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What is your gut reaction to this atypical composite novel structure?
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I'm a bit unsure on what your format actually is. You say you want to follow the individual origin tales, rather then spamming flashbacks from the meeting, so do you mean run each tale to near the conclusion then restart?Personally I would avoid jumping heads every few chapters like this. I really don't think you should start with them discussing their varied upbringings and it being them telling their stories unless unreliable narration is a big part of the story. So I'm not a fan of the "traditional format" as it is described here.
I personally would enjoy something like this if you just ran it straight to the major conflict in a single POV then reset to another persons story or perhaps move the major conflict forward. Then another characters story, I think the important thing to do would be to carefully choose the order of stories you wish to reveal to hide major plot points properly until you can reveal them well. Since you are doing 6 which is a lot for this style perhaps tie 2 stories together that have a strong bond or play with it a bit.
Also I'm not sure what is the main conflict but I assume something has gotten to be the reason why they are now working past their differences and working together, hopefully with some open hostility between some of them still.
I'm interested in other peoples opinions though.
I mean to run each tale to the conclusion of them ascending to becoming leaders. Chronologically, that happens at slightly different times, but at some point eventually, all of them are the leaders of their respective people. And THEN they convene for the major conflict resolution discussion. I suppose the best way to visualize it would be if the book was divided into two parts - I. Origins and II. Conference.
Most of them would have been leading for a while, and interacted with each other one on one previously (unseen). The Origin threads would take it only until they become leaders. And then the Conference section would pick up from the start of the conference, with some individual conflicts already existing and then starting off from there.
The main conflict is the one of all human history - to make the best deal for yourself and your kind. Is that not compelling enough? Geopolitics, basically.
Oh, and by traditional format with the flashbacks, I meant that's the way it's usually done, but I do NOT want to do it like that. I want it to be separate, standalone stories for each individual, written from their POV, and that entire narrative being followed through simultaneously for all of them. For example, if I allocate 5 chapters for each character, with each of them ascending to leadership at the end of their fifth chapters, then I'd start with the first chapters of all, then the second chapters for everyone etc. This way, the last five chapters of the 'Origins' section is their climactic moments. I'm not a fan of long tale-telling flashbacks.
I would not debate this. I would write it. You will know if it can, or should, work when you do that.
If it's good, I'll read it. If the format is impenetrable then I will abandon it rather quickly.That said, every possible combination of what you're thinking about has been done. For instance, Joe Haldeman's Buying Time alternates POVs until the characters come together a the denouement.
“Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Einstein(or one of the many quotes incorrectly credited to him)Think of the story you want to tell. If you can tell it in a simpler way then you're planning it, then I'd say try it that way. If simplifying it would take away something that you feel makes the story special, I'd say don't.
It's really an answer only you can come up with, regardless of how much you respect the input of the group. That's my two cents anywho.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion enters in medias res and then flashes back to different backstories as the main narrative progresses. It was highly successful (and modeled on Chaucer). There is a reason that epic poems and many great novels enter into the middle of the action: it captures interest immediately.You could also move the narratives forward progressively by switching between them until they all coincide.
Treating each separately in sequence and then combining them would not be confusing, but it would mean that certain characters will have hundreds of pages (or at least a long time) during which they are not discussed. That may be a problem.
Trike wrote: "If it's good, I'll read it. If the format is impenetrable then I will abandon it rather quickly.That said, every possible combination of what you're thinking about has been done. For instance, Jo..."
And then there's Dan Simmons's Hyperion which mirrors The Canterbury Tales by having all the characters on a journey during which they all tell their tale...and the conflict resolution then picks up in book 2 once all the character background is taken care of.
I disliked Hyperion, so I never finished it, but that's another good example.If all these people are the leaders of their respective countries and are different ages, then Sid could just tell it chronologically, jumping from one to the next as they come onto the scene. Then, within each individual's story, refer back to the older characters as they influence events which then in turn influences the younger characters.
A good example is Queen Elizabeth. The scope of her reign encompasses 63 years and vast global changes, and she was a teenager during WWII as well as the independence of India. (Trivia: sometime in September 2015 she will become Britain's longest-reigning monarch.)
