Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 120
May 27, 2013
A TV show I want to see
Picture if you will the Popham colony, third English colony in North America, presided over by a Mr. Raleigh Gilbert. Who in 1608 learns of the death of his older brother John and his inheritance of Compton Castle in Devon, and then leaves. Fortunately the colonists have built the Virginia, first ship built by Europeans in North America, and they can pilot the ship away from this horrible, cold continent. Now imagine the nearby Abenaki Indians, who have been watching the ship’s construction, decide they might have use for the invaders’ technology.
Thus began the voyages of the Pinnace Sagadahoc. Her mission: to explore the strange Old World, to seek out allies and partners in arms. To fearlessly tread lands no Abenaki has seen.
EPISODE 5: Guile at Gbagle
Voiceover: War chief’s scroll. Moon: Corn Maker. We have arrived at the Slave port of Gbagle on the Gulf of Guinea, hoping to learn more of the Iron Triangle and its working. In the landing party are myself, the Catholic Vasquez, witchdoctor Wskaniia, and Red Moccasin.
War chief: Whites are coming. Bows out.
Vasquez: I suggest mercy, chief. Let us remember Christ and forgive them their trespasses.
Wskaniia: Damnit, chief, this is no time for Christian forgiveness!
Red Moccasin: Argh! I’m hit!
War chief: Get behind cover!
Wskaniia: Damn bloodthirsty Europeans!
Vasquez: Highly unchristian of them.
War chief: Fire arrows on my mark.
Red Moccasin: Hurrrrg.
What will happen next to War Chief and his intrepid crew? Tune in next time to Atlantic Voyages!
May 26, 2013
Podcast 11: Wars of the Future (3 of 4)
I’m talking with artist and researcher C. M. “Memo” Kosemen on the subject of war and the future…and many other things including:
My book, Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen
Steven Pinker again.
Natural selection of ideas.
The Domination series, and The Man in the High Castle, and Harry Turtledove.
Charles Stross and his lecture at Olin College about THE FUTURE!
Kage Baker’s Novels of the Company.
Vat-grown meat and its associated…ickiness.
Henrietta Lacks, the immortal woman.
And before you think too much about that association, we end this episode!
See more of C.M.K at his youtube channel and deviantart page.
May 24, 2013
Happy Cyrillic Day!
Happy Cyrillic Alphabet Day, everyone!
In honor of “The favorite Bulgarian holidy” May 24, I give you the lyrics to ‘Cyril and Methodius: a hymn for all schools.’ (Кирил и Методий Български всеучилищен химн), a song you might recognize from my podcasts.
Back in the day, the tradition was for all of Sofia’s school children to march from their schools to the big statues of Cyril and Methodius that stand in front of the Bulgarian National Library. While they marched, they sang this song (thought not necessarily at the same time). Nowadays, the school children don’t all march at the same time, but people still visit the statues and put flowers at their feet, and they still sing this song, the original original text of which appears here, but we’re going to use the modern version.
Върви, народе възродени,
Go forth, people reborn
към светла бъднина върви,
To the bright future go forth
с книжовността, таз сила нова,
With scholarship, this power new
ти чест и слава поднови!
Your honor and glory renew!
Върви към мощната просвета!
Go forth through powerful education
В световните борби върви,
In the global fight, go forth,
от длъжност неизменна воден
From duty unshirking followed
и Бог ще те благослови!
And God will bless you!
Свят светла просвета!
Уча Науката
Напред! Науката е слънце,
Onward! Science is the sun,
което във душите грей!
In which the spirits shine!
Напред! Народността не пада
Forward! The nation will not fall
там, гдето знаньето живей!
There, where the knowlege lives!
Безвестен беше ти, безславен!
Hidden were you, inglorious!
О, влез в историята веч,
Oh, go down in history yet,
духовно покори страните,
Those spiritually subdued countries,
които завладя със меч!
Who conquered with the sword!
And why not take the opportunity to learn some Bulgarian compound words? See, unlike English, which forms most of its high-level vocabulary from French and Latin, Bulgarian uses sticks its own simple words together to make more complex ones. That means that you can often recognize the meaning of a big long word, even if you’ve never seen it before.
