I've been trying to learn French recently. Well, more accurately, I've been trying to cram French recently - I have a trip to Paris coming up, which I've known about since March, and in fact even had the French-learning software since March, but being a writer it was absolutely necessary to procrastinate until weeks before I'm due to leave, despite my promise to myself that the next time I went to France I'd make sure I could speak the language. And even, oddly enough, despite the fact that I actually enjoy learning languages. Writer's logic.

I'm using Rosatte stone, which is great for learning nouns and verbs and adjectives like colour and number, but absolutely terrible for the more subtle nuances of language like pronouns, abstract verbs (or abstract anything), grammar, possessives, and anything other than vocab, really. You're shown a picture of a girl holding a pen, and given a phrase. You repeat the phrase. You can even match the phrase to the picture later on,or similar pictures, based on your ability to recognise the word 'girl' and 'pen', but you have no way of knowing what it was that phrase actually says. A girl and a pen? The girl's pen? A girl with a pen? A girl has a pen? The girl likes her pen? No idea. It's down to how you've interpreted the image. They then try to build on this complete absence of understanding, and you end up with an extremely superficial grasp of the language. I spent an entire chapter lesson thinking they were trying to teach me present and past tense, when in fact they were teaching negative nouns.

I've taken to having Google Translate open on the other screen. New phrases are typed in, I see what they're trying to teach me, and we go from there. This pretty much violates their notion of "natural language learning", where you learn by being immersed in the language - it's never translated back to your native tongue, you work purely in the learned language. But static images really can't convey abstract concepts like possession vs use vs proximity, and these concepts are crucial to language.

I don't know if I really have a point here, other than that I think it's fascinating just how complex our communication has become. We have concepts that cannot be reliably expressed in any other form. And yet, there still exist languages that have no number words, or no pronouns, or no measurement of time, distance or count - because the people using that language have never needed it. There's a school of thought that language controls our thinking, because thoughts need to be expressed in words. I find that a flimsy argument in some respects - it certainly is possible to think without words, and the connections between ideas are far faster and more efficient when you don't slow them down to force them into language. But there is the notion that as a culture, there are entire notions that are left behind if they're not catered for by your language.

I've run into the issue once or twice. At times, when I've been utterly exhausted or running a dangerous fever, I've had episodes where I have woken and my brain's reality check had gone for lunch. My theory is that some sections of my brain were still "alseep", and I had no idea what was real, what was out of memory or imagination. I couldn't remember my name, my life, or even that it was impossible for there to be a spaceship outside my bedroom door and the toasters to be having a revolution and siding with the vampires. The notion of 'me' was entirely gone, I was just a floating experience, scrambling to make sense of things with absolutely no compass for what was possible and what wasn't.

It is extroadinarily difficult to communicate this notion of depersonalisation using a tool that assumes the speaker has some form of identity. I say "I felt" but there was no 'me'. There was a focus of experience, but no personality inside. I couldn't remember what it felt like to be me - I couldn't even remember that I was supposed to be able to feel that way. Like a blank slate, but a slate that still cares for its own existence, and is resolute that no damn toaster is going to feed it to a vampire, spaceship or none. We can't rationally discuss entities that experience this. Just like those Amazon tribes can't discuss how many animals they hunted, or how old they are, or where they were last winter.

Perhaps that's one of the points of science fiction - to find the concepts that we haven't needed to talk about yet, so we can stretch our language to fit them.

 

There've been a couple of posts lately in various blogs I read about literature vs genre. Ursula le Guin's post Petty Expectations stood out for me, especially her examination of the Y.A publishing trends. Go read, I'll wait.

The argument of literature vs genre, in all its forms, is a bugbear of mine. Largely because it crippled my writing for years. I spent four years in a degree that worshipped literature, where my desire to play with otherworldly ideas was met with scorn and, on occasion, pity. I accepted and resented their assumption that literature was intrinsically "better" than genre, and despaired as I realised that it was not what I loved to write. But it was what I had to write, or fail. And I developed a terrible habit: I wrote to show I was clever. And I kept that habit for another three years after I left.

It didn't stop me writing. But my stories tended to hit people over the head with their concept, and shout There! Aren't I smart, Oooh, is it the old lady or the girl? Faces or vase? Isn't your mind blown? Hmm? Hmm? Praise me, praise me! They weren't bad, per se. Perhaps a little self-satisfied. But it was limiting what I could write - I would only write what I thought could be clever. And that's ridiculous.

My mother has an apt phrase for the distinction between genre and literature: one is written primarily to entertain, the other primarily to communicate a message or theme. Neither is better than the other, they're just different priorities.

The reason genre gets so bad a wrap is frankly that our various puritanical influences have devalued and even perverted the notion of entertainment for its own sake, and people forget that there is often a message or theme behind the genre-work, it's just not the primary purpose. But being 'entertained' just for its own sake is seen as wrong, somehow. A waste of time and resources, childish, pseudo-masturbation for those who couldn't put their brains to deeper thought, and that prejudice prevails over any closer examination of the merits of the work.

The reason literature is seen as so high and mighty is that so many of those books have forgotten the 'entertain' component entirely - and gotten away with it, too, for the same reason.

Books that have both rise above their category, whatever it is. But while we might scorn a message-less genre book, literature that doesn't entertain is alright - you're just not 'deep' enough to get it. Or smart enough. You haven't seen the cleverness of the work. How the author pulled in components from these classic (and also probably not very entertaining) texts, how the symbolism fliped the whole story on its head, and even though it has no protagonist, no plot, no entertainment value and is in fact a very boring diatribe about a chair in somebody's living room, it works, you see.

