Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 72

The Lords of the World

Percival Q. Singh and Mu-Rau

“The Lords of the World” is a detective story in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle, set in a world of H.G. Wells’ Martian Invasion. It is available here from Alternate History Fiction magazine.

P.Q. Singh portrait by Ivy Cave AKA Thundercake

When a damsel in distress turns out to be more dangerous, and in more distress, than she first appeared, Percival Q. Sing, moon-born professor of law and ethics, and his esteemed colleague Mu-Rau the Martian imam must dive into the nest of terror and oppression that is the England a century after the Martian Invasion.

 

Read the first few lines here

“Death to Martians,” a story in the same universe.

Conversations with various cool people about Making Characters, Worldbuilding, and Plot for “Lords of the World.”

The characters

Martian physiology

A map of Mars, also Martian continents, races, religions, and economic blocs

Some background on the writing process and worldbuilding

Alternatives to Sex? Martian reproduction

The idea-seed that started it all

 

Domesticated Velociraptors

What would the world be like if you could hire Velociraptor rides for your daughter’s birthday, race them through jungles, or buy them at the local pet store? Fourteen authors from around the world delve into the prospect of domesticated Velociraptors in these stories full of adventure, wonder, and possibilities. Come explore realities where Velociraptors protect the land, take over kingdoms, and get tamed by grandmothers in the second anthology from the Midnight Writers.

I got a story in this one from the same universe as Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen.

Pre-order now!

Some Notes for The Centuries Unlimited

If science fiction is about what we think the future will look like, an alternate history with a Point of Divergence in 1929 (when people from the future arrived bearing technological gifts) should look a lot like 1920s scifi. So a survey of the genre at that time reveals that my book will be full of this sort of nonsense:

hover-pack

particle accelerator-field generator

disembodied intelligence

improve conditions for the poor by giving them fish gills!

disintigration ray

robots with hollographic costumes

glass buildings

Sorbing (brain-draining)

rockets

gap between ruling and working class

giant dangerous animals (the fatal eggs)

freeze ray!

death ray

insanity ray

ray guns

The Light of History

Sometimes you just get sideswiped by inspiration. This week, Wonderful Awful Ideas is coming early.

 

Behold the Tree of Worlds: Yewdharma.* Its roots are sunk deep in the quantum bedrock of creation, invisible at the infinitely distant convergence of parallel lines that forms its trunk. Its branches are, of course, fractal. From mighty limbs of “what if the dinosaurs never went extinct?” to the microscopically insignificant twiglets of “what if I had woken up just five minutes earlier?” its canopy stretches in all eleven directions, drinking in the sunlight of probability.

It’s not a real tree. That would be silly. Yewdharma is a metaphor, a hideously complex bit of math squashed into a tree-shape by the brains of the pitiful primates that venture out upon its manifold surface.

There’s one now. Stony-faced, he clings to a metaphorical branch, supported by the metaphorical equivalents of rappelling line and cleated shoes. He has a pair of metaphorical hedge-clippers, which he is waving at a crow. The crow is not metaphorical; it is an angry black bird, and if you get too close to its nest, it will go right for your eyes. This bird is not messing about. It claws at the man’s gloved hands** and darts its pointed beak at his face, screaming.

The man wonders if this would have happened if he’d woken up just five minutes earlier this morning. He might have managed to get a cup of coffee inside him and been alert enough to avoid the bird. He flails with his hedge-clippers and knocks them into a small branch behind him. There’s a dull crunch and a world where Australia developed the first nuclear weapon goes spinning off into oblivion.

Oh well, more where that came from. It’s not so much words as a groove in the man’s brain, he’s had that thought so often. With a grunt, he hoists himself onto a sturdy branch*** out of the crow’s territory.

Free to look around without getting his eyes pecked out, the man searches for his target.

There it is: a broom-like outgrowth of twigs from the gnarled bole of World War II. More damn Nazi victories.

Nobody likes Nazi victories. Of course, half of them are blighted hell-scapes of apocalyptic destruction, but the other half are somehow worse. In those, someone in the Third Reich finally figures out that you can’t run a government on murderous racism, and starts making changes. In no time you have the swastika flying over humanitarian aid stations in Africa, and it just confuses the hell out of everyone. There was even one timeline where Germany ended up a Jewish theocracy.

Can’t let that happen again. What sort of example would that set for the other timelines? Why should they bother fighting against evil when down some other branch of history, the evil turned good all by itself? It would be bad for moral. It would disrupt the tree’s pleasing symmetry.

