Heinleining the Just in Time Research

While I was writing Impaler, I did a lot of research (no surprises here - Australian, never been to Europe, only seen snow a few times (courtesy Pennsylvania winters), and I'm writing a book set over six hundred years ago, in Eastern Europe, in winter, involving cultures I had never experienced except through reading books). The funny thing was, most of the research happened rather like modern inventory management - "just in time".

I'd been absorbing general books about the area and the time period for years, but that's not enough for the kind of specifics I was looking for. Things like "Okay, it's mid-winter. Snow - quite a lot of it for the most part - on the ground. Danube River frozen over to the extent that you can march an army across it. How far is that army going to get in a day?" (Not very, especially if they're dealing with unbroken snow). I learned a lot about logistics just dealing with that question.

Then there's the more interesting bits: Vlad is trying to get his army south without Sultan Mehmed II realizing what he's up to - preferably before Mehmed realizes the Wallachian crown has changed hands (again). He needs stealth. Moving several thousand men and horses doesn't correlate terribly well with "stealth" when you're marching them through the countryside - so Vlad comes up with the idea of taking out the enemy garrisons, and sharing the loot with the locals to buy their favor so they don't say anything.

To us, that's not a big issue - but in his time, it was unheard of. Similarly Vlad's decision to buy food rather than loot - despite the high cost (he makes the observation at one point that at this time of year food is worth more than gold) - was a total departure from the norms of the time. Knowing the norms of the time is general research, but the specifics, down to nuts and bolts sometimes, were things that typically I didn't realize I needed until I got to that part of the book.

So, just before the battle for Varna, I spent quite some time trying to find out what Varna's defenses looked like in 1477, as well as the likely impact of the 1444 battle (minimal, since the town itself wasn't directly involved), the architecture of the town, the layout of the governor's palace and where it was in relation to everything else, likely local culture, and so forth. This is not something that is readily available even to the best Google-fu. Google maps helps, interestingly enough. You get a good sense of terrain from that.

Ultimately, I ended up with guesses seeded with the very few pieces of hard data I managed to unearth - things like the old Roman baths still working and converted to Turkish-style, Roman ruins by the palace (which undoubtedly provided their own defensive layer, just by existing), and tried to give the impression of knowing a lot about the place when there was actually buggerall that I could find. Smoke and mirrors, the greatest art of the writer. Mostly I used a blend of known trends in better documented regions as close by as I could get them.

There were quite a few smaller research binges - working out what trees would be growing where, for instance, given that except in the more inaccessible parts of mountain ranges it's pretty unlikely the vegetation now is going to be much like the vegetation then. Phases of the moon in early 1477 was another critical aspect of the story - and that included the extra fun of figuring out whether the lunar calendars I was working from had made the conversion back to the Julian calendar, which was the only one being used in that region at the time (the Gregorian calendar wasn't devised until quite some time later). When various religious festivals occurred, Orthodox and Roman (at that stage, they were in synch - the combination of the Gregorian calendar and a revised method of calculating Easter shifted the Roman religious calendar relative to the Orthodox). I also needed to check and keep track of what, if any, major Jewish and Islamic festivals would be happening, and figure out the local forms of said festivals for the time frame I was working with.

It's much easier if you're writing fantasy - you can just make this stuff up. On the flip side, when you do make it up from the whole cloth, it tends not to be as richly detailed as something that's already got hundreds of years of history behind it. I suspect that's why PTerry uses Earth history and legend and twists it for the Discworld: he gets that richness without having to get all the fiddly little details right.

The big research binge - which took me a few weeks, to get everything I needed and build the right images in my head - was for Constantinople, of course. There, I was reading contemporary accounts of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 (eye openers all by themselves), whatever references I could find about repairs and new building in the nearly 25 years since the siege - including tidbits like the northern section of the walls hadn't been rebuilt, but the Golden Gate had been bricked up possibly due to a legend that stated a Christian savior would enter the city in triumph through the Golden Gate (Vlad's entrance isn't exactly "triumphal", but one suspects that little detail won't matter terribly much).

I even found not-quite-period maps, which were close enough to give me an idea of what the city looked like, detailed information about the walls (I was bringing them down, so I needed to know what that was going to take), as well as all the things a pyromaniac could do with a large supply of black powder.

The results of that deserve their own post, about medieval-style battle tactics - which I also learned way too much about. Of course, none of this (I hope) is lectured in the book. Hopefully it's all part of the background, so everything fits without being obtrusive.

Which leads of course to the question: aside from PTerry, who else does a really good job of Heinleining background information like this into their books?

Making the Foreign Familiar

One of the more interesting challenges I faced when I was writing Impaler is something that tends to happen to anyone writing historical fiction - although fantasy and science fiction suffer from it to a lesser extent. Basically, people have a tendency to assume that other times and places, real or imagined, are pretty much like they are now but with different clothes, magic, spaceships, or swords.

Heck, this is something that gets people into trouble now, with cultures as apparently similar as different regions in the USA, the USA and Australia, Canada and the USA, or New Zealand and Australia. It gets worse the more differences there are between where you're writing from (or reading from) and where/when the book is set.

Let's face it, fifteenth century Eastern Europe might as well be a different universe.

I know Sarah rants periodically about authors who'll have a servant buying baby-blue blankies in a medieval marketplace, and I really did not want to be on the receiving end of that rant. And that's really just the start.

Dave and Sarah know this, because I hammered them with all manner of weird questions early on, mostly about "stuff" - 15th century Wallachia wasn't a wealthy principality, and it had armies looting their way through the place on a pretty regular basis, so I needed to have a clear idea what kind of furniture there'd be, what the everyday plates and things would be made of compared to the best quality, what people of different ranks wore (fabrics and colors as well as styles), what would be considered the height of luxury at the time, and what kinds of food would be served at a regular meal compared to a feast. Not to mention what would be a treat for small children, and a whole host of other details.

Google got a heavy workout for a lot of this, and Dave and Sarah fielded more questions than any sane person should (thanks, by the way). There are no "Everyday life in 15th Century Wallachia" books out there, or I'd have bought them.

Mostly what I found were tidbits. Comments by bemused travelers of the period that even though Bucharest was ransacked and burned to the ground every few years the survivors rebuilt in wood (the place was in the middle of a huge forest at the time - wood was presumably the most accessible building material). The main streets 'paved' with wooden slabs where side roads were packed dirt. Somewhere else I found a mention that in winter everyone from the highest rank to the lowest wore sheepskin coats and boots for warmth. Information about what plants were native and what was introduced when. Domesticated animals (mostly sheep and pigs) and wild animals. When forks were introduced.

