In today’s Big Idea, Brenda Clough explore the issues of power, and superpowers, and whether both are more trouble than they are made out to be — and how that affects her new trilogy, of which The River Twice is the first installment.

BRENDA W. CLOUGH:

I was born in Washington DC and have lived here, off and on, all my life. So a fascination with power comes naturally to me. All my novels revolve around power and the difficulties of acquiring and managing it, and my new time travel trilogy Edge to Center is no exception.

And what is time travel but the ultimate power? Think about it. Nothing is over, if you can go back and fix it. No battle lost, no relationship destroyed, no opportunity missed. You blew it big time. But you could go back and make everything right – couldn’t you?

Well … of course not. Who wants to read about Superman steamrollering all the opposition? The whole point about writing about power is to explore the dilemmas it generates.  My hero Jack Wragsland falls into every possible pit of knives his ability to manipulate time allows him to get into. A reasonably conscientious fellow, he does try to fix it. It does not go well.

But there’s more to power than tinkering with space/time. The main tool the human race has developed to manage untrammeled power is government. Only good governance separates Americans from Yemen or North Korea. There’s a reason people want to immigrate into the United States, and it’s not because of our climate. Living in a well-run nation allows you to get stuff done: useful things like staying alive and having a family and not starving to death, picky details like that. And writing books – are there any great novels you know of that written by a resident of Pyongyang? Think of how difficult it would be to start a decent theater project in downtown Lebanon today. If art is the fullest expression of a culture, it’s government that gives the space for that culture to flourish.

So the other protagonist is Calla Ang, heir to an (imaginary) country in Southeast Asia. The problem she has is how to manage her political power. God knows there are plenty of knife pits a ruler can fall into, and the misery this can generate is just as great as meddling with time lines. Which Jack helps her with, a couple times.

There is a solution within the story, one that both characters work towards. It’s a grown-up answer, not an action-movie solution, kind of Zen: that you don’t have to wield the sword. You can have the power, and hold it back. Sometimes the wiser path is to simply not use the maximal weapon in your hand. Of course you can dive in there, thrashing and trashing, and that makes (I trust) for a thrilling set of novels. But if you keep on throwing the big hammer, are you smart? Sometimes, as Tolkien told us, the answer is small and mundane.

I insist that my protagonists be smart. Jack and Calla make horrible mistakes, but they learn from them. They don’t keep on banging their heads against walls. They grope their way, eventually, to a solution that Marvel heroes would never fall into.

—-

The River Twice: Amazon|Book View Cafe

Visit the author’s site. Read the Book View Cafe blog.

Who tells the story of a novel? For her new novel The Widows, the question is not an academic one for Jess Montgomery — her story of 1920s Appalachia hinged on the right voice to tell the tale.

JESS MONTGOMERY:

A few years ago, we were planning our first trip to visit our younger daughter for her birthday weekend at Ohio University, in Athens County, Ohio. While searching for places to hike in the Appalachian foothills, I ran across a tourism website for Vinton County (just southwest of Athens County), which featured Maude Collins, Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925 after her husband was killed in the line of duty while writing a speeding ticket.  Maude worked as her husband’s jail matron in the small jail attached to the county-owned sheriff’s house, where they lived with their five children. So perhaps it was expedient practicality that led the county commissioners to ask Maude to fill out her husband’s term. In any case, she won election in her own right as sheriff in 1926—in a landslide.

My imagination immediately sparked at the notion of a woman in law enforcement at a time when that was nearly unheard of. (Women still represent a minority of officers in sheriff’s departments.) But I was also taken with the mix of attributes I saw in Maude’s expression in a photograph of her: toughness and tenderness. Sorrow and selflessness.

I was also drawn by the setting of Maude’s story—1920s Appalachia. So many 1920s stories and books are set in big cities. The pop image of 1920s femininity is a sequined flapper girl with a feathered headband. Both Maude and the setting went counter to stereotypical 1920s imagery.

What’s more, my family of origin is from Appalachia, with deep roots that go back generation after generation on both sides. I grew up steeped in Appalachian lore, dialect, food, attitudes, customs, crafts, music. When I was in high school, I wrote a musical, “Just an Old Ballad,” inspired by the Appalachian ballads I’d grown up learning. Amazingly, my school’s drama teacher allowed me to produce and direct it—and I cast in the lead male role a young man who I’d later date and marry. Thirty-plus years later, we’re still happily married—a pretty great outcome for a self-penned and produced high school musical!

A deep desire to write again in such a setting quickly came to the surface as I considered Maude’s story, time and place. And soon, I started asking the sort of “what if” questions that lead writers—and their characters—to interesting places. What if a 1920s Appalachian sheriff is murdered—but his young wife doesn’t know who did it? What if she fulfills his role, motivated by the burning need to find out who killed her beloved—and why? What might she discover about him? About herself? About her community?

Soon I’d developed Lily Ross and an inkling of plot. I started writing from Lily’s point-of-view, in the past tense.

The story fell flat.

I wrote forty or so pages incorporating the murderer’s point-of-view.

The story felt cliched.

I wrote a hundred or so pages from the point-of-view of Daniel, the murdered sheriff in my story.

The story felt forced.

But through all these misstarts, another character emerged—Marvena Whitcomb. Daniel’s friend since childhood. A widow herself, after her common-law husband died in a mine collapse. A unionizer. A moonshiner.

And as I wrote, I realized that Marvena and Lily were unlikely allies, destined to discover together who had murdered Daniel and why.

What’s more, I realized that the story’s Big Idea wasn’t woman-in-1920s-becomes-sheriff-and-solves-murder-of-husband.

The Big Idea was about relationships and community. How those can support us, yet betray us. How difficult it can be to balance individual desires with the needs of the community. What it can cost our humanity—or give our humanity—no matter how we tilt the balance, whether toward our individual wishes or toward the community.

I realized that though Lily is the main protagonist of The Widows because she has the greatest character growth and change, the story needed to be told from the point of view of both women. Together, they do so much more than solve the crime of the murder of the man they both love in different ways. Through them, so much comes to life. Daniel, in their hearts and memories. Their community, in all its many aspects, both wonderful and dark. The backdrop of their story—woven from worker’s rights, strife between union miners and management, women’s rights, prohibition, coal mining.

Once I realized that The Big Idea in The Widows is the relationship between Lily and Marvena, and how it develops, the story began to unfold and live for me.

I hope it does, as well, for readers.

—-

The Widows: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

Can a “big idea” be a bad idea? Author James L. Cambias (who has been one of my favorite writers since we were both at the University of Chicago together) grapples with this problem, and how confronting this issue made his new novel Arkad’s World all the better.

JAMES L. CAMBIAS:

“It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”

— David St. Hubbins

Sometimes Big Ideas can be dangerous.* My new novel Arkad’s World was almost killed by a Big Idea.

The book is (in part) a love letter to boys’ adventure stories. As a tip of the hat to one of the greatest adventure stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I wanted to include an ambiguous villain — a Long John Silver type character, who would seemingly befriend my young hero Arkad, while pursuing a selfish hidden agenda.

My incredibly clever Big Idea would be that this slippery character would never actually say anything true. His statements would all be sarcastic, or jokes, or rhetorical questions; and when he actually seemed to be speaking in a straightforward manner he was lying. This pathologically untruthful villain would get hold of Arkad, and the two of them would search for a lost spaceship containing Earth’s lost cultural and historical treasures. Meanwhile, a seemingly menacing rival team (who are of course actually the good guys) pursue them and ultimately Arkad realizes he has been duped.

Sounds good, right? Very clever, right?

Okay, here’s the problem. My young hero is naive. He knows a lot about the world he lives on, but almost nothing about what’s going on elsewhere in the Galaxy. He doesn’t know how important the lost spaceship is. He doesn’t know the political background.

And the only character who can tell him all that important information is lying all the time. Which meant the reader can’t find out any of this stuff either.

For about six months in 2015 I bashed my head against this project, until I finally realized that my clever Big Idea was actually a really bad Big Idea. It was so clever that it crossed the line into Stupid. I had to scrap most of what I had written, redo my outline, eliminate my unreliable character, and start over.

The delay meant that I didn’t finish the manuscript until the end of January, 2016. I was about a week away from submitting it when I got the news that David Hartwell had died.

David was my editor at Tor. He “discovered” me and published my first two novels. He gave me encouragement and wise advice. I wanted him to see this book — not just because I wanted to sell it to him, but because I wanted his opinion of it. I wanted to impress him.

But because of my stupid clever Big Idea, he never saw Arkad’s World. I felt really bad about that.

His death also meant an emergency reorganization at Tor Books. Without David as an advocate, Arkad’s World kind of fell through the cracks, and the company declined to publish it.

In the end, it was someone else’s Big Idea — an absolutely crazy-sounding Big Idea — which finally got Arkad’s World published. In the Fall of 2017, at Gregory Benford’s urging, I went to the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama. (You can read my account of it here.) The TVIW is a conference dedicated to actually building and launching an interstellar probe to Proxima Centauri by 2060. It sounds mad, but right now I wouldn’t actually bet real money that it won’t happen. The people involved in the project are very smart and very dedicated, and at least a couple of them are very wealthy.

On the third day of the conference I played hooky along with some other science fiction writers — including Allen Steele, Sarah Hoyt, and Toni Weisskopf, the publisher at Baen Books. We went on a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center, including a visit to the old Saturn rocket engine test stand from the Apollo program. Ms. Weisskopf and I were both disinclined to climb the rickety-looking stairs all the way to the top, so we had a little time to chat while the others made the ascent. I told her about Arkad’s World, and she asked to see it.

Pitching a science fiction novel to an editor when you’re halfway up a rocket test stand is pretty damned cool. I think the Rule of Coolness forced Ms. Weisskopf to buy the book. Which she did. And now it’s out, so everyone can see the Big Ideas I didn’t have to throw out.

*See the history of the 20th Century for examples.

—-

Arkad’s World: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site.

I liked Breakfast With Einstein so much I gave it a blurb, which you can see in the image above. But why did I like it? Because it explores the esoteric realm of quantum physics — here in the everyday world. Here’s the author, Chad Orzel, to dig deeper into it all.

(PS: The UK edition of this book made the Sunday Times list for Best Books of the Year, 2018. Not bad!)

