Creative Outlets That Aren't Writing

One can't just pound out words for eight hours a day, five days a week.  Well, maybe some people can, but I sure can't.  So what else do I do to chum the creative waters?
For me, and I know this is going to be a real shocker-- it's worldbuilding work, especially maps.
Now, I'm sure a lot of writers just build the world for the stories, or craft a world around a story idea.  Which is probably the smarter thing to do.  I mean, if you're doing all that worldbuilding work, it should be for a purpose, right?

  And for each of these, maybe there will be a purpose somewhere down the line.  But when I'm-- I don't want to say stuck or blocked, because I don't think that's accurate, but let's say conceptual brewing, and my brain needs to mull on where things are going or how to do a certain bit, then doing some map-drawing or other worldbuilding activity (like figuring out biomes and then connecting rise of agriculture to said biomes, and thus determining where those Fertile Centers of Origin are going to be that civilization arises in) or micromanaging a pair of linked villages for what sort of setting might be there.  Or the rise of multiple interstellar empires. 
This is probably the sort of thing that other sf/fantasy writers dread.   And I get that.  But for me, it's a lot of fun.  And dorky.  I will fully admit to compiling spreadsheets filled with just raw data of animal domestication or tech development of number of planets for hundreds of stars or regions or whatever else.  That gets the processing and analytical part of my brain in gear, and lets the writing brain churn and simmer, and then, hey... a thousand words show up. 
Plus, maps are fun.  I can't draw very well, but I can do maps.
That's all for now.  I'll be at OryCon this weekend, and if you're in the area, I hope to see you there.


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An admin note: I'm in the process of consolidating and updating my website, so everything, including this blog will be in the same place.  I'll post in both places for a while, but eventually the Blogger version will go away, and everything will be over there. 

Worldbuilding: Integrating the Top Down and the Bottom Up

I'll fully admit, the worldbuilding work I've done for the Banshee space-opera verse has was done in a strange way.  Namely, I did a combination of top-down and bottom-up building. 

To define these terms: top-down building is when you make first big decisions about the different cultures, borders and interactions, and then build the map to meet those needs.  Bottom-up building is when you create the map first, and then figure out cultures, borders and interactions based on what the map demands.

Neither approach is right or wrong, good or bad.  They're just different ways to go about it.  In fact, I advocate the hybrid approach.

In this case, the "top down" involved the decisions about some of the alien cultures closest to Earth.  I knew one thing I wanted was a large Alliance in close proximity to Earth, who had taken a preservationist/non-interference attitude to the planetbound cultures in their spheres of influence.  I knew I wanted an aggressively expansionist culture (the Paxin) and an imperialist culture (the Surani), and a recent interstellar addition who would give the humans a good fight (the Krek'nik). 

Also, in general, I wanted our interstellar region to be filled with intelligent life that was all, more or less, in the same place-- i.e. everyone had gotten into space or could potentially get into space within a few centuries of each other (or in the case of the three "old" powers in the region, a few millennia)-- which, in cosmic terms is the blink of an eye and highly improbably, unless you incorporate a serious don't-poke-this-too-hard conceit.  Which I did. 

But, in terms of "bottom up", I knew I wanted the stellar geography to be sensible.  Real stars where they really are. Now, this meant I probably did a bit of homeworld-fudging-- I'm given to understand that Procyon is probably too young a star to have a planet with advanced life on it, for example-- but that fulfilled at least a sense of verisimilitude.

But the other "bottom up" aspect I had to ask myself was-- what else was out there?  I had the raw data on stars within 150 light-years of Earth, and from that, crafted some randomization for each star:  Are there planets?  Where are the planets?  Do any have life?  Is that life intelligent?  How technologically advanced is that intelligent life?  Have they achieved FTL travel, and if so, when?  From all that, I could build up exact details of the 147 starfaring cultures, and how their potential interaction might be.

This bottom-up method gave me the opportunity come up with ideas that I might never have had without star-map based data fueling it.  Seven alien cultures in relative proximity to each other form a loose coalition.  One advanced culture with no one in proximity builds a sizable empire before encountering any pushback.  Another with a powerful aggressive species nearby builds their culture on defending themselves. 

