Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 75

chthulian magic for good!

Gritty Captain Planet

A couple of weeks ago, the superlative Tex Thompson said three words to me, and those three words changed my life: Gritty Captain Planet.

The sun sets, embracing the big sky of North Dakota. Clouds pile up impossibly high, blue and pink and gold.

On the earth below, it’s a different matter. The soil is cracked, scummy, lifeless. It crumbles under my boots like moon dust. Nothing will grow here anymore. Even the hardy ponderosas, veterans of a hundred dry and freezing winters, have turned the color of ash. The oil derricks loom above them like dinosaurs, screaming and stinking, vomiting their poison across the face of Gaia.

My thumb goes to my ring. The metal –not gold, although it looks gold– presses warmly against my skin. It’s like the ring knows.

“Dobro. Is time. We review taktika.” Command’s orders whisper through my earpiece, cool as a summer breeze in the Izborsk valley. I can almost smell the orchids.

“I hold in one place the air of smoke column,” she says. “If time, I will be creating low pressure vortex to wreck up the place. Engineering?”

“I will pull the particles from out of the air,” Engineering rumbles. “If we have time, I will fold the land over those machines there.”

“Medical?”

“I short all circuits already lah.” Medical’s voice is warm and sweet, with enough force pent up behind it to bore through granite. “Overseer come den I give them embolism.”

“Não faz mal.”  Communications’ voice hums like a spiritual high-tension wire. “My xapiripë are with them. I have made the men to sleep. No killing is necessary.”

“We’ll see about that,” I say, my right fist heating.

“Only fire on derricks, Weapons,” says our commander. “To not be having repeat of last time, okay?”

“You just keep those polluting bastards away from me.”

“Okay, okay. Lezhat’, cowboy. On my mark.”

After this mission, I promise myself, I’ll ask her out. We can go to the movies. Or whatever, you know, whatever she likes. Parasailing.

“Mark!” she says, “Davayte!” and I spring from my hiding spot, sprint toward our target, clench my fist.

The derricks loom against the sunset, seemingly unstoppable. But my whole right forearm roils with plasma. A hot, bright streamer follows my hand up, forward, and I channel all my rage into one elemental command.

“Fire!”

Baby talks! (10 months) 2

I just came out of a grueling four-day weekend where the weather was bad, my wife and I were sick, and we spent almost the whole time locked up in our apartment with our children. I AM going to talk about my baby’s language acquisition now and if you don’t like it, you can go straight to hell.

My second daughter is now about as old as my first daughter when she started using real words. But while daughter 1’s words were mostly artifacts and animals, daughter 2 is more about people and situations.

Mama=pick me up! Play with me! I have no patience for being alone! Also, “mother”

Kaka=“big sister” (from Bulgarian). This one actually seems to mean “big sister,” since she only really says it when her big sister is around.

Baba=someone else will take care of me now. Also, “grandmother” (from Bulgarian)

Taka=why, here is a toy for me to cram in my mouth! Let’s settle down to a good game of chewing on things. Possibly from Bulgarian taka, which means something like “thus” or “in this way” or “there” in the sense of “there we go.” It’s what people often say when they give the baby toys.

Tuta!=the Bulgarian equivalent of “peek-a-boo”

Tate/Tata=Possibly “daddy” (from Bulgarian tate)

Batko=Possibly “big brother” (I heard it in what might have been an appropriate situation, but I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t just babbling)

Note: to count as a word, it has to be an utterance Baby reliably makes in specific situations to refer to specific things. Interjections like bwa, dabl, and aah! don’t count.

The Woodlords in their Carriages

Hypothesis: If Thomas Piketty  is right and growth is the major force standing in the way of the tendency of wealth to concentrate, and if innovation is the major factor (or even just a major factor) in growth, a post-innovation economy would tend to give rise to an aristocracy. With me so far?

Usually, aristocracies develop until they become so oppressive that their subjects rise up and overthrow them. The resulting chaos destroys old wealth, which must be rebuilt, causing growth and a period of relative equality and meritocracy (or at least the opportunity for such). But with enough technological divide between the high and the low, the aristocrats might lengthen the time before the next rebellion.

Aristocrats with access to more advanced technology than their subjects can ease the burden of the peasants or they can crank up the oppression or even both. The Tokugawas managed to keep their state stable for 400 years that way. I can’t think of a longer-lived state that managed to survive without (much) expansion, but maybe you can.

The wooden car above might be the product of a sort of high-tech Tokugawa Japan, where a small cadre of wealth-inheritors maintains the status quo in the name of conservation and stability. If Sakoku was the isolationist “Chained Country” of the Shogunate, then this world would be the Samirai (the chained future).

