PZ Myers alerts us to the grasping straws of those dimwitted creationist nincompoops, who, having had their ass handed to them by real scientists, have turned their baleful glare on science fiction authors:
Science fiction is intimately associated with Darwinian evolution. Sagan and Asimov, for example, were prominent evolutionary scientists. Sci-fi arose in the late 19th and early 20th century as a product of an evolutionary worldview that denies the Almighty Creator. In fact, evolution IS the pre-eminent science fiction. Beware!
It’s true.[1] Most Science fiction authors are atheists, or even worse, espouse strange ideas that would make a vicar’s bowls loosen.
Science fiction, by its nature is unorthodox. More than that: it’s heretical. The author is deliberately creating parallel universes, like the one God supposedly made, but with additions or subtractions that no God created (or else we would be living in that universe instead of just writing about it). It’s a deliberate affront to orthodoxy, implying that the world we have is lacking something and the author, a mere mortal, knows what that is and can create it himself. Sci-fi is a hack. It’s a software patch, illegally brewed in some guys basement, and grafted onto the cracked open, proprietary operating system of the world. That’s why it’s so awesome.
The world is bigger and weirder than the narrow view of some dusty old poem about how evil shrimp are and why we should all grow our beards and how the straight and narrow path and not spill our seed. Science fiction is a reflection that the world can and should be different and better and that human minds, creative, inventive and hyped up on sugar and caffeine, can make it so. Sci-fi also points out the glaringly obvious: that God is an evil alien who wants to suck on your soul, or worse doesn’t even exist at all, and is just the mad by-product of some sufficiently advanced alien experiment gone wrong.
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1. Except for Sagan and Asimov being evolutionary scientists. As PZ points out, Sagan was an physicist and Asimov a chemist. But let’s not quibble about facts, that just makes creationists cranky. And you wouldn’t like them when they’re cranky.
To pick up where we left off before being so rudely interrupted by the holidays…
Wait, back up for a second. For the curious, here’s a picture of my workspace, from the Ceiling Cat perspective.
Yes, that's a big pink owl on top of my mini. No, I won't tell you why.
This is where I do most, but not all, of my writing. The desk is not always this organized but I’m working on trying to keep my creative space in some shape, to help me work, if not faster, at least more efficiently. Hence the Big Board.
This will get a lot more cluttered, very quickly.
As you can see by the above picture (blurred for your protection[1]) I’m organizing my chapters and scenes using the tried and true note card method.
Each card has a brief scribble noting what should happen in that chapter. The 8 cards in the top left hand corner are the completed chapters while the single card just below those is chapter 9, where I am (and feel as if I always have been). The three cards (and attendant sticky note) below Chapter 9 are chapters 10-12. The four cards bellow those are chapters 13-16, which are the beginning of Act 2. As you can see, I’m breaking out the last third of Act 1 right now.
Act 1 is the Set up. That’s where we introduce the bulk of the characters (all the important ones anyway) and set up the drama that will get complicated in act 2, reversed in act 3 and resolved in act 4.[2] The note cards let me shuffle some ideas around before I even start writing the scene, that way I can tell if I even need the scene, or if I can move the action into another chapter. This makes things easier for me to see where I am and what’s going on, rather than just tying to visualize inside me wee little noggin.
Each act of this story is slotted for 12 chapters. Every 4 chapters makes an episode, with each of the 4 chapters as a miniature act. This, chapter 9 is a set up chapter for what gets complicated in chapter 10, reversed in chapter 11 and resolved (kinda sorta) in chapter 12.
And that’s where I am. I’ve been wandering around in chapter 9, trying to figure out what happens here in relation to what went before and the hundred and one strange ideas I have fr what happens next. You can’t se eit on the blurry picture of The Big Board, but the card for chapter 9 says:
Major Tom moves into a bungalow in the Castro and throws a housewarming party. Hijinks ensue.
This is more of a suggestion, or a hook, but it gives me something on which to focus. It’s a nice little set up. Two months have passed since chapter 8. Tom is settling into the 21 C but is having a few issues, such as a mild case of PTSD. But Salome and his gay neighbors are helping him through it and then along comes Alice Atomo, a friend of Salome’s invited to the housewarming party. Oh, and she’s brought her father with her. Who’s a mad scientist. It sounds sort of like a new story is starting, which it should. This chapter introduces the romantic subplot and, if I play my note cards right, a few other things that will get interesting later.
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1. I used the secret Photoshopping skills called “not focusing the camera” to hide the incriminating evidence of my heinous handwriting. It’s blurry not because I’m concerned about people finding out my precious ideas (I do actually want people to read my book) but his post is more about the method I’m using for breaking the story than what the actual story is all about. This clearly is not a secret, as I wouldn’t be writing this if it were.
