Worldbuilding: Complexity in the Political Landscapes

As part of Way of the Shield, I've been delving deeper into the politics of Druthal.  In doing so, I'm taking into account the same thing I said about strawmen villains, but taking that to a macro scale.  Sure, it would be easy to break the Parliament into two sides, and say, "This side are the right-thinking heroes, and this side are the villainous morons".  But then you don't have a story, you have a screed.  If a screed is what you want to write, go for it.  Didn't hurt Ayn Rand's sales.  But that doesn't interest me.

Druthal is a Parliamentary Monarchy, in which I've played some mix-and-match with aspects from traditional monarchies, parliamentary systems and healthy dose of US-style democracy.  It's not a perfect system.  It's not supposed to be.  It's a messy, flawed sausage grind, and that's what I like about it. 

The Druth Parliament probably has more in common with the US Senate than, say, the British Parliament.*   There are 100 members (Chairs) to the august body, 10 from each of the archduchies.  Each Chair serves a 5-year term, with no term limits.  Elections are staggered, so every year there are two chairs per archduchy up for re-election.  Chairs are ranked by seniority, so the 1st Chair of Acora is the longest-serving member from that archduchy, 2nd Chair of Acora is second-longest, and so on to 10th Chair for the newest member. 

Elections are not winner-take-all, since two Chairs are available in any given election.  Once votes are counted and illegitimate ones are tossed**, the top two candidates receive the Chairs.   Since no candidate needs an actual majority to win a Chair, there are more than two political parties holding Chairs in the Parliament.  In fact, there are six.***

Now, in designing these six, it was very important to give each party a valid platform that people can believe in.  No one is "wrong".

• Traditionalists (or "Dishers", colloquially) believe in the fundamental necessity of archduchies (and below that, duchies and baronies) understanding their own needs.  They want to maintain and strengthen the local authority of minor nobility; a baron knows his own barony better than anyone else, after all.  
• Loyalists ("Crownies") believe that Druthal needs to stand as a united nation, that a strong center, where everyone is given access to the same infrastructure, rights and opportunity raises the whole nation up.  
• Free Commerce ("Minties") believe that Druthal grows by trade and business, and by providing the means for commerce to thrive (including secure, easily traveled roads, well-protected sea-routes and minimal taxes and tariffs), the average Druth has the opportunity to succeed on their own merits.
• Ecclesials ("Books") believe in the fundamentals of community and moral centers, and that the grounding the church gives serves the needs of the people, on a local level, far more than any well-meaning directive from the capitol.  
• Functionalists ("Frikes") do not hold to specific ideologies of "what is good for Druthal"-- what's good is what works; if it doesn't work, you don't keep grinding at it.  They do tend to believe that simple, small steps work better in the long run than grand, sweeping gestures, and that moderation is the key to functionality.
• Populists ("Salties") believe that the people themselves are the backbone of Druthal, and that the core industries of day-to-day living (farming, ranching, mining, fishing, etc.) are the true center that everything is built off of.  By helping the people who do those things, all of Druthal is helped.

Now, in order to actually get anything done in the Parliament, of course, coalitions must be formed.  Loyalists and Free Commerce tend to vote together one way, and Traditionalists and Ecclesials tend to vote together the other way, and Functionalists and Populists tend to be swing votes.  In 1215, when Way of the Shield takes place, the Ruling Coalition consists of the Loyalists, Free Commerce and the Functionalists-- with the Frikes being the uneasiest of allies-- holding 53 Chairs.  Traditionalists and Ecclesials form the Opposition Coalition, with 41 Chairs.  The Populists do not belong to either Coalition, but with only 6 Chairs, they have the weakest voice in the Parliament.  However, since the Frikes are the least likely to vote with uniformity, the Populists can be a crucial swing vote on any given issue.

All of this, of course, is mostly the under-the-surface part of Way of the Shield; I've gotten more infodumpish here than I do in the actual text.  The important part, for me, is the shades of grey.  There is no these-people-are-right-these-people-are-wrong dichotomies.  I have heroes on both sides of the aisle, as it were, and villains as well.

And for me, that makes for a more interesting story.