It wouldn't be difficult to imagine the equivalent of someone coming of age during Hong Kong's return to China who later becomes General Secretary of China and then meets with Queen Elizabeth as they negotiate the independence of Tibet from China and whose views are shaped by British rule and the historicity of India's independence.
Start each story as the person gains ascendancy if not ruling status, then have them reflect on whatever it is that starts bringing the various countries together. Perhaps a long-forgotten deep space satellite from Earth begins transmitting again, electrifying the world.
Leader 1: |---------------- thing happens --------|
Leader 2: . . . . . . . |------- thing's influence ----|
Leader 3: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |---------------------| <-- born during thing, grew up hearing about it, entire life shaped by completely different knowledge of universe
Trike wrote: "I disliked Hyperion, so I never finished it, but that's another good example.If all these people are the leaders of their respective countries and are different ages, then Sid could just tell it ..."
Trike, that's brilliant! And I believe told that way, would enable the reader to follow the order of chronological events even better. I would definitely want to include the effects of one leader's actions on the lives of some of the younger protagonists. I'm a big fan of the Butterfly Effect and incorporating the ramifications of actions across time and geography is definitely one of the things I am aiming to do.
[I'm currently finishing up a Master's thesis, defending in July, and I can't wait to have some modicum of free time after that to continue writing this. So excited!]
Happy to help. Good luck with your thesis.
The other thing to do is to just write it. Get it all out, every bit of it, into words. Then, with all of the thing in front of you, you can shuffle. Flashback? It will become clear if it is needed. Viewpoint? You can easily see if it is possible for the character to be there.There are things that are just not possible to work out way in advance. However I write as a profound pantser, a writer who does not plan at all. It is a spectrum, and you may well be on the heavily-outlined end of the spectrum. The only way to know where you fall on the range is just to step up to the plate and swing. It'll become shatteringly obvious, right away, if you need to outline or not.
I understand what you're trying to do. Write it as though it were an anthology of short stories, then the last story is when they come together. Right?
Brenda wrote: "The other thing to do is to just write it. Get it all out, every bit of it, into words. Then, with all of the thing in front of you, you can shuffle. Flashback? It will become clear if it is needed..."I agree. Just write it. Once it's all written down, then you can see what you have and how it works and what you need to do with it.
Trike wrote: "I disliked Hyperion, so I never finished it, but that's another good example.If all these people are the leaders of their respective countries and are different ages, then Sid could just tell it ..."
Yeah this post is what I was trying to get at. Just make sure every single character arc is interesting/needed/something new and important happens or is revealed, because it only takes 1 bad arc 100 pages long to throw someone straight out of it.
Brenda wrote: "The other thing to do is to just write it. Get it all out, every bit of it, into words. Then, with all of the thing in front of you, you can shuffle. Flashback? It will become clear if it is needed..."I am definitely a thorough planner. To give you an idea, last night, I went back and made an excel sheet of dates for key events descirbed in each storyline to see how I should arrange the chapters. ;)
In the spectrum though - I might be somewhere in the middle, towarda the planner side. When I write a specific chapter, I pants it. But the main 'tent pole' plot points I try to plan out in advance. While pantsing if there seems to be a better ending possible, then I might go for that too. I have already started writing; 3/5 short stories that would become the first three chapters for one of the protagonists are finished. Character sketches and ideas for the other characters are jotted down too! Just need some time...
I like asking the community questions as the act of putting whatever problem I'm having into words helps solve it, and feedback such as this helps getting the juices flowing too.
B.R. wrote: "I understand what you're trying to do. Write it as though it were an anthology of short stories, then the last story is when they come together. Right?"Exactly! But with the last story being stretched out longer than the rest of the stories. If we take a normal 80000 word novel, let's say I have four viewpoint characters, each of their short stories could be in the range of 2500 words, five stories per character, to give ~50000 words for the anthology and then 30000 to bring them all together, and resolve the story.
It won't work, in my opinion.The problem is length.
