...And the Kitchen Sink

I wound up reading some comics that were a spinoff from a popular fantasy show that shall remain nameless. I had avoided this for some time but I finally checked out a couple of digital copies. I didn't make it to the end of them alas. It wasn't the characterization or dialogue that dismayed me; it was the sheer sensory assault of the plot. In addition to the original fantasy premise the comics had apparently thrown James Bond(the OTT Roger Moore era Bond), Star Wars, Back to the Future, and a large measure of soap opera. It had everything bar the eponymous kitchen appliance, and then as the title says chucked that in as well.

I've written fan fiction based on TV shows in the past and I know that one of the pleasures of it is being able to open out the universe. On the page you have more time to flesh out characters and you don't have to worry about the cost of effects, location shooting, and a huge cast. This of course can also apply with your own original works; you start off with a plot that's compact and a handful of characters and as you write the plot opens out and you start having to create flow charts to keep track of the characters.

This is no bad thing of course but the problem comes when, as with the comic, more and more ideas just get thrown in without any consideration for the effect on the reader. The first thing that happens is the author starts to break the rules of their own fictional universe; a character suddenly acquires telekinesis or the power to fly where there had never even been a hint such an outcome was possible, and then character number two suddenly becomes a vampire to offset the powers of character number one and then character three becomes a time traveling cyborg because now they look a bit bland, and so on and so on until you have a mad melee of plot elements all competing with one another for the reader’s attention.

In the end this will destroy the readers suspension of disbelief and involvement with the characters, they spend their time wondering things like, 'if the character used X to get out of a situation on page 100 why don't they use it to get out of the similar situation on page 200?' instead of getting involved in the intricacies of the plot.

Ideas are a wonderful thing but you do need to spread them out.

No Fly List

So previously I dealt with the issue of why aliens haven't come visiting but reading this article at Cracked written by ISS astronaut Chris Hadfield(Note some NSFW language in the comments section) and I realized that there was one assumption that I hadn't addressed; that our eponymous aliens could actually travel into space to begin with.

It is in fact pretty astonishing that humans can survive in space, and I'm not talking about the machinery that provides air and water and heat to keep the astronauts alive. We are a species that evolved on a planet under 1g of gravity. When we travel into space that gravity goes away and somehow the human body puts up with the this. Your bladder may not work the way nature intended, your reflexes and instincts are all completely wrong and have to be relearned and yet somehow people manage.

Now barring miracles of technology an alien race is probably going to be following the same path as earthly space flight. That means chemical rockets launching cramped vehicles whose crews will have to endure zero gee on their flights. What if they simply can't endure? What if the myriad of symptoms that sometimes afflict human space travellers were endemic and permanent for our alien friends?
It maybe that with sufficiently advanced technology the aliens could overcome such difficulties but what are the odds they would ever make the necessary breakthroughs if they never take those first steps?

Perhaps the galaxy will belong to mankind not because of our intelligence but because of our cast iron stomachs...

Logically Wrong

When it comes to designing characters for your story it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle; finding all the pieces and making them fit together into a coherent whole. As I discussed previously you need to avoid making characters too 'good' or too 'bad' but the jigsaw analogy is also flawed; if someone tried to put together the jigsaw of your life I'm pretty sure they would wind up with several pieces that just refused to fit the big picture.

The thing is people are notably inconsistent and prone to irrationality; and that doesn't allow for the simple action of chance in everyone' lives. I've personally spent almost my entire working career in the electronics career, either repairing computers or working in technical support, except for the three fairly random months I spent selling pensions back in the 90's. It was the product of a fairly odd chain of events; the sort of thing that probably wouldn't occur to you if you were designing me as a character and that's the problem of course; when you design something you expect all the pieces to fit together and in real life they just don't.

The best way to avoid this unnatural consistency is try to be a bit random yourself; visit Amazon and pick through their departments and select some random thing to include in your characters life. or you could just go for a walk and match off people walking by into random, unlikely pair and come up with an odd reason why that you can work into your story and character design. However you go about it try adding a little randomness to your characters and it will bring them that bit closer to reality.

Lack of Faith

"I find your lack of faith disturbing' Darth Vader announces just before he chokes an imperial officer with a display of force power in 'A New Hope'. Now on one level Vader is completely correct; this is after all only 20 years since the Jedi were wiped out. The Force should be something that's still a matter of fact to the citizens of the Imperium even if its fading into history. That of course though is also where Vader is dead wrong; the force isn't a matter of faith its an objective reality no different from gravity or magnetism. Star Wars is hardly alone though in this misuse of the ideas of 'faith' and 'spirituality'.

Now its not to say that religion and faith aren't discussed in some works of science fiction in a serious manner; or even just assumed to exist without making a huge deal of the subject. In the 'Lost Fleet' series for example you have a form of ancestor worship being the dominant religion and we see the characters take it seriously but there's no treatise as to how this came about and I'm fine with that, not being remotely religious myself.

