I’m having some fun with mundane chores today. What do you think about while you’re mowing the lawn?

A fantasy fan thinks, “I wonder if Sam Gamgee would like having a power lawnmower for all that grass on top of Bag End? Or would he would think a gas mower is a noisy, smelly Sharkey machine?”

A science fiction fan thinks, “Could you grow a lawn on a big space station? How well would grass grow in microgravity? Does it ever need to be mowed and how would you mow it? Is it a good enough source of oxygen to be worth the space and energy, or do you grow it mainly for crew morale?”

Friends, followers and readers, you’ve been very patient with me this spring while my attention has been everywhere but here. I will resume putting up new articles and discussions very soon. But meanwhile, I offer you one of the best articles I’ve read recently about writing hard science fiction and getting it right.

Ryk E. Spoor and Eric Flint recently released Portal, the final book in their Boundary trilogy (cover and artwork by my good friend Bob Eggleton), and in honor of the event, Ryk wrote a guest post on John Scalzi’s blog Whatever. He tells how he came to partner with Eric Flint on the series, and describes the challenges of writing the kind of SF Eric was aiming for: “real hard SF – near-future, using extrapolations of real technology, with parts of it solid enough to ring like steel when someone hammered on them.“

At the heart of the piece is the big challenge of any kind of worldbuilding – getting in all the information your readers need to be convinced that the world is real, and to understand what’s happening, without sinking the story under pages of info-dumps.

Here’s a choice bit on knowing when to stop explaining:

“That second bit is a crucial, and very scary, part of writing hard SF.

I’m happy to announce the publication of Paramourtal, Volume 2, the second anthology of paranormal romance from Cliffhanger Books.

It’s a great read, not only for people who like romances, but for anyone with a taste for adventure fantasy.The 10 stories included cover the gamut, from dark fantasy on the edge of horror, to straight out goofy humor.

You can read more about it on the Cliffhanger website, and order it in paperback at your local bookstore, at Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.  We expect to have ebook editions available soon.

The best panel I attended at Arisia this year was a fascinating, smack-on-the-head reminder that most of us – including this History major – don’t know nearly as much about history as we think we do. That panel’s topic was the invisibility of people of color in genre historical fiction, despite their presence in the real historical settings; and I’ll give it a full writeup soon. Today, I’m thinking about other recent archaeological news that should shake up our preconceptions about history.

First, the sensational confirmation that the bones under the Leicester car park are indeed those of Richard III “beyond a reasonable doubt” (in the words of the press release). Just the idea that someone has found and positively identified the bones of a king whose body has been lost for over 500 years is so extraordinary that, as fiction, it would seriously strain belief.  As fact, it’s the archaeological find of the century.

Beyond that, though, Richard’s resurrection is challenging the popular image of him as Shakespeare’s charismatic, murderous hunchback.

I’ve been remiss in posting regularly this winter (a new short story, marketing work projects, and a Star Trek article are my excuses); and though I hoped to make Sunday a regular “blog posting day,” this weekend I will be at Arisia 2013, schmoozing with many professional and fannish friends, and harvesting lots of goodies and fresh ideas from the many delightful and fascinating panels on the schedule.  I plan to post writeups of panels and perhaps other events in upcoming weeks.

Until then, I’ve gathered a small bouquet of creative and geektastic links for you to enjoy.

First, a couple of spec fiction writers talk about about worldbuilding:

At Home in Fantasy’s Nerd-Built Worlds is Saladin Ahmed’s (Throne of the Crescent Moon) analysis of why readers (and writers) love worldbuilding.

Across the Universe author Beth Revis offers Three Tips for Creating a Brand New Alien Planet from Scratch,  for the third book in her trilogy, which is just out.

In the past year or so I reread most of the Sherlock Holmes canon by wading through the doorstop-sized The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1988), which collects all of Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, along with many articles plus massive footnotes for each story.  The stories are, as ever, terrifically entertaining.  But this time, it was the scholarly accompaniment that got my attention.

I am happy to look at pictures of Holmes’s London and any number of geographical and historical footnotes about it.  It’s when the editor and his fellow scholars go beyond literary history that the unintentional hilarity starts.  The whole crew is obsessed with reconciling all the stories into a single, consistent history of Holmes’s life.

