Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 82
November 11, 2015
Teeth in the Darkness
A Tyrannosaur Queen deleted scene
I originally wrote this scene to take place after Andrea escapes from Trals for the first time. They were riding down a river in a canoe, Trals plotting to unleash Andrea on his enemies the Slavers, when Andrea decides she should just jump out and swim away. She does so, overturning the canoe. Here’s what happens next.
Brown river and red sunset sky whirled like dancers about Trals Scarback, while he considered his mistakes. He should have been faster to don clothes his clothes. Or at least the baldric of the sword Vritai. He should have waited until they were off the river before waking Njrea the black-clad sky-woman. His other decisions, though, had been very good ones. His plans progressed well…
If you want to continue reading, please sign up for my newsletter, which comes out on the 14th. You can also email me at bensen dot daniel at gmail dot com to request a free Advance Reader Copy of Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen, coming to Amazon in January.
November 8, 2015
Genre with Mike Underwood
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/120MikeNovember2.mp3
So have you heard about Genrenauts by Mike Underwood, available now from Amazon? If you haven’t, how about Geekomancy, and the Hugo-nominated Skiffy and Fanty Show, or even his previous appearance on my podcast?
Anyway, now it’s time to talk about Genrenauts, Mike’s experiment with that serial novella thing all the cool kids are doing these days.
I get to take my interest in genre and tackle it head on.
Turns out Mike has a degree in folklore
Who gets to use violence and to what end?
Chambara (aka “samurai cinema”)
Also the Heian and Kamakura periods are cool too!
The Heike Monogatari
The Eternal Sky trilogy by Elizabeth Bear
Thursday Next (not Wednesday Next, sorry)
Find more “world SF” on Skiffy and Fanty
A storyteller always brings themself to the story
Tor.com‘s novella imprint
November 5, 2015
Fellow Tetrapod
The team-building coordinator’s species evolved from some kind of free-swimming sea-slug, but I wouldn’t know that if it hadn’t told me.
Its body is supported by three arching legs covered in feather-like gills. A third appendage, more like the trunk of an elephant, protrudes from where the legs meet. When the door closes, this trunk vomits up clutch of eyeballs embedded in a lacy froth of digestive tissue and whistles.
“All right, everyone!” says the cheery chatbot in my ear. “It’s time for the icebreaker exercise. Please form groups with your closest evolutionary relatives.”
I scan the crowd dubiously. My colleagues scan me back with eyes and other, more cryptic organs. We’re all new to the Multiverse Council, and unused to talking to beings from other timelines. I suppose that’s exactly the problem this week of team-building is supposed to remedy.
The creature next to me is igloo-shaped and reddish, standing on a pair of round, spiny organs that might be mouth-parts, wheels, or domesticated pets. It doesn’t appear to be a deuterostome, let alone a mammal, so I nod politely and step aside, scanning the other twenty organisms in the room for fur or milk glands.
I don’t find any. Well, finding such a close relative would be unlikely. There are only a dozen individuals in the room, unless that thing shaped like a bridge made of blue lemons is actually a colonial organism, in which case I’m severely outnumbered…
I take another look at the blue lemon bridge.
“Pardon me, gentlebeeing,” I say, approaching it, “but would you by any chance, be a chordate?”
“Why, yes I am!” There is no pause for translation. Our chatbots may not be able to handle much in the way of small-talk, but they have a damn good grasp of cladistics.
Little mouths open and close on the lemons closest to me. “Are you a chordate too? Your anatomy does indeed resemble some free-swimming aquatic larvae of my lineage. Why, you’ve turned the notochord into a rigid support structure—part of your skeleton! Fascinating!”
“Thank you. Have you seen anyone else in our clade?” I say, hoping for a vertebrate.
The lemon-bridge shuffles one of its ends around to point behind me. “That fellow might be. Look at those rigid limbs.”
Rigid indeed. The creature stands on three stout legs in segmented armor. From its spiny, pitted body rises an organ less like a head than the claw of a praying mantis, except that on the claw’s bulging elbow a pair of eyes stare at me with damp hope.
“A vertebrate?” Says the claw-head, its voice a wheeze through three pairs of slats on its body. “Dare I say, a fish? Don’t say your lineage went the way of internal skeletons!”
“I’m afraid so,” I say, stepping to put the claw-headed placoderm between me and the lemon-bridge salp. “And it’s possible I’m not the only one.” I wave at another person. “Pardon me, sir, do you have a skeleton, too?”
The answer is a growling hiss. “Why, yes. Yes I do.”
It is the size of a Great Dane. Its long, graceful legs end in hooves, but upward of these hardened, elongated fingers, other digits curl, waiting for a tool to hold. The skin is covered in a cracked, waxy coating like lacquer, and its broad, neck-less head is twice the width of mine. Quills rattle from a tail like that of a porcupine. Nictitating membranes flick across eyes like mud-colored tangerines.When it opens its enormous mouth, light gleams off needle-teeth and a tongue like a ceramic pestle.