CHAD ORZEL:

Quantum mechanics is one of the most amazing theories in all of science, full of stuff that captures the imagination: zombie cats, divine dice-rolling, spooky actions over vast distances. Maybe the single most amazing thing about it, though, is that we think it’s weird.

That probably seems a strange thing to say, because quantum physics is so weird, but that’s exactly the point. These are the fundamental principles governing the behavior of everything in the universe, and yet they run completely counter to our intuition about how the world works. If these are the basic rules underlying everything, shouldn’t they make sense? How can the entire universe behave according to strictly quantum laws, and yet we’re not intuitively aware of it?

The answer is that quantum behaviors only become obvious when you’re looking at really small things: the behavior of electrons within atoms, say, or smallish groups of atoms moving slowly. As the things you’re looking at get bigger, their quantum-ness sort of blurs out, and we’re left with objects that, to an excellent approximation, behave according to the rules of Newtonian physics. The everyday, human-scale world, is just too big for us to see quantum physics in action.

At least, that’s what we think. If you know where to look, though, you can find hints of quantum physics absolutely everywhere, even in the most mundane of activities. The process of getting up in the morning and getting ready for work or school is absolutely full of phenomena and technologies with quantum roots.

Quantum physics got its start in an attempt to explain the red glow of a hot object like the heating element in the toaster you use to make breakfast — to explain that color, you need light to behave like a particle. Quantum physics determines the time on the alarm clock that wakes you up, through the cesium atomic clocks that we use to define the second — to make that connection, you need electrons to behave like waves. Quantum physics enables the sensors in the digital cameras your friends use to take cat photos, the semiconductor computer chips used to process them, and the lasers that carry them over fiber-optic telecommunications lines for you to stare blearily at as you sip your morning beverage of choice.

At the deepest level, the universe really does behave according to quantum mechanics, and while the huge size of the human-scale world mostly blurs out quantum phenomena, there are subtle hints left behind. That’s how we know about quantum physics, after all– from the work of scientists who spotted those little clues in the behavior of human-scale objects, and doggedly followed them to uncover the fundamental rules that we find so weird.

Breakfast with Einstein is a book about those clues, about how quantum phenomena manifest in everything that we do. It explains the quantum rules that govern everything, and how those rules applied to huge numbers of atoms combine to produce the world that we see. And it tells you where to look to see quantum physics in your daily routine. It probably won’t make you a morning person, but it might help make your mornings a little more amazing.

—-

Breakfast With Einstein: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|One World Publications (UK)

Visit Orzel’s writing for Forbes. See his personal blog. Follow him on Twitter.

You want to give your children every advantage… but how far would you go to give them those advantages? It’s a question that Arwen Elys Dayton is intensely engaged with in her new book Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful.

ARWEN ELYS DAYTON: 

About a week ago, a researcher in Shenzhen, China, named He Jiankui claimed to have used CRISPR to edit the DNA of twin girls who were born in late 2018. When the girls were early-stage embryos in a petri dish, He made changes to their genetic code to eliminate a gene called CCR5 and so render them resistant to HIV and other diseases. He was, according to reports, at least partially successful. The work hasn’t been independently verified, but no one is questioning that it’s possible. Because it is entirely possible.

Since 2012, when an element of bacterial immune systems was isolated and its potential for altering any DNA became widely understood, researchers all over the world have been figuring out how to use this tool—called CRISPR, as you have probably guessed—to usher in a new age of genetic manipulation. From editing human immune cells so that they can fight or even prevent HIV and cancer, to removing inherited disease, to giving future generations traits that no humans have ever had (night vision? immunity to the flu?), we are on a frontier of artificial human evolution. Aside from CRISPR, there are numberless advances occurring in all aspects of medicine. At least four groups are working to grow human-compatible (or outright human) organs in livestock, researchers all over the world are pursuing competing techniques for fighting the “disease” of old age, and various labs are focused on editing not humans but the insects that infect us—like mosquitos—to wipe out diseases that have been scourges for thousands of years.

The future is unfolding in research universities and biotech companies, and yes, even in sketchy, possibly unsanitary home garages. We are already debating who gets to make the choices about what can and cannot be changed in our DNA. But while we debate, some researchers have started choosing. And editing.

My natural mindset is not dystopian but intensely hopeful, and the idea that we might soon be able to remove disease from humankind is . . .well, it’s like a realization of the most inspiring parts of the science-fiction stories I grew up with. And as a mother, I instinctively, innately, want my children to have every advantage. Resistance to cancer? Who would say no? Longer life? Of course I want that for them. Higher intelligence? A stickier question, to be sure, but if it were only a matter of a few tiny adjustments . . . ?

I want to believe that, given infinite options, I would have strong convictions about what was acceptable and what was too much. But would I? Would you? How do we—intellectually, morally, and viscerally—weigh such options? And here is the birthplace of Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful—not the science itself, but the emotional life under the coming genetic paradigm.

When I was eleven years old, I watched a news story about a girl who was the same age as I was. She was refusing medical treatment for a fatal but curable disease because it went against the religious beliefs of her family. I have thought about that girl during all of these intervening years. How could she (or perhaps, some would say, only her parents) feel so strongly as to be willing to accept death rather than a proven alternative? And yet, as a fellow eleven-year-old, I also believed that she should have some say, some choice, in what was done to her, regardless of the consequences. The push and pull of my feelings about that girl, who probably died decades ago and whose name I can’t remember, were my touchstones in writing this novel. I wanted to paint myself into corners that felt just like that one. Or worse.

What happens if the design of a designer baby doesn’t go to plan? Where—and how—will he spend his life? (In Stronger, the answer is this: mostly underwater, away from other humans whom he does not understand, keeping busy by wrangling a flock of manatees that are growing human organs for transplant.) Other murky scenarios include a pair of semi-identical twins—both are dying, and the decision is made to harvest the healthy organ tissue from one to save the life of the other; forced modification of convicted felons to make them useful to society; the ability to keep a piece of a dead loved one alive . . . inside yourself. Unconscionable? Yes . . . for some.

On a meta level: What happens if countries cannot agree on biological ethics? Or on what makes (and keeps) humans human? When will this become a political issue? And what happens if religious groups make unwavering medical stands? Can we foresee a “Genetic Curtain” dividing the parts of the world where anything goes and the parts where humanity chooses not to change?

These intimate and grand puzzles were the big idea in Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful. The science will happen—is happening!—no matter what we do (short of a planet-killing asteroid or plague or other apocalyptic option, of course). How we use the science to change ourselves, and who we become as a result . . . well, that’s the question. And it was delicious and terrifying to explore.

—-

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful: Amazon |Barnes and Noble | Indiebound | Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Visit Get Underlined. Visit her on twitter.

A love of family history and a desire not to wander the fairlanes in their spare time led Steve Nedvidek and his co-creators to make The Jekyll Island Chronicles, an alt-history graphic novel series. How did these motivations end up combined into a colorful artistic creation? Nedvidek explains it all.

STEVE NEDVIDEK:

I was a kid who grew up enthralled by heroes and the worlds they inhabited: aliens with super powers, talking apes on another planet, and musketeers in some place called Paris.  Heck, even Charlie had a chocolate factory. But one day, much later, I realized my biggest heroes were a part of my family. They were REAL people who did REAL things and made REAL differences to me.

My father was a Marine who fought in Korea, taught me to draw, and worked in a factory his whole life. My grandfather was an immigrant from Bohemia who joined the US Cavalry to gain his citizenship, raised three sons, and could handle a bullwhip. So cool…

I began to wonder. “What were their worlds like?” Especially Grandpa. With little or no information kept by the family, my imagination kicked in and I began to dig into a time of our history that I had learned very little about—the early 1900’s. I found this world interesting and fresh and, really for the most part, unknown to me: the Great War, the League of Nations, Henry Ford, tech that was changing the world, and people who parented the kids that would become “the greatest generation.”

A convergence occurred that I noodled on for subsequent years: Why were none of the heroes I grew up with in THIS time frame? Why were superheroes only after WWII and why were they either aliens or somehow mutated? Wouldn’t it be awesome if veterans like my grandfather had access to the coolest gadgets of the time? What if Tesla and Carnegie designed superhero costumes? What would THOSE heroes be like?

In my adult years, with a family, mortgage, and full-time job, I found two friends in the same situation. Like me, my long-time friends Ed Crowell and Jack Lowe had familial connections to WWI, had read Tolkien and Bradbury and Wells and Stan Lee as kids, and wanted to tell a compelling story.

None of us played golf very well, especially me. So, we set off to do the next best thing.

“Let’s make a graphic novel,” I said. “That’ll be fun!”

Working on our short game would’ve actually been easier. Writing something that was basically an elevator speech—action heroes battling anarchists right after World War I—wasn’t easy. Especially when we had done NOTHING like this before. And while we did have great vigor and energy in our inexperience, we also had some pretty great assists.

First, we had Jekyll Island: THE Jekyll Island with its iconic Jekyll Island Club. The place where the Federal Reserve was created. The Golden Isles were winter home of Pulitzer. And Rockefeller. And Morgan. And Carnegie. 1/6 of the world’s wealth called Jekyll home. These Golden Isles are magical. They are REAL. The homes of many of these industrialists are still intact for visitors to see. Jekyll was the natural locale for our story to take place.

We also had SCAD—the Savannah College of Art and Design. That was one of our other “big ideas.” We sponsored a class in Savannah for high level sequential arts students to help us visualize our heroic characters, the cabal of evil anarchists, and the machines that would dominate our alt history/diesel punk world. The students of SCAD were charged with creating a pitch packet for us, that would help us persuade publishers and production companies to take a look at the story we were trying to tell.

We had a successful Kickstarter campaign that gave us financing. Here’s a fact: a graphic novel is insanely expensive to produce. Every word on the page must be laid out, drawn, inked, colored, and all sound effects and copy bubbles must be added. I had been a cartoonist most of my life, but I cannot do THAT.  It was going to cost us.

We had history. A typical writer’s meeting in my basement had each of us with our computer open, scouring and verifying weird and little known facts of the Gilded Age. “Hey, look at this!”, “Did you guys know…?”, and “Oh man, this is amazing!” were often heard. In a way, stringing together these factoids (like the explosion of a blimp over Chicago or the mail bomb campaign of 1919) created a narrative that in many ways wrote itself. This is the blessing of history and the extra blessing of alt history.

