Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 112
November 3, 2013
34 Pilgrim 2/3
Once again I’m talking with Simon Roy and David Gaffney about Pilgrim, a story about the Holy Land during the Crusades when all gods are real.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Even if it isn’t the Russians who say it, someone says it.
It’s remarkably exhilarating to cut.
Swash-buckling and pulp and the other stuff we are embarrassed to like
It’s us trying to communicate that same excitement and fun but doing it in a contemporary way?
Tarzan and it’s crazy racist stuff
The Multiregional hypothesis
The grasshoppers
Groom of the Tyrannosuar Queen, boys!
Fixing everything on the planet of strangely-colored people
October 29, 2013
A Head Like on Easter Island
Hey kids! It’s time for Scifi Theatre with Uncle Tom and Uncle Dan!
You might remember our previous fun with Aztecs and Aliens.Now get ready for a rip-roaring time with A Head Like on Easter Island.
TOM:
I was thinking about how to reconcile the multiple iterations or potential interpretations of these mythical ancient supercivs, for example, and hit on the idea that perhaps the unifying element could be technology allowing travel or communication between parallel worldlines. Perhaps some of these ancient supercivs aren’t even so much geographic locations as existential axioms that emerge independently in different timelines through a certain probabilistic “critical mass” or information density–so Atlantis is an island continent in one timeline, a world-spanning maritime empire in another. And any given one of these supercivs would have a set of varying relationships to the other supercivs, even the alternate variations of their own; so Atlantis 1.6 might be at war with Atlantis 4.8, in negotiations with Lemuria 6.0, have a joint trade agreement with Atlantis 4.1 and Mu 16, etc.
One of the ideas I’ve played with is that the Easter Island heads might be true representational portraits based on observation of posthuman time travelers. It would make for an interesting recursive causal relationship if the moai-like posthuman form was itself an aesthetic nod to Easter Island!
Now I’m musing on a scenario where the goal is to seed these memes across as many timelines as possible, leading to some sort of singularity or “critical mass” of information density where their incidence or emergence becomes inevitable, perhaps across ALL times and places. Seeding archetypes, or even godhood.
Chrestovenator’s (
) thoughts on the potential “memetic seeding” aspect of the Moaid “civilization” made a big impact on me, and dovetailed closely with other ideas I’d been exploring regarding information density as it relates to parallel universes and more esoteric philosophical and fringe science concepts like morphic resonance and the noosphere. Please see our exchange in the comments here.
DAN:
Of course you can’t tell a story about Easter Island without addressing its environmental and societal collapse and the horror and cannibalism than ensued. One way to marry both those concepts is to ask this question: what if the Rapa Nui people weren’t regular Polynesians, but colonists from an alternate world? Perhaps a world something like this?
On our earth, however, all they find is a bunch of scattered desert islands where a continent should be, and only have time to send out a single party of researchers before a trans-world war destroys their equipment and closes the trans-time gate. The Easter Islanders, then, are the citizens of a lost colony.
The Moai might be an attempt to contact the home timeline, perhaps a reference to an artistic style or motif –or a robot or cartoon character– that only another person from Home would recognize. The cry for help doesn’t work. The Rapa Nui, in their hopelessness, topple the Moai. By the time Captain Cook shows up, the heights of Atlantean civilization are a shadow of a legend, and remain so until the 1990′s, when Europeans re-erect some Moai and finally manage to attract the Atlanteans’ attention.
And here’s where my story draws its sustenance from Tom’s ideas of “ existential axioms that emerge independently.” Atlantis is a timeline-travelling culture that promotes different versions of itself (shades of the Real America in McAuley’s Cowboy Angels). It turns out this timeline is an aberration in which the Polynesian people failed to take over the world.
What? It was those dirty, drunken, fundamentalist Europeans who conquered everyone? Damn it. We need to correct that timeline right now!
October 27, 2013
33 Pilgrim 1/3
I’m talking with Simon Roy and David Gaffney about Pilgrim, a story about the Holy Land during the Crusades when all gods are real.
Also group projects, and why this is the time for adventure fiction to come back into the mainstream.
