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rogue planet
You're helping me write space opera, cosmic horror, action/adventure stories... and tell you about Plato, Kant, and Heidegger.
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Why a "ticking clock" is the best productivity tool you'll ever use

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The "dark side" of futuristic science fiction stories

What happens when sci-fi storytelling gets taken over by superstitious materialists

Is science fiction is supposed to be scientific?

A lot of fans seem to think so.

But what does it mean for a story to be scientific?

Facts are boring. If you want scientific facts, go read research papers (and try to stay awake).

There's a reason you're reading a story instead of a factual report.

Stories have characters. Stories are about something happening to characters, and how those characters respond.

Stories entertain you with dramatic conflicts.

Somebody has a problem and goes searching for a solution. But something else stops that progress.

Will our hero figure it out?

That's the magic of stories. Stories draw you in to a created reality using the power of unanswered questions.

Science fiction stories use themes and ideas and situations drawn from science and technology to create these characters and their problems.

That's how you get aliens, spaceships, ray-guns, and Big Dumb Objects. That's how you get Galactic Empires and pink mind-control lasers sending you messages from orbit.

But are science fiction stories really scientific just because their authors and fans fancy them to be more true-to-life? Does the presence of problems and situations drawn from the cutting edges of lab research make a story more scientific?

There's two ways to look at this question.

There's the part which we can call scientific. This has to do with the fundamental intelligibility of nature to the human mind.

There is an order to being, which scientific study can reveal to us. We can rationally determine the laws that describe repeatable phenomena.

Science fiction stories take place in futuristic settings with imaginary technologies. The author begins from the conviction that the intellect can comprehend and resolve the story's problems.

But there's another angle to think about.

Science has a "dark side".

Every new truth discovered by the scientists raises 100 or 1000 new questions.

Instead of moving towards complete knowledge, science leads us off into a growing field of darkness.

An explosion of ignorance.

If nature is fundamentally understandable to the human mind, there's a deep mystery about how this fact can square with the infinite horizons of uncertainty that open up before us after each new finding.

Good science-fiction, properly done, concerns human responses to problems created by technology and science. They express the conviction that human ingenuity can explain the events of the story and restore order.

That's unlike the weird tale and the horror story, where man has a glimpse of the unknown and runs away screaming in terror. These are two fundamentally different worldviews.

What's worth seeing here is how both of these have some claim to a scientific attitude.

Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke all took their own "handwaving" liberties with the science in order to tell a story.

The rule says that the SF writer gets ONE rule violation.

A moment's thought on that should tell you two things.

One, physics doesn't hand out free passes. Breaking one law of nature for the sake of speculation is as good as breaking many or most of them.

Two, authors don't earn good-boy points for being more realistic or true to scientific theories.

The only good-boy points you get as a writer are more book sales and more raving fans.

All speculative stories are imaginary. They are stories of the fantastic that take place in imagined worlds.

This is not a way for Your Host to degrade a certain kind of "hard SF" story. Quite the opposite.

The more interesting kind of storytelling understands itself as a modern-day form of mythmaking.

The mythmaker doesn't limit himself to boring rules set out by boring nerds who appoint themselves gatekeepers.

We can ask more interesting questions.

Where do the supernatural monsters, the inscrutable aliens, and the fantastic new sciences and machines collide in this conflict between the intellect and the unknown?

How can we tell fun, exciting, wicked-cool stories when all of these possibilities are on the table?

The materialist wants to get rid of all myths, legends, and religions as "silly superstitions".

The good teller-of-tales knows that science doesn't conflict with myth.

When you take the two together, you walk through fertile fields of imaginary treasures.

Even the tension between mythic and materialist world-views can be the engine of fantastic SF stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VtnDS6IJEk

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rogue planet
Public post

When the "write to market" advice goes south

The market doesn't know what it wants... but your readers know what they love

Direct marketing legend Gary Halbert once asked the audience at a seminar:

"If you were starting a restaurant right now, what kind of competitive advantage would you need to succeed?"

The crowd listed off a range of predictable answers. Location. Staff. The best burgers.

Halbert listened carefully and then nixed them all.

"I'll give you all of those things, everything you want. And I'll still beat you if you give me just one thing."

The one thing that he needed to make a killer restaurant?

A starving crowd.

He's not wrong. Desire for what you're selling is a key ingredient for any business.

The more intense, urgent, and burning the desire, the better your chances.

If you're selling books, you're in business... and you best be writing what readers want to read.

Halbert said this back in the 90s or late 80s even. What's old is new all over again. Up here in the age of indie self-publishing -- "NewPub" as the younger set calls it -- some of the more savvy book marketers and self-promoters have rediscovered the power of tapping into market desires.

Now it's called "writing to the market".

