Edward Willett's Blog, page 57

Magebane picked up by Science Fiction Book Club

Wonderful to see that Magebane has been picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club; my last book the SFBC brought out in hardcover was Marseguro.

Their description is nice, too:

Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane is that rare breed of novel—a brisk-paced, twist-filled stand-alone adventure of science vs magic!

Four centuries ago, a devastating revolution swept the world, and the arrogant MageLords, who had long ruled by spell power, were driven to a distant land, protected by a magical Barrier.

With magic banished from the rest of the world, the MageLords devolved into legend, and people turned to science to improve their lives. Meanwhile, behind the Barrier, the magic-wielders' brutal rule has continued unabated.

But there are those who, for far different reasons, would change all that. And a young scientist's apprentice who breaches the Barrier in a newfangled air-ship may be just the pawn they need….

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Picking the Bones

This is an unpublished and, as far as I know, never-submitted short-short I rediscovered in my files. I think I may have written it at Banff during the Writing With Style workshop on writing science fiction with Robert J. Sawyer, the same workshop out of which came Marseguro .

The landing pod settled in the middle of the alien battlefield in an expanding cloud of copper-colored dust, its antigrav moaning away to nothing and its liftjets sighing into silence.

Vultor Caruso watched the pod's descent through binoculars from the ancient camouflaged pillbox buried in the nearest hill, his lips set in a thin, tight sneer. "Damn claim-jumpers," he muttered; after years of working on his own, he talked to himself. He thumbed the magnification control to max so he could read the registration markings on the pod's side. "Oh, that's clever," he snarled. "Too bloody damn clever. 'Interstellar Red Cross' my ass." He squinted through the binoculars. What was that smaller text underneath…? "'Retrieval and Rescue,'" he read, and jerked the binoculars down so hard the strap cut into the back of his neck. "As if any of us coyotes would ever need to be retrieved. As if we'd let them."

Something whined in his ear like a demented mosquito; he slapped a control on the harness of his multisuit and the sound died. The emergency call signal—he should've seen that coming. They'd play this 'Interstellar Red Cross' crap to the hilt, try to talk him into coming down to the pod, then grab him, lock him up, and strip-mine the site. He'd bet there was a full-sized digship waiting in orbit for the all-clear once they had him.

But they weren't going to get him. And they couldn't do a thing here until they did, because like any coyote worth his gravjuice, he'd seeded the whole battlefield perimeter with alarms and nanocameras. Anybody but him set foot in it, his ship would take their pictures, ID them, and squawk-burst it straight to the Patrol through one of the four quantamitters he'd left tucked in orbit—two t be found, and two for redundancy.

They had to grab him and his multisuit so they could deactivate that stuff, or else they might as well get the hell off. And there was no way they were going to grab him, not someone who'd spent the last twenty subjective Earth years salvaging alien materials and technology from the battlefields of some ancient interstellar war.

He saw movement, and raised the binoculars again. Two people emerged from the pod in white multisuits, and he ducked down quickly when he realized they had their own binox. He didn't need to see them, anyway. He knew what they'd do. They'd set down right where he'd stuck his dummyship, shouting out an ID signal identical to the one his real ship would have been sending out, if he'd been stupid enough to leave it on. They'd poke around, scan the horizon, maybe even yell if they were desperate enough—and right on cue, he heard a faint cry of "Mr. Caruso! Vultor Caruso!"

Idiots, he thought, and stayed put for the next three hours, never looking out. It'd taken him two days to find the hidden entrance to this pillbox. There was no way these clowns would find it before dark.

He was mildly surprised when he heard the rising howl of antigravs winding up, but kept his head down in case it was another trick. Only when the liftjets roared did he poke his eyes back up to the level of the weapons slit.

The pod was gone, leaving behind only another cloud of coppery dust.

Vultor crawled out of the pillbox and brushed off his multisuit. He spat on the ground, the spot of moisture turning the alien dust as bright-red as freshly spilled blood. Damn claim-jumpers had eaten up the best part of his day. He'd be lucky to get back to his ship by nightfall.

Damn stupid claim-jumpers, he amended to himself as he clambered down the back side of the hill. He surveyed the vast battlefield with satisfaction. Littered with the decayed remnants of ships, the crumbling exoskeletons of the long-dead aliens, and anonymous dust-covered mounds that might hold anything, it was the richest site he'd ever found. No wonder the claim-jumpers came after it, but to think a wily old wolf like him would come crawling out like a whipped puppy just because they pretended to be some kind of rescue team…rescue from what? Monsters? Nothing bigger than a rat lived on this dump of planet. He snorted, and set off across the battlefield.

He was halfway home, and the planet's tiny, brilliant star had just slipped behind the horizon, when he heard the moan of antigravs again. "Dammit, can't you take a hint?" he roared, and turned around, expecting to see the landing pod descending behind him.

For a long moment, nothing made sense. Lights wove through the stars in an intricate pattern, throwing off eye-searing flashes like fireworks. Antigravs moaned, rockets shrieked, explosions thundered the air.

It wasn't until the hulking ships thudded heavily down two hundred metres away and the insectoids swarmed out that he really understood.

The war had returned. And as the aliens raised their weapons in unison, as though driven by a single mind, Voltor had time for only one last thought:

What scavengers, he wondered, would pick his bones clean?

 

Willpower

The New Year may already be a little long in the tooth for a column on New Year's Resolutions, since many of them have already been broken, but, hey, maybe you're one of those still clinging to the hope that this year will be different than all the rest: in which case, this column's for you.

The key to keeping a resolution is willpower, obviously. But what is willpower? Is it some mysterious quality that some people have and others don't? Is it a virtue we can build in ourselves with practice? Is it what separates saints from sinners?

None of the above, say some scientists. According to Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist at the University of Florida, willpower is simply a form of mental energy, fueled, like all brain functions, by glucose in the bloodstream. And that means that like any other form of mental energy, it can be used up.

