HD 28185: An Elite Odyssey

The first time I went to Los Angeles, what struck me was how this place I'd never been to in all my life could be so damn familiar. We see things on our screens and we read them on our pages, and while it's no substitute for experiencing a place with your own senses unmediated by anything, sometimes it's the only way we can make these journeys. As a science fiction writer, that's particularly the case for me--it's unlikely I'll ever leave Earth, and telling stories of far-off places is the best we can hope for. Even knowing these places are real can be staggering enough sometimes: last year I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a telescope, and my first thought on seeing those rings was "my god, it really does look like that."

One place I've visited twice now in print is the HD 28185 system, 138 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus; fourteen years ago we detected a gas giant orbiting in its habitable zone, and it's around that gas giant I've placed Esperanza, setting of the stories "The Paragon of Animals" in the March 2013 issue of Analog and "The Badges of Her Grief" in its March 2015 issue, which is available now--and you should totally go out and get it! It's a place that feels familiar now, though it's also a place I could never visit.

At least, I couldn't until Elite: Dangerous came out. This space flying-trading-pirating-exploring sim, the latest expression of a thirty-year franchise that goes back to vector graphics on the BBC Micro, is set in a one-to-one reproduction of the Milky Way and its four hundred billion stars. For now, it's also likely to be the closest I'll get to exploring the galaxy. With that in mind, given the occasion of "The Badges of Her Grief" seeing print, I went on a "short" pilgrimage to HD 28185--or as it's known in-game, HIP 20723, as E:D seems to have a serious love for the Hipparcos catalogue.

Well, as short as anything measured in light-years can be.

It wasn't THAT much of an odyssey, though. From my home base at Big Harry's Monkey Hangout* in the Jotunheim system, it was a trip of 158 light-years, with a brief stopover in the Ongkuma system to investigate the short-lived slave rebellion there. Seeing as how ships in E:D are capable of flying faster-than-light in normal space due to the magical frameshift drive--a technical necessity for a multiplayer game that, nonetheless, makes me feel dirty--and my Adder can cross 15 light-year gulfs in as many seconds, it was the work of an evening. I didn't even have to leave human space; to my regret, I discovered that HD 28185 is part of the Empire, the requisite society of neo-Roman assbutts that maintains slavery in the 34th century to remind us that they're a bunch of jerks.

It's not even a particularly interesting system. I was hoping to find things that would fire my imagination--perhaps even an Earthlike planet! What I found would be nothing to write home about if this was any other system--an asteroid belt close to the star and a rocky, ringed world with sulphur dioxide air, a 182 degree surface temperature, and a lonely orbital mining platform above, and at the edge of the system that I could detect, the gas giant HD 28185 b. Only in the stories I write is it called Corazon.

Not much, is it? Not even so much as a moon. I mean, I was hoping that it would at least have rings. Nevertheless--it had a feeling of reality to it. It's a world we know is out there. It's a place we can speculate about, and in this small way, I can see its face.

I'll be back there again, for future stories. For now, I like knowing that it's out there to be found.

* Which, incidentally, sounds like the sort of name the Culture would give to a space station. So far, it is only rivalled in-game by Norman-Mavis's Bingo Palace and Lucy Young's Orbital Happy Home.

I've Got A New Project

I'm not going to tell you what it is yet--it's only just begun to take shape--but you'll start seeing it here once it's ready to be seen.

Here's a hint, though.

I'm excited.

Oversight, Looking Under

Here's some free advice for today. Never get too close to people you look up to; they can only disappoint you. I say this because of the latest flap to engulf SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which brewed up out of weekend rumors and exploded onto the net yesterday. The context is a bit involved, going back to last year's controversy about cheesecake chain-mail chicks on the cover of a professional industry magazine and certain comments within, so I'd recommend reading this link for the details, and potentially also this takedown before you go any further.

So, yeah. That petition. Full of appeals to the First Amendment, of course--which is irrelevant in this circumstance, because the First Amendment only prevents the government from abridging free speech. SFWA, as a private organization, is not required to let anyone in particular use its bullhorn. Given that the signatories are of an age that predates the present-day educational system, you'd think they'd have learned that in Civics class. What really gets me is that writers, of all people, can work themselves into such a tizzy about the prospect of editorial oversight.

The point of editorial oversight is a simple one: to keep crazy stuff you didn't intend from getting into the pages. This is why newspapers have things called editorial boards. Just because the Bulletin, the magazine at the heart of this, is a publication funded by SFWA, it's not obligated to accept submissions by SFWA members. Under the new rules proposed for the Bulletin, its editor would engage in the "proofing and review process with select volunteer and board members." Because, as we all know, any editorial oversight whatsoever leads inexorably and immediately to politically correct Stalinism, and contributors will no longer be able to talk about how good lady editors looked in bikinis in the pages of an industry journal.

the horror

Especially for writers, this is rich. I'm still just getting started out in this game, but one of the first lessons I learned was this: you are never the best judge of what you write. I send all my stuff to beta readers as much as possible before I try to find it a home, for very important reasons. Part of that is the accessibility factor--when I write I'm carrying the world around in my head, and it's something I understand well enough that important things may not make it on the page because I don't think to put them there. Another, even more critical, part is the matter of perspective; someone looking at your work from a different angle may see something entirely different from what you intended to write.

I have direct experience with this myself, and it wasn't fun. Last year I was working on the draft of a story (which has yet to find a home, alas) where the antagonist relied on illicitly-obtained medication to endure in a specific environment. Now, when I'd been writing, what I was carrying around in my mind was the notion that this medication was a poor solution to a problem that could have easily been corrected by a simple medical treatment, but the antagonist refused to do this out of pride or fear. When I passed the story to a beta reader whose opinion I put great stock in, what I got back was an understandably ruffled comment about how the notion was insulting to people on medication, and how it was essentially saying "not only are drugs bad, but so are the people who use them."

My first, gut reaction was to get my back up and fulminate about how that wasn't what I meant at all. Fortunately that only lasted  a fraction of a second before the cool winds of Not Being a Dick blew in and I rewrote the thing, because fuck, that isn't what I wanted to say at all. I suspect this is the same way the original Bulletin flap started up, except Resnick and Malzberg had the window closed that day. Some people act like they think apologizing means weakness and that you're wrong, and that's something that they could never do. Hell, the entire reaction feels like it could be boiled down to "what's the matter with you, don't you understand we're PAYING YOU A COMPLIMENT, YOU STUPID FUCKING BITCHES?"

Once you get to that point, it's real easy to keep the train going. Braking? Less so.

I even have experience with the whole "need for editorial oversight" thing. Back in university I was editor-in-chief of the Absynthe newspaper for two years, and though we were directly funded by the student body, that didn't mean any frood with a student card could send us whatever they wanted and they had to publish it. In fact, I remember a bit of a flap that emerged as a result of insufficient editorial oversight, and while it eventually blew over it wasn't particularly fun to live through.