The cool shop in Victoria, BC, LEGEND
Bladerunner?
Hercules
All myths are true and “How can I use this to tell a fun, crazy story?”
Drawing your characters makes you think they’re real people, which gives you the momentum to tell their story.
Martian Law and the design of its characters
“Don’t go down a rabbit hole with back-story”
Ben Poulsen’s computer game project
October 22, 2013
AZTECH
Welcome to a new segment on Kingdoms of Evil from Dan the illustrious and illustrat-ious Thomas Duffy and maybe even you.
Our last idea was so cool, Tom and I decided to make this a weekly thing, so every Wednesday I’ll post one of our conversations about cool sci-fi ideas. We love third opinions, so please give us your ideas in the comments and maybe they’ll be included in a future segment.
Here’s Tom on the subject of AZTECH
From Cities of Blood by Peter Ackroyd:
There arose many great cultures during this time—the Olmec, the Zapotec, the Toltec, the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca. Some never had any contact with the outside world, living and dying unknown. Some still remain mysterious, the ruins of their cities hidden by vast jungles. But we known more about them now. They were based upon power and authority. They wanted to grow ever larger and, to this end, they were engaged in perpetual warfare. City fought against city, civilization fought against civilization. Warfare became an end in itself. (5)
–Imagine this exact same description, names and all, applying to conflict between civilizations on an interstellar rather than a regional terrestrial (Mesoamerican) scale.
Thinking that the Aztec “calendar stone” (Sun Stone), with the blood-drinking solar god Tonatiuh at the center, could be seen as a topdown view of the Milky Way’s galactic disc, with its supermassive star-devouring black hole at the core. The “five suns” (ages) of Aztec cosmology could then be variously interpreted as spiral arms, eras of imperial domination, capital systems, etc., as could the different calendrical and mythological glyphs. Could create an entire science fictional history/mythology just from the Sun Stone! I should look into this, somebody probably already has… : p
Maize deities, from The Ancient Aztecs:
• Xilonen (protected green ears when they first sprouted)
• Centeotl (guarded the corn as it ripened)
• Chicomecoatl (most significant corn goddess: “our sustenance…our flesh, our livelihood”)
–Thinking these would make good names for agricultural worlds
I love Tonatiuh as a black hole. There was a scifi book about time-travel and cross-time travel whose bad-guys were a technological civilization derived from the Aztecs. But aside from being super mean, I don’t remember much detail being given to their culture. Then there was the excellent Obsidian and Blood series by Aliette de Bodard, but that’s fantasy. So there’s room here to do something new.
The biggest hurdle here for me is getting the Aztecs into space in the first place. Perhaps they had the help of some ancient astronauts? I’ve recently been thinking about telling a sci-fi story set in a world where Forteana were actual fact.
Of course, Pacal was Maya, not Aztec, and lived in the 7th century AD, long before the Aztecs started their Triple Alliance in the 1400s. So how to bridge the gap? Perhaps this is an alternate timeline where the the new Emperor Motecuzoma II receives a strange codex as tribute from the frontier city of Tochtepec. The codex describes a “rising temple” in the abandoned city of Palenque, deep in the jungles of Maya territory. Motecuzoma doesn’t find the codex significant, but the high priest of Tonatiuh, repository of the secret lore, knows the true nature of the Calendar Stone: it is a map of a galactic empire of staggering antiquity and power. The priest sets out on an expedition into the jungle, desperate to access the ancient starship before it can fall into the hands of rival factions from Tenochtitlan, Mayan revolutionaries, or the vile and Alien Spaniards.
The other option would be to tell a story about modern archaeologists stumbling upon the secret, but that’s awfully star-gate. Also, the Aztec triple alliance was never an ancient empire, and it makes more sense to cast them as the up-and-coming heroes against the ancient Maya and the alien Spanish.