Baumeister, in a 2007 experiment, gave students an attention-taxing task (watching a boring video while ignoring words at the bottom of the screen), then rewarded them with a glass of lemonade. Half got lemonade made with real sugar, while the others got lemonade sweetened with Splenda. They were then given tests of self-control—and the students who had drunk Splenda-sweetened lemonade consistently performed worse. Their willpower was literally unfueled.

Baumeister has co-written a book on the subject, Willpower, with John Tierney, science columnist for the New York Times. He calls this state of mental fatigue "ego depletion," and there's really nothing we can do about it: it's just the way our brains work. So the real key to keeping resolutions, Baumeister and others believe, is, as Jonah Lehrer put it in a recent article for Wired.com, "to recognize the inherent weakness of the will."

Nothing displays that weakness better than New Year's resolutions. A 2002 study by John C. Norcross and other psychologists at the University of Scranton found that by the end of January 26 percent of resolvers had broken their resolutions. Half had broken them by March. By July, that had risen to 56 percent. A 2007 survey found that eventually 88 percent of all resolutions end in failure.

Bad statistics perhaps, but there's actually a flip side. Sure, only 44 percent of those who made resolutions continued to cling to them by July, but only four percent of a control group who had the same goals (i.e., losing weight) had made progress in that same amount of time. Resolutions, in other words, made it ten times more likely people would actually change what they wanted to change.

And despite the odds, some people do succeed at sticking to efforts at self-improvement. How do they do it?

A new study says it's not by any great feat of willpower, of which they have no more than anyone else. Rather, it's by application of careful strategy.

In this study, led by Wilhelm Hoffmann at the University of Chicago, 205 participants in Wurtzburg, Germany, received specially designed smartphones. Over a week, they were pinged seven times a day and asked to report whether they were experiencing a strong desire: if so, they were then asked to describe it, how strongly they felt it, and whether it caused an "internal conflict." If it did cause a conflict, they were asked about their ensuing success at controlling it: did they successfully thwart their desire to, say, eat a whole container of ice cream?

About half the desires were reported as causing internal conflict. In about 40 percent of those cases, the subject attempted to actively resist the desire. Resistance was not futile: only 17 percent of those desires that were resisted were acted upon, whereas 70 percent of desires that were not resisted were consummated.

The key finding, though, was that the best way to thwart self-conflicting desires isn't through the application of weak willpower, but by avoiding temptation in the first place. As Lehrer puts it, "unsuccessful dieters try not to eat the ice cream in their freezer, thus quickly exhausting their limited willpower resources," whereas "those high in self-control refuse to even walk down the ice cream aisle in the supermarket."

The latest scientific findings, to be sure: but what it all boils down to for me is an old saying I heard many times growing up: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."

If you don't want to yield to temptation, better to avoid it altogether: and maybe, just maybe, you'll actually keep your New Year's resolution.

(The photo: A dessert table at the International Festival of Wine & Food, Banff Springs Hotel.)

 

Saturday Special from the Vaults: A Speech by T. Walter Scott, First Premier of Saskatchewan, on the Occasion of SUMA's 2005 Convention

A few years ago, at the time of Saskatchewan's centennial celebrations in 2005, I had the opportunity to thrice portray T. Walter Scott, first premier of the province of Saskatchewan, and give a speech in his guise. Naturally, I made him a time traveler, so I could treat the whole thing a bit like a science fiction story.

Two of the occasions were to mark the centenary of the Hill Companies, intimately involved in the building of the city and province. One of those was here in Regina, the other in Calgary, where I got to poke fun at our neighbouring province in front of an august crowd that included the then-Premier of Alberta, Ralph Klein. So that was cool!

The following version of the speech was given at the 2005 convention of the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association's annual convention in Saskatoon.

It is a great privilege for me to be here on the occasion of the centennial convention of the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association.  My name is Thomas Walter Scott, and I have–or rather, from your point of view, had–the honor of being the first premier of the province of Saskatchewan.

You will forgive any confusion in tenses, I hope. For you, as I understand it, it is January 29, 2005.  However, when I awoke this morning, it was January 29, 1912.  I therefore bring you greetings, not only from the government of Saskatchewan, but also from what is, to you, the distant past, a time when this great province was not a hundred years old, or even ten years old, but barely six.

Before I enter into the substance of my remarks, I must first express my gratitude to Mr. H. G. Wells, without whose invaluable invention, the Time Machine, I would not have been able to be with you here today.

I confess that, having just arrived moments ago, I have no detailed knowledge of conditions in this Saskatchewan of almost a century in my future; but I have made a few observations already that imbue me with confidence that our glorious province has indeed blossomed into greatness as I have always predicted it would.

I note, for example, that the legendary hospitality of the Saskatchewan people has not changed; for after having left the Time Machine in the street outside this great auditorium in a spot conveniently marked with the image of a wheeled chair–an image which looked remarkably like the time machine itself, and which I therefore took to be an indication I should stop there–I glanced back to see a gentlemen in a blue uniform writing a welcome note and placing it in a prominent place where I could not fail to see it upon my return, a generous action indeed.  I must congratulate the current mayor and city council of Saskatoon for establishing what is obviously a corps of men whose duty it is to issue friendly greetings to newcomers. I certainly look forward to reading his warm welcome when I return to the Time Machine after my address to you, and I trust that those of you representing other municipalities issue similar greetings to newcomers to your towns and cities.

And speaking of the street outside, it was with great pleasure that I noted it was paved, and bordered by concrete curbs and sidewalks. This is a great advance from the province's early days; our standing joke in 1905 was that when it rains one could pick up enough topsoil to claim a homestead simply by walking down the street of any Saskatchewan city.  As one early resident of the province wrote home to Ontario, "we welcome the winters for the reprieve they offer from the sea of mud we live in the other three months"!

But even in my own time, we have made great strides in improving the roads of our cities.  Indeed, just last year, in the spring of 1911, we inaugurated that most civilized means of transportation, a streetcar system, in Regina.  Though I did not see it in my brief sojourn outside, I am certain that Saskatoon and other Saskatchewan communities must by now also enjoy this modern convenience. No doubt most of you rode these streetcars as you made your way to the convention from your various hotels.

