Archive for the 'Worldbuilding' Category

From Penguin: A SCIENCE FICTION OMNIBUS ed. by Brian Aldiss

Constance Ash February 3rd, 2008

Penguin paperbacks have long provided readers with authoratative editions of classic literature from all nations and genres, edited by experts in the field.  Peguin regularly updates its classics, with new translations, new citations, new editors and different covers.  Thus Penguin’s Science Fiction Omnibus, published in Britain in November 2007, updates the Aldis edited SF Omnibus of 1973.

You can compare the 1973 edition’s Table of Contents 

here with the Table of Contents for this new 2007 edition here.  A thoughtful consideration of SF sparked by this new edition of Aldis’s Omnibus appears in the current Times Literary Supplement. 

You may not agree with every point Dinah Birch, the writer, makes, but its interesting to read.

[ Loneliness shadows science fiction, and is made more acute by its customary settings amid the emptiness of space, with solitary voyagers or beleaguered bands of adventurers encountering the hostilities of planets that deny the consolations of familiarity. The opening images of Walter M. Miller’s brilliant “I Made You” (1954) are typical:

"It sat on the crag by night. Gaunt, frigid, wounded, it sat under the black sky and listened to the land with its feet, while only its dishlike ear moved in slow patterns that searched the surface of the land and the sky The land was silent, airless. Nothing moved, except the feeble thing that scratched in the cave."

The “feeble thing” turns out to be a man, about to be destroyed by the suffering robot that he has created. The story is recognizably a reflection of Frankenstein. It serves, like Frankenstein, to caution against the dangers of scientific progress pursued with no thought of moral consequences. This bleakly admonitory tone repels many readers. It is the business of science fiction to alarm, in the sense of providing the excitement of thrilling dangers, and of scaring readers with the prospect of a future in which human values are threatened. Ruthless invasions, apocalyptic plagues, wars and famines, dying stars, mechanized intelligences and predatory civilizations, have been its favourite devices. Fredric Brown’s “Answer” (1964), a piercingly brief story, points to the hazards of the internet, years before it was invented. Scientists link every computer on earth in order to ask a single question – “Is there a God?”. The answer is immediate: “Yes, NOW there is a God”. The warnings of science fiction are endlessly inventive, often witty, and sometimes salutary, but they do not make for comforting reading. ]

When I was a tad, far back in the days when there was little if any SF and even less F on television and in the movies and in the bookstores, these anthologies and omnibuses were among my most prized discoveries for reading, and re-reading, and re-reading even more times than that.  I didn’t realize it, but these kinds of collections were teaching me what was good about SF, and how it worked, through an infinite variety of treatments and approaches, only limited by the number of stories and writers that could be included.

Love, C.

Wild Cards: American Hero & other interactive web fiction

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 2nd, 2008

Tor’s new Wild Cards website has been spiffed up and updated, with information on the mass signing in Albuquerque today with most of the Inside Straight authors. Moreover, Tor has just launched the American Hero website, the fully in-character blog and promotional website for American Hero, the superhero reality television show taking place in the Wild Cards universe and a central part of the plot of Inside Straight.

There are twenty eight characters on the show and we’ve got illustrations for all of them from the amazing Mike Miller. More, all of the authors have been writing confessionals from the standpoints of their characters. Up now for Week 1 are Joe Twitch (created and written by Walton Simons), Spasm (created and written by Daniel Abraham), Drummer Boy (created and written by S.L. Farrell), and Rosa Loteria (created and written by yours truly).

Rosa Loteria portraitGo over and take a look. Ask the characters questions. Of course, the contestants are all busy with challenges on the show, but who knows, some of them might answer. (Mine are Rosa Loteria and The Maharajah.)

This is also kind of exciting as an author since it’s a new publishing venue. I’ve seen website expansions to the content from movies, most notably the rather amazing Donnie Darko site which had some neat fiction which expanded the movie, and likewise the (now long defunct) website for the Point Pleasant tv show. But this is the first time I’ve seen extra web fiction content being done for a series of novels and anthologies, especially author created and owned.

