44 posts tagged “sf/f fiction”

Apparently...

Mar 18, 2009
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I am:

Kurt Vonnegut

For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Which science fiction writer are you?

For the record, yes I do continue to insist that I'm a writer of fantasy, not science-fiction. So, perhaps this comparison is not entirely full of bogosity.

"Nar, Hippies!"

Feb 20, 2009
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Richard K. Morgan slags on Tolkein in a pretty good essay here.

“I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city”

- Gorbag - forgotten orc captain from Minas Morgul

[...]

That little twist of urban angst quoted above is one such trace. It comes at the end of The Two Towers and is part of an on-going set of dialogues between two orc captains at the tower of Cirith Ungol. And for a while - until Tolkien remembers these are Bad Guys and sends the wearyingly Good and Wholesome Sam up against them - we get a fascinating insight into life for the rank and file in Mordor. [...]

Go read the rest of it. He's pointing out what, for me, is one of the little joys of reading The Lord of the Rings, the stories of the little guys who aren't destined to be king of the world, who have their own motivations that keep them plodding forward so that somebody else can get all the glory when the battles are over. Like Morgan, I wish there more of that and less of the incessant elvish singing, but Tolkein is an acquired taste. I get that.

Morgan continues.

[...]

The great shame is, of course, that Tolkien was not able (or inclined) to mine this vein of experience for what it was really worth - in fact he seemed to be in full, panic-stricken flight from it. [...]

I'm a bit more forgiving of Tolkein than Morgan admits, on the grounds that I'm sympathetic to writers who suffer from what we now lovingly call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. (Tolkein probably would have called it Shell Shock, I'm guessing.) Here's Morgan walking himself back a bit:

[...] I suppose it's partially understandable - the generation who fought in the First World War got to watch every archetypal idea they had about Good and Evil collapse in reeking bloody ruin around them. It takes a lot of strength to endure something like that and survive, and then to re-draw your understanding of things to fit the uncomfortable reality you've seen. Far easier to retreat into simplistic nostalgia for the faded or forgotten values you used to believe in. [...]

Yeah. I'm okay with Tolkein not wanting to go there. The man earned a nice, quiet retirement by writing those books, so I'm completely fine with him leaving to posterity the process of figuring out how Good and Evil work in a world where nation-states resolve conflicts by turning their entire societies into industrial corpse manufacturing systems.

That said, I did note this: Mr. Morgan has apparently written a fantasy novel. I suppose I should read it.

The New Faith Of The True Emperor

Feb 2, 2009
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A while ago, I participated in a lexicon game run by a friend called The New Faith of the True Emperor. The result is at least a novel's worth of SF/F fiction content collaboratively competitively developed by a team of around twelve people. In this case, the theme is far-future dark science fiction weirdness.

It was great fun playing the game, even though real life intervened and made it tough for all of us to complete it. I had to drop out and wasn't able to return for the wind-up. Still, the resulting fiction product is interesting for its novelty. Like all lexicon games, the thing that separates the content from the more collaborative approach of building alternate world fiction is that the discontinuities aren't errors; they're a critical part of the content.

Anyway, this is a short message to promote the release of the material to the public. It has a non-commercial share-alike Creative Commons license, so it's completely free fiction. Enjoy!

Attention: Near-future Science Fiction Writers!

Jan 30, 2009
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When you next sit down to start extrapolating current trends in information technology and communications engineering for the purpose of envisioning what might be possible in the foreseeable future, would it kill you to find an actual information and communications engineering specialist who knows something about what are the insurmountable problems due to the laws of physics, and to buy that guy— sadly, it's almost always a guy— buy that guy a beer and ask him whether your cool whizzy SFnal idea on which you hope to hang your whole story is even remotely scientifically plausible?

Example: I have completely lost my patience with @FAMOUS_AUTHORS who utterly fail to comprehend A) It's The Latency Stupid, B) More CPUs ≠ Faster Algorithm Execution, and C) Global Multicast is Insecure and Unmanageable. I can sort of understand not grasping one or two of these concepts, but all three of them? Come on. Guys, you're not even trying, are you?