The first important root is род (rod), which means birth or generation. In fact, the word hydrogen in Bulgarian is водарод (vodarod), literally ‘water-birth,’ which is exactly what hydro-gen means in Greek.
In the first verse, you saw народе (na-rod-e or on-birth-vocative), which translates into ‘people!’ as in “People of the world, unite!” You also saw възродени (vyz-rod-en-i or re-birth-participle-plural). Together, they translate into ‘reborn people,’ but that translation loses the connection these words share in their roots. Maybe ‘generations regenerated’ would be better? And in the third verse we get Народността (na-rod-nost-ta or on-birth-ness-the), which means “the nation” or literally “the people-ness.”
The next big root is нов (nov), which means new. You see it in сила нова (sila nova or new power), and слава поднови (pod-nov-i or under-power-plural), which means “glory(s) renewed.”
And speaking of слава (slava), it means “glory.” So безславен? Bez-slav-en, or without-glory-participial, gives us “inglorious” or literally, “made without glory.”
Finally, we have дух (dukh), which means “spirit” or”soul” or “ghost” (and is also the root for “breath,” as in Latin spiritus). So душите грей (dushite grei) means souls or spirits shine (the х becomes ш before a closed vowel like и or е because it’s easier to say that way). And what about духовно покори страните (dukhovno pokori stranite)? Those would be духовно (dukh-ovn-o or spirit-of-adverb) spiritually subdued (or conquered, or enslaved) countries.
In other words, although Bulgaria might not have much modern fame or historical military success, it is SPIRITUALLY dominant, because Bulgarians invented the Cyrillic alphabet and brought literacy to the Slavs. Nyah nyah.
May 21, 2013
Worldbuilding versus Storytelling
I love worldbuilding, and I was describing alien evolutionary history before I ever thought of writing fiction. When I did turn my attention to storytelling, however, I learned the hard way that it’s not the same thing at all. The best worldbuilding starts at the basics (a planet with lower gravity, say, or a basis for biochemistry other than carbon compounds suspended in water) and works up from there. When you’re writing a story, however, a lot of that deep background won’t be necessary (although some will be). What IS necessary in a story, though, is storytelling.
So if you already have a world (or an idea for one), and you want to turn it into a story, what do you do? You could of course just use your world as stage-dressing, but that’s boring. You’re doing your world a disservice if you plop just any story into it. The best books use the world to explore the story’s theme, provide impetus for plot, and generate interesting characters. And here’s how.
To have a story, you need characters who want things but can’t get them. The process of either getting that thing or coming to terms with the fact that they can’t get it is the PLOT, or the exciting/interesting things that happen over the course of the story. Readers will get more excited and interested if they have a strong connection to the actors in the plot, so you also need to describe and develop the personalities of your CHARACTERS. Finally, even in the most frivolous fiction, the author has something they want to say about the characters’ problems and how we ought to solve them, which comes out in the THEME, or what the objects and events of the story symbolize. Some authors only figure out their theme after they’ve finished the first draft of the story, but everyone at least has some idea of what they want to address in the story.
The world can be woven into each of these three storytelling elements. For the plot, the world can provide a goal to be reached or an obstacle for the characters to overcome. An aggressive animal, a valuable life-form, an impenetrable jungle that need to be crossed, an hostile environment you want to settle in. In “man-vrs-nature” stories, the world is actually a character in the story. Specifically, it’s the antagonist, forcing the protagonist to fight to get what they want (i.e. survive). Of course, you can also make characters out of some of the speculative fauna (sentient or not). Finally, as the setting of the story, the world contributes enormously to the theme, reinforcing the emotional atmosphere of the story and reminding the reader about the issues your story addresses. Environmentalism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Mutually Assured Destruction in Harry Harrison’s Deathworld, Information and Dictatorship in The Knife of Never Letting go and so on.
