Guest Post

Patrick Weekes on Video Game Writing

Patrick Weekes’ first novel The Palace Job [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] came out two weeks ago. (And I would have had this post up then, if not for the fact that … um … okay, I got nothing. Apparently I just suck at getting things done on time lately.)

Anyway, not only does Weekes have both a novel and short fiction credits to his name, but he’s also done a lot of video game writing. I asked him if he would talk about how he got into video game writing, and the difference between writing a novel and writing a game.

Getting to hear about him being mauled by kobolds was just a bonus 🙂

You can read an excerpt of his new book at the Tyche Books website, or find him online at LiveJournal, the BioWare Blog, and Facebook.

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I came to video games as a player first. Primarily, in fact, as a somewhat terrible player. In the very old Telengard, I was the one wandering down to level 57 and getting eaten by demons. In the marginally less-old Gold Box Pool of Radiance on the Commodore 64, I was the one whose characters, all named after the heroes from Dragonlance, got mauled by kobolds. In Wing Commander, I was relieved to discover that you got medals for at least the first couple of times you panic-ejected. And in Star Control 2, I learned to sit patiently in hyperspace and wait for the Melnorme to come rescue me after the third or fourth time I forgot to purchase fuel.

As I grew up, I ran Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, built worlds, argued over rules, and went through the trials and tribulations that every gaming group encounters. I also started writing my own fiction, starting out with dark literary fiction in college and then gradually moving to lighter and happier work as I found my voice. On the video-game front, I played everything I could by a video-game studio called BioWare — the Baldur’s Gate series, then Neverwinter Nights, and finally Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I came to BioWare after the editor at Amazing Stories, Dave Gross, bought a couple of stories about a nameless hero and his talking magical sword, and then joined BioWare and asked if I was interested. That was back in 2005. Since then, I’ve written on three games and sold a few more stories, along with my first novel, which came out on September 26th. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s taught me some interesting things about writing for both the reader and the player.

The first and most obvious point when thinking about writing in games and in novels is that in a game like the ones we make at BioWare, the player has some measure of control over which characters they interact with, and how they talk with and form relationships with those characters. You have to be careful about writing a scene assuming that the player feels a certain way. Writing a buddy scene with the player and a character chatting over drinks? Whoops, it turns out that the player might never have spoken to that character before, and all your familiar old-friend dialog falls flat. Writing a scene where the player intercedes in an argument between two furious characters? Oh, by the way, you might be romancing one of them, and you might or might not have betrayed the other one on a deeply personal mission fifteen minutes ago. Writing an epic sacrifice scene where a beloved character dies tragically? As it turns out, the player has spent the last few hours on Twitter telling all her friends how incredibly annoying this character is, and how they really hope there’s a way to kill him off in the last act.

I used to think of this as a major difference — when I write a novel, I control how well the reader knows the characters, so I’ve got the final say in how those emotional scenes play out, right? As it turns out, working on video games helped me realize how important the reader is. My favorite character in the novel I’m writing might be the one that some readers reluctantly put up with. As a reader, I’ve read clunky novels and hit a point where I was clearly supposed to sympathize with a character who’d come up against terrible misfortune, but my reaction as a reader was, “Well, what did you think was going to happen, dumbass?”

As a novel writer, I’m in control of what the reader sees and hears, but not what the reader feels. Any emotional engagement on the reader’s part, I have to earn. As a result, when writing for games, I put the most emotional dialog behind logic checks that require that the player previously put time into making a connection with that character. And when I’m writing novels, I leave enough emotional content up for inference that the readers who are emotionally engaged will appreciate the scene, while those who don’t care about the character don’t have the assumption of an emotion they don’t share rubbed in their faces.

There are a lot of other differences, of course — writing as part of a team instead of being the sole creator of the world, writing dialog that is spoken aloud by a voice actor instead of read directly by the reader, and working with artists instead of simply writing descriptions for whatever I can imagine — but those aren’t specific to games. Every shared-world contributor has dealt with a team, and every playwright and screenwriter has had to learn to write for ear instead of the eye and work with the artists and set designers to create a shared vision. Video-game writing is where I learned to think of the reader not as the passive recipient of my wit and wisdom, but as an active participant who comes to my stories with his or her own experience, assumptions, and biases… and whose reactions to the story are going to vary accordingly.

Hopefully, then, it’s helped me learn to write things that work for more people. Or at least don’t leave people feeling like they’ve been mauled by kobolds.

Darkbeast Guest Post and Giveaway

I’m off doing Guest of Honor stuff at Northern Michigan Anime Con this weekend, so I turned the blog over to my friend Morgan Keyes to talk about her new book, and how she transitioned from writing more adult books as Mindy Klasky to a middle-grade novelist with a spiffy new pseudonym.

Also, she’s giving away a free book, which is always cool.

You can read an excerpt from Darkbeast on her website.

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Many thanks to Jim for allowing me to visit here and tell you about my middle grade fantasy novel, Darkbeast.  Due to the generosity of my publisher, Simon & Schuster, I will give away a copy of Darkbeast to one commenter, chosen at random from all the comments made to this post by 11:59 p.m. EDT tonight.

In Darkbeast, twelve-year-old Keara runs away from home rather than sacrifice Caw, the raven darkbeast that she has been magically bound to all her life.  Pursued by Inquisitors who would punish her for heresy, Keara joins a performing troupe of Travelers and tries to find a safe haven for herself and her companion.

Before writing Darkbeast, I published sixteen novels in a variety of genres, ranging from traditional fantasy for adults, supernatural chicklit, light paranormal romance, and traditional category romance.  (Those last couple of books – spicier than I was comfortable having my mother read – are the reason that Darkbeast is published under a pen name!)

