Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 89
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?
May 17, 2015
96 Writing Tie-ins with Josh Vogt, Stephanie Lorée, and Gary Kloster
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/96PathfinderMay.mp3
This is a big podcast this week with three people working in the Pathfinder (…don’t say ‘oeuvre,’ don’t say ‘oeuvre’…) universe! It’s Josh Vogt, Stephanie Lorée, and Gary Kloster.
Dungeons and Dragons Version 3.5
The fans are more knowledgeable than the authors
I would love to have a whole dedicated group of people to tell me who wrong I am
Gary’s serialized story, The Gem
The easiest way to get to the top of the mountain is write, submit, and always say “yes.”
Sam Sykes, Max Gladstone, Ed Greenwood, Lian Merciel, Wendy Wagner
The built-in audience is phenomenal
Enter the Janitor out now!
Launching at Denver Comic Con!
Ginny & The Ouroboros by Stephanie Lorée
May 14, 2015
Gods domesticate humans
I’ve been thinking about hereditary magic a lot lately. The problem is if magical ability is heritable (like in Star Wars, for example) what you’ve got is a master race: a population with an ability that places them above other people. And holy heck isn’t THAT an icky situation!
But what if magic isn’t an ability you’re born with? What if you acquire it by making friends with demons or gods? I’m afraid we’re still in rocky territory, because then people with magic are the people with the hereditary skill to make friends with spiritual entities, and if those entities are themselves intelligent…
~~~
March your men into the ruins. The words swarmed like wasps in the witch’s skull. Destroy the wild humans with fire and blade and sorcery.
Blue fire kindled on the tips of her fingers. Ten spells. Ten gifts from the Deep Gods. Tabitha looked up from them to the broken city, and the words of the prisoner rang in her head, sweeter and more human than the words of her Masters, but no less disturbing.
The hunt is fine and wild meat is tastier than tame. But when They are done with us, whom do you think They will eat next?
“Your puissance?”
Tabitha looked up into the eyes of her captain. “Yes?”
“Your orders, puissance?” Behind the captain, cracked and broken buildings still seemed to reach for the sky.
May 11, 2015
Junction Bibliography
And here are my non-fiction sources for Junction
The quotes of Kakuzō Okakura
Survivorman wants out of TV series
The Selling of the Last Savage
Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman
Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
White Fever by Jacek Hugo-Bader
A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov
I’m interested in any kind of exploration, but specifically in Canada, Australia, eastern Russia, and Papua/New Guinea
Any other recommendations?
May 7, 2015
Strategic Super Resources
What if radiation worked like in comic books? You can gain super-powers proportionate in strength to your distance from the reactor core when it melted down.
I’m sure governments would quickly start irradiating their top soldiers (which might not be a …great idea?), but what about the enemy? Blow up a soviet nuclear reactor and everyone not killed in the explosion will suddenly develop super-powers.
Mostly those new supers will be a mess for the Soviet government to clean up (which is why the US blew up the reactor in the first place), but what about the people who are mad their homes and normal lives were obliterated? I imagine they’d want to…avenge that destruction?
May 5, 2015
Junction Inspiration
Time to start collecting inspiration for my book about exploring alien worlds and murder!
And then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Virtual Mode by Piers Anthony
Titan by John Varley
Axis by Robert Charles Wilson
The Long Earth by Greg Baxter and Terry Pratchett
The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
Cibola Burn (The Expanse Book 4) by James S.A. Corey
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clark
The Getaway Special by Jerry Oltion
Missile Gap by Charles Stross
Quintessence by David Walton.
I’m especially interested in portals, exploring multiple worlds, and ancient alien artifacts
Any other recommendations?
May 3, 2015
95 Gardens and Time with Tiffani Angus
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/95TiffaniMay.mp3
This week I’m talking with Tiffani Angus, author of “The Final Voyage of the World’s Oldest Time Traveller,” in Athena’s Daughters Vol. 2, published by Silence in the Library. She’s also writing a dissertation (and a novel) about time travel in an English garden. Also…
Killing Hitler (it never works)
Witches Abroad (and the other Discworld Witches books with their elderly female protagonist)
My grandma was a badass
An Adventure by Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont
A Traveller In Time by Alison Uttley
Moondial by Helen Cresswell
Lavender-Green Magic by Andre Norton
Cloud of Sparrows by Takashi Matsuoka
The Changeling Garden by Winifred Elze, which features a time-traveling Mayan and Another Guy!