When I think of the world first, I try to weave it into interesting characters and themes, and let the plot emerge out of that. I ask myself: in this world, what sort of people are winning? What sort of people are losing? What do these people want? What conflicts are there between people or between people and the environment? I zero in on a point-person for this conflict, whose personal problems echo the bigger issues in the world. That’s my protagonist: a guy (or a girl) with an interesting problem. The person in the protagonist’s way is the antagonist. Everyone else either helping or hindering or indifferent is the supporting cast.
I focus on those people and conflicts that are strikingly different from the real world, because I’m writing speculative fiction and my readers expect something strange. I can’t get away from parallels with the real world, though, and I don’t want to. Instead I read up a little on the parts of the real world that most resemble the world I’m describing and form an opinion about them. That opinion is my theme, which I can use to inform my plot (does my protagonist get their way by punching people or by talking or by running away?).
Coming from the other direction at the same time, the world can also generate the theme. Is the environment hostile or hospitable, civilized or barbaric, frightening, interesting, or lovely? Imagine a sub-zero biology based on ice and ethanol—your human characters have to make warm habitats for themselves, but at the cost of boiling the native life to death. BING. A discussion of environmentalism.
Of course any one of these elements get silly if you ignore the others. A perfect story would have believable world building, interesting characters acting out an exciting plot and symbolizing with their actions an idea that will change civilization as we know it. It’s only achieving that balance that’s hard.
To see me apply some of these guidelines practically, take a look at this thread on the Speculative Evolution forum.
May 19, 2013
Podcast 10: Wars of the Future (2 of 4)
Once again I’m talking with artist and researcher C. M. “Memo” Kosemen on the subject of war and the future…and many other things including:
Drone warfare (also Robot Wars)
Kurdish insurgency in eastern Turkey
Globalization: those who run it, those who want it, those who don’t, and those who don’t get the choice.
A Bulgarian book that’s wildly popular! (link not available)
Jamaica’s success promulgating Jamaican culture internationally
Yogurt! (Invented by Bulgarians! No it was Turks! No it was Mongols!) And don’t get me started on feta.
The wild popularity of Turkish soap operas in (cough) former Ottoman vassals. (also, seriously watch Magnificent Century. It has beards like you would not believe)
Once again, see more of C.M.K at his youtube channel and deviantart page.
May 18, 2013
The Nation-States of North America
What would North America look like if, instead of a trio of federal states held together mostly by economic forces, we had Old-World-style nation states?
North American Nations
Why is the map so different? Don’t people call the US, Mexico, and Canada “nations” all the time? What the up?
An email conversation I had with Daryl Gregory of Miami University of Ohio and, more recently, a fun conversation going on at Indigenous History have gotten me thinking again about the World’s Other Side and the way science fiction (in this case alternate history) can help us to think about real world problems. In this case, the fact that so many people don’t know the difference between a state, a country, a nation or ethnic group, and a race.
The USA is not a nation, and at time of contact (and with a few exceptions) the indigenous nations were not states. If they they had been, we might get something like the picture above. The black borders represent national boundaries. The color of the territory indicates a bloc held together by ties ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious, or economic (or in most cases, some combination of all of the above). Note therefore that it shouldn’t really be “East Algia,” but “the East Algian countries.”
Of course the borders aren’t as neat as they appear on a map. Some are guarded more heavily than others, and there may be enclaves of ethnic Cadoans in Lacota (in fact that whole territory in southern Lacota is a bunch of ethnic Cadoans and Numiscans who are too poor and busy fighting each other to make a bid for independence, but that’s another story).
I made this map based on a series of real research projects into the way the geography of North America impacts the people who live (and lived) there, including indigenous languages and accents of English, and present day communication , trade , religion, and ancestry. You can see a similar attempt split the US up into nations based on cultural/geographic differences between modern Americans has some interesting correspondences to my results (the differences are mostly in the west coast and result from westward expansion settlers). The other maps all correspond with each other as well (except for religion), which might tell us some interesting things about North American geography.