For the past several years, though, I’d felt a pull from “The Darkbeast”, a short story that I wrote for the anthology Fantastic Companions, edited by Julie Czerneda.  In a couple of thousand words, I’d built a world that I longed to return to.  I wanted to learn more about darkbeasts, about how they worked as scapegoats for their people, about what happened to rebels who struck out on their own in a society controlled by religion.

The novel Darkbeast started out as a story for and about young adults, teenagers who had a fair degree of autonomy.  But as I wrote the novel, I realized that more interesting questions were posed when rights and power were taken away.  I wanted Keara to be most vulnerable, to be faced with tough decisions and even more difficult social restrictions.

And so, Darkbeast became a middle grade novel.

In many ways, that transition was destined from my first days as a speculative fiction writer.  As a child, I always enjoyed reading, but I hit my speculative stride in middle school.  I discovered A Wrinkle in Time and the Narnia series, The Hobbit and the Deryni.  I role-played my favorite characters (although I wouldn’t have known that term if you’d asked me), and I wrote my first fanfic (ditto).

Middle grade reading was magical for me, and now I wanted to share that magic with others.  I wanted to give young readers that feeling of escape, that urge to stay up late reading under the covers, that desire to create new stories that lived on in the light of day.

At the same time, I wasn’t willing to give up complex characters and difficult moral choices.  I definitely wasn’t willing to dumb down my vocabulary.  I learned about people and ethics and language from the reading I did in middle school; there’s no reason not to give today’s children the same keys to their world.

And so Keara became twelve.  And a pen name was chosen.  And Darkbeast has been released into the world.

When did you first discover a love of reading?  Do the plots and themes of those treasured books still inspire you?

Morgan can be found online at Facebook and her website.

Darkbeast is for sale in bricks-and-mortar and online bookstores, including:  Amazon | B & N | Indiebound

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Morgan Keyes grew up in California, Texas, Georgia, and Minnesota, accompanied by parents, a brother, a dog, and a cat.  Also, there were books.  Lots and lots of books.  Morgan now lives near Washington, D.C.  In between trips to the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery of Art, she reads, travels, reads, writes, reads, cooks, reads, wrestles with cats, and reads.  Because there are still books.  Lots and lots of books.

Morgan Keyes: Writers Write (And Do A Lot Of Other Things)

Morgan Keyes is the author of the forthcoming middle-grade novel Darkbeast [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], which just sounds cool. Check out this setup from the description:

In Keara’s world, every child has a darkbeast—a creature that takes dark deeds and emotions like anger, pride, and rebellion. Keara’s darkbeast is Caw, a raven. Caw is her constant companion, and they are magically bound to each other until Keara’s 12th birthday. For on that day Keara must kill her darkbeast—that is the law. Refusing to kill a darkbeast is an offense to the gods, and such heresy is harshly punished by the feared Inquisitors.

I like this setup, and having read a little of Keyes’ stuff under her other name, I’m adding Darkbeast to my evergrowing wish list…

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It’s become a cliche: Writers write. If we want to produce a novel, we need to put our butts in our chairs, our hands on our keyboards, and write.

Most people expand that hoary advice a bit: Writers read. If we want to know what’s going on in “our” genres, we need to read, early and often. We even need to read outside our genres, to get an idea of potential broader markets of readers, and to keep abreast of developing trends that might influence our own specific fields.

I’ve only recently realized how many other things that writers need to do.

A couple of months ago, I put the finishing touches on DARKBEAST, a middle grade fantasy novel that will be coming out at the end of August under the pen name Morgan Keyes. To get the book completely “put to bed” I spent months living the story, breathing its details, dreaming its myriad plots and twists. When I turned in the very last, absolutely-final, not-going-to-change-a-word edits, I found myself rather … empty.

I tried to sketch out story ideas, but nothing seemed fresh. I thought about branching out into new genres, but I felt utterly unprepared. I read background books for one new novel, researching a beloved public domain work that I intended to update as a modern story, only to realize (after a month of writing and several false starts) that the 19th century sentiment in that novel could not be translated into the sort of sassy, contemporary book I wanted to write.

In short, my creative well was empty.

And then, I attended the Silverdocs Documentary Film Festival. The festival included 114 films aired over seven days. I saw a fraction of them, “only” nineteen. They varied widely in style. One was as short as four minutes; several came in at right around two hours. They covered topics as varied as the manufacture of fortune cookies to the rock band Journey to migratory birds in Central Park.

And here’s the thing: each of those movies told a story. Each displayed unique characters in a specific setting solving carefully-defined problems. The documentaries were little gems of narrative. If they’d been books, they would have fallen into the genre of “creative non-fiction”, the novelistic exploration of narrow non-fiction topics, like Simon Garfield’s MAUVE, HOW ONE MAN INVENTED A COLOR THAT CHANGED THE WORLD or Trevor Corson’s THE SECRET LIFE OF LOBSTERS.

In fact, the documentaries weren’t merely lenses on another world. They were prisms. They shattered my preconceived notions, breaking my ideas into multiple component parts. After every movie, I engaged in long discussions about what the facts were, what they meant, how the filmmaker relayed them.

And somewhere along the way, I started to think of stories I wanted to tell. I began to imagine different types of narratives, building on the traditions of the fantasy genre that has long been my literary home, but different. I scribbled down notes for one story, and then another, and then another.

Viewing stories in a different medium than the one in which I regularly create allowed my “art” brain to relax. The films allowed the creative part of me to re-awaken, to begin exploring new boundaries.

Writers write. Writers read. And writers experience art wherever they can find it, in whatever format is available in the instant.