The man’s shears snick and billions of lives are lost.

Except they aren’t really dead. That’s another well-worn brain-groove. The man knows that none of the lives that he just caused to cease are actually gone. There are an infinity of lives just like them somewhere else on the tree. That’s how infinity works. All you can do is carve out your territory and keep it well-groomed.

The man has long since stopped wondering whether what he does is murder. Even when his metaphorical shears are cleaving through the heart of a screaming human being, he knows that in countless other spaces, they are not. In other other spaces, it’s him who’s being murdered and you with the shears, so what does that signify? Nothing at all.

Look into the man’s eyes as he does his work. See in them the absence of consequence, the boredom. See the omnipotent nihilist, and be afraid.

The eyes twitch. Was that a shadow? Or is that damn crow back? No. It’s something worse. Something that puts a spark of fear in the man’s heart the way no mere fascist empire could. There, on a twig on a branch of the Worlds Tree Yewdharma, is a flower.

 

*The Vikings spelled it wrong.

**Metaphorical gloves.

***It leads to a sheaf of worlds where cereals were never domesticated.

Symbionts

The airlock sealed itself behind us and vanished. Its edges blended in with the knobbly, translucent walls of the alien spacecraft, and it was gone.

“Somebody paint that spot,” ordered Commander Liu, and a yellow circle appered in my vision to mark the place where there was no door.

“I do not like this,” I said.

“Noted,” said Liu. “Our first order of business is to reestablish–”

The wall blinked. A membrane slid down it, less like a Venetian blind than an eyelid. It covered the wall, smooth and gray, then withdrew into the ceiling. The eyelid left behind a picture: blackness speckled with multicolored dots, nibbled, stone-colored crescents, a patchwork cylinder, a globe-hung scaffold.

“Stars,” I realized. “Asteroids. Our ship and EVA transport. It’s showing us a window.”

“Can I touch it, sir?” asked Qian.

Commander Liu frowned at him. “Touch what?”

“The transport, sir. Maybe that will communicate to the alien that we want to go home?”

The alien, he called it. Not the alien spaceship.

“Do it,” Liu ordered.

Qian pressed his index finger against the picture of the transport, a frame of metal laden with thrusters and emergency supplies.

The eyelid slid down again and when it rose, the window had changed. Pseudopods of the ship’s amorphous mass reached toward the transport. Something thumped on the far side of the wall, followed by the unmistakable scream of tearing metal.

The wall blinked and now there was no transport outside.

“It ate the transport?” I said. “Why would it do that?”

“Maybe it took touching the image for permission,” said Qian.

“Don’t touch the wall again,” said Liu as a soft tone sounded.

A score or so of little holes opened in the ceiling above us. Out of the holes dropped hard little pellets about the size of my thumb.

I scanned the closest one, found it was inert, and zapped some vapor off it for our spectrometers to analyze.

“Sugar and fat?” Liu read off his HUD.”What is that stuff? Candy?”

“Its a reward,” said Qian. “A reward for…” he reached toward the wall.

“Wait,” said Liu. “We have to be careful. This thing is bigger than our ship. If you touch that…” he pointed toward the image of our ship.

The wall blinked again.

This time it took longer for the alien to reach out and devour our ship, but we guessed what would happen and used the time to figure out why.

“Let’s say you’re a gigantic space-faring creature that looks like a spaceship,” I said. “Let’s say you aren’t smart enough to distinguish between food and nonfood floating out in space. But you have a way to find out. You lure sapients into yourself and you show them a view of the outside. Of course they will touch or point at or otherwise indicate their ride home then their home, itself.

The alien learned faster than us. We stopped touching the wall, stopped pointing, but by then all we had to do was look too long at one spot and the alien followed our gazes to select its next target. It ate two other survey ships before, shrugging off lasers and kinetics, it tore Outpost Station apart. After each glut of destruction, it showered us with candy.

Now we’re trying not to look at the walls, but its hard. we keep glancing at the stars even though we know we shouldn’t. We can’t help it. We’re looking for Earth.

This one was inspired by the mutualistic but not entirely friendly relationships between bacteria and animals Ed Yong describes in I Contain Multitudes.

Also, happy birthday to meeee!

Learning Bulgarian: Vacations and Governments

Remember last week? Well here’s some more Bulgarian vocab!

Obrashtam se kam (nyakogo): Turn to (somebody) for help

Dezhuren-on duty (from French, de jure meaning “of day”)

Pikolo-a bellhop (from Italian, piccolo meaning “smallest”)

Funny how English also imported both words, but with different meanings.

