Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 114

Story Germs 6

After our Skype Conversation and the mystery Skype conversation that no one will ever hear, all was quiet until AUGUST 12th, when Simon came back from his vacation and said:

YO YO YO!

Here’s some of the layouts, and the rough outline so far. The title idea is “Protector” for a few reasons. First, to honor the big ideas sci-fi of stuff like Protector by Larry Niven, and second, since the story concerns the interactions between various beings who consider themselves ‘protectors’. All the names, etc, are fillers for now!

INFO:

World: Earth, 3200 AD, Eastern North America. For nearly 300 years, earth has been under the care of the ‘Devas’, vast metallic beings of unknown origin who have been building vast environmental megastructures (diverting rivers, building ‘cloud towers’ that suck up and disperse water, etc). They largely ignore mankind, but will send messengers – robotic heralds – to warn humans before beginning an operation that might effect a population center. The Hudsoni, roughly iron-age level technologically, are the current dominant culture of the Hudson sea, descendants of holarctic asiatic warrior cultures, and while the Devas have been quietly reshaping the earth, the Hudsoni have been pushing south, conquering and expanding to the shores of the Great Lakes.

CHARACTERS

First Knife: The war-chief of the Hudsoni, brother of the Hudsoni Matriarch. Very brave, Loyal and honor-driven, but with a pragmatic streak.

Girl Commander/The Bride of Hesukristos: Former temple virgin sold into slavery, now unbalanced revolutionary leader with working laser. Ruthless and cruel.

Hesukristos: Former NATO Cyborg Commando, now unwitting reincarnation of an ancient blood god. Preaches ‘freedom’ for humanity from what he perceives as the oppression of the Devas, but instead is mainly motivated by a desperate need to gain some sort of control over his own reality – being asleep for 1500 years can fuck you up.

ME: Golden

Devas and First Knife are right on. Go Cincinatl! Gosherds for the win!

For the Girl Commander, how about Monia (from La Monja, the nun, or bride of Hesukristo). Other possibilities are “the Handmaiden” or “La Soltera” or some derivation.

I see a potential problem in the names of the Hudsoni (and is it Hudsoni or Hudonites?) and the Hesukristians in that they both begin in H. In text, that would be a no-no. In a comic, it might not make a difference, but a way to fix it would be to drop the H and make them Esukristians.

Podcast 26 Reality and Fantasy 1/3

Listen to the PODCAST

I’m talking with Emil Minchev author of Towers of Stone and Bone and Unlimited Access (available only in Bulgarian…so far!) about the difference between writing fiction set in the real versus fantastic worlds.

We talk about:

Sofia, Bulgaria  and the First English Language High School

“If the characters are so weird as to be completely foreign to the reader, the book cannot be enjoyable.”

Rocannon’s World by Ursula LeGuin

Gillyweed!

 

 

 

Story Germs 5

The ongoing saga of turning Simon Roy’s Archaeology idea into a fully-fledged story.

No more worldbuilding! Back to characters and story.

June 14th Chat

Simon: I have a slightly better solution to one of the story problems of that concept too. When it comes to the ordinary humans communicating to the giant biome-repairing super-robot gods, we have a sorcerer who is actually a millennia-old fella who has stayed alive thanks to a nanotech immune system, which also helps him eavesdrop on the robots.

HOWEVER the nanotech is starting to have replicating errors and failures so the sorceror is slowly, slowly dying looks all blotchy as the nanotech builds the wrong kind of skin, etc as it repairs him and he needs to build weird radio antennae out of the iron-age equipment and garbage of the forgotten technological age to communicate with the robots since the nanotech ain’t workin like it used to.

Daniel Bensen: what problem does that solve?

Simon Roy: oh just how the iron-age level native humans would relate to the robots repairing the biome. It just gives them a connection that makes more sense

Daniel Bensen : I guess it sounds like a cool character. But a little too much like the revived  cyborg. man out of time. High tech. Ruthless…

Simon Roy :That’s true – but I’m thinking of him not as a ruthless character with weird appetites but a really tired, weak old dude who just wants to see things turn out

and happens to be the last surviving connection to the tech of the old world

not super powerful or magical either – his only magic would be talking to the robots

or maybe infecting people and animals with his nano-blood and controlling them

but that might be too much

Daniel Bensen: the only way to find out is the write the story

Simon Roy: yeah I’m starting to do some thumbnails now. tis the time to jump in and stop ruminating

Daniel Bensen: can I see the scripts?

Simon Roy: oh there will be no scripts just messy notes and rough pages visual scripts if you will I’m goin deep comic bro

Daniel Bensen: I need to ask you about your process

Simon Roy:usually it starts with a semi-detailed list of events where i try to see how many pages each event should take up

then something like this occurs, if I’m the guy writing it

Daniel Bensen: it’s funny because I always write dialogue first

Simon Roy: see i don’t actually ‘write’ enough to have a reliable process

when im doing dialogue i’ll usually write it on a page or text file, then integrate it into the layouts when I’m doing those

OR, with the scene mostly in my mind, try and hammer it out during the layout process

but most of the stuff I’ve been doing lately (in terms of layouts/writing) has been prophet stuff, where I kind of ignore the dialogue side and focus on the visual storytelling

then brandon goes over that and drops on the dialogue

Story Germs 4

The ongoing saga of turning Simon Roy’s Archaeology idea into a fully-fledged story.

We talked about characters and worldbuilding. Now it’s time for more worldbuilding! How much worldbuilding is too much? About this much.

Feb 12th, Simon:

Just sitting my mind went in new directions today – probably to places where you already were with this story, but I had a few mental blocks in the way. Initially, I was thinking of this as a very loose, hunter-gatherer type of world. The problem with this, as you’ve already been talking of, is that its harder to believably root a semi-modern imperial culture in such a world after only a few generations. Both Hudson and Interior cultures need a more stable base for the story to work – and give the story a bit more to work with. More below.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about for this story, to maintain the feeling of ‘deep time’, would be to have the various ‘dead cities’ they explore NOT contemporary-looking, but the ruins themselves being from other, weird post-civilizational societies. Instead of paddling underneath a moldering freeway overpass, they paddle under a busted aqueduct with weird andean architectural hints…. deep time, man, deep time…

I’m thinking that pre-contact, it would be the standard story: A shaman, as intercessor between man and the supernatural, holds power over everybody in his/her tribe to some extent. But the final word is always that of the strongman.

But once the Marianites meet an ‘angel’ in the flesh (since the protectors are radially symmetrical and shiny like fish) their word cannot be doubted and they begin to rival the political leaders in influence. People already came to the Marianites for spiritual, medical and other advice, so know that they have much more to offer the people.

I’m also thinking that the Marianites will be a largely female priesthood, just to introduce more social and sexual dynamics into the story.

