Karl K. Gallagher's Blog, page 2

Plans Gang Agley

At the end of Seize What’s Held Dear, I promised the next book, Captain Trader Helmsman Spy, would be out this winter. I do have a full draft of CTHS and am working with a cover artist to get it ready to publish. But it’s not coming out this winter.

Unfortunately, when I set up the schedule for the next books in the series, I failed to allocate time for abdominal surgery for having a malignant tumor removed. Good sized one, too. The picture is scary. It was found during a routine colonoscopy, there weren’t any symptoms. Hospital and family are taking good care of me and the recuperation is going well. But I am not being as productive as I normally am.

I’m back at the day job. Not full time yet, but I’m getting close to it. That and other responsibilities are taking up most of my productivity. I am putting as much energy into my writing and editing as I can. As of now I expect Captain Trader Helmsman Spy will be out this spring. But that’s not a promise. I’ve learned my lesson about promises.

The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile

One of the most common ways for someone to start reading science fiction is picking up one of Robert A. Heinlein’s “juveniles”—a series of novels aimed at teen readers. Fans tell stories of finding one in the library or having their father hand them a copy.

My father died too young to push books on me, but I found the juveniles on the shelves he left behind. They stood out by the wear on their covers. Those books hadn’t been read once and forgotten. They were well loved.

I loved them, too (well, most of them). I re-read them regularly. They were powerful influences on me. Starship Troopers is part of why I joined the military, and helped me overcome the resistance I faced (it was not a popular choice where I grew up). Citizen of the Galaxy cemented my conviction of the importance of freedom.

Other people have similar tales. What is less often discussed is why those books have such a powerful impact.

J. Daniel Sawyer is tackling that question. In The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile, he analyzes all the books in detail, looking at the structure, themes, and tropes Heinlein used to build those stories. Sawyer draws on models of story structure such as the Hero’s Journey to explain the plots and tension in the stories. I was dubious about that because I’ve seen the Hero’s Journey overused to the point of Procrustean forcing, but Sawyer shows four models Heinlein used—the Hero’s Journey, the complementary Heroine’s Journey, the Horatio Alger bootstrap structure, and boy’s adventure story—and how appropriate pieces were used to make each story work.

He digs into how Heinlein created stories to appeal to teenage boys (the market the publisher wanted to target) while still being enjoyable by adult men and women. Part of the strength of the stories is how they connected to other parts of our culture, other stories and traditions that readers might know, and if not probably should.

Breaking out all those characteristics is useful for authors who want to write a novel in that tradition. Sawyer had helpful advice for how to outline and write a juvenile using those techniques. My work in progress queue is full enough I don’t expect to write a YA any time soon, but if and when I do I’ll be coming back to this book for advice.

There’s a Kickstarter going on right now for the book. I read and enjoyed a beta draft. I’m looking forward to seeing the additions in the final version. If you love these stories, or are thinking of writing novels for teens, I urge you to check it out.

New Release: Seize What’s Held Dear

Seize What’s Held Dear cover

New book out: Seize What’s Held Dear (book 3 in Fall of the Censor):

A dozen cities nuked. Millions dead. The Fierans are burning for revenge.

Marcus Landry is eager to fight the Censorate, but desperate to protect the innocents oppressed by Censorate rule . . . including his beloved, trapped behind enemy lines.

Storm Between the Stars is a Finalist for the Prometheus Award

The Libertarian Futurist Society has announced the finalists for this year’s Prometheus Award for Best Libertarian Science Fiction novel. My novel Storm Between the Stars is included along with Who Can Own the Stars? by Mackey Chandler, The War Whisperer, Book 5: The Hook, by Barry B. Longyear, Braintrust: Requiem, by Marc Stiegler, and Heaven’s River, by Dennis E. Taylor.

The Prometheus Awards recognize outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that dramatize the perennial conflict between Liberty and Power. For over four decades the awards have recognized new novels and, with the Hall of Fame award, classic works deserving of recognition. You may join the Libertarian Futurist Society at its website.