The kernel of the idea is undeniable. If you write like a good MFA graduate, you'll please all your peers, get published in all the right journals, and maybe win a coveted award or three.

If you're aiming to sell books, you'd best appeal to the tastes of a larger, hungrier readership.

What's the problem, then? Give 'em what they want and you'll win.

So you thought it was that easy? C'mon.

If you give the market more of what they're already buying, that's a good way to sell books.

For the short term.

But there's a downside.

You're always chasing trends and hoping that you time it just right to catch the wave.

What happens when you think about the long-term goals?

What do you want to achieve as an author?

You want to sell books, clearly, if you want to pay the bills as a full-time author.

So how do you do that? What goal are you aiming for?

There's a saying in the marketing world: "Different is better than better."

What if, instead of looking over your shoulder at what people bought last month...

What if you showed your readers a new way of looking at the kind of story you tell?

What if you gave them new possible worlds to play in?

What if you gave them an iPod instead of a better CD player?

When you see that phrase "write to the market", it's not wrong.

But it's split between these two meanings.

You can give them more of what they're already buying...

Or...

You can fascinate your readers with a unique experience that they can't resist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FG7nTUYowQ

PS – If you enjoy these posts, why not subscribe? That way you can receive them directly in your inbox... and you'll get the members-only posts.

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rogue planet
Public post

Why your heroic character shouldn't be a moral saint

When writing characters becomes an exercise in virtue signaling, you've lost the plot (and your readers)

What kind of character are you writing when you write a hero?

If you follow today's pop culture out there in the Land of Netflix and gaming and comics, you might come away with one of two impressions.

  1. A hero is relentlessly kind and nice to everyone
  2. There are no heroes, only shades of moral grey

You either write an always-smiling "Nice Guy/Girl" who makes everyone nauseous... or you turn into a goth kid who only preaches despair because it's more realistic, man.

Writing real people almost seems to rule out writing a "moral" character.

Real people have conflicting motives. They want different things. They place different values on different goals. They have living bodies that need food, water, and shelter.

Et cetera.

How can you capture that rich palette of realistic motives driving a well-rounded character, and still tell a story about the boring guy who only cares about doing his duty?

Here's one thing to think about. A good-guy doesn't have to be obsessed with duty.

No realistic character can be a piece of cardboard. He and/or she will be a conflicted mess of motivations, incompatible values, and mutually exclusive goals. Ain't nobody perfect what's born in the mortal flesh.

Many slow 'n shallow thinkers would take that fact and reason their way to despair. If nobody's perfect, then there's no standards at all.

Heck, maybe the only good thing to do is be kind and tolerant of everybody's choices no matter how silly, awful, or dangerous to others.

Not so fast.

Like I wrote the other day about the existentialist hero in a grimdark world, the absence of perfect people doesn't mean you can't orient yourself in the general direction of Good and Evil.

I may not know the exact geometric proportions of the line between Black and White, but I can sure tell which side we're standing on.

Here's another thing. Doing the right thing doesn't mean being kind and nice to everyone without exception.

That's a pretty silly thing to believe if you think about it for even half a second.

If you see someone in immediate danger and don't shove them out of the way because it might be rude... you've acted badly.

Extreme example though entirely true. Morality isn't about making people feel good, loved, recognized, accepted, or esteemed.

Do you really believe that you live in a world where anything a person wants is "good" just because they want it? Up here in 2021 that's the running standard for those lost souls still plugged into the Cable TV. Out here in the real world of humans, we know better.

Slippery standards or no, there is such a thing as a bad decision.

If I wanted to bore you with moral philosophy, I'd point out to you that there's an old tradition of treating "moral" as synonymous with "pure".

A real good-guy must be pure-hearted, selfless, altruistic to a fault, working for the Higher And Greater Good Of All. He acts for higher reasons than his own silly human motivations.

I draw your attention to the interesting choice of words here: "to a fault".

The words raise an interesting question. Can somebody be "too moral"?

Can a person be so selfless and pure-hearted that it becomes a character flaw?

Some resist the conclusion. A good person is a saintly person.

Me, I'm a realist. You can take almost any positive characteristic and find a situation where it becomes a vice.

Funny enough, ancient minds were far more perceptive about this angle on human behavior.

There's reason why Aristotle put practical wisdom at the head of the list of virtues.

A truly good person knows when it's proper to behave according to the rules of impartial morality -- and he also knows when it's time to throw down like Batman.

Being a good and moral person doesn't mean being a rube, dupe, or any kind of mark. You can't be a good moral person if you're crippled, sick, or dying in the streets. And not only that, a good person is able to freely choose his or her own goals and take responsibility for them.

Part of morality is taking care of yourself and those closest to you.

Any realistic hero worth caring about is going to be a writhing seething mess of psychological motivations.

