The Generic Science Fiction Story of the Future

I've been watching episodes of the old Buck Rogers serial, on TCM. Not regularly, but I've caught a few of the installments of the old Saturday matinee short feature.

The acting and cinematography are not up to Citizen Kane standards - but I've gathered that the 1930s Buck Rogers serial was more of a potboiler, than conceived as a great work of the cinematic arts. Special effects are, all things considered, pretty good.

Yes, they show Saturn appearing out of the clouds of outer space, spaceships sound like they're run by lawnmower engines, and we haven't had control systems that big and unwieldy for decades. But then, today's on-screen science fiction is - no, I am not going to get off-topic.

Been There, Read That

I know what "The Future" is supposed to look like: Buck Rogers' version; the Logan's Run effort; Escape From New York; A Boy And His Dog; and Escape From L.A..

Where, oh, where does Hollywood keep coming up with these new ideas? And that's yet another topic. Sort of.

The point is, we've got a fairly small number of standard-issue, generic, plug-in-your-character, science fiction "futures" by now. Nothing wrong with that, I think - as long as a writer - and readers - remember that science fiction/speculative fiction/whatever is a quite - mature? - genre by now.

I've been playing with a setting of the Buck Rogers/Star Wars flavor. (Yes - George Lucas knew about B.R., I've got fans in my family) I've mentioned Galaxy Cadet before. I'm fighting my OCD tendencies, successfully for the most part, and trying to remember how much fun I had, decades back, with the Star Trek universe. Pre-movies.

It's a good excuse for me to dust off my ambition to do a readable comic book.

These days, happily, I don't have to try to kid some publisher that it'll be the next [fill in your favorite series]. Yet one more topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis"
  (March 5, 2010)
• "Overused Science Fiction Cliches: or, 'You Mean, Beings of Pure Energy Isn't a New Idea?'"
  (December 4, 2009)
• "The Future and Other Ideas"
  (October 24, 2009)
• "Green Lantern Oath: Something to Think About"
  (July 23, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)

Products Have Names

A utility van - a Klaxon-6, made by Baden-Baden Auto and Gravel Sifter Works

Now, doesn't a name like that make you want to go out and buy one?

Probably not. But that's not the point in this case.

Not-completely-unrelated posts:

• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Making a Plausible Setting"
  (February 22, 2010)
• "Creativity, Research, and Finding a Cool Name That's Not Been Used"
  (January 20, 2010)
• "Procyon and Names"
  (November 14, 2009)
• "Names: Castle Dampthorn, Regsellend, and the Indo-Europeans"
  (October 20, 2009)

"...So We Built One..."

"...When humanity spread among the stars, we hoped to find vast, complex civilizations.

"They weren't there.

"So we built one...."
('Notes of a Traveler,' Otha Sisk)

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Thought for the Day: Fate and Character"
  (October 30, 2009)
• " '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme"
  (July 3, 2009)
• "Excerpts and Inspirations II"
  (July 2, 2009)
• "Excerpts and Inspirations"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Prologue"
  (June 23, 2009)

Continuity and All That

I've discussed what I call 'Star Trek syndrome' before. (February 1, 2010) That's where a writer starts out with a nifty, plausible-seeming idea and starts adding detail. Then, after a few stories, discovers that the details won't fit together.

Or readers may discover the inconsistencies.

It's called "continuity," but I think 'Star Trek syndrome' sounds cooler.

A related issue is picking the wrong narrator. Or a narrator who can't do what the writer wants, in terms of telling the story.

That happened to me, with the Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette blog. It turned out to be a good way to give me practice at writing short, (relatively) tightly-worded posts: and provided me with quite a bit of background for Loonfoot Falls, a small town in central Minnesota.

Then, last year I realized that the blog, which was mostly 250-word columns in the fictional small town's newspaper, couldn't tell some of the stories I wanted it to.

That wasn't the only reason I've taken a sabbatical from that blog, but it was a major one.

A human-interest column like that, published in a small-town weekly, has limitations. Don't expect a conventional rant about repressive small-town parochialism: it's just a cultural thing. Small-town weeklies, in my experience, tend to focus on the positive aspects of personal stories. When they're not reporting 'regular' news: which is about the same in small towns as it is anywhere else.

There's a reason why I'm not at all likely to read a celebrity exposé in Sauk Centre, Minnesota's, newspaper. It's not that we lack folks like, say, Charlie Sheen or Paris Hilton. There was a fellow who got in the paper after he ran buck-naked down Main Street. The difference is that the paper treated the incident as another bit of local news, and left it at that. No op-ed about the unfairness of anti-streaker laws, the lack of a naked-pedestrian lane on local streets, or a wig-picker's explanation for why it isn't the fellow's fault. Or wasn't: the 'victim of society' fad seems to have faded.

And I've gotten off-topic.

The point is that I need to find a suitable viewpoint character for more Loonfoot Falls accounts. Or maybe take the one I have, and change the venue.

Somewhat-related posts:

• "What I've Done, What I Plan to Do"
  (February 22, 2011)
• "A Not-Entirely-Misspent Afternoon"
  (August 20, 2010)
• "Epic Scale and Painting the Floor"
  (February 1, 2010)
• " 'Belvedere Union Grand's Room 313' - a Short-Short Story"
  (November 2, 2009)

Making Comics: Status Report, February 24, 2011

I posted a sort of status report on Tuesday, and this far-from-remarkable picture of a door:



There's an explanation for that, which is what this post is about. Mostly.

I've wanted to create comics for a long time, and tried once or twice. With unsatisfactory results. This winter I gave it another try: and posted a seven-panel sequence in another blog: "Narcissus-X: TRAPPED!," Narcissus-X (February 11, 2011)). I've mentioned Narcissus-X before: a sort of alter-ego and a terribly angsty, self-important artist.

The point is that this time, I told a story in seven panels of pictures and text: with satisfactory results. In my opinion, anyway.

So now I'm starting work on a graphic novel that will rival Shakespeare's King Lear and Adam's Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

Hardly.

But I am doing makee-learnee with several 3D models, sort of an apprenticeship: except without a master to tell me how to get things done. Also, happily, without deadlines.

It's not as frivolous an approach as it may seem. I've found that starting work on a project and learning skills as I go is more effective, and a lot less frustrating, than trying to slog through most tutorials.

In this case, I've started with a set of already-completed models, created by some folks who know what they're doing. Their screen names are Predatron, maclean, and Stonemason. Here's what I had at the beginning of this week:


Most of the urban scene is Predatron's City Streets: what's on this side is a collection of models by maclean.

So far, the only work I'd done was to stack some of mclean's models to make interiors for an office/commercial building whose exterior I'll be working on.

Across the street, one of Predatron's buildings already has a (very simple) interior:



I could leave that building as-is, but decided to play with the interior, instead. I'm pretty sure that the building's interior is intended to give the impression of a complete, occupied building when viewed from the street. The model as it stands gets that job done quite well.

It wasn't until I started measuring the interior that I discovered some oddities in scale. The walls between rooms seemed unreasonably thick for a building of that sort. The ceiling height, about 10 feet, was okay, as was the substantial space between ceilings and the next floor. We've gotten used to seven- and eight-foot ceilings: but buildings weren't always built that way. The doors seem normal - but they're about seven feet tall, in this scale. That's really tall and wide.

So I hid the existing interior for the building and started putting up walls for a small apartment at the front of the building:



The door is the right size - but wasn't satisfactory for what I have in mind. Which is why I made that green one. Eventually, I'll have a plausible-looking small apartment - at least when viewed from some angels.

But that won't be all that interesting, without characters and some sort of story to go with it.

Right now, I'm thinking of doing something like the slice-of-life Gasoline Alley accounts - but have no idea where I'll wind up.

Exoplanets, MIT, Mathematics, and Thinking With a Cold

It's almost two months since I've done a post here. There's some excuse - or explanation, at any rate. A busted pipe in the laundry room created something a distraction, for one thing. ("Busted Water Pipe, Day 32: Plumbing Progress and Regress," Through One Dad's Eye (October 18, 2010))

Now, back to the general topic of this blog.

You've heard of writer's block? I've got something more like writer's fog. I've heard that I'm recovering from a cold - and that may be so. I don't feel sick, which is nice. I don't even feel tired. But it's been one of those Mondays where I can't seem to think all that well.

Like I said, I'm recovering from a cold. Or so I've heard.

'Creative' work being off the table, I decided to do a little - wait a minute. "Off the table?" What does that mean? Did 'creative' work fall onto the floor? Maybe I should look there. No. Wait. It's a term from parliamentary procedure. Not 'creative' work. The other thing.

And that's the way it's been today.

Anyway, I decided to do a little research. Like the animated Jackie Chan's Adventure's Uncle: "MORE RESEARCH!" I like that series. Don't watch it much now.

Anyway, I decided to do a little more research.

About exoplanets. There's quite a bit out there: everything from (fairly) hard data; to serious research; to stuff that may or may not have been intended as a practical joke. Don't get me wrong: some of the more solid resources haven't been 'real' academic or government outfits - dedicated, intelligent amateurs - - - and I'm drifting off-topic again.

