Something that REALLY ANNOYS ME in SF writing and TV.

I did a previous post on Machiavellianism in SF, and how frequently it appears in various character tropes. I also mentioned how infrequently romantic love appears in SF as a major trope as well. However, there is one recurring flaw in both tropes that I see come up over and over again, and that is, typically, romantic characters and Machiavellian characters do not mix, but I still see authors constantly trying to pair a handsome, young, Machiavellian genius with some pretty, dopey blonde or brunette that just doesn't get it. The statement that opposites do not always attract is usually evident when the two characters are having a sexual relationship or engaging in sexuality in some other way, if I had a dollar for every SF show that involved a serious relationship I saw that had the serious, stoic young man come home to find his annoying, dopey girlfriend in some state of undress, promptly jump on top of him and attempt to seduce him against his wishes...calculator overload. One, the relationship is usually not even real, the Machiavellian character is usually keeping the dope around only so that he/she can use said dope for his/her grand plan; it's a good technique that really exemplifies the Machiavellian character's cunning, but if you throw sex in the mix, let's just say the Machiavellian character isn't exactly jumping at the fact of being taken to Pound Town on the Fuck Truck by his overly-attached girlfriend. More often than not, it just serves to make the Machiavellian character look like an emotionless robot and, to the eyes of the idiotic 13-year olds on the Internet, flamingly gay. So, the solution? Make the woman smart and not dumb! Give her some more dimension than a simplistic dope. Also, have the Machiavellian character incorporate his Machiavellian ways into the sex scene. This is the most obvious way to avoid this gaping hole in character development, to not develop one character any more than the other if the characters are in any sort of relationship. So, there's my rant for the weekend. Now, I must get back to work. Carry on, Internet.

Questions for Test?

  1. Why have SF writers focused more on romanticism than actual romantic love, even though there is plenty of room to make romantic plots in SF?


  2. Why are characters in H.G. Wells' "Time Machine" never named? What is the literary significance of that?


  3. Exactly how does religion factor into Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End?" What stance does he take on that subject, based on the text?


  4. How does extrapolation play into Clarke's writing as well?

Units list for Alternate History scenario: (Incomplete, will be posting more in the coming weeks)

ALTERNATE REALITY: AXIS POWERS WIN WWII (Hitler never betrayed Stalin scenario)

Circa 1984

-NAZI GERMAN EMPIRE (Germania)

Covers all of Europe and British Isles (with the exception of Italy and parts of the Balkans)

GROUND FORCES (Whermacht)

MBTs-

-Panzer Mk 7 “King Panther” (biggest mass-produced tank ever built, 76 tons)

-Panzer Mk 5 “Tiger II” (heavy tank destroyer)

-Panzer Mk 4 “Landsknecht” (medium tank)

-Panzer Mk 6 “Leopard” (heavy tank)

APCs/IFVs/AAA

Blohm and Voss B-80 “Bobcat” (APC)

Volkswagen V-14 “Jaguar” (IFV)

Saab S-12 “Locust” (AA vehicle)

Volvo M890 “Squid” (amphibious tank)

ARTILLERY-

Volvo SPHA-77 “Panzerwerfer” (self propelled artillery)

INFANTRY-

Usually outfitted with MP-68 assault rifles and MP-50 SMGs, but there are many different soldier classes, snipers, antitank duties…

AIR FORCE (Luftwaffe)

Transport aircraft-

-Blohm and Voss BV-900 (heavy transport cargo jet, carries tanks and other large vehicles)

Henkel He-500 (medium transport aircraft, carries paratroopers (Fallschirmjaeger)

Helicopters-

Henkel-He-22 (attack helicopter)

Henkel-He 40 (infantry transport helicopter)

Henkel-He 70 (heavy-lift helicopter)

Bombers-

XX-7 (stealth bomber, carries nuclear weapons)

Arado-A-1500 (ultra heavy bomber)

Henkel He-121 (medium bomber)

Fighters-

Messerschmitt Me-202 (interceptor)

Messerschmitt Me-400 (fighter-bomber)

Messerschmitt Me-376 (stealth fighter)

Messerschmitt Me-97 (air superiority fighter, carrier-based role)

Messerschmitt Me-110 (antitank platform)

NAVY (Kriegsmarine) - 607 ships, examples:

Carriers- Furher class supercarriers

KMS Erwin Rommel- 1100-foot long, nuclear powered supercarrier

KMS Adolph Hitler

KMS Hermann Ghoring

KMS Scharnhorst

KMS Kaiser

KMS Bismarck

KMS Mengele

KMS Tirpitz

KMS Prinz

KMS Frundsberg

Technology vs. Magic: One and the Same?