(I’ve still got to put some more thought into what exactly the protectors want to give the people and what they want in return. They’re intelligent machines who want to help people, but how will they do it?)

I’ve been trying to keep it a more restrained world, in a way – limit it to a geographic and political space where the Hudsonites could dominate other societies. With this in mind, the world could be at a very degraded point, civilizationally – the farming cultures that remain could be only weak shadows of the aztec-style empires that ringed the great lakes, which are now half-evaporated and too briny for much to live in… which would make them a bit easier to conquer, but folk memories of their former greatness could really inform how they view their current subjugation.

Well, maybe the Marianites are no longer truly Marianites any more. When God shows up and tells you that you’re doing his work wrong, things might change a bit. Again, I’m still trying to figure out how the Marianites would make this transition from mystical shamanesses to mystical technocrats – how would they fit the protectors into their worldview? It involves a few more additions to the Marianite worldview to make it work, too….

Let’s assume something new about the Marianite worldview (Now with a different name – Maria is gone!). Marwa is earth mother and Yeso is the active supernatural ruler of the sea. When Hudsonites die, they are set out into the ocean for Yeso to take care of, where they reside for eternity – but the ancestors live on as active supernatural participants, in need of honor, care and placation just as much as Yeso.

With this in mind, perhaps the “Protectors” present themselves as “servants of the ancestors” which – since they’re terraforming AIs sent by past humans, is technically true – fits nicely into Marianite ancestor worship. Folk beliefs could accrete around the Protectors, too – they’re the souls of great leaders, returned to help the people. It needs some work, but I think the protectors need to be more integrated into their host society for the story to work well.

THEN the tension between religious and poltical can come not just from power struggles, but from discomfort among the political elites that their religious leaders are ‘losing the faith’ or something similar – they no longer follow the true ways of the people, and are perhaps making deals with demons instead of gods. “We never knew about these ‘protectors’ before – so they could be evil”

With this religous element in mind, I’ve been thinking about the Cyborg too. Here’s some thoughts on the farmers and why they might rebel:

“But the farmers along the desert edge and in the interior – the Hesuans – have a more hierarchical society, with their priestly class on the top, ruling the roost, their military noblemen beneath, keeping the peace, and EVERYBODY ELSE at the bottom. HOWEVER: Once the Hudsoni, with better knives, guns, and tactics from the Protectors, sweep through the region, they destroy this system and dethrone the priestly classes. Initially the Hudsoni simply ruled and left religion to the people, but under pressure from the Marianites, they soon begin to set up new marianite temples…

But when they dig up the Iron Man, the oppressed Hesuans decide that he is Hesukristo IN THE FLESH (or metal or whatever) come to free his people from the Hudsoni and their demonic allies. This way, it’s not just the Iron Man’s charisma that compells the farmers to follow him, but his inescapable similarities to their own buried and reborn god.”

This is also a more compelling myth for your own power then just being a ‘servant of the ancestors’ – you’re a god yourself.

This all feeds back to the plot itself. If I can communicate some of these ideas early in the story – tension between religoius and political in the Hudsoni empire, doubts as to the goodness and holiness of the protectors – it opens up some new possibilities.

For example, Peter Shaw’s expedition could have a solemn Marianite Priestess along for the ride who can act in the role of political officer, pious religious figure, and maybe a sort of Romantic interest. Instead of dying out of loyalty for his brother, Peter Shaw’s doubts as to the legitimacy of the protectors could have him reluctantly join the Cyborg’s army (like you initially suggested)… but intervening to save the marianite priestesses life. Now the power is flipped (on multiple levels)…

Feb 13th Dan

It also depends on whether your world  (like the real one) exists independently from the story, or whether the world is a prop to make the story you want to tell clearer or more interesting. The difference is between Tolkien, who writes about Middle Earth and its history as if it’s one of the characters, and, say Foundation, where the “world” of the Galactic Empire is never fully explained, but exists only to raise or reinforce themes in the story (the decadent Empire symbolized by a city-planet totally dependent on import of food, a fallen nobility=people who spend all their time hunting giant birds, etc.)

I like both kinds of stories, but I usually have to reign in my tendency to nerd out. If I want to write a book and not a wikipedia page, I have to consciously focus my efforts away from world-building toward plotting the story. As a result, I probably lean more toward world-as-prop than world-as-character.

But hell, this is YOUR story. I can nerd out and world-build to my heart’s content! Let’s talk about those giant geese, and how they are tended by a hereditary caste of goose-people. What songs do the goosemen sing on their annual celebration (Goosemas Eve)? How do we make sure that those songs rhyme in the gooseman dialect? Hold on a second while I work out a vowel shift from English to Spanglish-Shanghainese. And I should put the coffee down.

(I am not exaggerating. I have literally written songs in made-up future-languages)

Calling things “the Hudson Sea” and “Michigan” will put a stop to that misconception. Also some big landmarks like mountains should have stayed the same. You could have the archaeologists examining an artifact that looks like something from our near future. Google glasses? The hulk of a self-driving car?

I like the deep time idea (…dude…). Have you read the Book of the New Son? There’s this really cool part where they talk about “artist’s sand,” a multicolored sand that people use to make mosaics and mandalas that is actually the eroded remains of the windows of sky scrapers.

Sorry, I’m getting confused about the cultures and peoples. Let me make a table:

Name: Area: Language: Religion: Social Structure

Hudsoni: Hudson bay: English/Chinese/Spanish: Marwanism (priestesses, Earth mother Marwa and her son Yeso the fisher god): Shamans recently dominant over strongmen

Hesuans: The drying Great Lakes: English/Spanish: Hesuism (priests, Creator God and his son Hesukristo the harvest god): hereditary caste system decapitated by Hudson invaders.

Canoemen: Marshes north and inland of the Hudson Bay: English: Marianite (shamans, mother Maria and son Yesu): crazy nomad barbarians

Did I get that right?

If so, I suggest some name changes so that names for the people and the religion don’t begin with the same letters as each other, which will make them easier for the readers to keep straight.

I’ve been imagining the Yon-tar as Van Neumann devices designed to terraform the planets they encounter (maybe they were intentionally sent from Mars or some other human colony, or maybe they’re just floating around in space and finally made their way back to earth accidentally). In the millennia since their creation they have evolved intelligence, but they are still slaves to their initial programming, which is to make conditions optimal for human population growth. They don’t have any “instinctive” reason to care about the safety or happiness of individual humans, although as intelligent beings they can learn how to care about humans the same way we can learn to care about chimpanzees.Another possibility is they aren’t extraterrestrial at all, but a manifestation of a system designed to manage global climate, something that was supposed to halt climate-change, but was abandoned as civilization failed. Their population crashed with society, but enough of them survived to slowly evolve into what we see today. Perhaps there are whole ecosystems of these things around the equator that nobody knows about, busily working to increase albedo, sequester C02, and detoxify the ocean.

