not have invented the idea -- a couple of science fiction writers may have anticipated him -- but he was the first person to treat the idea with scientific rigor, plus he was even then a well-known physicist, so it's named after him.

Anyway, the sphere as proposed by Dyson would not be a single giant object; rather, it would be a vast swarm of solar power collectors, space habitats, etc., circling the parent star in a variety of orbits to soak up every last photon. But for some reason, science fiction writers have always preferred to imagine a single giant ping-pong ball surrounding a star. The idea of something with a hundred quadrillion square miles of surface to live on is just incredibly appealing, I guess. (That's about equal to half a billion Earths!)

One of the first topics discussed on the panel is whether we could detect any Dyson spheres over interstellar distances, and whether the fact that we haven't indicates anything important. I believe it was Allen Steele who suggested maybe the Dyson spheres are all hidden. That prompted my first way-cool thought of the day: suppose we did discover signs of a Dyson sphere, hidden from view by a nebula or some other interstellar debris. The first question that would come to mind is: who are they hiding from? That's a pretty good story, right there. What's scary enough to frighten a civilization which controls the entire output of a star?

A second topic was one that G. David Nordley brought up: if you don't surround the star with habitats, but instead build a gigantic half-sphere, the thing can be balanced against the central star's gravity via the pressure of the solar wind. Now if you make the big hemisphere shiny on the inside (or even just paint it white), then the star's entire output is going in only one direction. As Mr. Newton can tell us, that means the star (and its associated planets) is going to move in the opposite direction. A half-Dyson sphere is a way to move entire solar systems around! Again, if you discover one, the question immediately becomes what are they running away from?

Finally, let's go back to the original Dyson sphere concept. Instead of a big ball, there's a vast swarm of space habitats surrounding the Sun. Each one can be quite large, with a population in the millions. There would be billions of these habitats, each as big and diverse as a modern nation. I can't really conceive of any government which could control them all, and no human could even begin to know all about each one -- any more than one person can personally know every human being on Earth today.

It seems to me that a far-future Dyson sphere swarm would look a lot like the old classic science fiction picture of the galaxy: lots of inhabited worlds, each with their own unique customs, but travel between them is not especially difficult. You can have down-at-heel space merchants, itinerant mercenary companies, aggressive empires, roguish adventurers, benevolent Federations, space princesses -- all the classic trops of Golden Age science fiction in a rock-hard realistic science fiction future.

I haven't written any of that yet, but I think I will. It's just too interesting. In the meantime, if you need a Dyson sphere fix, I suggest Allen Steele's Hex.

 

Chicon 7: After-Action Report

Overall, the convention was a lot of fun. The whole family had a good time.

I would like to give particular praise to the organizers of the childrens' programming track. Instead of just "day care" or "babysitting" they approached it like any other part of the convention activities: "what are some things we can do that children will enjoy?" At least some of the things they came up with could very well have been part of the general con schedule.

I also think the con committee made a very good decision when they chose to have 90-minute time slots for panels and events instead of the more typical hour length. In a large hotel spread through two buildings, with a confusing interior layout, the extra time meant that one could have a solid hour of discussion, a question period afterward, and plenty of time to get to the next event. The convention also had a very dedicated corps of volunteers going from room to room to let panelists know when it was time to shut up and get out. The result of all this was that things stayed on schedule all five days.

Of course, the most interesting part of the convention was the part I haven't really reported on: the after-hours parties. Reading about a party that someone else went to is rather dull, so I deliberately neglected that part. I do say that the London 2014 contingent had the best party room by far. It was always hopping, and rivaled the mighty private publisher-sponsored events. If the convention in London is anything like the swinging times on the top floor of the Hyatt, 2014 is going to be a memorable WorldCon.

The biggest problem with the convention was one which the organizers had absolutely no control over: the area of downtown Chicago directly around the Hyatt is mostly business offices, which means that all the associated shops and eateries shut down for the Labor Day weekend. I don't know if there's a cure for that, since having WorldCon over Labor Day is a pretty fixed tradition, and I would hate to see the convention abandon downtown for the suburbs.