What is noticeable in 'Lost Fleet' is at no point do the ancestors turn up and intervene to help the good guys out; they are genuinely a spiritual concept that provides solace for some of the characters but there is nothing to provide evidence that they have an objective reality. This alas is not a courtesy always extended  to faith by other popular science fiction media; with Star Trek being one of the worst offenders.

In Star Trek: Deep Space 9 we encounter the Bajorans. They are a people with a pervasive faith in what the call the 'Prophets' who are gods by any other name. Much is made of the spiritual nature of the Bajorans and their faith; much like the Force however faith doesn't come into it as much as you might think. The fact is that periodically the Prophets send the Bajorans orbs possessed of fantastical powers(up to and including time travel). Call me cynical but how much faith is involved when your 'gods' periodically send you presents. If this wasn't enough in the very first episode of DS9 Starfleet find out where the Prophets live and meet with them. From this point on faith becomes something of a moot point; when the priesthood has god's address not believing becomes a delusional act.

This is hardly the only time Star Trek decided that 'faith' and 'spirituality' need a helping hand. Commander Chakotay in Voyager meets his ancestor's 'sky spirits', who of course are aliens that periodically visited Earth. Kirk met the gods of ancient Greece and blew up more than one computer playing god. Trek is hardly alone in this either; Stargate SG-1 built an entire series around the idea of gods being objectively real and even Babylon 5 had an actual demonic possession.

So why do writers keep trotting out this idea of 'real' gods? Well leaving aside simply lazy writing(and seriously this is such a tired cliché that if it forms part of any story you are writing you should start redrafting now) I can't help but think that for some of them it's a form of wish fulfilment. We live in age where the Red Sea stubbornly refuses to part and manna does not rain down from the heavens. At the same time science keeps chipping away at the space in which a god might still exist. Perhaps there's a vicarious thrill in having a religion where the believers can turn to the sceptics and heathens and say, 'I told you so'.

Hide and Seek

So this time I talking about that staple of science fiction; aliens. Specifically the questions of why haven't we found any yet? And of course if they are out there why haven't they come calling?

The simplest assumption is of course that the reason we haven't found any is there aren't any. Now this can't be ruled out based on the current evidence but I don't personally find it very likely since here on Earth we have a number of unrelated species who demonstrate at least rudimentary tool using behaviour and the history of evolution shows the same concepts reappearing time and again independently. Wings have developed several times in unrelated groups; birds, bats, and insects so I don't see any good reason to assume intelligence is some sort of singular aberration that only occurred here on Earth.

So lets assume the alien civilizations are out there, why haven't we found any trace of them despite scanning the skies with telescopes both optical and radio? I mentioned part of the answer in a previous blog, that is it's just over two decades since we first detected planets around other stars and we are just barely at the point where we might be able to detect the presence of an atmosphere around a planet. Trying to detect the traces of an industrial civilization; probably still decades away.
radio signal are apt to be even worse since as much as we think of it as empty space is filled with dust, gas, and radiation that makes picking up signals even a few light years away a lottery.

Of course the above assumes that the aliens aren't just going to turn up on our doorstep; or as the UFO believers would have it that haven't already done so. I must admit I was fascinated by the UFO phenomena when I was young; convinced that there had indeed been alien visitors to Earth. that belief crumbled in the face of the misrepresentation of so much of the alleged evidence and a greater understanding of the way in which human perception and memory can be so easily confused and deceived. On top of which there is the fact that with the rise of the cameraphone one would expect an upsurge in the quantity and quality of UFO image. Instead the number of UFO reports has declined almost in step with the increasing ubiquity of the cameraphone. So under the circumstances I'm putting UFO's to one side and assuming that the aliens haven't made contact with humans; at least not so far.

So assuming the aliens exist but haven't actually flipped any cows or carved up corn fields where the heck are they? Here's my top five possibilities:

You can't get there from here...

There may be a myriad of alien civilizations out there but there is no guarantee that they can cross the distance between the stars easily if at all. That dust and gas I mentioned earlier may be incredible tenuous but at the kind of speeds needed to travel to another star within a human lifetime they could be like flying into an endless series of concrete walls. There are ideas like generation ships that would travel far slower and avoid those problems but they would have to be vast and aren't likely to be cheap or numerous so our aliens might not stray far from home at all. Of course I write science fiction so I can't just dismiss the possibility of FTL out of hand.

A long time ago...

The simple fact is that a technologically advanced species might have arisen near to our own sun a 100,000, or a 1,000,000, years ago, come to Earth and colonized and we might well never know. The forces of nature have eroded the the cities of earthly civilizations to rubble in 10 or 20 centuries imagine what would happen over 100 or 1000 centuries? The species might well be extinct never mind their civilization. The galaxy might be littered with alien civilizations but they may be the province of archaeologists rather than diplomats.

