Sable Aradia's Blog, page 42
March 26, 2018
Tidbits from a Pseudo-Medieval Kitchen
By Jeanette Ng
Well described meals can add a lot of flavour to one’s world building. I have clear memories of salivating over the banquets described in Brian Jacques’ Redwall books. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games has meticulously described food, especially in with each district having its own distinctive bread.
I love writing about food almost as much as I like eating it, but I confess much of my knowledge comes from my partner, who is the self proclaimed Benevolent Dictator of Serve It Forth, a catering collective specialising in medieval food. Over the years of research and practical cooking banquets, this is what I have learnt.
If you’re just here for recipes, my partner has a recently done a twitter thread of his take on some of our banquet staples here.
Read the full article at Medium.com.
March 25, 2018
Book Review: The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov
The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge, and the Big Fun in a Little Package Novella Challenge.
This story won the 1977 Hugo, Nebula and Locus for Best Novelette.
Once again, Asimov proves his mastery of the medium of “science fiction story.” He is perhaps not at his best in longer forms of fiction (he can be pedantic) but in shorter forms, he is amazing.
This poignant tale is the story of a robot who wishes he were a man, and thus, redefines what qualifies as sentient life. A must-read for the discerning science fiction fan!
March 24, 2018
We Can Navigate Using Pulsars: Where to Now?
By Robbie Gonzales
HALF A CENTURY ago, astronomers observed their first pulsar: a dead, distant, ludicrously dense star that emitted pulses of radiation with remarkable regularity. So consistent was the object’s signal that astronomers jokingly nicknamed it LGM-1, short for “little green men.”
It wasn’t long before scientists detected more signals like LGM-1. That decreased the odds that these pulses of radiation were the work of intelligent extraterrestrials. But the identification of other pulsars presented another possibility: Perhaps objects like LGM-1 could be used to navigate future missions to deep space. With the right sensors and navigational algorithms, the thinking went, a spacecraft could autonomously determine its position in space by timing the reception of signals from multiple pulsars.
Read the full article at Wired.com.
March 23, 2018
Successful Worldbuilding in SFF Mashups
Science fiction and fantasy mashups are popular right now. They give us an excuse to abandon typical SFF tropes for elements we’re familiar with in other genre fiction. Here’s some tips and tricks for successful plotting and worldbuilding in a mashup genre:
Familiarize Yourself with the Blended Genre
Okay, so you’re writing a space opera detective story. When was the last time you read a good detective story? Get a few crime novels and bone up. Make sure your research material includes the most-cited classics of the genre, as well as some of the most currently-popular books. Get a feel for what you’re trying to do, especially if you feel you’re trying to reach crime fiction readers as well as SFF ones.
Avoid Reading Similar Mashups
Even if you’ve read them before and that’s what inspired you, don’t read The Dresden Files while you’re writing fantasy noir. It’s just too easy to find those ideas appearing in your own fiction. Put another way, reading similar mashups while you’re working runs the risk of limiting your own imagination. Do it your own way.
Consider Areas of Conflict and Resolve Them
Continuing with our example; noir fiction depends on a feeling of darkness and hopelessness. It’s important the protagonist be badly hurt, cynical, and unable to solve every problem. Now we’re introducing magic into the mix. How can magic be limited to prevent it from solving every problem?
Jim Butcher’s solution is simple; the bad guys have magic too. Also, magic is not something everyone can do, so simply having magical ability is isolating, which gives Harry Dresden a whole grab-bag of personal issues to unpack.
Historical fantasy is another danger zone. If magic is easily available, why would a historical period remain the same? For instance, an enchantment that allows a person to send a message to someone else instantly at a distance could spawn the Information Age in Regency England.
Naomi Novik solves the difficulties of bringing dragons into the Napoleonic Wars in three ways. First, dragons are rare, so it’s not as though they can be used in place of modern aircraft bombers; Napoleon would have been all over that! Second, dragons are impossible to control. They have their own needs and wants, and much of her plot centers around them finding ways to get those needs and wants fulfilled. Third, social attitudes, such as presumed human and Colonial superiority, prevents historical France and England from maximizing their dragons’ full potential.
