The Ghost. If my old Smith Corona had looked like this, I'd still own it!

From the design site Fab.com comes this amazing piece of mid 20th century technology retrofitting. I started writing (or at least typing my mss and school papers) on a Smith Corona of the same vintage, but it sure didn’t look like this!! (and thanks to Kate Laity, or rather to the friend of hers who shared this on her FB page, thus allowing me to see it!)

When I saw this, I immediately knew there should be a subgenre called chromepunk. A quick check of Google tells me that Yes! Chromepunk lives! At least in comics, though it doesn’t seem to be a huge genre yet. Here’s a bit of Comixpedia’s definition:

“Chromepunk is inspired by science fiction but features imagery and styling taken from approxomately the years 1955-1963.” 

So if you were building a chromepunk world, the aesthetic would obviously be late 1950′s – chrome hot rods with big fins, leather jackets, pompadours. You might also get in some pointy rocket ships (Hi, Marianne P!) doo-wop singing groups, and the chromepunk version of the Blues Brothers?

And what would your themes be?  Cold war politics? Beat heroes and heroines rebelling against pressure to conform to traditional society? Or would you have more fun with beach parties,  bridge parties, and the Right Stuff? And of course, you’d have to have Elvis, who would stride through this world like a Titan (or perhaps an actual god? What would the world be like if Elvis were God? hmmm…)

What kind of stories would you tell in a Chromepunk world?

And what Chromepunk stories can you recommend?

Gladwell looks at “success” here mainly as professional success (a question in itself, fellow worldbuilders: what defines “success” in your world? Or does your world even have such a concept?).  And in doing so, he discusses not only the people we consider successful (professional hockey players, big New York law firms, Bill Gates and the other wizards of Silicon Valley). He also discusses people with average lives, whose talents or intelligence would lead our culture to predict that they ought to be successful; and why some groups of immigrants to the US were quickly able to leverage themselves out of the sweatshops and farm fields, while others were not. And he devotes a whole chapter to exactly what it takes for any human being to become really, really good at any one skill, whether it be programming, hockey or music performance.

He also looks at failures, especially when they are endemic and spectacular. One chapter takes apart the cultural anthropology of airline crashes (or is it sociology? I never can keep those two straight!) and how the way specific cultures require social superiors and inferiors to talk to each other can lead to catastrophe. This chapter alone is a perfect read for anyone who is creating a strongly hierarchical society, or perhaps a face-off between characters from a stratified society vs an egalitarian one.  It quotes conversation between superiors and inferiors that might take your dialog subtexts to a whole new level of crossed intentions.

Success, it turns out, is not just a matter of talent and hard work (though of course you do need those ingredients as well). It’s a complex of an enormous range of outside factors, including family and national culture, economic circumstances, luck, the tides of history, and even, sometimes, the month you were born. How those all combine to make the difference between a true Outlier and an average Joe or Jane, makes a fascinating stack of worldbuilding inspiration.

Here’s a very small piece of it. To view the rest, you’ll have to jump over to the article and click on the image (I recommend downloading the large version so you can browse at leisure).

This chart is a great place to start thinking about how magic works in your universe. The column headings (see the whole chart) pose some essential questions about magic, and the columns give answers imagined by dozens of authors.

As an exercise, you might want to write out your own answers to each question. And I’ll add one more:

“What are the magic’s inherent limits?”

This question comes from the fantasy rule that is generally considered one of the most important: magic must have some kind of limits or consequences. If it doesn’t, your characters can just magic up anything they need, and magic away any problem.  Kind of like the replicator in Star Trek.

In building your own world’s magic, what rule of magic did you think about the most, and why? And what is your favorite example of a good use of that rule?

Know what you’re talking about. You have to know enough about whatever you’re portraying, to make it feel real. The languages and cultures in The Lord of the Rings feel authentic because even the invented ones grew from Tolkien’s lifelong study of ancient European languages and cultures. You don’t have to make a career study of every aspect of your world, but you need to know enough to convince most of your readers that you’re not just pulling details out of your– ahem!