The again, sometimes an old-school academic institution gets it right.

CalTech had some interesting pages - some of which I eventually found. They'd done a more-than-usually-creative rehash of their website. Sort of like dropping an encyclopedia into a food processor, hitting 'puree,' pouring out the results and telling folks that they've reorganized the information - please browse our new-and-improved website.

It wasn't that bad, actually, although the data I was looking for wasn't - quite - there. Like I said, they'd 'improved' the website.

I had a little better 'luck' at MIT, finding a 19-page paper about exoplanets by Seager and others. It's in PDF format, and starts with:

"We use new interior models of cold planets to investigate the mass-radius relationships of solid exoplanets, considering planets made primarily of iron, silicates, water, and carbon compounds. We find that the mass-radius relationships for cold terrestrial mass planets of all compositions we considered follow a generic functional form that is not a simple power law:..."
(Seager and others, via MIT)

That "simple power law" uses symbols that aren't in all character code sets, ASCII or otherwise, so I'm not quoting more from that paper here.

Besides, anything that gets into mathspeak after the first 55 words isn't something I want to tackle right now.

On the other hand, it's an excellent resource.

So, in case someone at MIT gets the bright idea of handing their website over to a caffeinated intern for "improvement," I dropped a copy of the PDF file into a server I trust:

• "MASS-RADIUS RELATIONSHIPS FOR SOLID EXOPLANETS"
  The Astrophysical Journal, The American Astronomical Society (November 10, 2007)
  S. Seager, Kuchner, C. A. Hier-Majumder, B. Militzer (Received 2006 December 25; accepted 2007 June 21)

Please note: The AJ of the AAS seems to own the copyright to this paper. A bunch of folks who know a whole lot more math than I do created the paper's content. All I'm doing is putting a copy where I'm reasonably sure I can find it, a week or a month from now.

That disclaimer out of the way, the paper is a pretty good discussion of how mass and size (diameter) are related - or should be - for differentiated and undifferentiated planets. In other words, for planets that are pretty much the same material all the way through, and those with onion-like layers, like Earth.

Mostly, it's a fascinating look at what researchers are doing, making sense of what's being learned about planets circling other suns.

From the point of view of this blog, it's also a pretty good resource for working out plausible fictional planets.

Setting, Research, and a Telephone Directory

This post really does get around to the topic of writing. But first:

Minimum Standards and Scraping By

My household's cable got cut while a contractor was removing a couple trees from my back yard. Not his fault, I think. Turns out the cable service provider is under the impression that as long as the cable is (just) under the sod, it's okay. Which works fine, until somebody with a Bobcat comes by.

Live and learn.

The point is that I had quite a lot of time on my hands yesterday afternoon. With the cable cut, I couldn't get online - which meant that my blog writing and research (other way around, actually) was a 'once and future' set of tasks.

So I drove over to my father-in-law's, used his phone to contact our ISP/phone/cable television provider, talked, took a few photos - all of which still left with me with time on my hands.

Fairly Normal: For a Guy Who Reads Dictionaries

Some fifty-something guys, in my position, would get out the golf clubs, or watch a replay of the Super Bowl. I transcribed a telephone directory.

It wasn't a very large directory: I ended up with a spreadsheet that's less than 700 lines, top to bottom.

One of my daughters, at least, has been impressed that I read dictionaries. For fun. I don't do so all that often, but sometimes I enjoy going through the pages, looking for interesting words and noting where they came from.

In the case of the phone directory, it was more work than fun - but I'll admit to enjoying the data-entry process.

Getting to Know Another Way of Life

This wasn't just any phone directory: One of America's naval bases has a telephone directory that's available to the public, with what appears to be a modestly-complete list of offices, desks, schools, and stores. Along with, in many cases, which building they're in.

I'm not entirely clear on where Building 160 is: but I don't need to. I've learned that it's the building to go to with questions about vending machines, recreational vehicles, and cable television.

On a naval base? Isn't that, you know, military?

Yes.

I also know how to call someone with questions about child care for kids age six weeks to five years, and the bowling alley's number.

The assumptions I made, taking data from the directory, have me with the bowling alley and a barracks being in the same building. Which either means that my assumptions are wrong - or some sailors aren't getting much sleep.

Why Would Any Sane Person Deconstruct a Phone Directory?!

I wasn't seeking "to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning" by tweezing apart that phone directory. (deconstruction, Princeton's WordNet) I figured that, once I mined its data and put it into a spreadsheet, I'd be able to see what sort of activities happened on the base, and - in very general terms - how they were organized.

I found out that there were quite a few schools on the base. That wasn't a surprise: I knew that one of its functions was training, and training happens in schools.

I found out that a sailor stationed there could rent recreational vehicles on the base. That was a bit of a surprise.

M*A*S*H, College, and the Real World

I've enjoyed watching reruns of "M*A*S*H." Because of the show's wide and lasting popularity among American audiences, I've used Frank Burns as an example of a particular sort of mindset in another blog.

But "M*A*S*H" isn't real. It's a moderately well-researched television series - of the 'relevant' sitcom variety. There's an element of truth to many of the show's characters, but I'd no more use it as a reliable reference for military life than I'd watch Star Wars to learn about astrophysics.

I could draw from my own life experiences: but I know better. I'm old enough to have picked up my limp in Vietnam, but my draft classification is 4F - by the time I was in my teens, an x-ray of my left hip joint looked like the last stages of arthritic decay. Which is a topic for yet another of my blogs.

I have no first-hand experience of what life is like on a military base.

I'm certainly not going to trust the sort of impressions I picked up, going to college in America during the seventies and eighties. That was a colorful and strange era in our history - which I strongly suspect will appear in articles on abnormal psychology in centuries to come.

Which is yet again another topic.

So, very little of my own, personal, experience is useful in my research.

Analysis of a phone directory won't give me much of an emotional picture of what it's 'like' to live on an American naval base in the 21st century - but it will, I think, help me build a structure that I can hang more touchy feely information on.

Why Bother?

I've spent about five hours, so far, on this 'phone directory' project. I think it's worth the trouble.

I now know that at least one large American naval base really is like a small town in many ways, with its own 'downtown,' and even a movie theater of sorts.

Nobody would mistake it for a 'real' small town, of course. For example, the analogues to civilian functions seem to be on a smaller scale than what I'd expect in a town of that size that grew naturally.

I also learned that there may be a certain amount of humor in - of all things - the numbers assigned to buildings. This particular base's marina/summer equipment rental facilities are in Building 13.

All This - For Galaxy Cadet?!

I'm doing the research now, because I've been developing background and settings for a story or five about Galaxy Cadet. (March 28, 2010)

I wrote, earlier this year, that I should probably "loosen up" by writing a distinctly non-epic, lightweight story. Being the sort of person I am, my notion of 'loosening up' has now involved analysis of a telephone directory.

It's not as crazy as it sounds: I'll probably be able to use the same research for at least one other setting that's 'back burnered' right now.

A Problem With Nice, Orderly Societies

I've written about stories with A Message before. You've run into them: Several generations ago they might even have, "and the moral of this story is..." at the end; These days, it's more along the lines of Humanity has Killed Mother Nature and We're All Gonna Die! Or maybe the big, bad computers will take over.

Don't get me wrong: I liked the special effects in "Avatar," and "The Matrix" is on my to-be-viewed list. I'd have watched "The Matrix" start-to-finish before, but until this year, the excerpts I'd dropped into had been on late-night television. Apparently the 1999 movie's setting actually makes sense. Sort of. Good enough for 'willing suspension of disbelief,' anyway.

I'm getting off-topic. In the second paragraph. That's fast work, even for me.

Where was I? "...and the moral of this story is...:" right.

I don't particularly like stories that apply The Meaning with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, or drop The Moral on the reader like an anvil. Even if - make that particularly if I started out agreeing to some extent with what the author had to say.

So, I intend to write nice, bland, meaningless drivel with no discernible purpose beyond entertainment? Not likely.

---

Bear with me, please: the rest of this post is about Utopias and good intentions. Sort of.

---

Take nice, orderly societies for example. Sounds - nice - doesn't it?

A Nice, Orderly, Society Where Everybody's Protected: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Just imagine a wonderful world of the future: all the people walking around with a dreamy smile on their faces, completely and totally secure in the knowledge that they're safe from natural disasters, muggers, and unfamiliar ideas.

A reasonable desire for the security implied in the first two points is, I think, part of the reason we started cooking meat and living in groups of more than a dozen or so. I don't have a problem with preventing natural disasters. Or at least dealing with things like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and blizzards with minimal or no injury and death.

I even think it'd be a good idea if we could find a way to make muggers a footnote in history. Although in that case, I'm a little concerned about some of the methods suggested during the 20th century.

Lobotomies are coming back, by the way.