If you wrote nine books, fine. You could write one book for each character, give each book/character a compelling story. The ninth would then have them meeting. Although it would be better to, say, overlap some of that conference into the individual books, with the ninth being a much shorter character-story and then a lot of conferencing.
But if you're doing it in one book? We'll be halfway through the book without having been with any character for more than a couple of thousand words (i.e. a few pages). We will not have any real grasp of who these people are, and we won't have any strong allegiances to one character or another. [Getting readers to care becomes harder as you get more characters anyway. Two dueling characters, very compelling. Three, four, we can try to get to grips with. Eight different characters and we're struggling to remember who is who...]
Stories need to have... well, a story. With a beginning, middle and end, a through-line. That's why people would normally use flashbacks in this sort of situation: so that we could follow one character from the first page to the last, albeit with contrasting sections from other views. It IS possible to have a story when you're telling eight different stories from eight different perspectives... but it would be VERY difficult. You'd need to stress elements of continuity between the perspectives - recurrent themes or the same events seen from several perspectives, etc.
Another way of putting it: lead with what matters. In your story, it's the conference that matters, and the character backstories are just exposition - hence them being so short compared to the conference. So you lead with the conference. You don't lead with the backstory before the reader knows what story it's the back of! [at the very least, consider a prologue and then the first half of the book be flashed back from there?]
An unrelated problem is that you don't seem to have a... well, story in the other sense. A 'conflict' as one poster said. You need to personally emotionally engage the reader. A bunch of people we barely know sitting down and spending 30,000 words having a business meeting about international geopolitics is... not compelling. This is why, although we live in a world with a lot of conferences, very few novels are written about them, and those that are have to find a way to make the stakes personal rather than abstract (the conference's content gets pushed into the background for the personal story).
It IS possible to have a compelling political debate, but most readers won't like it, and writing it well enough for ANY readers to like would be is hugely challenging.
Wastrel wrote: "It won't work, in my opinion.The problem is length.
If you wrote nine books, fine. You could write one book for each character, give each book/character a compelling story. The ninth would then ..."
Wastrel, thanks for your input! You're right, the more I think about it, the more I feel I should limit it to just four main viewpoints. If I have just four, I can write four 10-12,000 word origin stories for them, and that should be enough to bring up their backstories.
The reasons why I want to do it like this is because:
1. I really want to make their entire life stories prominent, so that their actions and personalities are well connected with what they accomplish at the conference.
2. I'm using the experience of writing these short stories as a stepping stone towards getting comfortable writing longform stories. Writing it this way will keep me busy and writing instead of feeling hopelessly lost from the beginning. It's possible that when I finish with this cycle, I might realize, as Brenda said, that this isn't the best way to present the story, and then rewrite the framework to get the story across better. For that, I need to write first, and by giving myself these mini-goals, I just might do it.
This is also why the conference part of the story is still formative. I'm getting a strong '12 Angry Men' vibe that I want to create. It's entirely possible that by the time I'm done, I'll realize that the conference is not the best way to go about it, and I might opt to do something more along the lines of 'The Third World War' by Humphrey Hawksley, which is an alternate/future history book that follows the leaders of world as they make geopolitical decisions and have one-on-one talks/clandestine activities etc.
So now, would ~12,000 words each for four main characters before we begin the third act be too much?
I would keep it as simple as I possibly could. Especially if this is your first novel.
I thought of Red Mars when I read the first post. That has a looooot of characters, of varying ages and you get to see the life stories of most of them throughout the book, both individually and in relation to each other.That starts with a brief in media res incident, where we don't know the characters yet, then flips back several decades. After that it's similar to the setup you describe, switching between character viewpoints roughly (but not always) chronologically until we reach back to that first incident, roughly halfway through the book. The rest is the repercussions and fallout.
What's interesting (to me) about that particular book, I started out thinking one person is probably the antagonist and another the protagonist, but as soon as the time rewinds I thought perhaps I had it backwards. Similarly many of the side characters seem set up to be sympathetic or not so much. By the time you get back to that starting incident, you've seen everyone in both a positive and negative light, and the morality is a lot more grey.
