Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 99
September 25, 2014
Antipodes
Here’s a stupid idea that I can’t shake.
Let’s say that, from the earliest times, people could “tunnel” through the Earth. Build a henge, do some rituals and bloop, you’re at the antipode of the place you left.
What would that mean for world history?
Obviously, most places are useless for tunneling because they dump you in the ocean. But a few “sacred” places will give you a real destination. The Celtiberians might have escaped from the Romans to New Zealand. Some villages in central Africa will have a great supply of fish. Some people in the extreme north of Alaska and Siberia will have a source of penguins, which I’m sure they’ll enjoy.
The most interesting things are happening in Asia. Everyone from the Shang to proto-Yue and -Thai peoples to Austronesians and Malays will have access to South America, and vice-versa. Suddenly south America gets rice, pigs, chickens, horses, water-buffalo and elephants (of course you’d take an elephant through a sacred henge). Asia gets potatoes, maize, and llamas (not to mention cocaine). Austronesia and the Amazon swap sugar-cane and chocolate. What emerges is a Chinese-ish empire born long before its time, using naval power and tunneling infantry to conquer not only much of South America, but southeast Asia and Austronesia, as well.
The Great Shang Empire doesn’t last, of course. By the first millenium BCE, the empire has fractured, but not before it’s culture has spread horsemanship and literacy from Manchuria to Burma to New Guinea, from Patagonia to Panama.
By 1 CE, the East-Asian/South American hybrid culture is experimenting with boat-henges. They can tunnel from East Island to the Indian ocean, and attack the Kalinga on two fronts. They explore western Australia as a staging ground for setting sail and tunneling to eastern North America. And the islands east of New Guinea lead them to Mauritania.
War rages between the Romans and the Tunnelers. The result is an Age of Exploration 1500 years too early, with various Tunneling powers staking claim to territory in Africa, North America, and Europe. That’s where my story would begin…if I had one.
So what do you think? Have I set up the board correctly? And if I have, where do the pieces fall?
September 24, 2014
Petrolea
Victor Toledo went to Titan to reprogram and tame its machine biosphere. Doctor Chinni Merchant has made it her mission to stop him. The feral robots of the petroleum jungle want to strip the flesh from their bones.
Cut off from help, the engineer and the biologist must cooperate not only to survive in, but understand the hostile wilderness.
PETROLEA is an illustrated novella by Daniel Bensen and Simon Roy about conservation, morality, and love in a nest of robot dragons.
~~~
A Brief History of Petrolea (for some basic background)
Why Save the Mechanical Rainforest? (for some discussion on the philosophy of environmentalism starting here, and continuing here)
Imagining Dragons (for some charismatic megafauna)
September 23, 2014
Mutually Assured Distraction
Happy birthday to me! I’m 31 today, and Melissa Walshe sent me a very nice present: a wonderful, awful idea!
Duels using weaponized music.
For conflicts that don’t have a clear, provable resolution, opponents can challenge one another to a psychological duel, in which they take turns singing the most aggravating songs possible.
The goal is to force your opponent to a pre-determined end condition faster than you get there.(Maybe they each have to hold and egg and the first one to put enough pressure on it to crack it loses…leading to the development of “He’s a bit egg-handed” to mean “He’s got a short temper.”) Whatever the end condition, it should subtly demonstrate that the loser has the weaker emotional resilience to annoying circumstances.
The winner of the annoyance battle has the right to call the outcome of the original point, and it might even become the courteous thing to do, as it’s easier to lose face when you’ve just demonstrated yourself to be the more civilized person, and the very act of conceding another fight makes you doubly superior.
If duels like this become popular, writing the most obnoxious music possible might become a deliberate art form, leading to an entire genre of music that is specifically intended for use in psychological combat.
~~~
What a cool idea! In fact, something like it has already been invented at least once in the form of the Inuit Competition Song (Katajjaq), where the combatants stand nose to nose and sing overtones at each other until one of them can’t take it any more and starts laughing. It isn’t annoying at all. 
