Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 88
June 11, 2015
Dinosaur con-lang
Let it be said that I listen to commenters! When a linguist and a dinosaur-nut both told me to write a dinosaur con-lang, I couldn’t say no!
So first of all, what sort of sounds did dinosaurs make? It turns out there’s been some real science done to answer that question, and it turns out (non-avian) dinosaurs probably didn’t have a voice-box (a larynx, or, in birds, a syrinx). In other words, dinosaurs had no vowels.
That leaves dinosaurs with plenty of consonants, however, from the hiss to the bellow to the growl, croak, and cough as well as drumming, clicking, rattling, and booming. Hadrosaurs had more complex vocal apparatus in the form of their noses, some of which were pretty spectacular. Then you have your whip-cracking Brontosaurus and so forth, but I’m going to keep things restricted to a non-specific “dinosaur,” so we have no special physical adaptations to producing sound except, say, stomping.
That leaves us with a phonology a little something like this
= hiss (sustained, un-constricted airflow)
~ growl (sustained, constricted airflow)
H cough (ejective, un-constricted)
X croak (ejective, constricted)
C click (made with beak or teeth)
N snort (ejective, nasal)
M sustained snort
(V, W) rough snorts (hadrosaurs only)
> diminishing volume
< increasing volume
_ stomp
Syllable nucleus is formed by a sustained sound of variable duration and volume, which may be proceeded or followed by ejectives.
Ex:
X=>C (Croak, diminishing hiss, click) “Threat”
~~~< (V. long increasing growl) “Food”
N=< (snort, hiss) “Disgust”
MM>H (long, sustained, diminishing snort, growl) “Sleep”
Sentences are constructed as “prey” (object) followed by “teeth” (verb) followed by a “head” (subject), sometimes followed by a “tail” (modifiers).
Ex:
~ ~~~< M_ N=< ~~< ~~
gloss: (Tyrannosaurus food plant disgust Triceratops. Tyrannosaur food Triceratops)
loose translation: “I do not eat plants because they are for you. I eat you.”
Words to live by indeed, assuming that I am a tyrannosaurus.
June 9, 2015
Blowing up a beetle 2: the bones
We’re back with giant bugs and how we can get them. Last time we talked about the biggest problem with giant arthropods: their circulatory system. Today, it’s on to the bones.
First of all, forget that old saw about exoskeletons being inherently unworkable at large sizes due to the square-cube-law. Yes, the square-cube law is a problem when dealing with insects’ open circulatory systems, but we solved that already.
In terms of strength, chitin sheaths around legs (what bugs already have) works fine. Do the math, and you’ll find that a beetle-leg scaled up to the dimensions of one of my legs ( 100cm long by 20 cm in diameter) will have a exoskeleton about 0.6cm thick, which about the same mass and a quarter of the thickness of the bones in my leg. That’s not bad, especially considering the fun you could have with air pockets, different materials, and the exact shape of the bone in question. I’m confident exoskeletal legs will work, at least for an animal of my size.
The real problem is that an exoskeleton must be shed as the animal inside it grows. Imagine a lion-sized arthropod molting and going from armored battle-demon to squishy pink lump. It might not be able to support the weight of its own organs, let alone run and pursue prey.
There are ways to solve the problem. Dig a hole and hide in it while soft. Immerse yourself in supportive water. Build a “mobile cocoon” out of the old cast-off exoskeleton and silk. Or just have the skeleton grow with you.
Sea-urchins have exoskeletons too, but theirs are made of hexagonal plates that can be separated and the interstices filled with an intermediary material (in this case collagen) that later toughens into the necessary hardness and rigidity (in this case calcium carbonate). The bones of our skull (which are exoskeletons, in a way) work the same way. The difference is that we also have specialized cells (osteoclasts) than can destroy old bone as well as create it (osteoblasts), so even once the plates have met to form a skull, the whole thing can continue to grow as old bone is subtracted from the inside and added to the outside.