What oversight is _not_ is censorship, despite the petition's cover letter suggesting that SFWA is about to experience a "censorship explosion." By that logic, every rejection letter I've ever received is censorship, because the Bulletin is no more obligated to print my stuff than is Clarkesworld. What's more, it's ridiculous coming from science fiction writers, of all people. Not only do we live in the goddamn future, it is a future where it is easier to get one's message out than EVER BEFORE. Setting up a weblog is free and takes two minutes, and all of a sudden you have your place to publish "the article that the Bulletin refused to take!" for all the world to see.

I can't help but feel like this is the sort of thing that happens when authors gain Protection from Editors--they forget that the perspective they're writing from isn't the only valid one.

Another Sale, Another Impending Story

Today, I break my silence not for commentary about Rob Ford--I mean, christ, what could I even say at this point--but for a personal announcement of the writing variety. My story "Three Years of Ashes and Twenty Years of Dust" will be appearing in the Strange Bedfellows anthology by Bundoran Press, which will be slamming into retail in both physical and electronic versions come April 2014. I'm one of two Canadians represented among the eighteen stories that will be included, and I think that's pretty neat.

The story itself also has got a damn long title that might be changed--the official Table of Contents announcement, which you can see here, has it as "Three Years of Ash, Twenty Years of Dust." To be fair, the title was pretty much the last thing I came up with; all through the writing process it had the hugely inspirational working title "Vesta."

Also, that Gustavo Bondoni guy... he also had a story in Return to Luna, which is my most recent anthology credit, way back in 2008. I think he's following me...

A Bit of Doggerel

Today is "Doggerel Day" on Acts of Minor Treason, a distinction I only invented just this minute. I haven't been posting much recently because my main computer experienced a catastrophic processor meltdown last week, and I am relegated to my 2007-era backup. There was a time, not so long ago, when 2007 was unbelievably futuristic... alas.

But I do have something today--something quick, something minor, something dredged from the edges of memory. Verses like it were an integral part of my up-north camping experience as a youth, and with a slight bit of lyrical modification, it becomes highly appropriate to the present day.

They say that in Vancouver, the weather's kind of wet
Was raining when I got here, it hasn't let up yet
Oh, I don't want no more of B.C. life
Gee, ma, I want to go
Back to Ontario
Gee, ma, I want to go home!

Relevant meaning, indeed.

This Writing Is Bad and I Should Feel Bad

Yesterday evening I attended one of my last panels at Chicon 7--Bad Writer, No Cookie. It started out as a panel about purple prose and how to avoid it, but quickly transitioned into readings of particularly badly-wrought examples from the archives of Thog's Masterclass, assembled by David Langford.

There are definite commonalities, and simple things to look after: a too many adjectives and adverbs are the first lessons to be drilled in, but sometimes they take a while to take, as I first put "generally" back there before I rewrote it. There's a constant temptation to refer to gazes and looks as "eyes," so you end up with things like eyes bouncing across a room or eyes being collected and and eyes doing all sorts of things that eyes just shouldn't be doing.

That's not just purple prose, though. There's a certain overwroughtness that's common among starting-out writers, writers trying to shoot for something grand and glorious, trying to make their offering stand apart from the rest. They certainly do, but not in the way that they had intended. The effect, really, is ridiculous. It detracts from the story because the ornamentation of the verse is so ornate that readers have to peer in close to make sense of it and give themselves concussions on the brass.

It's one thing to talk about, though--it's another to provide examples. That's what Thog's Masterclass is for, that's what last night's panel was for, and that's what this post is. I went trawling through my own archives of incomplete stories, most of them dating from 2008 and 2009. None of them ever saw an editor, which is fortunate, because editors can't edit as well when they're struck blind.

Let me share them with you now.

There were eight thousand and sixteen people watching the launch through the same set of eyes, but he didn't imagine any of them had been betrayed by it like he had. The rocket's vapor trail cut across the placid sky like a tower made from a whirling snowstorm, roaring and biting men like him with all the fury of a freed tiger, or a staircase of clouds leading up to the gates of heaven that would collapse beneath his weight.

Today's lesson: rocket launches are loud and make smoke. I don't even know what the hell I was aiming for here, as the "story" died after this introductory paragraph--and no one else would, either, because no one would ever read beyond a paragraph like this.

Hob McDonnell knew he would die on the moon. There was no garden plot in his future and no weeping willows would scatter the sunlight around his simple tomb. All he could look forward to was the coarse inevitability of the ashen lands and frozen skies that surrounded him, and when he looked ahead all he could see was the fanning cloud of dust kicked up as Sevket Feyzioglu slashed ahead through the regolith with all the fury of a young man drowning in draughts of imagined immortality.

Anyone have any additional ways to get across that the moon is grey and dead? I don't think I established it well enough.

The half-dozen men and women walked like they were made of glass, shuffling through the tunnel like the thirsty drivers of a desert caravan, drifting from one flickering oasis of golden light to the next in a slow, unending zig-zag.

It may come as a surprise to some of you to know that things made of glass do not tend to walk particularly well.

That's only three. Doubtless I have more that I've left behind, and despite my best efforts I'm sure that some unnecessarily-ornamented passages will creep into future prose. It's insidious like that. The best thing you can do as an author is get a sense for the purple and beat it to death whenever you smell it. That is one of the author's jobs, after all.

Aiming for Accuracy

As an author, one of the things I try above all to avoid is an inaccuracy seeping into one of my stories. If you've ever written, you know this is far easier said than done. Especially for the sort of stuff I write, in many cases I can't fall back on my own personal experience; I've never been to space or the moon, because do you know what they charge to bring even one carry-on item? For things you're not personally familiar with, it's easy to trip into inaccuracies without realizing it because you're basing your speculations on something else which itself is incorrect.

I ran obliquely into this with my first story, The Platinum Desolation, though I didn't realize it for a while afterward, and when it came to how I described things I came off lucky. The climax of the story takes place in a craggy, broken lunar cave, my mental image of which was drawn almost entirely from the Tintin book Explorers on the Moon. The only problem is that the book predates the lunar landings and the knowledge they brought back, which is how the gang got there ahead of Neil Armstrong. A cave like that can be explained away as a partially collapsed lava tube, but while I was writing the thing, the facts of how caves form wasn't anywhere in my mind. I just needed a cave for the character to be in.

That sort of process is, I imagine, rather common in writing. Events unfold in a certain way, and writers build the world in such a way that the path is an interesting one. The problem is that depending on the writer, accuracy can suffer when it's put in competition with what the plot requires. It's a common temptation to go the easy or convenient or exciting route rather than the correct one, but it's a problem that compounds itself.

Writing a thing doesn't make it so.

