Sign outside Forks, WA. Photo: Forks Chamber of Commerce blog

Vampires are the new hot character, in case you haven’t noticed.  Vamps have been popular since Stoker wrote Dracula, but only recently have they had the chance to convert from nasty seductive blood-sucking monsters to broody seductive blood-sucking good guys.

These days, vampire main characters are everywhere:  brooding in the woods in romance novels; at vampire finish schools in YA novels; being superheroes in comics and on TV; and taking over the teen and adult prime time soap genre on television. Many of these vampire-centric stories are entertaining, some are even extraordinary. But still:

Enough, already!! Can’t writers think of ANY OTHER mythical beings to live among humans?

Yeah, I know: werewolves and zombies. Done and overdone. They’re also off the originality list. Same goes for witches, wizards and ghosts, who are not only well past their freshness date but also – duh! – human beings.

For those of you whose imaginations need a little assistance in thinking of other types of  supernatural creatures to populate your world, I offer this short list of supernatural species that I’d like to see in a contemporary setting:

Undine, by John William Waterhouse, 1872

Undine. A female water spirit of lakes and rivers, the undine traditionally tries to marry a human so she can gain a soul (see Anderson’s The Little Mermaid for a literary version of this story).  By the way, once Christianity took hold in Europe, its teachings added a new element to myth and folktale by insisting that fairies of any kind don’t have souls. How relevant that might be in a contemporary setting would be up to you.

Djinn (genie). A being of great power in Middle Eastern tales, the djinn is usually destructive and inimical to humankind, unless it is bound by some kind of magic, when it has to restrain itself from destruction and help its human masters. Living in a lamp is not obligatory. Besides, a djinn would have much more fun messing with your BlackBerry. (I already have a contemporary genie story making the magazine rounds right now, though it doesn’t quite meet the criterion of this list, because the genie isn’t the protagonist. Hmmm, maybe a sequel is in order…)

Selkie. The gray seal of the North Atlantic can swim ashore as a seal, take off his/her skin and walk around as a human for a while before returning to the sea. In the most famous selkie story, an Irish fisherman falls in love with a selkie woman, and hides her skin, forcing her to stay on land. She marries him and bears his children, then one day, she finds the hidden sealskin, puts it on and dives back into the sea. Take that to a divorce court!

Banshee. The harbinger of death in Irish folk tales, the banshee is a fairy woman whose horrible cry is only heard by those who will soon die. What would life be like for the fairy who had this job?

Menehune, the skilled craftmakers of Hawaiian mythology, have some similarity to Brownies. Photo from the blog Talk Story About Hawaiiana

Brownie. The small household spirit of English and German legend comes around after dark and helps the deserving with household chores, or causes mischief and destruction if it isn’t treated well, or sees signs of sloppy and lazy housekeeping. Best known from the Grimm story, “The Elves and the Shoemaker;” and now from J K Rowling’s House Elves, who seem pretty closely related. Would a modern Brownie need an Immigrations Green Card to do its stuff?

Animist spirits. In some mythologies  almost any place or natural object can have a resident spirit or animus; the Greek dryads and naiads (tree and spring spirits) are just one example.  Imagine you’re the animus of a nice woodland meadow, and someone comes and builds a subdivision on your metaphorical belly!

Almost any non-Western mythical being. India, for example, has more minor gods than there are grains in a teaspoon of curry powder. Africa, Japanese and Polynesian folklore seem equally rich with creatures. Pick one from your own ethnic heritage or someone else’s, and have some fun.

And the number one being I’d like to see playing main characters in contemporary settings:

Fairy. Also known as elves, the Fair Folk, fays, the People of the Sidhe, and many other names, depending on the country and the culture. I’m not talking about Tinkerbell and her cute little friends, the Disney/JM Barrie/Arthur Rackham pixies with butterfly wings. Real fairies are usually all that’s left in cultural memory of the Old Gods of any culture that has adopted more monotheistic religions.  Each culture’s fairies have their own powers and their own agendas, and all seem to have an irresistible fascination with mortal ways.