I note that this room is lit most brilliantly by electricity–so brilliantly, indeed, that it is difficult to see anything of any of you from here on the stage–which gives me confidence that all the cities of Saskatchewan must enjoy the benefits of electrical power.

Similarly, I am confident that most residents of Saskatchewan now have access to a telephone.  This is of great concern in my own time.  In the last election, in 1908, our Liberal platform called for increased telephone service, and we have committed ourselves to public ownership of long-distance lines.  However, I am firmly against the public ownership of local telephone companies, or other public utilities.  Government oversight, yes; government control, no. This, of course, contrasts with the well-known Conservative position in my day that all public utilities should be government owned.  Now, I know that the Urban Municipalities of Saskatchewan have called upon my government to place telephones under public ownership.  However, I am sure by your time that concern has long since faded.  I have often said it would be suicidal for any government of Saskatchewan to try to provide a telephone to every rural resident. That is best left to private enterprise; and no doubt the decades have proved me right. No doubt by your time hundreds of local telephone companies across Saskatchewan are providing the handful of telephones needed by the smaller towns,you're your organization and the Conservatives alike have come around the wisdom of the staunch Liberal belief that government should not assume ownership of ventures that could be handled by cooperative or private enterprise.

You know, when Saskatchewan became a province, just seven years ago for me, and a hundred for you, there were only 60 incorporated villages, ten towns and three cities–and yet, the Union of Saskatchewan Municipalities held its inaugural convention, cementing its reputation as a very forward-looking organization. In fact, it wasn't until 1908, the year my Liberal government won re-election, that the Legislature passed the acts that set up the current system of cities, towns, villages and rural municipalities, and created the new Department of Municipal Affairs.

No doubt the acts have been amended many times since.  You may find it amusing to know that in those early days, a village could be incorporated as a town with a mere 500 residents, and it took only 5,000 to become a city!  But villages longed to be towns. Among other things, towns could acquire parks and recreation grounds, and establish skating and curling rinks.  (The latter power was insisted upon by the many Scots in the Legislature!)

And in my time, villages are springing up and becoming towns with astonishing speed.  To name just three, Melville, Outlook and Watrous hardly existed in 1907, organized as villages late in 1908, and incorporated as towns in 1909.  No doubt by your day they each contain many thousands of residents and are thriving cities.

When the province began, we had only three cities.  Already, in 1911, we have four.  And their populations continue to soar.  In 1901, Regina had just 2,249 inhabitants; that swelled to 6,169 five years later, and 30,214 in 1911.  Saskatoon had only 113 in 1901, 3,011 in 1906 and 12,000 in 1911.  Moose Jaw sprang from 1,558 in 1901 to 13,823 in 1911, and Prince Albert from 1,785 in 1901 to 6,254 in 1911.  Overall, the province's population has almost doubled, from 257,000 in 1906 to nearly half a million in 1911.

And thus, though I have had no opportunity to confirm it, I am confident that today, in twenty-ought-five, Saskatchewan has proved the prediction I have made often:  "Just as rue as the sun shines there will be within this Province alone some day a population running into the tens of millions."

That being the case, many of you must represent urban municipalities with populations in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.  Regina alone, I am confident, has long outstripped the great cities of my age–London, New York, Paris–in population, beauty and culture, and though no doubt Saskatoon continues to lag behind Regina in population, even with only half as many people, I am certain it, too, must be a great city, as must Moose Jaw, Prince Albert, and all the rest.

I did my best, as premier, to spread the benefits of province-hood to all our cities. Regina, of course, was made capital and received the Legislative Building; Saskatoon received the University. Prince Albert was given the provincial penitentiary, and North Battleford the mental health hospital.  And Moose Jaw, the second-largest city in the province in 1911, received…um…well…well, no doubt something came up. Later.  After my time?

Perhaps I can share a little bit more about my time, though the political concerns of 1906 may make you laugh in this more sophisticated age.

I am ashamed to say, for example, that there is great concern about corruption in government in 1912.  My promise on becoming premier in 1905 was that I would present to the people of this province good, clean, honest government.  I am confident that the governments I have formed have set just such an example, so that never again have the Saskatchewan people seen politicians sullied by scandal.

In fact, if I may be permitted one partisan note, I am confident that my Liberal government has presented such an example of good government that Liberals continue to govern this province to this very day.

Peace, Progress and Prosperity was my slogan for the 1905 election.  I am certain all three have continued to be the lot of Saskatchewan residents in the years that lie in your past, but are still in my future.  This province's people have unlimited potential. Already, in my time, your association has played a key role in unlocking that potential.  The fact that I am here helping you celebrate your 100th anniversary is proof to me that you have continued to do so.

And…Mr. Wells told me I shouldn't tell you this, but…well, I happen to know you will continue to play a vital role in Saskatchewan for decades to come:  you see, I must now bid you farewell, remount the Time Machine, and make my way to my next speaking engagement–the bicentennial convention of the Saskatchewan Urban Muncipalities Association, scheduled for Saturday, January 31, 2105.  Reserve your hotel rooms now!

My congratulations and best wishes once again. Thank you for your kind attention.

(The photo: the Saskatchewan Legislative Building at sunset.)

 

 

 

 

Weight-loss through writing?

One of the risks of being a writer is a tendency to fall into sedentarianism (which isn't a word, but ought to be; clearly, it refers to a religious belief that the best way to avoid sin is to do as little as possible).

Aside from those keeners who have set up combination desks/treadmills (Arthur Slade, I'm looking at you), a poor choice for those of us who cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, much less walk and type at the same time, most writers do little but sit on their rear ends and tap on a keyboard.

It was therefore with great interest that I read a press release describing a study just published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which indicates that one key to losing weight might be, not physical exercise, but a writing exercise.

The study was conducted by Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo and Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University.

The researchers recruited 45 female undergraduates who had a body mass index of 23 or higher. A BMI within the range of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal weight; a little more than half of the women (58 percent) fell outside that range and thus would be considered overweight or obese.

Each woman was weighed, and then provided with a list of important values: i.e., creativity, politics, music, and relationships with friends and family members. Each woman was asked to rank the values in the order of how important they were to her.

