Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 59

I won the Freaking Sidewise Award!

I co-won the Sidewise Award for short fiction along with @adamrov and Ben Winters. I am honored to be in their company.

Click here for “Treasure Fleet” and the other excellent stories in Tales From Alternate Earths.

Click here for some notes from the world of “Treasure Fleet.”

Thank you all.

Sidewise Awards today!

The day is today! Go to Sidewise Award page and see if my alternate history short story “Treasure Fleet” has won!

And to wet your appetite for more, here are some alluring fragments of a sequel…

At the heart of the Forbidden City, the Great Lama of all China paced his temple and citadel. “A cycle of the zodiac and the South would be ours! That was what my father told me. That Imam-so-called emperor was supposed to be destitute, and then he goes and discovers a new fucking continent!”

…

“Ten-no-ki?” Captain Umizaka read the Chinese characters. “Heaven’s energy? What is this jibberish?”

“It’s the name of a city,” said the Malay. “The natives call it ‘Tenochtitlan.'”

…

From a distance, the building looked like a Hulagid Holy Pavilion. Perhaps it had started out that way. Now, human arm and leg bones dangled from the eves like ghastly wind-chimes, and more bones lay on its floor. A lot more.

…

Umizaka squinted at the grisly memorial and snapped, “Someone get those bodies out of the way and find out how much treasure they left under there.” It was often said the pirate understood only gold and treachery. Now he felt the call of both.

The Inklings’ Sidewise Q/A

Stephen Hunt at Inklings Press was kind enough to ask me some questions about the Sidewise Awards (coming tomorrow) and my feelings about the nomination of one of my short stories.

Stephen: So – it’s been a year since Tales From Alternate Earths came out, and you’re up for a Sidewise Award, the biggest award in the alt history field and up against the likes of Bruce Sterling. How do you feel about the nomination?

Dan: I’m not worried – I’m closing in on Bruce Sterling! Living in the Balkans: check. Tumblr account: check ( @brucesterling​ ). Getting nominated for a prestigious alternate history award: check! It’s only a matter of time, čoveče.

S: The Sidewise Award has a heady list of previous winners – including people such as Stephen Baxter, Walter Jon Williams, Lois Tilton, Gardner Dozois, Ken Liu… who are the great writers of alternative history who you admire and would say are influential?

D: Harry Turtledove and S. M. Stirling are probably my biggest alternate history influences, since I read them both extensively in high school, and learned how playing with history could make a good story. I admire the real diggers into alternate history, people like Bruce Munro, Den Valdron, and Jared, whose rigorous approach to their avocation creates worlds that deserve to be real. As story-telling, goes, though, Ted Chiang is everything I aspire to be. I’ve got a long ways to go.

S: What’s next for you, win or lose?

D: My story for the next Tales from Alternate Earths anthology is ready, about al-Andalus gliders.Then I have to finish my next novel, in which a cross-time rail system allows a 1930s private investigator to rescue her baby older brother from a high-tech child-smuggling ring. It’s got maser-wielding gangsters and a party on a blimp! In the mean time, my alien politics murder mystery and, uh, my other alien politics murder mystery are both looking for publishers.

S: Where will you be when the winners are announced?

D: I’ll be in the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel in Sofia, Bulgaria, performing my sacred duties as the godfather of the children of my best man and maid of honor.* I’ll try to keep my hands off my cell phone.

S: Okay, we’ll see how the final comes out. But in the meantime – Tales From Alternate Earths aside – if you were to name one alternate history book for readers to try out, which would it be? Just one. Yes, I’m being tough.

D: That is tough, but there is one alternate history novel that stands out: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. I know it isn’t “pure” alternate history (since it involves travel from the future of our timeline), but it is a good story populated by sympathetic characters, and it includes all the blue-sky guesstimating that makes alternate history so much fun. What if this had happened? Well then what if that followed? Next thing you know, you’re knee-deep in crystal skulls.

Thank you very much and keep your fingers crossed for me. With enough human wills yoked to mine, I’ll have the power to tunnel into the universe in which I win that award!

*The translation isn’t perfect. Go look up “kum i kuma.”