All the information went into a kind of mental map of what Vlad Dracula's world looked like, even though he's only in it for maybe a third of the book - and spends most of that time planning his southern campaign and carefully manipulating his boyars (the ones I mentioned in my blog spree - was it only 2 weeks ago? - as unscrupulous backstabbers with a well-known propensity for unseating princes and often murdering them as well) so that they're both afraid of finding themselves 'enjoying' the view from a stake and grateful for his generosity.

Then there's the culture. At that time, the culture was predominantly an honor-shame culture where appearances mattered. Vlad couldn't just be a fair, generous ruler - he had to show it as well. That meant calculated gestures of mercy, as well as placing himself at risk by not eliminating those he knows are traitors: instead, Vlad tries to arrange for those men to die in battle, which was considered an honorable death, and meant that he didn't need to make new enemies by executing the dead man's family as well - and gave him a chance of winning the loyalty of the dead man's heirs. Similarly, he had to show courage in battle despite the risk of getting himself killed (This doesn't seem to have been an issue: Vlad is reported to have led charges and taken the most dangerous role in more than a few of the battles he was in).

It was also a very male culture. Women fell mostly into the traditional roles - maiden, mother, whore and crone. In noble culture, women were effectively invisible: while they weren't sequestered the way they were in the Ottoman Empire, they had their part of the palace or manor where they and their servants did what was considered the female work.

To Vlad, the women's lives are an alien world - his last real encounter with female roles was when he left the nursery at the age of five and started training as a warrior and nobleman. Apart from his wife and his young sons' nurse, the women in the palace are irrelevant to him. It certainly never occurs to him to question this segregation - it's simply how things are. His decision to leave young Vlad in the nursery for longer than usual is one of his few unusual 'domestic' choices (He wants to protect his two young sons, and doesn't want to leave his sickly youngest boy with no company).

It's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that women in that time would respond as a modern woman would to that environment when for them it was how things worked. As often as not the wife was independent in her domain, as well as managing the entire estate when her husband was away at war - a situation that was far from rare. Since most noble marriages were arranged and usually political as well, love wasn't common (and it was very common for the husband to keep one or more mistresses - and to some extent it was expected that a virile man would need a mistress or two). Try portraying that sympathetically in today's world!

I hope I got a good balance with the way I portrayed Vlad in Impaler, but I guess March will be when I find out.

Research Matters

Oh, yes it does, even - or perhaps especially - if you're writing something involving worlds, pasts and futures that never actually existed. You see, Dave's post and the discussion about it afterwards is only part of the battle. If your story is set in Paris, then given a general time period, most people already have a handy-dandy little mental picture we can use to hang the story from. Granted, the little mental picture might come from a Disney cartoon, but it's enough to give the illusion of a sense of place. In the same way, American Civil War immediately brings to mind the handy-dandy mental picture of Scarlett O'Hara dresses and gentlemen fighting for honor, and oppressed slaves (hopefully not all in the Scarlett O'Hara dresses).

If you're writing SF or Fantasy, you can use key words to evoke the handy-dandy little mental picture: to most people the word "spaceship" gets a picture that probably blends the most recent Hollywood blockbuster, the flying saucer, and a few other odds and sods - unless you describe it first. "Uniform" in this context is almost certainly going to be tight-fitting, and "body armor" something like Storm Troopers, or like one of the assorted SF anime series.

On the fantasy side, "elf" is enough to bring the Lord of the Rings movies to mind. For that matter, unless you explicitly state otherwise, most people are likely to assume quasi-medieval cartoony European rural.

So where is research in all this?

Start by reading Sir PTerry. Now consider that everything in the Discworld starts somewhere in Earth's history and mythology. Yep. All of it - although I really do not want to know where the inspiration for the World's Best Dad mugs in the Exquisition's torture chambers came from. It's not just the weird and occasionally horrible trivia, either: take a stroll through pretty much anything from Wyrd Sisters on, and you'll find all sorts of world views beautifully integrated into the book.

And that, more than fact, is the gold writers need to be chasing.

I'm pretty sure that's not something anyone else is telling you. It's either some kind of mushy "all cultures are equal" - which isn't true, because they're patently not the same, and other people are very much not just like us with interesting food and costumes - or you're getting "write what you know" with the subtext that if you don't belong to the group in question you can't possibly write about it, insulting everyone with an imagination in the process... Anyway, what research can give you is the accounts of people who belong to cultures that resemble your imagined one to some extent - and which reveal the mindset and worldview of those people.

Say you're writing an Asian-themed fantasy, and you want a world that echoes Imperial China of the Han Dynasty. You go looking (Google is your friend) for translations of documents written in that era. Anything you can find is helpful, although if you can find responses to stressful events it's even better. Eyewitness accounts of this disaster or that war compared with a more or less impartial history of the same era can reveal all sorts of things - something Sir PTerry played on with his usual skill in Interesting Times, with Twoflower's incredulous reaction to ordinary people telling soldiers to (more or less) bugger off and the soldiers not retaliating. The urinating dog pictogram is a cleverly placed gag to soften the impact of the real message. I could go on forever about how well Sir PTerry does this, but instead I'm going to focus on a real example, one that's a little closer in time and space (and identities have been munged with to protect the guilty).

Someone I know is in the middle of a rather ugly falling out with her family over a whole lot of things that look petty and silly from the outside. From her side, though, there's a very different filter. As she sees things, she's being treated like a child and expected to do and be what everyone else in her family thinks she should do and be. She sees a pattern of put-downs and insults, and that she's only defending herself. A good writer should be able to tell her story and make her sympathetic to readers who would normally think her actions were petty, malicious, and immature. A good writer should be able to do this even when said writer thinks those actions are petty, malicious, and immature.

Which - of course - is where the research comes in. If you can find enough information about how people in Culture X thought and felt about Situation Y, you can put yourself inside their heads and think they way they did, at least for a little while. From such a source comes Pooh-Bah's much prized artistic verisimilitude and spares you the horror of writing what ultimately proves to be a "bald and unconvincing narrative"

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to take any document (yes, anything you can find on Google counts, and yes, it can be a news article. It just has to be a document. No video or audio, please) and try to figure out what that document reveals about the writer's world view. You don't even need to post back what you've found, although I'm sure it will be interesting if you do. Oh, and no using this as an excuse to slam someone for not agreeing with your beliefs. You're supposed to be trying to empathize here.

Progress, of a sort

Thursday through Sunday: Well, the last few days someone turned off the valve and slowed the information to a trickle. I'm not sure why - possibly it's the day job ramping up again for the next phase of the Neverending Project (I seem to get a lot of these. I think someone 'likes' me). At any rate the most I've gotten in a few days is that Milord Alvar is quite willing to hold out as long as necessary until I get his name right. And Millie finds this very amusing.