With that established, half the women were told to write for 15 minutes about whichever value they had ranked most important, while the other half (the control group) were told to write about why a value they personally ranked low might be valuable to someone else.

Between one and four months later, the women came back to be weighed again, and, rather astoundingly, the women who had written about an important value had lost an average of 3.41 pounds, while the women in the control group had (as is typical of undergraduates at university) gained an average of 2.75 pounds.

Why? Well, Logel's theory is that the women who wrote about values that were important to them felt better about themselves, and that led to better habits: perhaps writing about an important value made a particular woman feel so good that she went home and, for once, didn't snack; and that, in turn, helped derail a snacking habit that had been contributing to her weight gain.

The results tie in with previous studies that have found that thinking about values, even briefly, can have a big effect. For example, Cohen has used the same technique with minority seventh-graders who were underperforming relative to their white peers. The results: those who did the exercise continued to perform better for years thereafter.

"We have this need to feel self-integrity," Logel is quoted as saying. "We can buffer that self-integrity by reminding ourselves how much we love our children, for example."

So does that mean the key to losing weight is as simple as writing about something you value, once, for just 15 minutes?

Naturally, the researchers urge caution, and say it's too soon to tell. They point out that the women in the study didn't know that writing about values was supposed to help them live healthier, although they may have twigged, since most psychological studies don't require a weigh-in.

Logel herself, however, is a firm believer in the benefit of focusing on things of value. She carries a keychain that reminds her of one of her own important values (although the press release doesn't say exactly what it is, personally, not forgetting my keys is something I value).

And, Logel says, the ultimate goal of all her research along these lines is to find out what people can do to deliberately benefit from this fascinating effect.

In the meantime, she says, "There's certainly no harm in taking time to reflect on important values and working activities you value in your daily life."

Personally, I just like the idea of a writing exercise to help you lose weight.

It sure beats that other kind of exercise…although somehow I suspect the panting-and-sweating kind would still be a good idea, too.

Read My Book: Magebane

QC   and Bridges , weekly free-circulation entertainment/lifestyle magazines put out by the Regina Leader Post and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix , respectively, have both just run what I wrote for their popular "Read My Book" feature focusing on local authors' works. Here's what I had to say about Magebane (the online version here at the Star-Phoenix's website is slightly truncated):

First things first: yes, Lee Arthur Chane, c'est moi, Edward Willett. The pseudonym (a marketing decision by my publisher, DAW Books in New York, because this book marks my move into fantasy from science fiction) is actually the middle names of my two older brothers and myself.

If you're not familiar with the term "fantasy novel," well, The Lord of the Rings would be the classic example. Or you might have seen A Game of Thrones on HBO, based on George R.R. Martin's epic series. Essentially, fantasy novels take place in mythical lands, and typically involve magical or supernatural elements.

In Magebane, the mythical land is the Kingdom of Evrenfels, ruled by a powerful nobility known as the MageLords, because they can use magic. They rule with an iron fist over the Commoners, who have no magic.

But the MageLords haven't always lived in Evrenfels. Eight centuries ago they were chased out of their old kingdom by a Commoner revolt, led by something or someone called the Magebane that rendered their magic useless. They fled to the far side of the world, dragging some Commoners with them, and hid themselves away behind an impenetrable magical barrier. But now various MageLords would like to remove that barrier, each for his or her own reason, a new Magebane has arisen…and there are, bubbling up from the increasingly technological advanced Commoners the MageLords oppress, new rumors of rebellion.

What no one in Evrenfels realizes is that the Commoners outside the kingdom, for whom the MageLords are nothing but myth, have explored the world right up to the Great Barrier itself, which they see as a baffling scientific anomaly. Their technology has advanced even further than that of the Commoners in Evrenfels: so far, in fact, that one day a young man crash-lands in the kingdom aboard an experimental airship that has just flown over the Barrier…and throws everyone's schemes into turmoil.

Though a land of magic and MageLords may seem far removed from mundane Saskatchewan, local readers will actually find themselves very much at home in Evrenfels, a land cold in winter and hot in summer, largely prairie in the south, with lakes and forests in the north. They may find themselves even more at home in the capital city of New Coroba, where the King rules from a white stone palace (complete with equestrian statue in the formal gardens out front) set in a park on the southern shore of a man-made lake: albeit it a lake and park and palace protected from winter's wrath by a magical dome that makes it always spring. (OK, yes, that was pure wish-fulfillment on my part.)

Magebane came out in early October, and reviewers have been kind: in fact, Publishers Weekly calls it "spectacular," and says, "Double and triple crosses, fast-paced action, and powerful moral conviction will have readers hanging on every word."

Belated Saturday Special from the Vaults: Sonnet Sonnet

Delayed once more by festive cheer,

I make my first post of the year!

***

How serious are you, my poet friend,

About the craft to which your heart aspires?

Do your words borrow pain, and seek to lend

Unto the world the vision it requires?

Do you object to light verse as a waste

Of energy best spent on grander things?

Do you desire to scale the heights and taste

The clear, sweet air where lofty language rings?

To don poetic glory like a bonnet,

My friend, I think that you should write a sonnet.

The annual alcohol column

Every Christmas/New Year's holiday season brings with it a spate of articles about alcohol—you know, like this one.

Alcohol is a very odd thing for us to imbibe, when you come right down to it. It is, after all, the waste product of another life-form: namely, yeast. There are very few other life forms whose waste products we willingly take into our body. So why do we do it?

The answer, of course, is that this particular waste product produces interesting side-effects when ingested: side-effects that humans discovered very, very early on (beer and wine-making were already well-established in the Middle East by 1500 B.C.).

Although alcohol, like barbiturates, tranquilizers and anesthetics, is a depressant (in that it depresses the central nervous system, not in that it makes you depressed, although, of course, it may), at low doses it actually acts as a mild stimulant, producing exhilaration, loss of restraints and inhibitions and talkativeness—which is what makes it popular at parties.

At higher doses you begin to see things like slurred speech, sensory disturbance, poor balance and impaired judgment, and as the blood-alcohol concentration continues to increase, you eventually reach fun things like unconsciousness, coma, and, ultimately, death. Which are not so popular at parties.

