Magic, More Magic, and… Not Exactly Magic.

Tags

Fantasy, Reasoning, Sci-Fi, Thoughts

One of the fairly basic fundamentals of fantasy is that at some point, somewhere, there enters a little bit of magic. It might only be a little, or it might be a whole lot. Maybe there exist fire-breathing dragons. Maybe some lucky people get to return after death. Maybe dead people’s bodies don’t stop walking around. Or maybe it’s possible to blow up the entire universe by mumbling the right combination of fake Latin. (Still not sold on that concept, although I would never stop messing with it if I could do it. The laws of physics will bow before me!)

But the trouble with magic is that sooner or later, it needs rules. Without knowing how the system works, it’s impossible to quantify what will work and what won’t. If a wizard can summon a dragon made entirely of ice once without negative effects, why can’t they then do the same thing in another situation where an ice dragon would be useful? If they can do anything under the sun, what would stop the entire plot from being resolved in a single sentence: “And then, the wizard did it.”? Magic without rules obeys only the law of narrative convenience, and in the end, it’s really quite unsatisfying.

All of this, then, results in magic with rules. Magic with limits. Magic with fascinating little implications for everyday life, and the further and deeper you go, the more it becomes a part of the universe. Given something with rules, however opaque, people will set themselves to understanding it: it’s what humans do. You’ll start to get machines that work on magic, social rules codified around its use, theories of the universe that simply incorporate it as a natural law.

In the end, in the high-tech limit, the ‘magic’ simply becomes part of the fundamental workings of the universe. It can’t not. If there’s something more fundamental underlying it, that gets discovered. Light is magic. Light is electromagnetism powers our planet and our entire society, everything we do and everything we think about, and to a lot of people it’s a black box: gestures go in (pressing buttons on the remote control, say) and magic comes out (for example, scrying: tuning the TV in to a news report or a live sports event).

We forget this. We forget the mystery and the wonder and we take it for granted, and that’s exactly what happens with anything that’s sufficiently well understood. In a world where monsters exist, they don’t call them monsters, they have names for the creatures they know, some of which are horribly aggressive. In a world where magic exists, they don’t see it as magic once it’s been studied long enough. It’s just there. Boring. Ordinary. Mundane. Bland. They write books in which “magic” exists and wish they lived in worlds like that and forget that they already do.

So when I set out to write the Path of the Gods series, I had to stop, and think, and work out what would be their normal. What they wouldn’t even remark on, and what alternate sets of rules they might imagine instead for their fantasy novels. I do my best to weave their additional abilities as deep into the fabric of the universe as I can easily go, and as a result they have hard and fast limits, can discuss what they’re doing knowledgeably, and know the difference between the mundane and the marvellous. They don’t see it as magic at all, just another facet of the universe, and in fact to reflect that, to reflect how deep it goes, I tend to refer to such settings as “Physics+” rather than “magic”. The Path of the Gods takes place in a kind of ‘science fantasy’ setting: it’s not the world we know, but if you just made a couple of modifications (and then didn’t look too closely at the physical laws of the universe, because I haven’t done that and I’m sure they won’t actually work) it could be. Everything, however inexplicable it looks, has a reason. Everything works. Technology moves on at a rapid pace and “humanity” is still headed out to space, they just have a couple extra tools in the box and that’s their normal.

So I don’t really call it exactly magic. Because that gives the wrong impression. Magic implies arbitrariness, and worse, incomprehension. Most people use it as a term for things they don’t, or don’t want to, understand. That’s not what I write about, as a general rule. Rakariel of Before the Sun Fades calls upon magic, and that is what I class as magic, but it’s one of a fairly small number of settings that incorporates something I consider fully magic – and even there, it does have some rules, and people are studying it. Perhaps one day they’ll understand it.

In the end, the real magic in the world is understanding, and in that sense, I’m almost always writing about it. These little tiny blobs of meat on a tiny rock orbiting an insignificant star can comprehend the cosmos. And what’s more glorious, more incredible, than that?

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Out of Order

Tags

Books, Fantasy, Reasoning, Sci-Fi, The Path of the Gods

My plan for the start of this year was to do up Alt-Shift. And I did do some work on it. But now that I’ve done the hardest part of the thesis submission process, I suddenly feel I have a lot more mental capacity to devote to writing, and a certain other project has been nagging me no end. So all right, Raine, all right. You win. I’ll edit Reclamation over April, hopefully bringing it together more cohesively and comprehensibly. And then maybe I can see better the pros and cons of writing a third (fourth?) book versus trying to fit everything into Reclamation itself.