Do you agree? Disagree? If you’re a writer, have you found inspiration in other media? If you’re a reader, have you read works that were clearly inspired by other media?

Marie Brennan: Folktales and Legends

I’ve reviewed a number of Marie Brennan’s (Twitter, LJ) books, including her Onyx Court series (gorgeous historical fairy fantasy set in London). Her next book, A Natural History of Dragons [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], is currently sitting on my TBR pile, because I’m luckier than you are. I’ve been rushing to prepare all of these guest posts, and my brain is getting fuzzy, so I’ll just conclude by saying Marie invented the left parenthese, is a third degree black-belt in a rare style of piccolo-based karate, and is composed of 62% dark matter.

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Hello again, everyone! Did you miss me? (Don’t answer that.)

Last time I guest-blogged for Jim, on the topic of fairy tales and how they make no sense, I made a passing comment about how modern fantasy is more often like the folklore category of “legends” than it is like the Brothers Grimm. Several people expressed interest in hearing me expand on that thought, so here I am, back for a second round.

When I talk about the aesthetic qualities that distinguish folktales from legends — and let me digress briefly to say that I’ll be talking about “folktales” rather than “fairy tales” because most things in that category don’t actually have fairies in them — I’m mostly drawing on an influential book by Max Lüthi called The European Folktale: Form and Nature. As the title gives away, it focuses on European sources; what folktales are like in other regions of the world, and whether or not it makes sense to have a general category of “folktale” that you apply to all cultures, are questions that could fill not only a blog post but an entire grad school course. But since modern fantasy rests firmly on a foundation of European material, and is still only gradually opening up to other paradigms, his work is a good place to start.

I’m going to cheat here and quote myself directly, from a paper I presented at a conference and later turned into an article for Strange Horizons: “Lüthi gives a number of descriptors for the folktale style, including one-dimensionality, depthlessness, abstract style, isolation and universal interconnection, sublimation and all-inclusiveness.” You can go read that article if you want further explication of the latter points (I use them to analyze Meredith Ann Pierce’s novel The Darkangel, which is much more folktale-ish than most fantasy these days), but the main thing I want to unpack here is what Lüthi calls “one-dimensionality.”

In a folktale, things take place in “a land far, far away” — a land that is, furthermore, usually nameless. By contrast, in a legend the action often occurs in a named location, and one that is known. It isn’t just “the dark forest;” it’s that forest on the other side of the river from the village where the tale is being told. Legends are frequently bound into the landscape of the teller: this hill, that rock, the lone oak tree where your horse threw you last week. They’re about the world the audience lives in, and they are concrete.

The flip side of this, and the other component of what Lüthi means by “one-dimensionality,” is that in a folktale, while things may be physically distant, they’re spiritually close. In fact, physical distance replaces spiritual distance. A folktale hero, wandering along in his journey, comes to the foot of a glass mountain. How much time does he spend goggling at the sight? None at all. The same goes for talking lions, huts on chicken legs, and walnuts with whole dresses crammed inside of them. Weird things aren’t weird, in folktales. Nor are they scary. They just are, and the hero doesn’t bat an eyelash at them.

Legends? Are scary. And weird. And the characters in them react appropriately. If a guy comes riding along with his severed head under his arm, the hero not only bats an eyelash, but runs for the hills. Things in legends are physically close, but spiritually distant.

By now you can probably see where I’m going with this. Sure, fantasy novels of the non-urban or non-historical sort don’t take place in our backyards (and even some of the urban ones take place in Generic City #12) — but their locations are specific. In fact, our genre prides itself on its ability to make up worlds that feel real, complete with place-names and maps and histories and politics and all the rest of it. Even when we’re rewriting folktale plots, our settings are rarely vague, nameless kingdoms. And when our characters encounter weird stuff? We not only want them to marvel, we criticize the author for bad writing if they don’t. There are types of fantasy that shoot for a different target — especially in short stories, where it’s easier to sustain an artistic “folktale” style; keeping it up for the length of a novel is hard — but as a publishing category, fantasy is dominated by works that mimic the qualities of legends.

Mind you, we still do steal a few of our tricks from folktales. Lüthi argues that one of the characteristics of the style is that objects in it often default to precious metals and minerals, and a limited range of color. Gold and silver, black and white and red and sometimes blue . . . we use green more than folktales do, for which we can probably thank Tolkien and his trees, but it’s true that lots of things fall into that narrow range of shades. And we certainly do love extremes, where our protagonists are orphans or youngest children, royalty or peasants, but rarely middle children or middle-class. We’ve changed that some in recent years, but read through The European Folktale and you’ll see a few trends you might recognize.

Ultimately, of course, modern fantasy is its own thing, neither fish nor fowl, neither folktale nor legend. We’ve stolen tropes from myths and chivalric romances and a bunch of other genres both literary and oral. But if I had to pick one to say is the closest match, I’d probably pick legends.

E. C. Ambrose: Camoflauging Your Soapbox

E. C. Ambrose (Twitter) is the author of a new dark historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon, which starts next year from DAW books. The first book, Elisha Barber, is scheduled for a July 2013 release. E. C. blogs about history, fantasy and writing at http://ecambrose.wordpress.com and spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.

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Camouflaging your Soapbox: Writing for the Cause

One of the reasons we write is to find ways to explore or express ideas about the Big Things—science, religion, ethics, choices. And writing speculative fiction affords the opportunity to design thought experiments about subjects that can never be undertaken in a lab. We can create entire worlds, cultures and histories to push a question to the limits: What if. . .? and fill in the blank with a twist on a subject we’ve been brooding over, something we’re passionate about, something that courts controversy and stirs up readers. That’s the kind of book that gets people talking and thinking. And sometimes, gets the writer in trouble.