2. I’m using the modified 4 act structure, based on the the 3 act structure outlined by just about everyone. Most people recognize that act 2 in the 3 act structure is twice as long as act 1 and hinges in the middle on the climax. They dutifully break the act into 2A and 2B. But really it’s 4 acts. So for our purposes, if you read Syd Field or any other story structure guru, when he refers to act 2A, I’m talking about act 2 and when he says Act 2B, I’m talking about act 3. act 5 is right out.[3]
3. Historical anecdote: most plays written before the 19th century had a 5 act structure that was just the same as our 4 act structure but they always added a sort of prologue explaining the set up, called an introduction. You see this in Shakespeare’s plays, especially Romeo and Juliet, where someone comes out and sets the scene for you. By the 19th century, most writers realized this was redundant, as the details of the story could easily let you know where you were and who was doing what, so they dropped the introductory act.
Try not to break this one before Summer starts.
John Scalzi reviews Avatar and makes explicit what we already knew:
Cameron has enough of a track record that even without seeing this film I pretty much know how it will be: Amazing visually and technically, with a story that ranges from barely passable to moderately intriguing, with the weaknesses of the story compensated for by a better than average cast of actors and very well integrated action sequences. That’s pretty much a given at this point.
But what about that story?
The story was serviceable, and serviceable, lest we forget, is actually a positive.
No, a serviceable story is not positive, especially when we consider how much money was spent on this particular film. Cameron could have hired any number of willing screen writers, dialogue masters, sci-fi novelists or monkeys with typewriters to help him make the story as impressive as his visuals. But he didn’t. I’d bet money the idea never even crossed his mind. Because to Cameron and most movie producers, big sci-fi action films don’t need a compelling story. In fact, movie audiences have been trained to not even bother looking for one, and so the stories have become mere plot coupons to carry the audience from one exploding set piece to another without boring them too much. You see this more than most with Avatar, where many of the reviews gloss over the story and spend most of the time talking about the effects. That’s all the movie is really about. The fact that it all hangs on a shallow skeleton of a story is not even mentioned, or if it is, apologized for, as if a complex and engaging story is somehow a sin. “Heavens, let’s not irritate the mouth breathers by making them think too hard about what they’re seeing!”
And of course what they’re seeing is pure racist tripe. It’s the noble savage, wrapped up in a burrito of white guilt/anti-imperialism with a dollop of muddled racial essentialism on top. Or, as Michael Berube summarized it:
…the disabled jarhead goes into the Matrix, dances with wolves, falls in love with the princess, and (as Janet says) learns to paint with all the colors of the wind. And people are complaining that they’ve seen this movie before? Good grief, people, can’t you see that you’re getting at least five or six movies for the price of one? I mean, you’ve even got some Antz in there, you’ve got Vasquez from Aliens reunited with Sigourney Weaver (hey, and some guys from the Company, too!), and you’ve got a bunch of Ursula LeGuin narratives incorporated by implication. The visuals really are stunning, and how great is it that they actually called the mineral ”unobtainium”? It’s like calling it “macguffinite ore.”
But at least it looks pretty. (And yes, I’m “over”thinking it).
I realize I’m pissing into the wind in demanding better stories for my money.* The market for such a thing is against me. Audiences don’t demand better stories, and so directors and producers don’t make them. And until they do, we will see only thinner and thinner spectacle. Bread and circuses, chariot races around gladiators stabbing bears, noble savage myths about Thundersmurfs. It’s the same shit, warmed over again.
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* $10 13 for a 3D-induced headache is not my idea of a good time. Maybe I’m getting old and cranky, and will soon start muttering about children and lawns, but I refuse to pay money for the privilege of minor head trauma. If James Cameron wants to beat me up, fine, but I won’t let him mug me while he’s at it.
A long, long time ago, back when I was actually writing things on this blog, instead of just posting random cat pictures and promising to write things on this blog, I was working on a novel. This was so far back in the danky, drippy mists of time, even before the great Nanowrimo fiasco.[1] So, September, October, even. I had thrown out a few random links to news items and bits of weirdness that were jangling around in my head and generally being sticky with ideas for the novel-in-progress, refereed to cryptically on twitter as Novel # 3.
Well. Now that Nanowrimo is safely behind us, smoldering in the distance,[2] I can get back to focusing my short attention span on the proper novel that, truth be told, I’ve been fiddling with off and on since May. The fiddling is done, dear reader(s). The twangy Philip-Glassian warm up music has given way to a full blown orchestra (if John Williams directed an opera by The Ventures), harrumphing and blaring away in my brain. And it’s a doozy. And I will lay all its piece sout for you here, as they stand, partially to document the creative process I’ve developed since the previosu novel, but also as a self-evaluation tool, to see if any of the funny, silly, sticky bits that I think are so wonderful aren’t in fact total shit when I try to explain them to someone else.