Alcohol is easily absorbed into the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. How quickly it is absorbed determines how quickly its effects are felt. (Drinking while eating is less intoxicating than drinking on an empty stomach, because the fat and protein in the foods in the stomach delay alcohol absorption.)

Alcohol is metabolized by the liver, at a rate of about 3/4 to one drink per hour. Drink more rapidly than that, and your blood alcohol concentration rises. Unfairly (but nothing says physiology has to be fair), if a man and a woman drink the same amount, the woman will usually become more intoxicated. Men have more of an enzyme called dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol, and also tend to have more body water than women, which means the alcohol is more diluted than in women. Also, men tend to be larger.

As I noted earlier, every year new alcohol-related stories emerge just in time for the festive season. It's almost as if writers expect people to imbibe more at this time of year than others. Go figure.

This year's most interesting example: a press release about new research indicating that alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing.

At the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., psychologist Lorenzo Stafford asked 80 participants (69 females and 11 males, all regular drinkers, aged between 18 and 28) to rate a selection of drinks on the basis of strength, sweetness and bitterness. While they were doing so, they were subjected to four different levels of distraction, from none all the way up to loud club-style music playing at the same time as someone was reading a news report.

The participants rated drinks significantly sweeter overall when they were listening to music alone: which is interesting, because it indicates it's not the level of distraction but music specifically that makes alcohol taste sweeter. Since we tend to drink more of things that are sweet than things that are bitter, this could explain why, as previous research has shown, we tend to drink more and faster when loud music is playing.

Ah, you may say, but even if I drink a little too much, I always walk home rather than drive, so I'm all right, right?

Not so fast. Also appearing just in time for the holidays: an article detailing the dangers of walking under the influence. According to the journal Injury Prevention, from 1986 to 2002, 410 pedestrians in the U.S. were killed on New Year's Day. Of those, 58 percent had high blood-alcohol concentrations. In 2008, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 38 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood-alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent. Never mind people who fall down the stairs or trip at home.

So this New Year's Eve, remember this sage advice: even though you're imbibing another life form's waste product, you don't have to get wasted.

(The photo: Beer in winter. Big Rock Traditional, for those who really, really need to know.)

Belated Saturday Special from the Vaults: Landscape with Alien

This week's (two-days-late-because-of-Christmas) Saturday special from the vaults is an unpublished short story that won an award in the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild's short fiction competition sometime in the 1990s…I think. If I'm remembering right. It never found a publisher, but I used to read it at school and library readings from time to time, though I haven't for quite a well: I have newer, better stuff. Still, it's not a bad little story. (I sound like Linus looking at Charlie Brown's pathetic little Christmas tree…must be the influence of the season.) I hope you enjoy it.

Kareen Aldona added a white highlight to the orange flank of a boulder, considered a moment, enlarged it a bit, then set her brush aside with a sigh. She had hoped to finish the painting that day, but shadows were lengthening in the canyon, and it would take her most of the two remaining hours of daylight to get back to the colony.

She stood, stretching, then moved back from the easel to compare her creation to the real thing. Not bad, she thought, but the light still isn't quite right…. She shook her head. The sun, slightly more orange than Earth's, had a subtle effect very difficult to capture. "Next time," she promised herself. She cleaned her brushes, then packed them, her palette and her paints into her metal art case, which she stuffed into her backpack.

She stored the painting and easel inside the nearby cave she had discovered on her first visit to the canyon, then filled her canteen at the gurgling spring further inside. When she returned to the cave's mouth she saw the alien for the first time.

Though slim and no taller than she, its thick, black fur made it look much larger. Eyes of brilliant, liquid yellow gleamed from its long-muzzled face as it picked its way on broad, clawed feet through the rocks. It wore only a thin gray belt, from which hung a knife and a leather pouch. A slender rod of crystal glittered on a silver chain around its neck.

Kareen's breath froze in her throat, and at the same instant the creature looked up and saw her, and stopped. Even across the fifty meters separating them, she heard its low, menacing growl.

It can't be real! her mind kept insisting, despite the evidence of her eyes. There's no intelligent life on this planet. Dad's the colony biologist, he should know, right? The survey showed nothing. No cities, no villages, not even cave dwellings!

But the impossibility of the alien's presence didn't make it go away. It stood its ground, staring at her, the growl rising to a cat-like moan that made the hair on the back of her neck rise up.

Kareen wanted to turn and run, but had nowhere to go. The only way into or out of the canyon was the slippery, rock-strewn slope above above the cave, and the thought of attempting it with the alien behind her was too terrifying to contemplate.

Never taking its eyes from her, the creature slowly sank crosslegged to the ground. It drew its knife and thrust it into the ground close by its side.

Kareen tried to swallow with a throat suddenly as dry as the canyon floor. The alien's message seemed obvious; "I'm armed. Come no closer."

Why doesn't it just attack? she wondered sickly. I couldn't fight it. I don't even have a club.

She sat down on a large rock before her trembling knees collapsed, wrapped her arms around her legs and bleakly met the steady glare of the alien. But it doesn't know that, she thought suddenly. It doesn't know what kind of weapons I've got. It doesn't realize I'm helpless…

She tensed as the creature reached into its pouch and took out a transparent, glassy cylinder. Still staring intently at Kareen, it took the crystal rod from around its neck and touched it to the cylinder.

Light flashed and Kareen jumped to her feet. Now what? A gun? A grenade? I have to convince it I'm dangerous, too!

She struggled out of the straps of her backpack, and opened it to take out the art case. The alien hissed softly when it saw the silver box. "Same to you," Kareen whispered.

Holding the case on her lap, she took out a sketch pad and a pencil, carefully keeping the lid of the case between her and the alien, so it couldn't see exactly what she was doing. "This ought to puzzle it," she muttered. And at least she could leave a record of what killed her for the rest of the colonists…

…for her parents…

Blinking back sudden tears, she rummaged in the pack again and pulled out her binoculars, hoping to make out what the alien was doing with the cylinder and rod. She had the satisfaction of seeing the alien snatch up its knife as she pointed the binoculars in its direction, but even through them the cylinder was only a meaningless, light-filled tube.