It's a problem because people are notoriously easy to influence through cultural media, especially when you're talking about things that the average person doesn't have any direct experience with. For a minor one, take the idea of sound in space. It's among the simplest and most common of errors, but it's absolutely ubiquitous. While the production staff may know that there's no sound in space--since there's no medium for the sound to propagate through--we continue to see visual media use sound in space scenes because that's what the expectation has become. As I recall, there was no course in my high school dedicated to teaching people about such common errors.

Not all such inaccuracies are as far removed from the average person's daily life than the propogation of sound in a vacuum, though. You can find some right here on Earth. Take the apparent ease of knocking someone unconscious, something you'll find across TV, movies, and literature. Some unlucky person gets knocked on the head and is down for the count for hours at a time. In reality, if they're out for more than a moment or two that unlucky person is the lucky recipient of a traumatic brain injury, and depending on how hard they were hit they may never be able to operate a fork again.

Nevertheless, because it's so convenient for stories--hero gets a hard punch upside the head, hero is knocked out, hero gets moved to villain's hideaway and wakes up in a death trap, hero escapes and proceeds to wreck stuff up, and that's just one potential iteration--it gets used again and again. It gets used, and people think that because it's used it's true, just like the way forensic shows have colored the opinions of juries. As a recent Cracked article discussed, we get a lot of what we know from cultural properties, and we subconsciously assume that they're true. Hell, it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I understood that the way the starship Enterprise flew around didn't match what it would be like in reality.

As authors, we think we're just telling stories--but stories are more influential than that. People have always learned from them, and as such, I feel that authors have an obligation to ensure accuracy wherever possible. To do otherwise is to do a disservice to the reader.

Imperfect Recall

I'll always look back fondly on the 1990 Total Recall movie, if for no other reason than it was originally something I shouldn't have had. I was just a lad of ten or so, and nevertheless my mom allowed me to watch the hand-labelled VHS tape of it we recorded off some station or another, and I did--again and again. It was one of my first tickets into the world of grown-ups, one of the first hints of what was beyond the everyday, and despite its technical errors--Mars is not in a vacuum, and real-time two-way communication between Earth and Mars is impossible, just to give two--it'll always hold a special place for me.

As for the 2012 Total Recall movie? Less so. I went and saw it last night, and to be honest it's the sort of thing that would prompt a visit to Rekall for some synthetic memories to replace it. Once again, in the new Total Recall we have a purportedly "science fiction" movie written by people who are not science fiction writers debasing the concept of science fiction on the silver screen.

If you haven't seen it yet, the plot hits all the same points as the 1990 movie, although not quite in the same order. The biggest difference is that Mars isn't in the picture; the setting is Earth, after global chemical warfare has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable, save for a chunk of Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain as well as Australia, referred to in dialog exclusively as "the Colony" and in signs as "New Asia," for some reason. These two bastions of civilization are connected by the one of the most over-engineered transit systems I've ever encountered: the Fall, a gravity train that falls through a tunnel dug from one side of the world to the other.

Incidentally, this is where one of the 2012's films first errors appears. The British side of the Fall is established to be in the center of London. On the opposite side of the world, you'll find... the Pacific Ocean, a few hundred kilometers southeast of New Zealand. This took me thirty seconds to find and verify. I don't know what excuse the scriptwriters have. But it's hardly the most ridiculous aspect of building your movie around the idea of a tunnel through the world without it actually being about the tunnel through the world.

Mars: because you've got to get your ass somewhere.

The Fall, to me, is a good representative of just what's wrong with this movie. It's not so much a movie as it is a flurry of individual elements--elements like the Fall, the three-breasted woman, the skycar chases, the no-go zones left over from chemical warfare, and so on--and while some of those elements can be compelling on their own merits, when assembled they do not form a coherent whole. They do not make sense. For instance, why is the three-breasted woman even there? Outside the story, it's so they could have that connection to the original movie and have a callback to put into the trailer, but in-story? There's no reason. In the 1990 movie, it was simple enough--she'd been mutated by radiation that the cheap domes didn't stop. There's no reason given in the 2012 movie. She's just presented to us, and we're supposed to accept it.

It's the same deal with the Fall, and though the scriptwriters may not have realized it, the thing compromises the entire movie for me. Since there's no Mars here and no alien reactor, the motivation of our big bad Cohaagen has been changed to invading the Colony with his army of robots to provide living space to the overpopulated Federation, and the Fall is his troop transport. Think about it, though--this elevator just happens to connect what we are explicitly told are the only two centers of civilization left on Earth. How believable do you think it is that the war would bypass them? No, given the evidence presented to me in the movie itself, I have to conclude that the Fall was specifically built to link the UFB and the Colony.

Except that if that's the case, there's one big problem. This is a tunnel that is more than twelve thousand kilometers long, that goes through the center of Earth. Even a movie as ridiculous as The Core knew to add some technobabble explaining how its terranauts could survive the fantastic pressures down there. In Total Recall, there's nothing. Nothing except the scriptwriters' silent request that I actually suspend my disbelief over this shit. To put it simply, it's unbelievable. I cannot believe that a civilization with the technical know-how, resources, and manpower to build a gravity train would be troubled by overpopulation. Think of how expensive the maintenance alone would be for a setup like that. Sure, maybe for some reason they can't get rid of the lingering chemical contamination in the no-go zones--chemicals which can effectively be protected against with a simple face mask, even though actual chemical weapons like VX and sarin are absorbed through the skin--it would literally be cheaper to colonize Mars.

Don't even get me started on the garden-variety plot holes. To me, the new Total Recall movie is a failure--spectacular, in that it's a hell of a thing to look at, but it fails as a story. As a movie, it's like the Calvin and Hobbes comic with tyrannosaurs in F-14s: "this is so cool!" versus "this is so stupid."

Fixing Continuum

Continuum hasn't gone away. The Vancouver-produced, Vancouver-filmed, luxuriating-in-Vancouver series aired the final episode of its first season yesterday, and over the past weeks it's been picking up attention across the internet. My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the lack of competition; 2012 is not exactly a golden age of televised science fiction. It's a show that I've been following, but in a combative sort of way... in that it's rare that an episode goes by without me pausing it for an extended period so that I can swear at the screen. Continuum may not have gone away, and while it's no The Starlost, the way I see it it's shot through with structural compromises that make it stagger when it could have sprinted.

This isn't the first time I've written about the series here, and it may not be the last. Continuum is particularly important now, I think, because it's a sort of standard bearer--not only for televised sf, but for Canadian television in general. It burns me up to see shows like this not living up to their potential, and because it's something that even a person as oblivious as myself can recognize.

If I had to sum up what this show has done in its first season, it would be this: "missed opportunities." Even though the whole "cop from the future thrown back to the past to apprehend dangerous criminals" concept has been done before, it's hardly been tapped out, and the flexibility of a series offers a hell of a lot more opportunities to dig into the possibilities that concept affords than does a two-hour movie. Nevertheless, if there's anything the writers of Continuum seem to be doing, it's navigating characters around spots where the status quo might be upset and where the characters could find room to grow.