2 days until the Sidewise Awards!

Only two more days until we find out whether my alternate history short story  “Treasure Fleet” has won the Sidewise Award!

Continuing my sharing of backstory for this story of the Muslim Chinese discovery of the New World, I ask the question:

What if Hulagu had challenged the election of  Kublai as Great Khan?

Tell me your answer! And if you’d like to see mine, read on.

Far Future Evolution

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but I’ma do it anyway! It’s not like I’ll be around in a billion years to be corrected.

There are trends to evolution (even if only statistical artifacts ala Steven Jay Gould) and I think I can project these into the future:

Increasing diversity (lots and lots of different birds)

Decreasing disparity (they are all descended from the English sparrow)

Conquest of low-productivity areas (more life in deep oceans, deserts, mountain-tops, the Earth’s crust, the air, low earth orbit

3 days until the Sidewise Awards!

In case I haven’t beaten you over the head with this news enough already, my alternate history short story “Treasure Fleet” has been nominated for a Sidewise Award! They’re going to announce the winners on the 20th. Fingers crossed!

In honor of this momentous occasion, I’m sharing some of the backstory of the events leading up to the Muslim Chinese discovery of the New World. It’s all @melissamwalshe ‘s fault.

She had some REALLY interesting questions about alternate history. Specifically, what would have happened if explorers from Eastern Asia had discovered the New World rather than Western Europe?

1. What was the technological leap that made it possible for Europe to do it’s conquering?

2.  Would it make geographical sense for China to need the same technology to conquer, and if not, what challenges would they face and given where they were at, what’s the minimal change that would have made conquest feasible?

3. Was a philosophical difference in attitudes towards conquest a determining factor?

4. Who would the lynchpins have been and what would have had to change for them to be successful with a different message?

5. What is the Asian culture that would have been dominant at the time?

6. Would an Asian conquest be more likely if a different Asian culture had won a particular war?

7. How would the dominant philosophy (minimally tweaked for conquest purposes) impact the way that technologically less-advanced native peoples were treated?

8. What diseases were rampant in Asia at the time, and how would they have played out versus smallpox?

Read on to see my answers. But what about yours?

Babytalks: And he became a beybo gwegew

My daughter can now recite “the very hungry caterpillar” from memory. Which is great because it gives me a direct one-to-one comparison for her utterances. Here’s one of the more bizarre.

Instead of saying “beautiful butterfly” (the last two words of the book), she says something like “beybo gwewe” here’s my attempt to explain why.When she hears words from me, my daughter gets intervocalic dental stops turned into taps. For free!

ˈbjuːɾɪfəɫ ˈbʌɾɚflaɪ

First she simplifies əɫ and ɚ to o. (I think this is a common rule in American baby talk)

ˈbjuːɾɪfo ˈbʌɾoflaɪ

Then taps become approximants and non-coda fricatives become stops.

ˈbjuːlɪpo ˈbʌloplaɪ

Intervocalic stops are vocalized

ˈbjuːlɪbo ˈbʌloblaɪ

Approximants become glides: j when preceding front vowels and w when back (thanks @tropylium​ ) (this is something like Bulgarian baby talk, where r > l > j > i)

ˈbjuːjɪbo ˈbʌwobwaɪ

I’m not sure about this next part, but I think vowels converge somehow…

ˈbeːjɪbo ˈbəwebwəɪ

I’m not sure why, but in some B’s become G’s

ˈbeːjɪbo ˈgəwegwəɪ (I’ve sometimes really heard her say this)

And often the vowels continue to fuse and converge

ˈbeɪbo ˈgwegweɪ

At least, that’s what I THINK is happening. Any other ideas?

Distributing the future

I’m reading William Gibson right now, so what better time to talk about his quote: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

The implication is that we can look at those people with access to the cutting edge of technology, and extrapolate what the world will look like after that technology has been democratized.

Example: In the 1920s, only the fabulously wealthy could afford to fly across the Atlantic. In the 1960s, only universities had computers. In the 1980s, only scientists used email. And so on.

So, what high technologies* are today restricted to an elite few? What happens when they’re made available to everyone?