Ooh. I like the “solemn Marianite Priestess”. “Seducing you vas part of the plen. Not falling in luff viz you!”

His faith in her religion is failing, even as he is falling in love with her. Then, he is forced to keep her a prisoner. It will be his death if she escapes and runs back to tell the other Marianites about his apostacy. She says she won’t, that she loves him too. But is that a ploy to make him let his guard down? Or true love? Or Stockholm syndrome? Is Peter in effect raping her every time they have sex because she’s too scared to say no? Or is she powerless at all? The captured Protector seems to do what she says. Is Peter, in fact, HER prisoner?

Ooh. Delicious.

 

Baby talks! (10 months)

I’m you all care very deeply about infant language acquisition and my infant in general.

My baby turns 10 months old today, and it’s a great time to begin one of those lists of what words your baby uses. We got some good ones.

Booki=book (which she demands first thing in the morning)

Mama=a person giving food, give me food! (this person may be mother of father of a complete stranger), mother

Yummy/Nummy/Lummy=give me that food! (usually on somebody’s plate)

Khiiya/Giiya/Gya=Kitty (which she grabs)

Ba/Aba=Ball, cantaloupe, any round object, toy (archaic)

Ba/Buh=bear, dog, deer, moose, horse (possibly from bear or baba metsa, or grandma bear in Bulgarian)

Baba=grandma

Daddy/Tatty=I am going to chew on something inappropriate for chewing, daddy

Haide/aide=Let’s go/come on/get with the program in Bulgarian.

Pu!=something is dirty in Bulgarian

Dak/dag=either duck or dog or both. I’m not sure.

Hey/Hi=a greeting

Bye=goodbye

Note: to count as a word, it has to be an utterance Baby reliably makes in specific situations to refer to specific things. Interjections like bwa, dabl, agwa, kawai, namina, and aah! don’t count.

Story Germs 3

The ongoing saga of turning Simon Roy’s Archaeology idea into a fully-fledged story.

After ironing out the characters in Simon’s story, we started talking about the post-apocalyptic world they live in.

Chat, end of January:

me: hey, I had an idea about the Archaeology story

Simon: ooh tell tell

me: It came from reading the Martian General’s Daughter and Better Angels of our Nature at the same time. Premise: a stable civilization (Pinker calls it a Smart Leviathan) dis-insentivizes cultures of honor and violent tempers and so on. In general, people are brought up to save for tomorrow, exercise self-control, and put themselves in the shoes of others. Plus civilizations with wide-spanning communication nets tend to drive superstitions extinct by disproving them. Now, we could say that everything has reverted back to barbarism in the time the story takes place. Or we could have something of the old ways surviving. Something like the way the Chinese states never really lost their sense of history and rules of decency, even when they were fragmented and at war with each other

Your North America could look more like medieval Asia than Europe.

Simon: ooh. I like that

me: So like, an exam you need to pass to join the aristocracy? Called the SAT?

Simon: ehehe. Nice. I always like the futures filled with malformed, derived modern terms in the vocabulary

me: Definitely President=king etc.

Simon: so more of feudalism descended from the trappings of western society then fuedalism straight transplanted in time… I’ll have to re-jig the tentative social system I have, but that would be much more interesting then just tribal culture

much deeper

me: what exactly was the nature of the fall of civilization?

Simon: well, I’m thinking just serious, serious environmental collapse the equatorial regions are dead deserts, the seas are full of jellyfish, and men roam the circumpolar marshlands.

me: I like the giant geese thing. Losing horses would certainly put a hard cieling on empire-building. So maybe somewhere between China and the Aztec city-states?

Simon: Of course, if its a marshy circumpolar landscape, maybe they travel by boat through canals and natural waterways.

Simon: I was thinking more war canoes

me: I know the Inuit make kayaks with built-in runners that can be hitched to dogs and pulled like sledges. I don’t see why that wouldn’t work in marshes

Simon: Also, this is something I’ll be throwing in there



me: also the more I think of it, the more a marshy, fertile horseless centralized state sounds like Tenochtitlan

Simon: ahh yeah

I love that mesoamerican flavah

me: awesome hat-cloak

Simon: exactly and super weird

me: the mesoamerican connection might even be legitimate

Simon: yeah I’ve been thinking how to handle ethnicity, if at all everyone as a Latino Animist Christian

me: these people could speak a language derived from English, but with Spanish words for government and religious vocabulary

Simon: Christ, the sea god, giver of jellyfish sea-manna

me: Mama Maria la Tierra, whose wrath destroyed the wicked

Simon: her son ‘fisher of men and jellyfish’

Feb 6th Dan

As global climate shifts in the 2100s and 2200s, it acts as a “force multiplier” for other kinds of conflict. Ethnic, religious, and class tensions get worse as the food supply diminishes and ecological disasters send waves of “climate refugees” to swamp the social infrastructure of big states. These big states (or multi-state food-distribution/free-trade networks) sustain their population with massive technological projects: desalination, irrigation, land reclamation, all to grow more food with less arable land and fresh water. It works. Even as the earth becomes less habitable, human population continues to grow. This might be when the Van Neumann Zon-tar devices were created.

The fall comes with war. Perhaps it’s climate refugees from the desertifying subtropical latitudes, or an internal rebellion, or mismanagement from above or all three. Maybe we just run out of cheap sources of energy. In any case enough of the agricultural/reclamation infrastructure is destroyed that it’s impossible for most people to eat. Riots and mass migrations make it impossible for anyone to pick up the pieces. The knots of civilization that hold on in the chaos only do so by ignoring sustainability and burning their remaining fuel. Maybe some nuclear bombs and GM plagues are lobbed around. By the time the dust settles (three generations, let’s say), most of the world between about 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south of the equator cannot support agriculture, and the equator itself is more or less entirely uninhabitable.

Our story begins several thousand years after this Collapse. In North America, there is little habitation below 30 degrees north. The topsoil deposited in the American heartland by Pleistocene glaciers is now in the Gulf of Mexico, which is anoxic and devoid of most multicelcular life. Between 20 and 30 degrees, desert nomads shade into agricultural city-states based around low-tech irrigation projects spreading out from the great continental rivers and lakes (which are slightly poisonous, but whose water can be treated or used on crops). This Michigan culture reached its apogee 500 years ago, when barbarian invasions from the north unbalanced their delicate environmental reclamation. Now the Michigan Cities are shrunken and in ruins, although their religion, Madreism, has spread north to the arctic circle.