The Mohs Scale of SF Hardness

I’ve seen yet another argument break out about what counts as “hard” SF. Some people think “hardness” is a yes or no property and are indignant if some work is excluded. So it’s time to go over the Mohs Scale of SF Hardness.

(For non-geologists, the Mohs scale is a way of rating the hardness of rocks. It ranges from talc (anything can scratch it) to diamond (no lesser rock can scratch it). For genre discussions this is, of course, a metaphor.)

Disclaimers up front: “Hardness” is a separate property from whether a story is entertaining, actually science fiction, part of a particular sub-genre, or possessing the Campbellian “sense of wonder.” Yes, there are stories that are diamond-hard without stirring any sense of wonder. Us Hard SF fans call them “boring.”

Eight: Starting at the hardest level of hardness, there’s Real Life. Everything in the story exists today. SF fans consider this the least interesting level. Pulp stories with hard-boiled detectives are here.

Seven: The next level is A Simple Matter of Engineering. The gadgets in the story are compliant with known science and could be built if we put in the effort. The settings are as realistic as current knowledge allows. The Martian is at this level with the exception of its initial dust storm. The ion drive of the Hermes and automated Martian fuel manufacturing landers are just awaiting funding. The recent discovery of permafrost in the Martian soil means the hero could have dug for his water instead of messing with hydrazine (shudder) but this doesn’t make the story less hard, it just dates it. James Cambias’ Corsair is here, and hasn’t been ruined by a new discovery yet.

One problem with this level of hardness is that it only makes sense a short distance into the future. If your story is set a thousand years from now it’s ludicrous to think there will be no new rules of physics discovered in that time. If the setting isn’t as different from today’s as our lives are different from the world of 1000 AD that’s a failure of imagination.

Six: The third level is One New Thing. Invent a gadget, scientific law, or strange place, and examine the implications as it interacts with known reality. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is level seven with a spontaneously-created artificial intelligence. Niven’s “Inconstant Moon” is Real Life with an exploding sun. Corcoran’s Powers of the Earth adds an anti-gravity drive as its one thing, as AI and genetically engineered dogs have moved from speculative to a matter of engineering. My Torchship trilogy pushes the limits of this level with interstellar portals and a mass to energy converter.

Five: New Physics is where writers can invent lots of stuff. The trick to keeping it on this level is picking a few new inventions and dealing with their consequences rigorously. The Mote In God’s Eye and the related stories of Pournelle’s CoDominion series were here–Alderson drive, Langston Field shield, and weird yet plausible aliens.

Four: Artificial Gravity and Other Toys. Spaceships no longer need seat belts. This can still involve running numbers: Weber’s Honor Harrington series includes careful calculations of how much acceleration ships of each size can get from their gravitic impellers. This can still be “sense of wonder” hard SF. Ringworld had all sorts of impossible tech (teleporters, hyperdrive, invulnerable hulls, hereditary luck, and the scrith the Ringworld was made out of) but expanded our imaginations with what could be done with it. My Storm Between the Stars is at this level.

Three: Who Cares How it Works? Spaceships fly, blasters zap, Death Stars blow things up. The gadgets enable the heroes to do their stuff. Numbers are a distraction. Firefly and Star Trek fall here. Most space opera is here as well, such as Lee and Miller’s Liaden series.

Two: Add A Dash of Magic. It looks like a cyberpunk or space opera setting, but some of what’s going on is just beyond physics. Star Wars Jedi can control minds, hurl objects, and create lightning with their minds.

One: Never Mind Science. Sometimes the author wants to do something and doesn’t care if it’s proven impossible. Mammals interbreed with egg-layers, rocks hang in the air, and Rule of Cool is all. (I understand some people are cranky about science forbidding mammal/bird cross-breeding, but that’s something our Neolithic ancestors understood, so it’s not cutting edge research.)