And yet, I feel as if I’ve found my long-lost brother. That must be the purpose of this exercise.
“Welcome,” the giant amphibian hisses. “Welcome, fellow tetrapod!”
~~~
This Wonderful, Awful Idea is dedicated to C. M. Kosemen, Darren Naish, and Mike Keesey the godlike presense behind PhyloPic.
November 1, 2015
Want to draw some dinosaurs?
I’m preparing to self-publish my time-travel-romance-with-dinosaurs novel in January, and I am looking for some people I can commission to do pen-and-ink drawings of Hell Creek dinosaurs for the interior illustrations, If you can draw people, I’d also love to commission drawings of the characters. There’s also going to be a map.
The deadline is soon (Christmas), but I am willing to pay a reduced commission for illustrations that get to me after the deadline. Payment will be via paypal.
If you’re interested, please comment below with some links to samples of your work.
October 29, 2015
Hacking a Great One
The abomination stands in the center of a networked pentagram, red LEDs shining from the five routers at its points. It completes its shuffling circle, trapped there.
“Ready,” I speak into my throat mic, and the LEDs turn green.
Information flows through them to a hundred specially designed supercomputers, each in its own pentagram, each observed by five specialists in formal logic, neurology, philosophy, mathematics.
I lick my lips. This will work.
Eyes like pits stare from a head swinging at the end of a broken neck. The abomination did that to its body, minutes after that body’s possession. The body’s larynx was torn in half, so in order to understand the thing, I must read its chewed and blackened lips.
You shall fail, the abomination mouths at me, driven by impulses from a mind unimaginably vast and alien. Unimaginable by any one person, anyway. I am the possessor, not the possessed. You walk into the mouth of a shark, hoping that by the force of your arms you may hold its mouth open.
“Shit,” says Valentin, “does it know what we’re doing?”
“It could hardly fail to,” I say. “It’s insane. Not stupid. It doesn’t matter if it knows.”
If that is what you believe, take my hand. The thing in the pentagram pulls back its abused lips. An arm twitches up as if operated by a string tied weight falling through a black hole.
I watch blue light seep from its fingers. Consider touching that possessed flesh. The water and salt on my skin forming a conductive connection from my brain to it.
I reach into the pentagram, and seize the Deep One by the mind.
Happy Halloween!
October 25, 2015
Futuristic Violence
What? Another book has impinged upon by cynical exterior to the extent that it actually made me smile?! Unimaginable. And yet, here I am, writing another five-star review.
Imagine if the military implemented a teenage boy’s fantasy as a screaming death machine capable of emulsifying civilization. That’s what Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits is like. Also what it’s about. Also, it’s hilarious.
Futuristic Violence is a fish-out-of-water story about a somewhat-employed self-described “trailer trash” girl who find out she’s the inheritor of both an immense fortune and the attention of a collection of colorful psychopaths. And all of it takes place in a media-saturated libertarian consumerist nightmare of a near-future city, part Dubai, part Las Vegas, part Bladerunner, part Cracked.com comments section. In short, it’s as if David Wong aimed his satellite-mounted spy-lasers at my head and produced a novel calculated to punch me right in the adrenal glands.
There are problems, of course. The book is in fact a frenetic, sprawling mess through which Wong built his roller-coaster of a plot, into which he straps you, the reader. Both you and the reader are stuck watching helplessly as you are dragged up an incline of violence and hurled through loop-the-loops of even more violence. What I’m saying is the main character is pretty passive, but that’s okay because everything going on around her is eat-you-alive, demolish-your-house, glow-in-the-dark-vomit-inducing active.
And there’s even a message in there somewhere. Something about the cycle of violence? Or was it the cycle of poverty? Or maybe a manifesto for the redistribution of wealth to the proletariat? I lost track, being too busy watching a man in a blue codpiece punch a Siberian tiger to death.
October 22, 2015
Englefeld and England
What if the Harold Godwinson had lost the Battle of Stamford Bridge?
En th’Engleche
Two roys were ired by the côronation of Harold Godwinson en 1066: Harald Hadrada of Norwege end William the Conqueror of Normandie. The two’ve învaded Englefeld end were of succéſ. Pôſt a curt war, they’ve dîvided th’iſle, with the Noréſe roïning north of th’Umber end the Normans ſouth. Eventuâly have emerged the double roïnments of England end Englefeld, who th’apres five centuries have paſſed en the rivâlrîe. Juste or, their înfânts en the New Monde continue to quarrel.