---
*- This is mostly because I am American, and I'm far more familiar with our government than anyone else's. 
**- Most common form of this tends to be people voting for someone ineligible; namely, someone who is already serving and isn't actually up for re-election in that cycle.
***- At least, six that have members in the Parliament.

Perils of the Writer: Villains Made of Straw

One of the easiest traps a writer can fall into is making their villains just be wrong.  Especially if your story has some kind of political slant to it.

I mean, sure, it makes things nice and simple for you: bad guys are bad, so good guys win by being right and good and awesome.  High fives!  Also: boring.  Since your bad guys only exist to prop up arguments that you, the author, think are stupid, you'll frame the argument in the easiest way to knock down.  And since your protagonist's arguments are just so filled with your righteous rightness, they never face up to a real challenge. 

That's really easy to knock some holes into.

Case in point:  I recently was reading a handful of reviews for a SF book that takes a decidedly political stance.  There were, to be fair, many 5-star reviews, written by people who share that political stance, because the book validates their worldview.  But there were also many 1-star reviews, hammering the holes in the heroes political system, and how the bad guys were made to look like incompetent buffoons propping up an idiotic regime. 

Another case in point: Heavily armed Stormtroopers defeated by teddy bears with spears.

Yet another: The West Wing is now streamable on Netflix, and the strawmen don't get much more scarecrow-like than Gov. Ritchie, the Republican candidate Pres. Bartlet faces in his re-election campaign.  Ritchie is a stuffed shirt, and you learn all you need to know, all there is to know, in his response to hearing about a Secret Service agent killed in a random bodega robbery: "Boy, crime.  I don't know."  This is a guy who literally has nothing to say.   It sets up a satisfying slapdown*, but it doesn't create an adversary that's worthy of Jed Bartlet.

That's the key: nothing makes your heroes more interesting than giving them who is not only worthy of them, but who also can make a cogent argument explaining that they just might be right.  Give me a real, detailed antagonist that you, the writer, can believe in as much as your hero.  Then you've delivered something interesting.

---

*- "For the record, 'Boy, crime, I don't know' is when I decided to kick your ass."

Worldbuilding: Space Opera and the Future of Food

 I take the food aspect of worldbuilding pretty seriously, as you can tell.   This is just as true in Sci-fi and Space Opera as it is in Fantasy. 

On some level, I've often been disappointed by a lot of the SF I've read and watched along these lines.  Not that I necessarily want some sort of long infodump of alien farming, but food sourcing gets elided quite often.

Take, for example, the Replicators on Star Trek.  I kind of hate them.  They're a cheap answer to a major element of civilized culture.  On TNG, it even gives them the "high ground" to look down their nose at another species that still, you know, eats actual meat.  Because in their enlightened future, they don't need to deal with any messy reality of food production.  How do we feed ourselves?  We talk to a hole in the wall, and it appears like magic.

But taking magic tech out of the equation, the practical realities of how people produce, store and prepare food-- especially on long, deep space flights-- should be a worldbuilding element the writer is aware of, even if they never talk about it much. 

A fantastic resource Space Opera writers should check out is Mary Roach's Packing for Mars.  In it, Roach digs into every little practical "but what about this?" question that NASA was thought of (and they really thought about all of them), and solutions they've come up with, as well as the ones they still struggle with.  Food supplies for a manned mission to Mars is a major concern.*  The whole book is worth the time.

Alien foods are another thing to consider, specifically in terms of humans eating alien foods.  Now, biochemistry is not even remotely a strong suit of mine, but I'm given to understand that it's highly unlikely we'd be able to digest alien biomatter, let alone extract useful nutrients out of it.  Presuming no negative reactions**, it would just pass through our systems untouched.

However-- they still may be interesting to eat. Spices, for example.  We don't really get useful nutrients out of pepper or cinnamon or cumin, but they all make food more interesting. Alien spices can create unique culinary opportunities.   And that's also where xenobiodiversity can come into play, especially in terms of interspecies trade.  In the future you build, the trade of raw materials will, of course, be crucial, but there's nothing unique to, say the gold or molybdenum*** found on Earth compared to the gold or molydbenum on Starkasia or Paxica or wherever else people go in the galaxy.  But paprika?  Now that's something you can't get anywhere else.  That could be worth quite a lot out there.

