Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff's Blog: #42 Pencil: A Writer's Life, the Universe, and Everything, page 134

Squeeeeee!

Monday, I think it was, I got a ping from my friend Bryan and the Star Wars fan site Knight's Archive saying, "You're aware, aren't you, that the cover of your upcoming novel, THE LAST JEDI was just revealed at Comic Con?"

No, I wasn't aware. This is likely because the marketing part of a major book publisher does not communicate to the editorial department and thereby to the writers, but hey, he sent me a link to the cover.

Ta-da! There it was. With our hero, Jax Pavan, in glorious color, pretty much as I described him to my editor when she sent a hurried "Quick! We need to know what Jax looks like at this point!" I included a scene from the book that I thought was way cool and which the cover artist captured metaphorically in his painting.

What's that? No, I'm not gonna tell you anything about the scene.

No, I'm not gonna tell you what Jax is doing or why he's doing it under the inimical gaze of Darth Vader.

I just want you to sqeeeee along with me in close three part harmony.

The book is coming out in March of next year and will probably now inspire a new series of Padawan's Journal entries. The Last Jedi

Padawan's Journal #25: Aliens Ate My Homework

At what point the first alien appeared in fiction is debatable. Possibly it was in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; possibly it was long before that. I mean, you could argue that the old Aztec gods were aliens. In fact, some folks are pretty sure they were.

No, I mean it. Literally. Space aliens. Scout’s honor.

Anyway, I don’t really know when the first alien appeared in a story, but I do know that we’ve been writing about them for a very long time because we are fascinated with the idea of First Contact and, beyond that, continued contact with other races of people (Orps). We speculate about how different they will be when we finally do meet them (and we will). We fantasize about how much like us they will be, and we wonder if the similarities will blind us perilously to the differences (“It’s a cookbook!”)— or if the differences will blind us to how alike we are, also to our detriment.

This is a favorite theme of mine, by the way. Read “Distance” on my BVC bookshelf and you’ll see what happens when I’m really having fun.

I personally believe that part of the job of a science fiction writer is to prepare us for that First Contact moment—to give those of us so inclined practice in meeting people who do not come from this world so that we will not exhibit bad manners when the Day comes. But I also believe it’s the little invisible bits of alienness that will cause us the most trouble and that the more another race of people looks like us, the harder that invisible alienness will be to see, acknowledge and accept.

Now the GFFA has a lot of alien races in it. George Lucas clearly indulged his dearest fantasies when creating his cosmopolitan galactic culture, and as a writer who’s been allowed to play in that culture, I’m profoundly glad he had such a good imaginaton. He provided the templates for aliens whose brains were augmented by head-tails (Nautolans and Twi’lek), aliens who used pheromones to manipulate others (Falleen and Zeltron), aliens who evolved from insectoid life-forms, reptilian life-forms, amphibian life-forms, and on and on.

Naturally, science fiction writers are in love with the whole idea of The Alien. This has an upside and a downside. The downside is that we sometimes resort to stereotypes. Sometimes we do this because of cultural or political baggage. In this case we may use the “evil aliens” as proxies for some real world group we think of as “evil” (read Stephen King’s marvelous analysis of horror and fantasy fiction, The Danse Macabre for an insightful look at this phenomenon). And sometimes we do it because we need to send encoded messages to the reader in short-hand. In this case our choice of alien for a particular type of role subliminally shapes the reader’s idea of how they will deliver their lines and what attitudes they might have toward different subjects. For example, I will divulge that a Toydarian makes a brief appearance in a scene in Star Wars: Shadow Games (aka, Holostar). I chose a Toydarian because I needed to telegraph to the reader that this is a mercenary sort of fellow and I needed to do it without spending valuable page space building up a character that was only going to walk on, utter a few lines and walk off (okay, flap off—as we all know from Chef Jeff Vader’s YouTube video “Midichlorian Rhapsody” Toydarians are reminiscent of bumblebees).

For other roles, I choose aliens because I want to write about them, explore them as people and, well, because I think they’re cool. Take Twi’leks, for example. I love Twi’leks because they’re so graceful and elegant and because of the way their brain power is augmented by their lekku. I think it’s also fun to explore how the lekku are used in communication. Humans shrug their shoulders, Twi’leks (and other species with head-tails) can express indecision, or mirth, or anger and a range of other emotions in much more subtle ways. This might mean that subliminal conversations can take place between Twi’leks while other species remain blissfully unaware.