Novel # 3’s proper title is: The Man From Planet X. I’m borrowing the title from a little-known sci-fi movie from 1951, about a visitor to Earth from a rogue planet who is mistaken by the military for a threat when in fact, he’s jus a curious visitor who looks funny. And so they kill him. The movie offers an atypical criticism of the cold war and red-baiting era, somethig most of the sci-fi movies of the period address in purly jingoistic terms. Well-scrubbed white American men beat the ever-loving shit out of those skinny, weird looking Martians, who all look alike and want to steal our women folk, whose sole purpose in the film is to scream while wearing a bra designed by a munitions manufacturer so that an entire generation of American kids grow up associating bullets and breasts in an unhealthy Pavlovian manner that confuses sexual urges with aggression. In this movie, the military is the bad guy, shooting first and asking questions never, to the detriment of humanity in general. Same as it ever was.
My novel actually has nothing at all to do with any of this. I just like the classic B-movie ring to it. No, that’s not true either.
The main character is Major Thomas Jones, USAF, pilot of Freedom 7-II, the last Mercury-era mission.[3] Major Tom launches into orbit in 1963. And disappears. Almost 50 years later, in 2012, he falls out of the sky and lands in Uzbekistan. Due to the fragile political climate of that hollow state, the US military can’t go in after him. So they send in Salome Anaconda Divine, a Biological agent for a futurist NGO called the Geranium Appreciation society (which is sort of like if Boing Boing and Greenpeace merged and were funded by Bono and Richard Branson). Salome gets herself captured by the cannibal warlord who has Major Tom in his castle in the toxic wasteland adjacent tot her Aral Sea. Hijinks ensue. And by Hijinks, I mean the rest of the story. You see, Major Tom doesn’t belong in this world. He’s the first ever documented time traveler. Untethered from causality, he’s fallen through time and space and is free to change the future. But first, he’s got to figure out the world of 21 C and his place in it. Salome is there to help. Complicating matters are a government bureaucracy, militant Transhumanists, a secret society, madmen, monsters and other escapees from various futures that never were.
So, Major Tom is the Man From Planet X. He’s come to visit and see what this world is like and try not to get himself killed in the process. Currently, he’s just met a charismatic Investment banker who decides to be his arch enemy and a stranger who knows who Tom is and where he is really from, eaten sushi for the first time and been offered a job saving the world.
And that’s the story thus far.
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1. Some may say that ‘fiasco’ is rather harsh, considering that the half-assed attempt to write a novel in 30 days is the point of Nanowrimo, but I barely go 8K words into it before the bottom fell out. So, yeah. Not exactly a high point on my own personal commitment scale. I had intended to use it as a short-form look into the creative process, documented on the blog for all the world and posterity to ogle at and be informed, or at least interested. So much for that idea.
2. I’m not really slagging on Nanowrimo. It was great fun, as it always is and is a wonderful exercise to get the creative process moving again. Working on that ill-conceived story gave me the perspective I needed to work out some of the thornier plot issues under which Novel # 3 had stalled. And that really is the point of Nanowrimo. It’s a boot to the butt of the muse.
3. In the real world, Freedom 7-II was canceled, it’s crew (Alan Shepherd) and funding transferred to the new Apollo program. This actually points to a larger part of the world I’m building in the story, and is a cross between a spoiler and an Easter Egg.
This time to Texas, for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Probably won’t have internet access, as we’ll be out on the farm, mostly. If you’re still interested in my holiday book discount, you can still send me an email, I just won’t be able to respond until next week.
I’ve written two books and, as it happens, books make a lovely Christmas gift. I think your mother would like a nice Gothic Fairy Tale. And your cousin would enjoy a fine story about an umbrella and an aging cosmonaut. And if you order them by Friday, they should get there just in time for the holidays. Also, if you wanted, say a 20% discount, you could email me or ask me on twitter and I might be persueded to provide you with such a thing.
We’re back home and in the profound grip of Jet Lag. But! I’ll have some coherent thoughts on bad vampire novels, good POD books and President Obama’s disapointing slide into politics as usual. But first, sleep.
In the last two weeks, my National Novel Writing Month project has amassed about 7000 words. That’s not quite up to where I should by by about 10K words. Also, I’ve hit a story snag and due to impending travel plans will be gracefully bowing out for the remainder of the month. But!
This is a good thing. I never intended to write 5oK words but instead wanted to challenge myself to put forth a concerted effort to just write. Anything. The process was the point and it worked. That 7K word chunk, while not quite the story I wanted, helped me break down the walls and work out the kinks in the ideas that have been clogging my brain. I have a solid revised idea for my next novel and wouldn’t have gotten there without the effort I put in, and the encouragement of the Nanowrimo community and my friends. Thanks everybody!
Now, from her eon out, I have a novel to write. Somewhere in the vicinity of 90K words. I’ll be working at a much more modest rate, aiming for 500 words a day, roughly 2500 a week. That should put me at completion of the first draft in about 9 months. When I return from vacation, I’ll start the word count and post updates on my progress, along with chapters, as a way for me to continue to work out the process of writing a novel and give those interested a look into the creative process. Should be fun!