How often have you heard a reader complain about an author (frequently a big name, lightly edited author) using a book to expound upon some cause near to the author’s heart? Often, the cause is religious or political, sometimes social or ethical. It’s one thing to be inspired by a real-life hot button issue, and quite another to deliver a diatribe about it in the form of a novel. Nobody likes to be lectured, especially when they’ve picked up your book in search of entertainment.

So what if you do have a cause? You have a point of view on an issue. You want to explore it, to support it or to attack the other side. You could simply keep it on your blog and confront the issue directly. You could also put together a theme anthology where profits will support the cause. In my case, I’m donating some of the profit from my books to raise awareness and combat human rights abuses, and torture in particular. My series has a medieval setting, but when I started researching torture, expecting to learn more about the rack, the wheel, and other such arcane devices, I was horrified to find how much of the information was not medieval at all, but came from contemporary accounts. Little of this research made it into the books, but this realization informed my approach to writing them.

Fiction is a powerful vehicle for social inquiry and for social change (see the lasting impact of books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Black Beauty). The strongest themes are those that the reader discovers without realizing it, those that arise from the conflicts of sympathetic and believable characters engaged in the pursuit of their own goals—not your goals as an author or as a person. Allow your characters and their conflicts to embody different aspects of the cause—don’t tell them, or the reader, what to think, but rather, give them a stage broad enough to create real drama. Embed the reader in the experience of the character to show them the problems you see.

It helps to present multiple points of view on the subject, and to ensure (at the very least) that not everyone on the other side of the question is simply evil. This is a common failing of the cause-driven author, though it is also an attribute of a number of best-sellers. In Hit Lit, a recent book analyzing a dozen blockbusters of the last 100 years, James Hall found that many of them had religious themes, and that these themes were often one-sided, or at the very least, presented from the perspective of a skeptic. It’s an approach that engages both habitual readers and also those who read only a handful of books but want to see what all the fuss is about. There’s a fine line between stoking a lively conversation, and setting off an explosion. Most authors would love to achieve Dan Brown status, but it would be nice to get there without also getting death threats.

I believe that fiction can be a force for change, for confronting the causes we feel strongly about—but it works best when we’re using the tools of the novelist—character, conflict, plot—to challenge readers to experience that cause from the inside out.

And if an author is just looking to lecture? That’s what blogs are for.

Steven Harper Piziks on Homelessness

Steven Harper Piziks (Twitter, LJ, Facebook)  is one of the first Michigan authors I remember meeting back when I started to take this writing thing more seriously. His most recent books are The Doomsday Vault [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] and The Impossible Cube [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. Steven’s oldest son recently became homeless. I can’t imagine what he and his family are going through right now. He talks here about his experiences, about how his son Sasha opened his eyes to the problem of homelessness, and the things Steven is doing to try to raise money and awareness for people like his son.

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I’ve mentioned elsewhere (http://spiziks.livejournal.com/370953.html) that my son Sasha is homeless. The reasons are difficult and terrible, and the short version is that it’s the least worst of all choices.

Last winter he spent his days on the street and his nights in a series of church basements. I worried about him constantly. He got robbed at knife point once. Another time he got caught outside when the church closed its doors for the night and he had to spend a winter night outdoors. It isn’t something I ever envisioned for the little boy I adopted seven years ago from Ukraine.

After several months, Sasha managed to get a bed at the Delonis Shelter in downtown Ann Arbor. He’s working on his GED and trying to find a job. It isn’t easy, however, for a 19-year-old to find work without a high school diploma.

I do see him from time to time. It’s a surreal version of a dad visiting his son at college. I drive down to Ann Arbor, pick him up at a warped version of a dormitory, and take him to lunch somewhere. We talk, I ask him if he needs anything like shoes or a trip to the laundromat, I slip him $20, give him a hug, and drop him off at the dorm again. Except it isn’t a dorm, and he isn’t heading back inside to finish a paper for Monday class.

Sasha once gave me a tour of Ann Arbor from the homeless point of view. We were strolling around downtown, and this is how it went:

“He’s homeless,” Sasha said, pointing at a man in a polo shirt and baseball cap as we strolled past the bus station. “And so is he, and him.” This at two more men, both clean-shaven, in jeans and work shirts. They looked like two guys heading home after their morning shift.

“Later I have to go down to the dorms,” Sasha said in his accented English. “This is the good time of year for finding stuff. The University [of Michigan] students are all moving out, and they throw things away. A friend of mine found a laptop in the trash piles. Worked fine. You can get good furniture–desks, chairs. But we have nowhere to put them, so we leave them. And food! The students throw out all kinds of food everywhere. Cans and bottles and milk and peanut butter and Ramen noodles. All good, all to eat. Walk behind the dorms and you find anything you want. They waste everything, and we have nothing here. I don’t understand it.”

“She’s homeless,” he continued, and pointed at a teenaged girl in a hoodie with a purse. “She’s seventeen and she ran away from home. I don’t know why.” He nodded at a woman with stringy gray hair. She wore a brown sweater despite the warm spring day. Smoke trailed from her cigarette. “She’s forty and homeless and pregnant. Her boyfriend lived in a hotel until they kicked him out because he had no money for the rent.”

“I don’t take the food,” he said. “Not if it’s open. I don’t think it’s good. And I don’t climb into dumpsters. Not yet. I am embarrassed to be seen doing that.”

A man with silver-streaked curly brown hair half strutted, half strolled across the street. He wore a suit jacket and slacks.

“I call him Peter Pan,” Sasha said. “He acts like he can fly. I worry he will get hit by car.”

We passed a row of restaurants and cafes.