The Evil Prince has yet to show himself, although I have the weird feeling that he's there, he's just still buried somewhere in my subconscious. Based on past experience, this probably means I'll wake up one morning with him kibitzing with some of my other villains - all of whom are certifiably evil psycho bastards (so are most of my heroes - the difference is the heroes tend to fight it rather than revel in it). This does not reassure me at all - and anyone who knows what my villains are like will be cringing at the prospect.

Monday: So after days of silence, I get a major dump courtesy Subconscious Data Delivery - a service about as reliable as a two-bob watch - when I start drifting to sleep. It proceeds to haunt my dreams, and I'm still processing what emerged.

To start with "Seraph" is the royal family name - only it's actually a corruption of a much older title that related to the ship that crashed on the planet in the first place. I have no idea what that title was, but it applied to the people who had been genetically engineered to have the Engineering gift - the rapport with machinery. There's a vague sense that the gift was essential to keeping people alive initially, so those who had it became a kind of nobility during the time the accidental colony struggled to survive. It's translated to a sense that it's very wrong to have any kind of "useful" ability and not use it in the service of one's people.

His Royal Horribleness is a little clearer: physically he could be Milord Alvar's twin. They're cousins through most of the branches of the family lines back to the common ancestors, although it never got closer than second or third cousin, I think. The royal family has full time geneologists keeping track of who is where in the accepted line of inheritance. It doesn't help that they all tend to use the same given names - generally honoring particularly notable ancestors. Who, of course, are shared all over the family trees of the extended royal family. The Emperor is His Imperial Majesty Arthur James William Seraph, Twenty-Fifth of the Name, Forty-Second of the Dynasty, Lord of Eldarsund, Defender of the Holy, etc etc (the full list of titles goes on for half a page or thereabouts).

The Evil Prince is only "Royal", not "Imperial" because he's not confirmed as the heir, only presumed to be as the closest male line relative.He rejoices in a similar list of titles, most of them courtesy titles attached to being the heir presumptive. The names that matter are William James Albert Seraph. Milord Alvar shares all but one of them - his family name is William Arthur James Seraph. Without all the extraneous titles, he's generally known as Will Seraph, Lord Alvar - or just Lord Alvar. I think he's a little older than HRHorrible - no more than a year older.

HRHorrible is straight out of Evil-Bastard-Central - which seems to be where my subconscious lands no matter what I do. Even in my lighter stuff there's elements of it. Hell, Milord Alvar is just as much a product of Evil-Bastard-Central, only he chooses to control that aspect of his personality where HRHorrible doesn't.

Millie is the catalyst. She's the wild card that kicks off the whole sequence, and to some extent part of Milord Alvar's redemption. Oh, and she's the cause of the ending of book 1. She's found one of HRHorrible's 'playhouses' and - naturally - goes in there to free the women (in a permanent and lethal fashion if necessary. Yes, HRHorrible is that perverted. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that work without overdoing the ick or backing off too much from it). Milord Alvar finds out, and goes charging in to "rescue" her - not only does she not need rescuing, she ends up back-to-back with him fighting off MRMorrible's henchmen. While the whole place is sinking into lava, since the only way Millie could get the slaves out was to disable the damping systems in the complex. Several of the henchmen find out what it's like to become a carboniferous anomaly in a volcanic deposit.

Of course - as those of you who know how my mind works have probably already figured out - HRHorrible isn't the main villain. I'm not sure who is, except that it's someone who's around in a minor role in book one, apparently something of a non-entity. I'm not sure Milord Alvar and Millie know who he is by the end of book one: only that he exists.

HRHorrible... think cold, arrogant, superior, convinced the rest of the world exists to serve him. Constantly looking for something to "entertain" him - and growing more depraved and decadent with each new amusement he contrives. Nucking futz, but in that kind of cold, rational, self-interested way that's a hell of a lot more frightening than ranting and raving crazy. The only thing I'm sure about is that the Ultimate Nasty is worse. The Ultimate Nasty is convinced he's doing the things he does for the Greater Good...

Religion. This is a religious society. I'm not sure they were terribly religious when they crashed on this world, but they sure as hell are now. Something about surviving by the grace of god and the quality of one's mechanical expertise will do that. The general ethos is along the lines of God helps those who help themselves mixed with if God gave you the gift it's a sin not to use it for society. Sorta-kinda-Christian based, although not really recognizable as such any more - although the hellfire and brimstone part is very familiar, since they live with it all the time. At some point the idea that they're there to "redeem" their world crept in, so there's a lot of social value attached to "improving" the land by siphoning energy off the everpresent volcanic substrata to power all manner of mechanisms, by speeding up the process of turning lava to productive soil (which in turn leads to a voracious demand for more improvable land and an outwards expansion of the Empire), and so forth. Think the words of "Jerusalem" - "And we will build a new Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land": that's their notion of Heaven. Greenery, pleasant climate, and real night and day. Most people believe God intends them to build it themselves.

Tuesday: Now I know why HRHorrible gets involved with all of this - it's Millie. She's seen too much, but while she was still a street brat it was too much trouble to track her down and eliminate her. Besides, who would ever listen to a street brat? If the information comes via Milord Alvar, it's much more credible. Also, Alvar has the resources to dig up evidence that can't be covered up: the pair of them are a risk to HRHorrible's existence.

Ah. Yes, the little lightbulbs go on while I'm writing this. The ultimate Big Bad is someone in the Academy. He recognizes the threat Millie poses to HRHorrible and passes on the warning. I'm still not entirely sure what he recognizes, since to him one street brat is much the same as any other, but whatever it is Millie has no idea about it. It's not appearance or her name... so it has to be something she says without realizing what the impact could be. Oh. (Cue little lightbulb again - I just love the way my subconscious works). Alvar wants to know why she's so skittish with him. She tells him he looks just like the man who killed her mother (trust me, it's not nearly that simple or clean). Big Bad hears the conversation - and since he knows what HRHorrible does for recreation, and is working his way towards greasy eminence, he naturally warns HRHorrible.

Wednesday: I need to find a new name for book 1. Twilight would be perfect if not for certain sparkly vampires, and this book does not have sparkly vampires. It doesn't have vampires, period. Shadowlands is also out, courtesy a rather better book that's also too well known. Since I suck at this kind of thing, any suggestions would be welcome.

Oh, and for those who might be wondering, no I'm not worried that anyone is going to steal my idea. I could hand this set of notes to a dozen people and ask only that the names change, and get a dozen totally different books - with everything from horror to hysterical comedy and all points between.

Diary of Character Growth

Last week I posted about the story seed I'd been infested with. This week's post is kind of a diary of the things that have emerged since then - mostly character, which is usually the first or second thing I 'get', although there are likely to be other bits of world building and assorted strangeness as well. What I end up with on plot at this stage is usually a starting scenario and what the basic plot and main subplot are likely to be about.