And, this sounds corny, but we had each other. There are three of us on this team. Having three co-creators makes it easier to handle the load of writing duties, setting up social media (newsflash: men in their 50’s aren’t good at this), talking to newspapers, paying bills, getting cosplay costumes ready for Comic Con, and doing whatever was required to finish Book One. To be sure, there were times of tension, arm wrestling, and frustration with each other. But, in the end we know that this thing does NOT GET DONE if we don’t cooperate. So, we do.

Plus, we are still having fun! Book Two is done and is released this week, just in time for the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. Our publisher is making a donation to the WWI Centennial Commission for each book in the series sold in November and December. This will go to help complete the memorial in Washington, DC to those that fought in the Great War—it’s the only modern war still without a memorial in our Capital.

Book Three is started and should be out in mid-2020.

And although our golf games still stink, we have our world:  weird facts, exotic locations, supercharged machines, historical characters, a dollop of fantasy, and super cool heroes–all of whom are vets of the first World War.

I think Grandpa would be proud.

—-

The Jekyll Island Chronicles: A Devil’s Reach: Amazon|Indiebound|Powell’s|IDW

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Visit him on twitter.

Wiping out a terrible disease that kills millions each year: An unmitigated good, yes? Well, hold on there — Nancy Kress is here to explain how there are consequences to every action, and what those consequences mean for you, and her new novel, Terran Tomorrow.

NANCY KRESS:

Why should you care about gene drives?

Right now, I can see you thinking: I don’t! Next! But give me five minutes to explain why you should.

First, the five-second-or-so version (depending on how fast you read): Genes drive can, and soon will try to, eliminate an entire species.  Sparrows, wolves, mosquitos, and you are all species.

The five-minute version: A gene drive is an artificial “selfish gene” capable of forcing itself into 99% of an animal’s offspring, instead of the usual 50%. Theoretically, they could affect promoter genes, which are in charge of turning other genes on and off. In actuality so far, we know that they can affect reproduction by turning all males or females (pick one) of a species sterile. We know this because London researchers, supported in large part by the Gates Foundation, have succeeded in creating this gene drive in females of the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles gambiae sterile. At the same time, as part of the international effort Target Malaria, a small field trial with sterile male Anopheles will begin in Burkina Faso by the end of 2018. If all goes well, Anopheles may eventually be eliminated, and with it malaria.

What if all does not go well?

What if it does?

What if the same technique is used to eliminate other species?

These are the places that hard science fiction looks for stories—the impact craters of major technological advances like gene drives. I write hard SF, and my new novel, Terran Tomorrow, is interested in the impacts, good and bad, of genetic engineering on the natural world. Since those impacts are made by people, Terran Tomorrow deals not only with how people mess around with genes but also, and more importantly, why.  For what good or bad reasons, under what circumstances, with what consequences. How do we clean up other people’s genetic messes? How do we clean up our own—and at what personal sacrifices? Science is much more about people than petri dishes.

Terran Tomorrow is the conclusion of my Tomorrow’s Kin trilogy, which began with the Nebula-winning novella “Yesterday’s Kin.”  In the first book, aliens came to Earth. In the second book, humans went to World. In this third book, humans and a few aliens return to Earth, and are startled and shocked by the changes since they left. Environmental changes, personal changes, a complete upending of the social order. Time dilation, if it brings a decade of genetic warfare, can do that.

Marianne Jenner, evolutionary biologist, is caught between the clashing philosophies of her now-grown grandsons, ecologist Colin Jenner and his brother, U.S. Army Colonel Jason Jenner. Geneticist Zack McKay and his fractious scientific team are trying under impossible conditions to create a planet-saving gene drive. Alien visitors are rebelling. So are ex-wives. A civil war rages. And sparrows are now deadly.

Sparrows? Yes, because, as I mentioned in the five-minute version of why gene drives matter, they can theoretically affect other genes besides those regulating the reproductive system. There are also promoter genes affecting various metabolic pathways in organs such as the brain.

In real life, scientists are exploring links between microglia, a form of brain cells, and both schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s, in which microglia don’t seem to be functioning optimally. Could a gene drive change that? Or cause it? What else in the brain can be permanently changed with a gene drive?

In Terran Tomorrow, people must confront and act on two of the most difficult questions in genetics: How much risk do we undertake in experimenting with the building blocks of life? And if others have experimented and the results are catastrophic, how much risk do we undertake trying to clean up their disaster?

There are no easy answers to those questions, not in real life nor in fiction. That’s what makes the questions worth doing what SF does best: rehearsing one possible future. Because gene drives are already here.

—-

Terran Tomorrow: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Facebook.

 

Sometimes you start write something for fun, and then suddenly… the stakes become higher than that. Just ask Alexandra Rowland about that, as it concerns her new book, A Conspiracy of Truths.

ALEXANDRA ROWLAND:

Stories are in everything. If the human brain has been optimized for one purpose, it’s storytelling.

Well, okay, I’m being poetic. It’s pattern recognition, technically, if you want to be dreadfully literal about it. We look into the night sky and see a random scattering of stars, and we impose order on it, drawing constellations and filling up the void with patterns—stories. We see a piece of paper with green ink making pictures, and we impose a story on that too: Not just paper and green ink, but money, a dollar, and suddenly that same scrap of paper and ink has the arbitrary worth of approximately one candy bar.

Show someone a story, tempt them into giving one percent of their attention to it, and you can hack right into that part of their lizard brain that evolved to make educated guesses about the world around them, the better to keep them alive in a hostile wilderness. And once you’re in, once you have them by the throat, you can do all sorts of things to a person. You can lead them all sorts of places.

These days, the hostile wilderness is made of stories—it’s not just the effortless access we have to movies, TV shows, games, but also the battering tempest of the unending news cycle, the way social media amplifies the audience’s every scream of response. Someone realized once how irresistible patterns are to our brains and, because capitalism, monetized it and set it loose on an unsuspecting population. Half of the reason it feels so good to take a day or two away from Twitter is because your brain gets a rest from endlessly and reflexively sifting through clickbait and propaganda. There’s such a torrent of false positives that we survive by resisting the instincts of our lizard brains, armoring ourselves against the very stories that we’ve evolved to embrace. And it’s hard. We’re just not wired for that.

When I began writing A Conspiracy of Truths, it was only ever supposed to be for fun. It was supposed to be my procrastination project – a low-stress, low-stakes, low-pressure thing for me to screw around with, experimenting and tinkering and fucking up as freely as I pleased while I avoided the other book I was working on, the one I was Serious about. “I wonder how much worldbuilding I can cram into one novel without it getting annoying,” I thought to myself, blithely ignoring the other project I was allegedly committed to. “Let’s try it for the sake of science and see what happens. No gods, no masters, eh?”

But stories are in everything, and the human brain is optimized for them, and… things rather got away from me. Things seem to have, uh, really gotten away from me.

First, the damn thing disregarded all my intentions and grew its own plot – a story, initially just a framework to support the weight of the world I was constructing on top of it, but gradually taking up more of the space, more of the weight, more of my attention. And then, I suppose, either to spite me or to prove a point, it made its story about stories: About the power of the right lie whispered in the right ear, about the power of truth deployed strategically, about the ways we take strength from stories, what they do for us, how they change us.

The main character and snarky first-person narrator, Chant (a member of an order of wandering storytellers going back thousands of years) gets arrested, accused of witchcraft and espionage, and thrown in jail. He is looking at a very real possibility of being killed for crimes he didn’t commit, and he has nothing—no money for bribes, no friends in high places—just the clothes on his back, the words on his tongue, and a complete inability to give up and accept defeat.

When all you have is a hammer, every problem in the world looks like a nail: So, for the lack of any other tools at his disposal, Chant hammers stories at every ear he can reach. He knows he doesn’t need to change someone’s mind completely—all he needs, in most cases, is to plant a seed of doubt, to make them empathize with him for a split second, to make them pause, and wonder, and listen. He saves his sorry neck with stories.

I finished writing this book in mid-September of 2016, about six weeks before the election that brought us a painfully sharp reminder of the undeniable and overwhelming efficacy of propaganda. The book was only supposed to be an experiment in worldbuilding, but it became more about manipulating reality. The moral, if there is one, comes down to this: “It doesn’t matter if it happened that way in real life, as long as the story is good, as long as it’s truer than truth.”

Let me tell you the truth.

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A Conspiracy of Truths: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (scroll down on the page). Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

Science Fiction writers love science, but we don’t always get the science we already know 100% correct. Fortunately, Dan Koboldt is on the case, with his book Putting the Science in Fiction.

DAN KOBOLDT:

A few years ago, I wrote an article for Apex Magazine called “Eye-based Paternity Testing and Other Human Genetics Myths,” mostly because I was irritated at how frequently I encountered misconceptions about genetic inheritance in books, television, movies, and other media. I’ve worked as a genetics researcher for fifteen years, and it surprises me at how often people get this stuff wrong.

One frequent myth is the idea that physical traits like (like eye color) are inherited in classic Mendelian (i.e. dominant and recessive) fashion and can predict family relationships. The rock song “All I Wanna Do” by Heart is a great example. A woman has a one-night stand with a young man who apparently is hitchhiking. Years later, they run into each other and she’s got a child. “You can imagine his surprise,” the song goes, “when he saw his own eyes.”

It’s a great song but also not very realistic. Having similar eyes doesn’t make two people related. While it’s true that blood relatives often resemble one another, most physical traits that we think of as “genetic” are influenced by multiple genes and environmental factors. Eye color is a spectrum, and appears to be influenced by at least 15 different genes. It doesn’t always follow predictable inheritance patterns, either. People with blue eyes can have brown-eyed children and vice-versa.

In other words, eye color, like most physical traits, is not a good paternity test.

Another common myth is the idea of a “advantageous” mutation that changes an ordinary person into a superhero. It’s true that exposure things like radiation, carcinogens, and some classes of viruses can cause genetic mutations. However, a mutation occurs in the DNA of a single cell. Our bodies have millions of cells by the time we’re adults. Most mutations have no effect. Some may be deleterious, causing the cell to die. Even fewer mutations confer some kind of advantage to the cell, allowing it to grow and divide. If this happens, you don’t become a superhero; you’ve got cancer. Sorry, Spiderman.