From this, I found more interesting discoveries.  I devised a little equation based on expansion (how many colonies or outposts a culture had) and their tech level, and were able to calculate who the true "First Level" powers in the region were.  And from that, I've been putting together how the Astronomical Geopolitics (Astropolitics?) really work. 

I'd like to think doing that work-- while anal and time-consuming-- has created something a little more organic than just a top-down alone process would have.

Perils of the Science-Fiction Writer: Avoiding Obsolescence

I'll admit I'm not a big short story reader, nor am I as versed in the classics as I ought to be.  That said, I have a certain fondness for Ray Bradbury's All Summer In A Day, and to a lesser extent, The Martian Chronicles.  Both are very human stories that take place on Venus and Mars, respectively.  But they were very much the Venus and Mars of imagination, the Venus and Mars that couldn't be written about after the 1950s.

It's easy to see how, when all that was known about Venus was its cloud cover, a writer might imagine a Venus where the rain almost never stops.  Now we know that isn't even remotely close to the truth.  We know that All Summer In A Day is an impossible story.  It's still a great story, and it holds up in the sense that you can willfully ignore real-Venus in favor of its pulp-Venus setting.  You allow yourself that willful suspension of disbelief because you know the context.*

We live in an exciting time, in terms of astronomical news.  We are constantly hearing news of another planet being discovered in orbit of a distant star.  We've just learned of an Earth-sized planet in orbit of Alpha Centauri B.

But that also makes it a... challenging time to be a sci-fi writer, especially one that does the kind of in-depth worldbuilding that I do.  Any day I expect the news of a discovery to come that invalidates a major element of my work.  And I can only imagine if, say, such news comes in between finishing a work and it being published.  Would that be embarrassing?  Will it be embarrassing in 60 years?  Or will readers shrug and say, "Hey, that was the 2010s.  They hadn't even met the Helari** yet." 

This is probably why some of the better sci-fi gives themselves some breathing room-- putting a few centuries between now and the story.  Therefore the minor or major discoveries in the near future can be handwaved away.  Write too close to the day-after-tomorrow, and the work seems very dated.  I love Snow Crash, for example, and it's still a highly regarded work... but it's set in a 1998 that was a nigh-absurd extrapolation when it was written, let alone in retrospect.

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For some other news: Rayguns Over Texas now has a cover!  I'm absurdly excited for this book, especially since I'm being printed with such good company. 


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*- And, of course, one can write something in a deliberate retro-pulp style, but then you're almost writing fantasy instead of sci-fi. 
**- The Helari, of course, would find it amusingly quaint.

Future Worldbuilding: Geopolitics in the Interstellar (Part One)

Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know I take working out the geography pretty seriously.  I've built out a 150 light-year radius from Earth, and while in the building process I let a certain degree of randomness occur*, once I had certain things set up (namely, initial homeworlds and tech level of all the intelligent species in 150-ly radius), then I had to build with deliberateness.
 
That deliberate comes from decisions that I need to control-- and not just because I can't figure out an effective way to randomize it on Excel-- because the way a culture expands into space says a lot about their character.  Do they reach out and claim every star system they can get their dextrous appendages*** on as quickly as possible?  Or do they move slowly, maximizing the usage of resources in each system.  Do they aggressively strike out, clashing with any neighbors they might meet?  Or do they engage diplomatically, building bridges amongst cultures?

Whatever they do, once I allow an interstellar culture to claim a star system, I need to decide what kind of claim it is.  This depends a lot, but not entirely, upon what options that star system gives them: a star system with planets gives more options that one without, and one with planets with life gives even more options.  My designations are as follows:

Homeworld: This is self-explanatory-- the Homeworld is the world of origin for any given species.
Colony: The next highest-level of designation, a Colony is fully-autonomous and self-sufficient world that has a civilian population.
Station: If there are no planets, then the highest level of designation is Station.  Of course, there may be multiple stations within a system-- military, corporate or civilian, or a combination.
Outpost: An outpost is a planetbound facility that is neither self-sufficient nor civilian.  It can range from a military listening post to a mining-and-refinery base to a terraforming crew to a high-security prison.  These are typically on systems where no planet can support life, and are dependent on an infrastructure of supply ships.
Holding: This is the lowest-level of claim-- basically, little more than the claim itself.  Perhaps there is a squadron of ships or automated satellites to maintain that claim.
Preserve: This is a special designation, in which a species lays claim to a system and does nothing with it, other than protect it.  Of course, only a certain kind of culture is ever going to make a star system a Preserve.