I don't take the conventionally-dim view of humanity that's part of some contemporary intellectual fads - and a number of post-Gutenberg branches of Christianity. I have, on the other hand, been surrounded by human beings for over a half century: and I think the fellow was right:

"For mischief comes not out of the earth, nor does trouble spring out of the ground; ²But man himself begets mischief, as sparks fly upward."
(Job 5:6,7)

I've written about that before, too.

I also don't see humanity as a cancer on delicate little Mother Nature's face, or as a totally corrupt mess. But let's face it: People make mistakes. Some want to do harm.

I think that even a well-intentioned altruist can mess things up: if he or she gets enough power.

The desire to protect the weak from harm is, I think, a good idea. But I also thing we can be 'protected' too much. I've touched on that before, too:

" '...Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law....' "
" 'Locksley Hall,' Alfred, Lord Tennyson"

---

" 'Happily, some of us got off the planet in time.' "
" 'Notes of a Traveler,' Otha Sisk"
(" '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme" (July 3, 2009))

I'd Love to be In Charge?

I'll admit that there have been times when I thought I couldn't possibly do a worse job than national and world leaders. That's not the same as thinking that I'd do a good job.

The sort of broad control achieved by totalitarian regimes is - I think - a really, really bad idea.

It Can Happen Here

There may be Americans who imagine that 'totalitarian' governments are 'over there.'

Others feel that America's federal government is "totalitarian."

For that matter, there are a few folks around the world who seem convinced that shape-shifting space-alien lizard people really run things.

I don't agree - with any of the above. Which 'proves' that I'm part of the conspiracy.

Getting off-topic. Again.

If you've run into some of my other blogs, or met me in online communities, you may know that I'm a Catholic. Yeah: one of those people.

You might expect me to be appalled at the rampant pornography sullying our fair land. That's near the mark, but I'm also concerned about some efforts to 'protect' us from smut.

I don't think porn is a good idea. For starters, it arguably doesn't show much respect for people - women, quite often. But I don't think that books, magazines, photos and videos with prurient interest are the only problem we've got.

Several years back, it looked like the American public was going to be 'protected' from the Wicked, Wicked Web by our benevolent leaders. I'm fairly convinced that the folks who were pushing for a federal agency to control what Americans saw, heard, and read had good intentions. They said they were worried about porn and 'hate speech.'

"...Fair enough. I don't approve of pornography or hateful screeds either.

"But when some socially conservative Christian organizations joined forces with liberal political action groups, I got concerned. They both wanted the government to do something about about people putting bad things on the Web. One of the odd couples was the Christian Coalition and the Feminist Majority.¹

"We didn't (quite) get a federal agency in charge of deciding who could put information on the Internet, and who could view it, thank God. But it could have happened. A great many people were very upset.

"So upset that, in my opinion, they weren't thinking about the consequences of what they wanted."
(Another War-on-Terror Blog (March 9, 2008))

That odd couple of worried people was, I think, a demonstration that emotions and reason don't play well together. ("Emotions, the Frontal Cortex, The War on Terror, Anarchists, and the Illuminati," Another War-on-Terror Blog (December 23, 2008))

I don't have any problem with parents - or schools - using blocking software to keep kids from seeing stuff that the parents or school board don't think is 'proper.' Families and local school boards have an obligation to look after children - and are small enough so that the crazy ones can't do widespread damage.

But a federal agency deciding what well upwards of 300,000,000 people should be allowed to see? With an option to make the plan global?

I wasn't concerned that a federal agency couldn't manage something like that: I was concerned that one could.

Managing the Masses For Their Own Good? Been There, Tried That

I'm pretty sure that some folks really believe that Stalin's Soviet Union was a golden age for Russia. Others may feel that McCarthyism was a good idea.

The world wasn't made up exclusively of freedom-loving Americans and oppressive commies - or wise leaders of the people's struggle and oppressive Yankee imperialists back in the 'good old days.' And it certainly isn't now.

But I think we still have 'intelligent, caring' people who honestly feel that everything would be wonderful: if only everybody could be made to act just the way the 'right sort' think they should.

Since I also think that well-meaning do-gooders like that will be around for the foreseeable future: speculative fiction writers have no shortage of material to play with.

Related posts:

• " '...Into the Future...' - Excerpt; Attitude; Comment and Theme"
  (July 3, 2009)

Alien Life will Most Likely be - Alien

---

"Alien Life on Titan Would Stink"
Space.com (April 10, 2010)

"If life does exist on Saturn's intriguing moon Titan, it probably stinks.

"The icy moon has long been seen as a potential spot for extraterrestrial life, but so far, there's no evidence of any living things there.

"And if there were life on Titan, it would likely involve chemicals that are noxious and disgusting to humans, scientists say...."

"...'This idea that you can walk up to the alien ambassador and shake their hand is very unlikely,' said biochemist William Bains of MIT and the Cambridge, England-based Rufus Scientific. He explained that these other worldly life forms would probably be so foreign to us that it might be difficult to recognize them as life, and coming into contact with them could prove hazardous.

"For example, Titan life's metabolism might involve chemical compounds such as phosphine and hydrogen sulfide, which are both foul-smelling gases that are toxic to humans...."

"...Instead of relying on water as a primary ingredient for life, as Earthlings do, Titan's life might have blood based on liquid methane, Bains said. Such a creature couldn't survive on Earth, where methane is a gas at our warmer temperatures.

" 'Their blood would instantly boil then release this great cloud of chemicals, quite a number of which are quite poisonous,' Bains said.

"And instead of using the element carbon to build many of the molecules that make up life, these creatures' chemistry might be based on silicon. While this element is relatively flexible and able to bond with a wide variety of other elements, many of these bonds would be unstable. For example, some compounds that could be present in Titan life would spontaneously burst into flames if exposed to Earth's air...."

I'm not sure that I quite buy the "so foreign to us that it might be difficult to recognize them as life" part of the article. What's described - phosphine, hydrogen sulfide and other substances in liquid methane - would likely enough involve microscopic bags of liquid grouped in larger sacks - like the plants and animals we're familiar with. And fungi and bacteria, for that matter. And yes, I know that plant cells tend to have rather hard walls.

Aliens with different life chemistries most likely wouldn't look like the creatures we're familiar with: but then, neither do the critters found in the Burgess Shale. But we don't have trouble identifying the Burgess Shale menagerie as animals - or maybe plants - but whatever, something living.

Okay: maybe we'll find 'living crystals' or something like Hoyle's Black Cloud: but that's not what the article was discussing.

'Life as We Know It,' Class M Planets and All That

I think there will always be room for stories involving beautiful space princesses and exotic-looking aliens who think 9.8 m/s2 acceleration is 'normal' gravity. And are perfectly comfortable in a 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide mix at 21 degrees Celsius.

I also think there is room for stories where the alien ambassador needs a portable habitat to survive on Earth. And, likely enough, thinks Earth's air is thin and incredibly toxic: but likes the low gravity. ("Earth May Not Be a "Class M" Planet," Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

Looks like 'serious' scientists are starting to get their heads around the idea that "life" may not always be quite exactly what we've been studying here for the last few thousand years. That's not entirely fair: a competent biochemist worked out a plausible range of possible 'life chemistries' for a wide range of temperatures quite a few years ago:

"...Actually, the idea that life didn't necessarily need water isn't particularly new. A former professor (of chemistry, apparently) at Boston University put together a pretty good argument for a half-dozen life chemistries that might plausibly work in temperatures ranging from near red-hot to near absolute zero:

1. "Fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
2. "Fluorocarbon in sulfur
3. "Nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
4. "Nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
5. "Lipid in methane
6. "Lipid in hydrogen
   " 'View from a Height' Isaac Asimov (1963), Lancer Books (p. 63)

"Isaac Asimov might be shaky on the sciences of ecology and physics - at least in his fiction - but that was in his professional field: chemistry. I'm inclined to take his view seriously, that life-as-we-know-it isn't necessarily the only sort. We're #3 on that list, by the way...."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 24, 2010)

Then there are the scenarios where the 'aliens' are the descendants of people who left Earth back when humanity first reached the stars: and who have been away from home for a long time.

But this post is getting rather long. Goodnight.

Related posts:

• "Titan, Life Without Water, and 'Messing With Old Definitions'"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 24, 2010)
• "Well, That's Interesting: Burges Shale Creatures"
  (February 13, 2010)
• "Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
  (December 8, 2009)
• "Earth May Not Be a 'Class M' Planet"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009)
• "Life on Ceres? Could Be"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 5, 2009)
  Particularly
  Exploding Martians and the Viking Life Experiment

Getting Serious by Getting Silly: Meet Galaxy Cadet Aster Alpha

I've decided to get serious about the graphics side of story-telling this weekend: so I played with DAZ Productions Bryce. I've found that I learn more, faster, when I've got a picture of what sort of result I want in my mind and the excellence or lack thereof of the result is relatively unimportant.

In this case, I wanted a cityscape, seen from the air, with vast acreages of big buildings and other structures in the middle distance: and 'good grief, how big are they' buildings behind them.

