Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 117

Martian Law 5/12

“Sorry, gov.” The driver, thumbed his cap and tugged on one of the large, greasy actuator levers that lined the cockpit below and in front of us. “She’s acting up. Compressor leak in the third leg, I reckon.”

“So vent fluid and extend, man. We have no time.”

“Couldn’t do that, gov, not with all this traffic about.”

Singh leaned down, his long back and neck putting his head almost on level with that of the driver. “What traffic? We are in the only perambulator on this pitted sledge track it pleases you to call a road. Extend the legs, if you please.”

“Don’t want to scare the horses, gov.”

Money is handled rather different on Mars and the moon than here on Earth. I waggled a tentacle in front of Singh’s nose and his mouth set in a distasteful line.

“Would the horses perhaps appreciate a 100 percent gratuity?”

“Don’t know about them horses, gov, but I sure as hell would.” The driver removed his hand from an actuator and used it to grab his hat and hold it up to us upside down. “And Turkish paras, if you please you. Or Canadian dollars. None of that pound-sterling funny money.”

I unclenched my lower jaws and reached into my mantle to extract my billfold. With the bribe tucked safely in his cap, the driver gave a gleeful shove to all three actuators and yanked on the horn.

I grabbed hold of my fez as, with a belch of exhaust and a ululating roar, our perambulator rose on its three metal legs and pelted down the street.

Huts of corrugated metal and scrap wood, crumbling tenements, flooded Martian pit-dwellings blurred past us. Then we would come to a corner and the world would solidify while gyroscopic forces counter-rotated our passenger compartment above the spinning legs. The rainy smear of city-scape would crystallize into a screaming child in a second-story window, a pitted vertical landscape of rotten plaster façade, a poster on a crumbling brick wall. For an instant, I stared into the grim face of the Prime Minister. Behind him rose men with rifles, marching under the tripod silhouettes of war-perambulators. Bring back the Empire, read the slogans, The Sun Never Sets. And we were off again.

 

Just a bit of worlbuilding…

…that occurred to me in the shower.

Of course the Gondwanans weren’t always militant athiests.

First were the brothers, Sun and Glacier, and the sisters, Joy and Anger.

Sun and Joy made the son Rye and the daughter Love.

Sun and Anger made the son Missile and the daughter War.

Glacier and Joy made the son Letter and the daughter Art.

Glacier and Anger made the son Poison and the daughter Greed.

 

Rye, Love, Missile, War, Letter, Art, Poison, and Greed. These are the two-and-two-and-two-and-two.

Martian Law 4/12

So, I signed sometime later, she’s Scotch?

“Ethnic Scottish,” Singh clarified. “Her great-grandparents moved south to London in 1892, just two years before the First Invasion. In the Second, both her grandfathers were minor enforcers for the Edinburgh Mandarin Authority placed in charge by the Martians. Her parents, however, saw which way the wind was blowing, changed their names, and settled into new, English identities just before independence and the ethnic cleansing that followed.”

Our black-cab perambulator rocked and I put out a tentacle to stabilize myself. Outside, the “investment area” of London with its neon signs and redweed/currency change stalls had already given way to the coal-caked, half-abandoned dilapidation of the city proper.

How could they blend in so completely?

“Because,” he snorted, “the propaganda about the divisions between the so-called Anglian and Scotian races is just that. In a different political environment, everything spoken by everyone from North America to Australia would be considered the same language.” Singh smiled wryly. “I would say the major barrier to her acceptance as an Englishwoman is not linguistic, but the fact that she has been feeding information about her husband to the Scots for the past five years.”

That would strain her marital relations, not to mention her personal liberty.

“And her life,” Singh watched a ragged family pass in a horse-drawn cart and sighed. “Her ruthless, narrow-minded tribal jackass of a husband won’t hesitate to have her executed for making a fool of him. Although,” he smiled thinly at me, “finding out she’s a spy does rather improve my opinion of her. Justifying as it does her choice of spouse.”

Where a man might raise one eyebrow, I formed my northward tentacles into a sardonic array. Odd that you know all that since she told us none of those details about her family. Is my lip-reading so bad?

