Tag Archives: On Writing

Worldbuilding: Deep Space Terminology, An Overview

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World building is a complex and demanding process. I’m not an expert on it but it is fun to share all that work from time to time and for me, one of the things that means is sharing the dictionaries and lexicons that start to accrue over time as I write stories and come up with new concepts.

This week’s world building log is on The Divided Futures, a series of stories about humanities future and what kinds of challenges it’s going to come up with for itself. Specifically, here are some common terms from the Extrasolar age, the age of interstellar colonization and increasingly difficult national relations. Terms like:

biocomputer – A kind of upgrade to the human brain that works in two ways. First, it allows the human brain to enter a state similar to the fight-or-flight reaction people already possess. They experience time and a much slower relative speed, usually seeing things moving at one half or one quarter the normal rate. Digital computers can also coopt the incredible processing power of the brain to carry out their calculations with, sending the person who’s brain serves as the biocomputer into a sensory deprivation state. The most invasive versions of this technology allow people to experience time at 32x – they perceive time at 1/32nd normal rate – and function as the core of incredibly powerful processing engines. But the human brain cannot adapt to the most advanced forms of this technology past a certain age. This used to be around the age of twenty but, as the changes biocomputers impose on brain matter and function grow more and more pronounced, that age has fallen to fifteen.

cetacean ballet – The term for large space vessels moving in precise patterns via tesseract technology (see below). It generally refers to either the traffic patterns of large passenger or freight ships around a spaceport or the movements of large war vessels engaged in a pitched battle.

CMD – Stands for Cochran Mass Drivers. It’s an unofficial unit of measurement for mass driver technology that still finds widespread use in U.S., Russian and Chinese colonies. One CMD is equal to the amount of mass the Cochran mass driver on Mars can launch from the surface of the planet into orbit in a single firing. Because of it’s age the Cochran mass driver tends to be pretty weak by modern standards and most colonies have local planet to orbit launching systems that average 2-4 CMDs per firing. Constant retooling and upgrading by the Cochran Foundation means that the value of the CMD is almost always in flux, which is just one reason why it’s not an officially recognized unit of measurement.

CODSpace – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by other branches of the U.S. armed forces or English speaking foreign militarizes.

ComODS – Slang term for the U.S. Combined Orbital/Deep Space forces (see below), primarily used by people within that branch of service and the media.

downwell – Refers to moving towards the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Downwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving towards the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to towards one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of upwell (see below).

Exo – Pronounced like the letters “X” and “O”. This refers to an atmospherically sealed suit built around a self propelled exoskeleton that allows people to move and work more effectively in super low pressure environments. They range from simple exoskeletons that give a person enough strength to move components massing twice as much as they do to complex armored weapons of war used by soldiers in low microgravity combat.

hash – Refers to an area where gravity’s effect on spacetime distorts it to the extent a tesseract drive can no longer create folded space. This is usually found in the center of a gravity well such as that created by a planet or a Hawking reactor (see below). Gets its name from the way the relevant space is hashed out on most realtime space charts.

Hawking reactor – A method of generating power created some sixty years ago and widely accepted by humanity, a Hawking reactor uses Unified Field Theory to create a microscopic flux in spacetime – essentially creating a miniature black hole. It then harvests the resulting Hawking radiation to create power. Physicists assure the public that black hole evaporation will prevent these singularities from ever becoming true black holes and that they vanish even if the reactor is not shut down safely, but some people view them with a large measure of distrust regardless.

McGee – US ComODS slang for microgravity (see below).

MGI – MicroGravity Infantry, refers to a ComODS branch that specializes in fighting ship to ship, repelling boarders, boarding and seizing hostile ships and making space to planet assaults. The last doesn’t technically take place in microgravity but the name still makes more sense as calling a fighting force in space Marines…

microgravity – Refers to regions of space where no large stellar object, like a planet or a moon, is close enough to produce gravity noticeable to humans. The effects of an object’s gravity never really disappear, they just become so minuscule as to be meaningless, hence the term microgravity is usually preferred to zero gravity, even though they are functionally the same in most cases.

rad cloud – The heavily concentration of stars near the galactic center, a place widely considered too dangerous for exploratory work, much less colonization.

spacetime – Refers to a mathematical construct that unifies space and time for the ease of higher mathematical functions.

tesseract drive – A method of “propulsion” that folds two distant points in spacetime together and allows a vessel to pass from one to the other in effectively no time at all. The “speed” a space vessel can reach is only determined by how much distance can be covered in a single folding of spacetime and how quickly its generators can recharge the drive and repeat the process. Tesseract drives have existed for nearly one and a half centuries but that doesn’t mean they’re trusted technology. The fact that process of folding spacetime leaves it distorted for several minutes or even hours afterward, to the point that a ship cannot tesser again until it “clears it’s own hash (see above),” is frequently used as an argument that the technology might be permanently damaging spacetime in ways not yet understood.

Unified Field Theory – Often shortened to UFT. A mathematical system that has succeeded in relating three of the four “universal forces” in quantum physics, namely gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force continues to resist physicists efforts to bring it into the theory with the other three. UFT serves as the foundation for many modern technologies, including artificial gravity, tesseract drives and the Hawking reactors that feed it all.