Here's what I got:



The 'foreground' structures are from the Rigel Orionis Megalopolis product. Those weird airships are the Bryce Flying Steamer. My oldest daughter tells me that they're done in the 'steam punk' style. I created what's on the horizon in Bryce.

That picture isn't related to any story or setting I'm working on. The flying steamers are - sort of - but that's still pretty vague.

So, why bother? I need to re-learn how to use Bryce - and how to make more effective use of it - if I'm going to make quite a few of my projects work. Putting that picture together helped. Quite a bit.

Getting Serious About Being Silly

Galaxy Cadet (Heroics and Hairspray in the 27th century) is a project that's been on the back burner for years.



Baum Media Productions is a fictional company - part of Loonfoot Falls' world. (Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette features a 250-word column from the equally fictional town paper each week.)

I don't have the resources to do what BMP did - create feature-length animated Galaxy Cadet movies - but I think I can have a shot at writing stories about Galaxy Cadet. Her name's Aster Alpha, by the way, and after a brief but spectacular mission on the Stellar Guard carrier Wotan, she's been assigned to the fringe patrol ship Albatross.

That was the most remote, obscure, isolated, dead-end spot they could find. And yes: there's a story behind that.



That's Aster Alpha again. I have no idea where that picture was taken. Some sort of planetside port facility, apparently.

If those names don't sound like the sort of terribly serious stuff I've been talking about - you're right. I think I need to loosen up a bit: and following Galaxy Cadet's career may be a good way to do that.

Related posts:

• "Interstellar Empires, Imagination, and an Occasionally-Sozzled Detective"
  (Friday, March 12, 2010)
• "New York City, 3650"
  (March 1, 2010)
• "Making a Plausible Setting"
  (February 22, 2010)
• "Baum Media Productions: From Light Bulbs to Galaxy Cadet"
  Loonfoot Falls Chronicle-Gazette (August 21, 2009)

Well, That's Interesting: Brooklyn and the Names of Things

I touched base at Google Translate and discovered that "Brooklyn" is 布鲁克林 (Bùlǔkè lín) in simplified Chinese.

That's actually closer to the original than the English take on at least one city in India. I speak American English, so as I grew up I knew the place as "Bombay." "Bombay" may have come from an Englishman trying to pronounce "bom bahia": Portuguese for "good bay". Which the place is.

Folks who lived there, and weren't Europeans, apparently called it Mumbai.

"...The city was called Bombay for much of the last four hundred years. The origin of the name is obscure, but is often said to come from the Portuguese phrase bom bahia meaning 'good bay'. The name Mumbai has been used in the main local languages for as long, and is ascribed to the local goddess, Mumba (ai means mother in Marathi). The name of the city was changed to Mumbai by an act of the parliament in 1997...."
(The Mumbai Pages, "By any other name" - More in their FAQ)

Things Change

I wrote a little about names, language, and history before. (February 26, 2010)

We might be calling that big city on a river in Britannia Londinium to this day, if the Caesars had managed to hold their empire together. But that's not how it happened. Romans founded the city, began developing that outpost of their empire, and retreated: leaving ruins and legends; and a shaken Roman's description of a huge, red-haired and very scary woman. They really could have handled Queen Boudicca with more finesse. But that's another topic.

Centuries after the Romans had retreated, leaving memories of a day when roads were built and order maintained, boatloads of French-speaking Vikings landed and picked up where the Romans had left off. Which is yet another topic.

Today, those Vikings are speaking the language that emerged from a sort of philological Cuisinart that imposed quite a lot of French and Latin on a Germanic language. We call it English. Which is yet again another topic.

Where was I? Londinium. Right.

That name hasn't changed all that much. From the sounds of it, a syllable or two dropped out - and I'm pretty sure the vowels aren't quite what the Romans used. There's a whole lot more going on: but I don't know as much about linguistics as I'd like to.

16 Centuries is a Long Time

Quite a lot can happen in 1,600 years. It's been that long, about, since Alaric succeeded in capturing Rome, but failed to hold the city.

Alaric's conquest wasn't an isolated incident. Germanic tribes and Huns were making life so hazardous, that some - but not all - Roman citizens were abandoning their cities. There's pretty good reason to think that quite a few Romans from Padua, Aquileia, Altino and Concordia, for example, fled into a (relatively) nearby marsh.

It looks like those Romans set up a sort of refugee camp. A thousand years later that camp was Venice: a sort of Mediterranean analog to New York City. Today, it's a city that looks quite a big like it did in its heyday: which is a good thing for its tourist trade.

It's possible to use Alaric's sack of Rome as a milestone, marking the beginning of the end for the Roman Empire. But not Rome's influence.

For a very long time, north of the Mediterranean, the only language you could be fairly certain that someone in the town you were in was Latin. The language of the Caesars was still taught when I was in school: but by then English was the language you were most likely to find in spoken somewhere. (More: "Why isn't there More Mandarin on the Web?," Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 4, 2008)) Those Britishers were everywhere.

Another 1,600 years, and things will have changed. Again. Still.

A 'good enough for a story' educated guess is that China will have finally sorted itself out, and be a major player on the world's stage. My take on what's coming is that they'll have emperors again - and that what we're seeing today is one of the messier inter-dynastic 'warlord' periods. With some moderately weird foreign ideologies mixed in.

Yeah: my guess is that people who are serious about putting the Middle Kingdom (中国, or Zhōngguó) back on the map will not want to keep reminders of colonial days around. Not even the time when they were trying to adapt the foreign ideas to their ways.

I've written about what I think is likely - possible, at least - with urban developments on the east coast of North America. ("Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis" (March 5, 2010))

I'm not assuming that the Boston-Washington D.C. corridor will still be heavily built up because I'm a red-white-and-blue-blooded American. The cities there have a reason for being there - mostly as break-in-bulk points for trans-oceanic trade. I don't see that changing.

Look at it this way: Rome is on an important river crossing, and more-or-less centrally located. And, after a rough patch after the awkward transition from Empire to recovery, an economically important part of - we're calling that part of the world "Italy."

So, why was I looking up what simplified Chinese is for "Brooklyn?"

Today, Brooklyn is a place sitcoms and comics can use as a locale for ditsy, amusing not-rich people. It's also a major seaport with industrial potential.

New York City is the "Big Apple" of course. And probably will be for quite a while. It makes a pretty good place to put financial enterprises and the upper end of other economic interests. And it's got that name: "New York City" still has a bit of panache.

It still may, 1,600 years from now. Or, not so much. I'm willing to guess that Brooklyn / 布鲁克林 / Bùlǔkè lín won't be just like it is today, either. I'm guessing that Bùlǔkè lín could be pronounced "Bulookeh Lin" and still be recognizable. Or, not. It's got a nifty exotic/familiar look to it, though.

Welcome to the Bustling Metropolis of Bulookeh Lin

Having visited the quaint Antiquities Preservation District of Niooyueh Shì, come see the hub of Greater Nyok, Bulookeh Lin.

Okay: I'm running out of time, but briefly: I see no reason why Brooklyn couldn't become a more central part of the New York City area. For starters, it's got what Manhattan doesn't have: square footage. upwards of 71 square miles.

Those names? I'm still thinking about that.

Related posts:

• "Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis"
  (March 5, 2010)
• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Why isn't there More Mandarin on the Web?"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (April 4, 2008)

Daniel Boone and the Megalopolis

I've been thinking quite a bit lately, about the world of 3650 or thereabouts.

Since I'm making some moderately non-pessimistic assumptions, I figure that people won't be any stupider in the next few thousand years than they have in the past. Also that we'll have around 780,000,000,000 people on Earth by then.

Not a typo. And not, really, all that much more than the 6,790,062,216 or so we have now.

Overpopulated? That depends on your frame of reference.

Daniel Boone and Manhattan's Lower East Side

Although Daniel Boone apparently didn't move each time he could see the smoke from a neighbor's chimney,¹ I suspect that he'd not feel at home in the Washington, D.C. - Boston megalopolis.

I lived in San Francisco, a few decades ago, mostly in an area that was between five and 15 levels deep, apart from streets and sidewalks. I thoroughly enjoyed sharing the end of a peninsula with a sizable fraction of a million other people.

My children grew up in a small town in central Minnesota: the population topped 4,000 recently. I love it here, too: but the ambiance is very different. And some of my kids are acutely uncomfortable even in a relatively lightly-developed area like the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area.

A great deal depends, I suppose, on what you grow up with. But then, I grew up in the town that's across the river from Fargo, North Dakota: and I loved living in a rather built-up city.

The appeal that San Francisco had for me were the opportunities to directly experience the micro-cultures in the city. I lived on the edge of Chinatown (the real one: not that tourist strip), where folks don't have the Western aversion to bright colors on buildings; I could - and did - walk or take public transport to book stores, museums, art galleries - you get the idea. To manage that sort of activity here in the upper Midwest, I'd have to have access to my own aircraft - and even then I'd be eating up too much time going from place to place.

Yeah: There are advantages to having a lot of people in a small area. We're social creatures, and there's a lot of energy generated when we're able to meet each other.