Newer city-states have sprung up around the Hudson Bay and claim to be the successors of the Michigans, although the Anglic languages they speak have only heavily borrowed from the vocabulary of the exulted Michigan Hispanic. Their Hudson Ecumen has established colonies up the northeast and northern coasts of North America, with some older, less loyal breakaway states around Great Slave Lake and Bear Lake. They are aware of a “north-west passage” around Alaska into the pacific, but have yet to explore much of Asia or the West coast. Civilization (such as it is) ends quickly outside the farming hinterlands around the walled cities. Barbarian river-men paddle their canoes or drag their dog-sledges over the marshy un-farmable wasteland. Their lightning-raids with swords, bows, and muskets are swift and dreadful indeed, but without the any way of making or transporting cannon, they cannot threaten the walled cities.

Politically, each city is sovereign, with an Alcalde (sometimes Mayor) or a council of Senadores. Small  might be “Little Brothers” to a larger neighbor, in which case the Gobernador, appointed by the Alcalde, is responsible for tribute, levees, and keeping the roads and waterways open. A Ministro is responsible for keeping the peace within such an alliance, and it is considered polite to use one to command troops in a war against another Ecumen member. For foreign enemies outside the Ecumen, you need a General or Admiral. The Holy Church puts Madres (male or female) in grande Catedrales, where they act as advisers to the Alcalde and help to settle disputes between cities before the matter escalates to violence (which as we know angers Madre de la Tierra). Everyone pays lip-service to the idea that one day all Hudson peoples will once again be united be a Presidente Grande. Staple foods are sweet potatoes, rice, and maize, with cattails as famine food. They also harvest jellies and keep farms of catfish, pigs, turtles, and giant geese.

Life among the Rivermen (or Kayakers?) requires less bureaucracy. A Manger is a respected older man who advises members of the community and helps mediate disputes. A Boss or Chief (or in more civilized tribes, a Henral) commands warriors in battle. A Memry (usually a woman) guides the band as it travels and intercedes with the God on behalf of the people. Decisions regarding the whole tribe are made by the Men’s and Women’s Bords (which includes every respectable adult person in the tribe), with the Manager presiding. “Folk” (family) or “Famly” (clan) disputes are settled by the most respected person in the group. Unlike the nomads in the southern deserts, the Rivermen have no tradition of gathering into multi-tribe armies. They survive by fishing, harvesting jellies, herding giant geese, growing cat-tails, and raids on their neighbors.

Feb 7th, Simon

Feb 7th, Dan:I really like poncho-dude on the left there. And I absolutely dig the stache you gave him in picture two (which is just an awesome picture in general. I love the sense of imminent danger). The characterization I get from this is a very serious dude. He’s proud that he’s good at what he does. It’s just that what he does is kill people, and he’s never been entirely comfortable with that. He has regrets, and those regrets feed his drive to continue his work. Maybe if he kills the RIGHT people, he can quit.

As far as world-building goes, I dig the poncho and sombrero. Also the naked legs thing makes sense for a culture that uses canoes rather than horses to get around (canoe-cavalry? Navalry?) In a way, these guys will probably conduct wars like classical charioteers, with two guys for paddling and one guy in the middle with a gun or other ranged weapon. When they come to a portage, the two paddlers become draggers (the canoe has a runner-keel to help it on marshy ground, and maybe detachable wheels for dry land?). In battle, the forward paddler becomes the light swordsman (offense) and the rear one (in armor) becomes the heavy swordsman (defense), while the boss in the middle shoots oncoming enemies. On open water, you get mini naval warfare, with canoes trying to get a broadside on each other (crossing the T) or making strafing runs at each other like WWI fighter pilots. Axes might also be useful weapons, since they can disable enemy canoes.

As for clothing: these guys will probably have lots of woven straw or reeds, almost certainly cotton, probably not wool, probably not silk (although who knows). Minimal leg-wear for canoe-men coupled with waterproof boots and cloaks makes sense. I really like the SE Asian clamshell hat thing, so I hope you use that. Armor could be steel (made from bog-iron?) or something more exotic like carbon fiber (grown from GM plants?). Here’s a fun idea: make the shape of the armor reminiscent of the design of the cyborg, suggesting that there’s some folk-memory of war-monsters that modern artisans incorporate into their designs to scare los anamigos.

The hinged breastplates are interesting. What’s the thought behind those?

More ideas will probably suggest themselves with research into naval warfare as practiced by:

The Aztecs

The Vikings

Pacific Northwest Indians like the Haida (who modified traditional harpoon-rigs to mount guns on the tips of their canoes!)

The Polynesians

Chinese administration during the Waring States Epoch

Aztec administration during the Triple Alliance

The Hellenic Ecumen (post Alexander, pre Rome)

Other possible sources of inspiration:

This picture strikes me as fairly realistic. I bet a lot of canoe warfare is shooting at someone until you get close enough to stand up and whale on each other.  A good weapon for this might be a rifle with a very heavy (or perhaps bladed) stock, so it can be used to smash your opponents after the ammo runs out. The savage post-apocalypse version of a bayonet.

[image error]

Oh, sorry I forgot to comment on the cyborg. I like the creepy lobster-armor, but I like the bulky silhouette of the other one better. It’s interesting you’ve chosen to obscure his face, which (as we know from that great adventure classic Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, also from more obscure works like Star Wars) is an excellent way to cut off a character from the audience and make them less sympathetic and more evil. Perhaps the human head is actually in the chest of the cyborg, and when he’s feeling happy, the guy retracts a plate and looks out at the world with his real eyes?

Also, for extra creepy fun, here’s a nice design for the eyes:

[image error]Feb 7th, Simon:



I like the idea of armor reminiscent of cyborg design.

With hinged breastplates are based off of ancient japanese wooden armor, and I like the way they’re also a bit reminiscent of modern body armor. I’d love to do more and make their weapons look derived from modern military stuff, but theres always the danger of making it look too video-gamey.

But I really like the idea of incorporating monsters, etc, into the designs!

Visually, I wanted to try and mix up plains native (loincloth and breeches) with mexican and asian cultures, so there will be a few conical hats among the sombreros. The dudes I’ve drawn there were supposed to be wearing breeches AND fish-skin boots, which lots of cultures use (i believe they even show up in a certain book we’ve both been talking about)…

Really I want to just straight-up copy tlingit wooden armor AND war canoes AND weapons, but as someone who does a lot of work with natives (illustration work I mean, not social) I’m a bit sensitive about the whole cultural appropriation thing. Too easy. That being said, the close-up you sent me is part of one of my favourite paintings – the tlingit warrior in full wooden armor with rifle looks like something out of the coolest miyazaki story never told… some corner of ‘nausicaa’s’ world he left unexplored.

I’m impressed by how far you’ve gone into this, as I hadn’t quite figured out the nitty gritty of canoe warfare. I think that’s mainly because I only have the first section of the story visualized in any sort of clarity – and that part won’t involve any naval battles. Further along though a proper comic-sequence of a canoe battle would be awesome – and something I bet few people ever depict.