After I wrote the article, I thought it might be fun to have an ongoing blog series to educate authors about scientific and technical aspects of science fiction. The problem was that many of the relevant topics were outside my area of expertise. We may not like to admit it, but scientists don’t know everything. We tend to specialize in a given field, and outside of it we may not have any more knowledge than the average person.

I wanted my blog articles to be written by true experts. After all, someone who works in a relevant field on a day-to-day basis can provide depth and nuance that you won’t find on Wikipedia. Also, their information tends to be more up-to-date, because not all of us get around to writing books or updating the relevant wiki page.

So I started to collect experts in other subject areas. The SFF community, as it turns out, is full of them. Most writers have day jobs, after all, and a lot of them work in science, engineering, medicine, and other technical fields. This was the genesis of my Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series. Each week, I invite an expert to discuss their real world expertise as it applies to science fiction. Most of the contributors are SFF fans themselves, so they offer some lovely examples of works that get things wrong (or right).

Fast forward a few years, and the blog series had collected something like 150 articles representing a wide range of disciplines. Eventually, someone smarter than me had the idea to collect this useful information into a book. I thought that Writer’s Digest books would be the ideal publisher for such a reference. Luckily, they agreed.

Putting the Science in Fiction includes 59 chapters from a wide range of technical experts who collectively have endured more than 200 years of graduate school. Two thirds of the book’s contributors identify as female, by the way, so we’ve kept the “mansplaining” to a minimum. There’s also a hilarious foreword by bestselling author Chuck Wendig.

Our goal is simple: to help writers add a dose of realism to their science fiction stories. Every chapter is short and to the point; we address common pitfalls and misconceptions, and then offer some tips for getting the details right. With a bit of expert guidance, anyone can write stories that are realistic and compelling (even to readers who know a lot about the underlying science). And that, my friends, is the big idea.

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Putting the Science in Fiction: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site.

Magic is powerful and can change the world — but in Beth Cato’s new novel Roar of Sky, magic also has consequences, especially for those who wield it.

BETH CATO:

In my books, I write about women who are strong in realistic ways. In my first series, The Clockwork Dagger, Octavia Leander is a medician who is defined by her compassion and her courage to make a stand, whether in a battlefield surgical tent or against drunken punks pummeling gremlins for their amusement. I wrote her the way I did because I was sick and tired of waiting for someone else to write books about my favorite role-playing game archetypes–white wizards and clerics–as the main heroes, not as convenient doctors there to keep the big burly warriors alive.

I had a different idea in mind as I started Breath of Earth, the first book in my Blood of Earth trilogy. Ingrid Carmichael is a smart and savvy woman of color in an alternate history version of 1906. America and Japan are allied as the Unified Pacific and in the process of dominating mainland Asia. The economy and technology of her world is driven by geomancy: energy harvested from the earth and stored in crystals called kermanite. This harvesting is perilous business. Geomancers take in the power of an earthquake and hold it as a fever. This means that in a big earthquake, the lash of power could kill a geomancer almost instantly if they don’t break direct contact with the ground or channel the energy into kermanite.

When I describe the plot of Breath of Earth at conventions, I like to say, “Spoiler alert! There’s a big earthquake.” There’s no hiding that the climax of the novel is the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, but in this version of history, it happens for very different reasons.

Did I mention that Ingrid happens to be a geomancer? A really, really, powerful geomancer? Something women aren’t supposed to be–and certainly not women who look like her.

The second book, Call of Fire, takes the action up to the Pacific Northwest. To save herself and countless others, she must risk holding a whole lot of geomantic energy.

Some people insist that fantasy writers have it easy because magic provides an easy solution to problems. Not in my books. Magic carries consequences and Ingrid is a human woman channeling demigod-level powers. Her body is irreparably damaged. As I already established in my other series, I don’t believe Ingrid should be conveniently healed and sent on her way.

The cover of my trilogy’s finale, Roar of Sky, shows Ingrid standing amid the lava fields of Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island. She holds a guandao, a halberd-type weapon, but not to wield it in battle. She now relies on various aids to help her walk, climb stairs, and perform other basic functions. The events of the previous two books have left her in constant, nearly debilitating pain.

Even though I write a lot about magic, I see my books as fundamentally realistic. The women I know embody a quiet kind of strength that isn’t readily depicted in genre novels. They deal with pain on a daily basis, but they endure. They have trouble walking. It takes them several tries to get up from a chair. They cope with migraines that stab their eyes like ice picks, yet they get kids ready for school, drive, and do what needs to be done with one eye open. They endure. The women I know wouldn’t work well for some motivational feature on the nightly news; their lives are too normal, too boring. But you know what? They endure.

Ingrid is a gifted geomancer, but what enables her to stay alive isn’t her godlike power. It’s her endurance, her willingness to adapt, to find a way to stand up even through sheer agony. That’s what makes her a strong character, like so many of the real women I know.

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Roar of Sky: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

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In today’s Big Idea, we learn of the tomb of a surprising person in a surprising location, and how K. Bird Lincoln used it to think about the world and characters she created in her new novel, Black Pearl Dreaming.

K. BIRD LINCOLN:

I grew up Lutheran in a mostly white church in Cleveland, Ohio. Imagine my surprise twenty years ago in Tokyo when my then-boyfriend’s kooky uncle leaned across the dinner table, bathing me in whiskey sour breath and said, “Hey, I’m from Shingo-mura, the town in Aomori that has Jesus’ Tomb.”

Right. For sure. Smile. Take another sip of beer.

I’d been told weirder things before, so I brushed it off. Only, the whole “Jesus’s Tomb” thing wouldn’t let go of me. Once Google became popular around 2002 that drunken phrase niggled at my brain cells until I caved and dropped down a rabbit hole of weirder-than-fiction history.

Kooky uncle’s surname, Herai, is actually quite unique in Japan. The Google rabbit hole revealed the theory it’s a Katakana-pronunciation version of “Hebrew” in Japanese. Regardless of what you believe, TripAdvisor lists “Christ’s Grave” as the number one “Thing to Do” in Shingo-mura. The city has a page that explains the whole history in English. TLDR: Jesus escaped Golgotha across Siberia, went to Northern Japan, changed his name to Daitenku Taro Jurai, married a farmer and had three daughters.

Huh. That wasn’t in my Sunday School class. My first instinct was affront, derision, disbelief. How could a country like Japan presume to claim Jesus? They couldn’t just steal him from centuries of Western tradition, culture and religion with an absurd story!

Fast forward a decade and I’d lived in Japan, had children, traveled widely, and experienced many ways in which U.S. culture has appropriated Asian cultural heritage in equally absurd ways. My children are biracial Japanese-Caucasian, and at the time I wrote the Urban Fantasy Dream Eater, there weren’t many multi-racial heroines represented in fantasy genres I read the most.

Believe me, I know exactly how fine a line I would walk presuming to write about Japanese culture from an insider perspective. So, I didn’t. The Portland Hafu series is based in “third nation” cultural identity: the shared habits, experiences, and traditions created at the intersection of two or more peoples.

Like my daughters who must feel awkward and guilty both at the Hiroshima Memorial and Pearl Harbor. Like Koi Pierce Herai in Dream Eater’s sequel, Black Pearl Dreaming, who is both U.S. and Japanese, and a mix of human and creature of the myth-based Kind.

The Big Idea is this: The people who wrestle every day with what to take and what to ignore from their cultural heritages, whose outside perspective even in the country of their birth, are the ones who will save the world.

Claiming Jesus is buried in a small town in Aomori may be absurd, but it does not perpetuate derogatory stereotypes or bring moral harm in a racist or sexist manner to Lutherans (or even Jews.) In Black Pearl Dreaming, Koi travels to Aomori and rightly ignores the Grave of Christ to focus on bigger issues. She contends with tricky, racist wounds still festering from the World War II Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the U.S.’s use of the Atomic Bomb. What do we owe those we’ve harmed in war? What if the harm inflicted allows the survival of a people? Who is qualified to judge the balance of good or evil? Or forgive.

When the stakes are high, it is those who are fluid with their identity, who cannot force their round pegs into one solid square nationalistic shape, that have the meta perspective necessary to empathize with all sides.

Regardless of your politics, the times are calling for more empathy, more understanding of disparate points of view. It’s the interstitial and the third nation folks who may hold the key to humanity’s ultimate survival.

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Black Pearl Dreaming: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Kobo

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Call Steven Erikson a radical, a rebel or just someone who watches too much TV, but the fact is: Right now, a particular trope of fiction has him fed up. And he’s doing something about it, as he explains in this Big Idea for his latest, Rejoice, A Knife the Heart.

STEVEN ERIKSON:

I have a confession. I watch a lot of television. When it’s not sports that I’m watching, it’s dramatic series, be they mainstream or Netflix or any of a number of available networks. And I go to films. A lot. Sometimes I wonder why I bother, since my disaffection grows. What’s bothering me about all these television shows, series, and all those films? In a lot of them (okay, in most of them), at some point, somewhere, a certain expression of power shows up. I’m not talking the superhero flicks here. I’m talking about something rather subtler, so commonplace we barely notice, even though it drives plot after plot.

It’s this: men with black sunglasses and wearing suits and driving black SUVs show up. They chase down the hero, truss them up and whisk them away. Or the hero escapes a few times, only to eventually confront whatever hidden hegemony is behind all the secrecy, and it’s the black-suits all getting gunned down in the white heat of righteous rage (because, really, who wouldn’t?).

Or: a SWAT team kicks in the door and basically does the same thing. Or maybe it’s a Special Forces squad. Or how about the classic combination: SWAT team and some guy in a lab coat wearing wire-rimmed glasses who’s always last to arrive.

The point is, time and again, some hidden authority barrels into the story, and we’re off and running. Now, for entertainment purposes, sure, it’s what we’re kind of used to these days: secret cabals of government/corporation/whatever are out there messing with the lives of innocent people, and the plot often boils down to an almost Western motif: the lone individual against corrupted nodes of concentrated, above-the-law power, be that a monomaniacal rancher, robber-baron, or the Illuminati.