To sum up: a great convention. Thanks to the Con Committee and all the volunteers who made it happen!

Chicon 7: The Final Chapter

On Sunday I ferried Agent X down to the extremely well-run ChiKids program area for Doctor Who Lego building, Jedi costumes, and steampunk Nerf guns. Agent X had a great time at Chicon. I spent the same period watching a panel on screenwriting by Michael Cassutt, Melinda Snodgrass, and the alarmingly overqualified Dr. Harry Kloor.

The Crack Team then joined noted Chicago game designer Kenneth Hite for lunch, at which we discussed the secret history of Oz and other recondite topics.

My first panel as a participant on Sunday was "The Resurgence of Pseudoscience in 21st Century America." It came out very different from what I (and, I'm guessing, the audience) expected. What I think everyone came into the room for was a nice comforting hour of panelists verbally pissing on Creationists and maybe Anti-Vaccinators, while the audience gets to affirm how smart they are for not believing in that stuff.

They reckoned without Mary Turzillo. She decided to shake things up and challenge people's preconceptions, so she asked, quite reasonably, if there's any difference between believing in the God of Genesis and "believing in" Darwin? After all, except for the small minority of actual evolutionary biologists in the room, most people's knowledge of the subject is based on faith -- faith in the honesty and accuracy of science popularizers and textbook authors.

Mary also challenged the antagonism on display. If the goal is to change people's minds, how is that served by insulting and belittling people who disagree with you? She never raised her voice or lost her composure, but after an hour Mary had an entire huge meeting room full of people sputtering and shouting. BEST PANEL EVER.

After that I went upstairs to a much smaller room to read from Chapter 2 of my forthcoming novel A Darkling Sea. It was very gratifying to see about a dozen people -- none of whom were friends sitting in to show their support -- listen with evident interest to my reading. I think this was my most successful reading to date.

The Dalekette and I rounded out the day at a panel on creating realistic spaceships, but unfortunately my own fatigue has left me with little memory of it. We returned to the hotel room for a light supper of pizza. Then the female half of the Crack Team headed off to the Hugo Awards while I got Agent X to bed and rested up for the night's parties.

The Hugo winners, in case you haven't already heard:

BEST NOVEL: Among Others, by Jo Walton

BEST NOVELLA: "The Man Who Bridged The Mist" by Kij Johnson

BEST NOVELETTE: "Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders

BEST SHORT STORY: "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu

BEST RELATED WORK: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Third Edition)

BEST GRAPHIC STORY:  Digger, by Ursula Vernon

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (LONG): A Game of Thrones

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION (SHORT): "The Doctor's Wife"

BEST EDITOR (SHORT FICTION): Sheila Williams

BEST EDITOR (LONG FICTION): Betsy Wollheim

BEST ARTIST: John Picacio

BEST SEMIPROZINE: Locus (of course)

BEST FANZINE: SF Signal

BEST FAN WRITER: Jim C. Hines

BEST FAN ARTIST: Maurine Starkey

BEST FANCAST: SF Squeecast

JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARD: E. Lily Yu

When the awards were done (in a record-breaking two hours flat, thanks to the ruthless professionalism of toastmaster John Scalzi), we filtered upstairs for parties. Four hours later, we filtered back downstairs to bed for a little sleep before flying out on the last day of the convention.

 

 

Chicon 7: The Third Day

The Crack Team breakfasted in the room again, and once more split up for separate activities. Because Saturday was the day leading up to the grand costume contest, the two younger members of the Crack Team wore their hall costumes: "Agent X" (an alien-fighting Man In Black), and the "Dalekette" (a Dalek-inspired showgirl outfit). 