Thursday: Characters begin to emerge. Two of them, one male, one female. Definite sense of a romance subplot. He insists his name is Alvar Seraph, which is... somewhat ridiculous. Arguments over the name begin. She is Millie - possibly short for Amelia or Millicent, although she's being rather close about that.

He's noble and might be willing to accept "Alvar" as a noble title rather than his actual name. It's got to be there, though. Yes, it's weird, but characters will not cooperate for me if I don't have their names right. Long white-blond hair, dark blue eyes - the kind that look like they could be black until you get close - carries a sword-cane. Early twenties, but has had responsibility for a whole lot of things since 14 or 15. His manner isn't so much arrogance as assurance: yes, he really is that good.

She's a street brat. Mama was a whore, and died of her pimp getting pissy. She figures begging, picking pockets and running whatever errands she can get paid for - and pretending to be a boy - is safer.

Okay, so we've got a massive social differential here. Fine. Possibly a Pygmalion aspect.
There's some bioengineering way back - probably from Earth for the spaceship crew, although no-one in story-now knows anything about it. They see an inheritable gift which allows the person who has it to feel the workings and effectiveness of machinery. They 'know' when everything is going well, when something needs maintenance, and when something is going to break. They need training to be able to consciously focus on the gift, and to actually do something about what they feel. They're in two classes: Mechanics can diagnose and fix when told what to do. Engineers can do all that as well as design new machines. Both groups are highly regarded.

He is - of course - an Engineer as well as a nobleman. She has the gift but was never talent-scouted even though the Imperial Academy of Mechanics and Engineering is supposed to find everyone with the gift and train them up: well-maintained machinery is essential to their survival, especially the dampers that keep volcanos from developing in the middle of the cities and the steam turbines that provide power to the cities - powered by diverting water into the volcanic regions to generate said steam.

Opening involves her sensing before he does that a set of dampers under a busy square is about to go, realizing he's got the gift and is more likely to get people out of the way than she is. She'd run away after that, only he's not letting anyone that talented get away from the Academy. The dampers go, but his orders prevent any deaths when a rift opens up across the middle of the square.

He drags her to the Academy - thinking she's the boy she looks like - and goes to arrange a team of Engineers to upgrade the dampers.

Friday: Okay, I was wrong. Milord Alvar is definitely an arrogant sod. Millie is an imp. Sarcastic, self-assured the way street-brats can be (think Gavroche from Les Mis the musical). She's going to cause chaos in the Academy, especially since the Dean of Admissions is one of those unsackable incompetents who gets shuffled to where he can do least damage. Said Dean has problems with well-born girls having the gift, thinks that low class boys who've got it must have got it from a noble ancestor somewhere, and can't possibly learn to be Engineers, and as for low class girls, well they must only be after one thing.

The Academy Arch-Chancellor is one of your ineffectual avuncular types, and really hasn't got a clue how to run things. He's there because he was the most senior staff member when the previous Arch-Chancellor died. Negotiating Imperial political appointments and talented students from the full social range is beyond him. He'd much rather be buried in designs for new mecs.

Social structure/culture is probably most like the British Empire towards the late 1800s, although the colonies have rather more representation than they ever did in the Brit Empire. At this point I think the story is entirely within the capital city (I don't have a name for that yet), but there is a much larger world out there. The Nightside barbarians are a constant threat to the outlying colonies. I'm not sure what/who they are yet, except that it's rather more than just 'barbarians'. I know that at least some of them are exiles and descendants of exiles.

And the little light-bulb just went on to inform me that Milord Alvar and Millie are going to be exiled by the end of this - hence book 2, Nightside.

Weekend: Conflating all of the weekend's news into one piece...

Milord Alvar is still being unfriendly about his name. Millie is a brat. She managed to give all the stick-in-the-mud types collective conniptions in very short order and ends up being taught by Milord Alvar who is amused by her antics rather than horrified - I'm not sure why he finds her amusing, but I imagine I'll find out eventually.

The ending of book 1 involves the Crown Prince, who is the grandson of the Emperor and a nasty piece of work. I'm not sure yet what he's into/up to, but at minimum there's slavery (which is supposedly outlawed) and attempting to arrange granddaddy's murder so he can have the throne. I'm not sure why he ends up crossing swords with Milord Alvar and Millie, but he does, and he dies in a spectacularly ugly fashion - which is why they end up more or less exiled (as in, they're not sure they'd get a fair trial and decide that discretion is the better part of survival).

Monday: His Imperial Majesty is getting to the end of a long life, and outlived all his children. He's still mentally with it, enough that he's got his heir tied up in layers of bureaucracy and is quietly looking for a way junior can have an unfortunate accident. That's not a problem. The problem is that it's kind of difficult to classify "sword cut from navel to chin" as an accident - which means he has to try and convict the culprit.

Tuesday: Well, well. Milord Alvar is in the line of inheritance - distantly, but close enough that if His Imperial Majesty chooses to select an heir rather than appoint his closest male descendant his heir, Milord Alvar is in the running. I think His Majesty hopes that after a suitable absence he can blame junior's death on someone who's already going to die - or already dead - and appoint Alvar his heir. It's not an option that gets used a lot because it causes civil wars: imperial princes tend to get a little upset when they're passed over for the distant cousin they never thought was worth considering.

Wednesday: Weird synchronicity. In the MMORPG I play for decompression I just got to the final world. The 'feel' of it is exactly the feel for this piece - advanced civilization corrupted and dying/dead. Oh, and parts of the cities crumbling into lava. No dragons, though, more's the pity.

Attack of the World Building Bunnies

(Or: A diversion on writing process)

So there I am, sleeping peacefully - or as close to it as this narcoleptic gets (kind of a drugged doze, usually) - and I get ambushed. This happens with disturbing frequency.

I know you're not supposed to admit you get ideas from dreams, but I do, often. What I don't get are plots, which means after the idea makes its appearance there's an incubation period of indeterminate length while the idea ferments and characters start lurking behind odd corners of grey matter waiting for their chance to ambush me. Occasionally they'll insist I tell their story without letting me know what the end is, but usually I have to pry it out of them. There are times when I wish for a crowbar, then I remember they live inside my skull, and the result of me applying a crowbar to that wouldn't be all that scenic.

Anyway. So I wake up with this haunting image and a data dump about this world and setting. It's SF mixed with steampunk, an accidental colony on a world that's a) orbiting a huge star close enough that the thing positively looms in the sky, b) has a moon that's also huge (it may actually be effectively a binary planetary system, but that's not entirely relevant) and in geostationary lock, c) has a ridiculously long rotation period, d) has an even more ridiculously long planetary year (as opposed to what the locals call a year), and e) the entire civilization has grown up from its origins during a solar eclipse. Oh, and the world is very volcanic. They use this as a power source, and live in perpetual twilight.

