There’s a wonderful LinkedIn group called Science Fiction Readers, Writers and Collectors, whose members regularly fire off fabulous discussion topics then carry on smart, engaging and entertaining debates about all things science fiction and fantasy. Not long ago, I asked this group what they thought of Stargate Universe. The responses were black and white; fans either loved it or they hated it, for dozens of fiercely argued posts.

SG-1's O'Neill checks out a stargate. Image: MGM

The debate crystallized my understanding of the fundamental difference between Universe and the 2 previous Stargate shows: they represent opposite approaches to telling a story.

To illustrate these 2 approaches, I use the metaphor of visiting a museum.  You can take a guided tour, or you can ramble through on your own.

Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis used the guided tour approach. The showrunners took their audience through the “museum” step by step, pointing out the major exhibits and explaining their importance: “These are the good guys, these are the bad guys, this is the conflict, these are the choices the heroes have, this is what you can look for in the next scene.”  Suspense in this kind of story comes from wondering how the heroes will deal with the stuff in the “next room;” while emotional engagement comes mostly from liking the characters enough to want to spend time with them and watch their relationships grow.

Stargate Universe, in contrast, is a free ramble, and that’s what has shaken up the fan base. The showrunners set up their “exhibits” and sent us in on our own, to walk from room to room and make of it what we will.  No one is telling us which events matter most, how the characters fit in, or even which ones we’re supposed to like; we have to decide that for ourselves. And most of the time we can’t even begin to guess what will be in the next room, let alone what we’ll find 2 or 3 rooms ahead.

There’s a lot to be said for a guided tour approach. The author has more control over the audience reactions because he’s directing and shaping them most of the time. And it’s a lot easier for the audience to enjoy a guided tour, because we don’t have to think hard or pay really close attention. I love this kind of story for relaxing on the beach, unwinding at the end of a workday, or entertaining me in the kitchen.

The biggest risk of a guided tour story is that it may be too safe and easy. You may bore your audience by failing to surprise and challenge them enough.

The SGU team finds a kino that is really going to mess with our heads. Image: MGM

The free ramble is a much riskier approach, because it’s a lot harder to pull off. You have to give just enough information to keep the audience current, but not so much that they can see what’s coming. More important, you have to provide story questions that are compelling enough to keep the audience with you even when they don’t have a lot of information. And even then, not everyone will stick around. People don’t always want to have to put the story pieces together on their own, and they often don’t like main characters who aren’t definitively good guys or bad guys.

So what makes a free ramble story worth attempting? The audience has to live it. We’re not standing back with the guide and watching the big picture from a safe distance. We’re in the crisis with the characters, moment by moment. We’re challenged, unsure about what’s happening, who they should trust and what’s going to hit them next; and even more unsure about what they will do or should do about any of it.  More than any other storytelling approach, the unguided ramble recreates the surprise, intensity and uncertainty of real life. And that is the source of the emotional engagement that’s the ultimate payoff of any good story.

Either approach works, and I like both kinds of story. But for a real mental challenge and the best emotional sleighride, give me the free ramble every time.

Which approach do you like best and why?

Cartoonist K Beaton, creator/owner of Hark! A Vagrant, just posted this perfect illustration (double meaning intended) of two opposing approaches to worldbuilding:

If you have trouble reading the words in this image, you can read the full-size original here, among a wide spectrum of cartoon reflections and speculations about life, the universe and everything. And history. Lots of history. Just my cup of ink!

My friend Carol, a hula instructor with extensive knowledge of Hawaiian culture, recently sent this email to a group of friends planning to visit Salem, MA:

Kuka'ilimoku, Hawaiian war god. 19th century temple statue in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum

“When you go to Peabody Essex Museum please don’t forget to pay your respects to Kuka`ilimoku, King Kamehameha I’s war god, who lives there.  (Ku the Island Seizer)

“He is one of a very few ki`i (tikis) that escaped the destruction of the gods’ images perpetrated by the Hawaiians themselves after contact w/ the British (but years before the Christian missionaries got there: It was a political, secularist, and feminist move led by one of Kamehameha’s widows.)

“He is “asleep,” a state the museum had a kahuna put him in to prevent him from being too powerful without the required constant attention of a caregiver.  But I think you will still feel his mana (energy) if you visit him..“

This made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, at the idea of a statue being so awake, so powerful, it has to be put to sleep. And notice that Carol says that Ku lives at the museum, not that he is “exhibited” there. When I asked her about it, she added this:

“Hawaiians don’t believe that a piece of carved wood has power per se; it’s more that the god with his power inhabits the physical statue.  I’ve had this explained to me in a way that sounded pretty much like how the nuns explained Catholic religious images to me; that surprised me, because the same nuns would have had me believe that “pagans” thought chunks of wood had power.

“The same word, ki`i, which is Hawaiian for tiki, can also mean a photograph or picture, so Hawaiians know the difference between a representation of a god and the god himself. This isn’t to say that they don’t believe the image has power by virtue of its likeness. Post “Enlightenment,” our own culture seems to have developed a very diminished idea of what “likeness” entails.”