The creature watched her a moment, then thrust the knife into the ground again–a little closer, this time. Good, she thought. Let it worry for a while.

Taking an occasional look through the glasses to get the details right, she began to sketch, while the alien continued to work on the glowing cylinder Kareen was convinced was a weapon. She only hoped the alien believed her imaginary weapons were as real as its own.

When the alien became hard to see, slowly disappearing into the gathering purple haze of twilight, Kareen put her sketchpad away. After the first few minutes when her hand had been inclined to shake, she had drawn well, better than usual, capturing a good likeness of the alien, even forgetting her fear for minutes at a time…but somehow her artistic success didn't seem nearly as important as it usually did.

She had decided what to do. Though for all she knew the alien could see in the dark, she had to try to sneak out of the canyon in the night. She couldn't just sit there, fighting sleep, picturing the alien creeping closer and closer…

She put the sketchbook in an outside pocket of the backpack and took out her canteen, taking a much-needed drink of water. Her stomach growled, reminding her of her missed supper. Her parents would be beginning to worry. Within an hour or two they would be organizing a search party.

Too long, she thought, waiting for dusk to become full night, watching the constant flickering glow that marked the alien's location.

Abruptly the light vanished. Kareen gasped, then scrambled up, listening.

She heard nothing but the faint whisper of wind across the stones.

Now, she thought. Wiping sweaty palms on the front of her shirt, she began picking her way over the stone-strewn canyon floor toward the slope behind her.

Her progress was agonizingly slow. Every few seconds she froze, listening for the clicking of claws on the rocks or soft, hissing breathing. But hearing nothing did not calm her fears. When she couldn't hear the alien, it could be anywhere.

When at last she reached the canyon wall, the first part of the ascent proved no problem. The gentle slope at the bottom base was no harder to traverse by darkness than by daylight.

But halfway up the slope steepened. Flat, slippery rocks shifted treacherously beneath her feet, and as they crashed down behind her, Kareen realized all hope of slipping out of the canyon unnoticed was gone.

Heart pounding with fear and exertion, she reached the last stretch of the climb, four meters of nearly vertical rock. She had climbed two meters when, as she reached for a new handhold, she heard rocks she had not dislodged crashing down into the canyon.

She jerked her head around to look, though there was nothing to see, and her feet slipped. For a moment she hung desperately by the fingers of one hand, scrabbling with the other, and then the rock gave way and she fell.

Agony stabbed her ankle as she hit the slate-strewn slope and rolled, gaining momentum, in a growing avalanche of rocks, down to the very bottom of the wall she had so torturously climbed.

As she lay dazed, bruised and bleeding, the rocks gradually stopped shifting and silence returned…or near-silence. Then the sliding of the rocks resumed. Someone–or some thing–was coming down the slope.

Kareen rolled over and sat up, but when she touched her ankle pain lanced through it, and she knew she couldn't run, couldn't even stand. Dust ground between her teeth, and she felt for her canteen, but the backpack that contained it had vanished, torn off somewhere during her headlong plunge.

Now she heard what she had only imagined before, the click of claws on rocks. The sound stopped. Light flickered up the slope as the alien bent over something wedged between two boulders…her backpack. She watched it paw through her belongings, sniffing the brushes and paints, paging through her sketchbook. It bent down and picked up the pack and the light went out again.

By the time it reached Kareen the pounding of her heart in her ears was as loud as its claws on the rocks. Finally it loomed above her, a blacker lump in the darkness. It tossed something at her and she almost screamed, but it was only her sketchpad. Light suddenly glowed from the crystal rod around the alien's neck, and Kareen saw the sketchpad was open to her drawing of the alien.

From its pouch the alien drew out the glassy cylinder that had so frightened her, and, kneeling beside her, touched it with the crystal rod. A soft glow suffused it, and Kareen gasped.

Her own figure appeared in three dimensions inside the cylinder's walls, rendered in perfect detail and color, sitting on a rock with her art case open and a pencil in her hands.

The alien made a sound like a soft purr and set the cylinder on the ground beside the sketchpad. Then it took Kareen's canteen from the backpack and, supporting her head with its warm hand, trickled cold water between her lips.

Saturday Special from the Vaults: Dragons over Europe

This article appeared in InQuest , a now-defunct magazine that focused on games and game reviews–originally, when I wrote for it ca. 1996, only on collectible card games. This story was based on the premise that creatures from Dominia, one of the multiple parallel worlds in the card game Magic: The Gathering , invaded Earth in the past, so I guess you could call it alternate history! It was fun to write, anyway: it's kind of like a science column written around a complete made-up "discovery."

One other fun note: the scientists quoted are real scientists, and the quotes are real, too. They all graciously agreed to provide expert commentary for this obviously fictional "science" article.

Bob Rubman didn't expect to make an earth-shaking when he plunged into the warm waters of the Adriatic on August 14, 1986. The young American skin-diver only expected to see the wreck of a Roman trading ship, a few amphorae, nothing spectacular.

Instead he found a skull, a very odd skull: a skull, astonished archaeologists eventually had to admit, that had belonged to…a merman.

When the incontrovertible evidence appeared in respected scientific journals, hundreds of similar discoveries came to light, bones and artifacts that had been hidden away for years by scientists and non-scientists fearful of ridicule. Now, almost a decade after Rubman's dive, a picture is emerging of life in the Dark Ages that bears little resemblance to that drawn by history and science before now.

The key to this new version of history is the Karlsberg Bestiary, discovered just last year deep beneath a German castle. The pictures and descriptions of animals it contains correspond in startling fashion to the new archaeological findings.

The first few pages of the bestiary are badly damaged, so that only fragments of text can be deciphered. They read, "In the Year of Our Lord…strange creatures from a far land descended upon us. Dragons and giants stalked the heights, and the forests filled with…Baron Karlsberg spoke with…name of the Land from which these monsters came: Dominia."