Heroes are going to experience conflict. They're going to doubt, second-guess, and make bad calls. They might even do bad things from time to time.

The point of the Hero is not flawless goodness to a fault. Superman is a fun and admirable heroic character, but you can only tell so many interesting stories about the immortal demi-god. Superman never feels conflict over his sense of duty.

If there were any moral saints, they'd make for boring characters and bad role models.

Batman, now there's a guy with problems. Batman lives in the shadows. He knows pain and fear. He's not the ideal represented by the Big S, which only makes him all the more relatable.

We "get" Batman because we all know what it's like to have to choose between good and bad. We understand that struggle to figure out the right thing and then make ourselves do it. The higher the stakes, the harder that choice gets.

That struggle (and the occasional stumble) is what makes an interesting hero.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6LU3sy5h4


PS – If you enjoy these posts, why not subscribe? That way you can receive them directly in your inbox... and you'll get the members-only posts.

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rogue planet
Public post

Is science fiction a myth?

What happens when fanboys and bean counters take control of the writer's imagination?

The story goes like this:

Once upon a time, silly foolish humans believed that the world was flat and the stars hung in crystalline spheres around the firmament.

Then along came Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin bearing the Truth of Science, and finally humankind could set aside our superstitious myths to see the world in the light of Reason.

Several hundred years into this process, this has become a firmly established bulwark in our culture.

Defenders of the so-called "Enlightenment" tell us that it's more than a cultural process. The truths uncovered by science are really-real stuff revealing the secrets of the universe. We've hit on truths which are unique, timeless, and universal.

Critics of the project have argued, for better and worse, that the process of revelation is hopelessly caught up in culture. The desire for pitiless objectivity remains above all a human desire, caught up in human projects and directed by human interests.

The narratives of the Enlightenment do have some claim to real innovation, if only because of their effects on our quality of life and our ability to do things. But they are narratives, all the same.

The dividing line between the old myths and the new sciences isn't nearly so clear as the "Pro" side of the argument wants it.

This battle won't be settled here. It raged, and still rages, through nearly every part of our culture.

Even in the arts, the push-and-shove between hard-line realists, who believe that art has an aesthetic and even an ethical duty to mirror reality, and those more "myth minded" creators who live in the airy-fairy spaces of the imagination, hasn't worked itself out.

It likely never will.

In a recent series of posts, author JD Cowan has lately explored the nerdish gatekeeping and corporate mediocrity that manufactured the genre of "Science Fiction" out of nothing. The series is well worth reading in its entirety.

If storytelling is about evoking certain patterns of feeling in the reader, then the narrative form, the use of evocative metaphor and figurative language, the telling of heroic and (yes indeed) moral tales, these are all central to science fiction.

They aren't distractions that you can dismiss with a wave of the hand and an appeal to The Rules.

The quest for faultless accuracy, excess attention to "the numbers", letting your story be told according to the limits of our best scientific theories, and other tropes of diamond-hard sci-fi can situate themselves within the genres of the fantastic.

Can.

I don't deny that part, and I'm not sure anyone would.

But we've all seen the nerds. We all know about "Fandom" and its bizarre obsession with details.

The issue comes when nerdly gatekeepers take it on themselves to build an iron fortress with a gator-filled moat around their special territory.

"That stuff", the likes of Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, and even Tolkien, goes over there in the fantasy box. We'll only allow the good stuff in here with us.

The obsession with manning the gates was only aggravated by its convenience for traditional "OldPub" publishing houses and the bookstore shelving format. Robots and spaceships go in Science Fiction, everything else is Fantasy.

Convenient, maybe, though not the stuff that a writer wants clogging up the imagination when it's time to create.

It's all fantastic literature. Even the sciency looking stuff with shiny chrome rockets and "nano-" prefixed to everything.

All speculation, all drawn from the well-stocked imagination of a creative mind.

All of these stories are Wonder Literature meant to evoke emotional responses in the reader with tales of far-off times and places.

As David Farland points out:

The big hits of all time have almost always been wonder literature—from Homer’s The Odyssey, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare’s plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Hamlet. All of these were wonder literature, along with other such classics as Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, and The Jungle Book.

Versimilitude matters -- but the point of imaginative literature is not to give the most accurate report on the facts and laws of nature.

It's to tell a story about interesting people with interesting prolems in interesting places.

We forget that at our own risk.

If I sound like an old romantic poet, then so be it. Romantics understood the human condition to a depth that no scientist -- or science-obsessed geek -- ever will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZDRF98nb1Q


PS – If you enjoy these posts, why not subscribe? That way you can receive them directly in your inbox... and you'll get the members-only posts.

There's no charge (yet) to subscribe as a free member. You can join here, or head to https://rogueplanet.zone for more options.

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