Anyway, please take a look and see what you think, and also, let’s talk about the web as a venue for new fiction in general.

I Love the End of the World

Madeleine Robins October 30th, 2007

Over in my LiveJournal someone kindly mentioned her enjoyment of The Stone War and noted that “I love a good post-apocalypse.” My first thought was: gee, so do I. ‘Kay, not certain what, if anything, that says about me personally. But as a writer I can think of several reasons to love the end of the world.

First: you get to have your cake and consume it as well, setting-wise. You can set your story in a real world, trash a couple of well known local landmarks (how often has the Statue of Liberty shown up in destroyed-New-York movies?), and use that as a base for your invention. Depending on the sort of work you’re writing, you can get as interesting as you like: when I wrote Stone War I was deliberately going for weird, which meant that I could knock a whole city block of brownstones askew, or have the West Side Highway tie itself into knots. But you can also be hard-headedly logical about what would survive and what would not, depending upon the mechanism of the apocalypse and the time elapsed since the event.

Second: There’s the memento mori factor. Seeing the world brought low is a metaphor for dealing with our own inevitable deaths–and seeing something grow out of that. Who knows what part of our lives will be remembered in fifty years or a hundred or a thousand? Shelley’s Ozymandias tells us to look upon his works and despair, but the works are gone and nothing but the warning itself remains: “Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Post-apocalyptic fiction trades in what is left behind and what meaning it has (remember that a shopping list is a sacred text in Canticle for Liebowitz).

Third: There’s the opportunity to see what an individual can do after the end of the world. Humans have at least as much interest in creating order out of chaos as they do talent for creating chaos in the first place. This can lead to Lord of the Flies scenarios, but it also lends itself to your plucky protagonist or band of protagoni going up against the Bad Tribe. A post-apocalyptic setting adds a frisson of extra meaning, with our knowledge of the past a palimpsest, the action and reality of now overwritten on everything we know about the past. In near-event post-apocalyptic settings, your characters are dealing with the disaster itself, and their own survival. Just as intriguingly, in a long-past post-apocalyptic setting, the characters deal as much with the meaning of the old world and its demise, and that can make for really interesting fiction.

Sure, I love the End of the World: what’s not to love?

Down the Pub With Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

Constance Ash September 16th, 2007

The following is from an article in the current Times Literary Supplement around a new book about the Inklings, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep.

[ There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said�. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King.

However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.
What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met for seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their number. It was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the scene, marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of substance to a narrative which had already swollen far beyond the “second Hobbit� requested by his publishers. Glyer suggests that this incident typifies the way in which the Inklings affected one another’s work, despite the fact that in later years its members were frequently to insist that their meetings acted more as a social club than a writers’ circle, brushing aside any suggestion of real influence. ]

That the TLS article begins with the pub, reminds me of last week’s discussion on the LJ BlackGate fantasy magazine site, bg_editor, re taverns and Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery.

Love, C. 

Live Free!

Lois Tilton August 7th, 2007

An occupational hazard of reviewing fiction is the necessity of engaging works one would not otherwise be likely to read. Thus I find myself from time to time encountering that peculiar fringe subspecies of the genre, libertarian science fiction.

The practitioners of libertarian SF tend to be ideologically motivated, and their fiction, more often than not, serves primarily as a medium for their Message. Of course, no political position confers immunity from the general tendency for an overload of ideology to make for bad story. But libertarian SF seems to be afflicted with a peculiarly wrong-headed Message, that we must go into space to live free!

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Uses and Abuses of Multiple Languages in SF/F Worldbuilding - A Question

Kate Elliott April 13th, 2007

Jason writes:

I have a question concerning the inclusion of multiple languages in a novel. I put a great deal of effort and pride in developing the histories and different culture, reasons for certain beliefs, mythologies and law, arts and so on. In my paradigm, I have four different cultures on a single large peninsula. Two of which are off shoots of the same people, one is an older civilization from the south and then the dominant culture who were migratory raiders turned Empire from a different part of the continent entirely.