Scientists have thus dubbed the arrival of these strange creatures The Dominian Influx. The information in the bestiary, archaeological findings and current understanding of ecology and physiology indicate the Dark Ages were even darker than we thought.

The Dominian Influx must have initially created a huge imbalance in the ratio of predators to prey, for most of the creatures described in the Karlsberg Bestiary are predatory. Dr. Mark Brigham, a biologist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, says that there is usually only one predator for every 10 animals of roughly the same size. The Influx upset that ratio.

With huge predators suddenly unleashed on a relatively small area of Earth, it was not a good time to be a deer, a boar, a rabbit, a sheep–or a shepherd. We know that Europe's population crashed at various time throughout the Dark Ages; although the Black Death is usually blamed, it may well be that death actually came in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes.

Which is not to say that the Black Death did not claim its share: the Karlsberg Bestiary lists among the new arrivals giant Plague Rats, which must have immediately taken their time-honored place in the squalid cities, spreading pestilence.

With prey vanishing, the arriving creatures could either starve, eat each other, or relocate. (It's no coincidence that the Perled Unicorn, a beautiful creature which arrived with the others, quickly disappeared; to the large predators it was just horsemeat with a built-in toothpick.)

So the creatures of the Influx spread across Europe, seeking out their ideal habitats.

To the cool, rocky peaks of Europe's mountains migrated such creatures as the Hill Giants and the Gray Ogres, intelligent, man-shaped beings of incredible height and strength; the Roc of Kher Ridges, a bird of such enormous height it could lift a war-horse in each talon; the War Mammoth, a creature long extinct on Earth; and the rarely seen Serra Angel, which spent most of its time gazing longingly at the sky as though homesick.

The Alps became the home of the Hurloon Minotaurs, bull-headed men with a love of battle and, according to the bestiary, remarkable singing voices that echoed up and down the valleys of the Alps, drastically increasing the frequency of avalanches.

The giants, ogres and rocs had good reason to head for cooler climates; their huge size made them vulnerable to overheating. Dr. Neal Smatresk, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biology at the University of Texas at Arlington, noted that ordinarily, giants should have no more trouble than a normal-sized human maintaining their body temperature, because larger creatures have slower metabolic rates than small ones. "However," he added, "if they got real energetic, which I don't think they could do for a real long period of time, they could employ the traditional methods of sweating or taking a plunge in a nice cold lake. The sensible thing to do would be to live in a somewhat colder climate, or a place where there were nice, deep, cold lakes."

A roc would have preferred the heights not only for the cool climate, but also as a jumping-off place for flight–a means of conserving energy. Until the existence of the Roc and some of the other flying creatures pictured in the bestiary came to light, scientists put the upper limit to flight at 12 kilograms. "Some pterosaurs (flying dinosaurs) were considerably bigger than that," Dr. Brigham noted, "but they soared, they didn't actually flap to fly. They couldn't take off from the ground; they had to jump off a cliff."

The roc's ability to fly despite its large size is one example of the apparent ability of many of the creatures of the Dominian Influx to perform seemingly impossible feats. The most current theory in the on-going debate as to how they did this holds that they were able to tap a mysterious source of energy unavailable to ordinary Earth animals.

The Shivan Dragons apparently sought out high launching-points for the same reason as the rocs, but they congregated on lower, warmer ridges and desert mesas.

The reason is simple, according to Dr. Betty Juergensmeyer, Professor of Biology at Judson College in Elgin, Illinois. "Reptiles are cold-blooded: they have to sit out in the sun and warm up before they can do much," she said. Desert heights are ideal for sunbathing.

This habit undoubtedly brought dragons into conflict with two other creatures who liked the same habitat: the Mesa Pegasus and the astounding Granite Gargoyles.

"A dragon would probably think a pegasus would be fairly tasty," Dr. Juergensmeyer noted. Only by forming flying herds to defend themselves did the flying horses avoid the fate of the Perled Unicorn.

Granite Gargoyles were apparently a silicon-based life-form. Unlike carbon-based life-forms (everything else on Earth), a silicon-based creature would not have to eat; instead, Dr. Juergensmeyer said, it would probably be solar-powered, soaking up heat to meet its energy needs. Unfortunately, the best places for soaking up heat were often already taken by a sunning dragon, which must have led to some epic battles…usually won, no doubt, by the larger, stronger dragon, which must have then been frustrated by its inability to eat its fallen foe.

The gargoyles weren't the only silicon-based life-forms to appear in the Dominian Influx. On the desert floor, and elsewhere, dwelt Earth Elementals, massive, slow-moving creatures made of stone, and highly territorial. However, they and the other Elementals the Bestiary describes–Air Elementals, Time Elementals, Water Elementals–played a role in the ecosystem more akin to that of weather, which may wreak havoc but then goes away again, then to that of an ordinary predator or prey species. Drawing on the same unknown source of energy that enabled rocs to fly, elementals existed outside the food chain–as did the Djinn, usually also found in the desert.

In the desert, few humans came in contact with the Dominian creatures. The mountains, too, were sparsely inhabited, and the few people that lived there must have fled when the rocs and giants and ogres arrived, and especially when the minotaurs started singing.

But they weren't much safer in the wooded valleys, where the Craw Worm lurked, sometimes quietly sunning itself in forest glades, but crashing through the trees with incredible speed (and deafening sound) when in pursuit of prey, which was basically anything that moved. The Craw Worm ruled whatever forest it invaded, quickly driving humans and most other creatures into other valleys or, in the case of humans, into walled cities and stout castles.

Other perils also lurked in the forest. The Thicket Basilisk could turn its enemies into stone…a purely defensive ploy, Dr. Brigham said, "unless you can eat rock. I don't know anything that can."

Dr. Smatresk noted that the ability of the basilisk is reminiscent of that of the fire salamander, which sprays a highly potent neurotoxin up to two metres, into the eyes or mouth of its attacker. Its strong defensive ability probably also explains why the basilisk evolved extra legs, which might be good for climbing but would actually slow the creature down. "Most really fast animals minimize ground contact," Dr. Smatresk pointed out–but the basilisk's defensive capabilities meant it had no need for speed.