Let this photo represent time, because I like it. And, you know, the clock.

For me, this is most glaringly obvious when it comes to Kiera Cameron, protagonist and unintentional time traveller. At the end of the first episode she managed to finagle her way into working with the Vancouver Police Department, posing as a federal agent, to better pursue the criminals from the future. But the problem I find is that if viewers weren't specifically told she's from the future in the opening sequence of every episode, you wouldn't necessarily know it--especially not from her actions. To be honest, I don't buy Cameron as a person from the future.

Why? Well, first, there's the issue of basic culture that everyone grows up in, is surrounded by, and uses as a baseline in terms of their actions. From what we've been shown, it's needless to say that the basic culture of 2077 would be vastly different from that of the modern day. Imagine finding yourself back in 1947, for example--you wouldn't have to look very hard back then to find something repugnant, like the casual racism and sexism. What we've been shown of the future is enough to say that Cameron would have a hell of a difficult time adjusting to the present. Bear in mind that she comes from a time in which a Macross Missile Massacre is part of standard operating procedure for arresting unarmed suspects. A time where basic rights barely exist and a time in which personal surveillance is ubiquitous.

Sure, this is the sort of stuff Cameron would get used to, but until she did get used to there would be plenty of room for character development. Instead, she seems static--aside from the standard "time traveller doesn't know how to drive" shtick and a fascination with horses, which may have gone extinct in her future, there's not really anything. Look at Life on Mars for an alternative view--Sam Tyler only went back thirty-three years, and he didn't just adjust like it was pulling an old sock inside out.

Then there's the gadgets. It wouldn't be science fiction without the gadgets, right? That sort of thinking may be why they've been treated the way they have, exemplified by Eric Knudsen's teen genius character managing to repair Cameron's shorted-out service suit... a suit that's state-of-the-art sixty-five years from now, based on dizzyingly advanced technology. To go back to 1947 again, imagine if you damaged your smartphone while there--how believable do you think it would be for some local teen genius to fix it, considering that the transistor itself was only invented in that year, and the integrated circuits upon which modern microcomputers rely weren't manufactured until the 1960s?

Here, I feel the writers missed an excellent opportunity to create a character arc for Cameron. Sure, when she arrives in 2012 she's still got all her tools, her future gun, her suit, and so on, and thanks to them outclasses any local individual. The thing about tools, though... tools break. When her suit got overloaded during a fight partway through the season, it should have stayed unusable. After the terrorists actually succeeded in briefly taking control of her by using her head implants like a puppeteer's strings, she should have lost the use of that too--and with it her ability to identify fingerprints, read a person's vital signs, and so on right at a glance. Cameron's overarching goal is to return to the future, but she could have had a character arc that shows us how she copes and, more importantly, who she is when those pieces of the future fall away, one-by-one, leaving her trapped in an unfamiliar time and forced to do a job that she's relearning as she goes.

I don't know if Continuum has a writer's bible. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. To me, it has more of the sense that there wasn't much pre-planning in this regard, that the writers came up with these things as they went. That wouldn't necessarily have been a problem even as recently as the 1990s, when episodic series were the rule, but it's 2012 now--a different world. The past, if you'll recall, is a foreign country. People do things differently there.

Star Trek's Creative Stagnancy

When I was young, Star Trek was not only my gateway to science fiction - aside from a few books like Ender's Game or Escape from Splatterbang, it was essentially coterminous with the entire idea of science fiction. In Central Ontario in the early 1990s, before the ubiquity of the internet and the cultural universalization of what had once been the domain of the strange and timid nerd, it was easy to fall into that pattern; when it came to televised science fiction, Star Trek was pretty much the only game in town--resulting in an audience concentration that enabled things such as CityTV booking out the SkyDome in 1994 to screen the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That wouldn't necessarily happen today; after eighteen years, the fans have diffused.

Honestly, it's for the best. In many respects, Star Trek can be seen as "beginner's science fiction," an easily approachable, entry-level gateway to everything that lies beyond. A similar thing happened fifty years ago: when the pilot of the original Star Trek was screened at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention in 1966, science fiction fandom was vastly, vastly smaller and more insular than it is today. After Star Trek hit the airwaves, sf conventions were deluged by new fans who had been introduced to this entire new world of possibilities. At the time, of course, there were concerns that the tide of new fans would swamp the structures that had existed up until then; David Gerrold's The World of Star Trek, written in 1973, gives a good look into the concerns of the time. Still, it didn't end up becoming a dry run of Usenet's Endless September; many of the new fans integrated themselves into the existing structure, and Star Trek provided another avenue for people to become aware of this thing called "science fiction."

They may move on, but on the whole Star Trek itself remains behind. When I finally started branching out into things that weren't based on an idea by Gene Roddenberry, it was like the gates of the world had swung open. At its core, Star Trek is fundamentally limited by fifty years of precedent--a dense kudzu of stories that often contradict each other, and restrict possibilities.

That chair looks like it's got lots of possibilities for comfort, though.

Honestly, looking back on it now, at times Star Trek just seems fundamentally uncreative. I know that this is mostly a result of how television has changed in the last twenty-five years; after its debut in 1987, almost every episode of The Next Generation was effectively self-contained, and when there was a two-parter with the "Previously on Star Trek: The Next Generation" trailer, you knew you were in for something out of the ordinary. Being unable to build on what you've built previously, except for minor callbacks like Picard's Ressikan flute that don't require any prior familiarity anyway, means that everything has to be simple.

For me, what really sums up this sort of attitude is, for me, the way it deals with planets. Only a handful of worlds in Star Trek actually have their own names, and even then they're almost always derived from the people that live there--Vulcans come from Vulcan, Cardassians come from Cardassia, Ferengi come from Ferenginar, humans come from Huma, and so forth. Klingons come from Qo'noS, which is the only departure from the pattern I can think of. Otherwise, the tactic is always "Star Name, Orbital Position." So humans would instead come from Sol III, and so on. It doesn't matter whether it's a colony just starting out or the sprawling homeworld of a species that numbers in the billions. It strikes me as a sort of creative sterility. After all, by the time of The Next Generation the writers had almost moved away from the senseless Greek letter combinations that were in vogue in the 1960s, aside from insipidities like the "Alpha Omicron system." They still had to come up with the name of the star anyway--why not just apply it to the planet of interest, instead?

It's certainly more natural. In fact, as I got older that was one of the factors that attracted me to Star Wars: the fact that all the planets had their own names! Like they were important in and of themselves, that people lived there that weren't satisfied with living on the Eastern Continent of Beta Whatsis IV! This was particularly true in the Expanded Universe novels, which I got into through the Thrawn trilogy--a trilogy written by Timothy Zahn, someone who'd already found success in science fiction writing, and who brought those sensibilities to the Star Wars universe.