Now while I have a passing interest in linguistics, I am no Tolkien. I am curious how one goes about creating a believable world, flush with exotic and distinct civilizations and language without actually building a complete language from scratch. And beyond that, how I should include enough of those languages in the novel without confusing the story and making readers groan every time the big, gravely voiced Syvrian foreigner appears on stage with the learned Republican.

I’ve dealt with this so far by having most main characters speak the dominant culture’s tongue, but there is a character that was married into a foreign culture and the dominant culture just ain’t so dominant there. I wonder if I am creating headaches for myself by worrying the problem to a nub, but can’t seem to convince myself that I should let it go.

Three initial thoughts:

1) no, you are not worrying the problem to a nub

It’s well worth thinking through how you mean to deal with the issue of multiple languages in far greater detail than ever gets on the page, in part so that you know what is going on and in part because once you know what is going on and how you are going to deal with it, you may find that it takes less complicated maneuvers than you believed it might to get your point (of multiple languages) across.

2) less is more

You’d be surprised by how much you can suggest through a few well chosen words, phrases, or misunderstandings. Mostly readers do not, I think, want to wade through text heavily-laden with foreign words, whether real or made-up, but that doesn’t mean such words can’t be used sparingly to good effect.

For instance, as a single example, one rule of thumb is to introduce such words in specifically important contexts and at spaced intervals so that the reader doesn’t have to juggle a bunch of new stuff all at once - same way you introduce new cultures, new characters, new landscape. Beware infodump, of course.

As for the character who has married into a foreign culture, I think how you deal with it depends on whether s/he understands the foreign language or must use a translator.

3) Remember, always, that language is a window into a culture and can say as much about how a culture looks at the world and interacts internally as does clothing, architecture, political structures, religious rituals, etc. Emphasize those parts of language that illuminate cultural differences rather than layering in a bunch of different words for the same thing.

I specifically want to throw this question open to comments because I happen to know there are some folks out there with actual expertise in this matter.

Additionally, I’d be interested in hearing people’s opinions on examples of languages done well and done poorly in stories.

So, please weigh in, all.

Gates of Damascus chili — the spice trade and worldbuilding

Kevin Andrew Murphy April 4th, 2007

One of the most valuable reference books I have in my fiction writer’s library is The Complete Book of Spices by Jill Norman. It details, simply and photographicly, the history of the world spice trade and the major regional spice blends. From a writing standpoint, this helps to flavor a world, because few things give a sense of place so much as the cuisine, and nothing places a cuisine so well as the spice.

The meanderings and peregrinations of the spice trade are why cardamom is so favored in Swedish desserts, Indian black pepper replaced African grains of paradise in European cuisine, and Texas has chili cookoffs.

I’ve never cooked chili before, but a group of friends has been doing potlucks a couple times a month, and the challenge was given to have a “chili cookoff night” which then became a more sensible serial chili cookoff, where so far we’ve sampled two different chilis and now it’s my turn.

Of course, being a writer, nothing is ever simple and everything is research, and I like research. And, as a number of years ago a scorched pot of apricot jam was saved by turning it into apricot-ancho chili barbecue sauce, I knew that apricots worked well with chili, so why not postulate a world where the tomato had never gotten to the Old World and Texas-ish chili con carne was invented somewhere else with the local produce? Like, oh, say, Damascus, also noted for its apricots?
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Where’s the Latrine?