Well, all of that leads me to a second confession: I am having a growing problem with authority. I am not so naïve as to not understand the notion of secrecy (or even privacy if one wants to swallow the illusion that corporations are people, at least legally, and that successful competition demands the hiding away of knowledge); and I get that nations play the same game. But, you see, film and television are showing us a world, and in that world anyone who has a secret will by default erect enormous organizations devoted to keeping that secret, and that organization must, of course, not only be heavily armed, but also justified in killing to defend that secret. Until the hero arrives to tear it all down.

When I watch the eponymous scene – that SWAT team charging in, faceless and guns bristling, to tie up and whisk our hero away – a small but steely voice in my head speaks to those anonymous soldiers: “What gives you the right to do this? See how you revel in your power to terrorize someone, hiding your humanity there behind your face-shield. See how readily you take orders, even when those orders can destroy the lives of your country’s own citizens. How eager must be your salutes to that great cold-eyed spider at the heart of the web, that the sovereignty of a single person should mean so little…”

Yeah, I know: Steve, take a breath. It’s only a silly show, after all. And we watch with nary a blink of the eye. This is the modern world, after all, one where abuse of power is so common we barely take notice of it. It’s just how it is, and Hollywood is simply reflecting that reality. Yeah, I get it.

I’d been meaning to write a First Contact novel for well over a decade. I’d made researching such a novel into a hobby. I had an inkling that I didn’t want to create a novel that sat easily within the sub-genre. I wanted to dismantle a few tropes, the first one being how so many First Contact stories involve, a priori, an Earth-based authority as humanity’s first point of contact: a secret Majestik-style cabal deep inside the government, the ubiquitous Men In Black; or an astronaut settled deep into the quasi-military realm of NASA; or a scientist (collected up by men in black suits wearing black sunglasses and driving big black SUVs) acting at the behest of the People in Power, and more crucially, that ET’s willing to play along.

Instead, and I think this qualifies as a Big Idea when it comes to First Contact SF, I wanted an ET arriving that then set about doing what it does, while utterly and completely ignoring the usual list of suspects (presidents, men-in-black, scientists, the military); and to then not only ignore them, but bring them down. An end to secrecy. An end to hidden power-blocks and all the vicious games they play to stay in power. Wake up, world, to a brand-new day.

Sometimes an idea for a novel only comes alive when two entirely disparate elements suddenly come together. That synergy is the fuel every writer looks for. It launches the rocket, does all the heavy lifting, and before you know it, you’re floating in orbit, looking down on the whole shebang.

Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart is my thought-experiment, my ‘what if’ followed by ‘then what?’ Sometimes, the only way to kick back is through art. Anything else and suddenly the black SUV’s pull up outside your house and, well, you know the rest…

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Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound | Powell’s

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The thing about trilogies is that they always have that “middle chapter” — the one that has to do its own thing while serving the arc it’s in the middle of. Writing one is always a challenge, and Ryk E. Spoor is here today to tell you how he’s managed it with Demons of the Past: Revolution.

RYK E. SPOOR:

The Demons of the Past trilogy (Demons of the Past: REVELATION, REVOLUTION, and RETRIBUTION) is probably the most complex work I’ve yet written. To an extent this is because I’ve spent more time on it than anything else – the first draft, originally simply titled Psionic! was written in 1978 and I’ve updated, redrafted, and enlarged upon it for decades since. It takes place in the same writing multiverse as Paradigms Lost and the Balance Sword trilogy (Phoenix Rising, Phoenix in Shadow, and Phoenix Ascendant), and is one of the most personally important stories I’ve yet published. The trilogy is a complex game of strategy and manipulation with the only chance for the good guys to win really resting on three words sent from one person to the other – and even that only gives them a chance.

That setup occurred in the first book, Revelation (from Double Dragon Press). At the end of Revelation, the main viewpoint character, Captain Sasham Varan (formerly of the Reborn Empire) was a fugitive from his own Empire because he knew that the Prime Monitor – right hand of the Emperor – was a monster with hidden and malevolent intentions, as well as viciously hostile psionic allies hidden across the Empire. Varan’s only allies were the mysterious trader called The Eonwyl, the R’Thann scientist Sooovickalassa (often called “Vick”) whose unique process had made Varan a psionic, and astrophysicist and warrior Guvthor Hok Guvthor. Varan’s best friend Taelin Mel’Tasne – a high-placed member of the Five Families that helped guide the Empire – had received and, to his horror, understood Varan’s cryptic, three-word message “Please trust me”, leading Taelin and his brother Lukhas (high in Imperial Security) to formulate a very desperate plan indeed.

In Demons of the Past: REVOLUTION (from Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire Press), both Varan’s group and Taelin’s have to come to an understanding of what they are dealing with, and how they can do so, all while Shagrath’s manipulations bring the Reborn Empire closer to the brink of a galaxy-destroying war.

The middle of a trilogy is always the hardest. In a prior Big Idea column, I discussed how I addressed some of those issues in Phoenix in Shadow, by essentially having a storyline for one of the major characters be concluded in that book, even if the true main plot couldn’t be resolved until the third book.

But I couldn’t use that approach for Demons of the Past: REVOLUTION. Unlike the Balanced Sword trilogy, the characters in Demons of the Past are all personally caught up in what is really one huge plot, which can be divided into three books based on the type of activity in each: Revelation is about recognizing the problems that are facing the characters; Revolution is about the characters coming to an understanding of those problems, their own capabilities and relationships, and how they must move forward; Retribution is about the characters taking that understanding and turning it into action. The separate character arcs are smaller, and contained within the overarching plot, in a way that prevents the admittedly more satisfying in-book resolution seen in Phoenix in Shadow.

Mechanically, Revolution is also the book where I had to make sure that all of the key clues to the actions the characters would take in the future were properly set up. The final confrontation in the third book is dependent on Varan and his friends pulling off a very carefully coordinated strategy, and. to be fair to the readers, all the aspects of that strategy must be set up in the three books, so that the reaction at the end is “Ohhh, yeah, that makes sense” rather than “what nether regions did the author pull THAT out of?”

To an extent, that meant that Demons of the Past as a whole had to be focused on the characters more than any other book I’ve written. Varan, the Eonwyl, Taelin, Guvthor, Sooovickalassa, and even Shagrath had to be not merely clearly different, but clearly defined in a way that would allow the readers to say “oh. That’s right, of course this character would have to act that way”, because the characters’ behavior, beliefs, and personalities ultimately determine the success or failure of the major action in the trilogy.

In a way, knowing the core purpose of the middle book, and the personalities involved, simplified the writing. I knew Varan’s group had to discover the nature of Shagrath’s allies the Kaital (the name they eventually learn), Shagrath’s true origin and name, and enough details about both to provide a foundation for defeating them. I also knew the characters themselves had to learn more about each other, and that key elements in that area were the Eonwyl’s secret past, the true history of the Thovians (Guvthor’s people) and of the R’Thann (Vick’s species), and Varan being threatened by a weakness (a phobia of Zchoradans and related species) that had been established early in the first book. In addition, we had to learn something about Taelin’s actions and plans, and about Shagrath’s true intentions, capabilities, and resources – and the latter should be terrifying indeed, or there’s not much tension to drive the book.

None of this, of course, offered the same type of closure as the ending of Phoenix in Shadow. There were some high dramatic points the book could end on, but all of them amounted to some form or another of cliffhanger. On occasion, I’ve referred to Demons of the Past as being “Star Wars, if Luke had gone on to the Academy and only learned how rotten the Empire was when he’d been in service for twenty years”. Revolution, then, is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy. It has to end with the characters in it deep, no matter what they’ve learned. It has to tell us what the magnitude and nature of the opposition is. And it has to leave the characters in a situation where they will be forced to act decisively.

Ultimately, the latter drove the decision. The title of the book – Revolution – refers to the fact that Varan must accept that to save even a part of the Reborn Empire he will have to place himself against what it has become, and be himself a revolutionary, willing to bring down the star nation that he loves and that was his home and source of pride. This brings him full-circle back to his very first adversaries – the Zchoradan Meld, the only other star nation that can begin to rival the Reborn Empire. Varan must face his phobia and his own patriotism and overcome both to plead for the aid of his own people’s long-time enemies.

That is, in many ways, the high (or low) point of the book, the understanding and acceptance of Varan of the course he must take, regardless of the personal cost. He must accept the consequences of his past confrontations with the Zchorada, and the propaganda that Shagrath has created to make Varan out to be a true monster, in order to convince his former enemies that they have – that they must have – a common cause.

And that must end in doubt, not certainty.

Taelin’s course, too, must be moved forward, and it struck me that it would be symmetry that he would do as Varan did, sending him a hidden message, but where Varan’s had been a message of subtle terror, Taelin’s would be one of hope – that also showed how fragile the hope could be.

In the end, I think I succeeded as well as I might have; the course for our heroes is clear, if fraught with perils of many sorts, and the dénouement of the entire trilogy is (mostly) set up, in its elements at least. I hope readers will agree, and follow Varan through to the final volume (coming next year), Demons of the Past: RETRIBUTION.

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Demons of the Past: Revolution: Amazon|Ring of Fire Press

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Facebook.

 

Football, cooking smells and names — how do they all come together to be inspirations for an epic fantasy novel? Jennifer Estep knows how, and today she’s here to tell you how they combined for Kill the Queen.

JENNIFER ESTEP:

I tried to write epic fantasy for years—years!

In fact, the very first (unpublished) book I ever wrote way back in college was an epic fantasy. But even though I wrote a couple of them when I was first starting out, the genre just never quite clicked for me. So I moved on and started focusing on urban fantasy, along with young adult fantasy. But in the back of my mind, I promised myself that I would try my hand at adult epic fantasy again someday. As much as I loved reading works by David Eddings, Terry Brooks, and J.R.R. Tolkien, I wanted to write my own books and tell the stories that I wanted to tell.

Now, thirty-some odd books later, my first published epic fantasy, Kill the Queen, is out. I’ve been pitching the book as Gladiator meets Game of Thrones with a kick-butt heroine. It’s a good description, but it’s not the “big” idea behind my book.

Truth be told, I don’t think there was just one “big” idea that inspired my book. No, to me, Kill the Queen is several “little”, disparate ideas that morphed into one story.