Highly recommended read, Sid, if you don't mind a bit of hard sci-fi (also it's a behemoth of a book, to get all those characters, and has two followups, but it works pretty well as a standalone too.)
Krazykiwi wrote: "I thought of Red Mars when I read the first post. That has a looooot of characters, of varying ages and you get to see the life stories of most of them throughout the book, both indivi..."I love hard sci-fi! That's what I'm trying to go with here; A very realistic depiction of the future. I hadn't heard of that book before but I will definitely put it on my to-read list. And yes, that does sound like the kind of structure I might end up following. I especially like that aspect which described, of swinging sympathies through reading the story.
Does anyone here like the James Michener books? That kind of a historical novel about an area is something I'd like to tackle too at some point. Thanks for the recommendation Krazykiwi!
Wastrel wrote: "An unrelated problem is that you don't seem to have a... well, story in the other sense. A 'conflict' as one poster said. You need to personally emotionally engage the reader. A bunch of people we barely know sitting down and spending 30,000 words having a business meeting about international geopolitics is... not compelling. This is why, although we live in a world with a lot of conferences, very few novels are written about them, and those that are have to find a way to make the stakes personal rather than abstract (the conference's content gets pushed into the background for the personal story)."I don't see how you can make the determination about the lack of story or compelling backstory without knowing the slightest bit about what he wants to write.
The Goblin Emperor only has half of a traditional narrative structure yet it works... and is garnering both awards and sales.
Anyone who claims you need nine books (which: holy shit) to flesh out the idea and structure Sid has outlined has never read a good short story. I've seen epic tales told in ten pages. The right words can be utilized to pack a lot of information and emotional impact into a small space.
Haldeman's The Forever War is a masterclass on how to put 8 pounds into a 5-pound sack. I've never heard anyone complain that they finished that book (which is really a fix-up of several short stories) and didn't know the main characters or that the action wasn't widescreen and epic enough.
Brenda wrote: "I would keep it as simple as I possibly could. Especially if this is your first novel."Or go the Ancillary Justice route and make it both good and complex. Option two.
Trike wrote: "Brenda wrote: "I would keep it as simple as I possibly could. Especially if this is your first novel."Or go the Ancillary Justice route and make it both good and complex. Option two."
In fairness though, according to her wiki, she wrote something in her youth first that wasn't too successful before getting picked up for Ancillary, 12 years after she started writing it apparently too, so these things seem to take a long time! I'm definitely just learning right now and it will take a while to be able to write good and complex stuff.
I would love to read something like this -- a novel having an interesting structure is generally very important in my enjoyment.I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a writer -- I'm more of a visual artist, but it seems to me that what you're talking about here is composition just like in visual arts. If you see a photograph of a centered, static, evenly-lit subject, you'd say that it has a boring composition. This might be OK if the subject is *REALLY* interesting, but generally it's better to use some perspective, contrast, repetition, juxtaposition, etc. to engage your audience.
And yeah, it does take a lot of time to get good at that stuff. Keep at it!
I like this idea, both as you initially presented, and as refined by feedback. I especially like that you're attempting to get us to care about all of them, so when we get to the conference & conflict we're not sure who to root for.If you can write a story with no bad guys, especially if it somehow ends with a win-win (times four-, or possibly even six-player) plan for their future, I will sing your praises to the world.
After all, that's what will ring true-to-life. Most people aren't evil, or even stupid or lazy or power-mad... most people, including 'great leaders,' want to do what's right for their families and communities.... Conflict arises when we have different ideas of what's right.
Unless its Putin. Have a guy seem nice, then turn out to be Putin.
Cheryl wrote: "I like this idea, both as you initially presented, and as refined by feedback. I especially like that you're attempting to get us to care about all of them, so when we get to the conference & conf..."I really want to do that, give a balanced characterization with good and bad traits for each, their different personal and nationalistic motivations and generate conflict wherever their ambitions collide geographically/economically/ideologically.
For some reason I am unable to come up with decent villains or unlikable characters; I can't empathize with most I read about or see in books/movies, so I can't seem to be able to write any well. I suppose that's a bad thing though, there are unlikable characters in the world so any realistic portrayal should have its fair share of them...