But it’s a hella cool car.

Author recommendations

I’ve been bad about talking about books lately. Also, uh, I don’t know what to read next. So here are my favorite authors. Maybe you’ll recommend me yours?

Here are the authors I’ve discovered in the past couple of years:

Neal Stephenson. I’ve been getting into his work lately. He may not know biology (ugh, the second part of Seveneves), and his depictions of non-American places and people occasionally slide into exoticism, but he knows people and he knows institutions and he knows machines. His spaceship (or sailing ship or cargo plane) will absolutely look and work and feel real, as will the person operating it, the person repairing it, and the person who paid for it. He does his research. As a first read I recommend Zodiac, which has a great main character, ALMOST plausible biology, and a tighter plot than most of his books. Right now I’m about halfway through the Baroque Cycle and really enjoying it.

Greg Egan is another author I’ve recently discovered. Either each of his books is an obscure joke on the reader or he is insane. (our uploaded utopia crashed when its denizens stopped believing they were software, a physics experiment destroys the universe because the person in charge forgot a negative sign in the equations, enlightenment-era aliens discover the truth about their world—a hollowed-out asteroid careening between neutron stars that will surely kill them all, turns out the quantum observer effect is something we can just switch off—let’s stop collapsing wave functions and let literally everything happen at once!). Certainly he taught me a lot about math and physics.

Jonathan L. Howard is good too. His Johannes Cabal books smash a grim, sarcastic asshole against various genres (magical realism, mystery, surrealist, spy thriller) and see who dies first. Fun and snarky!

Ben Aaronovich. Police officer in London sees ghosts. Becomes a wizard. Fights crime. The best part about these books is the loving asides describing London history through art and architecture, which is important to the plot since stone absorbs spiritual energy, giving old buildings an monuments magical properties (aka being flipping haunted).

And here are some authors I always impulse-buy, no matter what:

Louis McMaster Bujold. If you have talked to me, I have recommended her. She is a genre fiction demiurge. Reading her books is like listening to Mozart. And she’s FUNNY.

Vernor Vinge. He does not write fast enough, damn it. This is another scifi author who really knows what he’s talking about. He basically invented the Singularity in science fiction and he still writes about it better than almost anybody else.

Daryl Gregory. Each of his books is different, each is fascinating, each very human. Superheros are people who suffer from tragic spiritual parasitism. What if zombies were people and Descartes was right? If you change someone’s reproductive strategy, are they a different person? I want to be him when I grow up.

Kage Baker. The Company didn’t invent time travel and use it to fund their research into immortality, they invented immortality and used time travel to test the process. Then they got into the antiquities business. Her fantasy was excellent as well.

Ted Chiang. An absolute flipping genius. There is nothing he’s written that hasn’t made me reconsider the way I live my life. We should all dump money on him to make him actually write a full-length novel.

Passing on the torch now: What authors do YOU guys like?

Shrinking

Does anyone remember the Tom Swift book about shrinking? Navigating a lawn at a height of 2cm, dodging insects and insect-sized robots. Or Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine? With the flying on butterflies and tossing around globes of ultra-viscous water? Delightful.

But there’s a problem. You can’t do that. Let’s say you hand-wave away the problems you’d have messing with the electromagnetic force and make electrons orbit closer to atomic nuclei. You’d have a compressed person, and all the atoms in that person might play nicely with each other, allowing chemistry to work and that person to survive. But those tiny atoms are sure as hell not going to play nicely with normal-sized atoms. How will your tiny person breathe? What happens when they try to touch something? Will the miniaturized retinal in their eyes even react to bombardment by relatively huge photons? And that’s before we start worrying about the square-cube law or the fact that a .02m-tall you will still weigh (ideally) 93kg. At 1/100 of your height, you are at 1/1003 your volume, meaning a density of about 1×106kg/m3.  That’s a bit denser than a super-massive black hole.

Let’s just say you’d asphyxiate as you burned and froze and evaporated into a puff of Hawking radiation.

So let me put it this way: remember that episode of Futurama where they characters piloted tiny robot versions of themselves through a VR interface? Much more plausible.

And having the main characters be drone pilots doesn’t mean you’d have to give up tension, sure the pilots aren’t in danger of their lives, but maybe they need to navigate the micro-world in order to accomplish something, like defuse a bomb or assassinate a bad guy. Now there’s a story I want to see.

You can never go home again

So it seems like Lovecraft is big these days. Is that just me?

Also, what the heck has been going on the US? I’ve only been living abroad for eight years, but it seems like a completely different culture there now. Cops shooting disabled people, unschooling, a wall on the Mexican border. I know that the media is telling a slanted view of life in my home country, but things seem to have gotten dark fast. Poison in the water supply. Cars programmed to kill.  The voices coming from the boreholes in Williston. Bedbugs.