Yes, a lot of people do use Western fairies already in their fiction, including Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Mike Mignola and Susanna Clarke, to name just the few I’ve read recently. Each has treated fairies in very different ways, but I haven’t yet found a contemporary novel, comic or screen presentation with a fairy as a point of view character. And given the wide variety of fairies in the world, the possibilities are endless.

In case my few species haven’t inspired you, here’s a much more comprehensive list compiled in honor of the day by the brilliant and possibly demented (in the best way) David Malki of Wondermark.com. Look up any names you can’t identify, and I’m sure you’ll find inspiration.

Go. Create. Entertain us! And Happy Halloween!

Images: MGM & SyFy

Stargate Universe is the third TV iteration of the Stargate franchise. By all the rules of TV franchises, it ought to be either (a) the same series formula and quality, like the CSI and Law & Order clones; or (b) the same series formula and story concepts becoming ever more generic, like the later Star Trek series.

Instead, the creative team of Stargate Universe jumped to a new dramatic level by taking big leaps in concept and storytelling. If you want to take your own imagined world in a completely new direction, this is how it’s done.

Universe starts within the familiar Stargate setting: human military and science personnel stationed on an off -world base accessed by ship and by stargate, exciting Ancient technology to be studied, bad guys attacking. Then the crew’s retreat through the stargate turns into a one-way trip to the wrong end of the universe. Instead of dialing the gate back to Earth, lead scientist Dr. Rush dials the mysterious gate address he’s been trying to reach for months, and the fugitives end up on an Ancient starship that’s traveling distant galaxies on its own.

If this sounds like a variation of Stargate Atlantis or Star Trek Voyager, look again. Yes, the crews of those shows found themselves on their own in distant parts of the cosmos, and Voyager’s crew also went involuntarily. That’s about where the similarity ends. The Ancient ship Destiny is not under control of its new occupants, who so far are little more than passengers. They never know where they’re going next, or what’s going to break down on a ship that’s been traveling since long before recorded human history. If they stop on a planet to get supplies, they risk being left behind when the ship makes its next interstellar jump. Unlike the crews of the other shows, they can sometimes talk to home, thanks to telepathic communication stones (very cool use of previous worldbuilding: the stones were invented for Stargate SG-1 long before Universe was ever thought of), but talking to home so far seems mostly to lead to more trouble and conflict.

Now here’s where the real fun starts. Diverse groups of characters in desperate straits are supposed to bond and form a team so they can survive.  That’s how its done in TV and movieland, right? Remember how well the two previous Stargate teams worked together from the start? And how the two enemy crews in Voyager became a harmonious team in about three episodes?

This is not that crew. This is ordinary people like you and me, with very little of the heroic about them. Most of them are plain scared – as they should be – and a lot of them, being either scientists or politicians, think they have better ideas than anyone else about how to stay alive. In four episodes, there have already been several near mutinies and lots of power struggles over who gets to be in charge every time something goes seriously wrong. And the two guys who actually are in charge, Rush by virtue of his knowledge, and Col. Young, the ranking military officer, don’t trust each other at all.

Destiny's crew learns that only 17 people can escape in a shuttle before the ship flies into a star

Previous Stargate shows have been mostly episodic, and often humorous in tone. They have also gotten progressively better as the characters and situations develop into the second and third seasons and beyond.  Universe is tightly serialized so far, and much more dramatic.  And it’s riveting. This week’s episode, Light, was one of the best hours of TV I’ve seen in years, with the ship heading straight for a star, and the crew facing the prospect that only a handful of them can escape in the one working shuttle. What would you do if you had to face a lottery that gave you one chance in 5 of surviving beyond today?

This is only their 4th episode. I can’t imagine where they’ll have taken us in a year or three.

Happy Birthday to Us! Yes, its really a cake, made by the London Cake Company and featured on Cake Wrecks - where they also feature outstanding cakes like this one alongside the wrecks (see their link in Geektastic)

Today is the first anniversary of WorldBuildingRules!

In this first year, I’ve made 67 posts in 35 categories and 57 tags.

