Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 40
January 8, 2019
A Perfect Snowflake
A perfect snowflake.
My daughter’s face drawing close.
A blob of water.
January 7, 2019
Five Star Book Reviews: The City of Brass
A street rat in Ottoman Cairo feels like she’s someone special. She can heal supernaturally quickly and speak every language, including one she’s never heard anyone else use. During one ambitious scam, she uses this personal language to spice up a mystical ritual so she can charge a higher price for her bogus faith-healing.
And the patient wakes up, grabs our protagonist by the wrist, and snarls in a demonic language: “Who are you?”
It turns out the hidden, magical world of elemental spirits doesn’t give much of a damn about the human world, unless it finds a human doing magic. Then things get complicated and political.
Now we have deadly power struggles, handsome and troubled men, ancient destinies, and ethno-religious grudges tangled up in a magical city populated by fire-breathing demigods. The City of Brass is a fun goddamn ride.
The Fifth Day of Junction: The Dissection of the Shmoo
This beautiful picture was created by scientific illustrator Franz Anthony
Here’s a sample of some of the monsters that will eat people in Junction. *w*
“The bullet was stopped inside the shmoo’s body,” said Anne. “But it didn’t hit a bone. This thing doesn’t seem to have any. And this steaming discharge. Nothing alive could be that hot. Not while it was alive. But when it was pierced by the bullet… the way its body flopped when Daisuke moved it…press into its side again, Dice.”
She winked at Daisuke and his heart flopped over.
“Look at that,” said Anne, prodding the shmoo. “Look how it sloshes around? Several layers with blood and viscera between. Not a tube-within-a-tube like us but…bags-within-bags?”
Daisuke summarized for the camera: “So this creature is like several water-balloons, one inside the other.” He looked down at his steaming boot. “All filled with acid?”
“Can’t be,” said Anne. “There’s only acid in this outer-most layer, the one under the skin. The reservoir of sulfuric acid is sandwiched between what must be some very tough barriers.”
“So how does this thing hunt?” asked Daisuke.
“Probably with these.” Anne pointed at a transparent, centimeter-long spine, one of hundreds that dotted the creature’s tough skin like the quills of a porcupine. “Let me…Dice, you got a pair of pliers on you?”
As it happened, Daisuke did. He plucked his multi-tool from his utility belt and passed it to Anne. Her warm fingers brushed across his.
“Don’t want to touch this thing with bare skin,” she muttered, clamping the pliers to the tip of the spine and pulling. The spine slid a good five centimeters from the shmoo’s body before it stuck.
“Hm,” said Anne. “These spines go all the way to the core of animal. I bet they’re for sucking up the juice of the prey animal. The shmoo doesn’t even have to inject digestive enzymes like a spider. All it has to do is pierce the inner layer that protects a glasslands animal from its own acid.”
“As I did, when I shot it?” asked Hariyadi.
“But the bullet didn’t go all the way through,” said Anne. “It pierced the outer layer, the inner one, the gooey center of the animal, but got lodged here,” she prodded a black lump in the rapidly deflating mess. “Against the other side of the inner layer on its way out.”
“Damn, that thing must be tough on the inside,” said Pearson.
“It would have to be, to defend against exactly the sort of attack it uses on its prey.” Anne scooted around the shmoo. “Where are those eyes? I can’t seem to find them.”
“It seems a fragile existence,” said Hariyadi. “A walking chemical reaction.”
“You’ve just described yourself,” said Anne. “Ever see someone with a gut wound? Same problem.”
Daisuke heard a sharp intake of breath and realized that maybe Hariyadi had seen a gut wound digest a man from the inside out. Perhaps the dear colonel had caused one.
“Ah,” said Anne, “there the eyes are. Interesting.”
“Interesting?” Daisuke prompted.
“I can feel the lenses inside,” said Anne, prodding the sagging body with plier nose of the multi-tool. “They’re embedded in the tough, inner membrane. But how do they see out through the outer skin?” She brushed the tool around the glass spines at one end of the oblong body, smoothing them into a swirling circle like the petals of a chrysanthemum. “Shine your light here. At this angle.”
The chrysanthemum petals blazed suddenly with blue light. As Anne poked them, the light flicked to green, then red.
“Right,” she said. “These spines aren’t just transparent. They can conduct light all the way through the outer skin. The animal can even tune its visual system by slight adjustments to the angles of these…what…optical spines?”
“Like…” Daisuke’s brow furrowed as he worked on a way to dumb that down. “Uh…a periscope? Eye glasses?”
“Like a weird alien eyeball made of millions of tiny prisms floating in acid,” said Anne. “That’s what it’s like. She pushed off her knees and looked up at Hariyadi. “These things are going to be a problem.”
Junction by Daniel M. Bensen will be available in January 2019 from in print and ebook from FLAME TREE PRESS.
January 6, 2019
Fourth Day of Junction: Maps and Air Pressure
On the Fourth Day of Junction, I got some hiking. In Junction (coming out on Thursday!) a survey mission on an alien planet crashes in the alien wilderness and has to walk home.
But what do our heroes have to go through on their trek? Why, five different alien biomes, that’s what they have to go through. The names have a changed a bit since I drew these maps, but the rout they take is the same. You can find out more here.
Another problem our heroes face is that the planet Junction is 1.3 times as massive as Earth, which means everybody weighs a bit more and air pressure changes a lot more quickly with altitude. The way the math works out, you start to get altitude sickness about half a kilometer lower than you would on Earth.
Not to mention to terrible savagery that lies within the human heart! Why the geopolitical situation alone…
But I’ll save that for another post. Happy Junction!