Honestly, after fifty years that sort of thing is what Star Trek is in dire need of: a re-evaluation, a re-opening, more possibilities for creativity to flow in unanticipated directions.

Common Words: The Path to Fogstorm

As a creative person, it's always a good idea to remember the sort of places you've come from; in addition to giving you a better grasp of how your skills have improved and your style has evolved, it's plenty easy to come up with an idea you just can't do justice to at a particular stage in your development. That's why you set it aside for a year, or five, or ten, and approach it afresh from an entirely different perspective, bringing ideas or knowledge to the tabel that you just didn't have back when the concept first occured to you.

"The Path to Fogstorm" is one of those for me. Incomplete, it was originally written in freehand on lined paper, dated November 28, 2006 - only months after I resolved to try writing things seriously for once. Then, as now, I didn't have any idea where I was taking it; at the time, I was planning on having it be a part of some "future Earth wrecked by a magical apocalypse" setting, before I ditched that sort of concept back in 2007. When I rewrite and complete it, I've been thinking of setting it on a habitable red dwarf planet - one of those worlds where the plants are all black and the sky is perpetually a ruddy twilight. Atmospheric, I think.

***
"The Path to Fogstorm," Zeroth Draft
by Andrew Barton
***

They say I'm the best lightman that's walked the path in years, but I'm not too sure what to think about that. Little Sis says the old boys are trying to feed my ego and make me feel part of the gang. Might be that, but then she's never known any other lightman than me. The way I've been figuring it, they all say that so I'll work all the harder and let 'em all slack off back safe in town.

When I'm out on the path sometimes I wonder if I'm crazy, doing so much of what I do. Isn't hardly no justice for a kid like me to have to do most of it all, just because I'm not scared of the dark like they are. Or maybe it's because I know deep down, not really wanting to, that I don't have all that much to lose. Whatever it is, I've never had so much as a hair twitch in all the days and nights I've walked that path.

At least it's quiet. Feels like sometimes the lurkers are scared of me just like all the old boys are scared of them. me, I've never seen one, and if it wasn't for the way the forest acts out past town I might not believe they're even there. The lights keep them in their shadows and away from decent folk, and it's every lightman's job to make sure they never go out. Little Sis says it's like what priests used to do before the world tried to kill itself, but I've never felt very much like God was ever watching me. I don't think even Heaven has stuff that can look through that cloud.

Doesn't matter if anyone's watching us in the end, be 'em lurkers or angels. We get by.

#

You didn't have to walk far past the stockade to not be able to tell that Fogstorm was there at all. If it was up to us we'd probably have retired the last lightman before I was born and to hell with the whole business, but Fogstorm wasn't the kind of village that could stand all on its own. We had traders roll up to the gates every once in a while, but only if all the lights were kept burning. Those old boys back behind the walls were fearless next to someone who hadn't grown up in our endless twilight.

So it wasn't all that much of a surprise when I came round a bend to see some wild-eyed outlander huddled next to one of the light standards with a brandished, nasty-looking gun. He was shivering like he was freezing to death, but if he hadn't spotted me yet I don't know how he figured he'd keep some really brave lurker at bay. It was lucky for him that those lights can shine forever if you treat them well. When I first started out as a lightman, I heard tell that some were from the Old Times, even.

I must've stepped on some loose pebbles or something, because all of a sudden he jumped like there was a spear being jammed in his ribs. He pointed his bang-bang at me, the muzzle dead black, and it took all my lightman's training to keep from shooting him down for being such a terrified idiot. Fear's no excuse for stupidity, not when it could get you killed.

"Don't come any closer!" he yelled in a trail-worn voice, probably loud enough that every lurker for two miles around heard. If that's how he acted, he was damn lucky the light hadn't gone out. "I'm armed and I will defend myself! For the love of God don't come any closer!"

Fear and stupidity all in one sack of flesh. Did he really expect even a genius lurker to understand him, or pay him any mind if it did? Sometimes those idiot outlanders are more trouble than they're worth.

"Calm down, fellow," I said, not moving a muscle. Didn't really want to try my luck, and setting him off might mean a light gets broken from a bullet gone astray. I'll be the first to say I'm one of the worse shots in town. "I'm not a lurker. I'm a lightman, come down the road from Fogstorm."

Now that |I could get a more careful look at him, that outlander was obviously just a hop away from losing it completely. There was no telling how long he'd been out in the dark, but a day or so sounded right. To someone used to seeing the sun, it must be torture.

"Fogstorm!" He shouted hte name like it was a length of string to lead him out of the forest's maze. Little Sis told me a real old story about that once. "Thank God! I was thinking I'd die out here in this forsaken dark!"

Couldn't disagree on that count. I've been looking for seventeen years now, and I've never seen something to have the signature of the Almighty in it.

Then he slumped like all his energy had left him. His gun fell otu of his hands and clattered against the stones. First thing I did when I walked up to him was kick it away, further down the path. No point in taking chances with a man who might be seeing demons hidden in the dark.

"Careful now," I said, unhitching the canteen from my belt and offering it to him. When he handed it back, seeming like a man asleep, it was drained empty. It made me remembr that my own throat would be dry soon, but then nobody ever said that charity was painless.

"Thank you," he wheezed in a hoarse voice, but it didn't sound so dusty anymore. "I'm sorry. I thought you were one of the shadowfiends, that you were about to tear me apart."

"First time on the path's never easy for anyone," I said. Just because I didn't appreciate his fear didn't mean I couldn't understand it. "Things get better, by and by."

"I was hoping I wouldn't be so transparent," the outlander said with a chuckle. "Guess I thought too much of myself."

"There's no way to get ready for walking the path except by doing it," I said. "No abstract learning on this road, by God! So what's your story, fellow?"

***

and then the entropy of their universe reached critical mass and everything came to a halt, forever locking them in mid-conversation

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Previously on Common Words

• #16: Just Like Real People
  
• #15: Passion Before Reason
  
• #14: Alpha Pavonis
  
• #13: No Regrets
  
• #12: Pattern Recognition
  
• #11: A Scene from the West
  
• #10: The Ossuary
  
• #9: Tranquility's Prologue
  
• #8: Corona
  
• #7: The Tragic Myth
  
• #6: The Platinum Desolation
  
• #5: The Worlds Machine
  
• #4: Tranquil Fragments
  
• #3: The Software Market on Rainier
  
• #2: Sixty-Ton Payload
  
• #1: To the Gallows

A Continuum of Thought

Outside the field of pure literature - and even then, it can be scarce - Canadian science fiction is rather thin on the ground. With the United States right next door, it's not difficult to understand why. With a shared language and historically porous border, it's always been all that Canada can do to keep from being overwhelmed by American cultural exports, and there are few things that dovetail with the American spirit as well as science fiction does. Nor did we ever have our own version of Doctor Who, not with the CBC grudgingly supported by governments but never given what it needed for true independence. Especially when it comes to televised works, generally the best we've been able to get are Canadian/American productions like Stargate SG-1 and its successor series.