Don’t like that idea? You can break the exoskeleton up into scales, which lock edge-to-edge like puzzle-pieces, and can be lost and regrown one-at-a-time like shark teeth without sacrificing structural integrity (bonus: video-game-boss weak spots!). Muscles that are anchored to areas with no shell-scale won’t have any leverage and will be useless until the new shell hardens. The animal will have to change its behavior, either getting help from its conspecifics or building a temporary crutch for itself out of found materials (wood? old scales spun into silk?). Either that, or muscle-anchoring scales remain un-shed, built into large, dead structures as the animal grows, like the rattle of a rattle-snake.
There is an additional problem, raised by Sam Brougher here, that the joints on an exoskeletal limb can only be pin-joints, like door hinges, because any other kind of joint (for example the ball-and-socket joint in your thumb) would require the hard surface on the inside, which is sort of the opposite of an exoskeleton. And he’s right. I don’t see how to get other kinds of joints (unless the lower part is composed of nonliving, shed shell?). So that is a real limitation on the kinds of things your giant bugs can do.
But if we got rid of all their limitations, they wouldn’t be bugs any more, now would they?
June 7, 2015
Blowing up a beetle 1: the blood
Last week I talked about the three basic ways to approach speculative biology, and this week I’m starting with the first: getting inspiration from real animals. For example, bugs. Sci-fi writers love bugs. They’re gross, they’re weird. They’re…tiny.
So why don’t we have giant bugs?
Steve Bein raised this question in regards to his sci-fi work-in-progress and I decided to help him out because I expect him to help me with the Japanese main character of my work-in-progress that’s just the kind of guy I am.
The main reasons arthropods can’t get any bigger than a lobster (the largest recorded is 20 kilos) is their circulatory systems. Athropods’ open circulatory systems are very inefficient because they don’t have blood vessels at all. Instead, blood (technically it’s “hemolymph“) is pumped by the heart (“dorsal blood vessel“) into the body cavity, where it sloshes around. If it sloshes close enough to the spiracles, it gets oxygenated. If it sloshes back up to the heart , it gets sucked in and pumped back out. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.
You could just shove a vertebrate’s closed circulatory system into an arthropod and call it a day. Say the dorsal vessel extended branches out into the body, which branched further and so on until you have a full cardiovascular system with a discrete heart running along the back of the animal. But that’s boring, and you would still have the problem of respiration.
Maybe the animal has book lungs like a spider, or maybe the spiracles of an insect have branched inward, becoming an air-filled tracheal system intertwined with the fluid-filled cardiovascular system of blood. Each leg has its own “cardio-pulmonary complex” associated with it, plus a big one in the belly to feed the organs.
Rather than breathing in and out, these animals breath THROUGH, with air entering the system through spiracles near the head and exiting near the ail. Air is pumped by action of the muscular blood vessels that wrap around the tracheal tubes, or by muscular contraction of the whole abdomen (like a balloon inflating and deflating). Running also generates more flow-through.
Then you run into the second problem, which is structural…
Also, the kind of guy I am is f-ing verbose when I talk about speculative biology, so I’m splitting this post into three. Tune in Wednesday for a discussion of our giant bug’s exoskeleton.
June 4, 2015
Paranormal Electricity
So I was watching Everything Wrong with Paranormal Activity and I thought, “wait a second. Those ghosts can reliably slide kids across the floor? Not to mention all the door-slamming and chair-stacking and house-imploding they do. Where does the energy come from to do it?”
And then I thought, “who cares where the energy comes from? If I attach flywheels to all of my doors and chairs and children and whatnot, I’ve got me some free GHOST ENERGY!”
And not only that, but assuming my ghosts are malevolent and of less than infinite power, I’m making the world safer by exhausting them. It’s win-win!
Except now I have the incentive to murder people horribly so I can make more ghosts to supply me with energy I can sell. So I’m the bad guy in this story? Again?
Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay my electricity bill. Now who wants to come to my medieval implements of torture party on the equinox at the desecrated graveyard? There’ll be free Cool-Aid and witches!
June 2, 2015
Why design aliens? How?
I’ve tried to do different things with my writing: Satire, Police procedural, Adventure, Political Intrigue, Romance…and it got me wondering. Maybe I’ve spent enough time away from my first love, speculative biology.
So this post is the first in a series on creature creation and speculative biology, a look at the world-building work behind my new project Junction. It should also work as a guide to help you guys create your own living worlds.
So how do we create organisms? Where do we get our crazy ideas?
One way to get ideas is to look at other organisms of Earth’s present or past. What if rather than evolving from something like a fish, as we did, large terrestrial animals evolved from something like a crab, or sea-slug, or a jellyfish, or a stromatolite? What evolutionary changes would you need to get annelid worms to swing through the trees or sweep majestically across the plains? (and don’t say it’s impossible. Nobody in the Cambrian could have looked at Pikaia and predicted gibbons or wildebeests).
Another way is to work from the ground up. Figure out a whole evolutionary history or anatomy and derive all your critters from there. I don’t recommend this route unless you really like drawing lots of critters.
The third was is to go the artist’s route. Say “I want the animal to look like that” (or scribble a random shape on a piece of paper without looking) and then figure out how something that looked like that might have evolved. Me, I have a story in mind with certain narrative necessities. I can design animals and plants that fit those necessities.
Next week we’ll start with a look at the first route, trying to take a body plan from a familiar animal and forcing it into the ecological niche of another familiar animal, with some very alien results.
June 1, 2015
Unlikely Influences
What Daniel M. Bensen learned about writing from teaching ESL
Check out my guest post on Kate Heartfield’s series Unlikely Influences.
May 31, 2015
97 Short Stories with Shawn Scarber
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/97ShawnJune1.mp3
This is Shawn Scarber, author of Night Witch, a story in A. Lee Martinez’s Strange Afterlives anthology. He’s also written a hell of a lot of short stories, some of which have even gotten published.
A. Lee Martinez, oh my!
The Night Witches
Japanese mono no ke
LADY CARDULA AND THE GRYPHON, by Shawn Scarber:
“The Reflection in her Eye” in March 2015 Black Denim Lit.
Dan tells a Bulgarian shaggy dog joke…
If you’re not reading short fiction, you’re not going to be able to write short fiction
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
Dallas Fort Worth Writer’s workshop
Something I talked about with Tex Thompson
The competition is so good
If somebody signs up to my newsletter, that’s success
The Writer’s the Future contest
And check out Shawn’s excellent and thorough notes on this podcast, including some stuff we didn’t get a chance to say.
May 28, 2015
Natural Space Disasters
The scene on Trans-Saturnia habitat is one of shock and loss. The people of this impoverished colony, plagued with chronic corruption and poor development, saw their shields fail late last night, at the height of the radiation flux from the IK Pegasi supernova.
“There was a light…my wall melted! People tumbling around…have to grow a whole new lower torso!”
Survivors gather at the matter fabricator to share stories of catastrophe’s avoided…
“…I was incorporeal at the time…”
…and those who weren’t so lucky.
“…swept off into space with no transponder…go insane from sensory deprivation. We’ll probably have to revert to her backup.”
The damage to the hull and basic life-support has self-repaired, but the scars on the people run deeper. Foreign aid has backed up in distribution bottlenecks, and local law enforcement has been slow to deal with panic and looting. The re-incarnation wait-times for those vaporized in the nova continues to stretch. Perhaps the government of this beleaguered habitat is dragging its feet, knowing that when its population is once again corporeal, it will have some serious questions to answer.
For Event Horizon News, I’m Journalist Emulation.
~~~
For some further reading, see Creating a World without Poverty by Mohammad Yunus. It isn’t the fact that poor countries get hit by more natural disasters, it’s that they can’t deal effectively with them.