A great technologist and SF writer once said, "Supreme technology is synonymous with magic." Though technology is rooted in science, and magic in fantasy and superstition, both entities have a similar effect on people who witness them. Take for example, the laptop I am writing on right now. If I were to time-travel back to the Middle Ages, and show a knight and his lady this computer, he'd probably kill me on sight for being a "sorcerer," because he wouldn't know what to make of "The Internet," "IPhones" and "tablets." People tend to apply what they know or what they are familiar with to things that are unknown to them, even if the conclusions they make are wrong. People don't like it when things don't make sense, and they will always find ways to explain seemingly senseless but somehow orderly things, just the ways people do it now are different in nature than the way they explained things in the Middle Ages, for citizens of medieval Europe would have explained a computer as either witchcraft or a sign from God, we explain a computer today as a sign of a technologically advanced society. Even more exemplary of this point is my Samsung GalaxyTab, a tablet computer with an AI voice that will actually speak with you. It won't just speak with you, it will give you attitude depending on your tone of voice with it, engage in dialogue and even have conversations, it will answer questions and display answers as Web pages from Google and Yahoo, using the fastest search engine available at the time to bring me the exact information I require at any given moment, and it has a snotty, girly voice that reminds me of a Japanese anime girl, gets kind of funny too every now and then, because Samsung is a Korean company. Literally arguing with a machine that can, in part, think like a person is something that would have terrified a medieval peasant, or even a 19th-century aristocrat from Europe. It is just too "future shock." Still, AI and robotics are the next step in machine development, and the GalaxyTab is one of the most advanced of the new computers. Though, my friends and I like to joke that it's some young woman trapped in the tablet by an evil wizard...

Happy Friday!! Machiavellianism in Science Fiction (WARNING: SPOILERS IN THIS ANALYSIS)

It's Friday, and I'm here for another post, my fourth one this week. Wow, I've produced a lot. So, this post represents a polar opposite from the last one, in terms of frequency in SF. If romantic love is rarer than hen's teeth in science fiction, than Machiavellianism is a dime a dozen, still, it is so common because it makes for a such a good character base in SF. Science fiction is full of "evil Emperors," "CEO tyrants," "Rogue Vigilantes" and other villains and anti-heroes that all have traits of Niccolo Machiavelli's principles in Il Principe, his landmark political treatise in the 16th century. Though the expression of Machiavellian traits varies from character to character, story to story, and series to series, it is safe to say that almost every SF series and story that I have seen has some kind of Machiavellian character in it. Be it Duke Lito and Lady Jessica in Frank Herbert's Dune, the Sith Order in Star Wars, the Umbrella Corporation and the Templar Knights in Resident Evil and Assassin's Creed, respectively, Teru Mikami and Light Yagami from Death Note, and Kaan from Star Trek, and many, many others that I am aware of but will not list for the sake of brevity, all have the same characteristics. They lust power, and they will instill the fear of God in the people they seek to manipulate to achieve that end. They all show no empathy at all when it comes to achieving their own ends, and will unhesitantly and in some cases gleefully kill their enemies in the most sociopathic way possible. Not to mention, it is a cliché amongst SF writers to give their "villians" the same demented, cackling laughter, but it just works. That cackle that Emperor Palpatine has when frying Yoda with Sith lightning at the end of Episode III, or the sick, mad laughter that Light Yagami engages in during Death Note's final sequence before giving a speech that would give Adolf Hitler a run for his money, and then getting shot 7 times by the one man he trusted, in both the Japanese and English versions, these two scenes have become something of pulp classics among SF and SF-anime fans. The point of this is, that Machiavellian behavior also has a literary benefit, as the fatal flaw in Machiavellianism always dooms the Machiavellian character: They place their trust in the wrong person.