I know that when I lived in the US, I saw weird stuff all the time, but the normal details of daily life tended to counterbalance things like sentient corporations and advocates for cooking and eating the rich. Hardly anyone actually got eaten, anyway. But from a distance, yeah, it looks weird when there’s a real political party centered around a Lizard Person. Yes, yes, there is a European Lizard Party, too, but nobody pays attention to them. And has anyone heard anything from Nebraska in the last three years? Since the pyramid thing, I mean.

I guess I’ll be in for some culture shock when I go back home this summer. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble cleansing my overself in the inverted pyramid of airport security, and I’ll need traveler’s insurance, but what’ll I do if one of my friends invites me to a Forbidden Conclave? Those didn’t used to be a thing, and I don’t usually carry that many cuttlefish on me!

Now, I know I’ve pissed off half of my readers. I don’t usually like to get political on my blog. And I’m not really serious. Of course I love my country. Hand to my heart: Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

Cold ghosts

The hardest part of fighting ghosts is you have to do it cool.

Ghosts eat heat, so any energy you pour into your weapons systems only makes them stronger. That’s why we need to capture them, of course, but it makes things damn hard. For the strong ones, just keeping your body temperature up is a challenge, and not one that the insulating sigils are always equipped to handle. That’s how ghost-hunters die. Not that NASA cares, of course.

Thinking some more about the world of this story and maybe this one?

Let’s say the afterlife is part of the universe. Let’s also say that ghosts are cold. How would ghost-assisted heat-dumping work then?

Perhaps ghosts are the 3D cross-sections of higher-dimensional objects, so they are no more violating the laws of thermodynamics than a heat sink sticking up from the surface of a flat circuit-board.

As for the machinery needed to keep the ghost in place: perhaps pentacles, ghost jars, etc. are the equivalent of bolts that attach the heat sink to the board (and maybe some spiritually conductive wires). Alternately, you could just persuade the ghost to hang out there.

And I’d say the best place to use this technology would be space.

Grind their bones for Phlebotinum!

The Timur changed everything.

The ship limped to Leo station under tug power. Its engines were dead. So was half the crew. So was its shaman.

Which was impossible. A ship without a shaman could not pass through hyperspace. The Timur should have been stranded at Shaman System, a hundred light-years from Earth.

The ship should be stranded, the shaman delegation on Earth insisted. If the ship’s hyperspace drive had been made to work without a living shaman, this could only mean the crew of the Timur was guilty of the most profane form of corpse desecration.

To which several human experts had replied, “desecrated…how, exactly?”

We still need shamans to pass through hyperspace, but now it seemed those shamans don’t need to actually be alive at the time.

The Timur destroyed everything.

Thanks to Exxon-von-Steamboldt for helping me put this idea together.

A while back I wrote a novella about resource-extraction and aliens with petroleum for blood. It’s a very nice story, but it had to be set within the solar system in the near future. Set a story like that outside the solar system and if humans got there in the first place, we probably have a better way to find or manufacture Phlebotinum than by ripping it out of the crust of a habitable planet.

But! What about stable transplutonian elements? Say a civilization, at great expense, produces some sort of magical phlebotinum and incorporates it into their biology. Their civilization falls (or at least they lose the ability to make phlebotinum), but their descendants still carry the stuff around in their bodies (how the stuff gets from mommy alien to baby alien is an interesting question. Coprophagy? Cannibalism?) Humans COULD assemble the equipment and energy to synthesize phlebotinum, but it’s far cheaper to just process the bodies of the aliens. Yay! Something awful!

 

Tyrannosaur Queen review on Altered Instinct

Brent A Harris is a stand-up guy. Not only did he (and Ricardo Victoria and Leo McBride) accept my story “The Devout Atheist” for their Tales from the Universe anthology, he took it upon himself to read Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen and review it! Positively! Without any bribery at all!

Author Brent A Harris turns reviewer as he delivers his verdict on the pre-historic pulse-pounding pulp prose that is Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, by Daniel M Bensen. 

Time travel, alternate timelines, dinosaurs. That was more than enough to interest me in Daniel M Bensen’s Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen. And, while the title implies that it has more in common with Taken by a Pteranodan than pulp sci-fi, (other than a couple salacious scenes and some bits of violence befitting a Zack Snyder Batman film), Bensen crafts a rather high-brow look at a lost colony, complete with dimensionalities: language, ethics, and culture/religion. In other words, it is not a caveman-meets-woman/angel-of-the-future-love-story—well, it is that, but it also has a depth, which is unexpected in the day of self-published works.

Read on