Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 119
June 23, 2013
Podcast 15: Write more good! (1/3)
This podcast was recorded at a workshop I did with Kalin Nenov of the Human Library on the mechanics and conventions of writing genre fiction. We talk about:
the difference between fiction and nonfiction, books and movies, close and omniscient 3rd person narration
Why close 3rd person is good
What good writing has:
Emotional impact (“the hook,” fun, interesting, etc)
Transparency
Theme (or “deepness”)
Good style, following the cardinal rules of:
“Show don’t tell”
“Omit needless words”
Why you shouldn’t use:
hedge words:somewhat, really, pretty, rather, a bit
filler words: I mean, like, so, um, well, actually, you know
adverbs
Sense words like “see, hear, smell” etc.
book-isms: shouted, yell, asked, exclaimed, (just use “say,” but not in Bulgarian каза)
Check back next week for the rest of the list, or go here to see it in text on the page of my esteemed colleague and writer, Melissa Walshe.
June 21, 2013
I am the Flat Earther
Glee! Spectacular sci-fi writer John C. Wright has picked ME to lampoon for my logically unsound moral system! http://www.scifiwright.com/2013/06/the-parable-of-the-flat-earther/comment-page-1/#comment-87641
God, I suppose now I have to think of something clever to say in response. I’ll get back to you on that.
June 18, 2013
What will our stupid faces look like?
There have been a lot of big-eyed, orange people floating around on the intertron recently, with people talking about the “evolution” of humanity. Sorry, but if your future history includes genetic manipulation or artificial selection, that’s art and fashion, not evolution.
Evolution (that is, natural selection) is what happens when parts of a population breed more than others. That’s it. And yes, it does apply to humans. I’ve talked about some recent positively-selected (i.e. “beneficial”) mutations in humans, and you can also hear what actual biologists have to say on the subject. But without going into details, how can you get a PICTURE of what humans will evolve into in the next X generations?
Step 1) Establish a baseline. Chose an age (say 30). Make composite faces based on every male and every female human being aged thirty. If you don’t have the resources for that, make composite pictures based on a representative sample of humanity. Here’s a twist: the baseline won’t look European. It will, however, look beatiful.
Now that you’ve established what the average man or woman looks like, now it’s time to project into the future. Of course we have no idea what selective pressures may affect the relative frequency of our genes in the future. However, we can take a stab at what selective pressures are in operation right now. And that’s grandkids. The more grandchildren you have, the more successfully you have spread your genes and the more selected-for those genes must be. What did those genes actually do to get you to have so many grandkids? Who cares? All we know is that the people who breed more have more influence on the genes of subsequent generations.
So Step 2) Take the top 50 percent of grandkids-havers and make a composite of their features and that will be your picture of humanity in the near future, assuming no new mutations and no environmental changes.
Step 3) Take the top 10 percent for a more exaggerated and therefore more distant future.
Unfortunately, we don’t have good global statistics second-generation fecundity. The best we can do is look at fertility rate (number of births per woman) and factor out infant mortality (deaths per thousand live births). No, you can’t just use population growth, because immigration is part of that. And you can’t look at young populations, because that might be due to a war or something that killed old people.
Step 4) Here are the countries with the highest fertility rates, in order of which has the best fertility/infant mortality ratio.
East Timor
Burundi
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
So will everyone look like East Timoreans in the future? Not necessarily. Developed countries have low fertility, but also low mortality. Maybe enough to swing things.
Adding the 10 countries with lowest infant mortality to the mix, we get a new list.
Monaco
Bermuda
Iceland
Sweden
Japan
France
Singapore
Italy
Hong Kong
Macau
East Timor
Burundi
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
Obviously there’s a huge gap between countries with lots of dead babies and countries with a very small number of living ones. The people who’s grandkids inherit the future should be somewhere in the middle. How to find it? Why, gapminder of course.
Obviously there’s a correlation between infant mortality and total fertility.
If things stay the way they are (they won’t, but if they do), as time goes on we should expect to see those countries in the middle taking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the total human gene pool. Those would be the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which have the (evolutionary) golden combination of high fertility and low death. Again, this isn’t a measure of number of grandchildren, but at least people in BRIC countries have more chance of having grandchildren than the extremes in Monaco and Afghanistan.
Superimposed over each other, those average faces give us someone who looks like this: (drum roll)
Except that when added to our list, here’s where the BRIC countries fall out:
Monaco
Bermuda
Iceland
Sweden
Japan
France
Singapore
Italy
Hong Kong
Macau
Russia
East Timor
Burundi
China
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Brazil
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
India
Ouch, India. So the future face of humanity is…Russian? Huh.