The Internet has helped me keep in contact with the world: I 'drove' around the lower east side of New York City earlier this week, via Google Maps. It's not the same as being there, of course - but I was able to take a good look at my surroundings, which I wouldn't have been able to if I were driving. And I could move a whole lot faster than I could, walking. Or driving, for that matter.

Back to New York City, ca. 3650.

My, How You've Grown!

The megalopolis we know today has grown. North America has what's essentially a new mountain range, running from Florida northwards: several miles high in most spots.

And yes: That'd have an effect on weather patterns. My guess is that there'll be 'reverse wind farms' here and there, forcing winds 'uphill' to maintain what we think of as 'normal' climate. Weather control? I suppose you'd call it that.

New York City itself would be one of the higher areas, I suspect. It's an excellent natural harbor: and ocean-going vessels would still be a reasonably efficient way to transport large volumes of material. There'd probably be more than a hundred times as much traffic, though: so we're probably looking at offshore port facilities, too.

How would I feel about living in a city that was essentially one building, several hundred miles long by about three miles deep?

Today, I live in central Minnesota, where water is a mineral for a large part of the year: and I'm not a winter sports enthusiast.

Don't get me wrong: I love it here. But the prospect of living inside 24/7/365, in a place that'd 'feel' like the Mall of America, with climate-controlled pedestrian access to analogs of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Grand Ole Opry, Broadway, the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Plus whatever people come up with in the next sixteen centuries?

If I did a 'Buck Rogers,' woke up in that era, and wound up living near the east coast: I might find it a bit crowded. Also extremely exciting.

Old MacDonald Had a Farm

All those people will eat. I've mentioned this before.

I don't think today's sewer system could handle the load of a three-mile-deep New York City. But then, I don't think that Rome's system, two thousand years back, could handle the volume that contemporary systems do: and the Romans were good engineers.

The point? People aren't stupid. We adapt. When what we're doing doesn't work, we improve our methods, or develop new ones. Some of us do, anyway. Others complain and wait for someone else to fix things. That's a different topic.

I really don't think we'll be dumping all that waste into the Atlantic. Remember: all those people are going to want to eat on a regular basis. That sewage just about has to get treated and sent back west to the farms.

Disgusting? I don't think so: but then I live in a town where we can tell when someone upwind has turned their manure bed. Let's get real: Everything on Earth has been eating recycled, ah, stuff for hundreds of millions of years. All that's different about my world of 3650 or so is that we're managing the process a lot more than we are now.

Those farms won't look like those quaint old fields you see in 'visit Ireland' brochures. Think a greenhouse, many levels deep, with "sunlight" generated locally for all but the top level. Livestock? that'd be elsewhere, but not too far away: you don't want to have to haul silage any farther than you have to.

Horribly artificial? Artificial, yes. Horribly? That's a matter of taste. I think Ord ("The Dream") wouldn't like the world 16 centuries out - at all. Or today's world. Me? It'd take getting used to. But then, my ancestors would have had a few adjustments to make, if they'd been taken out of Roman Europe and dropped here in 21st-century Minnesota.

Where's all that energy coming from? Well, that's another topic, for another day.

And I haven't even gotten into the specialized gourmet/recreational business of free-range cattle.

More-or-less-related posts:

• "New York City, 3650"
  (March 1, 2010)
• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
  (October 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

---

¹ "Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality," Gregory McNamee, Encyclopedia Britannica Blog (October 23, 2007).

New York City, 3650

I've been thinking about New York City quite a bit more lately than I usually do. Partly because one of those nifty ideas that's been wandering somewhere in my brain's infrastructure popped out into the front office last week.

The basic idea isn't anything new: it's a setting for what could be a sequence of 'club tales.' Sort of like the 'Mr. Mulliner' short stories by P. G. Wodehouse (which are not speculative fiction at all); or A. C. Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" (which is).

The best location for this place, I decided, would be on Earth, in a major city, and about 16 centuries from now. Almost any period after the advent of the short circuit would do: but that's roughly when my 'Blue Buzzard' stories are, so I'd only have to do background research once for both sets.

So, what would a "city of the future" look like? Probably not quite like this:

"This painting by Frank R. Paul's of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Shmoise regulations...."

"...If there is one thing that united the artist-prophets, it was a fascination with gigantism. Since the most impressive engineering feats of the early 20th century were bigger and better dams, bridges, canals, and whatnot, it seemed only reasonable that the cities of future ages would look as though they needed a round of thyroid treatments...."
("Future City," "Skyscraper World," Tales of Future Past)

David S. Zondy, creator of Tales of Future Past, has a point: those illustrations from the 20s and 30s of cities of the future showed huge buildings. And, quite often, elevated roadways.

Now that megamalls are news only when something newsworthy happens in them, maybe it isn't quite so cool to imagine megastructures.

Cool or not, New York City in my 37th century is going to have to have some fair-sized buildings. Or I'll have to radically change what I've got planned for Earth in my stories.

Starting with a population somewhat northwards of 100 times what we have now.

Flint Knives to International Harvester: Change Happens

We couldn't feed that many people today. But I've done a little research: and that's not a crazy-high figure. Of course, it would mean bringing agricultural technology up to 1975 state-of-the-art around the world. Just as important, we couldn't have too many countries where the primary function of most people was keeping dear leader supplied with fresh lobster. But I'm getting off-topic.

A Hundred Times as Many People? However Will Earth Survive?

My 37th century Earth won't look just what we've got today: but I'm not talking about the 'dying planet' stuff mentioned in "Avatar" (2009).

What I think many doomsters forget is that human beings are biological entities. We consume organic material, water and oxygen. But it doesn't stay inside us. On a time scale of seconds to hours, most of what went in comes out again. We can't consume what we excrete, at that point, but quite a few organisms can: and eventually we, or someone like us, will get the same molecules again. It's a system that's been working for hundreds of millions of years: and I think is likely to keep recycling, whether trilobites, dinosaurs, or we are pushing part of the process along.

Will it be different, with more than a hundred times as many people around as there are now? Of course. It's different now, compared to the 'good old days' when there were only a few million of us. (See " 'The Dream' - a Short-Short Story," for a look at today's world as a hideously-overcrowded future)

Back to New York City, ca. 3650

As it stands today, New York City can't handle another 99 people for everybody who lives and works there now. But quite a bit can be changed in 1,650 years.

I did a little checking, and found that many (most, where I looked) buildings around New York City's Central Park were about 15 stories tall, with some around 20. Near the south end of the island, they're taller, of course. But that 15-story range gave me something to start with.

You can't just add more floors to a building and leave it at that. Aside from structural considerations, people in the upper floors will want to get down to ground level now and again. We manage that in today's skyscrapers with elevators. Which takes up floor space - books have been written on the subject: the bottom line is that there are limits with the technology we have now. 'Sky lobbies' are a partial solution.

We might wind up with something like those old aerial roadways, after all.

With a blithe wave of the hand, I took New York City's skyline, and multiplied in by a hundred. Vertical transport? I'll figure that out later.

Those buildings around Central Park would be 15 x 10 x 100 = 15,000 feet tall. That's almost three miles. The park is less than a mile across. The place would be a trench: "scarier than it is now," as my oldest daughter put it.

Just How High Will We Build?

I did a quick check, and found out that five kilometers is almost the limit for how far up you'll find cities - Wenzhuan is 16,730 feet, or 5,019 meters, above sea level.

People can live there, obviously - but I'm not sure how much higher we'd go before the air was uncomfortably thin.

So my Central Park is surrounded by buildings around 15,000 feet tall? No problem: Air's breathable at that altitude, and I'm still not worrying about vertical transport.

Central Park's being at the bottom of a three-mile-deep trench is an aesthetic issue - which I'll ignore for now.

Incremental Growth?

There was a story where New York City was destroyed and rebuilt as a cube, two miles on a side. ("City Cube," Tomorrow's Skyline, Tales of Future Past)

That could probably be done. Napoleon III's government leveled good-sized parts of Paris, laying out the groundwork of what we've got today. ("Streets of Paris," James Chastain (1999, 2004)) There's pretty good reason to believe that the streets of Paris today are so wide and straight because the civic leaders wanted the citizenry exposed to light, air and cannon fire.

The mid-1800s were a colorful period. And another topic.

Apart from phenomena like Napoleon III and urban renewal, though, cities tend to grow one piece at a time. That's why today's New York City has brownstones, modernist architecture, and a jumble of other styles being used side-by-side.

I rather like the effect, myself.

Right now, I'm playing with the idea that 1,650 years from now New York City will have grown more-or-less gradually. No two-mile-high cubes.

A quick sketch of the south end of Manhattan with a height limit of about 15,000 feet didn't look too crazy. I don't know whether to look at making that end of the island taller - or spreading out the 'downtown' area.

To keep the buildings from looking like improbably elongated mega-pencils, I've assumed that Manhattan will continue to be high-value property: valuable enough for organizations to buy several blocks and build a single structure over them.

We've got something like that happening in Chicago. But that's yet another topic, and it's getting late.