Access to scientific data (I just really want to read those journals without paying for them)

Supercomputers and server farms (connected to the grid and available to neighbors ala home-generated electricity?)

Private planes (Not in the sense of private cars. Uber for business jets?)

Cosmetic surgery (or maybe that’s just me reading too much Gibson)

Personal assistant/stylist/lawyer/doctor (come on automatization!)

Custom medical procedures (see Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End)

Any others?

 

*I’m not talking about luxuries or conspicuous consumption. No gold-infused food or live-in maids — we’ve always had those.

Asking for Help

As a writer, I need a lot of help. Not just psychological and financial (oh the effortposts I could write) but just getting facts right in your fiction is an enormous job.

I’ve written about the Illinois Indians, the American military, the city of Brussels, the 15th century Ottoman Empire and traditional Bulgarian woodcarving, the New Guinea highlands and the Indonesian military, life in Lima and Mumbai, and most recently turn-of-the-century Chicago and American black history, and the design and use of gliders and Moroccan society and culture.

I didn’t know about ANY of that stuff before I started writing. And of course I needed to find out. Even finding books was hard, because which books? I needed to find people to help me, but people are hard to talk to, especially since some of these issues are sensitive, and I don’t want to insult anyone with my mistakes. I don’t want to just dump my error-ridden manuscript on some stranger’s lap and demand they fix it. But I also can’t just demand that someone tell me everything they know about a given subject.

I think the answer is to give experts specific questions, so they have something to react to, and then we can dig deeper if we need to. Questions something like:

1) What are some idioms or aphorisms from this place/time/culture?

2) What is/was the food like?

3) How do/did rich people live? Poor people?

4) What entertainments were popular? What do/did people quote?

5) What are/were the major cultural divisions? What did/do people disagree about? What were/are people really angry about? Grateful for?

6) Who makes/made the important decisions? How?

7) What did/do people think is/was heroic and honorable? What did/do they think is/was evil and disgusting?

8) What’s something very common everybody did/does that most Americans don’t do?

9) What surprised you about going there/doing this? Or, when you left there/stopped doing this, what surprised you?

Those are all the questions I can think of right now, but maybe you have more? Are there any I’ve missed? Tell me in the comments

Baby Talks: Approximantation

Yes, my baby is still practicing fricative harmony. She’s also doing something else, which is approximanting? Is that even a word? She makes stops into approximants, is what I mean.

I speak General American English, so my intervocalic dental stops become flaps. I realize and as  [ˈwɑɾɚ] and [ˈdæɾi].

VtV > VɾV

VdV > VɾV

My wife and her family, however, speak Bulgarian, whose baby-talk register regularly replaces alveolar trills with alveolar approximants and alveolar approximants with palatal approximants. They realize (“fishing”) as /liba’jof/.*

r > l

l > j

Put those two tendencies together, and my baby pronounces as /’wɑlø:/**

VtV > VɾV > VlV

While is /’bɛji:/

VlV > VjV

Simple enough, or so I thought until I heard the way she pronounces : /’bæɰi/

VgV > VɰV

And is not *dæli, it’s /’dæji/. My mother in law thinks she’s saying /dai/ (“give!”), but my mother in law is wrong. My baby is saying “daddy”

VdV >VɾV > VlV > VjV

So it looks like the rule my baby has generalized is:

Make voiced intervocalic stops into approximates. Make unvoiced intervocalic stops into lateral approximates. Make lateral approximates into semivowels.

In other words, find your phoneme in the below chart and skip three spaces right.

p>b>ʋ>?>w>w>w>w

t>d>ɹ>l>j>j>j>j

k>g>ɰ>ʟ>ɯ>ɯ>ɯ>ɯ

To test whether this is true, I should see if she makes these realizations:

as /ˈhæʋi/ (? I guess? Since there isn’t such a thing as a labial lateral approximant)

as /ˈbeɪwi/

as /ˈkɛ.ji/

as /tʃiːʟi/

Wish me luck!

 

*the final /f/ is because of European final-obstruent devoicing and is present in adult registers as well

**not entirely sure about that final vowel. It’s a rounded something-or-other. What babies usually use to replace /ɚ/.