Obviously all of this stuff is very back-of-the-envelope, but it’s an example of the kind of thinking that should tell us what our descendents might look like. For less hedging and more certainty, I will need a grant for 10 million dollars to fly around the earth in my hover-census-photobooth, taking pictures of everyone and asking them how many grandkids they have.
I’m sure Kickstarter will help me.
June 16, 2013
Podcast 14: Expectations and Scifi (2 of 2)
This continues my talk with Simon Roy (of Prophet, Tiger Lung and Pilgrim fame) about controlling expectation in genre fiction. And audience learning curve! And the difference between worldbuilding in text and in comics!
We also refer to:
Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
A bit of worldbuilding
The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Maid and Butler Dialogue
Beta-readers and the dangers and benefits of focus groups
Like “I am Legend”‘s original ending and stupid ending
Prophet again
Omega Man, the first “I am Legend” movie
And text versus pictures! Also:
and Jonathon Hickman
Podcast 14: Expectations and Scifi (2 of 3)
This continues my talk with Simon Roy (Prophet, Tiger Lung and Pilgrim fame) of about controlling expectation in genre fiction. And audience learning curve! And the difference between worldbuilding in text and in comics!
We also refer to:
Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
A bit of worldbuilding
The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Maid and Butler Dialogue
Beta-readers and the dangers and benefits of focus groups
Like “I am Legend”‘s original ending and stupid ending
Prophet again
Omega Man, the first “I am Legend” movie
And text versus pictures! Also:
and Jonathon Hickman
June 9, 2013
Podcast 13: Expectations and Sci-fi (1 of 2)
Today I’m talking with Simon Roy about controlling expectation in genre fiction.
And at the same time, he’s drawing “a bit of Prophet”
We also mention his Tiger Lung Beneath the Ice
And although we don’t mention Pilgrim, you should damn well read it.
Also we got:
and
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosiverse (specifically Labyrinth)
Podcast 13: Expectations and Sci-fi (1 of 3)
Today I’m talking with Simon Roy about controlling expectation in genre fiction.
And at the same time, he’s drawing “a bit of Prophet”
We also mention his Tiger Lung Under the Ice
and
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosiverse (specifically Labyrinth)
June 4, 2013
What will we have to fight about?
It’s been about a month since CMK and I recorded out conversation about wars in the future, but this idea keeps coming back to me. A good thing, too, since I write science fiction, and every story needs its conflict.
Take for example the first episode of Continuum. Obviously I’m a big fan of strong, time-traveling women in power-suits, but I really wonder if we’ll still be fighting the big government/big corporation war 65 years in the future. The separation between government and business may be an issue now, but playing the question out in the 2070s is like a 1940s sci-fi story about the 21st century battle between fascism and communism. We have so many more important things to fight about these days than our grandparents’ half-baked political rhetoric (institutionalized racism versus totalitarian denial of human nature…ooh, which should I pick?), and I’m sure our own grandchildren will feel the same way about the issues that happen to be important to us.
So what will we have to fight over in the future? I’m sure there are lots of things (add your comments below!) but I’d like to focus on one that came out of a twitter conversation I had recently with Steve LeCouilliard, author of Una the Blade (another strong woman with roots in the Conan mythos! Either I’ve tapped into a deep throbbing well of cultural trend or I’m not as creative as I thought I was).
The problem of our grandchildren will be cultural homogenization.
As communication and travel becomes ever easier and cheaper, people living in different places will be increasingly exposed to eachother’s ideas. Customs and practices that seem better (i.e more useful, more rewarding, more profitable) will spread at the expense of local customs. You’ve been denying your daughters education for thousands of years? Guess what: societies that let their girls go to college are out-competing yours. Arbitrarily declare some part of your population untouchable? Fight wars based on ideas of national pride that were invented out of whole cloth by state propagandists? Don’t do that, either. And by the way, here are some medical practices that will extend your lifespan and lower infant mortality. Globalization, the connection of ever-larger networks of commerce and communication, forms the basis of peace, tolerance, and freedom.
But at the cost of diversity. We have the same basic kinds of skyscrapers, cars, and computers in every place humans have skyscrapers, cars, and computers. There is some choice (laptop versus server stack), but those are machines built for different purposes, not the regional variations that make the older technologies of fashion, housing, and cuisine so interestingly different in different places. And as time goes on, don’t you notice that everyone’s wearing business suits, living in apartments, and drinking coca-cola?