But now there's Continuum, a science fiction television series that began airing its first run of ten episodes last Sunday - created by a Canadian, produced by a Canadian company, filmed in Canada, aired on a Canadian specialty channel, and starring a cast that is almost entirely Canadian... I'm starting to recognize a pattern here. Continuum is one of those rare discoveries, a Canadian science fiction series. It's not often I discover things while they're still new. Usually I'm just oblivious and hampered by my lack of cable. Fortunately, not everyone is; it blew away existing records by pulling in 900,000 viewers on the first broadcast, so it may well escape the fate of previous Canadian-made series such as The Starlost.

Nevertheless, I figured it might be instructive to take a look at the first episode, and evaluate how the crew's begun to set the story up and where they might go.

Quick summary, then: Continuum follows Kiera Cameron, played by Rachel Nichols, a Vancouver cop (actually, "City Protective Services Protector") from 2077, who along with a group of terrorists about to be executed is thrown back to 2012 in a last-ditch time travel attempt gone horribly right. Cut off and alone sixty-five years before her own time, it's up to Cameron to apprehend the terrorists and, somehow, get home. On its own, not particularly groundbreaking; there's a whiff of a Terminator vibe, but since none of the characters are soldiers or robots there's probably little danger of Harlan Ellison threatening legal action here. But there are options. It's one of the few shows both filmed and set in Vancouver, which means that our heroine can wander up Granville Street in a daze without the producers having to unfurl the Stars and Stripes or line the road with U.S. Mail and USA Today boxes beforehand.

Anyone in this photograph could be a time traveller.

That's not to say this series is a shining star. I've heard complaints about the acting, but that's not going to be something I focus on, since it has to skew pretty close to Manos: The Hands of Fate territory before I can really notice it without being told. Instead, I'm more interested in the writing - how the creators went about setting up their story, their conflict, and their future. After thinking about it for a couple of days, I can tell you right now that I definitely wouldn't have approached it in the same manner.

There's a rule in writing, possibly one of the most important rules: "show, don't tell." At its core, this means that good writing gets something across by demonstrating the truth of something, rather than just stating it. If a character is angry, you show them punching the walls, or being overwhelmingly calm, or whatever else is appropriate based on that character. You do not have them announce that something makes them feel angry.

It can be a bit more tricky when you're dealing with a visual medium, though it still exists - and I feel that the greatest flaw in Continuum so far is that it has told us too much. Take the terrorists, for example - they're part of a group struggling against a world where governments and corporations have colluded to such a degree that there's such a thing as the "Corporate Congress," where freedoms of speech and assembly have been stripped away. But the problem is they tell us too much about them. Until the episode specifically told me "hey, these guys are the villains," I was having a bit of trouble with it.

In fact, they tell us too much, too fast about the future. Personally, I think the nature of the future is something that should have been revealed slowly over the course of multiple episodes. Say, start off the episode with the prison scene, the characters are immediately transported back to 2012, and the future is gradually filled in not only through flashbacks where appropriate, but through the actions of the characters. The way people conduct themselves shows a lot about the sort of world they come from.

This sort of thing is present in the series' depiction of the future, to some degree - while for many people, the most striking thing about the 2077 SkyTrain Cameron rides to the prison might be that the announcements are made in Chinese only, for me it was that it was completely standing-room - no seats whatsoever. An implication of a crowded world, an uncomfortable world, just by the way it builds its transit. Likewise, the 2077 SkyTrain retains the same door-opening chime that you'll find on the system today - one of only a handful of elements connecting the Vancouvers of 2012 and 2077 together. In the establishing shot of the prison you can see the twisted, partially submerged wrecks of the cargo cranes at the foot of Main Street, and though I've seen media references to the Lions Gate Bridge remaining in background shots, I didn't pick up it. Nevertheless, the lack of many other familiar anchors works well, in its way - it's a sort of whisper, "something serious happened between now and then."

When it comes to Erik Knudsen's character, the 17-year-old technical genius Alec Sadler, I can't help but think his direct involvement in the episode's events was a negative. In-story, he's recently built the prototype of some kind of encrypted communication system that Cameron uses in 2077, and so he's able to hear and be heard by her, see through her eyes, and so on, presumably setting him up for the Mission Control role later in the series. In principle, there's nothing wrong with this; again, I just think it happened too fast. Cameron arrives in 2012, loses the terrorists, is disoriented and trying to report in, and Sadler immediately starts chiding her for breaking into his groundbreaking encryption.

It seems too convenient, really. Not only has he already developed the prototype of the technology that's used in the future, it has absolutely no compatibility issues with something sixty-five years more advanced, and when Cameron starts trying to report in he's already monitoring and jumps on it immediately. The problem I have with this is that it denies Cameron an opportunity for character development - we're denied the chance to see this person when she's completely cut off and completely alone, lost in an unfamiliar environment with little clue of where to go next.

Still, I'm interested in seeing where they take this. I just wish they could have left some more things unsaid for a while. If you're interested in checking the series out, Showcase has it up for online streaming here.

Superheroes and Gods Just Ain't All That

When I was just a callow youth, fifteen or so, I stumbled into a part of the Internet where I realized I could build creative muscles that were then still thin and scrawny things. Specifically, I recall my line of thought going something along the lines of, "Sweet! This is a comedic setting so I can do whatever I want and I don't have to justify it!" While this sort of path is worthwhile for getting practice at the craft, sooner or later the training wheels need to come off - and sooner or later that justification, that plausibility, becomes more and more important in whatever you're creating.

Plausibility! The byword of stories and alternate history timelines alike, a necessity if you want people to follow along with the tale you're stringing; people have to be able to accept that what you're telling them could be the case, that you're *not* just leading them down the garden path. Good stories need to accord with the world as we know it to be true, or they're fatally compromised as a result.

Sometimes it's difficult to really wrap one's head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon's withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that "the Defense Department didn't think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy." Presumably, the implied conclusion we're supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie's style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn't figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an "espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency," which really narrows it down - and, hell, I imagine it's easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

While you could in theory make a plausible case for, say, this public art installation being in fact part of a point-defense laser system, unless you've already established a world where things like that are known to happen it's not going to fly very far.

Here, I speak from experience - while I was still planning the background of some "future investigation" stories, one of the biggest hurdles was establishing the organizational background they'd lean on so that I could have a better idea of what sort of stories I could plausibly write. Real-world agencies were right out of the picture; unless you're actually a part of something like that, or have invested a huge effort in studying it, it's extremely difficult to write one accurately. While the idea of a general "world police" was tempting, given the potential involved in globetrotting adventures, it's not very plausible - how many countries do you think would be willing and eager to hand over their law enforcement to, say, the United Nations? Would any?