I consulted another friend who has had some encounters with Maori beliefs in New Zealand (the Maoris are some sort of ethnic cousins to the Hawaiians) and she told me of an exhibit in New Zealand where bowls of water were dotted around for visitors to ritually wash themselves, so that they wouldn’t accidentally take any mana away with them.

If you’re Polynesian or come from some other culture that holds these kinds of beliefs, you may be saying, “So what?”  But for most Westerners, the idea of “inanimate” objects having any sort of power, consciousness or metaphysical energy is completely alien, and almost incomprehensible.

Yet Westerners also walked this close to the natural world, long ago, and we still hold onto some of those beliefs. I’m sure you know at least one person who talks to their plants or to their car; and many people confronted by a computer or some other complex machine that isn’t doing what we want, act as if the machine were deliberately thwarting us.

Then we have all our religious, patriotic and family symbols. The more we value one of these symbols, the more likely we are to act as if it had some level of awareness. How do you feel about seeing someone damage a picture of someone you love, or a saint’s image, or your national symbol? If you have strong feelings about such things, you may act as if God or your saint or your flag has actually suffered or been insulted. Does a picture or a piece of cloth feel pain or outrage? If you drop a communion wafer on the ground, have you hurt Jesus?

So what do people think about material objects in the world you’re building? I admit, this is a much bigger question for fantasy worldbuilders, as science fiction creators are unlikely to think about possible life or energy in things, unless they’re writing about AI or atomic physics!

So where do we find animism in current fantasy? (I say “animism” with conscious imprecision, as most people misuse it, like Carol’s nuns talking about pagan images, to oversimplify the beliefs of traditional cultures).

Greg Keyes, Children of the Changeling. His first 2 novels draw much on the mythologies of northeast Asia. The world includes the divine spirits of rivers and springs, as well as a rather scary “godsword.”

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Pratchett has introduced a number of “sentient” objects into the Discworld. The most famous is definitely The Luggage. If you’re an enemy of its current owner, beware!

Tolkien’s One Ring. While most objects in Middle Earth are perfectly ordinary, the One Ring seems to have a will and purpose of its own. This was portrayed in the movies by having the Ring whisper to the characters as it tried to tempt or terrify them. Pretty effective!

I’m sure there are many, many other good fantasy examples of objects like the stature of Kuka’ilimoku. Please post a comment and suggest some!

What if the Earth had rings like Saturn’s?

A friend pointed me to this fabulous short video by Roy Prol, that shows how a ring system would look from different latitudes on Earth, and at different times of day. Very beautiful! Be sure your sound is on.

You can find this video on many sites. I found it here on Flixxy, where there’s additional information and a link to the Wikipedia article on the Roche Limit which influences how and where planetary rings form.

I wonder how a ring system would affect our current satellites and space program? Would the rings be far enough away that our satellites and spacecraft would orbit inside them? Would they have any effect on Earth’s magnetic field and on satellite communications? How much would the rings interfere with astronomical observations from Earth?

If anyone is science geek enough to have the answers to these questions, please post a comment and let us know! Meanwhile, we can all imagine living on a planet where we might take nighttime walks by  “ringlight.”

The domestication of the horse was one of the great advances of human culture. Horses gave humans extraordinary mobility and led to developments in herding, agriculture, warfare, sport, etc.  Now there’s new evidence from a dig in Kazakhstan, that horses were domesticated in Asia by 5,500 years ago, which is 1,000 years earlier than any previous evidence, and 2,000 years earlier than in Europe.

Reconstruction of the tarpan, or wild European horse, Equus ferus. Illustration by Daniel Pickering, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

The Kazakhstan site has been studied for over a decade, and some archaeologists were convinced that the high number of horse bones both as food and as sacrifices, plus tools that could be used for making harnesses, were convincing enough. Others were skeptical, partly because the bones found at the site were nearly indistinguishable from the bones of wild horses. Recently though, some subtle differences were found in the leg bones at the site, which were slightly closer to domestic horse bones than wild ones – an indication of the start of the selective breeding that has made the modern horse so different from its ancestor the tarpan (though I once had a pony that looked a bit like a tarpan, especially in winter!).

The final evidence came with new techniques to study pottery, which proved conclusively that some of the pottery vessels had held mares’ milk. Even the skeptics couldn’t imagine milking a wild mare! (The Kazakhs are still horse people like their ancestors: both articles below have a photos of a Kazakh woman milking a mare)

You can read two news articles about the discovery on LiveScience.com. The first story is here, and a recent story by one of the research team is here.

Following up on my last post, here are a few thoughts on Gordon Van Gelder’s benchmark for excellent fantasy:

“A fantasy story that reaches the level of myth.”

For me, successful fantasy always at least brushes along the borders of myth, and the best fantasy plunges right in.  What does that mean? Let me start by defining what I mean by myth.