United States Combined Orbital/Deep Space Forces –  The branch of the U.S. Military charged with securing the spacelanes and defending U.S. Exoplanetary States and Territories from foreign threats. Considers itself the most powerful vacuum-ready fighting force in existence, although the British and Indian space arms both have their own thoughts on that.

upwell – Refers to moving away from the center of a gravity well or magnetic field. Usually attached to a descriptor if there are multiple large gravity wells or magnetic sources in the area. “Upwell Jupiter,” for example, means, “I am moving away from the surface of Jupiter” as opposed to away from one of the gas giant’s major moons. The opposite of downwell (see above).

So there you go. You’re probably not ready to jump in and navigate the space lanes just yet, but at least if you wind up frozen in a block of ice and get thawed out three hundred years in the future you’ll be prepared to talk the talk, if not walk the walk. Best of luck!

Genrely Speaking: Thrillers

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we discuss what we mean when we reference genres in discussions at Nate Chen Publications. While others may disagree with the way genres are defined here they’re often so poorly defined as to be open to a great deal of interpretation, one of the reasons why I started this little feature in the first place.

Today’s topic is thrillers, a characteristic genre, and one that’s become more and more popular as modern storytelling techniques have evolved. Thrillers need almost no introduction as we’ve all seen or read more than one or two, but in addition to defining the goal of Genrely Speaking is to analyze and help develop a deeper appreciation for what genres have to offer writers. So let’s take a look at this popular genre, shall we?

  1. Thrillers deal with immediate and visceral threats to the wellbeing of the central character. Which is to say, they are always games of life and death. Whether it’s the life of the central character or someone they care about or the lives of everyone in a city or planet, thrillers are always playing for keeps. They offer simple, straight forward threats to the protagonist even though the solutions to those problems are almost never simple.
  2. Thrillers feature focused and tense pacing that leaves the audience little time to see far beyond the immediate danger to the character. While the narrative still varies it’s pacing (at least in well constructed thrillers) it never really lets the audience forget that the characters are facing dire threats. There may be romantic or comedic interludes but the threat to the characters is always nagging away in the back of the audience’s mind. Incidentally this is a major reason so many thrillers impose time limits of some sort on their protagonists. It helps give the narrative that urgency.
  3. Thrillers keep the audience guessing. Whether it’s about how the characters will pull off what they’re planning, or how their plan will go wrong, or who the traitor in the group is, every thriller has at least one mystery that will persist through ninety percent of the story, from very early on until the very climax of the narrative. While every story has some kind of mystery to it thrillers need big, attention grabbing ones that will hold an audience for the bulk of the time they’re engaged.

What are the weaknesses of thrillers? Well, for starters they’re really popular and they engage well with human psychology so a lot of them tend to get made and that creates two problems. First, originality starts to dwindle quickly. A successful thriller gets made and people follow the pack. That happens to an extent with any kind of success and not just in writing or entertainment. The bigger problem, for writers, is that in thrillers it’s the execution that makes them great and not the characters or the trappings of the plot. Unfortunately when people knock off thrillers they tend to copy the characters or the plot and not deliver the tight, gripping pacing needed to really make a thriller work. They bungle foreshadowing and ruin the mystery, fail to make the danger to the protagonists feel imminent or just can’t get the pacing right and everything feels off.

Second, thrillers are vulnerable to fridge logic – even very good writers can get so caught up in the excitement of their story they don’t see plot holes coming or, worse, they cross their fingers and hope the audience won’t notice. In the Internet age that’s a pipe dream. Discovering you accidentally gutted your magnum opus with a stray plot thread is no fun but it won’t be nearly as bad as the roasting your audience will give you when they catch you out on it. Always write with care, but that goes double for thrillers.

What are the strengths of thrillers? If one of the greatest weaknesses of thrillers is fridge logic and fridge horrors one of their greatest strengths is fridge brilliance. The moment when your audience is frying up eggs and suddenly clicks together all the little hints you left behind in your story and realizes, “Oh, he was the protagonist’s father!” Or, “That dirty information broker was playing both sides!” Or even, “She was in love with him and that’s why she sacrificed herself!”

Of course many thrillers won’t trust their audiences that far and will just brain them over the head with whatever thing the author wants them to walk away with. But when a creator takes the time and care to hide all the clues but makes sure that you’re too wrapped up in the main story to pick up on them the moment of realization after the fact almost always as much greater impact than simply having it spelled out in the story for you.

Of course the ultimate strength of a thriller is it’s ability to grab the audience and run with them. It’s human nature to want to know, it’s human nature to empathize and it’s human nature to want to come out on top. By giving us a protagonist who feel a very visceral threat we can empathize with, who we want to see come out on top, and then keep us guessing as to how it all happens, the thriller offers a solid formula for keeping the audience with you every step of the way. You have to execute the formula correctly, but then that’s true of any set of instructions. In short, the thriller is just plain good at getting and keeping your audience.