I had been thinking of the portage element, though – I figure an early scene will be Peter shaw and his troops crossing a portage and running into a whole bunch of anxious clamshell-umbrella dressed peasants standing nervously around a laser-blasted dead protector… a foreshadowing of the power they’re going to fight!

Feb 7th Simon:

Here’s the pessimistic map I was using….

This climate setup feeds really well into classical archeological imagery, too – all the great abandoned cities will be in desert and scrubland, giving hints of ‘raiders of the lost ark’ and egypt, which is a nice legitimizing thought-line to touch on. I’m now thinking that “The Iron Man’s” base will be in a dried-up lake (where his troop carrier crashed in wetter times) and the great camp around him will look like burning man! Out on the playa!

Or something.

This is basically the historical setting I’ve arrived at, minus the apocalyptic war elements – in terms of sheer momentum I think our current global society, given a rapid change of circumstances like this, would manage to unravel pretty damn well without nukes or plagues. If a catastrophic climatic shift takes place over a decade (these things don’t usually take too long), much of the developed globalization-dependent world would starve without their cheap foreign-made food. I imagine you’d have a weird situation where governments would attempt to go isolationist right as their civilians would give up on national borders. Even internal migration within large countries would probably be enough to start some serious shit…

I’m thinking that the cultures of the “Hudson Sea” will be the dominant ones – jellyfish eating, rice-stealing maritime warlords with small fortified cities ruled by strongmen, who have a long history of raiding their southern neighbours.

(Developing this world further will go in cool places, though – with a largely ice-free arctic, the cross-cultural trade between North American, asian, and Northern European cultures would be pretty cool…)

But though the Hudson warlords rule, there are long-standing ethnic and religious tensions between them and their vassals – their contrasting religions being a huge tension point.

In the south, the farming cultures are followers of Hesukristo, the god of rebirth and harvests, son of the celestial father, and enjoy a more administrative religious experience in line with their generally more orderly lives.

But the hudson cultures are Marianites, worshipping the earth mother “Maria” and her son, Yesu, the sea-god who gives them ‘manna’ (jellyfish). (In this, Yesu is roughly equivalent to the inuit “Sedna”, a woman who had her fingers cut off and drowned in the ocean – but whos fingers became the beasts of the sea and who herself became the cruel sea goddess and granter of animals to the inuit. Yesu was killed by his enemies and thrown into the hudson sea, where he was resurrected from the dead by his celestial father and took charge of all the life of the sea).

They come from the shamanic tradition of personal, subjective interactions with the gods (while in altered states), so when the Protectors revealed themselves to the Marianite shamans of the north, the Marianites and the rest of their society were particularly receptive to this direct manifestation of godhood.I think having the agricultural peoples as being more ‘civilized’ and having a more organized, hierarchical society works. But what of the more loosely organized warrior tribes of the Hudson? Wouldn’t every chieftain call himself a “Presidente”, only subservient to the man with the balls to make himself “Grande Presidente?”

I’ve gotta dig around a bit more OR work on corruptions of “president” and “Prime minister”…

What I’ve been thinking as the current political paradigm is this:

The first person to contact the Holy Protectors is a Marianite shaman, who perceives the Protectors as Angels of the Father, (the uninvolved penultimate deity of their cosmology), and develops an exclusive relationship with the Protectors (which the protectors themselves support, as they want to keep control on any technology they give the natives).

This new empowered elite of shaman-priests, now with real, tangible gods at their service, appeal to the Presidents of the hudson tribes, offering education and technology in return for pious service to the Protectors. Harry Shaw’s grandfather, the craftiest ‘Presidente’, kills his rivals and becomes “Presidente Grande”, (or Presidentissimo) and begins a century of expansion.

For the Shaws, it’s a classic matter of superiority and control over their age-old enemies. But for the Marianites, it’s more about using the most expedient source of applied force to establish the Protector-guided new order on Earth.

The resulting political system is an inherently unstable one, with the Shaw Presidente Grande ruling the whole region like a mongol khan. All participant (hudson) and vassal parties must give tribute to the Grande Presidente and his army, whether it is in rice, gold, or labour, and submit to the Marianite plan.

But this empire, held together by the military strength of the Hudsonites, is increasingly administrated and controlled by the Marianites, who are busy building a new enlightened protector-approved world…

Thus making the Hudsonites, and their Presidentissimo, feel rather insecure in their relationship with their technocratic allies. In the days of Yesu Shaw, the Protectors could be compelled to occaisionally smite the enemies of the rivermen with HOLY FIRE. Now, they won’t even return their calls… would the marianites help if something goes wrong, or just switch allegiances to keep up with their plan?

Meanwhile, the rice and maize-growing vassals of the plains are getting pissed with both of ‘em, seeing BOTH as invaders and oppressors regardless of better irrigation and more efficient resource utilization.

Since this is a society with no horses (all the megafauna was eaten during the collapse WAY back), I think that the most boat-mobile cultures (like the large, complex native cultures of the Pacific northwest and eastern woodlands) would  probably be better equipped for warfare then the land-locked subsistence farmers of the interior. Both pacific northwest and eastern woodland cultures would go on long, long range raids (haida gwaii warriors stealing slaves from oregon and california, for example) so I think giving the rivermen a heritage of warfare not unlike that (or the mongols) – where most of historical war is small-scale intertribal, but occasionally big multi-tribe armies will clash for big events (allied tribes annihilating a common enemy) is the one that works best for me. Then, having the agricultural societies as being more like city-states with vassal villages they protect contrasts well against more dynamic, ambitious tribal warriors.

Feb 8th

I like the idea of a dry, arid American Midwest, but my nerd-on is for the new subtropical marshland of northern Canada.  I’m also thinking about places like Greenland, which are now warm and wet enough for forests, but don’t have any topsoil. Imagine a land that’s basically a wet parking lot from horizon to horizon. Bleak.

However, for the purposes of the story, a desert will fit the theme better, and it will also be a lot easier to worldbuild, so yeah.

I don’t think any readers will balk at :”there was catastrophic climate change and the collapse of global civilization” as an explanation for why things are so different in the world of the story. Unless the plot hinges on them, the exact details can be left to the imagination of the reader.

Also: representations of Yesu should totally have a Crown-of-Jellyfish-Stingers

The impression I got was strongly centralized agricultural states around the Great Lakes (classical Cairo, Tenochtitlan, etc.) smaller-scale citystates further north (classical Macedon, medieval Paris or Khwarzim, etc.) are run by “civilized” barbarians. Then there are the stateless canoe people of the north and interior. But maybe the Hudson people are less civilized than I’ve been thinking. Maybe the buffer states between Han states and central Asian barbarians (Jin, Xia, Uyghur khanates, Kara-Khitan in descending order of civilization) might be a good model.