Here's the simple, unalloyed truth about The Avengers - the presence of superheroes, Norse gods, and intergalactic invaders acts as an add-on to the world as we know it, and does not give creators license to freely abandon the world as we know it unless they show us how that presence changed it. It only comes up as a strange-looking issue because most people don't know how military bureaucracy works to begin with. If it was something more familiar to the common person - like if cars suddenly ran on molasses instead of gasoline with no reasoning or explanation - the point, I think, would be a lot clearer.

There's no problem in bringing new things to this ordinary world - just so long as you're doing it, you don't contradict the way we already know this ordinary world to function.

Between Headlines and Asteroids

Asteroid mining has its detractors, and I'm sure there are some who would have preferred that the previous sentence fragment to be confined to speculative articles and science fiction stories. Such a shame, then, that Planetary Resources had to upset their applecart last week by having the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to dare to look beyond the dirt at our feet and try to reach for the future.

That's not to say that at least some detractors of asteroid mining don't have valid points. It is expensive as hell, it is at the bleeding edge of our technological capabilities - even though there were those who thought we could do it as early as the 1970s - and there's no assurance that Planetary Resources will succeed in its push. It would distress me mightily if Planetary Resources ends up going under, but it wouldn't surprise me. After all, nobody's done this sort of thing before.

Although the media was typically breathless in its coverage of a bolt-from-the-blue event such as PR's initial announcement, cooler heads have since prevailed and parts of the news cycle have begun to knock down what's been built up. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it is, after all, what the media should be doing - attacking plans like this straight on to see how well they stand up to the punishment.

I just wish that there was some requirement for the journalists who go after this stuff to have at least some basic understanding of what they're going after. Case in point: the Globe and Mail's Economy Lab recently published an article questioning the economics of asteroid mining. Its headline? "Why asteroid mining won’t spark interstellar gold rush."

Hopefully, you've already noticed what's wrong with that headline. If not, let me conduct a brief refresher on the English language. "Inter-" is a prefix derived from Latin, and in both languages means "between," generally in the context of something passing from one place to another place. To claim that anyone thinks that asteroid mining is going to start an "interstellar gold rush" is as facile as saying that a drive from Chicago to Milwaukee is an international one.

Though you could probably find people who would like to make that a reality.

I can't fathom why things such as this seem so opaque to many people. Not only is it not a complicated word, but I would expect someone who's risen to at least a moderately high station in the journalism field to be better at using words than the average folk on the street. Here, I'll break it down for you: "inter" means "between," like I talked about in the last paragraph, and "stellar" means "stars." This kind of etymology should not be a revalation for someone writing copy for Toronto's national newspaper.

Technically speaking, the article is completely correct. Asteroid mining won't spark an interstellar gold rush, any more than a walk to Kelowna would spark a need for my passport. But that wasn't the point, was it? The article goes on to cast a wan light on possible cost estimates for asteroid mining. See, the correct word here is "interplanetary" - no one is suggesting that Planetary Resources plans to send robots to Alpha Centauri to mine whatever asteroids may be chilling four light-years from here.

The fundamental issue at hand, the way I see it, is this - if this major newspaper cannot be trusted to use the appropriate word in its headline, what assurances do I have that the material inside the article is in any form trustworthy?

These days, I don't expect much from most newspapers. Using the correct word in the proper situation is the least they can do.

The End in Sight

Sooner or later, unless things are allowed trail off in an unsatisfactory manner that fails to resolve the central conflict, every story ends. It's the ultimate result of the protagonist's actions and should bring closure to the narrative. It's key for all writers to have a firm understanding of how they most effectively create, but even for those who just start writing and wait to see where the unfolding story takes them, my own opinion is that when it comes to writing a story, the single indispensable thing is a solid sense of how it is going to end.

It's not that you necessarily need a blueprint before you start writing; in my experience that's just needlessly constricting, though I imagine that there are some writers out there who use that sort of method successfully. It's important just to know roughly where you're going to end up before you start off; that way, elements like foreshadowing can be employed throughout the story, and the ending becomes a natural result of the story as it's unfolded. Personally, I need to know the general way my stories will end before I can start writing them - I need to have that destination, even if the route I'll take to get there is unclear. When I've written stories that fell apart or were abandoned, generally they were because I didn't know how I was going to end it when I started, and as a result my notion of the plot changed substantially through the course of the writing process - producing something that bent under pressure.

Whoever wrote Mass Effect 3 evidently did not follow anything remotely like this advice. Perhaps you've heard of the controversy that's been brewing since the game's release last month, the vociferous hatred of the game's endings among the fanbase that demonstrates the pitfalls inherent in a participatory narrative like the Mass Effect series. Encountering a weak ending in a book or movie is one thing; you had no role in the events as they unfolded, and in the end you only had to invest a few hours. In Mass Effect, which since its 2007 release was championed as something where your choices in one game would shape events in the next and where you could easily spend seventy-five hours guiding Commander Shepard from the opening scene to the final options, investment is vastly higher; it's more appropriate to say, I think, that players experience a participatory narrative, and as such there's a far greater necessity to provide a satisfactory conclusion.

It's somewhat understandable in its way - I can't think of any other series, offhand, that has been this audacious when it comes to an overarching participatory story. So it's not that much of a surprise, in retrospect, that Mass Effect 3 thoroughly fumbled the conclusion to such an extent that I swore at the system when the credits started rolling - and it wasn't even the whole conclusion, either. Just the last ten minutes.

Please note that there are SPOILERS AHEAD for the Mass Effect 3 ending, in the event that you still wish to experience it firsthand.

Also note spoilers for The Winter's Tale up there, for all those of you who are still waiting for tickets to the Globe Theatre.

Mass Effect follows your character, Commander Shepard, as he or she learns of and works to defeat the Reapers, a fleet of staggeringly ancient, incredibly powerful machines that pass through the galaxy every fifty thousand years and destroy all advanced civilizations, a cycle that has been continuing for tens of millions of years. Fundamentally, the story is about breaking the cycle of history; about doing the impossible, doing what's never been done before, surviving in the face of astronomical odds. In the third game, the Reapers arrive to annihilate civilization, while you work to unite the disparate species of the galaxy and complete a superweapon left in the archives that survived the previous cycle of destruction, in order to destroy the Reapers once and for all.

The final component in this weapon, a component you've been searching for throughout the game, is ultimately revealed to be something that's been present from the very beginning - the Citadel, an ancient, massive space station, the center of galactic society. You fight across the killing fields of London and ultimately, near-death, board the Citadel, dispatch the antagonist, and wait for the weapon to do its work...