At first glance thrillers do not feel terribly exotic, although that is in no small part because they tend to stand on their own rather than be combined with an aesthetic genre. Part of that is simply because the pacing makes the world building aesthetic genres want much harder to do. But also, aesthetic genres tend to put a little more emphasis on characters and plot elements, things thrillers don’t particularly need to be effective.

But that doesn’t mean the thriller is a narrow genre. On the contrary, no other genre demands more from the author in terms of pacing and careful plot construction. Studying thrillers carefully will help you to master those aspects better and maybe one day you’ll be able to blend a thriller with your favorite aesthetic and make a new genre of your own.

Everybody’s a critic

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So criticism is good for you, whether it’s criticism of your work or someone else’s. The next logical question is, what critics provide useful feedback? There’s a lot of critics out there, ranging  from Michiko Kakutani, literarian extrodinair, to Noah Antweiler, the Spoony One. What are their relative values and weaknesses?

Well, in short, it really depends on what kind of aspect of a work you want to examine.

In general, highly literary critics are going to grapple with issues like theme and symbolism. Many works are crammed full of tiny subtleties that are all designed to point the audience to a single conclusion about a work, many of them so subtle or so vague that the audience either misses them or isn’t sure what to make of them. When you add in creators who add symbolism without bothering to consult with an expert on what it’s supposed to mean (I say this with tongue firmly in cheek) or who add symbolism for the express purpose of muddying the waters, it’s easy to wonder how much value there is to reading that kind of highly literary criticism.

The answer is, a lot. As I’ve said before, many creators are building their stories with all the care of a master jewel thief planning one final heist. Careful examination of that kind of work is definitely beneficial. But all but the most patient and painstaking minds will find that it grows dull after a while (and not a long while at that). I try to read one or two works of serious literary criticism a year – currently I’m working through “Reading Joss Whedon,”edited by Wilcox, Cochran, Masson and Lavery. Also, this is the kind of criticism you only tend to get from books and journals, the kinds of things it’s better to get from a library (cheap) or dedicated research database (expensive) than try and dredge up online, so access to it is not as easy as the next kind.

You see, below literary criticism but above the layman’s criticism is the criticism you get from people who spend a lot of time exploring stories and have become experts on narrative structure and examining the craft of writing. We’ll call this semi-literary criticism. There’s a lot of people out there these days that dabble in this kind of criticism. Already mentioned are reviewers like Kakutani (who I believe has done some true literary criticism as well) and Noah Antweiler (who has done no literary criticism and has the motto “Because bad movies and games deserve to be hurt back!”)

While Spoony can be both excitable and crass he does put a lot of thought into his critiques and takes the time to thoroughly, sometimes too thoroughly, explore his points. It might be tempting to write him off, since he doesn’t have any background education in writing or film, but the fact is you don’t really need much beyond reading comprehension and a nose for lazy writing to be a good semi-literary critic and Spoony has both in spades. Spoony has examined the plots of a number of video games as well. While that’s still kind of useful for a hardcore writer many of his critiques are not going to translate to other mediums directly.

Doug Walker, The Nostalgia Critic, is a movie critic and leading member of the League of Super Critics and his work is very good. While he is a movie critic first, and thus addresses issues such as the strengths of an actors performance or the technical level of a film’s cinematography, there’s still more than enough said in his typical review about plot and characterization to inform attentive writers watching his work.

There’s very few to no video reviews or podcasts for written fiction that I know of – Linkara’s Atop the Fourth Wall for comic books on Channel Awesome, liked with the Nostalgia Critic above, coming the closest that I can think of – but a good way to find in-depth analysis of a book is to hit up Goodreads. I don’t recommend doing this with a book you love as the Internet has absolutely no regard for the things you love and that will probably hurt. But if you had a title you thought was mediocre, chances are the people on Goodreads have analyzed why it’s lousy or not lousy six ways from Sunday and there’s a lot you can learn from reading that kind of thing.

And, of course, I have also dabbled in semi-literary criticism right here, and hope to continue doing so for a long time.

So we come full circle back to you. Yes, you too should indulge in criticism. The more criticism you read the sharper you mind should become and the sharper and more insightful your abilities to pick apart writing and analyze it should become. Practice it as much as possible on your own so when you disagree with other critics you’ll be equipped to talk about why. Who knows, you might eventually be able to make your living as a literary critic yourself! Don’t worry, we won’t hold it against you if you do.

Criticism

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No, not the kind where some rude jerk on the Internet comes along and tells you that you’re worthless. We’re talking about the kind of criticism where some rude jerk in a highly respected literary publication comes along and tells you you’re worthless.

When I was in college, earning that Journalism degree, there was a lot of criticism to be read and I learned something very interesting from it – critics can take any word from any part of speech and turn it into a noun describing a literary phenomenon, thus proving that Whedonspeak is a real literary concept. Literary criticism is also a real thing and a useful tool for the aspiring writer. Why? Well, there’s a lot of reasons. The simplest and most straightforward is that literary criticism, for all that it is sometimes pretentious and frequently boring, is one of the densest, most insightful and useful breakdowns of what stories are and why they work an author will find.