Romantics in science fiction, revisited

A while back, I did a post about romance in science fiction, but I'm revisiting this topic because of two reasons. One, because the topic of a romantic science fiction universe and romanticized universes and plot lines in general are deeply fascinating for me, after watching such universes as "Dune" from Frank Herbert and "Star Wars" by George Lucas, I just love watching world-building exercises, like these two series do a masterful job of, and more recently, "Halo" and "Mass Effect," are both romanticized views of the future, but, romanticism, as seen in Halo and Mass Effect, doesn't have to always be positive. Romantics in this type of science fiction are usually negative, such as the Covenant, a massive alien religious society that starts a 25-year war with humanity in Halo, somewhat reminiscent of the Ottoman Turks' genocide against the Balkan Christians  during the Renaissance, or the Swedes' Protestant genocide against Bavarian Catholic women during the Thirty-Years' War in the 17th century. The extrapolation of history onto the fictional Halo universe, set in the year 2552 A.D., is obvious to someone who understands the thinking behind the historical romanticism. "Mass Effect" depicts humanity in the same type of scenario as it was after Columbus discovered the New World, colonizing new planets and meeting new races after discovering light-speed travel. Mass Effect is more of a classic romanticism, with a rosy view of humans challenging the unknown and emerging victorious over Nature. This, however, ends very quickly and turns extremely negative with the discovery of the 'Reapers,' an armada of aliens that emerges to consume everything in the galaxy, and then recycles the energy, as per the First Law of Thermodynamics, leaving the hero character, Commander Shepherd, to try and stop the Reapers' advance. In this way, romantics are actually quite common in science fiction, but they usually aren't seen as such because the way things are romanticized is often very negatively. The second reason that I'm revisiting this topic is just how few academic journals talk about romance in science fiction, if you enter "Romance in Science Fiction" into JSTOR, Gale Group, or EbscoHost, you will only find 2 scholarly documents of any credibility, no more, no less, trust me, I looked. Those documents only contain 3 pages of information, and one document even went so far as to say "Romance, in SF, does not exist." Why is it that science fiction writers and journalists alike are so afraid of using the word "romance" when describing a science-fiction story, when there is so much romanticism being thrown around? How could scholarly journals in the world's databases blatantly ignore and deny the existence of something I see everywhere? Are these people, professors and scholars blind?! What is clear is that romanticism is very common, but actual romantics, as in, characters in love, is very, very seldom seen as a major plot device in SF. If it's present, it's usually just a subplot, like in Mass Effect, with Shepherd's romance with several characters in the video game series, the romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala in Star Wars, or the decidedly Machiavellian pseudo-romance between the two star-crossed dystopian architects Misa Amane and Light Yagami in Death Note. Perhaps authors are afraid that if they make romance the main plot in an SF novel, it become more of a genre-identity crisis, do you classify the work as a true SF novel, or a romantic one? Furthermore, how do you make a "sci-fi romance," if such a thing exists, and make it good, as in, not sound too pedantic, cliché and like something out of the realm of bad fan-fiction? Few authors actually venture to experiment with that, for fear of critical disapproval, and I think that's a shame. There is so much that could be done by blending SF and Romance genres, its just that no one has bothered to try writing something like this. Just look at horror and romance, and all the shows like Vampire Diaries, True Blood, and other "Paranormal Romance" novels that have popped up after the first book to attempt that, Twilight. Even though that book was as cliché and corny as it got, it was important because it blended two genres that few people though it was possible to blend, and successfully enough to launch an entirely new genre. I have actually written what I would consider to be a "sci-fi romance," and I took great care to keep it within the gray area, not too sci-fi, not too romantic. I plan on publishing this eventually, and I hope that it isn't ignored, because of the potential that it has. Just something to think about.

Alt Histories, continued: What if the Anglo-Saxons won in 1066?

My previous post discussed what a surviving Roman Empire would have done for the world, this next post examines another critical juncture in European history that would have had profound implications for modern life if it had gone the other way. For this scenario, let's assume the actual timeline of Rome stands, and Rome falls in 476 A.D, and the "barbarian" Germanic and Scandinavian tribes take over the formerly Roman lands. However, the Alt-History occurs in 1066, with Harold of the Anglo-Saxons defeating William I of Normandy. What would be the implications of a Saxon-held England after 1066? The short answer would be...Tremendous. What many people don't realize is that the Norman conquest of England, had it not happened, would have completely altered the modern world. Like my previous alt-hist post described, the modern language would be very different, with English being a derivative of Old English and Germanic languages, anyone speaking "English" would really be speaking mostly Germanic, Latin or Nordic dialects, with some Viking or possibly French mixed in, but no French to the extent of actual, modern English. Politically, the situation would be even more astounding. The political situation in Northern Europe during the eleventh century was one dominated by Nordic peoples, the Vikings, the Anglo-Saxons, the Picts, the Celts, the Jutes, and the Varangian Rus'. Prior to around 1000 A.D., these people had been largely autonomous, but after Kings Cnut and Alfred of Wessex brought the Nordic peoples together in England, Denmark, Norway, and most of the North Sea and Baltic Territories, the "Nordmen" began to trade in earnest, form unions, and became quite wealthy. English, Danish and Nordic goods were shipped into the lands of the Kievan Rus' and Novgorod, in what we now think of as Ukraine and Russia, respectively, and Russian grain and crops were shipped to Constantinople in the South, and back to England and the Northern Lands in the North. Roman goods from Constantinople and Rome itself would enter the triangle of trade at their respective origin points. By the end of Cnut's reign, this "Northern Empire" with strong ties to Rome and Constantinople was well established, with King Harold of England as the main political figurehead of this Empire. William I, of course, destroyed this fledgling society in 1066 with the Norman conquest. But, what would have happened had the English managed to repel the Norman French? What would the result be? The answer, besides an English language largely free from French, would be a political situation in Europe where all the wealth in the known world would start to flow in a triangular trade route from Constantinople to the Northern Empire to England and back again, with trade and income coming in from Asia as well. Eventually, the Northern Empire, under the Anglo-Saxon control, with the backing of the Varangian Russians, the Kievan Rus', Constantinople and Rome, would have colonized America, sometime around 1100 A.D. Vikings had already been there in about 1000 A.D., and permanent settlements would have appeared by 1100. The rest of Europe, in awe of the Northern Empire, would start to gravitate towards the North, away from Rome; even Rome and Constantinople would be revived by the amount of natural wealth coming from the New World and the Anglo-Saxon trade with the Native Americans, and the Dark Ages would have been made lighter, with a Renaissance happening much sooner than it actually did. By 1300, we could have expected the Northern Empire to control most of Europe and the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to what is now Miami Beach, Florida, and by 1500, another Roman Empire, this one under the control of London, Oslo, Moscow, Constantinople and Rome itself, only even larger, would likely have appeared. The Eastern Seaboard of North America would be almost completely English, Germanic, Viking or Russian, and a colony of the Nordic Empire in Europe. All of this could have happened, had that afternoon in 1066 just turned out a bit differently.