Singh stared forward through the windshield of our black cab perambulator. His long, strong-featured face was backlit by the light coming through the side window, but could see his upper lip quirk upward. Simplest supposition, Mu-rau, he signed. If she is Scotch, wealthy, influential, and still connected to the rump state government in Edinburgh, she could have no other family history than the one I outlined. Also hers is the fourth such confession I have heard since our arrival in this city.

So why are we acting on this one? Perhaps none of the other crypto-Scotch were so attractive? Charity, my friend, should be unrewarded by definition.

“Not charity, but expedience.” The smile vanished and his fingers moved in quick, birdlike jabs. None of those other cases will result in two deaths if not dealt with before the end of the day. Mrs. Dunwitty may know things her husband the general does not, but I am party to facts known to neither them nor their puppet masters. “Driver,” he spoke aloud, “I believe I did not misspeak when I told you time is of the essence.”

Martian Law 3/12

“The peace of God be upon you,” I signed to our visitor.

“Oh, er,” her hands rose to form, hello.

I am imam Mu-rau. I extended a tentacle for her to shake while the other eight signed, I have heard a great deal about you, Mrs. Dunwitty. Please be seated.

She sat with evident gratitude.

“Professor Singh, Mu-rau Effendi,” she pronounced my name in the syllables humans have assigned to Martian tentacle-shapes, “I come to enlist your aid in extracting me from the dilemma into which your meddling has thrust me.”

Singh’s eyes narrowed his skin temperature dropped. Pretty our interlocutor may have been, but my friend values his own professional reputation above mere sexual reproduction. “And what harm do you imagine my council has done your husband?” He said, in a voice of lunar regolith and frozen oxygen.

“I imagine nothing, Mr. Singh. You advised the Selenians to recognize England’s border north of the river Forth.”

My friend nodded as much as his stiff collar would allow.

“Even though that land was claimed by soldiers with heat rays and war-perambulators,” said Mrs. Dunwitty, face warming.

Singh propped himself against the wall. He does not sit in Earthly chairs. “Most borders are set by armed action.”

“Illegal action.”

His elegant shrug was made somewhat less so by the clanking exoskeleton. “The international court is less than a decade old and, I am sorry to say, plagued by corruption. Its judgments are less important than the stability and prosperity of the region, which would not be served by yet another handover of land and the reprisals and ethnic violence that would inevitably follow.” His long hands traced a phrase in sinuous Martian. In the condition of lack of unilateral oversight, non-kin groups will, against even their own long-term interest, suck a shared aquifer dry.

“’Good fences, make good neighbors.’” She translated bitterly. “Clearly, Mr. Singh, you are woefully ignorant as to the composition of this particular neighborhood.”

The baring of her small teeth and the shape of her dark eyebrows told me that Mrs. Dunwitty was furious with my friend. I did what I could to correct the situation.

Might I inquire, I inserted by tentacle between them, why you are so set against Mr. Singh’s actions?

“Especially since my new border benefits your country,” commented Singh, unhelpfully.

“England does not benefit from rewards to her immoral and illegal behavior.”

“But,” Singh brought his steepled fingers up to his lower lip, “it certainly benefitted your husband’s career, Madam. General Dunwitty, then captain, was in command at Stirling, was he not?”

“Oh yes,” she said acidly, “the governorship. You needn’t have bothered with that poisoned gift, Mr. Singh. My husband was doing a perfectly good job of hanging himself before you handed him the extra rope.”

My friend makes no attempt to deny the accusation. In fact, if I am any judge of his expressions, Singh was impressed. “So you approve of my plan to put your husband in a position where he cannot hide his…vices?”

“I believe you Martians say ‘the greedy will drown themselves in their own wealth.’”

Neither of us are Martians, I corrected gently. My colleague is from Selenia Dome and I am a Turk.

“So why come to us?” Singh filled the following silence.

“Because England will not be served by the murder of another of her high officials, however corrupt he may be.”

His eyes flicked up to meet hers. “You’re saying you believe General Dunwitty is the target of an assassination plot.”

“I do not believe, Mr. Singh,” she said. “I know.”

“And you think that your husband should not?”

Her skin, which had cooled, rose again. “I should very much like to warn my husband of a plot against his life.”

“Then why do you not do so?”