The image is glimmerings of a dark orange sun around the edges of shadow against the silhouette of Victorian-esque buildings. It comes with a sense that the whole place is doomed - Nightside is largely unexplored, cold, and people who explore there don't come back. It's relatively warm with the eclipse: full sunlight will be too hot for fragile humanity. And vulcanism is tearing the land apart.

All of this is quietly simmering somewhere in the back of my head, accumulating depth and history and waiting for the right character to emerge and to carry a story which I suspect will involve an apparently doomed battle to survive the combination of an increasingly hostile physical environment and a decadent cultural environment. And just to prove that the way I build stories is... interesting, I now have the titles of at least two books in this world: Twilight, and Nightside. It's going to be dark. I suspect 'lyrical' may creep in just from the feel of the place in my mind.

Yes, this is what passes for my process at the very beginnings. Whether this one goes anywhere will depend on whether a character emerges to carry the piece. It's a rather complex synergy for me, requiring any number of pieces to land in place. If/when they do, I have a story which will devour what I laughingly refer to as my spare time. Until then, I have an annoying itch in the back of my head and some odd mental imagery.

To those of our readers who write, how do your stories start? What is your 'seed' and how does it grow? To everyone - do you want to hear more of the progress of this particular seed as it happens? If so, are there any special requests? I can't make any guarantees - at this stage it's quite possible the whole thing will die - but I'll do my best to oblige.

Utopia-Dystopia: One man's Utopia is another's Hell

Thomas More's Utopia is arguably the first science fiction ever written, because the piece is effectively people living in a perfect world. Plato's Republic doesn't count because it's a treatise on how to create Plato's vision of a perfect world.

The fact that I find both these perfect worlds horrifying is actually not that uncommon: no matter who builds a perfect world, we imperfect humans will always go and mess it up. On top of that, my idea of perfection is not going to be someone else's - quite possibly anyone else's.

So naturally, any kind of utopia is actually going to read as a dystopia to most people.

On the flip side, dystopias have a long history in literary, sometimes as moral lessons of the 'if this continues' type, satires, and of course the mess the heroes have to try to fix.

Okay, this ramble does actually have a point. Just let me find it again. Oh. Yes. Literary utopias are usually a resounding failure because either they're assuming humans... aren't, or because they just can't work with human nature. Or - more usually - both. (Funnily enough this applies to political utopias too. Whodathunkit?)

How often have you read about the idyllic lifestyle of this or that people and thought there was no way that kind of society could work because people just aren't like that? If you're anything like me, it's more than a few - but if we sat down and compared notes, there's a good chance that you'd like some of the ones I hate, and vice versa.

So, let's take a look at what makes a Utopia/Dystopia.

Start with the theoretical one size fits all, which in practice quickly turns into one size doesn't fit anyone very well and doesn't fit some people at all. If you're one of the ones that it more or less fits all right, you can probably live with the place, but if it fits too badly or doesn't fit at all the place quickly becomes sheer hell (this, incidentally, is one of the reasons I loathe pantyhose. I'm in the 'sheer hell' group). Not even clones will flourish in a monoculture - there will be enough experiential difference to ensure that some are misfits.

Now add human nature, which isn't changing any time soon. We're social critters, with all that implies: namely hierarchical and with deeply ingrained enforcement behaviors. Whether they're instinctive or not isn't relevant, because they're so strongly wired that they might as well be instinctive. No matter how you raise your kids, how carefully you keep them from the whole notion of competition and leaders and such, within seconds of meeting a new person they're sizing that person up and figuring out where they 'fit'.

When you watch someone - anyone - meeting a new person, a lot of what goes on in the first few seconds is working out whether that person is above, equal, or below in the social hierarchy. If the two have different ideas of who belongs where, there'll be quite a bit of work on the part of whoever thinks they should be superior (i.e. both of them) to establish superiority in a way the other recognizes. The winner will stand a little taller, the loser slump a bit - and as often as not neither one is consciously aware of what just happened.

That covers the leaders and followers (shepherds and sheep). There's two other very general 'types' you'll find in any large enough group. They're rarer than shepherds and sheep (this is why you need a larger group), and both of them will get attacked by shepherds and sheep if they reveal themselves. Predators (wolves) are kind of obvious. They pretend to be sheep so they can profit from other people. And no, this does not mean profit per se is evil. Using other people is - if you get all the benefit and don't pay any of the costs, you're a predator. If it's a crime with a victim (and yes, this includes running a company into the ground to get everything you can from it then walking away and leaving a bankrupt company and thousands of ruined lives), it's a predator thing. So is mooching off someone all your life - although that could be argued as a more parasitic behavior.

Then there are the goats - the independent-minded explorers and questioners who won't go with the herd unless they've decided independently the herd is the right place for them. No-one likes them: they often identify predators first, they make the sheep uncomfortable, and they question the shepherds. This is why you get a lot of misfits in certain areas - they identify each other and band together for their own protection. (As a side note: the USA is a nation settled and founded by goats. Over 200 years after the war of independence, that still shows - and is why the other 'colony' nations have the most in common with the USA. It's also why a heck of a lot of the inventions that materially changed people's lives originate in the former colonies. Penicillin: USA and Australia, cars: USA, planes: USA, drought-resistant damn near anything, Australia (Yes, I've left a lot off. It's not meant to be exhaustive)).

There is no such thing as a society where even all the sheep are happy. The best thing you as an author can do is build something that mostly takes into account human nature and has a whole bunch of incentives that tend to guide human nature towards improving things for their fellow-humans rather than destruction or power games (trying this in real life tends to end badly. We're perverse critters).

Some of the best fictional societies are - of course - Pratchett's, which take all of the variety and perversity of human nature into account. Sarah covers some interesting ground with Eden and Earth in DarkShip Thieves, and what Dave does to all the cultural myths about who is superior, the noble/innocent savage, the simple religious folk, the - oh, the heck with it, what Dave does to practically every cultural myth ever in Slow Train to Arcturus has to be read to be believed (if you haven't already read it, go and buy it. It's worth it.)

Who else has good fictional societies? Conversely, whose alleged utopias horrify you?

Overthrowing the Evil Tyrant

And why it's not quite as easy as it sounds.

We've all met them. Usually male, although the Evil Empress or Queen occasionally gets a look-in, the Evil Overlord, whether the CEO of Evil Inc. or the Emperor of the Galaxy, or a petty prince of some forgotten nation in Fantasyland, is something of a staple in science fiction and fantasy. Usually he, she or it exists mostly to be overthrown.