Too complicated? Oh, it gets worse. Many stories are rigorous in some areas of science and hand-wave others. An argument broke out over whether Dune was “Hard SF”. Where does it rank on this scale? The treatment of ecology is at One New Thing–a desert dominated by sandworms, with the implications for human society and future terraforming worked out in detail. Meanwhile the Bene Gesserit and Navigators Guild were effectively working by magic.

Another example of that mixed level is Bujold’s Vorkosigan series. Most tech in the stories is generic space opera, but the biological tech for reproduction, genetic engineering, and terraforming approach A Simple Matter of Engineering in the detail and accuracy provided. Whether this counts as “hard” SF depends on which aspect the viewer cares most about. If forced to assign a label I’d go with “partially hard” or “biologically hard,” which I’m sure amuses the twelve year olds in our midst.

So where is the line for defining something as “hard” SF? With most of the other things we argue about in the genre war it’s a matter of taste. I’ve noticed the most common line is artificial gravity. If the author make the crew strap in for acceleration and float the rest of the time the book will be called hard SF even if he’s resorting to blatant handwaves such as passing through a “loop of cosmic string” to travel between star systems.

This also points out the weaknesses in the definitions people are tossing around for “Campbellian SF.” Plenty of non-hard SF books such as Ringworld and Hogfather (a pure fantasy) provide the sense of wonder or “conceptual breakthrough” Campbellian fans desire.

The “hardness” of a story is just one way to describe it, separate from whether it includes any entertainment or other qualities. A hard SF story doesn’t guarantee it will provide sense of wonder. What the term “hard SF” does is give readers an idea of what to expect from the story, so they have a hint of whether it’s what they’re looking for. Which is all any genre label is really useful for.

FOOTNOTE: TVTropes has a version of this scale but I disagree with part of their analysis so I wrote this.

New Release: Between Home and Ruin

The sequel to Storm Between the Stars is out today: Between Home and Ruin.

The Censorate erases all information over a lifetime old. The newly discovered Fierans must give up the art and history they preserved from Old Earth . . . or face war.

This is the second book in the Fall of the Censor series. This saga will cover the conflict between a small pocket of free people and a brutal, rigid, empire. Book Three (title TBD) is close to having its rough draft done. I expect to release it this summer. The fourth and fifth books are outlined (more or less). They’ll be released in 2022.

Anarchy and Government Interview with Dan Behrman

I talked about science fiction, government, and anarchy with Dan “Taxation is Theft” Behrman. Why do we have governments, what do people get out of them, and how can we get away from having too much government? How is fiction useful for thinking about these problems? Can we cut out the middleman and just sell political office to the highest bidder, and what would the politicians do if we did?

Watch the whole interview on YouTube.

Again, Hazardous Imaginings Released

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I have a story in the anthology Again, Hazardous Imaginings. It’s a collection of science fiction stories chosen to push against the taboos of the current literary establishment. My contribution is a . . . less than elegant take on how to deal with the dangers of unconstrained artificial intelligence development.

November Book Reviews

Fire on Iron by Andrew Fox: A horror/fantasy tale set in the Mississippi River theater of the American Civil War. A Union captain takes his ironclad on a secret mission, only to be caught up in the supernatural machinations of an African sorcerer wanting revenge on those who took him as a slave.

Tales Around the Supper Table: A collection of short stories by North Texas authors. Eclectic but enjoyable, all better quality than the average story collection I’ve read. Didn’t hurt that I know the guy cameoing as the voodoo lord.

American Guerilla by Mike Guardia: I’d actually picked this up looking for a bio of Wendell Fertig, who ran guerilla ops against Japanese occupation on a different Philippine island. I’m still glad I read it–Volckmann did some amazing things, and managed to incorporate some of what he learned into Army doctrine. The latter may be the most difficult accomplishment.