Sid wrote: "Cheryl wrote: "I really want to do that, give a balanced characterization with good and bad traits for each, their different personal and nationalistic motivations and generate conflict wherever their ambitions collide geographically/economically/ideologically.For some reason I am unable to come up with decent villains or unlikable characters; I can't empathize with most I read about or see in books/movies, so I can't seem to be able to write any well. I suppose that's a bad thing though, there are unlikable characters in the world so any realistic portrayal should have its fair share of them..."
You could always write the bad guy who is just a more extreme hero. I.E. Professor X wants and Magneto want very similar things, to raise the status of mutants in the world. But where P-X tries to achieve equality through care and showing where they fit with humanity, Mags uses strength to try to impose dominance. Also, that dominance was imposed on him. He has a reason to be the way he is. As long as you can sympathize, see why they'd be that way, I don't think you yourself have to be the type of person who would ever go there.
That's not to say I think you're idea is lacking a villain, just some tidbits on villains from my POV. Also, I love the X-Men.
Tommy wrote: "Sid wrote: "Cheryl wrote: "I really want to do that, give a balanced characterization with good and bad traits for each, their different personal and nationalistic motivations and generate conflict..."That's true I really like Magneto's characterization. That makes sense and in a lot of cases I can empathize with him too. That's a good point; I'll definitely try to make a villain like that. Thanks!
You need to have a couple people -- or at least one -- who is a genuine villain, though. If you look at world leaders, there are so many currently who are just selfish assholes, and many of them are textbook psychopaths. Again, look at Putin: when a Superbowl-winning coach visited Russia, Putin asked to see his Superbowl ring. When the guy handed it over for Putin to inspect, Putin put it on and walked out of the room, while his bodyguards blocked anyone from following. In order to avoid an incident, the State Department convinced the coach to say he had given the ring to Putin as a gift, but the dude just straight-up stole it.
Recently Putin was to meet with the Pope and he made His Holiness wait for over an hour. They were in the same hotel. Putin is just a dick.
Then there's North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He had his own uncle and his uncle's aides executed for "crimes against the state." His real crime was almost certainly closer to "backtalk" and his means of execution was to be eaten alive by starved dogs. Seriously, read that last sentence again aloud to get the full impact. 120 starved dogs ate 5 men. Recently he had his defense minister executed by blasting him with an anti-aircraft gun.
The previous Pope, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, was the guy who shuffled around pedophile priests while blocking law enforcement on five continents. Rumor has it that he was ousted by a silent coup masterfully orchestrated by the Jesuits, who then had one of their own installed as Pope, even though Jesuits report directly to the Pope and aren't supposed to hold offices within the Catholic Church.
So we get the first Pope to "retire" in more than 400 years and the first Jesuit Pope ever. Even without the shady business behind the scenes, that's an interesting scenario you can play with.
I don't buy into the notion that every villain is the hero of their own story and they all think they're doing the right thing. I think some people are just twisted and they know it. Those guys at Enron who were stealing from people and gleefully jacking up electricity rates while wildfires burned down power lines weren't good guys and they reveled in that. Since so many of them rise to positions of power, it feels false to not have at least one sitting at the table.
Trike wrote: "I don't buy into the notion that every villain is the hero of their own story and they all think they're doing the right thing. I think some people are just twisted and they know it. Those guys at Enron who were stealing from people and gleefully jacking up electricity rates while wildfires burned down power lines weren't good guys and they reveled in that. Since so many of them rise to positions of power, it feels false to not have at least one sitting at the table. "I agree, to a large extent, but that kind of sociopathic narcissist type, really do think they're simply better than everyone else. They deserve everything they have (as long as it's going well). If everyone else was as smart and as cool and as tough as them, they too could take whatever they want, but nobody else has the stones they have. I've always taken that "hero of their own story" quote not to mean they are doing the right thing, but more they have the right to be doing the thing they're doing. For basically good people, the two are pretty often one and the same.