However, this brings up a related issue. Reclamation and Ascension are two books in the same timeline. Ascension happens first, and leads essentially directly to many of the events of Reclamation. Reclamation, however, sets up a lot of mysteries and questions to be answered… a good half of which would be answered simply by having read Ascension first.

So perhaps I should do them out of chronological order, and have the story move around the timeline, at least in terms of publishing order. Ascension answers half the questions Reclamation poses – what’s really going on and how did we get here? – and adds its own layer of urgency to Reclamation’s other half: what do we do next? Which would then be neatly tied up in the as-yet-unnamed third book. At least as long as it works best having a third (fourth? Ascension is starting to look really long…) book, which I think it will, given the nature of Reclamation.

Spaceship Design

Tags

Art, Background, Books, Fused, Reasoning, Sci-Fi, Writing process

Returning to the subject of The Fused, my Ship hasn’t yet been fully drawn, but I thought I’d spare a moment or five to talk about Ship design. (It actually has a name, somewhere. Nobody remembers it, though, except probably the Ship itself.)

When I started out writing The Fused, I had a small collection of images lifted directly from a dream I had. The Ship itself wasn’t so much something that was fully envisaged, as simply the location where all the events took place: in effect, Lindsi’s world. As a result, over the course of writing the story, it’s been through a few morphs before settling into this final shape. (I’m still nailing down a couple of the proportions, but basically, the shape is solid.)

In the first vague conception, the Ship was much more stereotypical: vaguely ovoid, with the four Habitat Domes embedded along the sides, the pointier end pointed forwards and engines set into the rear. Main Corridor 1 was, under this conception, almost literally the backbone of the Ship. Then I started to think about it, and this presented a few problems.

• Either some of the Domes had no view of space (and I’ve already specified that they all do), or the Ship needed gravity of different orientations in different locations.
• Differently oriented gravity would make for some very confusing junctions.
• The preferential “up” for the core of the Ship was unrelated to anything else, whether the gravity fields changed with location or not. It would be an entirely arbitrary choice.

Deciding that the Ship’s designers hadn’t wanted to faff about with multi-directional gravity, I then needed all the Domes to, essentially, be on a plane, or they wouldn’t all get to see the stars. The Ship went through a very brief period of being imagined as sort of stingray-shaped. However, that again gave it an entirely arbitrary choice of “up”, and simply didn’t seem like the most simple or resource-light solution given that it was built in space, and thus in freefall.

At around that point, I also realised that this Ship needed fuel. It’s a generations-long mission with no guarantee that its destination will be viable (it does have a destination, although again, people aboard don’t really know that), and while I did give it fusion power, even fusion isn’t free. You get through a lot of hydrogen that way… and everything on the Ship had to depend on the main fusion reactor, plus its auxiliaries. Everything. Up to and including any atomic synthesis systems they might have for creating the heavier elements that their fusion reactor won’t give them. With the best will in the world, the Ship will not be a closed system. They lose energy (radiatively, in the visible and the infrared), and they lose matter both when they use the attitude thrusters or the powerful main drive (used for accelerating and decelerating to/from interstellar travel speeds, which are still a lot less than the speed of light), and when they simply throw away waste they can’t recycle any more. Simply in order to balance the mass-energy equation (and therefore avoid carrying an entire journey’s worth of fuel), the Ship needed some kind of matter intake.

Space is big, and it’s pretty empty. But it isn’t entirely empty. There’s debris and things floating around out there, remnants of all kinds of past events… but more than anything else, there’s an extremely tenuous interstellar gas and dust: mostly hydrogen, but with other elements mixed in. The easiest thing by far to do would be to simply slurp up the interstellar medium and feed it to the reactor. And to do that, you need a ramscoop. A big one. (Essentially, a large funnel.)

So suddenly, all envisionings of the Ship needed to include a ramscoop. Which, mounted on the front of either of the two designs, began yet again to look a bit silly… and to be a decided waste of construction materials. The back of the scoop was just so much wasted space.

And at that point, it occurred to me that all I needed to do was make the ramscoop bigger. The Ship didn’t need to be going “forwards” by its own internal gravity, there’s no preferred orientation in space except that your main thrust has to point in the direction opposite the one you want to move. If I made the ramscoop big enough, it could actually be almost the entire body of the Ship, with the Habitat Domes all safely on the back of it — where they’d have an excellent view of the stars, be protected from forward radiation by layers upon layers of spaceship, and need no gravitational alteration at all. The main reactor (and auxiliary reactors) and main engine just needed a mounting, and since the Ship now has to fly “down”, in the direction the mouth of the ramscoop points, the logical answer seemed to be to stick a spire in the middle of it, essentially a big stick with the engine and reactor at the top. This kept the engine some distance away from the Domes in case anything went wrong, and had the double bonus of looking pretty and incorporating the concept of a spire, which appeared in my dream as inside the Habitat Dome and was originally shelved as it simply wouldn’t fit very well.