And the more important something is to your story, the more you need to know about it.  If bows are a common weapon in your world, you might only need some quick research to make sure that you know the basic capabilities of the bow. But if your main character is a professional archer, you’ll need to know a lot about bows and other archery equipment, and you might even take a few archery lessons. (Don’t worry about getting a degree in every aspect of the world you’re writing about, though, because you’ll never be able to satisfy every reader on everything. No matter what the topic, you’ll always run across the specialist who calls you out on details within his own field of expertise).

Put your back into it.  Most worldbuilders draw maps, record chronologies, even make up languages and mythologies (my favorite is the rabbit mythology of Watership Down). For her novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke went a step further: she created a centuries-long history of English practical magic, including human and fairy personalities, reference works, footnotes containing long article quotes, and a great deal more- a history so believable that I actually looked it up on Wikipedia to reassure myself that it was all her own invention. That’s the kind of worldbuilding effort that not only gives your characters a rock-solid context, but makes unforgettable worlds.

Capture our imaginations. I think this is the single most important element of authenticity. Your alien or magical system or 23rd century technology can be as realistic as an encyclopedia, but if it doesn’t move and excite your audience, it’s a failure. On the other hand, a really exciting invention or culture or character can waltz right past our suspension of disbelief and take root in our imaginations.

Lightsabers can’t work in the real world, as my college roommate, a physics major, never tired of explaining to me in the Star Wars summer of 1977. But that didn’t stop her spending hours with flashlights and plexiglas rods, to design and construct a pair of lightsabers so we could be Darth Vader and Obi Wan for Halloween.  Score 50 for Imagination over physics !

You surely have your own short list of stories in any medium, that capture your imagination because they create an authentic experience of some kind. Please, share them here!

Chris Pine and Denzel Washington as ordinary railroad workers at the start of a far from ordinary day. Image: 20th Century Fox

Unstoppable’s trailers and reviews led me to expect a fast-paced thriller with lots of exaggerated action, trains blowing up, and characters carrying out really preposterous stunts that would never work in the real world. In other words, entertaining popcorn.

What I got was a day in the life of a small group of railroad workers – a day in which something has gone seriously wrong. The writers of Unstoppable did something that’s relatively rare in the action movie genre: they took the trouble to research the world they were writing about and tried to portray it faithfully. The script doesn’t have the characters puke exposition to explain this or that technical detail of railroad operations. It just lets us watch and listen as railroad men and women work and talk to each other about their work, and assumes that we’re smart enough to figure out what we need to know to follow the story. As we watch people move trains around, we begin to understand (if we didn’t already) just how much care must be taken every minute of working with these steel and diesel monsters, to prevent exactly the kind of incident that drives the plot.

Unstoppable builds its authenticity by keeping its feet pretty firmly on the ground as far as the action. No one gets gratuitously run over by trains, no one leaps heroically and preposterously around on a moving train. On the contrary, Denzel Washington’s character is actually thwarted in his plan for stopping the train one car at a time, when he comes to a gap between two cars that is too wide for an ordinary man to jump. An action movie hero would jump anyway and dramatically just make it and drag himself to safety.  Washington, playing a 50-something railroad veteran on the brink of retirement, hesitates at the distance, then stays put and looks around for another solution.

Unstoppable was based on a real runaway train incident in 2001, and though, naturally enough, the script heightens the stakes somewhat, many of the details are the same, including the cause of the runaway, the personnel, and the way that the train was finally stopped.  I’m sure that railroaders can nitpick the details, but the world of the movie feels authentic, because of the rich layering of technical detail about train operations, and because the characters stay within those technicalities and limitations in making their choices. There’s also a layer of emotional authenticity in the tensions between rookie and experienced railroaders, and between labor, management and corporate.

And there’s one more emotional layer that I didn’t expect in an action movie. My cousin Yvonne has been a railroad worker for over 2 decades. She told me once that everyone who works the railroad knows that someday, they will likely kill someone, and it won’t be their fault, but they will still have to live with it. And she capped that statement with this story:

A veteran engineer whom she knew well was driving a large freight train when he looked ahead and saw a schoolbus stalled on a grade crossing. He immediately applied all the braking power at his command, knowing that no matter what he did, he could not stop the train before it hit the bus.  Then, with seconds to spare, the bus driver got the bus started and pulled clear of the track. And as the bus moved away, a little girl in the back window waved happily at the engineer.  She had no idea how close to death she had been. But the engineer knew, and it was the end of his career. He quit soon after.

