Category Archives: On Writing

Why Systemic Theology?

Posted by natechen on

We’re not going to be addressing systemic theology on a large scale today. It’s a huge topic that people can, and often do, study for their entire lives on a scope ranging from personal reflection to rigorous academic investigation. It’s also important to note that very few people embark on those studies. They’re not topics that interest most people nor is the study of them very accessible to most people, as writings and talks on systemic theology are generally addressed towards those who are already very aware of the questions and contradictions that they attempt to address. That doesn’t change the fact that big, world changing beliefs have days and years of constant, diligent, intelligent thought behind them. The problem this poses to a storyteller is twofold.

First, when dealing with anything as all encompassing as religion, if your story is going to address the topic then if you fail to adequately understand it you will come off as insulting and uninformed. Second, systematic theology is so complex, obscure and full of jargon most people aren’t familiar with it. The observant will notice that these two things are somewhat in tension.

There is no direct contradiction, mind you, but the first thing the average writer must work with is the fact that most people who profess a religion do not know the full intricacies and nuances of hundreds or thousands of years of religious study and meditation. That’s not a judgment, just a fact of life. I drive a car with only a basic understanding of what it is and I go to church with only a marginally greater understanding of God. What writers must understand is that systematic theology does exist. This is something modern Western culture seems to entirely reject, as if acknowledging the fact that people work hard to create coherent, consistent ways of understanding their beliefs is bad.

Modern writing’s approach to belief is the Bajoran approach. To the extent people believe anything, they engage with it as a way to promote a nebulously understood ‘good’ for their community that comes from the solidarity and continuity of religious expression. This approach identifies strengths of religion – solidarity and continuity – and mistakes them for the purpose. However, as stated in my introduction to this topic, we are defining religion as something that connects its adherents to a concept or being that transcends the material. Solidarity and continuity are certainly immaterial concepts. The problem with them is that they do not transcend the material, nor do those religions focused on them ever insist that they do.

Consider the Vulcan belief in logic. Nothing about logic is bound up in the Vulcan people, it is entirely abstract. If there were no Vulcans, logic would still exist. Its basic principles would still be discoverable by anyone with an ordered mind and a desire to systematize the world. In fact, it is the discovery of those principles that drives Vulcan belief. While the methods Vulcans use to discover logic are unique to their people and build a sense of shared community and understanding among them, logic is not dependent on Vulcans. In fact, Vulcans find particular insight from the methods used to uncover logic by other species.

In short, logic is transcendent. Logic is logic regardless of the who, what or where and will continue to be so no matter how much time passes.

The Klingon belief in honor is rooted in courage and conquest, virtues of a warrior who bends the universe to his will. In the far past, the Klingons were attacked by a spacefaring people. Their homeworld was stripped of many vital resources then the invaders departed, leaving the castoffs of their technology on Qo’nos. Impoverished and enraged by this travesty, the Klingons fell into petty infighting. Eventually they would be united by Kahless the Unforgettable, who conquered the planet, taught them the importance of honor then pointed his people towards the stars.

The Klingon understanding of honor is rooted in the example Kahless set. It stands in stark contrast to the Federation’s understanding of honor. Starfleet honor is rooted in loyalty, excellence and the promotion of the common good. And yet from the moment we first see Kirk meet Kor we see that these different senses of honor result in similar actions and attitudes. These similarities and contrasts are part of what make the Klingons such a powerful foil.

Honor is transcendent, it will exist whether or not anyone holds to it. And yet the ways people hold to it create a very rich and nuanced understanding of what exactly honor is and how we can try to reach it. By showing the many different shapes honor can take when it interacts with specific circumstances, personalities and cultures we get a better understanding of those conditions, peoples and cultures.

Neither the Vulcans nor the Klingons have anything approaching a systematic theology. At least not one that we see on camera. Even if creating such a thing was one of the goals the writers had when inventing these cultures they couldn’t have the depth of thought and nuance we see in the real world theologies of long lasting world religions.

Yet we can still see how the core, transcendent pillars of their beliefs function. They inform vast swaths of their cultures and thoughts and no one looks at them quite the same way. If there were a religion like the Klingons’ or the Vulcans’ I can easily believe it would have a systematic theology. By the same token, I don’t think members of those species would be upset with how their religions are presented in Star Trek. It is handled with nuance, depth and empathy, even if the writers are not adherents themselves.

The Bajoran religion isn’t quite so lucky.

The Prophets are so named because they often predict the future to benefit the Bajoran people. These predictions, along with the religious rituals and traditions of the Bajoran people who are waiting for new prophecies, exist mostly to keep the Bajorans alive and give them a sense of community, rather than to give them an understanding of the Prophets. They are mechanisms for survival rather than transcendence. Unlike the Vulcan understanding of logic, the rituals and Prophecies the Bajorans study cannot serve as a bridge to other civilizations. They’re too particular to share.