Osvobozhdavam/osvodya- to check out (literally “to free up” from svoboda or “freedom”)

Oplakvam/oplacha se ot (neshto)-to complain about (something)

Spravnyavam/sravna-to compair

Gledam kam (neshto)-to look out at (something)

Vsichko stava-you never know (literally “everything happens”)

Darzhava-a government, a country (the thing that controls a country is darzhavno ustroistvo or “government apparatus”)

Palnomoshtiya-power, jurisdiction (literally “full-ability” or “full-mightiness”)

Vrachvam-to grant

Naznachavam-to hire (to “to-know”)

Osvobozhavam-to fire (to “set free”)

Dlazhnost-a post in the government (a “must-ness”) related to zadalzhitelno or “required”

Vissh-high (position, power, post). I’ve never come across that s-sh sound combination before. As opposed to visok which means “high” or “tall” in the physical sense.

Uprazhnyavam-to exercise power

Pomilvane-a pardon, amnesty (literally “a little-kind-ing”)

Obyavyavam-to announce

Vaorazhen-armed (“en-weapon-ed”)

Napadam/napadna-to attack (“to-fall” similar to English “they fell to it”)

Polozhenie-a situation

Izvanreden-extraordinary (literally “completely-out-order-ed”)

Zasedavam-to meet, to sit (of a committee, ministry, etc.) (literally “for-sit”)

Poznat-familiar (literally “a little-known”)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family Tree

I’ve been working hard on the book I’m calling  The Centuries Unlimited (aka Time Trains aka Raj Station, aka Renaissance Express). Posting my progress here, the first thing I’ve completed is the future family tree of the protagonist (plus a few unrelated supporting characters).

Knickerbocker Station

Emily Gallagher (protagonist) 19-y.o. (b. 1888) an economist

Robert King 20-y.o. (b. 1887) a naturalist

Black Station

Helen Hunt (relationship character) 33-y.o. (b. 1909) a detective. Emily’s daughter.

John Williams (antagonist) 35-y.o. (b. 1907) a human-trafficker and mobster.

Kennedy Station

Billy Hunt 23-y.o. (b. 1919) a leftist radical. Emily’s son. (from Black Station)

William Hunt 61-y.o. (b. 1919) a politician. Emily’s son.

Elmo Hunt 40-y.o. (b. 1940) a mad marketer. William’s son.

Betty Bleirer 36-y.o. (1944) a spy. Helen’s daughter.

Monday Station

Denise Hunt 36-y.o. (b. 1974) a cyborg mechanic. Elmo’s daughter.

Cheryl Hunt 40-y.o. (b. 1970) a business mogul. Elmo’s daughter.

Genka Espinoza 18-y.o. (b. 1992) a cyborg vigilante. Betty’s grand-daughter.

Crisis Station

Ginevra Espinoza 46-y.o. (b. 1992) a professor. Betty’s grand-daughter.

Chandra Hunt 35-y.o. (b. 2003) a counter-terrorist. William’s grand-son.

Al X 30-y.o. (b.2008) a terrorist. Denise’s son.

James Villanueva 25-y.o. (b. 2013) an artist. Denise’s son.

Kisha Lizowski 28-y.o. (b. 2010) a monster hunter. Betty’s grand-daughter.

Pivot Station

Alexander Villanueva (b. 2008) 57-y.o. a call-center rep. Denise’s son.

 

I’m pretty sure the dates all add up. :/

Snider!

“Watch out for sniders tonight.”

I turned away from another breathtaking Rasan sunset. Behind Enrique and Firey Plummet, the moon shone below the glittering webwork of one of the mechs’ space stations. The stars were coming out on my first night on Rasa.

“What,” I asked, “are sniders?”

“A fascinating example of the inventiveness of natural selection,” said Firey Plummet, his artificial voice buzzing from the speakers on his squat environment suit.

“Not something you want to surprise you.” That was Enrique. He was human and didn’t need an environment suit. Our mentor was dressed in his usual layers of khaki, which struck me as uncomfortably warm for this muggy night in what would have been Earth’s southern China.

Rasa had the same basic land forms as Enrique and my home timeline. Those big forest capped limestone pillars you see in the backgrounds of famous Chinese paintings. Except this landscape had no people in it. the vegetation at the top was all various forms of grass inhabited only by various forms of invertebrate and bird. No mammals, no lizards, not even bees. Something had wiped all those forms of life out in this version of Earth. I hoped to be the one who discovered what.