The first “little” idea that helped inspire the book was football. I love football, especially the NFL games. I participate in a couple of fantasy leagues, and my friends and I used to get together on Sunday afternoons to watch football and hold MeatFest—a cookout that featured inordinate amounts of meat, especially bacon.

About two years ago, I was watching a football game and listening to the announcers’ hyperbole about how the players were “weekend warriors” and “gladiators of the gridiron”. I had been thinking about trying to write an epic fantasy again, and I was searching for an idea. For some reason, the word “gladiators” resonated with me, and several “what-if” questions popped into my mind. What if I created a fantasy world where people cheered on gladiators/troupes the way they do football players/teams in our world? What if my heroine was forced to become a gladiator in order to survive? What if her gladiator training helped save her kingdom?

With those “what-if” questions swirling around in my mind, I came upon a second “little” idea—my family. My grandfather had several brothers and sisters, and as a result, I have dozens of cousins. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of our summer family reunions when we would all get together to eat, play games, and just hang out and catch up. What if my heroine, Evie, was part of a royal family and all her cousins were slaughtered during a massacre/coup? That would be a great way to start my book, as well as provide a lot of motivation for Evie to get revenge on the people responsible for the massacre.

One of the things I have a love/hate relationship with in epic fantasy is that you, as the writer, have to name every single thing in the book. The magic users, castles, kingdoms, rivers, cities, plants, animals. They all need names. After many false starts and stops, I finally decided to use Roman mythology (along with Norse mythology) as the basis for some of my names.

Why was this my third “little” idea? Well, I’ve always loved mythology, and I like to use names with meanings that tie in to my characters’ personalities, surroundings, and more. For example, in Kill the Queen, Bellona, my main gladiator kingdom, is named after a Roman war goddess. Plus, since I was writing about gladiators, using Roman mythology seemed like a good way to add another layer of subtle depth to my overall world building.

Sometimes, my “little” ideas are things that percolate in the back of my mind for a long, long time. Several years ago, I read an article talking about how the sense of smell is the least used sensory descriptor in books. As writers, we almost always describe what our characters see and hear, but we don’t necessarily talk about what they smell all that often. Oh, I thought when I read the article, it would be a fun writing challenge to include more smells in a book someday. Well, that someday finally arrived.

One of the first things I do when I start writing is think about my heroine’s magic/powers. For Kill the Queen, I wanted Evie to have a couple of different powers, including one that most people would think was a weak, useless ability, so I decided to give her an enhanced sense of smell. Most people scoff at Evie’s ability, but she can actually smell people’s emotions, which comes in handy. Plus, having a character with an enhanced sense of smell was something I haven’t done before, and it also played to one of my strengths as a writer. (More on that below.)

The fifth—and perhaps most important—“little” idea that helped shape Kill the Queen was my own writing strengths. Over the years, as I’ve written various books and stories, I’ve identified some of the things that I enjoy writing—action/fight scenes, strong heroines, and food talk. Whenever I’m contemplating writing something new, I often think about what characters, settings, and plots will really let me bring out my writing strengths. That’s what I did for Kill the Queen, and I think this is one of the things that finally helped me get over the hurdle of writing epic fantasy. Penning a gladiator-themed book let me incorporate several action/fight scenes, and Evie becomes both physically and mentally stronger as she progresses through her training. Plus, Evie works in the gladiators’ kitchen, and people’s emotions often smell like food to her—garlic guilt, cinnamon curiosity, and more.

A book doesn’t necessarily have to be one “big” idea. Sometimes, one or two or five (or more!) “little” ideas can all come together to create one story.

Happy writing and reading, everyone!

—-

Kill the Queen: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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Why do writers write books? One reason is to figure out who our characters are, and who they need to become to be fully realized. Amy S. Foster explains the journey one of her characters makes, across a trilogy of books that ends with The Rift Coda.

AMY S. FOSTER:

Almost three years ago I wrote a post about the Big Idea I had for the first book in my series. My Big Idea was to create characters who sounded and acted like actual teenagers even though they were Super Soldiers guarding a doorway to the multiverse. It was a Big Idea, but it was not the Big Idea that would end up dominating the landscape of these novels.

I couldn’t have known when I created Ryn- a female, a girl warrior that I would run up against so much institutionalized sexism that in the beginning, I wasn’t even aware it was happening. But it did and it still is.

It was little things at first. ‘Why does Ryn care about boys?’ ‘Good story, but is she doing all of this to have sex?’ ‘Ryn is far too preoccupied with her love life. She’s a soldier.’ I was confused. Did I put too much romance in my novels? I mean sure, Ryn likes a boy but, that boy was always written as a device. He was an outsider. The voice of reason. He came into the situation and said ‘uhhh Great Big Super Important scientific discovery and teenagers are policing it? Really?’

The story started out with Ryn figuring out who was in control and why the people in charge were not only making teenagers into deadly killing machines but also interning immigrants from other Earths inside a village that while nice enough, was still a prison.

Soon enough I realized that Ryn’s journey was about much more than teens recognizing themselves in Ryn’s dialogue. I wanted teenage girls to recognize themselves in Ryn, period. But they weren’t and why would they?

Society tells us that women must choose between love and power. Girls aren’t supposed to be gun toting, hand to hand combat bosses, tactical genius’ AND be into boys (or other girls). Or their hair. Or clothes or make up or their feelings. How would a girl pick up the Rift Trilogy and be able to project herself into the role of Ryn if she has never seen a girl in real life be a fully realized female warrior? I’m not being extra about my feminism here. It was only this year, this month, that the first female candidates were able to be up for selection as a Navy Seal. And it’s not like the response has been positive. People are pissed. Pundits are complaining about standards slipping.

As I began to craft the final installment of the trilogy, the real Big Idea came to me. I need to help the world redefine what the female warrior archetype is. No, she is not a guy with boobs. She is a woman and she can lean into those singular attributes to make her a better warrior. Empathy, active listening, communication, admitting vulnerability- these skill sets will guarantee she is a superior soldier. They will also help establish that she is not a monster (I’m looking at you Joss Whedon/Black Widow) and therefore doesn’t have to be Asexual (Wonder Woman, you are hot, but I think we could have all used a little more time in that room with Chris Pine). Speaking of that- why is Diana the only child of the Amazons? Oh right, they are warriors- they can’t be mothers too (except why not though? Themyscara seems a fairly idyllic spot for raising a kid and they are incredibly maternal).

You see were I’m going with this. We don’t have a vast cadre of female warriors to choose from but the ones we do have are either virginal or non committal. They can have sex but not think about having a family. They can be creators but not destroyers. And so I had to make sure that Ryn embraced these parts of herself that she had been told by society made her weak. She had to learn to lead not from a hierarchal vantage, but from a more feminine non-linear one. She had to be okay with saying, what should I do here? And not worry about being perceived as incapable. Finally, she had to come to terms with the fact that she had feelings and those feelings weren’t getting in the way of her job and that in fact, they would make her better at it.

The more I speak about this at comic cons and write about it and do interviews, the more traction I get. I can see the change happening. Last week I got an email from a young girl who said she loved the book and was thinking about enlisting. She had never considered being a soldier before because she thought she was too emotional. She wrote that Ryn helped her understand that her empathy could actually do some good in the world.

If that’s not a Big Idea, I don’t know what is.

—-

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Think time travel is disorienting for the characters who use it? Think about the poor author who has to plot it! D.B. Jackson knows, and explains all the nitty-gritty details about it in this Big idea for Time’s Children.

D.B. JACKSON:

Anyone who has written a time travel novel knows that they can send an author ‘round the bend. Time travel is a plotting nightmare. It creates narrative holes big enough to accommodate a truck. It acts as a virtual eraser, a do-over generator, a distributor of endless mulligans. Even the most sound, well-considered plot point can be undermined by the simple question, “Well, why can’t one of our characters go back and prevent this?” Hermione Granger’s ill-advised flirtation with Time-Turners is just the tip of the iceberg. Time travel will make an author’s brain explode.

So, naturally, I have just published the first novel in a new time travel/epic fantasy series.

In Time’s Children, volume one in my Islevale Cycle, Tobias Doljan, a fifteen-year-old time traveler – or Walker in the parlance of my created world – is sent back fourteen years to prevent a catastrophic war. Upon arriving in the past, however, he barely escapes an assassination plot that claims the lives of his sovereign, the royal court, and all of the royal family except the sovereign’s infant daughter, the princess Sofya. Tobias, with the help of his friend and love, Mara, who follows him back through time, must protect Sofya from the assassins, reestablish the royal line, and correct the dark, spiraling misfuture that his journey through time has unleashed. The book is fraught, but it’s also fun. It has action and suspense, assassins and demons, and lots of different kinds of magic. Because the time travel wasn’t complicated enough.

Those of us who write fantasy and science fiction often build into our magic or tech systems costs and limitations that limit their reach. Otherwise we risk allowing these world building devices to take over our stories. This is how I sought to keep time travel from robbing my book of all its narrative tension.

Time Walkers are rare in my world – I don’t have lots of them running around Islevale, undoing one another’s efforts. They cannot Walk without magically “Bound” devices called chronofors, which are also rare, not to mention dear. Walkers can go into the past, and then return to their original time, but they can’t explore the future. As they journey through time, Walkers must endure the “between” a harrowing, airless expanse that lengthens the farther back one travels. Walkers can only carry their chronofors when they journey – no weapons, no tools, no money, no clothing. If a Walker meets herself in the past, she might go insane.

Finally, and most significantly, for every year Walkers go back, they age that much. If a Walker is twenty, and goes back one year, she arrives as a twenty-one-year-old. And after she returns to her time, she is twenty-two. So, yes, my brief plot synopsis omitted a key detail: Tobias and Mara begin as fifteen-year-olds. When they arrive in the past, they are twenty-nine-year-olds, though their emotions and intellects remain the same. They are, essentially, children in the bodies of adults. If they make it back to their own time, they will be forty-three.

And that could easily be the big idea of the book. Adding that cost to my magic system creates tremendous narrative tension, drives a good deal of my plotting, and powers my key character arcs. Certainly, it informs elements of what I think of as the crucial themes of my book. But the central premise – the emotional core – of Time’s Children is somewhat more nuanced.

