Just The Caffeine Talking

Things I Want Other People to Write

I've never written fan fiction. When I was young, it felt like cheating or plagiarism to write a story set in someone else's fictional setting, or using their characters. (This was before the whole concept of "shared worlds" or "expanded universes" arose, and all works actually had a single identifiable creator.)

And when I was older, getting my own work published, I wanted to see my own creations in print. In my game writing career I've done a lot in established settings, but that always felt like a collaborative effort.

But at the same time, there are some fiction series I enjoy very much, and I've thought of some cool ideas which would make for interesting stories. Since they aren't my "properties" I don't think it would be proper to write these up, so all I can do is publish them here. Maybe the authors in question will stumble across this humble 'blog. If so: please, use these ideas if they appeal to you! I'm not the type to bring some stupid lawsuit because someone "stole my idea."

         Here's my fictional wish-list.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series: I've actually got three here. The first is that she should actually put her protagonist Miles Vorkosigan in opposition to his friend, foster-brother, and feudal overlord Emperor Gregor. What does Miles do when he thinks Gregor is wrong? What if Gregor is wrong — or what if he's right and it's Miles who's wrong about something?

The second is more of a background or subplot. I want to see Miles's cousins, the non-aristocratic just plain Kosigans. It would be highly entertaining if they're just as clever as the line of Counts, but in a less law-abiding way. Or, conversely, if Miles is related to a pack of entertaining numbskulls from the Dendarii back woods.

The third is an elephant in every room of the series which the characters resolutely ignore: what happens when Barrayar and its interstellar empire no longer want to put up with being ruled by a bunch of feudal gangsters? How will Miles — and Gregor — manage the transition, especially since history is seldom kind to ex-aristocrats and unemployed monarchs.

George R.R. Martin's "Thousand Worlds" series: Oh, you don't know about this one? You've only heard of that endless giant fantasy novel/TV series? Well, guess what: before he started A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin wrote some fantastic science fiction short stories set in a very distant future with humans spread across the Galaxy. (His "Tuf Voyaging" sequence is part of it.) I don't have a specific idea for this setting other than that I want to see more of it.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series: I want the Potterverse novel for grownups. Specifically, I want one that actually tackles the issue of what it means to have a secretive hereditary caste of people with supernatural powers, who apparently consider themselves immune to ordinary laws and governments. I want to see how that plays out. (Note: I'm kind of writing this one myself anyway.)

Star Trek: I want an anthology series set in the Star Trek universe. Call it "Tales of the Federation" or something. Pretty much everyone on Earth has at least a passing familiarity with the setting, so one could use it to tell stand-alone science fiction stories without having to involve a continuing cast — thereby avoiding both the soap opera of interactions among "series regulars" and hitting the "reset" button at the end of each show. People could change, fail, die, get comeuppance, and then leave.

If anybody has me on their fictional wish-list, let me know in the comments.

        

Arkad eARC Available!

If you can't stand to wait for a printed copy of my new novel Arkad's World (and aren't picky about things like copy-editing), the electronic Advance Reading Copy is now available. Read a free sample or buy the whole thing here at the Baen Web site.

I honestly think this is my best book yet. It was delayed by a couple of false starts, and then by the loss of my editor David Hartwell at Tor, but now it's finally on the way. I'm tremendously excited that other people can finally visit the world I lived in for two years while writing it.

What I Saw On Facebook Yesterday

"In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. The little sandy-haired woman had turned bright pink, and her mouth was opening and shutting like that of a landed fish. Even O'Brien's heavy face was flushed. He was sitting very straight in his chair, his powerful chest swelling and quivering as though he were standing up to the assault of a wave. The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out 'Swine! Swine! Swine!' and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen. It struck Goldstein's nose and bounced off; the voice continued inexorably. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic."

— George Orwell, 1984

Dragon Awards!

Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir.

Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson.

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope.

Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt.

Best Media Tie-In Novel: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray.