The Aztecs could use the starship to gain access to weapons they can use to beat back Spain (or perhaps launch their own invasion of Europe), but there isn’t much time for godlike technology to percolate back to Tenochtitlan, wracked by disease, rebellion, and starvation as it is. I think Cortez still takes the city, but he arrives just days behind the refugees flee and Motecuzoma sets up a court-in-exile on the fertile planet of Xilonenan. There evolves a sort of underground railroad ferrying Mexica people out from under Spanish dominion, a railroad the Spanish trace to Palenque, where they discover the starship. Word gets out to the rest of the world.
NOW it’s the Age of Exploration on steroids plus the Space Race plus the Cold War. All the world’s powers are pouring their armies and explorers through Palenque and coming back with unimaginable riches, miracles, and weapons. This also opens up the idea for a very cool story of colonization and conquest across the galaxy-spanning ruins of the Ancient Astronaut civilization (whatever that might be). But the Aztec Empire in Exile has become strong in hiding, and they are ready to push back to Earth and reconquer their lost land. And what happens if the Ancient Astronauts aren’t quite as extinct as people assume? Lost civilizations in spaaaace!
So that’s like, what, three books at least, right?
October 20, 2013
Podcast 32 Aliens
I am talking to Mark Witton of scifiideas.com about aliens including:
The Cetagandans (yes yes I know, just listen to the podcast and you’ll get it)
The Whoosians
The Speculative Biology Forum discussion on worldbuilding and storytelling
A really cool author and translator 
The Ayahuasca ritual
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
The…Time Lords?
I’m trying out soundcloud this week, so let me know what you think! If you don’t like soundcloud or it doesn’t work for you, here’s the traditional link:
October 16, 2013
A different creative process
Here’s a creative process I haven’t yet tapped into: dreams.
These are the musings of Thomas Duffy of deviantart fame, as well as Ben’s computer game team.
Tom: Hybrid hypnagogic/hypnotic idea/image flash the other night, with a heavy dose of hypnopompic rationalization and logical shoehorning!
Was musing as I was falling asleep on those little tiny spaceships you often see in sci-fi, “blasting for all (they’re) worth” (to paraphrase Shirow) despite having no apparent fuel source. The solution provided by my semi-conscious brain was that they are drawing on a (practically) unlimited source of hydrogen in a parallel universe via a kind of miniaturized Casimir gate or Krasnikov tube, generated at minimal energy cost by an integral component of the drive system. An inexhaustible reaction mass for (otherwise) air-breathing transatmospheric nuclear engines, not to mention interplanetary rockets, and of course an alternate to a Bussard-style ramscoop for interstellar vessels relying on nuclear fusion.
From there it became obvious that there were multiple such “mono-elemental” parallel universes–one, in fact, for every chemical element in our universe. Each universe had a sort of unique “resonant access frequency” that corresponded predictably to an intrinsic physical property of its native element–the element’s atomic number, for example. So once we had stumbled across the existence of these universes, they were easy to locate and tap into. The “problem” (such as it is) was that it required increasingly greater amounts of energy to draw material from them, not just proportionate to the weight of the element but logarithmically or expontentially as you moved “up” the periodic table. So hydrogen was basically “free” to us, but helium was significantly more expensive in terms of the necessary energy investment, and any heavier elements required such a prohibitively high energy expenditure that humanity hadn’t been able to extract them yet. For all practical purposes we were limited to exploiting the “Hydrogen Universe.”
It was unclear to me in exactly what form these elements existed in their “native” universes…I had a vague image of a uniformly distributed gaseous cloud of particles that were prevented by native physical laws from clumping, clustering, fusing, or degrading (decaying into lighter elements, I mean). These universes were clearly artificial, as indicated by the “coding” system built into their “resonant access frequencies,” and they had presumably been “built” by somebody native to our universe, or to a universe parallel to ours with identical physical laws, based on the chemical elements represented. This and other factors (most notably the proportionate increase in energy expenditure required to tap elements) led to the hypothesis that these different universes were originally created as part of a commerce or exchange system, perhaps one that hadn’t been used for millions or billions of years. “You get the hydrogen for free, but anything heavier than that is gonna cost ya!”