There’s an emotional beat in Unstoppable that is exactly like my cousin’s story- just a look on the face of an engineer watching the unthinkable coming at him and knowing that he can’t stop it. That’s authenticity.

We’re looking for male-female romance featuring at least one paranormal character, length between 6500 and 8000 words. These are firm limits, so please don’t email and ask if we’ll take 4000 or 10,000. (never do that anyway, to any editor. We don’t make up guidelines just to amuse ourselves, you know. ) You can find full guidelines and submission information on our Submissions page.

If you’ve read the guidelines and are still not sure what we’re looking for, take a look at Paramourtal (available in several ebook formats, for instant access) or if you’re short on time, at least check out some of the reviews for it to get a summary of some of the stories.

And a personal plea from this editor: don’t send us a vampire romance unless you’re absolutely certain we’ve never seen anything like your approach to the vampire romance. Because if you read this blog, you already know I was sick of vampire stories a decade ago!

That is apparently what’s happened to the author of the fantasy novel I’m reading. I know women exist in this typically “European medieval” fantasy world,  because they’re mentioned once or twice as village wives and as travelers. But only mentioned. I’ve now reached page 53 of this otherwise well-written first novel, and the author has not yet singled out an individual female for even one sentence of description, let alone giving a woman a name or a line of  dialog.

This book, the first of a series, has received much praise, collected some impressive cover blurbs and a few awards, and already has a fan wiki and other fan sites devoted to it, just a few years after publication. So I wish someone could explain to me how a successful and talented 21st-century fantasy author could be oblivious to the possibility that, in a realistic world, some of the characters would be female? And how could all of his first readers, not to mention his editors, fail to point this out to him?  Even Tolkien, who is often criticized for scarcity of female characters, gives us Bilbo’s remarkable mother in the first pages of The Hobbit and the obnoxious Lobelia in Chapter One of The Lord of the Rings. And he was writing for our grandparents.

I can think of plenty of scenarios that might have only men, or only women- a convent, a submarine, a colony of clones, a battlefield- and I’d have no problem reading a well-written story in any of those settings. But this isn’t one of them. The writer has mentioned that women do live in this traditional rural community. He just hasn’t noticed that they might be people, not merely scenery.

For me, this is a dealbreaker. Not because, as a woman, I’m offended that women seem to be invisible to him (well, yeah, that too, a bit). But because the omission demonstrates such a colossal blind spot in his imagination.  I’d feel the same if an author took for granted that people from different kingdoms all dress the same or speak the same language.   If you as an author and worldbuilder can just forget to think about half the people in your society, how can I possibly trust you to imagine a rich, deep, complex and realistic world?

The list can be found here on NPR’s web site.  Well worth a look, if only to see what the current generation thinks is worthwhile, and perhaps most important, to discover what goodies you might have overlooked.

Reading the list, you’ll run through the same emotions as did many of the hundreds of readers who posted comments. “Oh, good, my favorite!” “What! I can’t believe that made it onto the list!” “Why did this get left out?” “Why did so-and-so get five books, and my favorite only got one or none?” “Why did they pick that book by this author, instead of the other one?” “Too many new books” “Too many old books” “Where’s Harry Potter/A Wrinkle in Time/Narnia? [for the record, this list specifically excluded books published for children, regardless of how many adults love them!]“

I was pleased but not even a little bit surprised by the title at the very top of the list, nor should anyone be surprised who has been paying attention to lists of this kind for the past decade or so.  As I read on, somewhere in the first 25 or 30 titles I began feeling that I was reading an assigned summer reading list, and suspected that people were voting for these more because they were “important” classics, rather than actual favorites of the voters (does anyone still read Orwell’s Animal Farm? Even in High School English?).  And like many, I wondered why some authors’ book series were listed and voted on individually (books from Discworld and Pern) while others got entire series treated as one book (The Wheel of Time, The Dark Tower and a couple more).

But overall, I found it to be an excellent mix of Golden Age classics and established new writers, a good thumbnail portrait of speculative fiction for the last hundred years.

When you’re done gloating and arguing over this list–and, I hope, marking down a few more good reads you’ve missed so far–take a look at the other list: the first one, the one that I and over 60,000 others voted on. It’s a much longer list, and has a lot of goodies on it that will give you many, many more reading choices. NPR has kindly left it up on their site, you can find it and print it out, here.