“Are you talking about spiders?” I asked, “snakes? Land crabs?” Those last could grow to the size of an easy chair, but as far as I knew they were herbivores and lowland animals.

“Yes,” said FP, “snakes.”

“Not exactly,” said Enrique. “There are pit vipers in the lowlands, but they can’t get on top of these karst outcroppings. At least without significant…” He wiggled his fingers. “…derivation from their ancestral bauplan.”

“Cladistically, they are still pit vipers.” FP’s voice synthesizer was good enough that I could hear his annoyance.

“They’re attracted to heat, so zip up your tent.”

Well, I did and nearly drowned in the sweaty, un-moving air. It took hours for our campsite to cool off. And when it did, the snider found me.

I was finally drifting off when something impacted the fabric of the tent over my head. Four pointed feet scrabbled for purchase on the slick fabric, and the animal–the mass of a kitten–slid down the tent and plopped to the ground.

A few seconds later, another creature jumped into the tent’s other side, followed quickly by a third.

I decided to open my tent and look outside. There was no way I could sleep with these creatures bombarding my tent and no way I could stop exhaling the warm air that attracted them. At least, I told myself, I deserved to see what a snider looked like.

My tent zipped up from the bottom. Readying my flashlight, I opened up a small hole in my protection.

Something skittered across the beam of my flashlight in a blur of spines and legs. Tarantula? I thought before I moved my flashlight and caught it crouching.

Slitted eyes glared at me over over a scaly lip and a pair of flexing…fangs? No, those were legs, legs evolved from teeth folded like switchblades. Behind the eyes, lower jaws gaped, split, folded backwards into spindly grasshopper-like hind legs. A round, spiny body rose behind these legs like the abdomen of a spider and a forked tongue flickered out between those fang-forelimbs. Toothy mandibles scissored under its body.

It leaped the way nightmares leap. One moment of terrified distraction and it was clawing at the end of my flashlight, flexing out the fangs folded behind its forelimbs. With a disgusted cry, I shoved my flashlight and its loathsome passenger out of my tent and zipped up the hole.

I spent the rest of the night in the dark shivering, listening to the patter of viperous bodies against my tent. I only managed to drift off near dawn and woke too soon to the sound of birds and the smell of cooking meat.

Carefully unzipping my tent, I discovered Enrique and Firey Plummet hunched over a fire. Enrique was warming his hands while FP had plunged one of his metal claws directly into the flames. Between the pincers, a round, spiny body popped and hissed.

“Good morning,” said Enrique. “Tomorrow, it’ll be your turn to catch breakfast.”

This story was inspired by this tumblr post about the evolution of snakes. It takes place in the same universe as Fellow Tetrapod.

Learning Bulgarian: vacations

Here’s a new thing I’m doing: typing up my notes from Bulgarian classes, with highlights that might be interesting for you language-nerds out there.

Today we talked about vacations. Here are some interesting words:

Stanyavane=check-in, from nastanyavam (to check in), from the root stan (a campsite) cognate to English “stand,” (through Latin) “state,” “stable,” and (through Persian) the “-stan” in Kazakhstan and many other countries.

Zapazvam=to reserve, literally “for-save”

Otsyadam=to spend the night somewhere, literally “from-sit” (syadam is also cognate to “stan”)

Zadalzhitelno tryabva=one has to. Literally “one obligatorily should” In general, Bulgarian makes no distinction between “one should” (tryabva) and “one has to” (tryabva), but if necessary, this is one way to do it.

Obslyzhvane= service (in a hotel or restaurant). From obsluzhvam/ga obsluzha (to serve), related to usluga (a favor), uslugi (services), sluzhba (duty, service as in military service), and sluga (a servant).

Nedostatak=a con, literally “an insufficiency.” From dostatachno (enough). The opposite is predimstvo (a pro).

Sabor=a village festival, a town fair. From sabiram (to gather)

Pekhlivanin=a strong young man, from Turkish pehlivan (a wrestler)

Bungala=Camping houses. Look at that nice plural neuter ending

Amethyst: a Haiku

Born late and alone

I play on rocks and wander

A cougar eats me

Light shining through rock

Becoming solid and real

I eat the cougar

My mouth drips with blood

What once was other is me

Eating is just great!

A pair of hunters

On long legs, pumpkin heads sway

They turn. Weapons! POOF

Light shines off cave walls

Standing on two legs, I see

Them: the Crystal Gems

And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, why the heck aren’t you watching Steven Universe?