Another possible direction for Hudson is the Holy Roman Empire or the early Japanese states: they have no permanent capitol, but instead move their court from one fortress to another. Partly these moves were to avoid stressing the environment too much in one place (i.e. running away from the spectacular amount of sewage a primitive aristocratic court can produce), and partly they were a way to slough off the hangers-on at once court, avoid one city or fortress becoming too dominant in the region, and above all demonstrate the court’s wealth and power.

I was thinking more of Presidente being the equivalent of Czar in Eastern Europe, with the rulers of smaller satellite states calling themselves “knyaz.”

But I like the idea of Presidente being equivalent to khan, with Grande Presidente being a once-in-a-century kagan.

What’s the substrate of the language of the Hudson people? If it’s English, then “presnet” or “pram” might evolve, or maybe “predenny” from Spanish “presidente.” But then the word becomes gibberish to modern readers. It might be cool to “translate” the word back to its modern English cognate. So you get characters saying things like, “As one sun shines in the heavens, one President rules upon the waters.”

I like Presidentissimo. Were the shamans part of the same culture as the settled Hudson people before the Protectors showed up? If so, then I would expect them to evolve into an aristocracy, while the Presidents become a warrior caste. The other option is for the President to keep the shamans under his thumb by threat of force, a proposition that becomes more unstable as the Protectors flex their muscles.

The historical parallels I can think of are Louis the Pious and Hulagu Khan: the successors of empire-building barbarians, born in a time of political consolidation, when religion is more important that command of troops, torn between the warlike traditions of their ancestors and the scholarship and civilization of their newly-conquered vassals.

A fortress built on a hill would be impossible to take by river-men, or even besiege by people in canoes. Plus it looks like your city-dwellers still have gunpowder (Gunpowder without horses is so cool!). I think the canoemen would be a threat to trade and to outlying rice-farming peasants, but no more than a nuisance otherwise.

Of course, interior Canada may be a perfect battlefield for the caneomen in the same way the the Asian Steppe was for the Mongols. Maybe there isn’t any high ground and there aren’t any good places to build fortresses.

As cool as canoe-paddling Mongol/Haida/Vikings are, it’s worth giving them up for Clint Eastwood robbing the Pharaohs’ tombs.

We’re getting to the point now where we could waste a lot of time thinking about aspects of the world that will never appear in the story (or world-build something really cool that doesn’t fit into the story, and then make the story worse by shoe-horning them in). But that’s okay. It only means that the world is more or less built, and there’s enough groundwork laid to suggest interesting directions the story might go.

Story Germs 2

The ongoing saga of turning Simon Roy’s Archaeology idea into a fully-fledged story.

After a week of emailing back and forth, Simon and I had ironed out the plot of a story about a warrior-aristocrat in a post-apocalyptic North America and his dealings with his tyrannical brother, an insane un-frozen war cyborg from the 21st century, and a host of enigmatic alien entities.

Jan 16th

…

I think if I end up building this thing further, I think that doing the Zon-tars as heavy-handed wildlife managers would serve my own ideological purposes the best. The underlying current of “man the scrappy underdog who always wins because of some innately human rightness” that pervades so many stories like this is something that, right now, I’m a little cynical of, so if I could make it work, I feel like I’d want to the story to end not with a democratic, equality-driven resolution of man and alien on equal footing… but how to do that without making something too preachy or depressing? We’ll see!

Exploring the dark side of ‘human management’ could be brought in super early, too, both to contextualize their purpose on earth AND to explain why the aliens aren’t taking care of matters themselves. Something like: a major population center in the rebelling region had become afflicted with an unmanageable disease, and rather then treat it they quarantined and destroyed the effected population (like we sometimes do with bison with tuberculosis, for example). Having so recently weakened the regional population, they figure intervention by their human agents would most likely end with fewer deaths and a stronger regional breeding pool.

This also makes the region where the ‘iron man’ emerges hostile to the aliens and ready to rebel anyways – showing off the gap of understanding between the alien managers. “Why would these excavation workers rebel? We HAD to annihiliate all their relatives in those villages for their own good. It’s illogical that they would hate us for protecting them.”

There’s also be room for brain-exploding forced uploads, too – sometimes researchers need to dissect a few of their charges. That’s a particularly visceral evil thing to do, too!

(Why they’re managing humanity need not even be explained, I think – perhaps only intimated.)

One thing I just thought of too would be having the Peter character pull a “ned stark” and get killed when he refuses to join the Iron Man, (a nice cheap-shot on the audience since we’ve spent up until that point empathizing with him) then switch to following a supporting character – like his lieutenant or something – that will then have the character arc of joining the Iron Man and becoming disillusioned with him. I think that could work if the supporting character was strong enough – or empathetic enough, like the Hegemon’s teenage son, trying to prove himself any way he can with a teenage chip on his shoulder…

Man, now I wish I had the time to draw this damn thing! It’ll be in a slightly different direction then your outline, but there’s lots to work with there. Elements of ‘democratized superhuman tech powers’ to fight the zon-tars could be accomplished with barely-working thousand year-old laser rifles instead of ‘uplifting’ the tribesmen with cyborg nanotech. The visual of a nomadic tribal warrior clumsily slinging some big bulky laser tube (built for cyborg warriors) is an awfully tempting one for me… Picture a khan-era mongolian horseman with some natty leather strap of his own design tied to a big-ass laser! THE GOD-LANCE!…

Jan 16th, Dan:

The Zon-tars as heavy-handed wildlife managers could be very powerful. On the one hand, they are doing the noble work of keeping human population stable in the long term (and why ask why? They think it’s important, the same way we think its important to keep bison populations stable), on the other hand, from the human perspective, this is horrible endless oppression and genocide (what happens when the herds need culling?). Oh, as added horror-bonus, forced breeding programs when the population is too low, and when it’s too high, they encourage people like Peter to go to war. That way we get to lower the population, weed out the gene pool, and engage in a fascinating and ancient human custom.

…

Depressing is the danger here, I think. Most real-world first-contact scenarios are heart-breaking. But drawing from them, here are a few of the more positive outcomes:

Humans are absorbed into alien society at the cost of our traditional way of life.

Humans continue their traditional way of life as a form of performance art for alien tourists.

Aliens pay humans for services in goods, not knowledge, creating a class of warlords who use alien technology to oppress everyone else.

Aliens ignore humans, allowing us our independence and traditions, but cutting us off from the opportunities of interstellar civilization, and leaving us vulnerable to alien outlaws.

But there is no way for us to beat the aliens at their own game. There will never be a uniquely human space-ship, only a human-built space-ship copied from alien blue-prints and produced more cheaply. But Earth-as-China is probably way to optimistic. Probably it will be more like humans-as-New Guinea, with human-built space-ships the equivalent of cargo-cult coconut radios and wooden airplanes….