In Englanz
Twa kings war angrits by ðe a-banden o Harold Godwinson inn 1066: Harald Hadrada o Norveger an William ðe Cifeborn o Normandy. Ðe boþ o ðem invod England, boþ bladefast. After a schort a-harrien, ðey splits ðe eyland, an ðe Norðmanner rulen fae norþ o ðe Umber, ðe Frenscher soþ. Ðe twyn kingdoms o England an Englefeld laiter bevods, an spend ðe nest fiff hunnarer a-vyerens. Na ðeir Newarldisch beirns gaesk on currying.
So, can you spot the ways Northern and Southern English diverged under Norse versus Norman-French influence?
Now, for those of you from a timeline in which Harald died at Stamford Bridge…
In English
Two kings were angered by the coronation of Harold Godwinson in 1066: Harald Hadrada of Norway and William the Conqueror of Normandy. Both Invaded England, and both were successful. After a short war, they split the island, with the Norse ruling north of the Umber and the Normans south. The twin Kingdoms of England and Englefeld later emerged, and spent the next five centuries in rivalry. Even their American children continue to squabble.
Many thanks to the History of English podcast, these Middle Engilsh, Norman French, Old French, Old English, Old Norse, and Scots dictionaries, not to mention my sister for recommending the novel Wake.
October 18, 2015
Geekiness with Micah Joel
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/107MicahJoelOct19.mp3
I’m talking with Micah Joel, the author of several short stories about famous computer programmers and a new story about time travel. The topic of our conversation is geekiness and the autism spectrum.
The spectrum of “normal” is broad
Neurotypical and not neurotypical
The Wrong Planet Asperger and Autism Forum
shaking your head to mean no is not universal
How do you write a culture you don’t understand?
The framing effect and thinking in a foreign language
Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon (not Nancy Kress, sorry!)
I could be accurate AND serve the story, but…
October 15, 2015
Lovelock’s Curse
In celebration of my 200th follower on tumblr, I sent out an invitation for people to suggest topics for me to write up Cro-Magnon Art Critic wanted me to do something with kaiju, so here we go…
Lovelock was right. Terribly, apocalyptically right. The Earth is carpeted in a vast superorganism, of which animals and plants are merely cells. Our planet thinks and it digests, and it responds to attack.
The first atomic detonations woke the Earth’s immune system. Pollution in the booming 50’s aggravated it to full-blown anaphalaxis. Cysts formed in the oceans, swamps, and forests — cocoons or eggs the size of buildings, growing creatures designed to destroy the sources of irritation: humans.
The first cyst burst off the coast of Japan, releasing a creature that might once have been an agamid lizard. It was followed by a tsunami of modified ants in Arizona. Rumors trickled out of the USSR of the Blood Worm of Altaic mythology, packs of wolves in military formations, even giant, murderous geese.
Ironically, tragically, the chaos and distrust caused by the first kaiju attacks resulted in even more testing of nuclear weapons as the Cold War heated up. Crows the size of MiGs circle over ruined villages in Eastern Europe. Ships vanish from Pacific trade routes, and mangled, toxic, slime-covered debris washes up on shores around the Pacific Rim. Entire towns in the American southwest have gone missing. And now the Superpowers are talking about weaponization.
October 11, 2015
Book review: the Martian
I read a lot of science fiction. Like a novel or two a week. So when I say that Andy Weir’s the Martian is the best science fiction book I’ve read since May 2014, that means it’s better than at least 72 other books. I keep trying to top the Martian, and I just can’t.
The Martian‘s main problem is its pitch. “Robinson Caruso on Mars” perfectly sums up the story and sounds perfectly stupid. What, does someone find footprints in the Martian dust? No, there’s just this astronaut who’s stuck on Mars with a couple of months of oxygen, even less food, and three years before anyone can rescue him. How does he survive and make it back to Earth? That’s it.
So the Martian is not an ambitious book. It has just the one hero (the guy trying to survive on Mars) and a handful of supporting characters in the form of the other astronauts and NASA technicians and managers trying to help him. The plot is mostly just solving one problem after another. And it’s marvelous.
Andy Weir knows what he’s talking about. Everything, from the basic physics to the applied engineering to the psychological foibles of the characters rings absolutely true (“will he go for such an insane scheme?” “Of course he will! He’s an astronaut!”). The problems involved in keeping someone alive on Mars (and their solutions) are always both surprising and satisfying (delicious Martian potato-skin tea). The story may be narrow, but it’s deep.
The Martian is also one of the few science fiction books I’ve read recently that do what science fiction is supposed to do: involve real science. There’s no half-understood waffling about quantum mechanics or epigenetics here, just good, solid explanations of soil chemistry, computer programming, and orbital mechanics. The science is all deeply embedded in the story, to the point where understanding it is literally a matter of life and death for the protagonist. And whole thing is effortlessly, poignantly funny.
The Martian does everything science fiction, and good literature in general, is supposed to do. It connects the human to something larger than human. I can’t wait for the movie.