“Some places will give you food at the end of the day,” Sasha said. “But you have to be there right when they close. Pizza places throw everything out, but I do not want to get it from the garbage, so sometimes I ask the girls at closing time, and they give some to me.”

“If you have a Bridge Card [food stamps], you can buy sandwiches or hot coffee from the grocery store, but there is no place to keep extra food at the shelter. So you can’t buy groceries, only expensive sandwiches.”

We passed an older man and a woman with backpacks and grocery bags. Sasha waved at them, and they waved back.

“I know them. They are going to Camp Take Notice,” he said.

Camp Take Notice, Sasha explained, is a strip of state-owned woodland on the outskirts of Ann Arbor. In the last few months, it’s become a shanty town of tents and ramshackle shelters for people with nowhere else to go. Its name is unofficial. The government, however, is now forcing the people off the land and building a fence around the land to keep them out. I blogged about that at the link above.

“Everyone looks at you funny if you have nowhere to live,” Sasha finished. “Like you aren’t a real person. It is hard.”

Every town has a homeless scene. I’ve become adept at spotting it now. Like a magician, Sasha has made the unseen fully visible to me. The restaurant where people come for food. The dumpster where people go to scavenge. The building where they go to sleep. The teenager/woman/man heading down the sidewalk, trying to look like they have somewhere to go.

We can help. For the next year, I’m donating the royalties from my ebooks at Book View Café and Amazon to the Delonis Shelter. Every time you buy one, you’re making a donation. You can also donate to the shelter directly at their website. Equally good is to donate to your local organization or shelter for the homeless. Every dollar counts.

Together we can make the least worst a little better.

Alma Alexander: Writing the Other

Alma Alexander (Twitter, LJ) is a Pacific Northwest novelist, short story writer, and anthologist. Her books include “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, “Embers of Heaven”, “The Hidden Queen”, “Changer of Days”, the YA Worldweavers series, and “2012: Midnight at Spanish Gardens”; short stories have appeared in a number of recent anthologies, and “River”, the first anthology where she wore an editor’s hat, is out now.

The novel “Embers of Heaven” is now available in the USA for the first time – initially as an ebook at Amazon and at Smashwords, with a paperback edition to follow soon

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Almost exactly a year ago, novelist Kari Sperring wrote a blog entry entitled “Other people’s toes.” You can go and read the full entry, but there are a few things I would like to pull out of there – to wit –

[on Connie Willis on Blackout/All Clear]

… the historical errors in them are, frankly, parlous, and — as an Oxbridge historian — I am personally rather offended by how stupid she thinks my kind are, apparently… Then I read [Connie Willis’s] short piece in the Bulletin. Here’s the key excerpt. ‘That era [Britain in WW2] is just so fascinating — the blackout, the gas masks, the kids being sent off to who-knows-where, old men and middle aged women suddenly finding themselves in uniform and in danger, tube shelters and Ultra and Dunkirk, and running through it all, the threat of German tanks rolling down Piccadilly! What’s not to like.’

That was when I looked up, and said, very sharply, ‘How about all the dead civilians? That’s not to like at all.’Because, you know, the Blitz was *not* fun.

Here’s my point. History is not a theme park. It’s not a story, either. It’s people’s real lives. If you’re going to write about it, about any part of it, you need to do your homework properly, you need to be respectful, because — as Ms Willis did with me — otherwise, you’re going to find someone’s sore place, someone’s vulnerability, someone’s sacred or difficult or secret thing, and you’re going to do damage. Other countries aren’t theme parks, either, nor museums, nor big bags of useful resources. They’re homes to millions, they’re people’s lives, too.

But the Blitz is not likeable, it’s not fun, it’s not an adventure playground. And talking about is as if it is lessens us all.

I guess what I’m saying is, at bottom, very simple. Be careful, when you talk about other people’s things, histories, homes. We don’t all understand the same things in what we read, we don’t all have the same assumptions. We start from different places. It’s far too easy to discount, to elide, to erase people by not respecting that they may not be just like oneself. It’s far too easy to trample, to damage, to stamp hard on sensitive toes.

Kari Sperring was talking about an interesting and not a little unsteady position for the contemporary fantasy novelist – writing about a period in history which is still very much in living memory (if not the people who have lived through the period themselves then certainly through their direct descendants, sons and daughters whose connection with that particular era may not be direct experience but certainly first-hand accounts thereof). It is something that I myself have had cause to think about in my own work.

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David Constantine – Steampunk Before The Age of Steam

David Constantine is the author of steampunk/alternative history THE PILLARS OF HERCULES (Night Shade Books, March 2012), and can be found on the web at www.thepillarofhercules.com. As David J. Williams, he’s also the author of the Autumn Rain trilogy. Interestingly enough, David does not personally run on steam, but is instead platypus-powered. He may or may not have a Hello Kitty tattoo. (And I really need to stop writing introductions when I’m overtired…)

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Steampunk sits astride the SF landscape, a clanking smoking beast. And while it started off focused on the Victorian era, some of the most compelling modern steampunk places it in entirely different contexts, the most notable being fantasy and postapocalyptic. Yet—when we consider the sheer volume of stories and novels cranked out—there remain good reasons for the subgenre’s ongoing fascination with the 19th century. As a displacement of anxieties regarding technology, steampunk conjures up an alternative reality that at once both minimizes the birth pangs of industrialization and distracts from the current predicament in which such industrialization has landed us. The societies we glimpse in Victorian steampunk are—with some notable exceptions—idealized; we see the airships and parasols, but rarely the mass graves around the rubber plantations……we listen in on drawing room conversation, but rarely hear the roar of the Vickers guns as they mow down Hostile Natives who’ve fallen behind the Curve of Progress.