So that’s how the Ship got to the shape it is today. It’s essentially an almost flat cone with a spire at the point, at the top of which is a lump containing the engines and suchlike. The front, or “bottom” given that the artificial gravity points in the direction of flight, is fairly featureless: other than the observation stations on the rim, it’s pretty much impossible to look ahead with the naked eye. A variety of protrusions around the edge house forward-looking sensor arrays, and it’s likely that the Ship also has drones in formation with it, further away so their instruments can get an unimpeded view — without much in the way of friction, anything the Ship deploys needs no thrust to continue moving along with the same speed and course as its parent. The back of the scoop is full of interesting features, most prominently the four domes, like giant bubbles. In the exact centre, the spire on which the engine and reactor are mounted sticks up, another set of whiskery protrusions here monitoring the Ship itself.

And that, as they say, is that. Now to finish drawing the thing, and roughly to scale at that…

Unusual Dilemmas

Tags

Question for you!, Reasoning, Thoughts, Writing process

Such things are pretty much a stock in trade of writing, of course, but now I’ve got an authorial one, and I’m not quite sure yet what to do with it. In a nutshell, I have to decide terminology.

My characters have a single word for a certain concept that does not match our word for it: this is for reasons that will later have relevance. However, in order to load the word with the correct immediate baggage in English, I have to equate their word and our word somehow. If I just use our word, then when certain things are revealed, things embedded in their word won’t have come across to the audience. If I use only their word, I have to take special care to load it with all the right baggage in a lot of early description so that I can be sure people are carrying it around, and then everyone is likely to see some things coming a mile off. But, if I use the two words interchangeably (which would at first glance seem reasonably sensible), I set up the false impression that the two concepts can be distinct in their language – which for my characters is not the case.

It’s a knotty little problem, though not one I urgently need to solve due to that wonderful thing that is the tool of find/replace: I can locate every reference in either terminology with ease. So I’m not fussed about it immediately, but in the long term, that’s something I’m going to have to work out… and it’s interesting. At least, I think it’s interesting.

Right now, I incline to thinking the best way to go about it is to stick almost exclusively to their word and try and load the baggage as subtly as possible so nobody notices I’m not putting their boxes on the cart they think I am. But maybe I’m wrong. Can anyone out there think of any relevant examples? Good or bad — what to avoid is as useful a piece of information as hints on what to attempt!

Recycling the Brain

Tags

Reasoning, Thoughts, Writing process

The human brain, it seems, is wired up to believe in things. It likes certainty, and it likes to look for patterns and for intent where neither exists. It likes causality, detests randomness and chaos. It’s hard to use it to get an objective view of the universe, because it keeps getting in the way. Belief — in anything — is comfortable and comforting. It’s a state of mind where evidence is discarded and surety is reached.

It’s also, unsurprisingly, kind of a problem. Discarding evidence leads to making decisions that conflict with reality, sometimes irredeemably — and in these conflicts, reality will win 100% of the time. It can’t not: reality is what is. Belief is just what humans want to be true.

What’s all this got to do with writing? Well, potentially quite a lot! Whether it’s exploring what a world that really is shaped by belief would be like or investigating the rise and fall of unrealistic expectations, it can be found in a thousand and one different ways in stories… and in the head of the author. Which is where this post comes in.

You see, the belief circuitry is a massive disadvantage when it comes to navigating the complexities of everyday technological life. Ascribing agency to your computer means you don’t fix a driver conflict and the little pest keeps crashing “because it just hates you”. Assuming that something is because you think it is, you can assume understandably enough that everyone else thinks the same way, at which point truth (or the best approximation of it we have) and fact become only as “valid” as your own subjective and quite possibly utterly divorced from reality opinion. Which is rubbish. Take that up with the rock you believe is made of feathers that’s about to fall on your head, and get back to me.