January 4, 2019
Chocolate Crunches
Chocolate crunches
I need another coffee
Snow falling out there
The Third Day of Junction: Radio Interview
Merry Third Day of Junction! And Merry Second Interview for the 12+3 show on Bulgarian National Radio (here’s the first). I recorded this interview at the end of December, getting ready for the big book launch of Junction.
Here is the radio interview, and for those of you who don’t speak Bulgarian, my translation:
A conversation with a friend – a marine biologist – awakens the imagination of writer Daniel Bensen to write his book, Junction. Prior to his novel’s launch party, Bensen told BNR:
“There was a conversation between me and my friend, a marine biologist. She wondered what would happen if we found a new continent on Earth -whether we would destroy it or treat it much better. I wrote a story about the discovery of a new planet, and at the beginning of the novel I asked the question – what do we do with this new planet? It was in those moments that I had the most fun, while writing about the different aliens living on this planet. In the book, we find a way to get to a new planet called Junction, which is called that because it has many wormholes – some of them lead to the Earth, others to quite different places. Animals and plants that fall on the planet develop their own ecosystems. “
“People who read science fiction know a different amounts of technical information,” Daniel Bensen told “12 + 3” and explained:
“I wrote Junction so people can appreciate it without knowing much about biology, but the biology I used in the book is real. I wanted to make the aliens as real as possible. One of the characters is a biologist who explains these things. “
“I’m working hard on a Bulgarian translation because I live here and want my friends and family to read the book in Bulgarian.” (but still no dice)
“One of the things that impressed me about the Bulgarian book market was how much Bulgarian readers love fantasy and science fiction,” said Daniel Bensen.
The premiere of the book is on January 10 at 19.00 in the FOX book café in Sofia.
2nd Day of Junction: The Nun Language
Junction’s launch day is on the 10th, and I have a day off, so this is a good day for some language-constructing!
In Junction, a wormhole is discovered in the New Guinea highlands…by the rest of the world. The people who live near the wormhole have always known about it, and they call themselves the Nun.
Nun is a pandanus or avoidance language, spoken to non-Nun or when off of Earth. Thus, while its grammar is presumably similar to that of the Nun’s private (and largely unstudied) language, its vocabulary is mostly loans from neighboring Mek languages such as Ketengban, Eipomek, Nalca and Yali. Nun may also be a Mek language itself, with post-modifying SOV sentence structure, and agglutinating morphology, very much like Nalca.
Attestations (in approximate order of appearance):
Im sam e (sky in house) = (the) House(s) in the sky
Mek im sam (water sky in) = (the) In-Sky River
Yeli im (worm sky) = the Sky Worm (mythological)
Yo Dung (tree worm) = a wormtree
Dung yo (worm tree) = a treeworm
Soko Heng Tokwey (land sun ground) = land of ground sun, Lighthouse Biome
Soko Bou Deibuna (land wind death) = Deathwind Biome
Soko Ining Eng (land blood sweet) = land of sweet blood, Sweetblood Biome, Oasis Biome
Soko Mekaletya (land toymaker) = land of toymaker(s), Toymaker Biome
Metek aleb-ti-a (small give.IT.NOM) =a toymaker
Yo sam mek (tree in water)= (the) Water (is) in (the) tree
Dan meteklyetya ub-ak do (what toymaker be.3RD.PRES.PL QU) = What are toymakers?
Yoyo Mekaletya (forest toymaker) = the toymaker forest
Daisuke adya hadya ara deb-lem-la-a okay ub-la (Daisuke erg. fish-crab abs. eat.PRS.3RD.PRS.NOM okay) = Daisuke eating the fish (is) okay.
Keb-lum (listen.IMP) = Listen!
Din-lulum! (see-pl.imp) = Look, you all!
Nun-ak ang ulu-na (we.contained with there.is.NOM) = The tribe has us
Keb tek-lum (listen stand.IMP) = Wake up!
Danya yak-nam-ak do (who come.FUT.3RD.PRES.PL QU) = Who will come?
A full word list may be found here.
And if you want to participate on twitter and get your very own Nun sentence, go here.
January 3, 2019
The Woosh of Traffic
The woosh of traffic
The coffee machine gurgles
Snow on the parked cars
1st day: a process essay
On the first day of Junction…
It’s only a week until Junction’s launch on the 10th, and in celebration, here’s an essay I wrote about writing it. It’s my first magazine publication, which means they paid me. 
December 31, 2018
Five Star Book Review: Ra
After reading Fine Structure I went on a feverish search for other books by Sam Hughes. And I found out he wrote another book after Fine Structure, and it was even better.
If Fine Structure was about “what if technology were a lot harder?,” Ra is the just-as-horrifying opposite extreme. Some time in the 1970s, a retired Indian mathematician attempts to “optimize” a mantra for use in meditation. And the mantra does something.
Magic is a branch of applied science, rather like electrical engineering or computer science if you could use it to kill people with your mind. Don’t worry, though, getting to the stage of mind-killing requires a PhD.
Sam Hughes has worked everything out. The meaning of the various Words of Power, the accent you have to use when you pronounce them, the look and feel of the written language that represents them and the mystical talismans – ahem! I mean, “the precision industrial equipment” – that wizards can use to manipulate the forces of nature. He’s figured out what wizards do to unwind (bojutsu, because it helps hone their staff-wielding skills), the boring jobs wizards get in industry, the dreams they have for more. Sam Hughes has created something just on the edge of being real, and then he brings it crashing down in a very exciting way.
If you’ve read Sam Hughes before, you know it’s not a question of whether the Earth will be destroyed, it’s a question of how many times.
Nota Bene: I read both the official ending and the alternate one, and I actually like the alternate one better.