So when we consider steampunk that features other “real” time periods—and many recent works have done so—we have to be careful. We’re dealing with a literature that offers a view through a glass darkly; that can bring new light to our relationship with technology, but also has a manifest tendency to idealize (or demonize, for that matter). When I positioned steampunk in the ancient world for my recent novel, I was trying to navigate that tension, in addition to tapping into my longstanding interest in the classical age. What I didn’t realize when I started out is how much steampunk was in that world already. Heron of Alexandria invented the steam engine itself in the first century A.D. (yes, you read that right), but the device was seen as little more than a curiosity. And Archimedes designed weapons known as steam guns; it’s not known whether he actually built them, but a team at MIT recently constructed a prototype using his diagrams.

But it’s precisely that lack of knowledge that plagues us in getting to the reality of Just What Was Really Going on Back Then. Ninety percent of the scrolls penned by ancient writers perished in the Dark Ages, and those writers weren’t generally given to discussions of technology, since they were—by and large—aristocrats who left such things to artisans, manual workers and other such lowlives. Yet every once in a while we get a tantalizing glimpse. In the first century B.C., a Roman ship sank off the Greek island of Antikyhera; twenty millenia later, when it was recovered, archeologists found a device that’s come to be known as the Antikythera mechanism: a precise model of the heavens, featuring more than 70 gears and so elaborate that it’s been called the world’s first analog computer. Had we not dug up this device, we would have had no clue it existed. There are no hints of it in the textual record, which underscores just how little we know about a world so much of which has been lost. We tend to see past societies—particularly those that existed two thousand years ago—as primitive, but the ancients had machines that leave us marveling even today.

But it’s possible to take such a sentiment too far. Without splitting hairs over the blurry boundaries between steampunk and its gearpunk and clockpunk cousins, we’re left with the question of what prevented such technology from not being more pervasive in the ancient world. Specifically, why didn’t that world move to a new level, in the same way that the agrarian economies of the 18th century became the industrialized societies of the next? The dynamics underpinning the “take off” phase of industrialization are too complex to be examined in detail here, but one issue that comes up again and again is the necessary catalyst: i.e., devices only see proliferation and/or mass production if there is incentive for their use.

Which, arguably, there wasn’t. It’s not like the ancient world lacked the profit motive of modern capitalism…far from it. But it was what the ancient world had in abundance that mattered: slaves. Every single field of industry was reliant on slave labor, to the extent that slavery was an integral part of the class structure. Slaves could hope to be freed, and rise in stature, and a few of them went on to rule empires. But the institution of slavery went unchallenged, regardless of who was in charge. Given such a ready supply of slaves, the very idea of labor-saving devices remained stillborn. And it’s worth noting that—even if one wasn’t enslaved—the vast majority of the society lived lives that were nasty, brutish and short. Examining the ‘what-if’ ramifications of steampunk thus becomes, ironically, a means of throwing that fact into sharp relief. And—regardless of what time period it focuses upon—in showing us roads not taken, steampunk underscores just us how far we have yet to go to realize technology’s promise.

Diana Pharaoh Francis Talks About, Well, Me…

Diana Pharaoh Francis (Twitter, LJ) lies! You can’t believe anything she says here. She’s one of those fiction writers. She lies professionally! (Her next book Blood Winter [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] will be out around Christmas of this year.)  She informs me that she is not particularly dangerous and I escaped from nowhere and so no one is hunting me down to drag me back to any sort of asylum. Really.

I am very much amused…

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to Jim’s blog. I’m here today to lay out some facts for you, facts you’re likely highly unaware of, and you should be. You must be able to make informed decisions.

First, I’m very sorry to have to inform you, but Jim has lied to you. Constantly and relentlessly and on a variety of subjects. Let’s start with the basics. He isn’t really human. What he is, isn’t certain. Some scholars have postulated that he’s some sort of alien with few bones, as evidenced by the cover pics he did demonstrating how real female poses on Urban Fantasy covers could be. As you can tell from those pictures, no human could actually manage them, and someone with either few bones or other magical properties could only manage to twist himself (or herself—it’s still debatable what gender Jim really is) into such positions. The fact that Jim reasonably accomplished these poses, is proof positive that in fact, he is not human.

Other scholars, incidentally, have suggested that he’s a shapeshifter (unlikely, given the shape he’s chosen for every day life is so very innocuous), that he’s a djinn (highly possible, given that he does fit into small bottles and it would explain the contortions in the cover pics if he was actually made out of smoke, plus Djinns are frequently not so attractive), it is also possible he’s some sort of serpent creature covered in human skin as a disguise (a la V or so many bad SciFi channel movies.) This latter possibility brings us to the next dreadful truth.

Jim Hines is the ghost writer for almost all of the SciFi channel movies involving snakes, piranhas, spiders, gators, octopi, and sharks. Yes. I hate to be the one to have to tell you this. He is responsible for not only writing, but casting and funding these movies. He himself came up with the brainless pepto-bismol pink spiders that farted fire (I mean, what a dead give away!) in Arachnoquake. Sorry Jim, you can’t fool us with the pink. You’ll have to do better than that. And Megapython vs Gatoroid was another of his babies–who else would have chosen his favorite singers Tiffany and Debbie Gibson for the parts? You now know what he does when he disappears and leaves someone else to blog.

Third, he doesn’t really have diabetes. I know what you’re thinking—he’d never lie about that. But I’m sorry, he has. Really, his blood is some sort of highly acidic goop that burns through steel. Yeah, you got it. His great, great, great, great aunt Martha was the alien in Alien. Though that was a disguise as well, so we still don’t know exactly what Jim is. The diabetes thing is just a cover up to allow him to stab himself periodically with needles full of some concoction that is believe to be a ‘happy’ drug. Quaaludes for aliens or djinns. Though the little baby aliens in Alien and Aliens bear a remarkable resemblance to a certain fire spider and also to all the spiders in his SciFi movies . . . . I sense a theme here, a Freudian slip of epic proportions that clues us in on not only what he is, but what a danger he presents to the public.