It might be interesting to follow someone who perhaps starts out on the infamous road that is paved with good intentions, but ends up being the Enron guy, just so far beyond normal morality trying to keep his house of cards from falling down around him. Breaking Bad style, maybe.
Or maybe the other way around, does anyone ever do that? Could you? How would you write that even? Someone bad, with no good intentions at all, out only for themslves, but ends up saving the day for all concerned?
Another reading recommendation for grey morality done well: Glen Cook. Any book, really, he does it all the time, but probably the first of the Black Company books is a good place to start.
Trike wrote: "I don't buy into the notion that every villain is the hero of their own story and they all think they're doing the right thing. I think some people are just twisted and they know it."I think you're 100% right in that statement. My comment wasn't to give Sid an idea to delve into villain writing, which he said he sees as a weakness to his writing.
We agree in general, though. Some villains are just evil and that's in no way auto-bad, as some would say.
There are enough books with evil villains. They are disproportionately represented in books, which makes some readers see more of them irl than there really are. Give us a break from that. Write something *original* instead of modeling your work on all those examples given above.
Remember The Martian? It didn't "need" a villain.
Villains are heroes. Look at history, where generals, kings are the 'conquerors' who invaded, looted and in general destroyed. Inarguably, history tells us that they are heroes. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, roman emperors. To me they are villains.
In a book, villains are whatever you want. Like in one of my books, 'A Criminal with Ethics,' where the main character is a criminal, inside a society flooded with crime. What else can a hero be under those conditions?
Everybody is a hero, in their own eyes. Osama bin Laden did not think of himself as a nut. He thought of himself as a heroic and godly individual.A classic tactic, if you are ISO plot and villains, is to rip it from history. Asimov stole the Roman Empire and put it into the Foundation books. George R.R. Martin has based GAME OF THRONES on medieval history. Roger Zelazny borrowed huge chunks of Hindu mythology for LORD OF LIGHT. I wouldn't retread the old ground -- do not rewrite GAME OF THRONES, please -- but there's masses of history around to borrow.
Brenda wrote: "Everybody is a hero, in their own eyes. Osama bin Laden did not think of himself as a nut. He thought of himself as a heroic and godly individual.A classic tactic, if you are ISO plot and villain..."
Hindu mythology is underused in the west and really cool please people use it more. Warring States(Japan) is very very fertile for ripping ideas from that gets underused in the west as well.
Brenda wrote: "Everybody is a hero, in their own eyes."That's the currently received truth of literature these days, but it's often untrue.
Gordon Gekko has staying power because he knows he's the villain -- and he's based on a real guy. Interviews with CEOs who are classic psychopaths, as Jon Ronson did for his book, proved that some of them are fully aware that they do not conform to any sort of morality and that they lack empathy for their fellow human beings. And they revel in it. They think being a psychopath is awesome.
And that's not even getting into world leaders who are clearly insane.
If Sid is writing a book about this, he should have someone who thinks he's making "hard choices" because he does consider himself the hero of his own story, but there should also be a Putin or Idi Amin, leaders who are fully cognizant that they are bad people and *like* it.
Trike wrote: "Brenda wrote: "Everybody is a hero, in their own eyes."That's the currently received truth of literature these days, but it's often untrue.
Gordon Gekko has staying power because he knows he's t..."
Great points, Brenda and Trike!
I want to actually dig deeper. What has allowed people like Putin and Idi Amin to rise to power? Cruelty and ruthlessness may have allowed these two in particular to rise, but what fundamentally allowed these cruel people to lead their society?
The answers are necessarily complex and obscure. Poverty, rescource scarcity, past injustices (colonialism/WWII reparations) enabled a mileu that promoted the rise of such people. Most military dictators came to power on the backs of a misinformed, wronged, poor, hurting society that deemed itself too weak to resist a strong ruler and nay, even prefered the strong hands of a charismatic leader.
Now, what happens if we strip these socioeconomic realities away?
If we begin to colonize a new planet, resources in abundance, the ability to harvest these resources easy, and it has only been less than a thousand years of expansion starting with a limited population, what kind of breeding grounds for leaders would arise? Surely they would be different from any we've experienced till now.