When you come down to it, it's usually pretty easy. Not necessarily easy at the "toss a trinket into a volcano" level (yes, I know I'm oversimplifying. Shut up.), but there's a big Final Battle of some description, the Evil Overlord dies, and all is happiness, sweetness and light. As often as not, the Evil Overlord is some kind of kludged-up metaphor for the hero's journey to some kind of enlightenment (something the hordes of Tolkien-imitators usually fail to notice is that Frodo did not gain 'enlightenment' per se. He was irreparably wounded by the trials of his journey, and ultimately unable to remain in/on Middle Earth. There was a happy ending, but it wasn't for him.).

So why do tyrannies in the real world last so long?

Leaving aside the obvious "they're not really that bad" answer that I'm sure people are thinking (if you are, you're wrong. Read on MacDuff), the most atrocious regimes of all political flavors have lasted a long time for reasons that can be illustrated by two things.

First a recent news report about the execution of a North Korean man for - officially - revealing state secrets. The state secrets in question? Work conditions at his factory, and the price of food. Who he revealed them to? A South Korean friend. Let's just consider that for a moment. How often do you bitch about your job, or about how much things cost? Has it ever occurred to you that you could be executed for that? Me either. What kind of a regime does that? A horribly abusive one, obviously, but more to the point, one that keeps very close tabs on its people, leading us neatly to the second thing.

After the Berlin Wall went down and people got access to the secret police files, they found out that in the worst regimes - East Germany and Romania are particularly notable here - something like one person in four was reporting to the secret police. Applied here, that would mean about 15 of our followers were spying on the rest of us, and one or two of your Mad Genius hosts was doing the same (technically, one and three-quarters, but I don't see any volunteers for 3/4 of a person). More than three people in your family? Odds are, one of them is working for the secret police.

Since I'd be prepared to guarantee that very few people here have lived in that kind of environment, I think it's safe to say most of us don't have the mental toolset to understand the kind of environment a tyranny always begets. We're all accustomed to a relatively free and open society where you don't face execution for bitching about the cost of food.

How does that kind of situation develop? It's remarkably simple. In every tyranny, regardless of ideology, the way to ensure your safety and by extension that of your loved ones, is to be a Loyal Citizen. If a theology, you go to church and make sure you're the first in, the last out, and you know every hymn and your scripture - and never, ever contradict the priests (even, or perhaps especially when they contradict scripture). If you're in Onepartystan, you join the Party, go to every meeting, and so forth. But the easiest, quickest, and apparently least costly way to show your loyalty is to offer to pass information on to the authorities.

So, you do that. It's only little things, you think, and it's not going to make you a bad person. And at first, that's how it works. You might mention the co-worker you detest complaining about the cost of food, or the crazy old guy down the street who's muttering "Dear Leader my ass", but it's not like they're actually traitors or anything, and nothing bad is going to happen. Then the person you report to drops a few hints that make it obvious you're being watched as well. So when Grandma mentions that these newfangled collective farmy things are a waste of time and she never went hungry before they did this, you feel like you have to tell them, in case someone else has already passed it on and you'll be in trouble if you don't say anything. You try to downplay it, but you still tell them. And some time later, you go to visit Grandma, and she's not there, and the young family who live there now don't have any idea who used to live there - they're just happy they have a home.

You tell yourself Grandma is in a nice retirement village somewhere, but you know, deep down, that she isn't. And that you, personally, probably turned her in as a malcontent, or a traitor, or whatever the official buzzword is.

This is why people don't rise up and overthrow the Evil Overlord unless an extraordinary event triggers some kind of spontaneous outpouring of repressed rage, grief and guilt. The Evil Overlord already has them trapped in chains they've made themselves, link by little link. If you're writing a story where overthrowing the Evil Overlord is involved, you need to remember that your characters can't chat about it in the local pub. Anyone could be a spy for the Overlord. They can't even trust their own group - remember that one in four ratio? The worse the Evil Overlord is, the more likely it is he's got that many people spying for him.

That doesn't make rebellion impossible - but it makes it a whole lot harder than Lord of the Rings and its multifarious imitators (or, for that matter Star Wars and any number of space operas) would have you think. The people you're trying to liberate don't trust you because they can damn near guarantee that anyone they don't know is spying for the Overlord (why else would a stranger come here?), and you can't trust them because you know some of them are spying for the Overlord. They're going to be suspicious, unfriendly, and arrange unpleasant, deniable "accidents" for you, especially if they suspect that they're likely to be on the wrong end of a purge because of you.

They're not going to welcome their new freedom when you win, either - after as little as a generation of tyranny, people mostly expect that the new overlord will be just like the old one, maybe with different words to wrap around the same basic reality. More often than not, they're right. We're wired to follow someone who leads. It's what kept little tribelets of our ancestors alive in a dangerous world.

The fact that good leaders are a whole lot rarer than bad ones and freedom is a lot of work is something that adds depth to your writing and world-building when it's there - and if anyone doubts this, I strongly recommend a closer look at Sarah's Darkship Thieves. Athena's paranoia is perfectly justifiable and sane in the world she's raised in - and her Daddy Dearest is very much an Evil Overlord. Yes, she is the Evil Overlord's beautiful daughter. And yes, she does manage to more or less kick off rebellion. It's nowhere near as easy as George Lucas would have you think, either.

Any other examples? Thoughts? "Someone shut that madwoman up" messages?

Ye Merrie Olde Wars

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Because fiction thrives on conflict, and the biggest, baddest conflict anything has to offer is war, there's an awful lot of it in fiction. Historical fiction has subgenres for pretty much every major war and quite a few not so major ones - although "major" is something of a misnomer when it's happening to you.

Of course, historical and modern fiction have to content themselves with actual wars. We get to make them up.

Funnily enough, with all that wonderful material in history about weird ways wars have been started (okay, they were usually an excuse to go after someone) fantasy and science fiction seems to excel at the "traditional enemies who fight forever and have no idea what the actual war is about". Fantasy is worse than science fiction for this, despite there being all sorts of interesting reasons for two - or more - countries to be at war.

There's the basics - EasyBeats have to defend themselves against RagingAggressors or they cease to exist, BreedLikeRabbits need more space or they'll starve so they invade the neighbors, RuggedMountaineers (who seem to be related to the Horse People from Diana Wynne Jones Tough Guide to Fantasyland) raid SoftFlatlanders because those mountains don't let you grow shite.

Then there's the more sophisticated set - SnottyProtocolers offended by RoughButHonest and war gets going, no-one actually knows who owns that prime parcel of land but by deity it better be them, They (insert verb here) differently than We do so They must be evil.