In the forest you could also be unlucky enough to run into Giant Spiders, massive arachnids that might have devastated entire countries if not for the fact that "the muscle mass to move something like that is enormous, so they'd be very, very slow," as Dr. Smetresk pointed out. "They wouldn't have the same ferocity and energetic movement that (ordinary spiders) have." Instead, they probably contented themselves with spinning vast webs, creating fairly permanent areas of danger that intelligent creatures, at least, could avoid.

Most spiders, of course, eat insects, but at least one species of insect mentioned in the bestiary would have been smart enough to avoid any spider's web The Killer Bees, which the bestiary claims devastated whole villages of humans in a crusade to free their enslaved kinfolk from the honey hives, are said to have carried swords and shields during their attacks, although, as Dr. Juergensmeyer commented, "With their tails, they need those? I would think bees would have enough weapons without swords!"

The bees weren't the only intelligent denizens of the forest. Others, which probably drove out the giant spiders whenever they could, were the Ironroot Treefolk: intelligent, mobile trees. It's not as strange as it sounds, according to Dr. Smatresk. "There are plant communication systems that work via electrical conduction," he said. With the right kind of cells, those communication systems could develop into something analogous to our nervous system.

The Ironroot Treefolk were probably no more taken with tree-chopping humans than the Killer Bees were with the honey-sucking ones–and so humans were also driven from the forests, no doubt with the additional help of the Scryb Sprites, tiny, winged humanoids for whom some country folks still leave an overnight bowl of milk.

Humans fleeing the forests had to hope their path did not take them through the swamps, for here lurked some of the nastiest of the strange new creatures, including the Fungusaur, a bizarre creature that became stronger every time it was injured. Naturally, that made it highly aggressive; getting injured was its best offense.

This is another creature that drew on an unknown source of energy. In fact, regenerating and growing stronger at the same time would require an "infinite energy source," Dr. Smatresk said, because losing tissue means losing an enormous amount of energy, too. That's one reason why regenerated tails and limbs on Earth amphibians are usually "not-very-good copies of what was there before."

In the swamps, too, lurked two more of those strange creatures that lie outside the ordinary realm of ecology: the Nightmare, described as a terrifying horse with fiery mane and hooves, and the Bog Wraith, a ghostlike figure that, the bestiary says, murdered many an unfortunate traveler.

There are other ghostlike creatures in the bestiary that also lie outside the bounds of normal biological science. What are we to make, for instance, of the Drudge Skeletons, dead bones that knitted themselves together and took up arms? Or the Phantom Monster, whose appearance spelled doom for whole villages, according to the Bestiary, but which apparently had no physical substance at all?

For the Sengir Vampire, perhaps, more can be said scientifically, for of course there are already creatures on Earth that make a meal of blood: vampire bats. Vampires were in an enviable position among the creatures of the Influx: all the other creatures were their prey. Although mammalian blood was preferred (it probably tastes better; as Dr. Juergensmeyer pointed out, whereas mammalian red blood cells don't have nuclei, the red blood cells of other types of creatures do), they could feed on any creature.

Dr. Brigham, whose specialty is bats, noted that two of three known vampire bat species actually spend more time feeding on birds than on mammals, and they have been seen to feed on reptiles. And, he noted, "in terms of the fat and the carbohydrates and all that (the vampire) needs, I think blood is an excellent meal."

Even walled cities were no protection from these dread creatures. Indeed, it was a difficult time to be a human. Trade almost stopped; few people dared travel the roads. Agriculture became a dangerous activity. And Plague Rats were a constant threat.

It was, however, a good time to be a Carrion Ant.

Coastal cities had an advantage in that they had access to fish–but even the seas had been infested with the creatures of the Influx, as Bob Rubman proved when he picked up that mermaid skull.

Merfolk managed to extract the oxygen they needed from water–an impressive feat, because water, Dr. Smetresk pointed out, holds 20 to 30 times less oxygen per volume than air. He believes the merfolk had no lungs at all, but huge amounts of gill tissue in their extra-large chests, through which they rammed vast quantities of water. In addition, he said, their blood must have been particularly good at capturing oxygen and releasing it to the tissues.

Tales of mermaids exist the world over, so it may well be that these creatures still roam our oceans. If so, Dr. Juergensmeyer and Dr. Smetrask both speculated, their days may be numbered: they must be very sensitive to pollution.

"You've got to bring in water, parasites and all kinds of gunk from outside into this very delicate area," Dr. Smetresk said. "It would have to be their Achilles heel."

Tales of Sea Serpents also exist all over the world, and so this sea-going version of the Craw Worm, too, may still roam the ocean, having remained behind when almost all the rest of the Dominian creatures disappeared as mysteriously as they appeared, some three centuries after the Influx, as though in answer to a sudden summons.

Whether merfolk and sea serpents heard the call or not, one creature definitely did, and left our oceans forever–for which we can be grateful.

Leviathan was so huge it is impossible to even say what its length might have been. It could only exist in the oceans, where, Dr. Juergensmeyer noted, it didn't face some of the same problems as land creatures, which have to be concerned about the ability of their bones to bear their own weight, if they get too big.

Leviathan, like today's large whales (mere minnows by comparison) probably migrated through the world's oceans, north to feed in rich waters teeming with plankton and fish; south to calve (because although Leviathan was too large to ever get cold, a baby Leviathan might not have been).

Wherever Leviathan went, it would have left behind a marine wasteland, Dr. Smatresk said. "Obviously they'd deplete an ecosystem pretty fast."

Leviathan could have scoured whole islands clean of life just with the waves of its passing, destroyed the fisheries on which beleaguered towns depended for food, sunk entire fleets without even knowing it had hit them…and yet, like all the rest of the Dominian creatures, it vanished.

Now that scientists have finally begun to accept that the Dominian creatures really existed, and to piece together the picture of the world as it was during their brief sojourn here, one question continues to haunt them: "What happened to them?"

Perhaps the flip side of that question is even more disturbing:

"What if they come back?"

(The image: A merman from Magic: The Gathering .)