I’ve talked about several different stories I’m writing about my imaginary world, Khasran. One, The Master Patterns was published before the blog began; another, The Thief of Twilight, is going through the magazine submission slog right now; and two were started this year, because of ideas from posts on this blog. I’m still working on these and other unfinished stories that I haven’t yet mentioned, so stay with me as I address the storytelling and worldbuilding challenges they raise.

I’ve learned more about writing good posts and a lot about formatting blog pages and adding widgets. I’m sure there’s still a lot more to learn and new approaches and topics to try.

And I’ve had some surprises about what kind of  content attracts the most interest. The “Most Popular” list tells the story: by far the most visited post on this site is my Apollo 11 anniversary post. Not necessarily from any virtue of the post, but because this is a very popular topic. Every day I get hits from searches for “moon landing” “Buzz Aldrin on moon” “earth from moon” “Apollo 8 earthrise” and similar keywords. I also suspect that the post’s title “Moon Landings Real and Imagined” has drawn a few moon landing conspiracy theorists – who must have been disappointed to learn that my imaginary moon landing is the one in the Heinlein movie, not the one in their conspiracy! That’s worth a giggle at least. When I reread the post in that context, I’m glad to see that some of my observations do serve to support the truth, in that I point out some details that we could only learn by going into space in person.

I’ve gotten some faithful followers and a lot of compliments. I haven’t gotten as much discussion as I’d hoped, but I trust that will come along in time. And I have grown my visibility substantially.  When I started, I could count the daily visitors on the fingers of one hand. While I’m still far from being a megasite, I ran out of daily fingers and toes months ago.

One major thing that’s still lacking: I really want to find more online resources for worldbuilders. Though I’ve got a few, and they’re all great, I want to add many many more, enough to create a whole page of resource links on many areas of worldbuilding. And for that I need your help. If you’re a worldbuilder and you have some favorite sites that provide indispensable information about space travel, historical or alien clothing, languages, weapons, cities or any other arcane information that helps you make a believable world, please send me the link so I can check it out.

Meanwhile, have some cake and join me in Year 2!

The City of Poets is the setting for my newest Khasran story, as yet untitled. The idea came from an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how Basra, Iraq, is reviving its tradition of populist poetry. As I posted earlier this year, I was captivated by the idea of a city where poetry reigns supreme. I knew I had to find a place for this city in Khasran’s world. So here’s a bit of my process of starting to create this place.

A city where poetry, song and music are the most precious commodity, must be a place where people like to enjoy life, take it slow, and give themselves the leisure to enjoy their favorite arts – to listen, to perform, and of course, to talk a lot about the art.

Endless Skies, by Rick Sardinha, cover art for the webzine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. A little inspiration for my worldbuilding. See more of his beautiful art at his website, www.battleduck.com

So I knew right off that my new city has a balmy climate, where people can sit outdoors all year and listen to performers. A city in a warm climate has to have a way to keep cool in the summers, and a large body of water nearby is the pleasantest way to do that. I learned this in San Diego, whose Pacific Ocean breezes protect it all year round from the brutal heat of the desert just a few miles inland. The river that runs through Khasran flows southward across the plains for another 500 miles, gathering streams and tributaries until it’s a lazy, looping giant a couple of miles wide. I planted the City of Poets just where the river leaves the plains and starts to cut through sandstone hills. The city built of that yellow sandstone sprawls alongside the river like a lazy marmalade cat basking in the sun.

Why would there be a city just here? Suppose it were the spot where river traffic from up and downstream, intersects with caravan traffic from east and west across the plains.  Old trade routes make for an old city, and a cosmopolitan one. The markets here are colorful and varied,  and the people are well accustomed to welcoming strangers from many countries. That fits well with the easy going personality I already imagine.

And what’s better than a waterfront for leisure? The whole city faces the river, and except for the dockyards, the waterfront is miles of parks, terraces and plazas where everyone gathers to shop and talk and sing, and small pleasure boats and water taxis dart along the shore.

I had to walk through the city with my characters to learn more about it: the boulevards don’t run straight perpendicular to the river; they run towards it at an angle that exactly aligns with the prevailing wind, so that the roads funnel the river breezes deep into the city.