But we’ve got all this belief circuitry, like it or not. It’s just more of a disadvantage than the advantage it once was, when we lived in a world that we really couldn’t control and didn’t yet have the tools to understand. So what do we do with it? Well, and finally getting back to the stories, I think a good thing to do is recycle it! Over the years, I’ve built up an incredibly extensive mythos surrounding the things I write: not only does each world have its own suite of physical laws and what-have-you, but beyond all of that there’s an ultimate linking factor, a simple yet complex underpinning with enough give to hold everything comfortably, and just enough structure to bind it all together. It is, if you like, my personal storytelling Theory of Everything. And I like theories of everything.

So that’s where (most of) my belief circuitry goes. It operates on a mental level quite deliberately separated from the everyday, from the real. Ask me anything and I’ll tell you it’s not true, because probabilities are that it’s got nothing to do with reality whatsoever; certainly it isn’t grounded in it. But on the level of my second-layer thoughts, the ones that aren’t allowed to influence important behaviour, I sometimes like to believe it might just be real. Heck, I talk to the voices in my head and I’m capable of running three complex personalities besides my own without experiencing noticeable slowdown, I think I can handle believing one more little story that I know ain’t so.

The trick, of course, is knowing it ain’t so. Fall down there, and you end up divorced from reality, detached from the world, living in a little cocoon because the big wide outside is just too scary. If you’re lucky, you picked a common story, and you’ll have plenty of friends. Unlucky, and you picked a story that has everyone accusing you of wearing a tinfoil hat. Because when you don’t know it ain’t so, you start acting like it’s true, which is no way to behave about anything that has nothing to do with reality. Like I said, if you disagree, take it up with the rock you believe is made of feathers that’s about to fall on your head, and get back to me.

Fundamentally, we don’t know for sure what is and what isn’t. The only way to find out is to ask the world questions time and time again. Come up with an idea it’s possible to disprove and test it, reliably, repeatably, over and over until you’ve run out of ways to disprove it, or until you have disproved it and need a better idea. That’s how it works, that’s the only way to really learn about anything at all, even your own self. Ask questions and never stop asking.

And the bit of the brain that likes to be solid and certain and utterly right no matter what? Well, the best use for it I’ve ever found is to build a wonderful, beautiful framework around everything else that’s unreal — and to keep that inner world a world apart. Make it your own world, make it a safe space, but never, ever, under any circumstances, mistake it for the real. That way lies what we sometimes, inconsistently, call madness.

Fantasy Animals!

Tags

Fantasy, Question for you!, Readers, Reasoning

I have a question! Let us take a fantasy world with a noticeably different ecosystem and whatnot to our own. Now, some of the ecological niches may well be filled with animals quite similar to our own in some ways (ex: this rather cool PhDComics on the convergent evolution of wolf and hyena jaws). In such instances, would you prefer it if the author (that would be me!) used a similar well-known animal name as shorthand and only noted the differences (ex: Renais and the incident of the fork-tailed mice, which as you might expect look and act a lot like mice in our own world), or came up with an entirely different name to match the animals notably unlike ours (example from a different universe: burlen, a species of roughly horse-sized reptilians that are typically used as beasts of burden and curl up when threatened, protected by their armoured skin)? If I have burlen, would you find it weird to have things called cats in the same world (provided that, you know, there has been mammalian evolution, which there has)? If it’s reasonable that something much like a cat exists in the world, should I call it a cat, or something else? What do you think?

(And no, “stop making stuff up” is not an answer, I’m writing fantasy and sci-fi here! ~_^)

Oranges and Lemons

Tags

Oranges and Lemons, Reasoning, Short stories, Thoughts

I’ve just posted another, relatively new short story, Oranges and Lemons. (Epub to follow.) Oddly enough, in some ways it’s also the oldest of them all, and it comes at things from a very different tack to most of what I write. This isn’t a story I’ve worked out on my own. This is a story I heard. And when, a few years ago, I finally found out that no-one else had ever heard it despite the fact that plenty of us knew the source, I decided to eventually write it up and share.

Oranges and Lemons the story is both condensed and expanded. The text is expanded — greatly expanded — from the concepts in my mind, but the sequence of events is heavily compressed. The concepts can cover years in a single emotion, but I can’t do that easily in writing. So I cut the rambling it would take and tried to compress all the weight of the conceptual background into a series of events spanning a single day.

But, you might ask, and the real purpose of this post is to tell, how did it all come about in the first place? It’s like this. When I was young, I heard — repeatedly — the nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons” (the version I know is below the cut, for anyone who’s interested). It’s a song that as far as I can make out (correct me if I’m wrong) is basically designed to memorise the bells of London, with a playground game tacked on to the end. Given the constant bell repetitions, you’d think that was pretty clear… but my younger self (like my older self, really) was both very literal-minded and logical, thought in concepts more than anything else, and always looked for a story in everything. I can’t go through my childhood thought processes — I barely have any datable memories from before I was seven or so, let alone memorable thoughts — but I can guess at the reasoning behind my interpretation. It probably, subconsciously, went something like this:

1. It would be silly for there to be a song about bells.
2. The word “said” is used. Bells can’t talk.
3. The bells must be a metaphor!