She curled her presumably shapely lips. “Because, Mr. Singh, my husband will want to know how I came by the information. And he will kill me when he finds out.”

Podcast 21 Hook your readers (1/2)

Listen to PODCAST

What makes a reader keep reading? In this workshop I did with Kalin Nenov of the Human Library, we try to answer the question: why do people finish reading books?

It’s strange or new

Rising stakes (The Dreseden Files)

The character changes

The character is sympathetic and the reader can identify (unless you want the reader to continue in the hopes that the character will die or be punished)

Wish fulfillment (Django Unchained)

A lesson (but be careful not to be too preachy or trivial)

Curiosity (as in mysteries: who did it? or in FSF: how does this world work?)(The Chronicles of Amber)(Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency)

Interest in what will happen next

Humor and fun

Romance (Jane Austen‘s books, which are also funny and, since they take place in a different world, evocative of curiosity)

Excitement (emotional intensity)

Education (after you finish it, you look at the world in a different way)

Morals (that you agree with)

Guilty pleasures like Harry Potter, Area 51, Twilight, Trueblood, and Fragment

Note: My microphone wasn’t always good enough to pick up people in the audience, so you’ll hear me ask  questions and then seem to answer them myself after  short pause. I am not actually talking to myself.

The Kite Runner

 

Martian Law 2/12

I cannot be regarded as any sort of expert on human beauty. Indeed, to my acute embarrassment, it is often only with difficulty that I can distinguish one sex from the other. Dull as my interspecies aesthetic sense is, however, my reading of Singh is somewhat better. Thus it is that I can testify to Mrs. Dunwitty’s appeal. Her appearance rendered my friend breathless and therefore, given the peculiarities of his species’ method of communication, speechless.

“Mr. Singh,” she said, “I am not sure you remember me.”

His spastic nodding indicated that he did.

Selma Dunwitty (wife of General Arthur Dunwitty of the English People’s Army) was an average-sized woman, so standing as she was in our rented sitting room, her bonneted head came up to the bottom of Singh’s sternum. Her body was invisible under the rolls of dark pinstriped cloth then fashionable among the new London elite, which contrived to be both billowing and confining. I, who have always hated my balloon-like mantle as a nuisance and health hazard, am consistently dismayed at how humans, who might spend hours lounging about naked in the air of their lush homeworld without ill effect, insist upon covering themselves in artifice.

In any case, the only skin visible of Mrs. Dunwitty was that of her hands, which were small and neat, and her face, about which I can say little except it had no obvious deformities.

“Sir, I know my husband’s occupation might do little to recommend me to you…”

Singh shook his head and half turned, eyes pleading at me.

I rose to the occasion, straightening my fez, affixing my plate-sized monocle over one eye and inflating my mantle. I was born and raised under earth’s crushing gravity and I am confident I did not appear too much the “feeble octopus” as I crawled into the receiving room.

Martian Law 1/12

“I am vast, I am cold, I am unsympathetic. I am vast, I am cold, I am unsympathetic.”

Martians do not sigh. I will admit, however, to a certain resigned limpness in my tentacles as I crawled into the lavatory. What’s wrong, my friend? I signed.

Percival Quincy Singh, my friend and partner and, I admit, personal project, leaned heavily on the sink, his long back hunched to bring his face into the gilded mirror’s view.

“Nothing is wrong,” Singh spoke in his native Selenian Creole, the shapes formed by his mouth distinct in the mirror. “To be wrong, an event must impinge upon the ego, and the walls of my rationality are high. I gaze down from the rampart of reason, and pain is as distant and unimportant as the germs which congregate in a drop of water. I am vast, I am cold, I am unsympathetic.”

It’s a woman again, isn’t it? I signed.

Carbon fiber chords creaked as Singh hung his head. The shoulder flanges of his fulcimenatory exoskeleton gave his long, Moon-born body the look of an etiolated vulture. “It is always a woman.”

Does she object to your council?

Molecular actuators whined as Singh slashed a long, gray-brown hand through the cold air of our apartment. “Everyone objects to my counsel. I know I have arrived at the proper course of action when all factions of power react in equal disgust.” He drew himself straight, the fore and aft spinal columns of the exoskeleton ratcheting up until his black hair brushed the ceiling. The high collar clicked up under his jaw, masking my friend’s unfortunate tendency to hunch. “I shall put her husband out of a job. Or perhaps in jail.”