Best Horror Novel: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King.

Best Comic Book: Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron and James Harren, Marvel Comics.

Best Graphic Novel: Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius M. Gopez, Dynamite Entertainment.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones, HBO.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of War by Monolith Productions.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery by Jam City.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game: Red Dragon Inn 6: Villains by Slugfest Games.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card/Role-Playing Game: Magic: The Gathering Unstable by Wizards of the Coast.

WorldCon 76 Report: Day 4

Reading back over my WorldCon reports, it occurs to me that I don't seem to be doing much. A couple of panels a day, and mentions of parties, but that's it. The reason is something I had to explain to a friend: "At a con the fans have fun and go to parties. The pros work . . . by going to parties." I've made at least three very useful professional connections at social events during this convention. Now, of course, going to parties is also fun, but a lot of what I've been doing is professional gossip and schmoozing, which isn't very interesting to read about. 

On Sunday the 19th I was a little surprised to discover there wasn't a panel at 10 a.m. that I absolutely had to see. So part of the Crack Team and I found a nice bakery-cafe with sidewalk seating, and had breakfast al fresco while people-watching. 

At 11 I did manage to squeeze into an absolutely packed reading by Jack Clemons from his forthcoming book Safely to Earth, which is a memoir of his time in the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs, and a look at the lives and activities of some of the half-million people involved in the space program who don't get to ride the rockets.

Following that I attended yet another panel on SETI (it's something I'm interested in; don't judge me) called "What Do We Do When We Find Them?" There was some interesting discussion — one of the participants pointed out that our reactions will likely be very different depending on whether we pick up signs of some other civilization's activities, a signal sent to us, or a physical artifact. Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer, was a delight as always. (When is the Vatican City going to put in a WorldCon bid? VatiCon, anyone?)

We had dinner with friends in San Jose, and so skipped out on the Hugo ceremonies, but we did make it back to take a turn through the surprisingly subdued post-Hugo room parties in the Fairmont Hotel. And so to bed, as Samuel Pepys would say. 

Congratulations to this year's Hugo winners:

Best Novel: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin

Best Novella: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells

Best Novelette: "The Secret Life of Bots," by Suzanne Palmer

Best Short Story: "Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience," by Rebecca Roanhorse

Best Series: World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Best Related Work: No Time to Spare, by Ursula K. LeGuin

Best Graphic Story: Monstress vol. 2, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Best Movie*: Wonder Woman, from Warner Studios

Best TV Show: The Good Place, "The Trolley Problem," by Josh Siegel and Dylan Morgan

Best Short Story Editor: Lynne Thomas and Michael Thomas

Best Book Editor: Sheila Gilbert

Best Professional Artist: Sana Takeda

Best Semiprozine: Uncanny, edited by Lynne and Michael Thomas

Best Fanzine: File 770, edited by Mike Glyer

Best Podcast: Ditch Diggers, by Mur Lafferty and Matt Wallace

Best Fan Writer: Sarah Gailey

Best Fan Artist: Geneva Benton

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Rebecca Roanhorse

*Note: until an opera or a radio play wins one of the "Dramatic Presentation" awards, I'm just calling them what they are instead of using the ungainly official names.

 

 

WorldCon 76 Report: Day 2

On Friday the 17th I dressed in my frankly magnificent Professional Author costume and plunged into the convention. All the really interesting panels seem to be first thing in the morning, so I went to one on constructing alternate histories, called "If This, Then What?" After that I took a pass through the dealer room and came across Colonel Professor Doctor Brett Cox showing off his new book, which I immediately purchased and got him to sign.

At noon I did my own panel for this convention, "The Culinary Speculative: Food in Fiction." We talked about how food can be an important symbol in stories — though sadly nobody shared any recipes.

After that I met a friend for lunch and then spent the afternoon wandering about the convention. Because most of the panels are very well-attended, it's difficult to just drop into one after it starts, as there's no place to sit. 