And you can find a poet or singer on almost every corner, very often more than one, taking turns trying to outshine each other. All these street performers can’t be full-time beggar poets,though; that would make for a poor city instead of a comfortable one. I think the street singers are ordinary working people from any and all trades, and this is how they use their free time: they go out with their friends and try out their newest compositions on the public. Only the very best would be able to make a living at it.

There’s more I’m learning, about the Temple of the Gods of the South, built on a dominant hill by the city’s current rulers, who are not indigenous; and the historical kinship between the builders of the City of Poets and the builders of Khasran. But I think I’ll save that for the story.

Someone in a LinkedIn writing group recently asked for advice on creating a city setting that is “rich, detailed and integral to the story,” a city that becomes a character in itself. He was asking what literary tools he would need to portray real cities, but the question can be asked just as well of imaginary ones. I’m currently working on that very thing for my newest story, which is set in the City of Poets I’ve been thinking about since the spring.

Emerald City

I tried to make a list of famous imaginary cities. To my surprise, I could only come up with four from literature: Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, Frank Baum’s Emerald City, and Charles de Lint’s Newford. Is this very short list a reflection of limitations in my reading, or is it really the case that science fiction and fantasy writers don’t often set their stories in cities? If you can add to this list, please jump in! Maybe the great gaming worlds, like Warcraft and Halo, have important cities too?

If I look to comics, there are several famous ones, notably Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham City. Like Khasran, both began as versions of a real city (in this case  New York) and evolved to have lives and personalities of their own.  This reminds me of a few more additions to the list: alternate versions of real cities in our world such as the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the Oxford of Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and the dragon-friendly Peking of  Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade.

So what does it take to build a city from scratch – especially a city that has a unique personality? Maybe spec fiction authors avoid cities because they’re such complicated entities. A city has as many elements to it as a whole world: geography, history, economics, government, culture, commerce, plus the pure physical challenge of thousands of people living packed together like cattle in a barn.

The vast majority of cities have grown from small settlements, for specific reasons, usually connected to geography and history.  There has to be a reason why so many people settled in this spot. Maybe it’s at the intersection of important trade routes, maybe it has a good harbor, maybe a king chose it to be his seat of government, maybe there are significant natural resources nearby.  Pick a reason, or a dozen, and see what those resources get you.

Then there’s simple geography. If your city has a harbor, it has to have a port district. If it’s in the mountains, i’s going to have lots of steep streets. If it’s in or near a desert, it’s going to need ways to keep cool, and it’s going to need a reliable water supply. A great Indian king built a huge city that was abandoned within a generation because local water couldn’t sustain the population. How does your city’s landscape and climate affect its street layout and its architecture?

Then there’s politics: maybe your city is a government center of some kind? If so, there are going to be a lot of bureaucrats or other officials in the population; and maybe a lot of official ceremonies and events as well.

Is your city a religious center? Then it will have temples, more ceremonies, visiting pilgrims, and lots of people holding religious offices.

Does your city need defenses from some enemy that’s always threatening attack? Low tech defenses might be walls and armed soldiers, or maybe a corps of wizards or others with paranomal ability. High tech defenses might be missiles, energy shields, or geosynchronous defense satellites. A city at war has a very different personality from a city at peace, with lots more security checks, and suspicion of spies and attacks.

What do your city’s inhabitants do for income? Every city needs industries to keep it alive; most cities have more than one. And a city with only one industry, like Detroit, is going to be in serious trouble when that industry moves elsewhere, unless it can find other sources of income.

Most interesting to me  is how your city manages to keep all those people living harmoniously and safely (relatively speaking) in such a confined space. Who grows their food, how does it get to the city, and how is it distributed? What happens to all the garbage and sewage that so many people produce? And especially, what keeps all these people at close quarters, in a reasonable social order? What keeps factions and economic and ethnic groups working together instead of trying to kill each other?

See how much fun you can have with just a few questions? Next up, how I’m starting to answer these questions in the City of Poets.

And remember, if you know of other imaginary cities, I want to hear about them!

This week, September 26-October 3, is Banned Books Week, an event sponsored by the American Library Association. The ALA is one of this country’s most active and dedicated defenders of our right to read what we choose, without interference from those who want to “protect” us or our children from books, magazines or any other reading material that they find offensive.