May 12, 2013
Podcast 9: Wars of the Future and the future of war
The future of war…is peace
Tyrannosaur Queen mentions a future controlled by the “Econ-peace,” and makes a parallel between the abolition of slavery and of war. If we listen to people like Steven Pinker, the world may indeed end up that way. Why? Because:
Stronger international economic ties increase the cost of war to the point where it’s in nobody’s interest.
Spreading education and literacy make populations more aware of the alternatives to war.
International media saturation makes it harder to get away with atrocity.
Democratization…might do something good too
All lead to a future where the invasion of one country by another doesn’t make any sense.
In this conversation with renowned artist and researcher C. M. “Memo” Kosemen, we talk about the future of war, the reasons we fight wars, and the technology that we might use to fight work in the future.
One possibility is theatrical war, where rather than actual soldiers killing each other, war is waged by remote-controlled drones shooting each other down. Memo asks us to imagine something like a little robot bird that flies into the engines of the big drones. Bruce Stirling has written about something similar.
What kind of drones? Well you got lots of fancy things come out of DARPA. Like Big Dog! Creepy!
Memo talks about a “gravy train” of peace-time military funding. Do we really need all those aircraft carriers? They didn’t do so well in Millennium Challenge 2002, after all.
Then there’s war-time weapons development. Look at the Manhattan project or mine-resistant personnel carriers (I think he’s talking about the MRAP).
War as a means of conspicuous consumption. Look how much tax-money our government can waste on drones for you to shoot down. Live on TV!
We may not have seen the invasion of once country by another in Europe in a generation, but what about the rest of the world? What about places that “aren’t worth it for the global powers to look into”? Civil wars in places like Syria, where nasty situations force people to be nasty. Or simply places with nothing much to lose no police systems where the only way to get justice is “the old way.”
The War Nerd talked about Egypt and how they use the Roman Testudo Formation.
Terrorism/anti-globalists might become a greater threat as the means of destruction become cheaper, putting WMDs in the hands of tribalists.
Someone might out a competitive alternative to global society, and we get a situation like NATO versus Warsaw Pact. But even the Cold War never actually went hot. Perhaps that was chance, and the next time we won’t be so lucky, or perhaps cooler, more rational heads will prevail, just like they did in the 1950s-80s.
Tune in next week for more!
And get more Memolishious goodness at his youtube channel and deviantart page.
May 8, 2013
Danke je wel
See how the blue line (page views) shoots way above the orange (unique visitors)? That’s one guy from the Netherlands who’s reading Kingdoms of Evil (all 400K words of it) all the way through from beginning to end, clicking from one page to the next, and boosting my stats and thus the price of my addspace (the green line). Dank je wel, nederlands. U bent een moderne held. Make a comment and I’ll say more nice things about you.
Just a little teaser
Stamboli is no longer a Christian City, they say. The Ayasophía is a crypt, and Saint Baldwin’s basilica might as well be a citadel for the Venetians. The demoticci these days more likely to sing prayers at a Synagogue or Musselman Jamiya, and it seems every day more Jehosaphite Stupas shoulder their way into the skyline. Look to the Dardanelle Bond, the ships strung on the mighty woven-steel chord like beads on a necklace, the engine houses at each end spouting their black coal smoke. See the smokestacks of the fabrikásia, rising higher than any dome or minaret. And if you listen, you can hear the cries of Forum merchants from here. Constantine made Stamboli a city of God, but now she is a city of many gods, all bowing to the Almighty Dinar.
May 7, 2013
Podcast 8: Translation strategies (in Japanese)
Here’s a little bonus podcast.Podcast 8: Translation (in Japanese)
What is the best way to translate this sentence:
“Watashi wa genki desu shi. Eto, konshu wa imouto ni atte, Miyajima e ikimashita.”
If you want to learn Japanese, perhaps the most useful way would be to translate the sentence word-for-word, where each element is given its nearest equivalent in English.
Obnoxiously Literal: I subject proceed-attention is because. Um, this-week subject little-sister with meet-and, Miyajima to went.