At the end of the day I watched the panel on "Not Hugo-Nominated Novels You Should Read," and then joined some fellow writers and scientists for dinner at a Chinese place nearby. After that we attended a party hosted by Tor Books at the Hilton hotel, and finished the evening by cruising the room parties in the Fairmont Hotel.

Thoroughly tired and a little unsteady, we retired to the room and told the rest of the Crack Team to quit playing computer games and go to bed.

 

 

   

Where to Find Me at WorldCon 76

This coming week the 76th World Science Fiction Convention will be held in hazy San Jose, California, and I'll be one of the participants. If you want to see me, here are my scheduled appearances:

THE CULINARY SPECULATIVE: Food in Fiction (Friday, August 17, 12:00 noon in room 210C of the San Jose Convention Center). Join me, moderator Nibedita Sen, Kat Tanaka Okopnik, Rose Lemberg, and Hector Gonzalez in a discussion about food in science fiction and fantasy. 

AUTOGRAPHING (Saturday, August 18, 12:00 noon in the Autographing Area of the Convention Center). I'll have my signing pens, so bring anything you want me to deface.

Those are my only "official" appearances, but you can also find me wandering about the con all week. I'll be passing out bookmarks and postcards with a first sneak peek at the cover art for my upcoming novel Arkad's World! 

 

Emotionless Bad Guys

Yesterday I was reading a James Lileks blog post about the legendary 1956 Roger Corman sci-fi movie It Conquered the World. If you haven't seen it, you probably should — because effects, locations, and extras were expensive, Corman reduced an alien invasion of Earth to a character piece, focusing on Lee Van Cleef (of all people) as a scientist collaborating with the villainous Venusian carrot trying to Take Over the World. Ultimately (of course) Van Cleef sees the error of his ways and sacrifices himself to destroy the googly-eyed giant alien vegetable, thereby Saving the World. We get a final encomium by his pal Peter Graves before the fade-out.

What struck me was the moral of the story so clunkily stated by Graves: that Van Cleef forgot that people are feeling creatures, so that the idea of an emotionless, perfectly rational world is impossible, or at least nightmarish.

It caught my attention because I've seen it before. It's a constant trope in Fifties SF. There's an example in Famous Science-Fiction Stories, for instance. It turns up on Star Trek quite a bit, as well — most notably, of course, in the character of Mr. Spock, who is a "logical" and emotionless Vulcan.

But . . . where does it come from? No Utopian thinkers ever imagined a world without emotions. Thomas More, who invented the whole idea, certainly never proposed that his Utopians should be emotionless. Naturally he thought that they should ensure that their emotions did not overwhelm their reason, but that was as far as he went. No one since More ever proposed that a world without emotions would be a Good Thing. So where does the idea of a Horrid Emotionless Society come from?

I blame the French Revolution. Its leaders — particularly the Jacobins — loved to wrap themselves in the mantle of Reason, overturning centuries of ignorance and ridiculous superstition. And, oh by the way, murdering tens of thousands of Frenchmen and plunging Europe into a titanic series of wars for the next thirty years. And then their self-proclaimed ideological heirs in Russia a century later managed to beat their body count by a couple of orders of magnitude. But of course, neither gang of bloody-handed revolutionaries thought of themselves as emotionless, or desired an emotionless society.

Complicating matters is the fact that America was also founded by a pack of Enlightenment-era thinkers keen on Reason. They also wanted a rational society, but were pragmatic enough to realize it could not be imposed from above, as the Jacobins and Bolsheviks attempted. (Plus the geography and internal politics of America made it impossible for at least a century.) Still, it has left Americans with a decidedly split personality regarding rationalism. Across the entire modern political spectrum you will find people priding themselves on their rationality, untainted by superstition and unclouded by emotion — yet simultaneously deriding their opponents as being heartless and devoid of compassion.