Yes, it can be very uncomfortable to have a total stranger submit your own works to that level of scrutiny. Eventually, that level of criticism will be useful to you (assuming anyone ever decides to try it) but in the mean time there’s no reason not to read criticism of other authors. You see, even if the things you read about don’t apply directly to your story you can still get tips that give great insight into how you might improve your own writing process.

Here are a few things that literary criticism is good for:

  • Criticism lets you get another’s perspective. And not just any other person’s a literary expert’s opinion (well, maybe an expert maybe just a shmoe on the Internet). While literary experts are like all other people, armed with subjective opinions and fallible intellects (but don’t tell them I said that), there’s one thing they have that most other people don’t – a vast amount of experience with literature. Simply by reading huge amounts of fiction one can start to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. While some experts will approach any work of fiction looking to plaster their own agenda all over it most are simply trying to break a story down and see if it stands on its own merits. Which brings us to…
  • Criticism shows you the shortcomings of a piece. Every writer makes mistakes, even Stephen King. Criticism carefully examines every aspect of those mistakes and paints them in neon colors so they will be easier for you to recognize. Really understand the mistake, whatever it was and regardless of whether you think it applies to you, and you’ll quickly come to grasp how to avoid it. Even if you’re already aware that the aspect of the work under discussion was a mistake you may still learn new things about what went wrong or how to correct it.
  • Criticism shows you the strengths of a piece. Writers are very good at writing great stuff but they don’t always stop to explain how they did it. Sometimes they can’t always articulate how they did it clearly and understandably. Sometimes the critics can’t either. But when they do they highlight every part of those successes as clearly as they do with mistakes. While plagiarism is bad, understanding what works in what is good is the first step to making something good yourself.
  • Criticism shows you the context of a piece. This is especially true of works that are more then ten or fifteen years old. Even if you were alive and reading at that time there may have been aspects of culture, the author’s life or the publishing industry they worked in that you were not aware of. This provides better understanding for what did not work, what did work and what only worked because of the piece’s context. There are often layers of nuance that even a very perceptive lay reader will not catch simply because they have not done the legwork that the professional critic does. Rather than do all that legwork yourself, let the critic do it. That’s why they get paid, after all.
  • Criticism provides a language for discussion. Critics do a lot of Whedonspeak for a reason. They need to reduce their concepts to a useful shorthand and do so without hesitation. Like in many industries there’s a lot of jargon to be learned (and it’s not always picked up quickly) but if you read enough criticism then you to can begin to work through these concepts in a much more convenient shorthand. So long as you do this to smooth discussion along and not to be a snob this is a great bonus!

Yes, as the name implies literary criticism has a tendency to be a little negative. But that’s only because that’s the only way to get all the positives! Criticism is the heart and soul of discussing writing – you don’t have to have a degree in literature to provide useful commentary on themes, character or plot. You just have to sit down at the table and remember that not everyone will agree with you. So find three or four critics to keep track of and read up (or watch or listen in) on what they’ve said and start gleaning those tips and considering those opinions. It’s not as good as having a dedicated editor looking over your shoulder – but in some ways it’s the next best thing and frequently it provides benefits an editor can’t.

Adaptations: Values Dissonance

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What is values dissonance? This article from TV Tropes does a great job explaining it in long form (really long form if you wind up wiki walking) but the short version is, values dissonance is what happens when the structure and/or aesthetic choices of a work are presenting themes that fight against each other. It doesn’t always mean that values are directly opposed, but there’s only so much space in a given work (and the mind of the audience) for each story. When the themes of a story are too many or just don’t work well together it creates values dissonance.

The phenomena of values dissonance occurs most often when a story is a collaboration or an adaptation and the various parties involved don’t agree on what the major theme or purpose of the work should be. This doesn’t always have to be an open disagreement, they may just be trying to fit all their shared ideas into a package that isn’t equipped to deal with them or, as is often the case in adaptations, they may just have too much respect for the original work to want to change “sacred writ” and just try and shoehorn their own ideas into a story. And, of course, it can be any possible combination of those things plus any other number of circumstances such as studio/publisher interference or just not having enough time to work everything out.

What I want to talk about today is not values dissonance per se as it is adaptations and what makes them so difficult. It just so happens that the number one killer of adaptations in my personal opinion is values dissonance.

But wait! You say that I recently did another post on adaptations where I explicitly said thematic material was changed resulting in an adapted work that was just as good as the original, if not better? You’re right, I did. Edge of Tomorrow made huge thematic shifts to the story of All You Need is Kill. But more importantly, it then carefully extrapolated those thematic shifts to every aspect of the film, transforming characters, dialog, situations and plot to fit while, at the same time, producing a visually arresting film with a solid plot that would be more comprehensible than the original to it’s target audience.

Reread that sentence a few times. It boils down what the scriptwriting and production team did over the course of a year or so to it’s bare basics, the execution was much more complex – and that was not a simple sentence to begin with. Edge of Tomorrow was a phenomenal success in adapting a book to screen in part because it was so conscious of the changes it was making and their impact on the work as a whole.