Without naming the guilty whose books I've read recently, let me just say that I'm particularly tired of the SFnal tropes that involve either A) unmanaged, zero-configuration, anarcho-utopian wide-area Wi-Fi mesh networks with the latency, bandwidth and error characteristics of highly redundant, subterranean fiber optic networks linked by big iron switches in hardened central offices; or B) emergent, sapient personalities hosted by digital processing functions embedded in a vast distributed global internet of small, commodity, even disposable devices.

I mean, at least when the previous generation decided to hand-wave over the small problem of how faster-than-light travel/communication is supposed to be possible, they were pretty open about it. They would at least go to the trouble of making up some bullshit technobabble about how some future scientist would get the credit for discovering the super-double-secret SF/F magick that allowed such stuff to happen despite our best current understanding of physics saying otherwise. Is that so goddamn difficult for you to do, too?

Seriously. I know you guys are hella freaking smart— much smarter than me. I know this because I hear it all the goddamn time. So why do I want to slap you for pretending to be stupid when I read your books? Why!?

All Hail MightyGodKing

Jan 9, 2009
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Just click through to his post where he photoshops the covers of old, popular genre books to give them titles that more accurately describe their contents. My favorite: Mary Sue Gets A Dragon, by Anne McCaffrey.

The Haskell Community Offers Advice To Writers...

Jul 24, 2008
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From a Haskell quotes archive:

<shapr> how will you know when you've written enough?

<kosmikus> I don't really know yet, but one of the following:

(a) if my supervisor tells me I have,

(b) if every chapter heading has content following it,

(c) if the deadline is there

<shapr> that's an excellent heuristic

This heuristic breaks down a bit for unpublished, unsigned fiction authors, i.e. A) you're unsigned, so nobody is going to tell you when you're done, B) you're unpublished as well as unsigned, so your deadlines are completely unfixed, so C) you're pretty much reduced to...

(b) if every chapter heading has content following it,

..which isn't so helpful, is it? Or is it?

Progress On Arts Of The Wize

Nov 3, 2007
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So, it's NaNoWriMo... and yeah, I know, I really should quit writing while I'm still unpublished, but I'm hoping I can finish up the second draft of Arts Of The Wize this month.

I just finished chapter seventeen (of twenty-three). The manuscript is currently 339 pages long, which is down from about 470 where the first draft was at this point in the story. I'm thinking the finished manuscript will come in right around 450 pages. Still longer than I hoped, but not too bad.

The story is really benefitting from the rewrite. I've pitched a lot of dross, and I've added a whole lot of additional grief for my protagonists to manage. (A comment from DCJ about one of the conceits I used in the first draft gave me an idea for a different one that I'm now finding works a metric truckload better...)

I'm in the process of cleaning up the mess of a final act I wrote in the first draft. Pretty much all my volunteers who read it complained they had no idea why anybody was doing what they were doing. Too many factions, with not enough clarity in what they wanted to accomplish. The fix for that was to stop trying to be so goddamned clever.

In the rewrite, I just show how there are really only two factions, with some individuals more or less committed to their respective causes than others. The jam my protagonists are facing is a lot more clear— they're basically caught between two powerful factions, and the only way for them to get out of it is to do something everyone thinks is impossible. To do it, they'll each have to cooperate in ways that neither of them ever through they would do. (Yes, this means I have to insert a twist in the climax that wasn't there in the first draft. It's going to be a pretty satisfying twist too, I think.)

I'm also eliminating a useless character (I might bring him back in another story), and using another existing character in his place— one that wasn't given enough room to play in the first draft. This has the effect of making one of the subplots Rone complained about into a much more relevant aspect of the story. As a result, I get to keep one of the other characters I really, really don't want to lose. Rone will probably still complain, but that's because it's just his way to complain about something.

There are four weeks left in NaNoWriMo. I have six chapters left. I doubt I'll finish before the end of the month. I'm pretty certain I'll finish before the end of the year. If I pick up the pace, and write every morning and evening on the commuter shuttle, I might make the goal. We'll see.

I may post more as the month rolls forward. If you don't hear from me, it's because I'm busy writing.

Yay! I Can Write Again!

Oct 24, 2007
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My employers have started operating a commuter coach service that runs between the Park And Ride center in Colma / Daly City straight to the corporate campus where my office is located. It only adds about fifteen minutes to my commute time, but it saves me about seven dollars per day in gasoline plus additional maintenance costs. The huge extra benefit to this is that I sometimes have time to spare while riding the coach to work on personal projects, and not company business.