A myth is a sacred story that has significance that is far deeper and more meaningful than its surface events and characters. Joseph Campbell once called myth the doorway through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos enter human consciousness (paraphrasing because I can’t find the exact quote; sorry!). Myth or sacred story is the way we humans try to understand the nature of the universe and the divine (God or gods or the Way or chi or whatever), as well as our own nature and our relationship to the cosmos.

While good science fiction tends to deal with matters of technology and society,  good fantasy goes right to the meaning-of-life stuff: “Who are we?” “Why are we here?” “What is God or the universe trying to do to us?” and most interesting in many fantasies: “Who are those other creatures, and what does it mean to share the world with them?”

(Bad fantasy or science fiction often just sets the characters down in a stereotypical fantasy/Sf environment – dragons! elves! space ships! ion cannons! – for some kind of adventure that’s supposed to be a big sweeping epic. Nothing wrong with this approach for popcorn entertainment as long as it’s executed with some style. However, failing to lay a solid conceptual foundation will always limit the scope of the story.)

I think achieving myth starts with reading a lot of myths and stories, and from there, being able to put mythical beings or objects into a story, or being able to invent good ones of your own. But it only starts there.

For me, the real benchmark is to capture the otherness of mythical elements: the unexpected, the unexplainable, the weird and sometimes frightening and completely beyond rationality; an otherness that you can recognize but can never completely assimilate even to the reality of the world you’re building, let alone the one we all seem to live in.

So here’s a short list of some fantasy creators that achieve myth on a regular basis:

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I’m long overdue to be writing a “Reading” post on the Discworld. No one is better than Sir Terry at combining contemporary genres (mystery, horror, satire, romance) with comedy, folklore and genuine myth. My favorite Discworld novel, Hogfather, has more layers to it than the Tooth Fairy has teeth.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion is inhabited by gods, demons and animal spirits that interact with, and sometimes possess people in ways that you’d never expect but that feel absolutely true. (I discussed these books in more depth in an early post that you can find by following my Reading tag)

Nina Kiriki Hoffman. In the short stories and novels I’ve read so far, the main character has some natural magical power; that is, the power is closely related to the natural world.  And what is more mythical than nature?

Greg Keyes. His first pair of fantasies drew on Northeast Asian mythology; his latest tetralogy, Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone is supposedly “Northern European fantasy” but you won’t find any of the familiar fantasy creatures in it. The world feels enormously old, with powers and forces sliding by in the shadows, or breaking into the light to scare you to pieces.

Charles de Lint writes urban fantasy about people whose hometowns overlap with ancient worlds: the gods and spirits of Native American myth, the fairy courts of the Celtic lands, or even stranger characters that, as far as I know, spring from his own imagination.

I’ve already posted a great deal about my favorites, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K Le Guin, and of course Tolkien. Just follow their tags to see what I’ve already said about how each of them uses myth in their writing.

I was clearing out a stack of old writing magazines when I came across a mini interview with Gordon Van Gelder, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which, if you don’t know it, is one of the oldest and most highly esteemed of the print genre magazines.  He was asked, what kind of stories was he most interested in seeing? Here’s what he was looking for in 2004 (and probably still is):

“A science fiction story that does something different with the SF elements (most of what I’m seeing lately reads like its written for a TV program).”

“A fantasy story that reaches the level of myth.”

These requirements seem to me to be as relevant for worldbuilders as they are for fiction writers, especially if you’re interested in creating an unusual world or an enduring one.

These standards probably mean something different to everyone who reads them. I’m going to talk a little here about what they mean to me, and what worlds they make me think of.

“Doing something different with the SF elements” is in a way, almost impossible to define.We don’t know what’s different until someone comes up with something new and we recognize it as such.  I haven’t been reading much SF lately, so I’ll have to give examples in terms of film and TV.

Take the alien arrival scenario. Nearly always in recent movies or TV, it’s done as hostile invaders coming to take over by military conquest (War of the Worlds, Stargate SG-1, ) or by subversion (V, Threshold). Then there’s District 9, where the humans herd the aliens into a refugee camp and keep them there for 20 years while the government experiments on them and their weapons. Now that’s a different take on the alien invasion!

A couple of other really original SF scenarios:

Lost, with its time bending stories and its secret organizations-and who’d ever think of being marooned on a tropical island as a science fiction scenario?

Children of Men, a post-pandemic story which is not about the heroic scientists finding a cure, but about an ordinary man in a world that has lost hope for the future, as he tries to protect the only pregnant woman in the world.

And one more, a short story I read in one of the online magazines (if I can find the story again, I’ll post the link here) that used advanced holographic technology, not for games or military applications, but to commemorate a suicide bombing by recreating the image and movements of every individual present just before the bomb went off.

If you have seen other remarkable story or worldbuilding uses of the usual SF material, post them here so we can all enjoy and be inspired.

In Part 2 I’ll discuss what I think it means for a fantasy story to reach the level of myth.

Update: The short story I mentioned is “Until Forgiveness Comes” by K. Tempest Bradford, published on Strange Horizons a year ago. On rereading, I find the recreation is a religious ritual, not holography as I remembered, but it doesn’t matter. It’s an extraordinary story. Go read it!

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!