Even worse, how do you know the practices you import will work in your region (remember the problems with irrigating Afghanistan using American methods…which also turned out not to work in America)? House construction is and must be different in different climates, where local, traditional practices still work better than imported ones. Import the wrong ideas and you could end up living in an impoverished wasteland.
And I can see how that might make people angry. A lot of the rhetoric behind religious terrorism (of whichever religion) boils down to: “they are trying to turn us into copies of themselves and we must stop them.” And the problem doesn’t have to be religious. Even secular Americans think threats to “our way of life” should be dealt with violently.
Now what will happen when North America is no longer a net exporter of best practices? What happens when American parents see their kids drinking European Fanta, wearing Indian saris, speaking Mandarin, and worshiping Allah? They’ll be just as mad as any froth-in-his-beard ex-patriarch in the Himalayan foothills, wondering why his child bride has to go to school now. But unlike some goofball in the mountains, American and western European ex-superpowers will be in a position to do something about their anger.
The question of globalization/homogenization will grow teeth then, you can be sure.
June 2, 2013
Podcast 12: Wars of the Future (4 of 4)
I’m talking with artist and researcher C. M. “Memo” Kosemen on the subject of war and the future including such topics as:
3D printing and how it might be used to make guns.
Other dangerous technology
Irregular books, and John Conway
The fun Charles Stross short story “Yellow Snow” available in this collection.
Adana, Turkey
Instinctive human racism
Coronal Mass Ejections
The Yellowstone Supervolcano
And no discussion of the end of the world would be complete without mentioning The Road.
That’s the last part of my series on the Future of War. See more of C.M.K at his youtube channel and deviantart page and tune in next time for a conversation with comic book artist Simon Roy of Prophet fame.
May 28, 2013
World to Story 2: Wild Far East
Here’s an example of what I was talking about in Worldbuilding and Storytelling (assuming you need another after this).
Inspired by Cory Trego-Erdner’s Wandering Warrior, I imagined a world where Japanese colonists settled the American west-coast. How? Because of a magic system I invented for another story, lets Muromachi-era scholars know about Chinese legends of a land to the far east, as well as Icelandic sagas of voyages to lands in the far west. Using Greek, Arabic, Indian, and Persian estimates for the circumference of the earth, some clever guy figures there ought to be either a big land mass or a group of big islands over thataway. The shogunate equips an expedition, which makes landfall in the Pacific northwest. Harbors along the northwest coast became hideouts for pirates in the 15th century. Oda Nobunaga, then Shogun, outfitted several expeditions to “the Far East,” which brought back fur and gold. Whether Nobunaga’s trading outposts broke new ground in America or whether they mixed with the descendants of the pirates is unknown, but there was a thriving community in the settlement of Ariyasuka (有靖加 or “the existence of peace increases”) to which Nobunaga and his loyalists could flee when Toyotomi Hideyoshi turned against them.
The flow of refugees would continue for some time, including ironically the retainers of Hideyoshi, as well as waves of Japanese Buddhists and later Christians (Kiristan). By the time of Isolationism (Sakoku) in the 17th century, Ariyasuka had grown to a settlement of over 100,000 people. Now called Arigoku (有国, the Land that Is, from which the modern English Arica derives), the independent colony retained illicit communication with anti-Shogunate groups in Japan, including the Imperial Court in Kyoto. It was Arican arms shipments and political pressure that broke the Shogunate and began the Yuuji Restoration in 1858. The wave of Japanese emigration that followed spurred another push of Arican expansionism, bringing the American Civil War to an uneasy truce as Northern and Southern English-speakers tried to maintain their western borders. They were only partly successful.
In the closing decades of the 18th century, the Wild Far East (野性の極東）is a land of extremes, the grass steaming at noon, and at night white with frost. A daimyo’s ransom in cattle guarded by bakerosu cowboys without a pierced coin to their names. Humble Arican towns and rail-stations set out patrols with long rifles to guard against the Emishi, the Banjito, the Komanche, the Yankijin, but there is no such protection for bakerosu.
Hayauchi Kusawara only wanted to deliver his cows to the Yankijin and drink his salary away, but then a woman fleeing a burning pueblo stumbles into his camp and dumps a problematic papoose into his lap. Gods and Buddhas know why he agreed to take the woman and her child back to Arica before a man named McCoy catches up to them. Maybe it’s the way the woman looks at him. Maybe it’s the child with the obsidian tattoos, who sometimes speaks the words of an old, old man. Maybe it’s just honor, although Kusawara didn’t think he had any of that left. All the bakerosu knows is that now he has someone else to stay up with and watch in the night, waiting for the flash of a pistol shot, or a drawn blade, or the rising of the sun.