I spent my morning in the airplane-hanger-like Dealers' Room, buying books and meeting people. After lunch with Agent X, I was part of the tightly-packed mass of fans watching the "Secret History of SF" panel -- which consisted of science fiction eminences Robert Silverberg, Joe Haldeman, Mike Resnick, George R.R. Martin, and Gardner Dozois sharing stories about past Worldcons. Most of the stories centered on drunkenness, nudity, and long-winded speakers.

When that ended I slipped next door to be a panelist at the discussion of "The Prime Directive: Altruism or Survival Strategy?" My personal position is that a no-contact rule when dealing with less-advanced aliens would be impossible to enforce, and possibly immoral. Other panelists (which included space advocate John Strickland, Dale Cozort, Bill Thomasson, and Anaea Lay) disagreed, and we had a lively time.

After that the Crack Team headed out to the old wholesale district west of the Chicago River for dinner, accompanied by science fiction and fantasy superstar Jo Walton. When I lived in Chicago it was a gritty section devoted to food distribution and restaurant supply outfits; now it's a thriving area of restaurants and loft condos. We dined on Southern-style cooking at a place called Wishbone.

We returned to the hotel, put Agent X to bed, and then went up to the party hosted by Baen Books. When that got too noisy we sent the Dalekette to bed and toured some of the other parties, including the one hosted by next year's Worldcon organizers, and the obligatory stop at the SFWA suite.

Even though the people in the next room were having a small private party we crept into bed and collapsed.

ChiCon 7: The Second Day

Our Crack Team of congoers breakfasted in the room on muffins from one of the many coffeeshops in the warren of tunnels under the Illinois Center complex surrounding the hotel. We then showered, dressed, and went off to the convention.

I attended a very entertaining and high-energy panel on "The New Pulp Fiction" featuring Adam Christopher, Chuck Wendig, and Stephen Blackmoore. They kept the audience laughing as they talked about the genre-busting style of the New Pulp, and how it is powered by the chaotic state of publishing.

After that I found my way to the noon "Dyson Sphere Update." I joined Allen Steele, G. David Nordley, Jordin Kare, and David Clements to discuss how -- and most importantly why -- one would go about building a giant sphere around a star. I learned something neat: if you build a half-sphere on one side of your sun, it turns your entire solar system into a huge (but very slow) spaceship! Very useful if you need to move out of the way of something dangerous, or if you prefer a more upscale part of the Galaxy.

From there I hustled to the panel on "Transhumanism: Where Do We -- as Homo Sapiens -- Go From Here?" It more or less wound up being a bigger and better version of Friday's Body Modification panel, with three of the same participants and a broadly similar topic. Oddest moment: a Canadian panelist pausing to sing hosannas for the Canadian health system and share his thoughts on the upcoming U.S. election. Dudes, if  you want a say in the process, apply for statehood. 

After that I took a break and made my first (partial) pass through the cavernous Dealers' Room. Two members of the Crack Team talked me into buying them nice decorative pins and an autographed book from Phil Foglio at the Airship Entertainment booth, and then I indulged myself with another autographed book (including a character sketch!) from Howard Tayler at Hypernode Press.

That left me barely enough time to hustle over to the "SF at the University of Chicago" panel, which was basically like a slightly more casual Alumni Weekend reception, only without any drinks and a lot more in-jokes. The science fiction community at Chicago has been reborn, Phoenix-like, at least three times since the 1940s, and Maroons from all the generations had stories to tell.

By the time that was done we all wanted dinner, so the Crack Team joined SF stalwarts Allen Steele and Michael Flynn for dinner at a local microbrewery. Along the way we fell into conversation with (or, more accurately, were harangued by) a Chicago native with a surprising knowledge of what movies were filmed in the city, and where.

With full stomachs the older part of the Crack Team finished the evening at the delighful party hosted by Tor Books. The fearsome bouncer at the door let us in, and we spent a very pleasant three or four hours hobnobbing, schmoozing, and rubbing elbows.

And so to bed.