Madeleine Robins March 1st, 2007

I’m doing research for the next project. The next project (hereafter NP) is set around 1050 CE in coastal Italy, which is not easy to research (there’s a difference between hard-to-research and not-easy). When I’m researching a period I know very little about there are specific things I need to know–many of which will never appear on my page. What are the names and sizes of the local currency? Styles of address? What’s the prevailing religious belief system? What is the legal system, and does it affect everyone equally? How do they handle human waste? This last is particularly important–you could be a peasant who never saw a piece of money, you could be an agnostic paying lipservice to the accepted religious system…but, to paraphrase Sesame Street, everybody poops. And I’m not just interested in the specific details of latrines and chamberpots, but about things like smell. Was a slight septic smell just a fact of life? Was the waste used to fertilize the fields? Was that likely to cause health problems? Were there people whose livelihood depended on waste-management? The thing is, I’m unlikely to dwell on this kind of stuff in NP, but I need to know it, so that I have a sense of the texture of the place and how daily life was managed.

At the same time that I’m doing this research, I’m reading a book set in a non-specific Fantasy When-n-Where. And what this book sorely needs is latrines. Not literally, exactly; there are occasional shots of men relieving themselves in the streets (intended to demonstrate what a sordid, nasty place this is) and mention is made of sewers (intended to establish a stench, thus demonstrating what a sordid, nasty place this is). None of this gives the reader a hand figuring out what the technological level of the place is, which would be one reason to mention waste-management. The book is set in a city, where waste-management would be very different from the countryside, but I have no idea in what way different. What the author has done is to neglect local texture and the sense that his characters have a life beyond the pages of the book, that everyone has household chores and needs to pee on occasion, not because it’s nasty but because they’re human.

The thing about world-building is that everything is connected to everything else. When you’re working to build a believable fantasy or science-fictional world, the agriculture connects to diet connects to waste connects to technology and who-knows-what-all. Very little of this should show up on the page, but you have to know about the latrines.

Creating The World Within Which You’d Like To Live

Constance Ash February 25th, 2007

The following pull comes from today’s NY Times’s Art section, in an article about the photographic artist, Justine Kurland.  You can find the article here, with a slide show of some of her work.

[ “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist,� she said. And in a sense these new works also relate to the aesthetic of late 19th-century landscape photography, which “was really about this idea of projecting an idealism onto a landscape,� she said. “It was a way of settling the West.� ]

Her vision of past, present and idyll, is an interesting companion to the ideas raised (yet again! you’d think BY NOW, primatologists, at least, would get it, that the female of our species never was a passive beggar at best to great big alpha males hunting to get the food to feed herself and children) in the article about chimp mothers creating hunting weapons and tools.

However, most of all, I was struck by Kurland’s statement, “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist.â€?  Not always, but often, this would fit those of us who make worlds that don’t exist, as a matter of course.  It states succinctly, as well, why we make worlds like Sherri Tepper does, for instance, that are our deepest terrors.  Without political advocacy and activism, we cannot avoid the worlds that are our terrors, or bring into existence worlds that are better than a world of terror.

Kurland is a photographer, not a fiction writer.  This is something else I liked about her statement.  It shows us all that fiction is not the only path to envisioning worlds within which we could live comfortably, with our children, other creatures and each other.

Love, C.

Devil in the Details Redux: China Dolls and Chandlers

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 11th, 2007

Blame National Geographic.

When I was twelve or so, staying over at my grandparents with a cold, I read an issue of National Geographic which gave the history of gemcutting, the history and provenance of the various cuts–the emerald cut, the sapphire cut, the diamond cut, the rose, the brilliant and so forth–and I happily commited all this to memory, along with the rough dates of when each was developed and became popular.  Which of course some years later totally ruined a television show for me, “The Wizard,” 1986, because while I could deal with the concept of a four-foot-tall mad inventor MacGuyver type, when he pulled out the ancient Incan emerald and it was not only faceted but cut in the brilliant cut that wasn’t invented for diamonds until about the 19th century?  And it was the size of a baseball but flawless which is likewise impossible for an emerald?  The suspenders of disbelief were snapped.

Yes, I know, we’re supposed to look the other way and not raise our eyebrows.  No one seriously believed that Yul Brenner was Thai either, no matter how much tape he put on his eyelids.  And Al Jolson was not really black.

That all said, there’s a big step between “Imagine if you will” theatricality and simply getting stuff wrong, and in a big way too. Continue Reading »

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