Let’s look at two adaptations of the same famous work that strive to be faithful to the original work. My original urge here was to go with Shakespeare, since he’s pretty well known and his stuff has been translated to screen more than once. Problem is, I’ve only read a few of his plays and I’ve only ever seen them on the stage. Plus, theater translates more readily to film than books, so it might not be the best choice for this purpose. And I didn’t want to bring modern day reinterpretations into the mix, as good as I’m sure West Side Story is.

The solution? Do a work by a different author that has been reinterpreted for the screen more than once which I’m already familiar with in all forms! So today we’re going to be talking about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The two most well known adaptations of Pride and Prejudice are probably the 1995 A&E TV miniseries staring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the 2005 film version staring Keira Knightly and Matthew Macfayden. For purposes of clarity, since both share the same title, we’ll use their years of release to differentiate them.

This is not a review of Pride and Prejudice so I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the work – and I’ll wait if you need to go out and read/watch it before we continue. It really is worth your time, as all Austen’s work is, although I think my favorite adaptation of her work will always be Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility. (Yes, even though there’s no Colin Firth. Though Mr. Darcy is still my favorite male character of hers, largely due to Firth’s superior performance.)

Most of the caveats of my last post apply here as well – this isn’t about actors or costuming or any of that other stuff, just the way the story is presented.

So let’s get down to brass tacks! There’s three categories where I feel the 2005 version suffers from values dissonance which results in the film being slightly weaker than the 1995 miniseries. And they are:

Elizabeth Bennet 

Our main character. In both versions and the book Lizzie is a woman of solid upbringing, good character and strange family. With four sisters and eccentric parents Lizzie is bound to be something of a character herself but fortunately it manifests in nothing more damaging than strong opinions and the guts to stick by them, generally admirable character traits. But Lizzie’s strengths are often her weaknesses and her tendency in the story to make snap judgments about a person and then carry them forward causes her to misjudge the characters of Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham in spite of mounting evidence that contradicts her opinions.

Elizabeth is the perfect flawed protagonist for a morality play. She’s a great person, much better than many people we know, in just bout every respect but one – her tendency towards prejudice. This, much like Mr. Darcy’s high regard for his own station in life, leads her to bad behavior that causes her grief, first in failing to recognize Mr. Darcy’s good qualities beneath his antisocial behavior and second in failing to recognize Mr. Wickham’s caddishness under his guise of geniality.

Austen very carefully shows Lizzie’s brilliance in a number of ways. She spars with the dour and acerbic Catherine de Bourgh in a way that is both meticulously formal and correct but still slyly irreverent and witty. We can tell she isn’t intimidated by this so-called personage before her but rather confident in her own position and more than capable to use the mores of the times as both shield from Lady Catherine’s attacks and sword to prod the lady back into place.

While the 1995 version largely keeps this dynamic (something of a theme for this version) the 2005 version chooses to have Lizzie react in a more defiant fashion, more directly putting Lady Catherine in her place. While this is a very modern and fully understandable reaction it’s very modernity puts Lizzie at odds with the rest of the story. It creates values dissonance between her and the rest of the characters, including her own romantic interest and, at times, her own character.

Worse, the 2005 version chooses to focus on the reaction Elizabeth and her family have towards Mr. Darcy’s handling of Lydia’s elopement as the catalyst for their changing opinions of him when, in truth, it was Lizzie’s realization that she had misjudged Wickham that caused her to reevaluate all her other snap judgments in Austen’s book. Only when confronted with her own character flaw could she begin adjusting her understanding to take it into account. (In Lizzie’s own words, “Until that moment I never knew myself.”) Where the 2005 Lizzie is carried away by an emotion of gratitude the 1995 Lizzie can say that she has come to know and appreciate Darcy’s character better. One of these is engaging character growth the other is pure sentiment.

(That’s not a contrast, by the way. Engaging character growth creates sentiment, the reverse is only true at times – and those times are pretty rare. When sentiment from character growth and plain old sentiment compete, the former always wins out because it’s founded on something solid.)

Themes of Class Warfare 

This is one of modern Hollyweird’s favorite themes and at first glance it seems a natural fit. After all, there is a sort of class difference between Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, isn’t there? Well, sort of.

As Elizabeth tells Lady Catherine, “He is a gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter.” Or, in other words, the difference is one of degree rather than one of kind. Darcy’s own feelings of superiority to the Bennets come from his feeling that he is better behaved than they are when Lizzie serves to show that he is just as offputting in his own way. The problem is not that there is a difference in wealth but rather in how people react to one another, difference in wealth being just one aspect of that (embodied not by the main protagonists but by the relatively minor character Catherine de Bourgh.)

This isn’t to say that class conflict never occurs or that it has no place at the storyteller’s table. Neither is true. But it wasn’t the story Austen was trying to tell nor is it something that seems to have even been on her radar. Pride and Prejudice was a story of self discovery amidst social mores with romance as the result of the journey. Romance was not the cause of self discovery nor did the process cut across the standards of the time (much). This was in part because that was the time and in part because Austen was writing about the life she knew, a strong trait in an author. The introduction of class warfare as a theme creates values dissonance between Austen’s original work and the 2005 version that is sidestepped in the 1995 version by, again, hewing to the original story. Granted it’s not much, but both works were of good quality and so ever little shortcoming shows.