The Cult of Smart by Fredrick deBoer: I read this to see the take of a leftie who believes intelligence matters. He went on at great length about how schools sort for intelligence and there’s some people who just can’t learn algebra.
What shocked me is that he doesn’t believe there’s any value in what’s taught in school. CompSci graduates get paid more, not because they can code, but because they were certified as smart by the CS department. The thought of individuals producing value doesn’t show at all.
There’s some decent ideas in the book, most importantly that we need to accept that we can’t make every kid learn calculus and lots of them won’t want to. His various snark on college admissions insanity I fully endorse.
The blurb promised radical ideas, which I wanted to steal for world-building weird settings. Turned out he wants Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Sigh.

Misha Burnett’s Endless Summer: I had a sneak peek at this from the Kickstarter. It’s a collection of science fiction stories. Lots of interesting ideas, including a terrifying failure mode for self-driving cars.

October Book Reviews

Where Is My Flying Car? By J. Storrs Hall
It’s rare enough for me to change my mind that it’s worth noting when it happens. I’ve tackled the “Where’s my flying car?” question many times both online and on panels. I’ve pointed out that there have been prototypes built, and they’d failed commercially, because what you need to make one a better car (bigger tires, stronger structure) makes it a worse plane, and vice versa.

Hall addressed that objection directly, looking at the tradeoffs and doing the math to show that there’s a sweet spot where a flying car serves a commute better than owning a Cessna and a sports car. He convinced me there is a good market for them—if government regulations hadn’t made it impossible to sell them, the same way Cessnas and other light aircraft were crushed.

Nuclear power is something I think we need more of. Hall pointed out some interesting capabilities with underutilized options. The existing power plants are too constrained by being descended from designs intended to breed fissionables for weapons, and government restrictions on developing anything new. There’s a lot of possibilities out there.

I wasn’t convinced by everything in the book, but it’s a damn good argument that there’s still some more low-hanging fruit on the technology tree, and the “Great Stagnation” is due to an unwillingness to experiment. Recommended for people interested in technology, government policy, or near-future world-building.

All Things Huge and Hideous by G. Scott Huggins
This is a light fantasy in a dark setting. The Evil Overlord won, all the world is oppressed, and a veterinarian has to keep the various animals alive. Protective gear takes on extra levels when treating a pet basilisk.
It’s an episodic story (not a complaint, a description) following various cases as Our Hero and his plucky assistant try to save patients despite vampire owners, the evil bureaucracy, and magical rivals. A fun read.
(Full disclosure: I received a free copy in a Twitter contest, but I’d previously paid for one of the included short stories.)

Hazardous Imaginings by Andrew Fox
Andrew Fox isn’t afraid to write about taboo subjects. His story collection is the first fiction I’ve read from him. It has stories involving the Rapture, Holocaust denial, social disintegration, and politically-correct censorship. This is not a “fun read”—in fact I took a break between stories to read something lighter. I don’t want to get into details of the stories because I can’t describe the important aspects without spoiling the hell out of the them. But if you want some damn good stories that make you think about what the world could be, this is a book for you.
(Full disclosure: I have a story in Fox’s upcoming anthology.)

Masquerade in Lodi by Lois McMaster Bujold
One of the impacts of the ebook revolution that is still being worked out is the freedom authors now have to freely choose the topic and length of their stories. Paper books have to be long enough to justify a price that covers all the overhead from the publishing house and distribution chain. I have “novels” that came out in the 50s that are a tenth the length of usual modern doorstopper.

SF Grandmaster Lois McMaster Bujold has been exploring these possibilities with her Penric stories. They could be considered a prequel to her novel The Curse of Chalion, as they’re in the same setting hundreds of years earlier. But there are no characters in common and no connection to the plot of the other stories.

The Penric stories are short, not tackling epic conflicts or inserting subplots to pad them up to an editor’s demands. Bujold is writing them as the Muse moves her, not structuring the plot to produce a series that can claim shelf space in competition with GRRM et al. The latest, “Masquerade in Lodi,” is inserted into the Penric series as number four of nine, an act which would give a traditional publishing editor spasms.

Is it good? Oh, yes. But I’d already said “Bujold.” If you’re not familiar with the series I’d recommend starting with The Curse of Chalion, a wonderful tale of treachery, loyalty, and love.