But for anyone other than a student of Japanese, that sentence will so difficult to understand it isn’t worth reading. Collapsing the meaning of idioms like proceed-attention and rearranging words so they respond to English sentence structure gives us:
Normal: I am well because, um, this week I met my little sister and we went to Miyajima.
But does “genki“ really mean “well”? Why not “I am good”? Does the choice between “I am well” and “I am good” communicate as much about the speaker’s education and level of formality as it does in English? Of course not. A Japanese person would communicate that information in other ways. I chose “well” because the pronoun “watashi” and the “mashita” at the end of “ikimashita” indicate basic formality, like how a Japanese teacher would speak to a student (what a coincidence!).
Most people would agree that my translation above is workable, but is it fun? Does it sound like natural speech? Will its inclusion of an unknown place (Miyajima) confuse the reader? Tolkien might suggest “translating” the name of the place.
Tolkienian: I am well because this week I met my little sister and we went to Shrine Island.
But then the sentence could have been uttered by anyone? What makes it Japanese? A particularly Japanophilic anime fan-subber might want to leave words untranslated if they wanted the reader to learn some new vocabulary, especially vocabulary that has no single-word equivalent in Japanese.
Anime: I am genki because, eto, this week I met my imouto and we went to Miyajima.
Which translation is best?
I suggest that your choice depends on your purpose. If you’re translating for someone interested in information (i.e. nonfiction), you should go with the Normal translation. However, if you’re writing fiction (and especially if the “original language” is not real) you might want to slide your scale toward Tolkienian or Anime. The obvious way to choose between the two is to use the first for fantasy and the second for science-fiction, but I get annoyed with sci-fi books that expect me to learn dozens of useless alien words in order to understand certain characters. I do, however, like to learn languages, so if the character in the book is speaking a real, potentially useful language, then I do like to see some words in that language sprinkled through the text.
So, listen to this snippit from my class with my Japanese teacher. First I chopped out most of the ums and ahs and the places where I fumbled the language too badly. Then I translated it starting with Tolkeinian and moving through Normal to Anime at the end. Can you see where one style ends and the next begins? Which works best for you?
I am well because, um, this week I met my little sister and we went to Shrinyle.
Me: Where is “Trinyle”?
Shrinyle is, um, there’s a pretty red contheon in the sea near Widyle.
Me: Is it?
Do you not know of it?
Me: I do not.
Really? Well…
Me: Oh! That famous…
Uh huh.
Me: Um, that “partle” poking out of the water.
The portal built in the water?
Me: Portal. Sorry.
Yeah. Miyajima is famous. And there are deer there.
Me: Deer? Um, the animals?
Right, right.
Me: Um…did you feed them?
Well you know, right now, because the deer are too fat and there are a lot of them, feeding them is forbidden. You know, there used to be stores where you could buy deer food? Before they sold feed, for about 100 yen everyone could give it out, but now it’s forbidden. That’s because…in Miyajima they have Miyajima maps out, just, maps that anyone can use? So, I was looking at one. A deer came up and ate the map.
Me: There isn’t any animal feed, so it was hungry.
Right. Probably. Also because they aren’t scared of humans, it just clip-cloped up to me and took it.
Me: So people don’t lose the game, um, we have to hunt them.
But ano, the deer on Miyajima are the kami‘s…tsukai they’re called. It’s the noun of tsukau. To use.
Me: That is a very interesting word. The kami use the deer. Interesting. Ano, aside from deer, can there be other tsukai?
Well. Foxes and snakes. White snakes are very good.
Me: I have been to that jinja.
A sou desu ka?
Me: The one in the middle of Lake Biwa.
Me: Un, in Kansai. Then, foxes are the most famous, ka na~. But people, ah, can’t.
People, yeah. Un. There aren’t any.
Me: Too bad.
The old…nanka, now there are foxes and deer, so everyone takes care of them…but the old shinwa? The stories about the kami? They have children of humans and kami. Like in the Greek stories.
Me: What do you call them? “Demigods?” “Half-kami?”
Just “kami” I think. Those people connected the world of the kami to the world of humans. So, you can’t hunt the deer on Miyajima.