September 21, 2014
74 Mystery and Steampunk with Beth Cato
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/74BethCato.mp3
I’m talking again with Beth Cato about her new book The Clockwork Dagger, writing a mystery novel, as well as this “Steampunk” thing that all the kids are talking about these days.
You have to have all these little twists and that’s a lot of the fun
Red Herrings and Chekhov’s gun
Johannes Cabal the Detective (it involves an airship)
Writing books your fans like and are new and interesting for you
Steampunk maker movement, fashion, and etiquette
There’s a smell to Steampunk
Laura Ingles Wilder and Rosemary Sutcliff
Leviathan by Scott Westerfield
All these different kinds of punks
Django Wexler and Brian McLellan
It’s an endless conundrum
If you are hungry for more, check out the except of the Clockwork Dagger on Tor
September 18, 2014
The Mermaid Invasion
So I was talking to Tex Thompson about the Fishmen of her ONE NIGHT IN SIXES and I gots to thinking about oceanic sophonts. Would they have something like cities? Floating conglomerations of driftwood? Those would still be pretty mobile, especially with sails. So not so much cities as caravans. Like with desert or steppe nomads, except much richer, since you can carry so much more stuff on a boat than you can on animal-drawn wagons. Plus, depending on where you are, the ocean can be a much more productive environment than the steppe or desert, supporting populations in the millions. The only limiting resources is wood.
So let’s say we have some sea-people, either like ONE NIGHT IN SIXES, IN GREAT WATERS, or THE MOON AND THE SUN, or just normal humans like the moken with some alternate-history tweaks.
What kind of tweaks? Well how about we delete shipworms? Without these little bivalves to eat and destroy floating trees, driftwood can last for much longer, in much larger chunks, perhaps supporting whole floating ecosystems as happened in the Triassic.
Riding these floating trees, our sea-people spread through the Pacific and Indian ocean, where they encounter and trade with land-people for wood and fruit. Pursuing whales, they make it into the Atlantic ocean somewhat later, invading the last bastion of land-people naval power, the Mediterranean.
September 16, 2014
Fighting words and Bulgaria’s history
NOTE: to read Cyrillic words in Latin letter, just hover the mouse over them.
Given its location, it’s not surprising that Bulgaria has a long and colorful history, and that history is mostly colored bloody, dripping red. I’m talking war, people, and there is no better way to see the effect war has had on the language than by looking at its names for weapons.
тояга-club, staff
From the old Bulgar language, which was not Slavic, but seems to have been either Iranian (Indo-European) or Turkic (Altaic), or both. Likewise, the word тояга may be related to the Indo-European word for “stick” (compare to English ‘twig’), but is more likely from Altaic (compare Turkish ‘dayak’, a rod or a stick). The Albanian word for a club is also “dajak,” which they might have gotten from Turkish, or might be from the same mysterious substrate language that yielded тояга (the Thracians??). With words this old, who can say?
In any case, imagine these guys, somewhere in Central Asia, riding their horses, and hitting people with clubs. Until they settled down and started smithing, at which point they needed…
меч-a sword
This is Slavic (it’s the same in Russian). The Slavs entered what is now Bulgaria in the early 500s, about a century before the club-wielding, possibly Altaic-speaking Bulgars invaded.
Fun fact: the Slavs probably got the word меч from Germanic-speaking peoples (Old English mece), who borrowed it from…nobody knows. But “sword” in Finnish is “miekka,” and “mes” in Mongolian. Oo~ooh!
While the Bulgars probably had their own word for sword, it’s the Slavic word that stuck. That’s because, although there were about as many Bulgars in Bulgaria as Slavs, the ruling Bulgar Clan (the Dulo), promoted Slavic over their own language in order to weaken the rival Bulgar tribes. So while modern Bulgarian still retains тояга, most of its other medieval weapons-vocabulary is Slavic like копие (a spear), and лък (a bow).