I think killing Peter depends on whether you want to write a relatively short, coherent, “tight” story (one guy does one thing and that’s the end, like a novel), or whether you want a sprawling epic. I’ve learned to avoid epics (because I want to write a different book every year and increase my chances of getting published), but perhaps an epic would work better (i.e. not be so hard to write) as a comic. Each edition might be very short, and people don’t necessarily expect them to follow the same character.

…Peter’s nephew as secondary main character could work, but, if you want to go that route, I definitely think you need to tell multiple stories from multiple point of view characters from the beginning. That way when Peter dies, people who are invested in him aren’t left high and dry. They will continue to read the series because they want to know what will happen to the other characters they’ve come to love.

Who might those characters be?

1. Peter (brother of the local warlord, armed with alien technology he doesn’t understand, good at soldiering, but too moral and prone to second-guessing for the job of general)

2. A fanatic (or a mystic? I’m thinking of Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, or even better, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah). Perhaps he is slowly disillusioned with Iron? Might be interesting to make this person a woman.

3.Iron’s right-hand, a teenager sent to work at the dig, then returned home to find his village had been quarantined and destroyed.

4. A nomad who sees Peter’s little kingdom as just as much an oppressor as the aliens. Perhaps a Bedouin to Peter’s Arab. A guide to Iron and his party as they search for the Lost Factory. Perhaps plans to use the Factory for the tribe.

5. A female spy sent to keep Peter in line. Love opportunities (with peter or with our number 3 man). Perhaps her cover is that she is a lore-master (i.e. a quasi-engineer, someone who knows how to make high-tech artifacts work). Her training is with alien tech (which is like magic), but she’s spent enough time with the archaeologists to grasp some 21st-century human technology and basic science. She has the know-how necessary to repair Iron and activate the factory.

And if you want to get weird:

1. Iron himself, depending on whether you want him to be a sympathetic person or a demigod/force of nature

2. One of the zon-tar (same caveats, plus it might make more sense to leave them enigmatic and mysterious), but if you do want to include one, a naieve archaeologists who sympathizes with the workers and gets caught up in the rebellion. Wounded so it cannot escape or call for help, it gets dragged around by the rebellion, being tortured, and demonstrating that not all aliens are bad-guys.

… I’ve been using England/Egypt as my map for this story, but China/Central Asia would also give us some excellent stories.

Someone like Genghis Khan (a middle-aged leader of a minor tribe of losers is forced to take over the continent in order to keep his family safe) would be cool. Also there’s Jamukha (the treacherous blood-brother), Teb-Tengri (the scheming shaman), Borte (the kick-ass politically savvy wife), Subutai (a commoner who became a horde’s greatest general), Jebe the Arrow (an enemy general captured and re-purposed)…take your pick….

Story germs 1

Often, I find, the germ of a story is an image or a vision. A man lost in a dark catacomb, a spaceship looming over a planet, a Molotov cocktail crashing through a window. Writers have to transform this image into words, and then draw out the story, character, and atmosphere it creates into a novel.If you’re making a comic, however, that first image can stay unadulterated. You still have to make a story, though, and that’s what I’m doing with the kickass comic artist and writer Simon Roy.

On his own webiste, Simon posted two excellent story germs.

What are those things? What are they doing with the humans? Why have humans reverted to barbarism? There’s a sense here of dread, hope, and regret that’s begging to be expanded into a full story. All it needs is a catalyst to boil down the conflict to the needs of a single main character and a catalyst to get the action going.

Jan 11th, Simon:

…And what happens when the aliens dig up a 22nd century (American) military cyborg who has some differing ideas on human history and self-government.

Your post on “what do the aliens want” is helping guide me in how to put it together, too!

Jan 11th Dan

…

A possible problem I see with this scenario is that it has too many things that are different from real life (“conceits”). Usually, a sci-fi story has one conciet: it’s the future or aliens have made contact with humans or civilization as we know it has crumbled. Putting them all together means you have to work harder to explain what’s going on to the reader. Part of that problem you already solved, because you can just show a picture of what the world looks like (i.e. that picture of an alien archaeological dig). Cursed visual narratives and their more efficient means of implanting information in the audience!

However the other problem is that it might be hard to get the reader to sympathize with either a cold alien intelligence, an illiterate nomad, or a high-tech cyborg, and it will be very hard to get them to sympathize with all three. One solution would be to make it a 21st-century cryo-frozen person rather than a cyborg, another would be to say that civilization cycled back to something like the 19th or 20th century before the aliens arrived, another is to make the aliens familiar in their behavior to the reader. There are probably better solutions to the problem than what I’ve suggested (another idea occurs: an uploaded mind from the Rapture of the Nerds that the aliens dig up)….

Jan 14th Simon

…

My idea for an opening scene would involve Harry Shaw, with the collected tribes of the plains, tensely waiting for the Zon-Tars to show up to the ceremonial raising of the Human-Zon-tar Friendship pole. When they arrive, however, they give only passing notice to the ceremony and instead whisk Harry away to their ship to talk (infuritating Harry and shaming him before his vassals/rivals).

The Zon-tars are concerned with studying and understanding Earth, and part of this involves archeological digs. When they dig up a military shuttle with a still-surviving military cyborg (or bio-cyborg or something), the cyborg promptly kills the on-site supervision and decides to free mankind from the Zon-Tar yoke (and become a god himself). The only part the zon-tars know, though, is that there’s a worker/slave rebellion at one of their important dig sites, and it’s the Hegemony’s responsibility to take care of it.

So Harry’s brother and right-hand-man, Peter Shaw, takes a bunch of his meanest warriors down to crush the rebellion, only to find the region rallying around this supernatural “Iron Man”. Peter Shaw’s choices are tough – either side with his brother, and the aliens controlling earth, or side with this new bloody war-god on behalf of humankind. ”

And that was as far as I had got. (That could be the whole thing, too, if I want to do it as a short story.)

Memo had a lot of good ideas to build on that – for one, the Zon-tars are post-singularity machines (originally from earth – or the descendants of intelligent human-sent von neumann probes, my variation).) trying to understand their roots AND develop ‘wetware backups’ as insurance against possible destruction.  My original idea is that they would simply be a handful of impossibly advanced interstellar academics, studying the world as thoroughly as they could, but Memo had the counterpoint: why would these apparently advanced beings bother stooping to such low levels as collaboration and slavery with the primitive humans?

The other option is that they Zon-tars are interstellar conservationists who have seen many species come and go, and so are attempting to develop some sort of rapport with the humans on human terms (which happen to include forced labour and war) to try and keep them safe in some sort of planetary reserve, managing the population and technology to prevent new sophont-induced mass extinctions/environmental collapses. The problem with this, of course, is that it’s not a particularly exciting or evil thing for aliens to be doing. It works with the whole ‘distant, managerial overlords’ concept, though, and makes them less cartoonish conqueror aliens and more ambiguous characters.