–Of course, you wouldn’t even necessarily have to invoke a parallel universe for this premise to work–you’d “just” need to establish the terminal point of the Casimir gate in a nebula, or the atmosphere of a fluid giant. But the fuel source would be much more unreliable, and not truly inexhaustible, and the energy expenditure for even a tiny real-world gate of that type would be trans-astronomical (not to mention that you’d have to transport it to the desired “endpoint” in the first place). The idea in my dream was that access to this parallel “Hydrogen Universe” could be had for a relatively small energy investment–that it was designed to be cheaply accessible from the outside.
Dan: I get the idea of a hydrogen universe (perhaps from a big-bang with no imperfections, resulting in the smooth distribution of ur-matter and therefore no clumps from which stars can form. Of course, once humans start extracting hydrogen, there will be clumps). But wait, nothing so perfect could exist naturally! And an all-uranium universe? Where the hell did that come from? And what if someone figured out how to game the system and steal from these vaults? And what if their creators found out about our scam?
Gentlemen, we have unintentionally stumbled into the Fort Knox of a godlike civilization. And back out of it again…with our pockets accidentally full of gold. And then we accidentally did that a couple more times. Anyway the silent alarm tripped, the cops are onto us, and the next wormhole from them to the solar system is due to open sometime in the next thousand years in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter!
By the way, I love the idea of trans-cosmic trading floors of mono-atomic feedstock. I’ve been trying to invent economic systems for godlike civilizations and that’s one I hadn’t considered.
Tom: I woke up all in the middle of the night kava-groggy from a dream involving a wormhole-like portal maintained by this spaceship or station…That in itself wasn’t too imaginative, but the intriguing aspect was that the gate or portal could only be accessed within a certain timeframe, and I don’t mean on a regular “Old Faithful”-type clockwork schedule as per Deep Space Nine, but like there was this specific narrow duration in which it could be accessed, once, and then never again. The idea was that–space and time being aspects of the same phenomenon or universal fabric–this gate was situated at a specific point in time rather than in space. It was delimited by temporal rather than spatial boundaries, in other words. It might be available at another time, but in a different location, and the ship or station with its requisite maintenance technology would have to be moved to “meet” it.
I wouldn’t have remembered this dream at all, probably, except that I had to get up to take a piss and while I was doing so I was thinking about the “Megacanthid” mech suits idea (sketches I just sent). I’ve been working on these (mentally) for quite a while, but because I was thinking about them in my groggy hypnompompic state, they somehow became conflated with that idea of the wormhole-like portal or gate and I started “dreaming” of this scenario where similar suits are dispatched from an orbiting station into the fast-moving eddies and currents of a Jovian or Neptunian fluid giant. (As with all nearly all my (more exotic and indefensible) mech designs, the functional rationale is that they be able to effectively grapple with potentially aggressive indigenous fauna if necessary.) They are more “planktonic” in every sense, drifting with the atmospheric currents and maneuvering within them rather than actively altering trajectory, and their design (like those of the native fauna) would reflect this.
The twist here, tying back to the dream, was that the mecha weren’t dispatched with their pilots in them, but rather that each suit hosted the terminal end of a Casimir gate with its “anchor” point back on the ship or station. Once the suits were safely inserted into the planetary atmosphere, the pilot would teleport into the suit’s control module via the gate, and would just as instantly teleport out if things went catastrophically wrong, either due to run-ins with native wildlife or the dangers of negotiating the hostile atmosphere. I was thinking (dreaming?!) that the whole scenario is so dangerous, though, that pilots still have a high casualty rate just because they often aren’t able to ‘port out in time (sudden attacks and unpredictable atmospheric phenomena (i.e. getting sucked into a downdraft and crushed by pressure), equipment failures due to environmental hardship, etc. etc.).