The big secret that everyone keeps missing is that there is no opposition between reason and emotion. We are always motivated by emotion — even a desire to be ruled entirely by reason is an emotional motivation. Reason serves the emotions, and always has. An "emotionless" society is not just undesirable, it's impossible, and I hope we can come up with a better straw man to demolish in fiction.

 

Thoughts On The Dreaded Backstory

David McGrogan writes interesting roleplaying games, and he had some interesting thoughts about fictional characters in his most recent 'blog post. You can read it here. If you're lazy and want me to just tell you what it says, his main point is that the urge to bolt a backstory onto archetypical characters (like James Bond or Darth Vader or The Mad Hatter) is all the rage in current media, because it's a way to "monetize the franchise" or whatever the buzz phrase of the week is in Hollywood. The obvious current example is the forthcoming film about Young Han Solo, but we've also seen Young Sherlock Holmes and Young Indiana Jones and even multiple competing origin stories for the Wicked Witch of the West.

The problem, of course, is that adding the backstory diminishes the very archetypical quality that makes the character popular in the first place. How many Star Wars fans would be just as happy not knowing young Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker's opinions on the topic of sand?

Mr. McGrogan isn't the first to notice this. His 'blog post reminded me of something the legendary screenwriter William Goldman wrote in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, about the lion-hunting film he wrote, The Ghost and the Darkness.* The movie was not a huge success, and Goldman identifies one reason as Michael Douglas's desire to explore the backstory of his enigmatic expert hunter character.

Douglas (and, after some arm-twisting, the director) thought about the hunter as a character rather than an archetype, which in Goldman's opinion weakened the role and the film, because instead of a super-cool lion hunter he turned into a guy with a string of failures in his past. In his book Goldman uses another example: would it really improve Casablanca if we found out exactly why Rick Blaine is an exile? Our vague imaginings are better than what the writers could ever come up with. "I like to think you killed a man," says Renault, and that's good enough for us.

Know when to stop explaining.

*About the real-life horror-movie killer lions of Tsavo. If it wasn't true nobody would believe it.

Search For The Old Ones

One of the great revolutions in human thought was the concept of "Deep Time" — the notion that the Earth and the Universe are vastly older than recorded human history, and even the origins of the human species lie long before the invention of writing. Charles Lyell, the Victorian geologist, was probably the first person to really understand the true age of the Earth, and his ideas in turn informed Charles Darwin's theories of the evolution of species. 

But the first fiction writer to really grapple with the concept appears to be H.P. Lovecraft. In his novel At the Mountains of Madness he threw a crew of Antarctic explorers into a face-to-face confrontation with the original creators of life on Earth, a tentacled species called the Old Ones whose history spans not a paltry few thousand years, but close to a billion.

And once one starts looking into the history of life on Earth, the question does arise: why did it take so long for an intelligent species (us) to evolve? There's no strong reason why intelligence couldn't have appeared in some contemporary of the dinosaurs — or even a species of the Carboniferous era, as far from the dinosaurs in time as they are from us. They had brains; why didn't some species get a bigger one? (My explanation is that intelligence is simply not as inevitable or even as advantageous as we like to think. That's also my solution for the Fermi Paradox.)

The famous British TV series Doctor Who imagined intelligent reptiles from Earth's deep past, dubbed the "Silurians" because TV writers are terrible about looking things up. (There were no reptiles in the Silurian age.) They weren't bad chaps really, they just woke up from hibernation and were horrified to find their planet overrun by primates. 

All good fun. Except . . . 

Why are we so sure that we are the first technological civilization on Earth? In a paper for the Journal of Astrobiology, scientists Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank tackle the question of how we might identify signs of past civilizations. We think of our cities and roads as durable things, but geology laughs at that. Over sufficiently long timescales, all artifacts get ground into dust. Schmidt and Frank identify some markers for past civilizations . . . and consider some otherwise mysterious events in Earth's prehistory which fit those markers. Hmm . . . 

You can download the paper here.