----

*- As is the human waste element, which Roach gets into as well.  There were NASA scientists who suggested the possibility of having the problems solve each other: the waste material could be purified and used as a raw protein base to be repurposed as a food supply.  Scientifically possible.  But astronauts in the discussion shot this down: "We're not eat shitburgers on the ride home."
**- Which, I would imagine, would be more likely to be allergic reactions rather than toxic ones. 
***- Or whatever matters.  "Molybdenum" is just a fun name.

Worldbuilding: Alien Perspectives and Communication

I've been thinking of late about how aliens, upon first meeting, would establish communication, as well as how communication continues once those baselines of communication have been laid down. 

As far as starting things out, there's plenty of talk of using the language of math and science to establish initial codes.  For a very rudimentary example of this:

Now, just about any species capable of, say, achieving
spaceflight should be able to look at this and decode-- from the top part-- the mathematical truism that is the Pythagorean Theorem.*  Then looking at the bottom part, they should be able to decode that it's saying the exact same thing in another way... and from there, discern details about the English language, how it's constructed.  You construct several of these images, and transmit them to the aliens you hope to talk to, and cross your fingers that those shoulds line up, and that you don't offend said aliens who think you're trying to patronize them and teach them basic math.

Of course, getting those shoulds to line up still makes assumptions.  For example: "look at this".  What if said alien species is, as we would understand it, blind?  Would they even have developed the equivalent of Euclidean geometry? Or, at the very least, would it mean the same thing to them?  What about a species that relies more on, say, echolocation and perfect pitch?  Would their Euclid equivalent instead come up with fundamental mathematics based off of musical pitches and frequencies? 

Even presuming we can get all that, then there's culture shock.  I'm still figuring out where to start with that.  Take, for example, how we and other species might process "scary".  A species that's eight feet tall, with six long, spindly legs, winged arms like a bat and a face like a lamprey would, probably, on first meeting, look terrifying.  But at the same time, our beauty-contest winners would still look like just another rat to them.  We might both react with fear at seeing each other, and that fear could seem utterly rational, but at the same time be completely unexplainable to the other party. 

So how hard is going to be, opening a dialogue with someone who makes you want to run screaming from the room, and the same time they think that you think they need to study 5th grade math?


There's a great short story by Kij Johnson, Spar, in which a human woman is stuck in an alien lifepod with an alien creature.  There is no meaningful communication.  There's only, from her perspective, constant sexual activity that wavers between consensual and non-consensual.  She doesn't know if what it's doing to her is, as far as it's concerned, a sexual act.  She isn't sure if it thinks of her as an intelligent being.  She's not even sure if it is an intelligent being; she might be having sex with the alien equivalent of a cat. 

And that might be what it comes down to: just not knowing anything, because there's no common ground at all.

---
*- Completely tangential**, but every time the Pythagorean Theorem comes up, I can't help but think of one of the dumbest moments in early Star Trek: Next Generation.  Having assembled Data's evil brother Lore, the crew (not knowing Lore is evil) is showing him how the helm on the Enterprise works.  Riker brings up the first half of the Pythagorean Theorem, which Lore automatically finishes, before stopping himself and feigning that it was something he had overheard but didn't really understand.  I'm not sure which part of this whole exchange is dumber: that Riker thought that tricking Lore into revealing he knew the PT was a clever trick at all, or that Lore thought that pretending he, an android, didn't understand middle-school geometry, was somehow a clever ruse. 
**- Ha!

Story Sale and other Small Victories

So, to start, I got excellent news on New Year's Day.  Namely, I sold a short story, "Jump the Black", to Rick Klaw's upcoming anthology "Rayguns Over Texas".  Rayguns is an anthology of original science fiction by TX authors, is scheduled for release at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 2013 Science Fiction Worldcon in San Antonio, TX).  It'll also have stories from Michael Moorcock, Neal Barrett, Jr., Joe Lansdale, Aaron Allston, Don Webb, Stina Leicht, and many other people who are far cooler than me.  Seriously, if it was Ocean's 11, I'd be the Matt Damon of the group. 