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*- Within 150 light-year radius radius, we're talking about over 10,000 stars in that space.  We're talking 14.1 million cubic light years.**  So you better believe I created a randomizing script in Excel that went through each star and decided how many planets it had, and the orbital radius of each of those planets, and then IF one of those planets was in the "Goldilocks" zone, IF there was life on that planet, and IF so, how advanced that life was, and IF that life was intelligent, how advanced the technology of its culture was, and IF that advancement has reached the point of Interstellar Travel, WHEN they broke the light barrier, and how advanced their interstellar tech is.  Randomizing those factors was necessary just to get the work down to a manageable level.

**- Douglas Adams wasn't lying.  Space is big.  Really big.  Because that figure is nothing compared to the rest of the galaxy. 

***- They all have dextrous appendages.  Else you can't build ships.

Future Worldbuilding: How I Love Spreadsheets and Map Tools

All right, so I've talked about mapping things out and alien civilizations, but when dealing with things on an interstellar scale, when you're talking about 4660 stars within a 100 light-year radius of Earth, with 153 alien homeworlds, not to mention colonies, outposts, stations and other holdings, one has to have a way to keep all that straight.

It helps that, when you come down to it, I'm a BIG spreadsheet geek.

About a decade or so ago, I had an office job in which my duties could be boiled down to, "Make Excel do my bidding."  I'm not saying I'm an expert at Excel, but I've figured out a lot of tricks, without which I would never have been able to construct this universe, this interstellar community, to the degree that I have.

One of my biggest struggles is trying to visualize all that data, get a real sense of who is neighbor to who, where borders are.  I'm still a big fan of ChView, which is an old program but has the advantage of being (relatively) easy to import Excel data into stellar maps.  But even with that, it's still challenging to really feel who is close to who.  I've developed some tricks-- being able to define any homeworld as a central star, and then getting the distance from that star to every other star, and then figure out who is close to that.

Also, I like having data at my fingertips that I can use to generate cultural ideas.  Since I used a certain degree of randomization to determine which worlds had life, which life was intelligent, and which civilizations had reached the stars, to then look through that information and say to myself: OK, these three civilizations are all within a (interstellar) stone's throw of each other, so what does that mean?  Are they allies, or enemies?  Or, these two are close to each other, but also relatively close to this more advanced, aggressive species.  So are they united against the common enemy?

I'm curious, does anyone out there have more interesting star-map making tools?  I do like ChView, but it has flaws, for certain-- it's an old program that hasn't been updated in many years.  But is there anything better?  Most of the other things I've seen are weaker in design, or are not capable of importing data in an easy way; I'd have to start from scratch.    Any recommendations?

Future Worldbuilding: Unfolding the Future

One thing I've noticed in most "future timelines"-- be it for books or television or movies-- the worldbuilding tends to gloss over the "near" future.  This, of course, makes perfect sense.  If you're imagining the 24th or 25th or 48th century, what happened in the late 21st century isn't necessarily all that important... unless it's a big deal.  And you don't really want to put a "big deal" too close to the present, else your world is going to be outdated before too long.

Broad brushstrokes is another matter, and can even be pretty crucial.  The Star Trek Universe doesn't have a lot of details about the 21st Century*; beyond the Bell Riots**, a manned Mars mission and Zephram Cochrane/Warp Speed/First Contact, we really don't know much of anything.  Babylon 5 was even vaguer.  Firefly was vague, but in the sense that the past was nearly myth: "Earth-that-was" and such.*** 

But as a writer and a worldbuilder, I'm big on knowing, even if it doesn't ever inform the text.  Just as the names Chuck Yeager, Neil Armstrong or Sally Ride mean something, especially to those in their fields, other milestones would be similarly remembered.  Who was the first person on Mars, and what did they say?  The captain and crew of the first ship to go at hyper-light speeds?  The first human to make alien contact, the first to step on a planet in another solar system?  The names and history matter.