...Far far away

Even if our aliens have FTL that's no guarantee that they will turn up and ask to be taken to our leaders; the galaxy after all is huge and liveable world may not be all that hard to come by. The vast interstellar empire (or Republic) spanning 1000's of stars might be out there right now; there could even be a number of them existing at the same time and yet in terms of the scale of the galaxy they would all be a drop in the ocean. The chances that they would interact let alone fight each other over territory is unlikely. Of course there's nothing to stop them having internal falling outs so there could be epic space battles being fought as I type and we will never know about; which is probably for the best.

Does it come in red?

There was a movie that shall remain nameless that had aliens visiting Earth who it turned out were 'allergic' to water. leaving aside the aliens stupidity it raised an important point; that is we rather assume Earth is a beneficent abode of life that other species would find every bit as appealing. I've mentioned the Asimov classic  'Nightfall' before and if the civilization from the world found Earth would they stop or hurry on by from a nightmare world that plunged them into darkness every twelve hours? There are so many possible variations in gravity, atmosphere, and climate that it's entirely possible our putative aliens simply find Earth an uninhabitable hellhole and have carried on to greener pastures.

Prime Directive

Yes it's a cliché but the aliens might not have come to visit for cultural reasons rather physical reasons. Now the Starfleet Prime Directive of non-interference might seem impossibly altruistic but such a directive needn't be so high minded; maybe the aliens are afraid we're going to start stealing their jobs and begging for aid if they make contact. It could also be that Earth is the interstellar equivalent of a bad neighbourhood and is off limits. Perhaps it's simply that the aliens have more in common with feudal Japan or ancient China and have no desire to meet other species and expose them selves to other cultures.

So there's my top five but I'm sure there's plenty more where they came from...

Grit in the Works

'Gritty reboot'; the phrase has managed to become a cliché in a remarkably short time. In essence it means taking some well known tale that's generally told with clear black and white definitions of who the bad guys and good guys are and adding shades of grey to blur the moral lines; making the fictional universe more realistic

Now in theory this can be a good thing. A problem that is prone to be pop up in fiction is that anyone whose good at their job can't really be one of the bad guys; doubly so if they happen to have a sense of humour. What this means is that these 'bad guys' are really good guys forced to serve the forces of evil by some outside factor. Some authors can't seem to cope with the idea that someone could be smart, charismatic, and charming; a person who is the the life and soul of the party one night and then gets up bright and early to order the execution of thousands. So yes the theory is good but the practice is all too often abysmal

The reason for this seems to be that writers seem to assume that 'gritty' and 'realistic' means 'lets make everyone a mean, despicable...well lets say 'jerk' to keep this blog family friendly. I personally think this is every bit as unrealistic as the idea of square jawed heroes and moustache twirling villains. Instead of clear black and white these 'gritty' stories often reduce everything to the same tone of muddy grey. Far from adding nuance and detail they simply obliterate it.

History shows that people are seldom all good or bad; business men who ruthlessly crush all competition and make a fortune only to turn around and spend that one on philanthropy and charitable works. Conversely there is the good neighbour who is warm, friendly, always happy to lend a hand; and just happens to wear a hood and burn crosses on the weekend. People are complicated and its no more realistic to portray them all as devils than it is to have them all be saints.

When Worlds Collide

So in a previous blog I railed against 'weird for the sake of weird' so this time I'm going to go in the opposite direction and ask; what do you do when reality itself turns out to be weirder than we imagined?

The realization that the sun was just one average star amongst many seems to have led to an assumption that the planets orbiting were also average and mundane, and that the nice neat arrangement with rocky bodies  close to the sun and gas giants in the outer was typical of the way in which solar systems form. Models were developed that described the mechanics of planetary formation and it wasn't just scientists who bought into this nice orderly image; writers of imaginative fiction were happy to go along with it.

Even where worlds were superficially exotic there was often that assumption of nice neat system mechanics overall; gas giants and rocky bodies knew their place and even if a world only saw night every thousand years (Nightfall) it was still relatively 'normal' in terms of the solar system it inhabited. The fundamental problem with all of this was it worked off a sample size of one; our own little solar system was the only one we could see. The best efforts of astronomers to find other solar systems met with no success; until 1992. Pulsar PSR 1257+12 was about the last place any one would have expected to find a planet since it was the remnant of a star that had long since vanished in a supernova. As it turned out this first discovery set something of a trend; what was a trickle of discoveries turned into a flood as we entered the 21st century and the Kepler space telescope added almost 3000 candidates and hundreds of confirmed new planets.

What became increasingly clear was that the nice neat ideas of planetary formation went out of the window almost overnight. Planets were found in all manner of bizarre orbits; worlds larger than Jupiter orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury does to ours. Some planets in fact orbiting so close that they are being slowly vaporized by their parent star; there's even a planet doing a fair impression of Tatooine out there.

So where does the dividing line lie between our bizarre universe and 'weird for the sake of weird'? Well the answer is that if you are adding something exotic and strange to give your story texture then that;s good; if you are adding it simply because you want to stuff in every cool idea that passes through your head or just to look 'cutting edge' then that's probably just WFTSOFW...