Obviously, I'm thrilled.  This literally happened on January 1st, and I'm taking it as a sign for the year to come. 

Here's one thing I've learned in the process of cutting my teeth in this business: take every small victory.  This particular one is a great one, and it's an easy one to crow about.  It has a tangibility I can point to: there will be a book with a story I wrote in it.  Other victories, other little milestones I have passed, don't have that same sense of accomplishment.  At least, not the way you can really explain to people who aren't/haven't done the same things. 

Back when I was still querying, for example.  Getting a full-request was a pretty big deal, something that puts me in the top 0.1% of everyone who says, "I'm gonna write a book."  But it doesn't actually put a book in bookstores or money in my pocket.  At the time, I was pretty proud of that milestone, but it wasn't something I felt I could make a big deal out of.  However, around that time, I ran into an actor friend I hadn't seen in a while, and when I mentioned it-- as well as that feeling that it wasn't really much of a victory-- he said, "I know exactly what you mean.  It's like getting a 3rd Callback, where you know the part is down to you and a couple other guys.  It gives you some validation, that you have talent... but it still isn't a job booked."

Still, I savor these moments.  The big one is coming.  I feel it in my marrow. 

Goals for the Coming Year

So, from my clock, 2012 has a mere 13 hours and change left to it.  2013 is coming, so its high time to set some unrealistic goals for the year:

1. Book deals for Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, and Maradaine Constabulary.  If we're really aiming pie-in-the-sky, this deal will involve the same publisher and all three at once.  That would be very nice, indeed, Universe.  But in the case of all three, I think I've really done what I can do, and it's past time to be focused on the Next Project.

2. Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield.  I should have finished this last year, but between various rewrites of the other three, a hectic summer and a few other things on my plate, it didn't come together.  Part of that was due to a flawed outline, which I think I've got a handle on now.  I understand why it wasn't working, which is a big hurdle to clear.  Time to drive it forward.

3. Finish Rough Draft of Banshee.  This is a project that's gone through significant conceptual changes over the years (you may notice that it's no longer USS Banshee, which is one major shift), but I've finally found an angle that combines character, plot and worldbuilding in a way that works pretty well, at least so far. 

4. Attend my first Worldcon.   It's in San Antonio, it's literally taking the place of ArmadilloCon this year, so it's what I'm doing.  Hopefully I'll have something good to do there.  (See point 1)

5. Have a good reason to start second books of Thorn, Holver Alley or Constabulary.  See point 1.

6. Hash out some of these random ideas into usable outlines.  Because if I accomplish 2 & 3 before I accomplish 1, I'll have no good reason to do 5.  So I'll need a new "new project", as it were. 

7. Never give up.  But this one's a given.

2012 In Review

So, a year ago I put out my goals for 2012, for which I can say: some came to pass, some not so much.  I still don't have a book deal, for Thorn, Holver Alley or Maradaine Constabulary.  However, I can honestly say I feel like I'm a lot closer on those.  All three of those were re-drafted or fine-tuned, so this year I have finished-until-a-paying-editor-tells-me-otherwise levels of drafts for all three. I got a really excellent rejection letter for Thorn. So for the first three goals, I'm still a bit short of the line. 

Number 4: Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield, did not come together.  I see now that my initial outline for it was woefully flawed.  In outline, it was a politically-themed murder mystery, but that was far too thin.  It needed scope, grandeur, and more antagonists who had a clue.  I need to get back in there and work out the details. I've had recent epiphanies that made things gel in my head.  Now I need to get them onto the page.

I did do more outlining and worldbuilding-- and some scene writing-- for what Banshee has morphed into.  I feel good about how this is coming together.  The bits that I have written, I really like.  But I need to solidify the outline before it really starts to live and breathe as a novel.  The finale is still something of a mystery to me.

Also, had Out of Ink produce one short play, wrote another for this year's.  I wrote an actual short story that I feel pretty good about.  ArmadilloCon and the Writers' Workshop went very well.

All in all, 2012 went strongly.  Not as well as I would have liked, but still: progression on the writers' path.  That's good, though.  It serves as a humbling reminder that I can always do better.