Ah, I signed. Mrs. Dunwitty.

“My course of action is not mistaken,” Mu-rau. His hands curled around the signs of my name. “My numbers are irrefutable. As well as the conclusions to which they lead. Regime change in the Democratic Republic of England will impoverish many, but enrich many more. Oh, but” Mu-rau, “the way she looked at me!” His exoskeleton clattered around his quaking limbs. “Sometimes I wish I had never come to this benighted planet.”

And I wish that my ancestors had not removed your ancestors from it, I signed. I wish my people had not invaded your world and caused the suffering we see today.

Singh’s upper lip curled. “Did the Martian conquerors teach the Scotch Lutheranism and the English Anglicanism? Did the tripods shoot rays of greed and tribalism as well as microwaves? No. The suffering we see today is not the work of Martians, but men.”

As you are a man, I pointed out. Do not hate your people so, my friend.

“I do not hate. Hate is unproductive. I merely wish—”

The doorbell chimed.

Martian Law: Illustration and Writing

After making sketches of the characters we talked about for Martian Law, I got to work on better pictures.

A quirk in the expression on Signh’s face and my (Mu-rau’s) response to that expression   generated the first line of the story, as well as Signh and Mu-rau’s relationship.

Writing a story is about giving your characters problems and then working through the solutions to those problems. For Martian Law that was easy. Singh is an international legal consultant, so the problems he deals with come directly from current events. All I had to do was supply an English paint-job to some generalized post-colonial strife and hook that bigger political picture into a personal conflict between Singh’s love interest and her bad-guy husband. With the help of Simon in a conversation I stupidly failed to record, I did just that. The result was these characters:

 Percival Q. Singh

Birthplace: Selenia Excavation, First Lunar Republic

Education: Savantry of La-uu’hi/veo’sa-uu (Helas Plantila, Mars), Nest of Social Engineering

Languages spoken: English, Selenian Creol, Ga-uhi/ge-uu’bi/bo’sa-u/nai, Mi’xa-u/ku’xa-uu, Scots

“I am vast, I am cool, I am unsympathetic.”

His problem: He is supposed to help earthlings, but doesn’t know much about them

Jama’ Mu-rau

Birthplace: The Byzantium Community (now the Konstantiniyye’den bir Marslı Çeyrek), Turkish Federation.

Education: Moral Philosophic sub-Savantry of Himalaya

Languages spoken: Ga-uhi/ge-uu’bi/bo’sa-u/nai, Turkish, Greek, English

“There is always a third option.”

Problem: he wants to help humans, but humans don’t trust him

Selma Dunwitty (wife of Arthur Dunwitty, General in the English People’s Army Birthplace: Burgh o Landeen, Sooth Scotland (now London, England)

Education: The Landeen Heich Schuil for Weemen

Languages spoken: Scots, English, Ga-uhi/ge-uu’bi/bo’sa-u/nai

“It is not who I am, but what I am.”

Problem: She’s being blackmailed by the Scots in order to put pressure on her husband.

From there, the story went easily. I only ran into problems at the end, which needed a solution to the problems I gave my characters. Because I don’t know the solution to a corrupt authoritarian state driven by rabid ultranationalism.

In the end, and after a month of letting the story rest while I worked on other projects, I had each character supply an answer: cameras, guns, and mercy. The most fun was the sit-commish ending scene where I set up some of the personality clashes that will drive the character development of these people in later stories. Because I plan to write later stories.

See the finished story here.

 

P.Q. Singh portrait by Ivy Cave AKA Thundercake

 

 

 

 

Podcast 20: Martian Law (3/3) Plot

_LISTEN to the Podcast_

Simon Roy, Memo Kosemen, and me, Daniel Bensen have ganged up to construct a story based on H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.We’ve discussed the worldbuilding and characters, now let’s look at the plot.

Also:

The Crimean Tatars

Wildlife reintroduction

Quranic verse 42:29 

Tay al-Arz (the folding of the earth)

not to be confused with Dabbet-ul-Arz (the beast of the earth)

The Whore of Babylon

Yeah it went to kind of a weird place.