Even Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary, a human being who is seen as a go-between anointed by the Prophets to prepare the Bajorans for a major crisis, doesn’t deepen this facet of Bajoran spiritual life at all. He occasionally gets cryptic prophecies but the key to unlocking them is the circumstances he’s in, not his understanding of the Prophets or some transcendent virtue they teach.

These survival driven tenants also negate nuance. Because prophecy and ritual are entirely circumstantial none of the different perspectives or cultural approaches to reach the same end can exist. There cannot be a broad examination of what it means to interact with the Prophets in different situations. The Prophets give revelations to relate to single circumstances for a single group of people or a single person.

We never really get a clear idea of why the Prophets behave this way. In the best case, their interest in Bajor seems to be some kind of inter dimensional charity project. Because these transcendent figures are so nebulous I never get the feel that the Bajorans have any kind of systematic understanding of them. (They do have a highly politicized clerical hierarchy, but that’s outside the scope of this post.)

It’s fine for transcendent figures to have specific points of interaction with those who seek them, by the way, and to be incomprehensible to those they interact with. The problem arises when those seeking the transcendent make no attempt to draw lines connecting those points of contact. They don’t have to all agree on how to connect those points or the order to draw the lines. No one ever has, no matter what clerics and priests sometimes tell you.

The point is they have to try. That’s the key to writing a belief system that implies a systematic theology without actually trying to create one. As a bonus, you’ll unlock all the nuance and depth of character we see in the Klingons and the Vulcans free of charge! Try it some time. The effort won’t be wasted.

Writing Vlog – 09-13-2023

Posted by natechen on

I’m wrapping up a project and getting ready for a couple of more, plus talking all about it in today’s writing vlog!

Weekly Writing Vlog – 04-12-2023

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Weekly writing vlog is pretty short but I’ll be taking a week off so hopefully when I’m back in two weeks I’ll have a lot to share!

Writing Vlog – 03-08-2023

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Weekly writing vlog brings a quick update on various topics but mostly the state of short stories.

When Spoof isn’t Enough

Posted by natechen on

From the title page Out of the Soylent Planet is utterly unrepentant about what it is. Robert Kroese has written a pretty fast moving and incredibly silly book about an intergalactic conman named Rex Nihilo and his long-suffering robot sidekick Sasha. It has lasguns. It has spaceships. It has lots and lots and lots of robots who are all forbidden from having any kind of original thoughts (Sasha included.) What it didn’t manage that well was laughs, at least not in my book.

Right off the bat I should note that humor is an extremely subjective topic and the fact that I didn’t find Kroese’s work funny doesn’t mean you’ll be equally unimpressed. I’ve heard several people say they thought it was hilarious. From a totally dispassionate point of view Kroese builds a number of jokes in very workmanlike fashion and executes on them well. That’s fine, but workmanlike humor kind of misses the point, at least in my opinion. Again, humor is hard to quantify.

All that said, I don’t intend to critique the humor in this review. I recommend reading a sample of one of the Rex Nihilo books and seeing if you laugh at it, since Kroese’s humor doesn’t change much in nature or tone over the course of the book. What you see is what you will get. You’ll probably get a better grasp of how much you’ll like his sense of humor firsthand rather than trying to see it through the lens of this review.

Instead, I’m going to recommend you avoid this book because the story and characters are very lackluster. I’m not a fan of negative reviews overall, mainly because poor quality media tends to fall into the same pitfalls over and over again. However, while I didn’t like Kroese’s humor and I thought his story had a lot of flaws, I can say it was original! In a way. Which is to say, I found its failures unique and refreshing in their own way.

As I said at the beginning, from the title onward Soylent Planet wears its idea on its sleeve. It is all about making fun of well known scifi ideas and properties. It begins with a chapter long sendup of Star Wars. The issue I have with it is that the Star Wars parody plays out along side the introduction of our characters rather than serving as the introduction to our characters. Rex and Sasha play no direct part in that parody they just watch it play out. It’s parody for the sake of parody, rather than a parody that also tells a story of its own. It’s more a distraction from the story than an enhancement for it and it had the side effect of making our protagonists less than the most interesting thing in the room.

If nothing else, this isn’t a running issue in the story. After this strange introductory chapter Rex and Sasha step up into center stage and their decisions do drive the story and are the major focus of the narrative, rather than being a sort of side show to a parody Kroese is running in parallel. However once Rex and Sasha are in the limelight we run into another problem. Rex is a character that borders on total incompetence who manages to stumble through things on luck. Again, this can work in a humorous story. The Pink Panther films comes to mind. The effectiveness of that is down to the quality of the humor in the story, which again is going to vary from reader to reader. I’ve already said all I have to say about that.