арбалет-a crossbow
Or not. Like English, Bulgarian gets its siege machine vocabulary from Latin. Arbalista is an arbalest or crossbow, as a catapulta is a catapult (Bulgarian катапулт).
But then the Roman empire falls and you get…
рицар-a knight
Which must be from some Germanic language (see German “ritter,” and English “rider”). There were Germanic-speaking Goths in Bulgaria from before the Slavs showed up, but I bet this word is more recent, and came with the Fourth Crusade. Of course the Crusaders didn’t just speak German, but also French and other Romance languages, from which comes кавалер, a gentleman (in the sense of a polite man), obviously from Late Latin ‘caballarius,’ a horseman and therefore a gentleman (in the sense of a man wealthy enough to afford a horse).
Of course, the word кавалер might be a more recent introduction, perhaps directly from Italian cavalliere (which is where English gets “cavalier,” although the meaning has twisted around to mean almost the opposite of a gentleman).
And what would Italian-speakers have been doing in the Balkans? Why, trading with the Ottomans, of course.
барут-gunpowder
The Ottomans annexed Bulgaria in 1396. Their secret weapon? An enormous, extremely well-coordinated army. Okay, their other secret weapon? Gunpowder. The word in modern Turkish is also barut, which itself comes from Persian اروت (bârut). Plus you have the thing you put gunpowder in, топ (Turkish top, a cannon), and the thing you light that gunpowder with (кибрит, Turkish kibrit, a match), and the thing that gives you time to run away (фитил, Turkish fitil, a fuse).
пистолет, пушка-a gun
But don’t worry. Other people got their hands on gunpowder, and in 1877, the Russians invaded, their hands full of guns…yay? пистолет comes by way of Russian from French (pistole), which might itself be from a Slavic language (Czech pis’tala, Russian pischal=a pipe). But anyway it was Russians who brought the (Russian/French/Russian) word into Bulgarian.
Things stay Russified for a while after 1877. Bulgaria gained independence, but stayed heavily influenced by Russia, especially militarily (for obvious reasons). However, since Russian and Bulgarian are both Slavic languages, a lot of Russian words make perfect sense in Bulgarian. Пушка (literally “a smoker”) means “gun” in Russian and “rifle” in Bulgarian. Самолет (an airplane) is the same in both languages and means literally “self-fly.”
But the world has changed since 1991, and now we have a new kind of weapon:
компютърното хакерство-Hacking
And look what a good job we’re doing with that.
September 14, 2014
73 Murder and Mystery with Beth Cato
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/73BethCatoSep-15.mp3
This week I’m talking with Beth Cato, author of The Clockwork Dagger, about her book (out now) as well as…
It’s easy to progress the plot by killing someone.
Parable of the Sower and empathy
Secret of Mana (one of the best role-playing games out there)
Horns of Ruin (which as power-ups)
Geekomancy (which has all that stuff)
Iron Druid (which has Easter eggs)
The Lies of Locke Lamora (whose main character is named after Locke Cole)
Ben Crawshaw of Zero Punctuation and his books Mogworld and Jam
David Brin talking about the Expected Surprise and Sundiver (not his debut novel, that wass
What is hopefully my debut novel
The things that mysteries excel is setting and period details.
You’d better know how many kinds of elves there are.
September 11, 2014
Fighting Fires
Inspired by the Lolo Complex forest fire of last year, which literally took place on the other side of the hills from my parents’ house (they were fine).
~~~
I knew what to expect when the cops got to my house. The air was full of mist, the sound of helicopters and sirens nearly constant. I’d seen this on TV a hundred times, watching my husband work.
“We’re evacuating,” I said, beating the cop to the punch.