Each bell and its phrase becomes a concept, painting an overall picture. Even at a fairly young age, I was familiar with the concept of the Old Bailey as a part of the system of law (specifically, it’s a court), and while I apparently wasn’t familiar with the similar association with Bow (Bow Street Runners, etc.), it being a Great Bell was enough to give its concept a position of power.

So we have a marketplace, where the traders are calling out their wares, the greengrocer advertising to his customers. We have a pile of debts, each one small, but nonetheless providing grounds for the forces of the law to harass. You’ll pay, you’ll pay when only you can, if you only get out if this everlasting downward spiral, but nobody believes it, not any more. Finally a voice in power casts you off as a lost cause, and whether it’s the debtors gaol and a dry place to sleep before death or whether it’s the criminal underworld like a thief in the night (because I was always uncomfortable with the idea that the real law would be so cruel), any last spark of hope is snuffed out along with your life. All for the sake of the trap, no money and no work and a vicious cycle of mounting debt that you can never escape.

I was probably a bit of an odd child, I suppose — but odd in the very best of ways. And apparently one who could see outside of my own little box: I’ve never even been short of money temporarily, much less outright poor. Thinking about it, I was probably a lot more aware of the outside world as a little kid than I was as a teenager! (I felt like I had enough to do sorting myself out without taking on the world as well, I guess. When I was little, though, I used to write Amnesty International letters and all sorts.)

Creative Commons: Choosing a License

Tags

Copyleft, Copyright, Creative Commons, Reasoning

Before actually putting up a story itself, I wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into with the terms and conditions. More than anything else, I want to share what I’ve done with the world, and I want the world to be able to keep on sharing. I’ve learnt a lot from stories, whether written or watched or experienced through games, and I’ve built on it in myself. If something I write means something to someone, in some way, then I want that person to be able to build on that and pass it on. If you care about what I write enough to want to work with it yourself, that’s the best compliment I could ever receive. I don’t want to lock down what I’ve written. I want those who like it to be free to read it, as and when they please, and to pass it on to their friends, and mess around in my worlds without fear of retribution.

Reasonably enough, then, the ever-increasing fuss about copyright-this and copyright-that has me rather concerned. I want to make sure nobody, not even me, can wield the banhammer over my own work, and it seemed to me that the best (and most widely-known) way to do that would be through a Creative Commons license applied to each story. Then, of course, I had to decide which license to choose.

• By: Attribution. The original attribution must be preserved. Sounds good to me – I’d like to be recognised as the author of the original. That’s really all I ask. But… attribution alone won’t preserve the freedoms of others as regards my work.
• Share-Alike: Using this option requires subsequent uses of the work to use the same license that I used. In order to prevent anyone else wielding the banhammer over my work (a rather ridiculous but unfortunately plausible situation!) I feel I need to select this option. Besides, it basically ensures that any and all derivatives can freely spread through as long a chain of descent as you like!
• Allow Derivative Works: Creative Commons licenses can allow or disallow derivative works, specifying whether only the original work can be passed on. The whole point of my sharing my stories with the world is so that everyone can enjoy them as they see fit, and share and build on them in turn.
• Allow Commercial Use: I had the most trouble deciding on this one, in the end. Was I really comfortable with someone else making money off what I’d done? But – in the end, why not? I always say that I should act on my principles or they’re worse than worthless, so here’s taking the plunge! If you’ve added your own interpretation, or something else that people want, then go ahead! I get credit for the original, and at the end of the day, that’s what I really care about. No matter who makes money, I’m not going to stop writing. Besides… any reproduction or derivation has to include the Share-Alike provision! This license spreads wherever my work does, allowing derivative works of derivative works, and if [insert major publisher/film company/game company here] choose to make a book/film/game based on it? They have to put it out under this same license. They can’t ban fanfic, or insist that only they are allowed to sell related merchandise, or whatever other draconian restriction they feel like inventing. Anyone who wants to go commercial, go for it – but remember that Share-Alike provision!

I freely admit this is a massive experiment on my part! Let’s see how it all turns out. This is my work, and my dream, and I don’t want to limit other people’s enjoyment any more than I have to. I won’t see anyone else’s dreams snatched away if I can help it.