Folks, I’m telling you. Be careful when encountering Jim. He’s been killed before and risen up. I know. I killed him in Crimson Wind. But he’s back. Dare I say from outer space? Did you just walk in to find him here with that sad look upon his face that makes it so easy to like him? So easy to fall for his charms? So easy to believe that he could just be a normal human and not a secret weapon for some evil force intent upon taking over the world? Over your souls? Over your minds and your children?

There’s really only one thing to do to. Go now. Get yourself armed. Flamethrowers, RAID, Skittles, chocolate, Scotch, Dr. Who, Firefly—whatever it takes to bring this monster to a standstill. Save yourselves. Save your children. Save the dog. (don’t worry about the cats. Cats are much smarter and more powerful than anything Jim might be).

I beg you. Take precautions now.

Uniform in the Closet, by Myke Cole

I’m home from Fandom Fest (which was a lot of fun!), and will be heading up north for vacation tomorrow morning. So I’ve handed the blog over to a number of guest authors, starting with Myke Cole. Have a great week, and I’ll catch y’all when I get back!

Myke Cole (Twitter, Facebook) is the author of Shadow Ops: Control Point [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], a military fantasy novel I reviewed here. He’s also the dungeon master who, with the help of Saladin Ahmed, made me fight goblins in our game at ConFusion earlier this year. He also got to be a fighting extra on The Dark Knight Rises, making him far cooler than I will ever be. This piece is an expansion of an essay he wrote for The Qwillery.

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Uniform in the Closet: Why Military SF’s Popularity Worries Me
Myke Cole

We’ve got this problem, and I think it’s pretty serious. There’s a growing gap between those who serve in uniform and those who don’t. It’s the worst kind of gap: experiential, cultural. It’s the kind of gap that gives rise to rumor and suspicion. The kind of gap that endures.

In May of last year, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, told the graduating class of West Point cadets that he was concerned about the growing gap between civilians and the military. In the United States, around 70% of youth are ineligible for military service due to health problems, criminal records, or other reasons. Of the remaining 30%, 99% elect not to serve. Currently, less than 1% of Americans serve in uniform. In a sour economy, recruitment soars, with a corresponding bump in educational and fitness standards, especially among the leadership. This makes the military, as it becomes more separate, more elite.

MSNBC’s Rachael Maddow addresses this question in her recent book, Drift. The New York Times’ Scott Shane summarizes her perspective:

“Only a tiny fraction of the American population serves or sends a family member to war, permitting a majority to remain oblivious to its grisly human price. . . . Contractors supply the battlefield support that once was the work of soldiers. A bloated security industry profits from the near-permanent state of conflict, sharing proceeds with pliable members of Congress. And now robotic drones carry out combat from an antiseptic distance.”

This is a serious problem, because America’s military is a citizen military. Our service members serve under the authority of civilians who are supposed to ultimately dictate policy derived from the vox populi of the American people. When the military fights, it does it for the royal you. That’s not the case in many countries. Look at Egypt or Burma, Guinea-Bissau or North Korea.

This is what has both Mullen and Maddow concerned. We don’t want to live in a country like that.

More importantly (as Maddow points out), having a military deeply integrated with the civilian population reminds everyone of the price of going to war, making it far more likely that we will do so only as a last resort. The bigger that experiential/cultural gap, the more likely Americans will simply shrug and accept that it’s time to lay down some ordnance. When the vast majority don’t have to buy war bonds, accept rationing, or offer up a family member, it’s an abstract, distant thing. A news item.

So, yeah. A problem. The genesis of the problem is a topic of much discussion in both civilian and military circles. The answer is complex, and like all cultural issues, will take a long time to resolve, but I am discouraged to see that the military’s own culture isn’t being examined in addressing it.

Let me get at it this way: We see members of the National Guard in their battle-rattle guarding train stations and airports. They are hidden behind tac-vests and magazines, Oakley Flak-Jacket sunglasses hiding their eyes. They look busy, alert. And they should. They’re guarding against threats. But when was the last time you saw a member of the military out to dinner, or the theater, or some public event in their dress uniform? Without a weapon? Not on Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day? Showing their service pride right alongside you?

There’s a great scene in a recent episode of Mad Men where Greg Harris (played by Samuel Page) has dinner out with his family. He sits in a crowded restaurant in his “Alphas,” (his service dress uniform) and tensely fights with his mother about his imminent return to Vietnam. It’s just a TV show, to be sure. But it’s one case where folks got the zeitgeist right. My parents regale me with stories of how service members used to wear their uniforms on every occasion that normally required a suit: Going out to the theatre, a fancy dinner, a formal party. Old movies feature plenty of scenes of servicemen donning dress uniforms to hop on a bus or plane.

You might still see that in Arlington, Virginia or Washington, DC. But what about in New York City? Or Billings, Montana? Or New Orleans? People never hesitate to thank me for my service once they find out that I have served. It’s inevitably followed by a slew of questions, interest and compassion. But finding it out in the first place is getting harder and harder.

And here’s where military culture comes in: There is a climate evolving that seeks to hide military membership. It’s largely driven by two concepts, both pushed to the forefront by the 9/11 attacks; “OPSEC” and “Force Protection.” It would put you to sleep to try and define them fully here (and hey, you’ve got Google and Wikipedia), but suffice to say that OPSEC culture attempts to protect sensitive military information (troop movements, ship and air schedules, etc . . .) and Force Protection tries to protect service members from terrorist attack (think, the USS Cole bombing). Both are genuinely important, both are needed.