HUMP DAYYYYY!!! about Ecology from Science Fiction

Ecology, or the study of organisms and their environment, goes far beyond simple interaction between organisms and the environment. In “Seed Stock” and “Balanced Ecology,” Herbert and Schmitz see ecology from a much broader perspective of evolution. In any given niche, an organism doesn't just exist, it has an ecological purpose, a job to do in its environment; there is always a purpose that an organism serves, nothing simply exists for the sake of existing, every organism has a role to play in the biosphere, the collection of all ecosystems and biomes everywhere on Earth. In science fiction, however, this basic principle of ecology is often extrapolated onto other planets, such as in “Seed Stock,” where an entire planet is being terraformed into an Earth-like planet from a less-than-habitable state. “Seed Stock” and “Balanced Ecology” both discuss human interaction with the environment, but “Seed Stock” takes a different perspective than “Balanced Ecology” does. “Seed Stock” is focused more on the human power in the environment, that people are indeed powerful enough to change nature, but also discusses that nature can quite often change people, through the short-term process of technological innovation to keep up with environmental change, i.e., solar panels to limit global warming, and the longer term process of evolution. By terraforming the planet into an Earth-like state, the characters in “Seed Stock” demonstrate the ultimate in human environmental modification: building a habitable planet from an uninhabitable one, taking Columbus', the Vikings', and the Native Americans' discovery of the New World in 1492 C.E., 1000 C.E. and 13,000 B.C.E., respectively, a step further and actually building a habitat, rather than just using the one already there. In reality, this is possible, it would merely take about 800 years of constant CO2 emissions at the level of Earth's global warming on Mars to create a climate and atmosphere identical to Earth's, according the the issue of Popular Science in May of 2012, but, as one scientist in that article stated, it is much easier to use the current environment on a planet than to make one, exemplified by his statement: “Columbus traveled to North America in a boat. Imagine if he had to build the continent when he got there.” We're talking about building a planet, something that is not yet currently thought of as technologically and economically feasible, although it is possible and the technology does exist as of now. “Seed Stock” is promoting the idea that humans not only CAN do this to a planet, but they SHOULD, however, we must be aware of the consequences of any environmental modifications. This type of theme is very common in science fiction, “experiments gone wrong” are seen in the first-ever true science-fiction novel, the 1816 classic Frankenstein, and more recently in the two Japanese animation cartoons, “Elfen Lied” and “Pokemon,” where the deranged experimental monsters “Lucy” and “Mewtwo” go berserk and cause all manner of bloody, brutal, mind-numbing chaos until the main characters can calm the monsters. The issues raised in Elfen Lied, Pokemon: The Movie, and Frankenstein, as well as “Seed Stock” deal with the interactions between Man and Nature. “Nature” with a capital “n” is different than “nature” with a small “n;” “Nature” assumes that there are elements of the natural world that mankind is not meant to control, essentially, something that is considered sublime or subliminal, beyond human understanding. “Nature” with a lower-case “n” is just as ambiguous, but it generally refers to anything that is not touched by the taint of Mankind, at least in Voltaire's definition. The caution that humans should take when tampering with “Nature” is the topic of “Balanced Ecology.” It states that even during the Age of Industry, where humans can alter a planet or even manipulate their own evolution, human beings should not try to control “nature” in any form, but rather live alongside it, as the argument in the book states that humans, no matter how intelligent they are, are just another large mammal living on Earth.