Sasha, on the other hand, is a robot who is forbidden to have original thoughts of her own. If she approaches such a thought, a safety mechanism reboots her. That’s an interesting idea, reminiscent of the narcoleptic character in the movie Rat Race, and seems like it should be the center of numerous gags. It’s not. Instead, it’s a plot device that allows Rex to escape the final danger he faces which is fine, in and of itself. I’m not saying that Kroese should have cut this plot device from the climax of the story, I think the two things could easily coexist. I just felt like neither character really had a central element that really held the story together.

Instead, Rex seems to bounce around from one scenario to another, spoofing on famous scifi ideas, and Sasha is dragged along in his wake. Both characters feel dragged by the plot, reacting rather than acting. Now, character agency is a tricky thing and I do think that passive or reactive characters are just as good as active ones, contrary to popular belief. But I like my reactive characters to have strong, well define core motivations that define their reactions. While Sasha is programmed to serve, that’s as close as either character gets to such a central motivation. I would’ve liked to see a stronger core to both characters to balance their passivity in this book.

What I can praise Kroese for is a good setup and payoff for the plot. He does a reasonable job of putting all the pieces in place for his climax before he gets there and he clearly enjoyed writing it. While many of the transitions in the story are clunky, the core idea is pretty polished. I want to enjoy this book. It’s just crammed full of things that make it hard for me. I wanted this story to have a point, to do something of its own with its characters and world. Kroese built it to spoof on scifi ideas and tropes instead. He executed on that idea pretty well in Soylent Planet. Whether you’ll enjoy that or not is a matter of taste.

Laziness

Posted by natechen on

I’ve written about my problems with the storytelling of Rian Johnson in the past. However after observing his career for some time, I’m beginning to believe that there’s a deeper thread running through his work that bears addressing. In the past, Johnson has stated he’d rather have half his audience love a film and half hate it than have a large majority simply like it. In fairness, he has succeeded in becoming quite the controversial director.

This position is merited. But I think the reason underlying that merited controversy is Johnson’s simple, undiluted laziness. On his own, I don’t think Johnson being a lazy director who somehow finds an audience is bad. Art and effort don’t have an entirely linear relationship and, once a certain degree of competence is achieved, even lazy creators can still create work of surprising artistic merit. This is true in every area of life and I don’t think art is an exception.

If Johnson was the only lazy director out there it might not be that big of an issue for movies as a whole although it would be disappointing. However we’re starting to see it with other creators as well. James Gunn and Taiko Waititi are also directors with a great deal of talent, in particular with a gift for striking visuals and excellent editing. As writers they have very little ambition.

Let me make my case using some examples from Johnson’s writing – and be warned there will be spoilers in here. In the movie Knives Out, Johnson builds his entire plot around a character, Marta Cabrera, who’s most notable characteristic is an is her inability to lie. Any time she lies she winds up vomiting. Marta is the caretaker for the aged Harlan Thrombey who winds up dying (indirectly) of an inappropriately administered medication. As his caretaker, Marta is implicated.

By the end of the story the genius detective Blanc has deduced the real killer and corners him into confessing using a gambit that hinges on… Marta lying. This is revealed when Marta barfs all over the killer after he confesses. All this happens in direct contradiction to all the previous instances where we see Marta vomit when she even tries to lie.

Now, I wouldn’t object to this as much if we’d seen Marta practice to overcome her difficulty. However there’s no set up like this at all, in fact it raises the possibility that Marta can lie and everything we’ve heard from her is actually a lie. We were supposed to be able to be confident in Marta’s integrity and the climax completely undercuts it to the point where I’m not sure her entire untruth allergy is a ploy on her part. It destroys Johnson’s narrative.

This happens again in Glass Onion, Johnson’s latest mystery film. A major central character, Andi, is revealed to be dead and the character who’s been called Andi up until the middle of the story turns out to be her twin sister Helen. This doesn’t add new dimension to any of the characters. It doesn’t cast any of their conversations in new lights, it doesn’t create tension since we don’t know Andi is an impostor and it doesn’t give rise to any clever gambits. A little more effort could have made this a twist that improved the story but instead it just undercuts our investment in what we thought we knew.

Finally, in The Last Jedi Johnson sets up the infamous hyperdrive kamikaze scene, where one ship rams another at near lightspeed in spite of the ways that contradicts everything else we’ve seen about the hyperdrive in the past including the previous installment in the franchise, Rogue One, where we see a ship at near lightspeed collide with another and get smashed to rubble without harming the other one. Give the hypderdrive kamikaze it’s due. It’s an impressive visual. It also shows a lack of care for the previous story and a lack of imagination for how he will get to his desired visual. There are may ways he could have achieved this. In fact in said previous film we see ships using ramming in ways suited to the Star Wars universe.