...and then the starchild appears. Okay, it's an ancient AI resident in the Citadel, but it controls the Reapers. It recognizes that the cycle has been broken, and gives Shepard three different choices to end the game with. Different in what way? Well, in one choice the explosion is red, in one the explosion is blue, and in one the explosion is green. Those are the only fundamental differences between them, unless you didn't do enough sidequests and preparation, in which case all life on Earth is also annihilated.

The problem is that throughout the entire series, this starchild was barely even hinted at - from what I understand, there is one reference in the third game to something greater controlling the Reapers, but even that can be missed depending on which dialogue options you choose. What's more, it effectively invalidates the ending of the first game. My specific problems are that it's literally a deus ex machina resolution - BioWare did everything but animate the crane that the starchild was brought down on - and that the nature of the resolution is, in a setting that up until then was rather rigorous, purely Space Magic.

Even then, Space Magic isn't necessarily the problem. The problem is that at no point in the series was the existence of Space Magic hinted at. Imagine if the last episode of M*A*S*H had instead involved Athena appearing before Hawkeye in his tent and filling him with divine power, enabling him to send out a wave of peace and understanding across the world so that the soldiers would put down their weapons, the politicians would sign on the dotted line, and the Korean War would be over and everyone could go home. That'd be a pretty shitty ending, wouldn't it? Do you think a conclusion like that would have been remembered as fondly?

Mass Effect was planned as a trilogy from the very beginning - it's inexcusable that BioWare did not already know how it would be ending, and did not work toward that ending for the start. It should be a lesson to writers, both in participatory and non-participatory mediums, to not disregard the ending.

After all, once the story ends, that ending is what's freshest in the mind - it's what will stick with someone, and a hamfisted ending can sour even the most stellar storytelling.

An Unnecessarily Sexy Description

If you had to describe, say... Indiana Jones, what kind of adjectives would you use? Daring, perhaps; capable, adventurous, and lucky would also work, considering how many of his plans were improvised on the spot. The same is true of most of the heroes of paper, stage and screen - these are competent people, able to face challenges that would slam most of us back on the mat without even blinking, standing in the face of danger and death and making it through because that's what heroes do. Words like bold, uncompromising, tough, and fearless tend to make the rounds fairly often, as well.

For dudes, that is. When it comes to female characters, the score is strikingly different. For a heroine, someone has decided that one of the most important factors is whether or not she's attractive - that the things a woman can do, what qualities she brings to the situation, are of less importance than what she looks like. This idea has been hideously persistent down through the years, but now that people are finally starting to realize that we should know better than that, this double standard just becomes more galling and grating - like a train screeching across old, rusty rails.

The DVD case for Tomorrow Never Dies, for example, describes James Bond as being "devastatingly cool," because in Hollywood that's something only a man can be. Imagine that they made a movie about Jane Bond - what description would be more likely? Something like "devastatingly cool" or, more likely, "stunning and sexy?"

It happens since I see evidence of it every day, even if it's not always thrown into my face. That's just the chance I take now whenever I board a SkyTrain, since they started placing ads for the new Ava Lee novel, The Wild Beasts of Wuhan. I growled at it inwardly the first time I saw it, then again, until I took a photo of one of the ads so I could properly tear it down without doing something that would get me a talking-to from one of those nice SkyTrain Attendants.

If Indiana Jones was likewise described as being fearless, sexy, and lethal - all qualities which are, admittedly, beyond argument - we might be better off, I think.

This frustrates me, this irritates me, because decisions to present people like this give a fresh jolt of electricity to the shambling beast that is the traditional view of women in Western culture. Especially in a non-visual medium such as a novel, but equally true for the world in general, whether or not a woman is "sexy" shouldn't warrant such prominent consideration unless it's directly relevant to the situation at hand.

Here's the problem: it's all marketing. This ad was most likely dreamed up in some office after being bounced from person to person in some committee, trying to maximize its impact. I can tell that's what happened because when I go to the website of the author, Ian Hamilton - an author whose name, incidentally, is practically absent from the ad itself - take a look at the words he chooses to describe Ava Lee. Words like "methodical." "Determined." "Confident." Certainly stands in stark contrast to the presentation in the ad, don't it?

Except, like I said, the ad reinforces that shambling beast. The continued presentation of women through this kind of prism encourages the belief that this sort of thing is okay, that there's nothing wrong with the implication that one's attractiveness is a question of fundamental importance for half of humanity. It helps give life to antediluvian attitudes that have no place in a civilized society - a society that, in many respects, still treats a woman's body as public property.

It's a relic of times far more barbarous than ours. We need to do what we must to relegate those relics to history, where they most assuredly belong.

Pay No Attention To What's Come Before

And I say,
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind, we just make some shit up
- Voltaire, "The U.S.S. Make Shit Up"

Building a coherent universe is a big responsibility - after all, it is a universe with all the detail that the word implies. Fortunately, creators don't have to go into detail on everything, or even most things; coherent universes can be built with broad strokes and implication, and the nature of those people and places and things that are focused upon in the narrative can imply a great deal about the society they come from.

Use too many broad strokes for too long, though, and you're in danger of a universe that doesn't look particularly like anything much at all. While some creators might be able to pull off that sort of thing, for most people too many broad strokes means that detail is lost. It's particularly easy to fall prey to this sort of thing when you're working in a shared universe - something like, say, Star Trek.

Yeah, that's right.

One of the problems with most of the Star Trek series came from one of its strengths - the starship setting, which meant that at the end of every episode the crew could leave those particular problems behind and not have to face them again. Even when those problems were solved, it was as if the solution was wiped from everybody's mind after the credits rolled because you certainly wouldn't see it show up again. Generally, if a writer was in a jam they - or, for that matter, the script editor who filled in the instances of [TECH] in the scripts - would create some particle or technological doubletalk to make the problem go away, but they wouldn't be filed away for later use. It's not as if every problem the Enterprise encountered was completely unique, but there's rarely if ever any attempt to try solutions that worked in the past. The same thing happens in terms of background details - in many shared universes, it seems, the preference is for something new to be created at need out of whole cloth rather than building upon something that's already been established to exist.

The problem with this is it leaves a long spoor of one-use solutions and settings, and makes the universe sort of like a puddle a mile wide but a millimeter deep; it appears to be big and dynamic and thriving, but it's the authorial equivalent of a set on some soundstage. Because authors didn't take the opportunity to build on what came before, there's a veneer of artificiality to the whole thing.

It's easy enough to correct, and particularly in the modern day - when fans maintain meticulously detailed wikis of their favored properties - there's a lot less reason for writers in someone else's shared universe to be unaware of firm foundations. For something that you created yourself, it behooves you to go back through every once and a while and reacquaint yourself with your work; it could be that some minor off-the-cuff thing you established ten stories ago is just what you need to help resolve something today.