This means I can write again. Progress on Arts Of The Wize is now proceeding at a completely reasonable pace. I feel certain I will finish the second draft by the end of the year, and probably not long after the Thanksgiving holiday.

I cannot tell you how happy this makes me.

Brewing And Other News

Sep 3, 2007
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Sadly, Michael Jackson has died. A brief moment of silence, please.

...

I bottled the Too Many Secrets porter today. Naturally, I had to forget something. This time it was to put the priming sugar into the fermenter before beginning the bottling procedure. So, that means spooning measured quantities of sugar-water into the bottles by hand before putting the caps on. The last time I did this, it mostly worked okay. Some bottles were more carbonated than others, but none of them were over- or under- carbonated.

I also cracked open a bottle of the latest Tumultuous Uproar imperial stout. It's excellent. This is my best batch yet. Smooth, perfectly carbonated, not a hint of off flavors, goes down easy, and rings your skull like the liberty bell. If you're a lucky recipient of one of these bottles recently, then feel free to open it whenever you want. No need to wait until October or November.

I'm participating in a Lexicon game run by my friend Dan Johnson. No, not the Dan Johnson you're think of— this one. The theme is epic, dark science fiction "in which rival clergy vie for influence in the creation of a new religion - one that will serve as the True Faith of all sentient life in the known and civilized universe. Will they succeed in forging a new creed, or will long-held dogma and ancient disagreements prove too bitter to overcome? Will they come together in the hopes of building a better civilization for the future - or does dark and dangerous blasphemy still secretly lurk in hearts and souls?"

If you're a friend of mine, and you'd like to follow along as we play it out, send me an email, and I'll send you a link to the server for you to bookmark. It's hosted by a friend of a friend on his personal home DSL account, so we don't want to publicize it very widely.

Finally, I'm not sure I'm going to be successful at keeping my dirty mitts off Arts Of The Wize much longer. Leopold is almost sort of starting to be manageable again. I'm getting hints that I might start having time off on Sundays again.

Sad News About <i>Arts Of The Wize</i>

Aug 6, 2007
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I shelved it today. I don't know when or if I will be able to return to it. I'm not optimistic.

This hurts a lot. I'm angry and very depressed over having to do this, but I don't have a choice. I simply don't have the time to devote to the project anymore. I've been ->this<- close to completion of the revised draft for five months now. In that time, I've been able to write three chapters. Three badly structured and desperately in need of rewrite chapters.

The reason? I've been trying to make progress by stealing little bits of time— an hour here, a half-hour there, usually when I'm least able to concentrate on what I'm doing to keep the narrative big picture straight— and it hasn't been working. I've been making a mess of it. Without reliably having blocks of time when I can write for at least four hours uninterrupted, I just can't work.

I don't have time like that anymore. Not like I used to, anyway. Work is more demanding than usual, and promises to be so for the next year at least (unless I get fired or something). I have to look after Leo full time on the weekends both days, and by the time he's asleep in the evenings and I've done all my other housework chores, I'm exhausted and I can't write. I've used up all the vacation time I can afford giving Gina the time off she needs to keep herself together, and there isn't any left for me. I thought I might have some time to write while I was in Chicago, doing IETF work, but that didn't happen. I was up to my eyeballs in work work work from morning to night.

What little time off from work and childcare and housework I get is structured from start to finish by obligations to extended family and close friends. This weekend, I was in Mt. Shasta visiting relatives. No time for writing. Last weekend, I got Sundary off to brew. No time for writing because Gina insisted that I brew. Other times, when I've been free from work and childcare and housework, have been assigned to similar non-writing activity. I'm not getting any time to write. I'm just not. I can't even get enough time to read other works in the genre I'm trying to write. Looking at the calendar, there won't be any time for writing between now and the end of the year, and I see no reason to believe there will be any time after that until Leo is old enough that I can start having Saturday mornings (or something) all to myself again.

This is maddening to me because I feel like an awful failure. For once in my life, I'd like to start a serious attempt to create something of lasting artistic nature (however pathetic and awful Arts Of The Wize would have eventually turned out to be, that's what I've been trying to do) and to finish what I started.