You can find a lot more information about Banned Books Week events and how to participate (or object, if you must) at these two sites, and probably many others:

Superstition Review Blog: the blog of the literary and art journal of Arizona State University, whose post on Banned Books Week brought it to my attention. Thanks!

ALA/Banned Books Week: the home page of Banned Books Week

I was amused, on reading the comments on the Superstition Review’s post, to see that in this country, at least, anyone can be a censor from someone else’s point of view. Conservative and liberal commenters were each accusing the other side of censorship, and proclaiming their own party as the true defenders of free speech.

The reality is that we have very little censorship in the United States compared to many other places in the world. You may remember that when a Danish newspaper published some editorial cartoons portraying Mohammed, the government of Denmark suddenly had a huge diplomatic problem with the entire Muslim world. The Muslim countries and their citizens believed that the Danish government must have approved the cartoons. They simply couldn’t comprehend that any government not only didn’t control all the media in its country, but didn’t even have the right to control it. (I’m not at all slamming Islam, since many non-Muslim countries have the same situation; China, North Korea, and Russia for example; the Danish cartoons are simply a recent high profile example)

What we Americans usually call censorship is not government activity, it’s the actions of private citizens or groups trying to get books or other material removed from their local library or school or bookstore, because something about it offends them.

Do you want someone else to tell you what you and your family can or cannot read?

Now here’s a little fun for the worldbuilders related to censorship and free speechf:

In your world, how do groups, governments and individuals respond to ideas they don’t like?

If there is censorship, who does the censoring? Is it a government, a religious authority, a dominant intellectual or economic group? How do they justify their censorship? What are they really afraid of?

How does the authority find the content to censor? How do they punish those who transgress, and how do they remove the banned material?

A few pieces from the Staffordshire Hoard. All photos by David Rowan, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; courtesy Staffordshire Hoard website.

Beowulf lives!  That was my reaction to the announcement today of a fabulous treasure find in England.

The Staffordshire Hoard is a collection of over 1500 gold and silver artifacts from the Dark Ages, circa 700 AD, found in a farmer’s field in July by an ordinary guy with a metal detector. It’s by far the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever found in Britain, and the richness of the objects is leading experts to believe that it may have belonged to a king.

Scabbard Boss, inlaid with garnets.

Pictures of the few pieces they have put on display are astonishingly rich, detailed and exquisite, even in their battered state after being in the ground for over 1300 years. The Anglo-Saxons were master goldsmiths and jewelers.

Archaeologists are orgasmic with excitement, naturally enough, talking about all that the find will teach them about the period, which is mostly lost to history. (That’s why its called the Dark Ages, d’oh!)

And that’s the link to worldbuilding. The Saxons, the Vikings, the Huns and other invading peoples from that era are our cultural template for the “barbarian” warrior.  We still commonly think of this type of warrior culture as being made up of huge bearded guys in helmets trimmed with fur and the horns of a bull, whose clothing is roughly fashioned fur and leather, who wield big clunky swords and battleaxes, and rip roasted meat off a haunch with their teeth, when they’re not pillaging, raping and burning.

Sword Hilt fitting with garnets

So when does that fur-clad barbarian find time or taste or skill to make something like this for his sword hilt?

What archaeologists learn from this hoard over the next months and years, about the ways of a long lost culture, could be as fascinating for worldbuilders as it is for historians.

Leslie Webster, former Keeper of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum, quoted on the Staffordshire Hoard’s Flickr page, says this:

“… it will make historians and literary scholars review what their sources tell us, and archaeologists and art-historians rethink the chronology of metalwork and manuscripts; and it will make us all think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms and the expression of regional identities in this period, the complicated transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork production – to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises. “

Maybe we’ll even have to rethink that barbarian stereotype!

Hulu.com is now featuring a 17 minute preview of the new series Flashforward, based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, which I reviewed this spring.

I haven’t seen an opening act this intense since the pilot of LOST.  Take a look here:

Flashforward preview

or on ABC’s web page for the series, here

Flashforward premieres on Thursday at 8 on ABC. It looks every bit as cool as promised.

Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog has won the 2009 Emmy Award for Short Format Live Action Entertainment .

Go, Team Horrible! And take that, big studios! Here’s the team showing off their prize:

Dr Horrible at the Emmys. Photo posted on Twitpic by Dr H co-writer Maurissa Tancharoen, 4th from left, between Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. Lucky lady!

The competition in the category was impressive this year: The Daily Show, Bruce Springsteen’s Superbowl half-time show, 30 Rock’s “Kenneth the Web Page” webisode series,  and Battlestar Galactica’s “Face of the Enemy” webisode series (the BSG “Razor” webisodes won last year in this category). Them’s some Bad Horses to beat!

And if you’re wondering how you missed the Emmy awards broadcast, you didn’t – at least, not if you’re thinking of the big awards program where the Best Drama, Best Comedy, Actor Actress, etc awards are presented. That’s the “Prime Time Emmy Awards,” which this year will be Sunday September 20, and will be hosted by Dr. Horrible’s own Neal Patrick Harris, which is reason enough to watch. (Maybe he’ll sing and bring out the freeze ray and goggles!)

The vast majority of Emmys are presented a week earlier at the Creative Arts Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, which was held yesterday. These less glamorous awards include all the craft and technical awards (makeup, lights, special effects, costumes, stunts, etc etc) plus documentaries, children’s and animated programming, and lately, cool stuff like original web programming.

The Creative Arts Emmy Award ceremony will be broadcast during the day on Friday Sept 18 on the E! channel 1 pm Eastern/Pacific.

Do you start with a situation and some characters, and build a world in which those characters could live and that situation could occur?

Or do you start with an idea for a world that has some unique qualities, and find your stories and characters in the process of exploring the world?

In a blog post on Omnivoracious earlier this year, China Mieville brought up this question in his discussion of  Tolkien’s worldbuilding. Here’s the relevant section of the post:

Tolkien

“Middle Earth was not the first invented world, of course. But in the way the world is envisaged and managed, it represents a revolution. Previously, in works such as Eddison’s, Leiber’s, Ashton Smith’s and many others’, the worlds of magic, vibrant, brilliant, hilarious and much-loved as they may be, were secondary to the plot. This is not a criticism: that’s a perfectly legitimate way to proceed. But the paradigm shift of which there may be other examples, but of which Tolkien was by a vast margin the outstanding herald, represents an extraordinary inversion, which brings its own unique tools and capabilities to narrative. The order is reverse: the world comes first, and then, and only then, things happen–stories occur–within it.

Mieville's latest

So dominant is this mode now (as millions of women and men draw millions of maps, and write millions of histories, inventing worlds in which, perhaps, eventually, a few will set stories) that it’s difficult to see what a conceptual shift it represented.”

There’s no right or wrong approach,  as Mieville says; and many of us probably do a little of both at one time or another, within the same world.

The question here is, how much difference does each approach make, in the kind of world you end up with and the kinds of stories that might come out of it?

Does starting with a character or plot make your world stronger in some ways but weaker in others? Does developing a specific world, by definition, limit you in the kinds of stories you might produce or the themes you can explore?

Can anyone give me examples of how either approach has affected their world and their stories, made them better or different,  or limited their choices more?

For myself, I have certainly used both approaches. In creating Khasran, I started with a story and characters in a familiar literary setting, the Arabian fantasy. The story itself drove me away from mythical Baghdad, or anywhere that resembled the Middle East of Scheherezade and Haroun al Rashid. I had to create a world to accommodate the story I wanted to tell.

Yet the deeper I go in the worldbuilding, the more Khasran sprawls in time and space, the more it develops cultures and landscapes and folkways unique to itself – the more I have shifted to “the world comes first, then stories happen in it.”  The two newest story ideas I’m developing came entirely out of the world. One is the holiday story I started developing at Christmas when I wondered what kind of holidays these people observe. The other idea, newer still,  sprang from that article about the City of Poets, when I discovered where in Khasran that city lies, and started wondering about its history.

Are these going to be different from stories like The Master Patterns, that came from my original character and plot ideas? I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll know better when I’m finished with them.