Allow me to backtrack for a moment. Early on, when I was still building my world and conceptualizing the novel, I struggled with my plotting. I usually outline novels, and this one was giving me fits. I had a conversation with a friend, and mentioned the problems I was having, and she asked me a simple question (I’m paraphrasing a bit). “What matters to you most? Not about the book, but about your life, your world. What are you most passionate about? Because,” she said, “that’s what you should be writing about.”

It took me all of two seconds to come up with an answer to her question: family. My wife and my daughters, and the love and laughter we share, mean more to me than anything. As soon as I realized this, I knew what Time’s Children and the entire Islevale Cycle are about.

It’s not just that Tobias and Mara have given up so many years of their lives, and it’s not just that they find themselves trapped in a broken past, their bodies and minds seemingly out of sync. What matters is their response to this singular circumstance. Their future is lost to them, at least for now. Sofya is dependent on them for food, for shelter, for love, for her very existence. And Tobias, before Mara finds him, is overwhelmed by the responsibility foisted upon him. I’m a parent, and I remember that feeling. I remember holding my older daughter the day she was born, and feeling both this unbelievable wave of love, and this panicked sense that I was barely more than a kid myself (even though I wasn’t that young when she was born). How on earth was I supposed to be a father?

What I soon realized was, I had a partner in this. Nancy and I had been a couple, but now we were a family, and together we would get through whatever we had to.

That’s what Tobias and Mara find. The only way they can cope with all that has gone to hell since Tobias Walked back in time, is to create a family out of ruin. In their case, the “family” begins as a deception, a way to conceal Sofya’s identity and spirit her to safety. But as this book ends, and the series goes on, their family coheres into something more powerful and more real. It continues to be a façade, but it also informs their relationships. Out of tragedy and danger and loss, they create a refuge built on love and loyalty and devotion not just to one another, but to the greater unit they have formed.

This sounds heavy, I know. Again, these really are fun books. But at root, they are about creating and relying on family under the most trying of circumstances. And that’s the big idea.

—-

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Today in The Big Idea, Julie E. Czerneda tackles the subjects of time, memory, intelligence, friendship.. and slime. They all have a role in her novel, Search Image. 

JULIE E. CZERNEDA:

Twenty years ago, when my host, John Scalzi, started this amazing blog of his, my second novel was published by DAW Books. It concerned a character who was, well, a blob of well-intentioned blue goo, liable to explode under stress. Beholder’s Eye. What these things had in common? Two authors, each going where they hadn’t before, both to discover it was the best direction of all. 

I didn’t set out to write Esen-alit-Quar, Esen for short, Es in a hurry or between dear friends. I set out to study the evolution of animal communication, starting with chemical signals and their role in the reproductive behaviour of fathead minnows (Pimephales promelas). Though perhaps they were a sign of what was to enter my life. After all, fathead minnows develop a mucous-secreting pad on their heads, used to rub clean a spot under a rock suitable for eggs to be laid. There they’ll wait, hoping a female approves their choice.

Slime, and its function, thus mattered early to me.

I also, as a humble grad student, had the privilege assisting my prof with his animal behaviour classes. There was the expected amount of cage scrubbing, the unexpected need to capture pigeons (at -40C) from the rooftop, and, of course, the discovery hamsters lustfully slime the sides of their enclosures, requiring more scrubbing.

A trend might have started.

Not that I noticed. By day, I was thoroughly busy with biology. By night, when I’d moments, I played with ideas. A Thousand Words for Stranger and the Clan Chronicles series came from those fathead minnows and the evolution of secondary sexual characteristics. (Really. Ask me some time.)

Esen? She came from that behaviour class. I’d taught the difference between r and k strategists: the former living short lives with many offspring, the latter few offspring with longer lives. That idea I had? I designed a species to be the ultimate k strategist. To live the longest possible life, reproducing rarely if at all.

I jotted notes. Doodled. How to do this? What if a living thing had control of its structure at the molecular level, harnessing energy to dispense with aging cellular components? Interesting. My something would need the ability to store and recall—with absolute accuracy—itself, leading me to extrapolate a biochemical memory. (This was thirty years ago, so I’m delighted by recent discoveries in that field.) Where might you find such beings evolving? Where energy was widely dispersed, but available if you had the time to travel far enough. Ergo, space. They’d be very few, and reproduce, reluctantly, by fission not sex. I fine-tuned the notions, noting almost in passing my creations didn’t have to have any one shape.

Because they could have any that they “remembered.”

All of which was fun, but hardly a story. Fine, then. What would my semi-immortal (for I wasn’t creating gods, but organic life) creatures do with their vast life span?

There’s something you need to know about me. When I was playing with these ideas, it was a time (the late 70s, need I say more?) of innumerable science fiction plots about how awful immortality would be. Star Trek, for example. Movies, TV shows, and books galore.

I didn’t buy it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d sob appropriately over, say, a vampire’s broken heart as a beloved aged and died. But beyond that? I’ve never accepted the “inevitable boredom” premise. It’s not in me. I’m not bored. I don’t get bored.

I get curious.

Thus, so would my beings. And what in the universe would fuel their curiosity? All of us. Beings whose lives were mere flickers of comparative time. Whose continuity came not from shared memory, but new life. Who saw death coming and created art and civilization in response.

My ideas were grew positively yummy. My beings would be archivists, of a sort. They’d collect information about “ephemerals” as they’d call us. Store and share it, not as objects, but as biochemical memory. Who’d collect genetic information to transform themselves into the species they observed, the better to learn every aspect. There’d be, oh, five in total, four budded from an original parent who’d be the Senior Assimilator, able to pick and choose what to share with the rest.

You’ll notice I still didn’t have a story.

Ah, but then I thought: what would bring disruption and chaos to a secret group of ancient beings, full of knowledge of living and extinct intelligences?

The unintended, unplanned arrival of number six. Esen.

***

Here are the first words of Esen I ever wrote.

“We would be together as long as he lived.

“And after that, I would remember Paul Ragem, my first friend, until the hearts of stars grew cold.”

I wrote her first book knowing this was how it ended. Otherwise I’d no outline or plan, only to set Esen in motion and see what happened along the way. No, that’s not entirely true. I’d two intentions by this point. One, to use Esen’s unique perspective to have as much fun as possible with real biology, the odder the better—and slime was a major goal, trust me.

Two, as you may have guessed, was to have a story about friendship.

Another thing you should know about me. I believe our deepest, most meaningful relationships are those between friends. The people we’d do anything for, who’d do anything for us. Who require no payment, no promise for their actions. Who call after a decade, and you pick up where you left off without pause. (Yes, family can be friends, but not always. Partners too. Mine is.)

I distrust stories that diminish normal, ordinary friendship. You know the ones I mean: where friends are introduced only to be sacrificed to motivate the main character to do whatever they must. I dislike stories where any friendship worth having must lead to “benefits.” Again, don’t get me wrong, I love a good romance. I just don’t want the only relationship that’s significant, that moves the story, to be the happy couple’s. We’ve far more friends than lovers. (I’m going to assume anyone for whom this isn’t true hasn’t time to read this blog. Good luck with that.)

All of which brought me Esen. I wanted a science fiction story, to please myself for only I (I thought) would ever read it, about friendship. How it grows. What it looks like. Feels like. How better than have a lonely Human try to explain it to the most alien bit of blue blob imaginable?

How better than have her try—no matter how hard–to understand what none of her kind have before?

Not that writing Esen, and her friend Paul, was difficult. In fact, I found writing her irresistible. The problems they face, and she attempts to resolve, are biological. Different sense organs. Different life cycles. Aliens who physically can’t make the leap to mutual understanding without a bit of help from someone who can. Mostly. For the other idea I’d had from the start? When Esen assumes another form, she’s still herself. A unique individual of that species, and no other. It lets me create wonderful complications for her to solve. You see, Esen means well, but she’s not always graceful or wise. Being Youngest. Writing her earnest efforts makes me laugh. More importantly they gave me the courage, as a writer, to put into words what I find silly or touching or utterly vital.

***

Picking up the story of Esen and Paul after writing a dozen very different books was as easy for me as breathing, and as wonderful as discovering a path down to a new river on a crisp sunny spring morning. You see, I’ve never stopped collecting weird, real, biology to inflict upon her. I’ve never lost my joy at portraying her wide-eyed curiosity about everything alive, because I share it.

And I’ve never lost sight of the importance of friendship. Into the future we go!

—-

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Living on an island means a different way of thinking about life — and death. J. Lincoln Fenn explains why, and how it made a difference for her latest novel, The Nightmarchers.

J. LINCOLN FENN:

I was driving the long, flat road from Kihei to Kahului, sugarcane fields and the distant rainforest mountains of Iao Valley to my left, listening to the public radio station and a fascinating discussion about the word ‘kanu’, which means two things in Hawaiian, ‘to bury’ (as in burying a corpse) and ‘to plant.’ When a family member was buried the spirit didn’t rise to a heaven or hell, eternally severed from the living, but remained on the island, inexorably linked to their descendants. The land and the ancestors were intertwined.

It makes sense because in many ways an island is a world unto itself. Resources are finite, and choices have consequences that can’t be mitigated. Be rude to someone at the pharmacy counter and rest assured you’ll run into their cousin at a PTA meeting. All the trash and garbage produced doesn’t go to some ‘out of sight, out of mind’ landfill—it’s a visible, ever-growing mound that everyone has to drive by. Set the sugarcane fields on fire to harvest the syrup, and ash called black snow falls on rich and poor alike. Things that can’t be changed must be accepted. “It is what it is.” Why would death be any different?

I thought about how different that is from the Western American idea of frontiers, and constant reinvention, the secrets that can be buried, the bloody conquests reframed as destiny. The idea that what we do here on Earth is ultimately irrelevant because we’re assured we’re the chosen people, with an eternal, separate paradise waiting in the sky. So not only do we think that we can dominate everything with impunity—from other cultures to genomes—we think it will have no real effect on our present, and future. We believe we can be severed from consequences and don’t have to acknowledge them.

This is our collective delusion.

Because the truth is, as one of my characters in The Nightmarchers says, “The things we bury have a way of digging their way out. They creep and clutch and bloom in our dark, shadowy places.”