Consider the Tropes of the Blended Genre
A delicate balance is needed here. One of the reasons we like blended genres is because we enjoy another genre’s tropes. On the other hand, if you’re just going to trade one genre’s tropes for another, you run the risk of being just as tired and dull as if you stuck with pure pulp sci-fi/fantasy in the first place.
If your plot runs on some of those tropes, consider them through the lens of SFF. What would be good reasons for those tropes to continue to exist in your altered world?
The best example I can think of for how to do it right is Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels. This is a Renaissance-tech level world with a feudal society and dragons; and yet, it’s entirely science fiction. Every “fantastical” element has a reason for being there, from the genetically-engineered dragons to the feudal structure needed to support them in consideration of the lost technology of her far-flung colony world.
You could also take an alternative approach. You could use the blended genre specifically to subvert the tropes! A Song of Ice and Fire, although it takes place in a fantasy world, specifically subverts high fantasy tropes by contrasting them sharply with the realities of medieval historical societies.
Consider Natural Consequences
If the normal world all of sudden learned that vampires and witches had been having a secret war for control of humanity for centuries, what do you think would happen? I think there would be riots, revolutions, and literal witch hunts, with a bunch of heavily-armed soldiers in lead-lined helmets to guard against telepathy. When dragons in Novik’s Temeraire world succeed in achieving equality, the world changes. Don’t be afraid to make those changes; that’s part of the fun. But if you don’t want them to happen, find a consistent in-universe method of preventing them.
Avoid Problematic Elements
Because certain genres were popular in specific eras, they may be laden with problematic social elements that alienate the modern reader. Noir, for example, is as sexist and racist as the 1940s were. George Lucas, whose Star Wars films were essentially Republic serials set in a science fiction universe, is often (rightfully) criticized for allowing certain racist and sexist stereotypes to bleed through. Try not to make that mistake.
Have Fun!
Above all, enjoy what you’re doing, because it’s no fun if you don’t. That’s the beauty of SFF – nothing is impossible!
Just sayin’: The Wyrd West Chronicles and the Toy Soldier Saga are both SFF mashups. The Wyrd West is a dystopian post-apocalyptic cattlepunk Weird Western. The Toy Soldier Saga is a military science fantasy planetary romance space opera. You can check them out at the links above, or on my About page.
March 22, 2018
Dan Koboldt on Magic Versus Technology in SF/F
By Dan Koboldt
It’s always bothered me that fantasy and science fiction get lumped together into a single category. The two genres seem very different, at least on the surface. Fantasy usually features some kind of magic as a core speculative element. It often takes place in a secondary world at a pre-industrial state of technology. Science fiction, in contrast, usually takes us to the future in which some as-yet-nonexistent technology underlies the plot. Granted, there’s a huge overlap between fantasy and science fiction fandoms. Maybe that means we live for escapism, whether to a fantasy world or outer space.
Read the full article on Cat Rambo’s blog.
March 21, 2018
Book Review: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge, the Military Spec-Fic Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, the Read the Sequel Challenge, and the Space Opera Challenge.
This book won the 1992 Hugo and Locus Awards.
This is not the first time, nor even the second, I’ve read this action-packed and yet moving classic space opera novel. But I get something new out of it every time. Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan just might be one of my all-time favourite protagonists. You want strong female characters? She’s all over that, and yet she’s a middle-aged woman (not a little girl, thank the gods; for a change we actually have someone whose age is appropriate to the position she’s in doing the job,) a wife, and a joyously nurturing mother. She does literal battle with a whole planet to see that her son is born, despite assassins, a military coup, and a murderous grandfather who does not wish the dishonour of a “mutant” born into his proud, aristocratic family.
Aral, Cordelia’s husband, has suddenly found himself in the position of Regent to a boy emperor, while Cordelia, a Survey Captain from another world with a more gender-equal view, finds herself an aristocratic lady in a society where women have strictly circumscribed gender roles. The Regency is how they end up as targets in coups and assassination attempts, and Cordelia blatantly ignoring where possible, and bucking actively where she must, the Barrayaran society’s rules, is a constant source of consternation and joy. And there’s a scene near the end that I’m not going to describe because it will totally ruin it for you if you haven’t read it, but it firmly establishes Cordelia as one of the biggest badasses in space opera today.
I love this book, and I’m a big fan of this series. Check it out!
Book Review: Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey
Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge, the Big Fun in a Little Package Novella Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, and the Grand Mistresses of Genre Fiction Challenge.