Now try to choose just TEN from that original voting list. That’s what we all had to do in order to vote. Just ten out of hundreds!

For the record, my picks, as well as I can remember several weeks after voting. (The last 4 were also contending in my mind with favorites by Bujold, Gaiman and Willis, but I think I ended up picking these in the end, with much anguish over having to leave off the others!)

1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Acts Of Caine Series, by Matthew Woodring Stover
3. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
4. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
5. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
6. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
7. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
8. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
9. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
10. The City And The City, by China Mieville

Our first cover

Cliffhanger Books is looking for new, previously unpublished short stories (approx. 6500-8000 words) for Paramourtal 2, the second volume of our award-nominated paranormal romance series. We are eager to read truly original fiction with unique (i.e. think beyond vampires and werewolves, though they are welcome as well), well-defined, emotionally complex characters. 

Give us an innovative take on an established character type. Approach your love story from a fresh angle or motivation. Hook us in with an imaginative and perplexing plot that will keep readers engaged until the very end.

Submissions are open to all U.S and international writers age 18 and over. Stories must be submitted in English. While paranormal romance authors are generally female, we want story submissions from talented male writers as well.

Interested writers are invited to review our submission guidelines at Cliffhanger Books.

Deadline for submissions is midnight, October 31, 2011 (Halloween).

Good luck!

A spaceship crashed in the street of an Old West cow town: the essence of Cowboys & Aliens. Image copyright Dreamworks/Universal Studios

So far this summer I’ve seen half a dozen blockbuster genre/action movies. Cowboys & Aliens is the only one to live up to my hopes. And that’s saying a lot, considering I’ve been eagerly awaiting this movie for a couple of years.

Picture a showdown building between a ruthless local cattle baron (Harrison Ford) and a tough-as-granite outlaw (Daniel Craig) who doesn’t like bullies;  with townsfolk like the sheriff (Keith Carradine), the saloon owner (Sam Rockwell) and others caught in the middle. Just when the gunplay seems ready to erupt, strange lights appear in the night sky, swooping toward the town…

The graphic novel from Platinum Studios. Go read it and its sequel!

Cowboys & Aliens is loosely based on a very entertaining graphic novel of the same name, but it also takes much of its creative juice from classic Western film tropes, and especially from the Clint Eastwood Westerns of the 60′s. In a video interview, C&A director Jon Favreau says there was a creative decision to  “keep the action in the Western language… and not completely jump off into a different genre.” And Cowboys & Aliens works because it stays firmly in the realm of the Western story. Instead of turning into an alien-invasion SF movie, it asks what would happen if the usual cast of feuding Western characters had their age-old conflicts interrupted by something — alien.  Old Westerns sometimes used attacking Indians to force the warring partners to work together. This time, even the Indians are driven to join the alliance against the plundering “demons.”

Daniel Craig tries out a new kind of fast draw. Image: Dreamworks/Universal Studios

The movie breaks down a little into Hollywood cliches during the climactic battle sequences (minor and nameless characters die, major characters end their feuds by  saving each other’s lives, the timid guy becomes a hero, etc, etc). But up to that point and on through it, the story unfolds with excellent pace and intelligence, eye-filling cinematography, and some neat and surprising plot twists. And the cast, first rate from top to bottom, turns the stock Western players into real human beings. Best of all is Daniel Craig, who can steal a scene even from Harrison Ford, just by being still. And he’s absolutely spellbinding all the way through.

By the way, I’ve noticed that reviews of this movie seem to be split into 2 extremes: people either love it or hate it. Hmm. In my experience, a movie gets that kind of review split because it somehow breaks out of the box, and a lot of people don’t know what to make of it. Maybe it’s a good idea to go into this one without too many expectations.

Next, I’m going to talk more about the challenges of mixing the Western with other genres, a process I’ve suddenly come to appreciate, thanks to Gods of Justice.

Update, August 6: Alana Joli Abbot, one of the writers of the C&A 2 graphic novel, has now posted a very thoughtful review on her LiveJournal page. Good reading for anyone interested in either genre or in the challenges of adaptations. I especially like her analysis of the Ella character’s role.  Be warned, though, spoilers a-plenty, so you might want to read it after you’ve seen the movie.

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