The Big Problem with this scenario is the gates themselves, which would require unbelievable amounts of energy to maintain–and if humanity has access to such vast energy resources, what are they doing stuck at the tech level of mech suits and spaceships?? One solution would be that the gates are a found, unreproducible alien technology; another is that energy is being drawn from some alternate dimension (remember the limitless hydrogen universe?!) but can only be used in this specific way for this specific purpose–allowing for the gates but no other form of energy independence. Which would also fit nicely with the idea of them being alien technology, I suppose…
Dan: Actually that kind of wormhole was the central conceit of the Anubis Gate www.amazon.com/The-Anubis-Gate…
What if those suits were drifting in the Jovian atmosphere in preparation to meet a gate we knew would one day open…and protect human space from whatever comes out the other end? Let’s say we’re not good at predicting when the hole will open. The margin of error is on the scale of centuries. So we seed these van-neuman plankton-mechs into the Jovian atmosphere and connect them via Cas-gate to people back on earth (or wherever). These Reservists go through their lives never knowing when they might be teleported into a mech in the middle of a freefall battle with alien antagonists. At death, they designate a successor. If enough time goes by, succession probably stays in the family, making a privileged soldier caste.
October 13, 2013
Podcast 31: Spiraling Out of Control 3/3
I’m talking again with game-designer, artist, and fellow ESL-teacher Ben Poulsen about:
“You want the game experience not to happen to the character, but to happen to the player.”
Egoraptor’s treatise on Megaman
And now you have to listen to me talk about my work! Bwa ha ha!
An update on Tyrannosaur Queen
Worldcon (no details, but I think it went well
New Frontiers (no 70 percent or more done!)
Martian Law (done and ready to read here for free)
Sherlock Holmes and the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency
Yes, a story in the same universe was the prototype for The World’s Other Side
Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books and their delightfully reprehensible characters
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld badguys and their goals
The difference between books with a single point-of-view character versus multiple
Winston Rowantree‘s very cool graphic comparison of video games to other storytelling mediums.
“make decisions that them”? Let’s hope none of my students listen to this.
October 6, 2013
Podcast 30: Spiraling Out of Control 2/3
I’m talking again with game-designer, artist, and fellow ESL-teacher Ben Poulsen about:
”Is your game streamlined in a way that’s going to make it transition from you to the audience?”
Fish-catching in Legend of Zelda
Pokemon Fusion (home of the terrifying butterder!)
“You do not want to take control out of the player’s hands.”
October 4, 2013
Baby Talks! (11 Months)
If you thought last month was an amazing demonstration of infant genius…
Starting from the earliest to the most recent new words, we have:
bo/ba-o (bottle)
isshis (fishes)
owl/owlyowl (owl)
baboo (grandma! From babo, the vocative declension of baba, or grandma)
kowa (a car, from kola)
bike (a bicycle)
baiche (from zaiche-baiche, bunny-wunny)
blavo/blawo/blaow! (bravo)
tapka/topka (from topka, a ball)
wow! Oh! (we have mastered back vowels, very nice)
ap/ap-o (an apple)
buhlak/buhla (a block)
pa/pa-ee (potty)
luff/luvv (from lâv, a lion)
line (a lion)
Uff (a wolf, also a fox)
papka (eat or food, from papkam, I eat cutely)
balaka (black)
ell (yellow)
cawuh (a car)
kukhee (a cookie)
She has started to respond differently to questions asked by different people and in different languages. She generally ignores me when I speak Bulgarian and everyone else when they speak English (except Pavlina, who gets responses with both languages). Sometimes, though, she knows and can pronounce both words for one object, and so says ba (ball) to me but tapka (topka, ball in Bulgarian) to her grandmother. The same is true for line (lion) and uff (lâv).
September 29, 2013
Podcast 29: Spiraling out of Control 1/3
I’m talking with game-designer, artist, and fellow ESL-teacher Ben Poulsen about how easy it is for a creative project to “spiral out of control…and collapse.” And more importantly, how to make sure that doesn’t happen.
We talk about:
Coordination between members of the team.
Kazuna Nakama (Music and Concept)
Thomas Duffy(Writing)
Aaron Roark (Programming)
Chris Morton(Concept and Design)
Manipulating the audience
“How do you get the player to do the thing you want them to do?”
The subtle might of the urinal fly
How does the art affect the story?
Caveman language!
“is the activity we’re doing economical…is it going to contribute to the completion of the game or is it just fun for us?”