This classic novella, which won the Hugo award for Best Novella in 1968 and was nominated for the 1967 Nebula, is where it all started, one of the greatest science fiction series of all time – the Chronicles of Pern.
In this story we are first introduced to classic characters Lessa, F’lar, F’nor, and their draconic companions. Pern and the dragons are established, and the conditions of the society are laid down. I can’t say enough good things about it. The story is complex one with a theme that might be described as the Serenity Prayer: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
March 20, 2018
If Mary Shelley Invented SF, Why Are So Few Female SF Writers Known?
By David Barnett
Two centuries. Two hundred years. That’s how long we’ve had science fiction. From the birth of Frankenstein, to the death of Ursula K Le Guin. Two hundred years.
This was originally meant to be just the story of Frankenstein, written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and published on 1 January 1818. But this week, with the death of one of the greatest science fiction writers of the past century, Ursula K Le Guin, at the age of 88, the lens lurched and shifted and something else was brought into focus: the role of women in science fiction.
Read the full article at The Independent.
March 19, 2018
Book Review: The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Read for the Hard-Core Sci-Fi Challenge, the Space Opera Challenge, the SF Masterworks Challenge, and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club here on Goodreads.
This crazy book reads like a combination of Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Douglas Adams. Part madcap comedy of the absurd, part noir, and part epic space opera, this book has you laughing at the protagonist in one scene, crying for him the next.
John Truck is a space trucker who’s always been down on his luck. He has a checkered past that led him into some political entanglements in the past between two groups he cares nothing about who are warring for control of Earth and the galaxy (and neither of them, thank you gods, are American clones; one is a group of Capitalist Israelis and the other is a group of Socialist Muslims.) A mysterious device is discovered by a very odd, and almost certainly crazy, monk’s order on the planet Centauri, whose people were destroyed in a great genocide by us humans, and only someone with sufficient Centauri DNA can operate the thing. Truck just happens to be the last half-Centauri in the universe.
A chase and a bloody competition begins to capture John Truck and force him to use the device for their side. The two warring factions want him to use it to defeat the other, while the religious sect wants to meet God in person (which is what they think the device is going to do). I can’t even begin to wrap my head around all the twists and turns. It’s somewhere between The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dr. Strangelove; weird, trippy in places, disturbing, and often hilarious.
The ending is perhaps not unexpected, but oddly satisfying. And there’s a very clear political statement that Harrison was making that I think is still relevant today.
The more I read 1970s science fiction, the more I like it. Aside from the blatant and pervasive sexism that is consistent (this one less than most; two of the main antagonists are women and they’re scary, but they’re a bit of a stereotype; then again, everyone in this book is a caricature, designed to illustrate a type of person as a whole rather than a specific character) 70s sci-fi is highly imaginative, and almost always seems to deliver the most creative worlds that most modern sci-fi writers wouldn’t dare to attempt; and if they did, knowing the industry, they would be sneered at. I wish we could rediscover that creative worldbuilding without rediscovering the problematic elements.
This looks so much like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to me in some places that I find myself wondering if it was an influence of Adams’ (it was written four years earlier.)
Anyway, great book, lots to love, and I’m glad it was on this list! Maybe not for everybody; I think you have to have a particular sense of humour, and a particular appreciation of the subtle work of the writer, to enjoy it; but I sure did!
March 18, 2018
TRAPPIST-1 Planetary Atmospheres May Be Habitable
Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, 40 light-years away from the Earth [1]. This makes TRAPPIST-1 the planetary system with the largest number of Earth-sized planets discovered so far. These planets are also relatively temperate, making them a tantalizing place to search for signs of life beyond our Solar System. Now, an international team of astronomers has presented a study in which they used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to screen four planets in the system — TRAPPIST-1d, e, f and g — to study their atmospheres [2].
Three of the planets orbit within the system’s habitable zone, the region at a distance from the star where liquid water — the key to life as we know it — could exist on the surface of a planet. The fourth planet orbits in a borderline region at the inner edge of the habitable zone. The data obtained rule out a cloud-free hydrogen-rich atmosphere for three of the planets — but for the fourth planet, TRAPPIST-1g, such an atmosphere could not be excluded [3].
Read the full article at Space Telescope.