May 27, 2015
World Leaders React to Wormhole in New Guinea
You heard me! Gearing up for my new novel Junction, I’m thinking about some of the things that will happen in the background of the story. When a wormhole to an alien world is discovered in the New Guinea highlands (just over the border in the Indonesian province of West Papua, to be precise) how does the world react?
Rapid response is how they’ll react. Australian and American troops Robertson Barracks and Lavarack Barracks will be on site within hours of the discovery, followed days later by the Papua New Guinea Defense Force (PNGDF) and as UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force? Ugh! Who invited them?). Forced to ship in helicopters from Java, the Indonesian National Armed Forces are last to arrive at their own party. Did I say party? I meant of course VIOLATION OF BORDERS! GRAAH!
After an initial (failed) rush to claim the wormhole, Indonesia forms a “mutual exploration bloc” with Malaysia and Brunei. They try to rope in the rest of ASEAN, but nobody wants to join them because of the awful things they’re doing in West Papua as they build up infrastructure on their side of the border. Whoops! Did we dump defoliant on the rainforest AGAIN? And napalm too this time! Well, the people who made those mistakes will be punished, you have our word on it! Genocide? What genocide? We’re pacifying separatists, shut up. And the people who shot at those New Guinean soldiers? Terrorists, of course!
The Papua New Guinea government is at the center of the political firestorm. They are torn between China and Australia/USA, with the army behind the first and the establishment behind the second. As time goes on and the American fist tightens, popular sentiment in New Guinea starts to swing toward China. Everyone is carefully avoiding the word “coup,” because the (PRC-trained) New Guinean army is in the highlands getting shot at by the Indonesians.
Australia is also torn between a government that knows its best interests align with the USA, and increasing anti-American sentiment in the populace. The Australian left-wing is opposed to persecuting a war against the New Guineans, while the left wing is livid at how casually their country has been turned into a limb of American imperialism. There’s a lot of talk about avoiding a “second Gallipoli.” There is a hard deadline on the current American/Australian/New Guinean alliance, and it’s the next Australian election.
China is much more cautious and pragmatic, and is using the wormhole as a way to generate good press. Of course the westerners are going to steal this important resource from the natives. One age of European imperialism was enough, and we will do whatever is necessary to prevent another. The fleet of war ships south of the Philippines is just there to ensure nobody does anything regrettable.
The USA is feeling the heat. They managed to get their people on the ground at the wormhole site (or rather people who take orders from the people who take orders from their people). But now they have to justify their presence to the American citizenry and the international community. Internationally, it’s all nods and smiles about exploring the opportunities of the wormhole in coalition with all of humanity (yes, China and Russia, you’re invited too). But internally, the only way to keep public good will (and funding) flowing is by whipping up a state of frenzy. Indonesia is a clear and present danger to the security of the wormhole (and did someone say “terrorists” a few paragraphs ago?)! The New Guinean armed forces were trained by China! And even the Australians are going to turn against us! If anyone is going to do anything “regrettable,” you bet your ass it’s going to be us!
May 21, 2015
Captain Yugoslavia
Captain Yugoslavia downed another Slivovitsa and wondered what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life.
~~~
So we all know that nations are shared fictions, right? There’s nothing fundamentally different between people on one side of the border and the other, and nothing fundamentally the same about people on the same side of the border. National identity is a story governments tell their people.
But what if it wasn’t? What if the Jungian collective unconscious produces superheros (hm, shades of Pandemonium? Or just Hetalia?) that are tied to particular groups of people. Do a good enough job with your nation-building and Captain [Your Country’s Name Here] is born!
But it doesn’t always work so nicely. There are three Captain Chinas and no Captain United Arab Emirates. Peru, Bolivia, and Equador share a Captain Quechua in addition to their “official” individual heroes. African heroes bear no relationship to the political map, and a few heroes like Yugoslavia cling to existence with no official support.
Where else do you think ethnic heroes will depart from official political boundaries?