Treatment of the Bennet Family 

Let’s be honest – this is not a fully functional family in any version of the story. However Austen’s version and the 1995 version portray this largely as a result of the parents being less than ideal. While funny and intellectual, Mr. Bennet is also condescending and a little mean to his younger three daughters. He feels they lack sense but never seems to try and teach it to them, even though it is clearly his opinion (and that of most everyone else who knows her) that they will not learn sense from their mother.

And Mrs. Bennet… lacks sense. Sense of people, sense of propriety, sense of the moment, just about every kind of sense it’s possible for a person to have, Mrs. Bennet is without.

Never the less, the Bennets are a whole unit, supporting one another as best they can in all eventualities and forming a tightly knit family that stands in stark contrast to the nearly-solitary Mr. Darcy who, although born to excellent parents, now has no family to speak of save a much younger sister who he is in no position to confide in. It is in part the contrast between this family with its grudging solidarity and Mr. Darcy’s aloofness that leads to his own process of self discovery.

In praise of the 2005 version almost all of these family dynamics are left in place… except one. As Lizzie’s relationships with Wickham and Darcy become more twisted she lets the secrets pile up as well, rather than confiding in her sister Jane and thus giving herself an impartial mirror to view herself, in as well as cutting herself off from the support that so mystifies Mr. Darcy. In short, she behaves like a teenager of the modern day, once again creating values dissonance between the supportive Elizabeth, who fights for Jane’s happiness as well as her own, and the much more self absorbed character portrayed by Keira Knightly. On top of that, it runs counter to the original them of self discovery that permeates Austen’s original work, as Lizzie has fewer ways to see herself clearly since she has no one she can trust to give her an outside view of herself.

Now it’s not my intention to sit here and bash on the work of Deborah Moggach and Joe Wright in creating the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice. What they did was very impressive from beginning to end. The things I’ve pointed out aren’t the most important details of the story. But at the same time the difference between good and great, a strong impression and just vaguely memorable, is frequently in those details. Adapting a work, particularly a well known and popular work, only adds to the difficulty of getting all those details right because there’s an added layer of complexity, namely audiences already expecting certain things from your adaptation.

Where Edge of Tomorrow prospered was in completely reimagining the original premise, whereas the 2005 Pride and Prejudice (and so many other similar movies) stumbled when it tried to shoehorn in viewpoints that didn’t mesh with the story they originally set out to tell without that level of reimagining to make the new material work.

Genrely Speaking: Aesthetics and Characteristics

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So I promised to talk about Aesthetic and Characteristic genres today. For starters, so far as I know, this is not any official literary distinction; it’s just something I’ve noticed as I spent the last year or so working on this segment and started organizing the genres I’ve covered into something like a comprehensive list. So what exactly prompted me to start breaking genres into two groups?

Well, basically it was the fact that genres get mixed and matched a lot. “Scifi thriller” or “paranormal romance” just to name a few. Look at either of those and you can break them into component parts. The scifi in the first is usually some kind of space opera or maybe just twenty minutes in the future hard scifi. The thriller is something else (that is not related to Michael Jackson.) Paranormal probably means urban fantasy while romance is well… romance. Each of these “genres” is actually two genres – one governing the aesthetics and themes of the story, the other governing the kinds of characters we see and the pacing and focus of the actual plot.

While on the one hand you can mix and match aesthetic and characteristic genres you can’t really combine two aesthetic or characteristic genres. Take the detective story and the police procedural, for example. Each of those genres demands totally different focuses for character development and plot structure. Likewise you can’t combine steampunk, with it’s heavy emphasis on progress and examining the standards of society, with the high fantasy themes of upholding law, rightful rulers and the destruction of the depraved – or you could, but your story would be jumbled, confused and lacking in impact.

Unlike the genres themselves, these protogroupings (ur-groupings?) have no real pros or cons. It’s just another way to take the expectations of your audience and your literary form and analyze them. I’ve been wondering if I should even bother making the distinction here on the blog since it adds so little to how I look at them – but then, there’s no telling what the Internet will make of things so there is that.

One of the most interesting things about aesthetic and characteristic genres is that they can stand on their own just fine. Thriller is a perfectly serviceable genre without adding scifi or paranormal overtones to it. So are hard scifi, space opera, detective stories, you name it. The whole point of fiction is to give us a reflection of real life with which we can form a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world. If there’s one particular part you want to focus on without wasting time building up added layers of complexity, go for it. That’s a real strength for a writer and you should not shy away from it. Genres are tools for understanding, not requirements of it.

So write whatever you want. But if you’re having trouble getting your themes focused or your characters to flow the way you want them don’t hesitate to use genres to help you find focus. That’s a big part of what they’re there for.

Sliding Scales: Idealism and Cynacism

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Let’s talk about verisimilitude, or how believable your story is. In general, a story has more verisimilitude the more it resembles real life and the more verisimilitude a story has the better and more timeless it becomes. As you might have guessed by the title of this post, we’re going to look at a particular aspect of verisimilitude, in particular the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism.