I'm not going to rant here about unrealistic battle scenes - suffice to say that the reason streams get renamed things like Bloody Run is not because someone had the trots. A truly descriptive battle scene would have readers racing for the porcelain to expel their most recent meal at speed - and yes, that applies to modern war as well. I'm even going to be nice and not rant about authors who go on about what a wonderful leader SoAndSo is, then have him (and it usually is a him) do something that is so phenomenally dumb you wonder where the heck he left those wonderful brains that day.

Instead, here's a quickie sample of some of the better fantasy depictions of the logistics and strategy of war.

PTerry. Jingo (based on a historical incident. Really), Thud!, Small Gods (the amount of history stuffed into this book should have made it explode).

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, more for the brief thumbnails of Sauron's preparations than anything else - it's bloody difficult to make war waged by existential evil work and Tolkein wasn't writing "fantasy" per se, he was writing "legends" which tend to skip all that detail stuff anyway.

Um. It would be so much easier to list bad examples, but I really don't want to do that. Over to you folks - which fantasy authors get their wars right?

The Problem With Politics

Politics in fantasy and science fiction, that is. I'm not going near the tar pit that is modern politics in any country.

Something you notice when you read a lot is that most people haven't got a clue how politics actually work, leading to what could be described as Tough Guide to Fantasyland political systems (If you haven't read the Tough Guide, find it and read it. It's hilarious, and boy does it skewer shoddy the fantasy cliches). Sadly, the same kind of thing also shows up way too often in science fiction, complete with the fantasy memes of the Evil Empire - it doesn't matter what it's actually called, if it functions as an Evil Empire, it might as well be one - the noble, heroic anti-imperial forces, usually horribly outnumbered/out-weaponed and so forth.

Part of the problem with imagining other forms of government is that English is actually a very egalitarian language. Over centuries we've lost any distinction between formal and informal address, much less anything more complex. Compare this to some of the European languages where there are formal and informal forms of "you", or some of the Asian languages which have multiple forms of address depending on rank, level of intimacy, level of formality, and so forth. To most native English speakers that kind of distinction is beyond confusing and heads rapidly into the realm of utterly incomprehensible - with the result that we find it very difficult to truly understand the kinds of protocol that go with any highly class-conscious society.

A rather length aside here - even English royalty is remarkably egalitarian. The rule for speaking with any member of the English royal family is burned into my memory, courtesy an incident from when I was part of a choir in Australia. The choir was singing at a college graduation where the Duchess of Kent (as patron of the college) was presenting the degrees. One of my sisters was graduating, so naturally the whole family was there - me and my mother in the choir, the graduating sister in with the other graduates, and the rest of the horde in the general audience (Yes, my family is a horde. I'm the oldest of 5. Back in the bad old days when the Queensland Government restricted public gatherings, we used to joke that we needed a permit to go anywhere as a family). Security, naturally, was tight, but we choristers were told that if by chance we did end up speaking with the Duchess, the rule was to address her as "Your Grace" the first time you said anything, and "Ma'am" after that. I wouldn't remember this except that... mum is a mad keen photographer and she wanted a photo of the Duchess. So, after the graduation is finished and everyone else has gone home (it was well after midnight) mum manages to find out which elevator the Duchess is going to be using and positions herself there - and gets permission from the security people, who basically said photos were fine so long as she stayed behind this line. I'm hanging back - figure painfully shy mid-twenties in dorky choir uniform and you've got it. Besides, mum's the outgoing, impossible to embarrass one, so if any of the horde gets to talk to the Duchess, it's her. The elevator opens, the Duchess sees mum with camera and pauses long enough for mum to get a nice photo, then heads straight to me. I'm not sure how long I was the very picture of gobsmacked, but it was probably a lot less time than it felt like! There was this moment of pure panic followed by a thought along the lines of "Oh, crap, what were the rules?" Fortunately the Duchess is a very gracious lady who knows how to talk to painfully shy, overwhelmed people - we ended up having a short but relatively sensible discussion about the choir she's a member of, the policies of both choirs about what jewelry the women can wear for performances, how much fun it is to sing certain works and so on. But after being singled out - I suspect because she saw me hanging back and I was in the choir uniform (so was mum, but she was waving the camera around, too) - I'm never going to forget that rule!

Anyway, back to fictional governments and forms of protocol that go with them. What you could call the 'default fantasy' setup involves a king, some number of usually not very well defined nobility, mostly parasitic, and everyone else. It doesn't take too much thinking about the setup to realize it not only doesn't work, it can't work. Part of the function of class distinctions is to define responsibilities - the higher the class or rank, the higher the responsibility. Slaves are responsible for whatever their job happens to be. Serfs (slaves tied to land rather than people) are responsible for feeding themselves and their families fed and usually having enough surplus for the land owner's requirements. Free farmers are responsible for feeding themselves and their families, usually providing at least one armed man for whatever purposes are needed, and paying taxes to their lord in either money or goods. In towns, the various merchants are responsible for making enough profit to keep their families fed, paying taxes to both the town upkeep and the lord, and usually some form of guild association as well. The 'noble' class - ranging from relatively small land owners to control of several cities - are responsible for keeping everything they own in good running order, collecting the taxes for those higher up the chain, enforcing the laws and where necessary making their own laws for problems specific to their regions. Royalty is responsible for keeping the nobility in order, relationships with other countries, maintaining law and order, and generally keeping the whole thing running - which is a huge simplification. In a fantasy setting, the effective limit of a country's size is based mostly on how long it takes to travel from one end to the other. Anything more than a few days becomes very difficult to manage unless there are trusted governors/nobles/whatever in each district who can act as royal proxies if needed. China overcame the distance issue by imposing a common culture on conquered peoples. Russia didn't reach its full extent until the late 1800s, when rapid communication by telegraph was possible. The British Empire managed to hold on to territory all over the world by a combination of local governors with vice-regal authority (that is, they could act as if they were the monarch) and relatively fast shipping which allowed them to reach pretty much any part of the Empire in six weeks.

To successfully deal with all the complications that arise in anything like this, you need to know who is in charge of what, because the actual distribution of control/responsibility gets pretty diffuse in anything large or complex. The whole system might be pretty much invisible to Joe Average - but it needs to be there, or you get the Tough Guide effect where it all seems to exist on tourism from adventurers.

On the science fictional side of the coin, it's often even worse. Those star-spanning civilizations connected by whatever macguffin is used to permit space travel? Impossible, even with the handwavium of faster than light/wormholes/whatever. Here's why: in any sufficiently technologically advanced society, knowledge is the key to wealth, and currency is typically a nominal unit of value rather than the 'hard' currency of less technologically based cultures. One of the things that makes this possible is effectively instantaneous communication, which can be done on a single planet. Over several light years? Not likely. To have a functional currency through a multiple star empire, you need to be able to withdraw money from a bank on planet A, and have that balance reflected instantly in the database on space station Z. I've yet to see anything that takes this into account.