We’re seeing those blooms everywhere. From institutionalized racism born of slavery, to the Western wildfires that cast smoke across the entire United States, to the gross machinations behind the Hollywood dream machine, all the things we tried to bury—mass genocide, toxins, sexism, racism and all the other ‘isms’—are growing, twisting, and cracking the foundational values of our culture.

We could very well be in for a grim harvest, at least in the short term.

But even as a horror writer I have to acknowledge another human propensity, which is our ability, in the face of great adversity, to drop ideologies and divisions with as little thought as a snake who sheds its skin. To exist in peace.

Not that it’s easy. Hawaii is one of the most culturally layered places I’ve ever lived, with a visceral pain born out of colonization, World War II, Japanese internment camps and a near continuous flow of immigration. Anger and clashes happen. But at the end of the day, if your car breaks down on the road, people will stop and help you push it out of the traffic. You’ll be an “Auntie” to children whether or not you’re related (or even know each other). One of the most poignant moments of my time there was going to an event about the struggle to reinstate Hawaii as a kingdom. It was standing room only—not many white people in attendance—and a Hawaiian teenager offered me his seat.

When I feel despair, I think of him.

And while the discussion about ‘kanu’ on the radio might have seemed like a small seed, it bloomed into this essay, and a novel that questions our fight to dominate a world that could be, if we only got out of the way, a real paradise, here and now. Whether we’re able to recognize our interconnectedness is irrelevant to the fact that we are. The world is an island, and nothing disappears into a void. Everything we bury grows, and all our ghosts linger, quietly watching.

—-

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Are the old, and even quaint, ways the best? Marshall Ryan Maresca has thoughts on this, and how they affected the creation and development of The Way of the Shield.

MARSHALL RYAN MARESCA:

Somewhere archived away in a box in my house, there’s a piece of paper with scribbled notes that I wrote in 2007:

FOUR SERIES

• Magic Student/Street Thief
• Fantasy Detectives — Magic crimes
• Two brothers – thieves — HEISTS
• Pacifist Warrior— Ancient order

And there it was—an idea: that I could bring together these characters, who could each tell their individual stories, but could also tell a larger story through the weaved threads of each narrative.

At the time, I hadn’t even written one novel— let alone four interconnected series—but the underlying ideas got their hooks into me too hard for me to ignore.  I had to do this, no matter how daunting and wild the idea was. So I dug in, radically reorganized my life, and got serious about the work of novel writing.  Over several years, those bullet points evolved into, respectively, The Thorn of Dentonhill, A Murder of Mages, The Holver Alley Crew and, now, finally, The Way of the Shield.

The process of developing these books created a paradox.  In writing Thorn, Murder and Holler Alley, I had created a world with a city constabulary, bustling infrastructure, elected Parliament and city council, standing military, and in the midst of social progress.  An ancient order of warriors with shields and swords seemed almost quaint.

Then I realized: that was the point.  It is quaint and outdated.  Here’s the Tarian Order, an organization with a deep and rich history in the culture, but with no formal authority or mandate. There were other Orders, but most of them were either disbanded or folded into modern organizations.  The only reasons the Tarian Order remains are tradition and inertia.  Most people only join as a path to improve their station.  But Dayne, my pacifist warrior, is a true believer.

Dayne is steeped in the history, enamored of the Order, and there is nothing he wants more than to devote his life to it.  Not to use the Order as a political stepping stone, and not just for mastering the physical discipline of the combat arts.  Dayne truly thinks saving every single life is the most important calling he can follow.  He wants to be the proud figure, standing tall with a shield, protecting the people and placing himself between them and harm.

But this changing world of modern politics rears its head again.  Dayne learns that he will not be promoted to full membership in the Order.  The Parliament holds the purse strings, and the Parliament gets final approval over the appointments.  Dayne failed to save the nephew of a powerful member of Parliament, and that member is making Dayne pay for his mistakes.

Dayne is left adrift: he has the talent, he has the passion, but he’s got no sense of what his future is going to be if he’s not able to be a part of this thing that he’s devoted his life to.  What is he going to do now, if he can’t be a Tarian?

Let me jump back to 2007, and that phrase I glided over a few paragraphs back: I radically reorganized my life.  That was a crucial moment for me to reach this point.  In 2007 I was working a job I hated. Hated.  It gnawed at my soul, and everything about my life was degrading because of it. Finally, I said to myself, “You’re 34 years old, and what are you doing with yourself?  Working this terrible job for terrible people, and hating everything.  You keep saying you want to write books, but are you?  No, you aren’t, and you need to.”

So I quit that job.  Which, let’s be real, probably wasn’t the best plan for a thirty-something husband and father with a mortgage, but it’s what I had to do.  Fortunately, my wife understood what was going on, and we came up with a new plan for our lives so we could continue on and I could also write.

Because had this idea—this mad, wild idea, at that point just a series of handwritten bullet points —and I knew I had to make it real.  I had to fight with everything I had to make it happen.  At the time, a lot of people called it impossible, said I wouldn’t be able to do it. No one was going to let me do it.

But yet, here we are, pushed forward with will and drive.  Four interconnected series in one grand, sprawling fantastical city.  With The Way of the Shield, the fourth piece clicks into place.

That’s the spirit I infused into Dayne: he has talent, he has passion, and when he’s told what he wants is impossible, he’s going to do it anyway.

—-

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Comedy! The Internet! Incipient fascism! Charlie Jane Anders has got it all in her latest, Rock Manning Goes For Broke. She’s here to explain it. There are footnotes!

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS:

What happens when Comedy goes TOO FAR (and then just keeps going)?

Supposedly some famous dude said on his death bed, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”* Nobody seems to agree on who actually said this, and whether anyone actually ever said those exact words. But in any case, this is a crock of shit. I’d way rather write comedy than be dead, and I think dying will probably be pretty fricking difficult. I fully expect that after I finish dying, I’ll have no energy left for anything else.

And I know you’re not supposed to admit this, but comedy has always come kind of easy to me. I love coming up with the most ridiculous thing that can happen in any situation, and the silliest thing someone can say or do. I grew up reading Henry Fielding and Douglas Adams and PG Wodehouse, but also watching everything from the Keystone Kops films to reruns of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. I love the moment when everything just spins out of control and vehicles are sailing off cliffs and people are throwing mashed potatoes in each other’s faces and the world is just spiraling into chaos.

Partly, I feel like those demented moments of out-of-control physical comedy are when we come closest to glimpsing the true nature of reality. In real life, everything is chaos**, nothing is ever really under control, and we’re all one banana peel away from hilarious disaster. And partly, those moments are just really, really fun to write.

So back when I started writing Rock Manning Goes For Broke, I was obsessed with physical comedy in particular, and just seeing how far I could take it on paper. And here’s what I found out: the more you take physical comedy to its furthest extreme, the more you start blurring the lines between “hilarious” and “terrifying.” Because when slapstick hijinks go really to enough of an extreme, they start to look more and more like regular violence and mayhem.

This wasn’t really that much of a surprise, to be honest. There’s a reason why Jackie Chan breaks several irreplaceable bones in every other movie he makes. And anyone who’s ever dipped into “splatstick” or the burgeoning genre of horror-comedy knows that slippery gory monstrosities can easily cross over into being hilarious. (See Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, Brian Yuzna’s Society, or dozens of other bizarro funny horror films.)

The main character of my novella, Rock Manning, is an aspiring comedy performer who wants to follow in the stumbling footsteps of Chan, along with Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, that dude from The Tall Blonde Man With One Brown Shoe, and countless others. And luckily, Rock’s best friend Sally Hamster has a video camera, an eye for great set pieces, and an almost limited reservoir of sadism. Soon, they become Famous On The Internet—just as society is crumbling and the United States is teetering on the brink of a fascist takeover.

A lot of the energy in Rock Manning Goes For Broke comes from the increasingly bizarre and high concept films that Rock and Sally are creating and posting online. Including things that honestly ought to be their own genres, like “Vacuum Cleaner Salesman vs. Roman Gladiator,” or “making an ice cream sundae on top of a hearse going 90 miles per hour.” These kids view danger and narrative consistency with equal measures of steely disdain.

But also, I got a lot of juice, storytelling-wise, from the collision between off-the-chain physical comedy and the brutality of incipient fascism. Rock and Sally’s high-school classmate, Ricky Artesian, becomes part of a brand new “militia” called the Red Bandanas, who aim to “clean up” America with a mixture of fearmongering, manipulation and extreme violence—and they want Rock to star in some propaganda films promoting their movement.

I know I started this essay by saying that comedy is way easier than that dying guy thought***, but the ugly flowering of fascism is surprisingly hard to make light of. Everyone from Chaplin (in The Great Dicatator) to Mel Brooks (in The Producers) to the makers of Hogan’s Heroes has lampooned the Nazis, but they’re still terrifying and abhorrent monsters. All the things that make a pie fight**** hilarious are also what make a swarm of real-life brownshirts pants-wettingly scary: the chaos, the indignity, the loss of control.

But when comedy goes Too Far, it not only gets closer to being a warped version of our worst night terrors—it also lets us start to ask questions about our propensity for organized violence. And that moment when the mayhem stops being funny and turns ghastly is a good preparation for the real-life moments when we witness atrocities right in our backyard, and it’s on us to do something to stop them.

 

* This whole fetish for saying pithy things on your deathbed always perplexes me. Why would you want to waste a clever line on a moment when nobody can possibly appreciate it? Plus to be honest, my last words are probably going to be something along the lines of “ow, this fucking hurts, you fuckers,” or possibly, “I want a discount on my hospital bill because these goddamn peas were still frozen on the inside. Let me speak to a manager. Yes, I will hold.”

** The difference between fictional chaos and real-life chaos is that you can at least sometimes enjoy fictional chaos, because it’s a lot harder to giggle with abandon when actual reality is getting torn to bits by flying doll-heads and exploding chickens and stuff. Actually living through a huge screaming mess is surprisingly not that much fun at all.

*** I feel very comfortable picking on that guy, because he’s dead, and also he could be any one of a number of dead guys, none of whom know where I live.

**** I actually organized a Ballerina Pie Fight in real life. Ask me about it sometime.

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Rock Manning Goes For Broke: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Subterranean Press

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