Memo also put forward the idea of Peter joining the cyborg and going on an adventure through the abandoned cities of earth to grab some sort of mystical alien-defeating weapon (or nuke or whatever) and making into a very classic Jack Vance/Joseph Campbell epic adventure, which does have a certain appeal. …

Aha – one last thought on this, derived from some of the world building in the amazing ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz‘ – perhaps chance alone made the aliens contact the nomadic warriors of a world that accommodates both industry and tribal chaos (think of if aliens accidentally formed an alliance with the plains tribes instead of the settling Americans during the mid 1800s). But that might be too much of a conceit in and of itself! …

Jan 16th Dan

The Shaw Hegemony sounds something like a theocracy, except with God occasionally actually doing something, and it’s not always what you expect. Another danger would be that other people could theoretically get the aliens’ attention and cut Harry out of the loop. Other parallels might be Chinese Mandarins (interacting between the alien Mongols and the general Chinese population), and I’m sure there are actually people like this today among stateless societies, who negotiate between the tribe and outsiders. The corruption networks that grow around charitable aid foundations in Africa might also be useful templates for this guy….So this is a discussion of self-government. Is it better to be ruled by outsiders or insiders? What if the insider is a ruthless dictator?

…

Peter Shaw is an excellent main character. The cyborg, Harry Shaw, and the aliens all must be cynical manipulators to some extent, and those sort of people are hard for readers to sympathize with. Peter Shaw might actually be a good, moral person, though, and so you can have him ask questions like “what is right?” without sounding silly. Also, he makes a great stand-in for any would-be revolutionary in history. Should I side with the would-be dictator, or the faceless, exploitative foreign business interests?

… I’m worried, though, that the Zon-tars aren’t bad enough. Are they doing anything unpleasant to humans? What are the humans rebelling against? Because in order to make Peter Shaw’s choice a hard one, the Zon-tars have to be bastards (perhaps unwittingly, but still).

One possibility is forced uploading. Zon-tars do a “destructive scan” of a human brain in order to build an accurate simulation, and bystanders see the guy’s head explode in a puff of nano-machines. That could raise tensions.

…I think it’s important that the aliens have a real stake in something on the earth, so we can sympathize with their motives. A historical parallel might be Egypt versus England. Archaeology is useful and interesting to the Zon-tars, so there’s a lot of archaeological work and tourism on Earth, but that’s only part of a general exploitation process. What do the Zon-tars want that Earth can provide? Organic feedstock? I can imagine huge factories, chewing forests into baby Zon-tars.

…Or they could just be conversationists. Conservation is a good idea when we apply these rules to ourselves, but when an overlord starts telling you how big your population can be, that’s oppression. Aliens managing humans like we manage bison would be a very, very bad thing for individual humans.

Which makes a great story!

…

Making Peter the main character might go a long way to closing the gap. Consider making him educated by the aliens in the ways of the ancients (like a turn-of-the-century Arab Egyptian might learn something at digs). Let’s say he has a culture crush on the United States, and so he’s constantly making comparisons to things he knows about the United States and things he’s seeing in the distant future (is this guy a Martin Luther King or a Malcom X? Is he a Lenin or a Stalin?) That could be enough to give the readers something to hold while you drag them forward into the story.

…

So to summarize what I’m getting from your story:

General Peter has a problem. His older brother, Lord Harry, has sent him to quell a rebellion around an archaeological dig run by the Holy Zon-tar, but this time it isn’t just a slave revolt.

(opening scene: a battle during the slave revolt with set-pieces and flash-backs to world-build behind the action) An enormous number of peasants and prairie tribesmen have allied themselves with a mysterious Iron Warrior, and have actually succeed in destroying several Holy Zon-tar. Then, when Peter is captured by the Iron Warrior, he finds out that this hero of the people is actually a survivor from the Time Long Ago, before the Zon-tar came.

(chapter two, talking and establishing characters and world building) Iron speaks of the right to human self-rule, even as he callously throws his allies to their deaths at the hands of the wrathful Zon-tar.

(Chapter three: More action)When Zon-tar justice catches up to them, Iron and Peter (metal and stone, get it?) are the only ones to escape alive.

(Chapter four: atmosphere and little adventures) They flee across the face of post-apocalyptic North America, trying to gather aid, hide from the Zon-tar, and find the factory/hospital that Iron can use to make an army as strong as himself. However, Peter is increasingly worried that Peter would make a worse ruler of humanity than the Zon-tar. When a woman from Lord Harry’s court joins their party, Peter does not expose her for the spy she is.( (actually maybe put this important character earlier? It depends on whether this story is more like a novel or more like a series of TV shows or comic books).)

(chapter 5, the lowest point) Finally, when they find the lost factory/hospital,it turns out Iron has no intention of augmenting anyone to his level. He only wants to replace the Zon-tar as ruler of earth. (the solution) Peter lets his girlfriend call down the Zon-tar to provide a distraction while the two of them undergo the surgery needed to become cyborgs as powerful as Iron, and churn as many other people as they can through the process.

(chapter 6: a kick-ass battle! Aliens and knights and good and evil cyborgs! Blarg!) The end result is a defeated Iron and a treaty with the Zon-tar, backed up an army of cyborg-citizens. True freedom only arises when everyone has the same destructive potential as everyone else.

Tune in tomorrow for more Zon-tarly goodness!

Podcast 25 Image to Story

Listen to the PODCAST

This week we walk through a storytelling project with Simon Roy, s a really cool starting point for a story about alien archaeologists.

O’Neill Cylinders

The Garden of Rama, Dust, The Book of the Long Sun series

Berms

Sorry it’s a short conversation, but we had internet problems. Tune in tomorrow for more on Simon’s Archaeology project.

Death to Martians 10/10

“Why don’t you just kill me? I mean,” William says, “you should just kill me. Because if you don’t then I’ll kill you!”

“No you won’t,” says Selma. “You will give us the information we need to take down…” she glances at the Martian pulsing at the foot of the bed and her lips quirk, “destroy the monsters who threaten our way of life.”

“Huh?”

Selma’s eyes dart back to William’s and her ironic smile vanishes. “I mean the monsters who would brainwash a boy into killing himself in order to make a political point. You, William, will tell us exactly how you were recruited, and where, and when, and how. “

“And then,” says the moon-man, Singh, “while we work to make life better down here, we’ll send you to live a better life up there.” He points at the ceiling, or something beyond the ceiling.

“The asteroid mines?” He asks, as if to test this impossible promise, to show it is nothing but new slavery.

“Selenia Dome. Where if you apply yourself, you will learn a skill that might turn you into a net gain for the human race.”

“And,” says Selma, “you’ll make enough money to send help to your family.”

William jerks away from her. “Liar! You’re Martian-loving traitors. You’ll kill me, or I’ll kill you.”

The Martian makes a tentacle whip-crack.

Singh clears his throat. “My friend Mu-rau asks, ‘what if there were a third option?’”