And then there is our fascination with the truly alien. Beings that don’t even relate to the universe in the same way that we do. In the Coruscant Nights series, Michael used a species called Cephalons that experience events in time the way we experience objects in space. I love the way he has I-Five describe this to Den Dhur, who’s mightily creeped out by the whole idea:

“…See that landspeeder parked behind you?”
Den looked behind him. “Yes.”
“Call it the past.”
The Sullustan frowned. “Why?”
“Because it’s behind you. See that trash bin ahead of you? That’s the future.”
“For you, maybe. I try to be more optimistic.”

— Coruscant Nights: Street of Shadows

snarf!

This, of course, affects the way Cephalons communicate. They say things that sound oracular, spacey and downright bizarre. And therein lies the “fun” for a writer. What sort of mysteries can be folded up in the alien dialogue, or hidden in a simple twitch of a tentacle? How will the way this alien is made affect how he relates to the cosmos and to other beings? How will the way he relates to the cosmos affect how he communicates with those other beings?Shadow Games

A Padawan's Journal Entry: Science Fiction, Star Wars and Philosophy

Star Wars is, at its heart, the classic tale of the battle between good and evil, between light and darkness, between Apple and Microsoft. It is part of a long and venerable history of epic moral fables that are not limited to SF. Tales such as the Mahabarata, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities ... and Frankenstein.

A lot of folks fail to see that distinguished connection. Take the late literary critic and journalist Lee Mortimer, who wrote of science fiction that it is: “A genre of escape literature which takes the reader to faraway planets—and usually neglects to bring him back.”
That about sums up what a lot of people I know think of SF. It’s for kids. It’s escapist. It’s not serious literature. To them I say: “What color is the sky on your planet?” Which is a SFnal way of saying: “You haven’t been paying attention in class, have you?”

Science fiction is so far from escapist that by the 1970s it got a bad rap for rubbing humanity’s nose in its wretched track record with regard to wars, imperialism and a poor attitude toward the environment and other species. SF writers were harbingers of gloom and doom—nasty nay-sayers who told us all the ways in which we were heading for an epic FAIL. Consider such films as "The Day the Earth Stood Still", "Forbidden Planet", "Star Trek: Voyage Home", "2001" & "2010", "Earth Girls are Easy" ... no, wait. Scratch that last one.

I think Ray Bradbury said it best:

“...fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling around of reality to enchant it and make it behave. ...all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way.”

We tackle all sort of big issues in SF too, by golly, from the scientific to the philosophical. Science fiction is an art of exploration and Star Wars has become one of the most popular vehicles for an exploration of karma, the nature of good and evil, what it means to be human (which I personally believe has nothing to do with your planet of origin), striking a balance between faith and reason, the material and the spiritual realms. The nature of the Force, for example, has generated an amazing amount of thought and discussion among Star Wars writers and fans alike.

In Patterns of Force, for example, Michael and I had to ask how the scenarios in the book reflected the characters’ understanding (or lack of understanding) of the Force. How would the reader interpret them? One might believe the Force was divided into Dark and Light sides, or completely neutral, or benevolent. One might view it as active and possessing of some sort of will, or passive—the manipulated, but never the manipulator of events. (The historical debate over the nature of God.) So, the writer asks, how could a Jedi or Sith character’s actions be interpreted in light of those different schools of thought? And if we, as writers, leaned toward any particular theory on the nature of good and evil within the Force, should we openly show that, or veil it in ambiguity?

This philosophical leaning can have a cascade effect on the way the characters behave and how the reader interprets their behavior. Is Darth Vader an arch-demon who is evil simply because he’s evil? Is he a fallen angel? Or is he a man who, alas, had the talent to acquire great power coupled with a history of soul-twisting events that left him bitter and angry—possibly even angry at the Force, itself? That’s the sort of question writers ask as we’re working out stories for these characters to inhabit. And the path we choose will illuminate the characters and the action in different ways ... which can have far-reaching effects on the plot of a story and any stories that grow out of it.

So, as you can see, writing Star Wars novels is just simple storytelling. Nothing to see here, Reality. Just move along. Meanwhile, Michael and I take up our respective Macintoshes and attempt to make Reality behave by pretending to look the other way.

You can read my science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and mystery stories on my Bookshelf at www.bookviewcafe.com