The short-lived, interesting failure**** Defying Gravity did get this sort of thing right.  The series, set in the 2050s, had already landed on Mars-- a mission that was at least a partial disaster.  Not to mention the fact that the first words on Mars were kind of lame. ("Red Planet, Conquered.")  So when the show, in its penultimate episode, had one of its characters as the first person to walk on Venus, it was an event in the world of the show.  What she said when she stepped off the lander mattered.  History was being made.

And that's what it's all about.  Making history, just forward.

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*- Though having the show in the '60s predict the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s was kind of amusing, especially since when the Voyager crew traveled to 1996-- the present when it aired-- there were fans complaining that the Eugenics Wars weren't happening on the show. 
**- Which, frankly, seem scarily possible right now.
***- Though I read a theory that Firefly could be a potential future of the Dollhouse-verse.  Which I can see.
****- I did like the attempt to import the style of a Grey's Anatomy workplace-drama onto a science-fiction setting.  It worked for me in making the SF aspects of living in the 2050s just part of normal life.  But I think the result was a show that really only appealed to the narrow overlap who liked both kinds of shows, instead of either.

Further Smaller Steps For Man

Yesterday was a pretty amazing day, one that gives me a lot of hope for the future of the human race.  For one, Curiosity landed on Mars, and even though there wasn't a lot to see, it did make for some exciting spectacle. Watching the video feed from NASA's JPL was full of intensity, as they would applaud every minor success.  But that's not the only thing: Oscar Pistorius ran in the Olympic semi-finals in the Men's 400m. He may not have won, but he ran.

Just let that really sink into your brain: In 24 hours*, we landed a robot science lab on Mars AND a man with no legs ran in the Olympics.

That's pretty damn amazing, what we-- the collective we of humanity-- can achieve.

Of course, being a writer-- especially a SF/F one-- this puts me in the mind of Future Worldbuilding.  What can we achieve, what can't we achieve, and where are we going to go?  When I've been crafting a Space Opera Setting, one of my goals was to maintain a certain degree of plausibility.**  

So, for the rest of August, it will be Future Worldbuilding Month, with a specific focus on Space Opera.   I'll talk some about my own ideas, compare some to my strong points of inspiration.***

So let's look to the future.

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*- I'm pretty sure they were within the same 24 hour period, but it could have been a few hours more apart than that.  But close enough.   
**- In as much as a setting with aliens and FTL travel can be plausible.
***- Including what are, in my mind, the five defining series of Televised Space Opera: Star Trek, Babylon 5, Farscape, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica.  We'll get into all of those.

Worldbuilding, and the Real World intruding on that

OK, this is how much of a complete dork of a worldbuilder I am.

If you follow astronomy news at all, you'd know that the star Gliese 581 has been in the news today, as they discovered a planet in the "habitable zone" for the star.  This is, by the way, the seventh planet discovered in the Gliese 581 system.

So I go through my Space Opera setting worldbuilding files, noting I don't even HAVE Gliese 581 on it.  How did that happen?  I'm supposed to have an accurate list of all major stars within 100 light years!

What do I do?  I go to wikipedia, look up Gliese 581, get its Right Ascension and Declimation and Distance, plug that into my ChView program, and see where the star pops up.  Right by it: the boringly named BD-07 4003.  Go back to Wikipedia, and lo and behold, that's one of its alternate names.  Back to my own database, what do I have?  Zero planets.

(I should note that the number of planets in any star system, and by "any" I do mean all 4,660 in the 100ly radius of Earth, was determined by a random algorithm taking into account a star's spectrum and mass.  Said algorithm makes in that most M-type stars have zero planets... so I may have to redo that since Gliese 581, as an M3V star, serves a fairly good example of the flaw in said algorithm.)

So, even though this would probably have ZERO impact on the actual stories I write in my Space Opera Setting, I feel a compulsion to Fix It.  I know Gliese 581 actually has seven planets, so I can't have it say zero on my database.  So I went through, fixed it, declared it a protected system of the alien alliance (who would keep grubby human paws of the place), and called that fixed.

And that's how much of a worldbuilding dork I am.