Vaguely-related posts:

• "London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future"
  (February 26, 2010)
• "Food, Agriculture, Technology, and City Folks"
  (October 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)

London, Londinium, Electropolis, and New York City: Names of the Far Future

One of the advantages of speculative fiction / science fiction for writers is that, particularly for stories set in the far future, they can make up anything they like, and it's okay?

Well, yes and no.

For someone who's writing exclusively as an exercise in self-expression, maybe.

A writer who wants other people to read the story - and keep reading it - not so much, in my opinion.

What's in a Name?

Take place names, for example. For someone writing a story in American English about contemporary life in New York City: all they need to do is make sure that they spell "New York" correctly, and keep check out the New York City Web site (www.nyc.gov), or other online resources like Google Maps.

No problems.

When your setting is not where you live, and you're portraying people who don't speak your particular dialect: things get interesting.

For example, would someone who grew up in Germany say that he lives in Germany? If he was speaking English, quite possibly. When he's at home, though, he lives in Deutschland. Which is why, here in America, we refer to citizens of the Netherlands as the Dutch. Which is another topic.

So, what about tales of the far future: anything goes, right?

Depends on what you're going for. If your story is supposed to be a cheesy spoof of Saturday matinee serials and the shallow end of science fiction's golden age: I suppose there's a sort of virtue to using names like Magnetonia or Electropolis.

Now that I see it: I actually like "Electropolis."

But, no.

What I was working with today (not all day - but I'm getting off-topic again) was a bit more serious.

I was looking for something to call New York City, about 1,650 years from now.

Sure, I could just call it "New York City," since I'm writing in the only language I'm really comfortable with: English.

But that doesn't help establish or support the setting.

I could make up some bit of gibberish, on the principle that the place would have a new name.

Things Change

That approach is half right. Not the "gibberish" bit: the idea that New York City might have a new name.

Or, maybe not.

London, that big city on a river in an island kingdom, has been around for a long time. Almost 2,000 years now (1,967, actually). Back in Roman times, it was called Londinium. (More, at "Roman London," Britain Express)

And, just shy of two millennia later: the name hasn't changed all that much. Mostly, I suspect, because the folks living there speak a Germanic language that was heavily influenced by French-speaking Vikings. Which is yet another topic.

Back to New York City, about 1,650 years from now.

One thing's sure: things will have changed.

I've decided, given what's happened over the last few thousand years, that China has a good shot at being

1. Intact as a cultural and political entity
2. A major part of the economy and culture of Earth

Besides: there are some seriously cool things I can do with an Earth that shows a heavy Chinese influence.

Like - I haven't forgotten - what people call New York City.

I put New York City through Google Translate, and got 纽约市 (that won't look right, unless you've got a Chinese font. I told Google Translate to give me the result in 'Chinese (Simplified)').

Next, I put 纽约市 in, asking for an English translation. Sure enough: I got New York City.

So, how is 纽约市 pronounced? If you read and speak Chinese: you already know.

To get the answer for me, I went back to the English > Chinese (Simplified) mode, put New York City in and got 纽约市 again. This time I told the software to "Show romanization" (that's a nice bit of software Google's got). (I'm learning to recognize characters - but pronunciation is something I'm not even close to getting right.)

I got Niǔyuē shì.

Which is helpful. Maybe that "ǔ" is roughly the same sound as "oo" (as in too or tool, as pronounced in American English). Or maybe it's more like "uh" like "cut". The American Heritage Dictionary Pronunciation Key says it's the latter.

The "ē" is a little easier - assuming that it's got the same value given in that American Heritage Dictionary Pronunciation Key. That's the "e" sound we have in words like "pet" and "met."

And yes, I know: I don't know how to pronounce Chinese. No offense, but I'm not aiming at linguistic precision here, so much as trying for a plausibly-close approximation. Moving along.

I'm guessing that "New York City" / 纽约市 / Niǔyuē shì sounds a little like "Niuhyueh Shì" in some Chinese dialects. Or maybe "Niooyueh Shì". It doesn't look that much like "New York City" in the Latin alphabet I use - but it doesn't sound all that much different.

I'll sleep on it, but I think that major city on the east coast of North America is called "Niuhyueh Shì" by the time that story's period rolls around.

Another Day, Another Question

I've spent hours this week, sketching out how the interior of the Blue Buzzard is laid out. I think it's important, so that I can show readers - eventually. I wrote about this on Monday.

On the other hand, one of my daughters doesn't do this sort of planning. She's written many stories. They're not the sort of thing I would normally read on my own: but I've read some, and they're well-written. (Observed as a recovering English teacher, not a doting father.)

So I have to ask myself - again - am I taking the wrong approach to writing?

Good question. Someday maybe I'll have a good answer.

Making a Plausible Setting

I watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" last Saturday. It's been almost 42 years since I first saw the film, and quite a bit has changed. Including me.

So, I took a trip down memory lane by viewing a movie I liked in my late teens? So what?

Stanley Kubrick's film is still (fairly) convincing science fiction cinema today. In large part, I think, because he understood that his 'futuristic' gadgetry and settings had too look like people actually used them. And, he made an effort to make sure that sets which were filmed as if they connected to each other - would actually connect, if placed side-by-side. And that live sets matched (more or less) the miniatures used for spacecraft exteriors.

I spent quite a bit of time today, working out the deck plan for part of the Blue Buzzard, a ship that's the setting for what I plan as a sequence of stories. For (some) written fiction, that'd be a waste of time. All an author would have to do is make sure that - if any numbers were given - there was enough cubage to accommodate whatever the action called for.

I'd be uncomfortable with that - I've read too many stories where willing suspension of disbelief was stretched when, say, a hallway had three doors on each side in one chapter, with pictures hung between them - and was three paces long in another.

Besides, what I'm aiming for is a story involving quite a few pictures, drawings, whatever. That means that I need to have at least a rough idea of where things go.

That deck plan? I can't use it. The good news is, I know what won't work, know a few features that will - all before making a single sketch or rendering.

Why all this fuss over deck plans today? My imagination had taken a sabbatical. Which is another topic.

Sort-of-related posts:

• "Science Fiction in the Movies: 'The Satan Bug' to 'The Matrix' "
  (January 26, 2010)
• "Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
  (January 23, 2010)
• "Thought for the Day: Computers and Human Brains"
  (August 15, 2009)
• ""The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
  (August 2, 2009)
• "Predicting the Future: a Look at a Will Be that Was"
  (June 26, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: Cityscapes"
  (June 25, 2009)

Well, That's Interesting: Burges Shale Creatures

Science fiction/speculative fiction writers have played with the idea of space aliens that don't look all that much like us. There are a few approaches, including the intriguing but relatively uninformative 'too strange for the merely human mind to grasp.'

I've been trying to find plausible body plans for people who aren't human: Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" was a reasonably good starting place.

Then there are the creatures of the Cambrian. Some of the strangest fossils from this period come the Burgess Shale. We don't know whether critters on Earth these days don't, as a rule, have five eyes because pairs of eyes work better - or whether opabinia regalis isn't the ancestor of more creatures for reasons unrelated to it's strange-looking head.

So far, I've come up with fifteen plausible body plans - most of which are quite familiar, including the one which was used for millions of years by the bipedal dinosaurs.

But I've got the idea that I've missed something. So today I went back online and checked out a few websites that discuss the Burgess Shale. And other Cambrian fossil finds.

"Early Fauna"
Western Carolina University

• 3+ billion years – life forms
  • cyanobacteria (blue green algae) – very early
  • changed atmosphere – generate oxygen

This page seems to be a resource for a class or classes at Western Carolina University. The style is terse, but there are quite adequate illustrations - and a pretty good presentation of the questions raised by these fossils.

More:

"The Burgess Shale Fauna"
Smithsonian / National Museum of Natural History

"Although the Cambrian Explosion is largely associated with animals having hard shells, the soft-bodied biota also diversified during this period. The Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna, discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909, in British Columbia, Canada, provides a rare glimpse of Cambrian soft-bodied animals. This fauna is especially important because the fossil record is biased toward organisms having hard parts. Another famous soft-bodied occurrence is the Chengjiang Fauna, of...."

It's one page of a section on the Cambrian era. No illustrations, more useful for outlining what to look for elsewhere.

There are links to pages with text and photos, but they load in pop-up windows that won't display properly if you don't have the kind of browser and system that the Smithsonian thinks you should. (I don't.) For example, one pop-up about Hallucigenia sparsa is cut off in mid-sentence, with the best work-around I found.

Nice artwork, though.


(screen capture from the Smithsonian, used w/o permission)

The top of the pop-up displayed find: but I'd have to go in and try re-coding the source, to see what's at the bottom. That, or either adjust or replace my system.

Related posts:

• "The Coconut Crab: No, It's Not From a Science Fiction Movie"
  (September 25, 2009)
• "Hurdia Victoria: Cambrian Supercritter of the Burgess Shale"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 20, 2009)

Today, I've been Charting This Quadrant of the Galaxy

Megalomania is a personality trait said to be common among RPG¹ game moderators. Understandably, since many game moderators create a small world, often complete with their own laws of nature: and the people and creatures which live in that world.