It's the same principle behind the incoherence of many academic texts - if you don't understand it, it must be good. Because if you admit you don't understand it, everyone else will look at you, shake their heads, and try patiently to explain it to you in as complex and convoluted manner as possible to disguse the fact that they don't get it either. It's an agreed code of conduct. They spent ten years of their lives geting to a place where they could garner respect for pretending to understand things; if people start writing things simply, then anyone could get in.

I should point out here that by 'they', I don't mean indivuals. I don't think any of my professors ever thought "No, I can understand too much of this, take it away and obfuscate it until I'm only 30% sure I even know what you're talking about". This is a mob-process, created by the gathering of specifically-similar individuals into its own entity, and propelled forward by the momentum of its own existence. Its purpose is purely to maintain the status quo - to keep itself in the undercurrent of the mob. And it does this by seducing the newcomers into unknowingly believing in it.

I'm not saying "don't write literature". I'm not even saying "don't write experimental literature that doesn't work", because you can't find what does work until you've found a bunch of things that don't. I am saying:

don't feel that "just" entertaining people isn't enough don't feel that you have to make some new and groundbreaking point about humanity with every story don't feel you have to be clever - don't try to be clever. 

Just let the story be what it needs to be. There are no new ideas. Especially now, when everyone and their dog is publishing. Ever since we had fire, we had stories to entertain us while we huddled in from the cold. So tell us one that speaks to you. That's all you need to do.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Where'd you lot come from?

Last week, our inhabitants became settlers from another world, which brought up a whole lot of new questions - namely, what the hell are you lot doing here, don't you know that thing's gonna blow soon?

Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

A short one today, because it's now that time of semester when my brain starts melting from answering student questions and resolving staff problems.

Heat

Our ice-world is volcanic, but it's still going to be uncomfortably cold to live on. While our inhabitants can huddle near volcanic vents and lava beds, heat is still going to be scarce - fire is difficult to create on an iceworld, and wood requires venturing up to the surface anyway, so our inhabitants are either going to have to have a technological adaptation to ward off the chill, or be physically adapted to deal with it.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

The sixty-fourth day of Fentebruary

 Our slightly-larger-than-earth ice planet rotates around its deadly start once every 120 years, while its three moons - a small dark, medium red and large white - loop around once every 426, 1150 and 5840 days respectively. We have four eclipses, occuring every 1380 days (dark-red), 7008 days (dark-white), 18396 days (red-white) and 22075 days (triple eclipse). That's earth-days, by the way - 24-hour rotations. We could change the day length (planetary rotation's more or less whatever you want it to be - it's dependant on how fast things were going when the planet was formed, and tidal locking stuff, so have at it. Anything up to about 96 hours is okay- after that, the temperature fluctutation between night and day gets too extreme. Also keep in mind the faster your rotation, the more volatile your weather.) but we've already got complicated things here, let's keep it simple.

I've always loved stories with double meanings, things that leave it to the audience (or reader) to decide one way or another. Not just 'does this happy ending last', but the meaning of the piece altogether. Margaret Atwood's A Handmaiden's Tale is perhaps the best example of this I've ever seen. It's something I've tried several times myself in short stories - unsuccessfully so far. I suspect that's largely to do with the fact that I couldn't decide / never knew which of several versions was actually happening, which made it impossible to write clearly. That and I always aimed for something far too complex to be ambiguous.

Having just seen Inception, which pulls this trick off beautifully, I think I'm getting a better idea of just why my previous attempts fell apart.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Over the moon

Our bigger-and-heavier-than-Earth planet orbits around its deadly star every 120 years. That's a looong time to wait for Christmas - almost two generations. It'd be nice if they had something else to look at in the meantime.

Satellites are important to a planet's health and not just from a spiritual or aesthetic perspective of the inhabitants. Orbiting satellites help prevent tidal locking - a planet being stuck with the same side always facing its sun, the way the moon always faces the same side to earth. A planet that's tidally locked to a sun will fry on one side and freeze on the other, becoming rapidly uninhabitable. Satellites also help protect a planet from passing comets and asteroids, by influencing the gravitational pull or even providing a physical shield (if we're lucky).

With a solar year of 120 years, I'd like to add a couple of moons in there - it'll help break up that 120 years with varying kinds of eclipses and alignments. And besides, multiple moons is a great ingredient for inventing religions and cultures.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Planetary plans

So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?

Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Starting with stars

I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.

Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.

I've always loved surreal art. Or perhaps realistic-surrealist - where both the familiar and absurd are constructed photorealistically. It's a difficult stunt - most often, the meld between reality and unreality is difficult; there's a 'seam' in the art, a place where it's clear the concepts are changing.

It's less obvious with different styles. Vladimar Kush's work, for example, has a clear illustrative style, which helps blend the concepts, similar to the great Dali. But it's the realistic ones - the ones where I can believe the absurdity with just as much conviction as the mundane - that really get me. I saw one such artist several years ago in a local gallery - I wish I could remember his name. His paintings were 2m square, and therefore far too large for me to own, rich with vivid colours, and real enough to touch. The concepts were simple and clear - a caravan in the sky, a sunset being 'unzipped' into day, posts from a pier in the clouds (yes, the collection had a sky/clouds theme.) - but the execution was gorgeously realistic.

 

Religion is always a delicate topic. It's unfortunate that in most novels, it's treated with a very heavy-handed approach. Religion in speculative fiction seems to fall into one of: thinly-disguised Christianity, flat-out corrupt and evil, Gaia-worship, or non-existent.

Which is a shame - because religion will tell you so many things about a society's values and the context of a character. It's an area rich with potential for developing interesting philosophies and concepts. And creating a religion isn't that difficult (hello, Hubbard.) - it's just a matter of looking at how things interconnect.