Johnson is supposed to be a genius artiste, setting up common tropes and then subverting them with his clever movie making. However, when he subverts he does it in the laziest way possible. You thought Marta couldn’t lie? Surprise! She can! You thought Andi was one person? Surprise! She was someone else! In fact, in Glass Onion the story is so bad that the characters themselves insult it as moronic. However, hanging a lampshade on your story’s lazily used tropes doesn’t make them okay. It just points out your laziness.

Waititi and Gunn are likewise both artists with their own visions that they seem intent on forcing into any narrative they produce and not making the least concessions to it. Gunn relies on character tropes to replace much of his character development. Waititi shoves jokes into his movies without trying to smooth the transition from narrative to joke or make the joke organically arise from the situation. It’s deeply frustrating, especially as these directors show so much talent in many other areas of their movie making.

Most of all it’s frustrating that people are so content with cheap entertainment. It is great to see people creating at their highest levels but when they only put their passion and effort into a very narrow band of what they make it shows incredible contempt for their creations and their audience. Hopefully one day we’ll all have more care for what we create and consume.

The Gospel According to Earth – Afterwords

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Well, it’s done.

Early in writing The Gospel According to Earth I had to confront the fact that there wasn’t really an ending to the story about Earth putting an end to evil government. The unfortunate reality is, mankind isn’t inherently good. I know that’s not an evaluation that’s particularly popular today but it’s a foundational part of my way of thinking and I don’t really believe we’ve ever completely pulled away from being a savage society where the powerful abuse the weak however they wish. We got further from that than ever before in the United States, I think. Even in this day and age it’s still a global problem, though, and as I worked to game it out in my head I realized that the future Earth at the heart of the Triad World novels would reform itself to an extent only to boomerang right back to depravity once again. Trying to sketch out a path for the Triad Worlds to build a new, utopian Earth was, therefore, foolish.

So I decided not to. That really wasn’t what I wanted to do when I started The Gospel According to Earth anyway. My purpose was to show the mindset that led UNIGOV to try rewriting the entirety of human history and why, totalitarian impulses or no, it is fundamentally wrong. Hopefully in the pages of the story you have just read I have succeeded. Since the Triad World novels are intended to be grounded in reality, rather than an exercise in the kind of unbridled idealism that some of the major scifi franchises they draw inspiration from, I chose not to close the loop on all the characters the story introduces.

In particular, I never gave the ‘great men of history’ the story introduces specific arcs or defined ending points. While I got to know and like Admiral Carrington and Captain Gyle I never intended to leave them on a specific note. They were just ships passing us in the night. I was far more interested in the lowly characters in the Fleet when writing and I particularly wanted to bring a solid ending point to Corpral Langley by the end of this story.

This was a bit of a challenge, since I felt I left him in a good place at the end of Schrodinger’s Book. In fact, that was a major part of why I chose not to reuse him or Aubrey as viewpoint characters in Martian Scriptures, along with my desire to see another part of the fleet. By the same token, this is also why I didn’t reintroduce Volk Fyodorovich in The Gospel According to Earth. Lang had to be the story’s touchstone character and I think he managed it well. I hope you’ve found following him as interesting as I have.

With a number of new viewpoint characters and an entirely new thematic through-line to keep track of, The Gospel According to Earth was a challenge to outline and write. The necessity of finding a good place to leave the story was also difficult. I don’t think I’d be a great intrigue writer so I chose not to go too deep into the wrangling needed to drag a peace treaty out of UNIGOV. Instead I ultimately chose to stop on the cusp of that new challenge and leave the rest of the details to your imaginations.

In the end I wanted the Triad World novels to concern themselves with questions of how we will govern ourselves, what we will trust in and how we can know if that trust is misplaced. I’m sure I’ve only marginally achieved those goals. Still, I had an enjoyable time writing these stories and I hope you’ve equally enjoyed reading them.

Now my typical structure at this juncture would be taking a week off. But, as you may have noticed, I just took my usual Christmas break and tacked an extra week on there before posting this! Therefore my next series of essays on writing will begin next week. I have a lot to say on any number of subjects, so strap in! This will be different.

Happy New Year!

Posted by natechen on

Hello everyone! We’ve reached the end of The Gospel According to Earth and the end of the year, so in accordance with tradition around here I’ll be taking a week off. In this case, there’s two weeks off stacked up so I’ll return in two weeks, on January 14th. Hope you had a merry Christmas and enjoy ringing in the New Year!

-Nate

Writing Vlog – 12-23-2022

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This week’s writing vlog is the last of the year. It’s only fitting that I look at how I feel I’ve done this year before setting goals for next year!