For me, it was also a somewhat humbling experience. Or would have been, if I hadn't thought through just how complex reality is, before I got involved with RPGs. One time, playing with my kids, I had to suspend play because I'd misplaced a barony. We knew it was there: but I couldn't put my hands on the manila folder I kept all the details in.

It's a good thing I'm not God. But that's another topic: for another blog. (Like A Catholic Citizen in America - shameless, blatant plug for another of my blogs)

Where was I?

RPGs.

Subcreations (February 1, 2010)

Human aspirations and limitations.

Right.

Charting the Galaxy, a Half-Quadrant at a Time

So, what did I do with my time today?

• Picked up some tax-related information at local clinics
• Dropped some letters off at the post office
• Went to the bank
• Bought some coffee
• Finished charting one quadrant of the galaxy

Don't be too impressed: All that last item means is that I've assigned positions for quite a few 'points of interest' in two eighth-section wedges of the Milky Way galaxy. A few of them are real, like Eta Carina and the Vela Supernova Remnant. Most, however, are figments of my imagination.

And none-too-detailed figments, at that: with a few exceptions.

It's a bit obsessive-compulsive of me, but I think I've got an excuse.

First, it's the sort of potentially-annoying, occasionally-pointless thing I do.

Second, and more importantly, I'm hoping that there'll be more more than one story in a setting I've been putting together. Much of the action takes place over a thousand years from now. Or, from the point of view of that prologue I posted:

"In ancient times, after humanity reached the stars, but before the Mandate of Heaven was restored to the Middle Kingdom...."
(June 23, 2009)

Individual stories may be slice-of-life vignettes, action-adventure space opera, or whatever. Taken as a whole, I'm aiming for epic scale.

So, I really don't want to write myself into a corner - or accidentally introduce something that feels nifty for one story, but complicates every story that follows.

Like the Racooters. That's what some humans call them. Their name for "people" is a short series of whistles, squeaks and clicks that's pronounceable (sort of) with a human vocal system - but which doesn't transliterate well into the Latin alphabet. The name "Racooter" comes from their appearance. Think a raccoon that's a little more massive than we are, and stretched out like an otter. The head bulges a lot more, above and behind the eyes - but that gives a general idea of their appearance.

The Racooters are good for at least one story - a family of them is looking for a piece of hardware that wandered off - and my oldest daughter and I have been talking through some aspects of their personalities, culture, and technology.

Where Have all the Aliens Gone?

If you're around my age (I was born during the Truman administration), you may recognize the song I'm jumping off from:

Where have all the aliens gone?
Long time looking
Where have all the aliens gone?
Where did they go?
Where have all the aliens gone?
We've not seen them: no, not one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Dubious 'alien abduction' stories and all notwithstanding, there isn't solid evidence that extraterrestrial microbes exist: let alone space alien proctologists. Ever notice, by the way, how the 'space aliens' of a few decades back were unaccountably interested in giving women pregnancy tests? Never mind.

I really don't buy the idea that humanity is, by some wild cosmic coincidence, at exactly the point where intelligent races die (horribly, of course) of pollution, global warming, nuclear winter, or whatever the crisis du jour is.

An idea that's been played with by speculative fiction authors is that the galaxy is crowded with aliens - who are scared silly of us. We don't see them, because they really, sincerely, don't want to be seen.

Or maybe we're on a sort of wildlife preserve. We don't see the aliens because they don't look all that much like us to begin with. more to the point, they're no more interested in making themselves known to us than entomologists are interested in revealing themselves to the termite mound they're studying. Keep going along that path, and you'll start wondering if we're in a zoo: or a laboratory.

Which has been done in some stories.

I'm going with another idea: that there's a fair number of non-human people out there. And, they really are non-human.

There's a very distinct possibility that Earth isn't a "Class M" planet in the "Star Trek" sense of the term: a planet that's right on the 50th percentile of suitability for biological life. (Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

We may be on just about the smallest world that could possibly support life-as-we-know-it. Devastating as earthquakes and volcanoes are, we rely on them for recycling stuff that would otherwise collect on the ocean floors.

A bigger planet would, unless there's something seriously wrong with the mathematical models geologists use to explain how Earth works, have more tectonic activity - earthquakes and volcanoes - probably a thinner crust, and more plates getting sucked down, heated and sent back up through volcanoes.

People living on a bigger planet would have a harder time getting off it, once they developed the technology.

Even if they could get into orbit, I'm not convinced that they'd be interested.

"Doesn't Everybody Dream of Flying?"

"Maybe there's nobody else out there, or maybe most people live on planets where it's really, really hard to get into orbit. Or maybe we live on a planet where, for the last few million years, the environment favored creatures with a bit more brains than usual: who were willing to take insane risks.

"Like flying.

"Or riding a tower of explosives to an airless hell of barren rock. Several times.

"Across the galaxy, most people may be staying quietly at home, playing the local equivalent of pinochle or Mahjong, or whatever: and shuddering at the memory of crazy Uncle Eddy, who once made something he called a 'raft,' but - thankfully - never tried using it himself...."
(Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009))

Remember: Non-human intelligences won't be human.

Which gets me back to that "quadrant of the galaxy" thing. I've placed - tentatively - 58 places where people got started. Including us. A few are more-or-less like us, physically and psychologically: like the Raccooters. Most aren't. Some died with no heirs, a long time ago. Some have been around for a really, really long time - the periodicals section of their analog to the Library of Congress would have documents that are tens of millions of years old. And maybe pictures of dinosaurs.

And some of the really old ones are, the way I'm setting it up, quite a bit like us. The way they think, anyway. Only they've been around for a whole lot longer.

That's where it gets interesting. There's a little spark of an idea that I intend to play with for a while.

Would We Realize That an Alien was Smarter than We are?

Speculative fiction authors have used the idea that space aliens don't just have better technology than we do: they're smarter. On the other hand, some of my favorite stories played with the (more rarely seen) notion that we're the brainy ones: and that the Galactic Protectorate has mile-long starships because they've been muddling through the research-and-development process for hundreds of thousands of years.

Then, they met humans.

You know, we could be scary.

But, let's say that we meet space aliens that are smarter than we are. A lot smarter.

Would we notice?

Maybe - but maybe not. What we might notice instead is that they take an awfully long time to get around to actually saying something.

Sort of like the way it's been suggested that dogs understand 'every word I say.' Like: "Spot, come here. I'm blah blah blah blah blah blah you'd blah blah come blah. Blah you blah blah go blah blah walk, Spot?"

If Spot wasn't a wolf whose ancestors we fiddled with until we had a stupid wolf that adores humans, Spot might feel that Master could just as easily have said: "Spot, I you come walk. Spot?" The syntax isn't right for English - but it gets the essentials of Master's statement. From Spot's point of view, and capacity to understand.

But that's another topic.

Related (to something, anyway) posts:

• "Well, That's Interesting: The Evolution of Galaxies"
  (February 8, 2010)
• "Aliens, Facial Expressions, Fear and Diplomacy"
  (January 29, 2010)
• "'All We Want is Peace and Quiet' - Another Look at the Mind of the Alien"
  (December 9, 2009)
• "Move the Planet - or - Safety First"
  (December 9, 2009)
• "Beautiful Space Princesses, Almost Certainly Not: Flying Whales, Maybe"
  (December 8, 2009)
• "Earth May Not Be a 'Class M' Planet"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (December 5, 2009)
• "Humanity Is Not the Eldest"
  (November 22, 2009)
• " 'Waiting on a Dead World' "
  (October 31, 2009)
• "Timing is Everything"
  (October 7, 2009)
• "Advice from C. L. Moore: Read What You Enjoy Most, and Some Rambling"
  (September 28, 2009)
• "Come Sail Away - The Universe is Full of Wonders"
  (September 11, 2009)

---

¹ Role Playing Game. The best-known may be Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Decades ago, I ran a couple of campaigns in a variation of that game system. RPGs can be wonderfully engaging opportunities for getting together with friends for a sort of interactive storytelling, exercises in tactics and strategy, or social events that might interest a psychologist. And, for some, an opportunity to get upset about what those people over there are doing.

A Planet is Not a Beach Ball - Quite

There's something to be said for stories that are strictly verbal - that exist as an ordered sequence of words, and nothing else. It's the sort of tale that was told before Homer cranked out the Iliad and Odyssey, and is still going strong - take a look at how Stephenie Meyer's and Steven King's books sell.

I'm trying a words-and-pictures approach to storytelling, though.

Which adds a whole new layer of complexity. That's good news and bad news. If I pull it off - with the assistance of my oldest daughter, who's a commercial artist - the end product will be memorable. One way or the other.

Planning for extensive visuals means that I'll need to collect source material. Some of that won't be too difficult, since I'm on Earth. Problem is, most of the settings aren't on Earth: and won't be built for centuries. Make that millennia.