Then you have the lunacy that is standard SF trope interstellar war. By using a quasi-Napoleonic environment, some authors make this sort of limp along, but space is effectively boundaryless. Your space empire or republic or whatever is effectively a collection of discrete islands surrounded by a whole lot of buggerall. If you've read anything about the problems of naval warfare during World War Two, you've got some idea - just extrapolate to three dimensions instead of two, and expand the scale from "big" to "so utterly freaking huge it's mind blowing". The Napoleonic analogy is probably as close as you can get, but even so, the assumption behind that analogy is still one of scarcity of resources when most planetary systems have more than enough of everything for a sufficiently advanced technological base to leverage - and that's without the extremely high likelihood of some degree of replication or fabrication.

Without near-instantaneous communication, there can't be any viable star-spanning anythings - instead there'll probably be a series of effectively self-sustaining/self-contained settlements and settlement clusters, each with its own economic systems and rules - making life very interesting indeed for the space traveler. The likelihood of this generating any kind of empire, much less an Evil one, probably has so many zeros after the decimal point it might as well be zero - except that there's a 100% chance some lunatic will try to form one. (There's a large historical precedent for this. Practically every attempt at building a utopian society anywhere falls into this category, because people aren't perfect and trying to make them fit the vision usually ends badly.) Not to mention that, like the fantasy realms, they're not going to be homogenous. There'll be misfits, eccentrics, leaders, followers, predators and prey, because every society has them.

All things considered, I'd better leave it here, because if I get into economics and how that works - or doesn't - in the vast majority of science fiction and fantasy, I'll have to write a book-length rant, and I'd much rather just write a book that does get it more or less right. I hope.

Who do you think does get it right, or close to right? What do they get right?

The Things Writers Do

Last night I was googling bizarre lethal animals, stinging plants, and weird parasites. Why was this, you ask? (Yes, yes, I know you didn't. Shut up. You're interrupting my rhetorical flight of something or other.)

The short short version - I needed all sorts of interestingly nasty ways to kill people. If there's a forbidden zone chock full of lethal everything, then it's a plot necessity that Ye Writer's characters will need to go either into or through it. If there are other characters with them, it's equally necessary that the other characters die. Unpleasantly, of course. The technical term for this is a writer-cookie, also known - to me at least - as a redshirt-with-extreme-malice (I do take special requests, as my friends know).

It's a very specialized form of writer-voodoo. I snapshot the person I'm going to kill with a little thumbnail portrait, maybe only a line or two, and sometimes a name that's derived from the original's name. Then I kill them in interesting and gruesome ways. Sometimes repeatedly. My manager has been killed twice now, and oddly enough he becomes easier to deal with each time I kill him (No, he has never read anything I've written. No, you can't tell him. It takes all the fun out of it.)

In any case, my forbidden zone was there anyway, there were some fourteen people going to die there anyway, four of them minor characters who readers are hopefully going to care about a little bit, the others servants along for the trip more or less (Yes, it does make more sense than that. No you can't read it yet. I'm still writing it.). It's with the others that I get to have fun and do the redshirt-with-malice thing to people who've managed to irritate me.

Why do I insert people I know who have pissed me off? (No, "piss" is not a rude word where I grew up. It's 'earthy'). It's therapeutic. I get to have fun researching bizarre and horrible ways to die and I get to let off steam by putting someone I'm angry with in the role of Ensign Cannonfodder and writing their horrible death.

The bizarre parasites, biting trees, and other nasties got to be featured because this particular book is set in a far future where the bio-engineered war tools have gone on to reproduce and evolve, assisted by said war putting a very hefty dent in the unmodified human population worldwide. Sites where the biolabs were, or where nuclear weapons were used, are still, centuries later, uninhabitable. And the rest of the world is more or less feudal, but the rulers are the descendants of the saner modified humans. Not surprisingly, they got names that reflected what kind of mythical critter they resembled most, so there are dwarves (short, muscular, able to smell metals and rare earths - optimised for finding and mining deep underground deposits), elves (pretty, charismatic, telepathic, and capable of controlling other people's minds as well as reading them - all very handy for spying), vampires (who absolutely do not sparkle and are more or less one of the less ethical faction's version of elves) and... well. You get the idea.

What this piece looks like - and will probably be marketed as when I get that far - is "epic fantasy with vampires". The war that created them isn't even legend, it's completely lost. The bio-enhancements are regarded as "magic" or "gifts from deity" depending on culture. And of course the forbidden zones are terrible places where evil magic happened so long ago their legends merely hint at it.

The fun part for me is finding workable reasons why someone would have engineered something like this and how a culture where pure humans are very much an inferior race somewhere between animals and "real" people might evolve. I'm going to end up exploring several variations on that evolution as I write the books - which means I've been digging into history, sociology and evolutionary theory as well, although it lacks the 'cool' factor of bizarre lethal plants and animals.

In all probability the only part of the research that will be visible in the finished book will be the forbidden zone stuff. I made a deliberate choice to avoid the standards like giant spiders, and go for the kinds of nasties that aren't all that common. Things like the tree whose leaves are covered with microscopic silicon needles that release a neurotoxin painful enough to kill (Rowena, Chris, you've probably heard about the Gympie Stinging Tree) and whose shed needles stay actively toxic for at least 100 years. Or the bird whose feathers and beak are coated with the same basic poison the poison dart frogs secrete (A New Guinea native bird).

As I've learned - repeatedly - from the virtual "PTerry was here" signs all over odd branches of history, you don't need to make this stuff up. It's already out there. Two of my big writer-cookies are finding the stuff, and making it happen to someone who's got on my nerve (I only have one, and it's rather sensitive).

What are your writer-cookies? And what are the things you do when you write just because you like it?

World Building

I have to run a workshop for the Australian National Romance Conference on World Building for paranormal, fantasy and futuristic writers. The thing about World Building is that if you do it really well, people don't notice it. The World Building goes on behind the scenes and motivates the characters.

So I've decided rather than create a shopping list of attributes for created societies, I'll work from the other direction (which is what I do anyway). When I write I start out with the person and their problem and the world evolves from there. This may sound really crazy and cause all kinds of problems, such as how can I be consistent? But I've always been fascinated by the way societies evolve and the pressures this places on people. So I've done a lot of reading and I trust myself to wing it.

If you stop and look at a lot of the things we do and why, they seem very arbitrary. As long as the created society has an internal logic, even where it is inconsistent, people will accept this. After all, why would you withhold education from half the population, then complain that they are stupid and can't be trusted with the vote?

Besides, I think creating a story with character, plot and world building will be a better hands-on way to explore the craft of World Building. I'm hoping the problems that arise as we come up with stories, will cause discussion and clarify points. And I'll have my back up list of questions in case I need them!