Martian Law: gathering steam

I’m always eager to see how authors produce stories, so in the interests of do unto others, for the next three weeks I’ll be taking you through a project from the beginning.

That project is Martian Law. And it began with an image from a friend. C. M. Kosemen, in an online conversation about my preliminary work about the World’s Other Side mentioned an idea of his own about an alternate history in which the War of the Worlds actually happened and a 21st century Muslim Martian discussed the problem of Christian terrorism in a Turkish cafe. It was such a cool idea I immediately went and worldbuilt it. I made maps and timelines and even a language based on the shapes of wiggling tentacles. Too much worldbuilding, I know now, but it did turn out to be useful since I used the world as the setting for a short exploration of the themes in the World’s Other Side.

Then I let the world sit for more than 2 years until Simon Roy, Memo and I decided to do a podcast where we’d build a shared world. I pitched a bunch of ideas at them and we singled out this HG Wells fan fiction for development.

You can hear for yourself what happened next.

The first thing I did after our conversation was draw sketches of the characters. Usually I have to wait until I get close to the end of the story before I know what the characters look like, but perhaps talking with such great artists did something to my brain because I made these:

You can see some ideas for tripod walkers, the female character, and the main character. The little chicken-looking thing is a very bad attempt at a Martian with a fez.

Next I pitched some title ideas at Simon and Memo:

Martian Law (get it??)

Vast and Cool

Small Invasions

The Un-vasion

The Martians

…some sort of clever out of context quote from Wells?

To which Memo responded:

Unloading the Burden (as in “The Martian’s burden to civilise earth)

Retreat!

The Empire Retreats

Mars Lets Go

The Pygmies’ War *(As in “When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.” – WinstonChurchill)

Mars Retrograding

 In the end we decided that Martian Law would be a good title for the first story, at least, with the others kept in reserve as titles for other stories.

I also thought of some plots of episodes, set in roughly chronological order, which Simon and Memo responded to.

1) Singh helps out the wife of a general in the English dictator’s army  (how exactly? by helping her escape? perhaps their plans to smuggle her to Wales are undermined by…)

Simon:Well if I remember correctly the idea started with the concept of martians randomly elevating scots to ruling caste of britain – so perhaps she’s a scot fearing a rising ultranationalist dictatorship (and accompanying ethnic strife)? I’m sort of thinking of a british/martian version of hotel Rwanda, where the ultranationalists are starting to gain momentum towards genocide while the martian authorities, happy letting their subjects test out self-rule, merrily ignore impending disaster… it could be singh’s attempt to justify saving an individual while her whole race gets attacked… depending on how short and banal you could make it, (ie the concept stripped of 70% of its over-the-top emotional manipulation and direct rwanda references) it could be cool without being too over the top or melodramatic. I feel like that story could work well without becoming too intense and thriller-ie…

2) The last remaining Martian colonists in England are discovered to be living in filthy refugee camps at Dover. Without proper sanitation, Earthrot has set in and they’re about to die. Mu-rau (our Watson) character helps them encyst, a process that will produce “new” Martians without memories and some genes swapped around horizontally (see tardigrades and bdelloid rotifers). By hanging around with the cyst-eggs, Mu-rau becomes gene-donor (father) and caretaker (mother) to them.

Simon: I like this but it could have more conflict in it, perhaps? I keep on coming back to the same themes of Martians and western colonial powers… the martians are killed when encysting despite Singh and Mu-rau’s efforts to help them, and only upon their deaths do the reactionary martian colonial powers take action… but that would perhaps feel like more of an opening story to a martian-human civil war story then a nicely closed vignette….

3) Later, Singh, Dunwitty, and Mu-rau are a team of “consulting ethicists,” going around helping human-run governments build ethical and rational legal codes (according to Martian ethics and rationality, of course). They  run into a boy in Boston who wants to be a suicide bomber for a radical humanist organization.

Simon: Would this be largely re-tooled from the suicide bomber story you already have? I do love that one…. that one is also the perfect intro to the concept of a mars-ruled earth in flux…

With these stories firmly set, I was almost ready to start writing.

But first we had to bring more development to the characters…