That's one of the questions I want to answer. Strip away the reasons that many leaders choose to point towards for war and politics: perceived slights, rightful territorial ownership, fighting over common, limited resources - and what remains?
Will there still be war if there is plenty of everything? And if there is, why? Is it just greed for even more, for having the 'most' and ambition for glory?
I really want to talk about that, but I realize how hard it will be for me to come up with tangible stakes for a reader to get invested in, if indeed there is such a cornucopia.
Almost all resource scarcity is driven by politics. It's only when societies collapse entirely due to war (politics again) or a natural catastrophe is scarcity a real thing simply because the system has been broken. Even then, the scarcity is uneven.The major problem with the starvation in Ethiopia back in the 1980s, for instance, was a matter of lack of infrastructure between the abundant, fertile south and the drought-stricken north. They didn't build highways or railroads because local warlords lined their pockets instead. A single highway could have alleviated the entire problem, but politics got in the way. Nearly all the food sent to them never got to its destination. It simply rotted on the trucks because of greed and political expedience. Then when the *real* drought hit a few years ago, the Ethiopian government simply claimed eminent domain on farms in the south and leased them to foreign corporations.
As for a rationale for why people would do this to each other, it's simple: some people are horrible.
There's a great line from the TV show Supernatural:
“People don’t need a reason to kill each other. Have you seen the Irish? They’re all Irish.”
-- War (the Red Horseman of the Apocalypse), Supernatural
I made this a month ago. I don't even remember what it was in reaction to, now:
— Trike (@Trike) May 30, 2015
I once wrote an entire novel inspired by the Moche civilization of coastal Peru, and its agricultural collapse. Got a copy of the archaeological report and everything. It's not a problem of finding stuff -- like I say there is a whole lot of history around. It is the finding of something you can work with.
Brenda wrote: "I once wrote an entire novel inspired by the Moche civilization of coastal Peru, and its agricultural collapse. Got a copy of the archaeological report and everything. It's not a problem of finding..."Definitely. I'm using the European colonization of the Americas as inspiration for the colonization of a relatively untouched landmass. There are plenty of themes within that that can be extrapolated towards space colonization of a new planet. The presence and extent of Earth-based culture on a far removed colony is also something I'd be addressing. Are some Earth cultures better or more likely to be able to/ want to preserve their cultures?
I'm looking at how scientific methodology and thought has evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries, coupled with 21st century digital advances to decide how scientific progress would play out on that planet and how it would shape life fundamentally.
Oh, if anyone likes science microhistories of single topics, I recommend 'The Alchemy of Air" by Thomas Hager. It's a recount of the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process, and how it saved the world and also fueled the rise of Hitler. Things like that fascinate - the intersection of scientific advancement and unintended consequences on society.
SciFi and Fantasy Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
The Martian (other topics)Ancillary Justice (other topics)
Ancillary Justice (other topics)
The Goblin Emperor (other topics)
The Forever War (other topics)
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For the past 800 years, these far flung seeds of humanity have prospered and expanded unchecked across this new planet. Finally, it is time to discuss the future. Will there be borders? Will there be unity? Do 10000 years of human civilization and prior conflicts still have meaning on his new planet? On civilizations that are generations removed from any remnants of earthly conflicts?
The leaders, whose growth we have just studied meet now to discuss this future. Politics, philosophies, and personalities personalities clash to determine the next steps for these leaders and their peoples.
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1. The traditional format would be, of course, to begin with the meeting of the leaders, and discuss their varied upbringings in flashbacks. But I wanted to write something more biographical, something that goes deeper into the study of 'the great man theory' and the relationship between society and the environment on the upbringing of an individual - great or not.
2. Following the individual 'origin' tales allows a better way to flesh out the world and immerse the reader in the different cultures of the planet, and get inside the heads of the protagonists.
3. Showing these individuals clash after getting to know them personally and connecting with them, provides additional ways to create conflict within the reader about who to support, when you (at least in theory) deeply care about almost all of the players.
Would this be too non-standard and not be compelling to read?