Never mind the issue of making everyday technology of over a dozen centuries out not look like a cheap upgrade of those silver lamé leotards that were the latest thing in "futuristic" fashion a few decades back.

Then there are the planets.

For a words-only story, describing the look of a planet from several thousand miles out isn't all that hard. We've got close-up photos of quite a variety of moons and planets here in the Solar System: Everything from Mercury to Jupiter, and Earth to Enceladus.

'Drawing' a picture of Distal in a reader's mind, all I'd have to do is use the trite "blue marble" description - or be creative and come up with something a bit less dusty.

No problem.

Distal? That's a planet that won't be found for quite a long time yet. Quite a bit like Earth, except for the parts that aren't.

My approach, so far, is to create photo-realistic images of Distal and other settings - for my daughter to use for reference, the same as she would for photos of the Great Pyramid in Egypt or a Louisiana bayou.

As a cartoon character said, "this has 'bad idea' written all over it." (Sam in Danny Phantom) Well, I'm giving this approach a shot, anyway.

Here's what I've got, so far.



Not bad, if I was trying for a beach ball. The colors and numbers were to let me see how a square array of pixels got mapped onto a sphere. That goal achieved, I refined the pattern a little, for more study:



So now I've got a beach ball that's got numbers and lines on it.

Not even close to looking like a planet.

But, I know what sort of distortions I'll be dealing with, stretching a flat graphic around a sphere. Now, to see if there's a fairly easy way to 'draw' on the sphere - and have software project what's on the sphere to a flat surface.

Not bad for part of an afternoon's work.

Eventually, I'd like to have three layers on the planet: glossy oceans, dull land, and clouds just a little over both. That's what I'd like to get - what happens, we'll see.

Not-entirely-unrelated posts:

• "Futuristic? Or Just Cutting-Edge?"
  (January 23, 2010)
• "The Future and Other Ideas"
  (October 24, 2009)
• "A Serious Search for Other Worlds, Life, and - Maybe - Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence"
  Apathetic Lemming of the Month (last updated January 15, 2010)
• "Clothing of the Future: 2000 as seen in the 1930s"
  Apathetic Lemming of the Month (June 26, 2009)
• "Futurist Fashion Designers of the 1930s"
  Apathetic Lemming of the Month (April 4, 2008)

Epic Scale and Painting the Floor

I've got more of the "artistic temperament" in me than I like to admit. There are days when I quite simply don't feel like being creative. At all.

Today was one of those days.

But, my schedule said that I'd be writing this post: which meant that I had to come up with something, anything, today. I don't like deadlines, but they have their uses.

'Star Trek Syndrome', Cordwainer Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

Don't get me wrong: I was a great fan of Star Trek in the sixties. And I've enjoyed watching those movies and series of the franchise which I had means, motive and opportunity to see.

But the original Star Trek suffered from an affliction that's endemic to the various science fiction/speculative fiction/fantasy genres. Since Star Trek is a pretty big landmark on the American cultural landscape, at least, I'll pick on that venerable series and call this condition the "Star Trek Syndrome."

It's where stories with a setting 'in the future' are written with a general idea of what "the future" is like: but filling in details as the stories are done.

It can be done: and Star Trek was enormously successful. But I think that approach has intellectual landmines set under some of the well-traveled paths.

The original Star Trek series was set at some point in the future: they settled down to somewhere around 200 years. No problems there, as far as the technology was concerned. Not as far as I'm concerned.

Future Tech

Now, faster-than-light spaceships, transporters, sentient (and occasionally downright temperamental) computers? If the series had been set 20 years from now, I'd have felt my willing suspension of disbelief stretched to the breaking point. Beyond, if there wasn't some really good explanation: like a bunch of MIT students on break, stumbling on a spaceship that had crash-landed with most of the equipment in working order.

I've heard that the Romans reverse-engineered what for them was alien technology - a Phoenician ship - from a wreck they found. Ancient Romans were never really at home on the sea, and hadn't developed shipbuilding skills. They were, however, top-notch engineers: and with most of a working model to start with, they could fill in the blanks.

Future Astropolitics

Even as a teenager, though, I started wondering about the timeline of the United Federation of Planets. 200 years is a long time: but the implication in Star Trek was that we'd gone from living on one planet to having interstellar settlements and a political entity which included these grown colonies (and had members that weren't human).

In under two centuries. Well under two centuries.

That's fast work. Really fast work.

I think that a case can be made that a bunch of seriously ADHD humans barged into an existing interstellar community, decided it'd be great if everybody started living in peace, harmony and the human way - and got the United Federation of Planets going before older and wiser heads realized what had hit them.

But I'm getting off-topic. Nothing new there.

Cordwainer Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S.Lewis

All writers, I think, are 'subcreators' to some extent. That is, they create a fictional world in which their characters act. The world of some stories are barely indistinguishable from present or past reality: the chief differences are the presence of the characters.

Even science fiction/speculative fiction/fantasy stories don't have to involve a great deal of work on the fictional world. There's quite a lot of off-the-shelf material.

• Science Fiction
  • Ray guns
  • Space ships
    • With optional antigravity
  • Aliens that act like funny-looking human beings
  • Toxic waste that turns people into zombies
• Fantasy
  • Swords
  • Horses
  • Flashy magic
  • Petty kingdoms
  • An economy that sounds feudal
    • Even if it isn't

Using any or all of these conventions doesn't make a story bad. Look at Robert Asprin's "Myth Adventures" novels: but then, he seems to have done some intense - and funny - analysis of fantasy's shopworn cliches.

Or take C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories. They're set in a fantasy world, and the seven of them add up to a tale that's epic in scope. But I think Lewis concentrated on the characters and plots - not on creating a heavily-detailed, internally-consistent, fully-formed subcreation. And they're good, solid stories, in my opinion.

The Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, I think, is more of a complete world than Narnia, with a more fully-developed history and set of interrelationships.

Then there's the universe of Cordwainer Smith. Particularly as it grew, it became more like the complexly-patterned world of Tolkien, than the slightly more generic land of Lewis's Narnia stories.

I like the work of all three. But I'm aiming at something closer to Tolkien or Smith, in terms of setting. What I actually accomplish - that's another matter.

Think, Plan, Then Write?

Comparing my productivity to that of #3 daughter, I may not be approaching this the right way. She's got a small but loyal fan base for her stories - which add up to a massive work - and has been making up the setting as she goes.

She's been doing what I'd call speculative fiction stories - with the same sort of issues when it comes to setting that I've got. But she's written quite a few stories. My output is - zilch, when it comes to something finished.

Like I said, I may be on the wrong track.

Or, not.

Like today.

Plan First, Then Varnish the Floor

In my youth, a stock cartoon situation was someone who had painted himself into the corner of the room - with nowhere to go. Some were funny, and all depended on the occasional lack of foresight that people exhibit.

Today, since my creative energies were nowhere to be found and my muse was on furlough, I decided to do a little research and review. I have a timeline for a particular setting that I'm rather fond of, I'd done some work on it late last year, and again this month: and it was time to go back and do a little checking.

Good thing I did.

I changed the names of several Chinese dynasties that don't exist yet (and probably never will - except in this 'future history'): for the better, I think.

Then, I took a look at the timeline I had for the future history as a whole, the voyage of one particular ship, and the transportation technology I'd assigned to this setting.

And found that I'd painted myself into a corner.

The times simply wouldn't work.

The Butler Couldn't Have Done It

It's like a ill-conceived old-fashioned mystery, where the master detective unmasks Jukes, the butler, as the murderer of Lord Thriply.

Just one problem: the author had demonstrated that Jukes had been several miles away, and couldn't have had an accomplice.

Dashing fine story, full of suspense and pathos, but the facts just don't fit together.

The Colony That Wasn't There Yet

I've got Our Heroes visiting a colorful, slightly exotic and - I hope - interesting world in one of the stories. A world where something like a quarter million people live. They're descendants of - well, that'll wait.

The point is, when I checked out the timeline: the original settlers would have arrived 10, maybe 20 years before the story starts.

They couldn't possibly have gotten to where they were - a small but thriving culture - in that length of time. Never mind the technology. The way I figure it, they'd need something like 200 years to grow from about a thousand people to a quarter million, building maybe a dozen settlements along the way.

If I'd already published something, I could have faked it - invoking some sort of technobabble as a solution.

As it is, I just shoved the story's date ahead by a couple centuries.

And, in the process of making the development of my 'space drive' - if not plausible, then internally consistent - I discovered another set of 'the butler couldn't have done it' situations.

That was good news, really, since I got an idea (born of desperation) for making a particular conflict into more than just one more 'space battle' built around 19th and 20th-century military technology that's been renamed.

It's late, and I need sleep.

Vaguely-related posts:

• "A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers"
  (August 17, 2009)
• " 'The Future, Far as Human Eye Could See'" - Hollerith Cards and Anachronisms"
  (August 2, 2009)
• "Hard Science: It's Not Necessarily a Limitation"
  (July 25, 2009)
• "Getting Details Right: The Vast, Huge, and Very Large City Of The Future"
  (June 25, 2009)