Let’s just get this out of the way now: I hate this scale.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk before about how such and such a book/TV show/movie is so dark and how they love it and isn’t it great that we get all this dark stuff these days. I generally pick something epically ridiculous (current favorite: I, Frankenstein) and agree, since that was such a dark piece of work it’s truly noteworthy.

I get into a lot of arguments this way.

Now don’t misunderstand. The sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism exists for a reason. In the eighties and nineties it was pretty much against the rules to produce anything that left a bad taste in the mouth at any point in the story. It’s not clear if this was some kind of backlash against ubercynical works like Apocalypse Now or if there was just some kind of natural cycle at work in the entertainment industry, but the result was a selection of very, very idealized entertainment.

This doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. Shows like Family Matters or GI Joe live on in our hearts because they were very entertaining and well done. But they lacked something very important, something very vital to human nature. They lacked the kinds of persistent, sometimes very draining and always challenging difficulties that everyone faces in life. (No, Cobra Commander does not count.)

No one was addicted to anything unhealthy, even vices as harmless as overeating tended to be dealt with in the course of a single episode. Family problems were solved equally quickly and issues like not having a family were either ignored or glossed over with a bucket of industrial varnish and a heavy handed brush. It was an era of sitcoms, easy fixes and loads and loads of camp.

And because entertainment of that age lacked the serious challenges of life, it lacked verisimilitude.

It’s hard to pin down an exact turning point but you’ll find that by the early 2000s entertainment was dealing with these things in depth much more frequently. TV series like 24 were beginning to look at large, persistent problems that were not going to simply go away in an episode or even a season. Lost became a phenomenon in spite of presenting more questions than answers. Themes were getting, as many would put it, darker and grittier. There was a cultural trend, they would say, to putting more darkness into stories and thus making them better.

Which is total garbage, of course, and I’m getting to the why next week, but right now we’re looking at the sliding scale so let’s stick to that. Here’s the thing about the sliding scale – it makes you think that you can’t have both idealism and cynicism in one story. This is untrue and I will prove it using one of the most beloved TV series of all time.

I’m talking, of course, about MASH. If you’re not familiar with this series and its characters, a summary is far outside the scope of this post. But the odds are good you at least know that MASH stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, that the TV show is set during the Korean War and that it was, on its surface, a sitcom. So shouldn’t this be a case of a campy, idealistic show?

Yes, it kind of should. Should being the key word.

You see, as you watch MASH you’ll probably pick up all kinds of witty things to say, comebacks to use yourself and hilarious sight gags that will make you chuckle for days. But you’ll also remember the haunted looks of doctors who lost another patient, thousand yard stares of soldiers who’ve been to the front and the seemingly endless parade of wounded who you really never know anything about.

MASH is embodied by Hawkeye Pierce, the brilliant surgeon with the incredible regard for human life and unshaken hatred for the war who, at the same time, is an alcoholic, shallow, borderline misogynistic womanizer – most of the time. We see him at his best and his worst and the show never stints on either one. Interestingly enough, MASH was a sitcom but it grew to be as popular as it did because the comedy of every day life was contrasted with the extraordinary tragedy of war.

While it might be an exaggeration to call many of the difficulties most people face “tragedy” at least when compared to the shock and harm of life during and after war, what draws people to the story and characters of MASH is the honesty in presenting the characters. By the middle of the show’s run all one note characters are gone from the cast and in the next five seasons show them at their best and worst. It’s not idealized – but it’s certainly not cynical, either.

Perhaps it’s best described as honest.

So what can a storyteller learn from MASH and its honesty? Well, that’s something for next week, I think.

Language, Language

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If you’ve read this Monday’s short story you may have noticed that Dmitri uses the term “Palatinus” to refer to the high ranking official he turns his case over to once his work is done. I have to admit, I was leery of using this term for reasons that are at once very simple and very complex. But before I can talk about that, I need to step back and admit something about the way Dmitri talks and his home in Terra Eternal.

If you’ve read the two stories I’ve done on Dmitri – Monday’s and this one from last summer – along with the Terra Eternal world building posts – here and here – you’ve probably realized that Terra Eternal speaks a language with heavy Latin influences. I made this choice for very simple reasons. Generally, when you’re telling a story, it’s best to give the audience what they expect.

Yeah, sure, you can defy expectations but if its not something that’s central to your story then your failure to live up to them will just be a distraction. Popular culture today associates Latin with magic and fantasy, elements that are central to the ethos of Terra Eternal. Yes, I could have made up a bunch of words of magic, people do that all the time when building fantasy worlds. But part of the schtick is that Terra Eternal isn’t a totally different world, it’s another version of our world. The Endless Horizons are really just echoes of the same world with fundamentally similar people in superficially different circumstances. It’s logical that the languages would be similar as well.