Unfortunately, both are engorged by the panicked post 9/11 morass, the Clausewitzian fog of war that has us seeing terrorists and spies in every shadow. Both OPSEC and Force Protection seek, first and foremost, to protect the military by hiding it. Keeping a low profile is central to both cultures. OPSEC is centered around the concept that, if you are identified as a military member, you will be immediately targeted by those seeking sensitive information (state based spies, criminals, anti-government activists), smooth-talked, elicited from, eavesdropped on, blackmailed. Force Protection posits that a person in uniform will be grappled by a suicide bomber, knifed in a dark alley, pulled into a waiting van with blacked out windows. OPSEC forgets that sometimes the attractive foreign woman is chatting you up at a bar because she genuinely finds you attractive and is curious about you. Force Protection forgets that sometimes people take pictures of bridges and trains because they find them aesthetically beautiful.

And of course, like everything else in the military, contractors swoop in. Jobs are created. Training programs. Force Protection and OPSEC literature, PowerPoint presentations, degrees, classes, departments. Bureaucratic entities that, once created, will fight to sustain themselves at all costs.

Remember the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” campaign form World War II? An October 2010 Straight Dope piece put paid to that notion. Turns out that loose lips didn’t actually sink any ships. This in the middle of a major, existential struggle against an implacable enemy dedicated to our destruction. Yet the culture remains.

So, we have a hidden military. Wearing uniforms is discouraged off post. Showing one’s military ID is believed to invite either creeping spies or bloodthirsty terrorists. Force Protection and OPSEC moves the military into the shadows. Service members work, live and play alongside their civilian counterparts, and many of them don’t even know.

Those not in the military might be able to pick a service member out by a t-shirt slogan or bumper-sticker (I have been warned off both, by the way, in Force Protection and OPSEC briefings). But they mostly see and hear about military members in fictional accounts, news stories about PTSD related suicides, homicides. YouTube videos showing snapshots of firefights. Sensationalized accounts form tabloids. Wikileaks.

And, not surprisingly, stereotypes begin to evolve and blossom.

All stereotypes work this way: Without familiarity, whisper and rumor replace reality. Fighting men and women become the stuff of legends. It works the same way all stereotypes do: singular, easily recognized characteristics get taken, blown out of proportion, used to define an entire class of people. I knew this had reached epic proportions when the Shit my Dad Says meme finally reached us and the YouTube video Shit People Say to Veterans went viral. It was poking fun, to be sure, but we’ve all felt that wonder at the cluelessness of a public who seems not to know us at all.

But the real danger lies at the crossroads of exoticization and ignorance: The fetishization of a group of people. For one thing, discrimination (both positive and negative) against people is always presaged by this. If you don’t believe me, go check out the wild distortions currently used as the justification for the relentless persecution of homosexuals in Uganda. But in the case of our military, it has more ominous implications. We have become the newest minority, with all the ignorant and dangerous stereotypes that status affords.

So what does all this have to do with military science fiction?

Military science fiction and fantasy, as a sub genre, is a mainstay. From Heinlein to Weber to Ringo to Haldeman to newcomers like T.C. McCarthy, genre books dealing with the military fly off the shelves. Heck, publishers like Baen practically stake their whole business on it. A lot of the newer, edgier fantasy hitting the market these days has a military cast to it (Joe Abercrombie’s work deals largely with medieval warbands, the military of their time. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is a decidedly military epic in many respects). That’s not even counting the movies. Battle: LA, Lockout, Battleship, Act of Valor. Dynamite Comics recently released short digital novels by Chuck Dixon (of Batman fame). The topic? SEAL Team Six. The last time I checked, the first volume was #643 (out of over 700,00) in the Kindle store and #24 in the Action and Adventure category.

And I started thinking about why. Military stories have always been popular, but why are people buying them now? What is it about today’s military service that folks find so fascinating? The answer is deeply troubling. This is the culture gap in action. People are fascinated with the modern military precisely because they are disconnected from it. Like people flocking to the zoo to see the rare Siberian Tiger, they are drawn to military speculative fiction by the sense of wonder that comes from experiencing the rare, the different, the exotic.

And in this case, that’s a serious problem.

Familiarity and kinship with a military is critical to ensuring it remains a servant of civilian masters and their policy. All military members must remember that, they too, are civilians. When they get home from work and take off their uniforms, they shop and play and raise their kids in the midst of everyone else. Distance breeds fantasy and mistrust. A military punctuated by the uneasy humor of that YouTube video. A civilian population unsure of what a man or woman in uniform, suffering from PTSD, might do to them if they get too close.

I am a writer of military stories. I want people to be interested in them. But I can’t shake the unease that my readers are drawn at least in part from a fascination with a culture that seems exotic because it has been made distant by the measures put in place to protect its members.

The healthiest relationship between a military and civilian populace is one of tight integration. The message I’d like to see repeated is “We are you, and you are us.” It is the best way to ensure that the military remains an instrument of civilian policy, and never a force for setting it.

It’s my sincere hope that interest in military science fiction (and fantasy) will move beyond a fascination with the other. The real military is a cross-section of all of American society. We have mavericks and hidebound rules-lawyers. We have lockstep loyalists and anti-authoritarians. We have heterosexuals and homosexuals. We have artists, dreamers and intellectuals. If you see it out there, it’s in here. We are you, and you are us. That depth and complexity of character makes for the best writing in any genre. Here’s hoping we’ll see more of it in military speculative fiction, and that the sub-genre can be used as a tool to bridge the gap that Mullen and Maddow have described.

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