These dedicated – not to say compulsive – Holmesians can argue for pages about anything from the exact date a story took place (even to checking the historical day of the week and the weather to see if it matches Conan Doyle’s account), to exhaustive evidence that such notable characters as Irene Adler and the Prime Minister are actually this or that historical personage. What really made me fall over laughing was this: Watson’s references to the dates of his marriage (in stories written sometimes years apart) are so inconsistent that all the scholars insist that Watson must have been married at least three times!

They are having so much fun with their scholarly wrangling that I can’t help wondering if they know (or care about) what is obvious to the rest of us:

Conan Doyle wasn’t trying to create a consistent narrative or a unified world. 

People who live in the cold latitudes often acknowledge the power of winter by giving it a face. Nearly every old culture in northern Eurasia has some form of Winter Solstice god. The Sakha, a Turkic tribe of Northeast Siberia, look to this guy:

Chysh Khan, the Bull of Frost – the winter king of northeast Siberia

In Sakha tradition, Chysh Khan rises from the Arctic Ocean and brings winter with his breath.  Since cattle don’t live in the far northern latitudes where Chysh Khan rules, many folklorists think he gets his horns and his hoofs (see the cloven hoof pattern on the mittens?) not only from bulls, but from the woolly mammoth that once ruled those tundras.

We modern, civilized Western folks have this guy:

King Arthur: I am your king.

Peasant Woman: Well, I didn’t vote for you.

King Arthur: You don’t vote for kings.

Peasant Woman: Well, how’d you become king, then?

King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king.

Dennis the Peasant: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

~ Monty Python and the Holy Grail

From this end of a hideously long American Presidential election, the best thing about King Arthur’s farcical aquatic ceremony is that it didn’t inflict months of advertising, sound bites and mostly moronic news coverage on his subjects. Our current system of government and choosing our leaders works well in some ways (certainly better than those of, say, North Korea), and not at all in others (the framers of the Constitution could not have dreamed of a media infrastructure that brings the election into every home, all day for months!)

So today seems like a good day to think about inventing imaginary governments.  Many books do feature governments of one sort or another, because good plots can easily be made of using power, resisting power, and fighting over power.  Fantasy tends to go for kings and lords; while science fiction often goes for massive totalitarian bureaucracies, when it’s not going for fallen civilizations fragmented into armed free towns and warlord territories.

Yes, those are cliches, and they’re cliches because so many people have used them as a basis for imaginary systems of government, without ever looking further.

Here’s how deep childhood terrors can go – even if they’re just imaginary:

This monster is the scariest creature in my imagination, scarier than giant spiders, serial rapist murderers, and all the demons ever imagined.

This terror from my childhood now lives in the Dinosaur Museum, Blanding, Utah.
Photo: Brian Switek

Does he look familiar? Some steampunk robosaurus, perhaps?

In fact, this is the decayed skeleton of a giant of the Silver Screen, the brontosaurus from the original King Kong. He is on display at the Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, Utah, and was photographed earlier this year for the Smithsonian blog, Dinosaur Tracking.

When I was little, perhaps 8 years old, I saw King Kong on television.  Most of it was just another old movie with monsters moving jerkily across the small screen, but this brontosaurus haunted my nightmares long afterwards. I was terrified by the sight of him plucking a hapless sailor from a palm tree and eating him alive, and worst of all, the sight of the sailor’s legs sticking out of the bronto’s massive jaws, still kicking.

At least that’s what I thought had scared me the most, until I watched King Kong with a group of friends, for the first time since childhood. 

Today’s post marks the beginning of  the fifth year online for WorldbuildingRules! Happy Anniversary to us!

This week is also the 25th anniversary of The Princess Bride, and these yummy looking cupcakes by Angela’s Kitchen seem the perfect way to party. Skip down to the end of this post for a link to Angela’s blog and the cupcakes.

I’ve talked about culture, adventure, magic, clothing, and many other things, and have looked at worldbuilding and storytelling in books, movies, TV shows. I’ve accumulated 112 tags so far, in 41 categories.

The blog has grown from 1 or 2 visitors a day in the first months,  to several dozen on an average day, and several hundred on a really good day. In 4 years, I’ve had nearly 40,000 visits in all, and over 11,000 in the past 12 months (despite some stretches of really infrequent posting this summer, sorry!).

Even better, I also have a small and very smart community of followers who make great comments on my posts! And you’re the people I want to talk to now, because you’ve stayed with me.

So tell me, please, what would you like to see here in the next 12 months?