“That’s right, ma’am,” he said, outlined in flickering violet light. “The incursion is about to cross the highway and the air—”
A sound interrupted him like an elephant trying to imitate a jet engine. I knew the howler couldn’t be as close as it sounder, they can’t breathe good air, but this was still the first time I’d heard one in real life.
The cop jerked at the noise as if stabbed by a cattle prod. Sweat visibly leaped out of the skin of his forehead.
“I know what to do,” I assured him. “Move upwind. Shut the windows. Don’t talk to toymaker worms. Don’t worry. My husband fights these things for a living.”
I shut the door and called to the boys. “Come on, kids. We’re going to grandpa’s house!”
~~~
Props also go to Daniel Heard’s “Banjolnir,” which got me thinking about alien incursions, and…is that Steven King’s “The Mist” in there somewhere? Monsters? Of course not! I must have been thinking about my own alien environmental catastrophe!
September 7, 2014
71 Multiculturalism with Steve Bein
http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/71SteveBSep8.mp3
Daughter of the Sword! Yes, I know that’s the first book of Steve Bein’s Fated Blades series and this is the second podcast I did with him. The second one is Year of the Demon and it’s now available in paperback.
Anyway…
Can you make the police officer male instead of female, white instead of Japanese?
Telling stories about ancient Japanese swords in LA doesn’t do anything.
Japanese culture, it’s not just wacky game shows, sexism, and electronics
Taxing Woman (aka Marusa no Onna)
Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice
We tend to want to put other countries into the boxes that exist in our own culture
I didn’t understand what I love about my country or what I hate about my country until I left.
If nothing else, multiculturalism gets you really good food.
September 2, 2014
The Global Scifi Market
When I went to Loncon3, My First Conference Ever, I took along a notebook. On the first page…
I got to meet Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of SHADOWS OF THE APT while waiting to get into the Dougal Dixon kaffeeklatsch. Then I talked with singer-songwriter Tim Griffin about (of all things) the use of syngas as a battery. What better way to store and transport electricity than use it to convert atmospheric carbon into gasoline? (Probably lots. Let me know in the comments!). But anyway, look at the top left up there. That was one of the two panels I managed to attend at the whole convention.
One of the things that impressed me about Loncon3 was its “World at Worldcon” series of panel discussions about the science fiction and fantasy literary worlds outside of the Anglosphere. They had panels on Scandinavia, German-speaking countries, Eastern Europe and the Baltic, Francophone countries, Spain, Israel, the Arab world, China, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. (I’d like to add more hyperlinks! Anyone else discussing these things? Let me know.)
At the Scandanavian panel, Tore Høie, Anna Davour, Sini Neuvonen, John-Henri Holmberg, Marianna Leikomaa talked about translating Nordic F/SF into English, and how hard it is to find (a) Competent translators (b) American publishers interested in translated work, saddest of all (c) Anglophone readers who want to read foreign books. It’s a real shame I can’t get all the Nordic fantasy I want.
I talked with Steve Bein about the difficulties of importing culture into the USA (and I WILL talk with him about it next week, if you’re reading this in the future), but I don’t want this post to be about shaming American readers and publishers. Instead, I want to show the other side of the coin. Look at the problems above from the perspective of the Anglosphere and you get lots of (a) extremely talented people who learned English as a foreign language (b) American publishers reaching out for new and interesting stories, and (c) people all over the world who want to read stories in English.
At the bottom of the page, as if proof of my thesis were needed, we have Lauren Beukes, a South African writer who writes (she insists) about South African issues. And yet, here she is, winning Arthur C. Clarke awards and getting talked up by Steven King. It may just be she’s a super journalist-author who actually flies to the settings of her books and interviews people there (!). It may be because she’s talking about global themes that are important to everyone. Or maybe her books are just really fun and interesting.
The people who write sci-fi and fantasy are not confined to America, any more than are the people who read sci-fi and fantasy. I think that’s a good thing. Just look at the work of Aliette de Bodard…but that’s another day at Loncon, and another page of my notebook.