In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker
Gardens are the place where adult stuff happens…t hings that aren’t nice or nurturing or growy
Wikihistory by Dezmond Warzel
Thanks, Capability Brown!
April 30, 2015
More space-pirates
So I was talking with Kim Moravec and Tex Thompson about wormholes, like you do. And she was having problems with getting a wormhole big enough to pass a person through without being so massive it would crash the Moon into the Earth. We came up with a fix, but the idea of a moon-masses wormhole got me thinking.
You got your wormhole, right? You put it in space. You don’t want this weird point-mass floating around naked, so you pour water onto it. Water goes through the wormhole and comes out the other side? Not a problem. Pour more water until everything equals out and you’ve got two big spheres of the stuff, each with a wormhole at the center.
You fly your spaceship to one of those water-spheres, drop a submersible, pilot the submersible through the center of the sphere, through the wormhole, through the sphere on the other side, and get picked up a spaceship waiting there.
A ridiculous mode of interstellar travel? Maybe. But it makes room for honest-to-goodness space pirates. They ride GM squid.
April 26, 2015
Eastercon: Dysprosium! part 1
Yes, I had a great time at Eastercon: Dysprosium. Yes, it’s taken me a month to even begin to sift through the crazy-great things I did and learned about there.
Here’s what I did on Friday, day 1.
I got to the hotel of the con all aquiver with nerves, mostly because I had just the day before dropped and broken my beloved kindle, and also because I wasn’t emailed a confirmation number for my membership. I spent the morning in abject fear that I would be refused a badge, but when registration opened, I found all I had to do was hand them my name and that was it. I didn’t even have to show ID. Why didn’t I claim to be Jim Butcher?
Anyway, I eased my nerves during the wait by talking with some of the other con-goers, one of whom recommended.
DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE by Laini Tailor (which is apparently like THE SHARING KNIFE, which is one of my favorite books).
Then I met up with my fellow members of the Conclave of Eostre, Kim Moravec and Tex Thompson. Most of what happened next is unprintable, but Kim recommended some resources to help me with my Ship-states project, including THE FLOATING BROTHEL and “Banished.”
Kim also recommended TITAN by John Varley which is apparently Petrolea? We’ll just see about that!
Then there was some truly terrible scrumpy, more unprintable conversation, and a panel discussion with Tom Lloyd, Seanan McGuire, and Adrian Tchaikovski about cryptids, plastic-eating seashell fungus, WAR WITH THE NEWTS, Prehistoric Australian megafauna in aboriginal myth cycles, and the virgin birth of male komodo dragons.
I had signed up for a kaffeeklatch with , not because I knew anything at all about her or her work, but because I wanted to know more about this “romance” thing writers keep talking about. Whole books about human emotions? Preposterous.
That kaffeeklatch was easily the best one I attended at Dysprosium, stocked with fascinating people, not to mention C.E. Murphey, herself, whose hard-headed approach to her work I very much admire. We discussed some amazing and crazy things, such as:
PEOPLE OF THE TIGER by Wayne Edward Clark
Murphey’s books, including URBAN SHAMAN (with shamans), HEART OF STONE (with gargoyles), and QUEEN’S BASTARD (alt history and apparently pretty evil). You can bet those are on my kindle now.
PELQUIN’S COMET by Ian Whates
Judith Tarr, who according to C.E. Murphey is like Guy Gavriel Kay but better 
Also she trains Lipizzan horses??
Janny Wurts (similar to George R. R. Martin)
“A female character who isn’t someone’s inspiration”
“The replacement killers” (a movie)
And that was just the first day!
April 23, 2015
Other Sofias
While at Eastercon, I kept hearing about “Other Londons”? There’s Un Lun Dun, A Darker Shade of Magic, a third example that proves my point…anyway who cares about London? I live in Sofia, and I’m thinking about Other Bulgarias.
Fortunately I don’t have to think long. Like everywhere else on the Balkans, Sofia is a layer-cake of various historical empires, from the Roman “Serdica” to the Byzantine “Triaditsa” to the Bulgarian “Sredets” to the Ottoman “Sofya.” Imagine a character whose magic power it is to hold an object and transport herself to the an alternate history that split from ours at the time of that object’s manufacture.
“I enter the Sveta Sofia, and find it’s grown. A huge, decrepit dome rises now caps the building like a broken eggshell, and water drips onto secondary roofs of timber and cloth. No metal or plastic, which is a bad sign. A shaven-headed boy in black robes uses a bronze sickle to beheads a dove right in front of me. Which is probably a worse sign.”