In fact, Sophers that study language in Terra Eternal work by this principle. All the languages they’ve encountered fall into one of sixteen different groups based on the basic rules of sound and grammar involved. These groups are called phonemes (a real word I’ve given a different meaning, another part of writing in this setting) and most public officials like Dmitri understand the basics of at least two of them – their native phoneme and the First phoneme, which is the Latin equivalent of the Throneworlds. The only things that really vary from world to world is vocabulary and pronunciation. Barriers, to be sure, but not as insurmountable as entire different languages.

This is why terms like Regulus, Praetorian and Century are scattered liberally through stories about Terra Eternal. While an empire that touches all or part of fifty two worlds is bound to wind up with a melting pot of a language, and Terra Eternal has stolen a plethora of terms from other cultures as they were assimilated, the bones of the First phoneme is Latin in nature.

That brings me to palatines. I’ve mentioned once or twice that I work in a Genealogy department and one category of records we have is an index of palatines who came to America. When I started there I’d never heard the term before but I quickly learned from context that palatines were some kind of high born people and the word had a good ring to it, so when I started building Terra Eternal I was thinking of using it as a term for a high ranking official. But I wasn’t sure what kind of official they should be so I started doing some research into the term and I discovered I had heard the word before, just with a different pronunciation.

You see, most fantasy geeks would spell it paladin.

Palatines were officials in many European courts, but the most powerful of them was probably Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. Some poet wrote a verse about who twelve of these palatines, the Peers of the Realm, and their great feats upholding the empire and this later became the archetype for the holy warrior, made mighty by his devotion to truth, justice and righteousness. I’m not sure whether the spelling was changed deliberately or accidentally but over time this particular meaning became associated with the spelling paladin until Gary Gygax basically enshrined it with his Dungeons and Dragons role playing game.

So what’s this all mean?

Basically, I’d adopted a linguistic conceit, that the powerful, magic-driven culture spoke a Latin-based language because it was what the audience would tend to expect. But the word palatine was closely associated with the idea of holy warriors by that same audience and that was a concept I wanted to avoid focusing on with Terra Eternal. On the flip side, palatine was a real word with concrete meaning and that’s a resource that shouldn’t be quickly cast aside. I wanted most of the basic social structure of Terra Eternal, the empire’s superstructure if not the local governments, to have Latin terminology and palatine was a part of that. But I didn’t want to give false impressions either – the palatines are just high level bureaucrats, not holy warriors.

Looking back on it the answer should have been obvious but as is so often the case it took me a while to get there. The actual Latin word is palatinus, which is different enough from paladin that I didn’t think confusion was likely. And that is how the character of Palatinus Sollenberg came to have his title and I came to wish that I’d chosen some other language for the basis of an interdimensional empire.

Like sign language.

The lesson for today? Worldbuilding has a lot more to it than you’d ever expect.

Genrely Speaking: Alternate History

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking! Unless, of course, this is your first encounter with this running gag feature, in which case welcome! Genrely Speaking is where we look at genres, those loosely defined groups of literature that, in theory, frame any discussion about fiction we care to have. Since it’s important to understand what is meant by any given genre – or more specifically what any given person means when they talk about a genre – I’ve taken it upon myself to go through most of the genres I read and talk about and define them for your convenience!

Today’s subject is alternate history (or Harry Turtledove) a genre that skirts around scifi territory but really isn’t. While both are, in one way or another, about human ideas, alternate history does its best to stay within the bounds of, y’know, historical events. You can tell you’re dealing with historical fiction if the following things are present:

  1. A framework of familiar history. While some works of historical fiction can wind up very, very far afield (coughHarryTurtledovecough) they almost always begin with a distinct jumping off point, a moment in history that readers will already be familiar with or can become familiar with in fairly short order. For example, the novel Days of Infamy begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Guns of the South begins in 1864, just as the Confederacy’s decline began to pick up speed.
  2. One huge difference. This is the alternate part. In order to be alternate history, something must be different from what we knew. Some writers will try and find the smallest possible thing they can change and still make an interesting story but usually it’s pretty big. In Days of Infamy the Japanese follow up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Hawaii. Guns of the South tells how Robert E. Lee actually manages to win the war.
  3. A careful and thoughtful examination of what might actually result if these things had been changed. Some of these can grow to absurd lengths. The complete breakdown of Guns of the South ran through four books, including the original, at a minimum. I haven’t read all of them, trying to hunt down all of Harry Turtledove’s work is an mammoth task.

What are the weaknesses of alternate history? There’s a lot of them. It can come off as dry, particularly if the author is trying to run down and explore all or just most of the fallout of whatever his big idea is. Like many scifi or scifi related genres, alternate history is in danger of drowning under the weight of its own ideas. It shows how invested the author is in his story but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s well told.

Worse, it can drown in its own scope and size. Alternate history authors tend to look at the big and the bold, not the small and the mundane. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that once you change one thing about history the changes snowball until your reader can feel lost and confused. Particularly since people who read this genre tend to be familiar with history already… and thus the new details can get mixed up with the old.

Finally, you see a lot of historical figures creep up in alternate history. Which is fine, but if not meticulously researched and carefully done they can come of not feeling quite right, or worse like a caricature of themselves rather than a real person. Granted, that’s all you can really get from reading a book – but the audience shouldn’t feel like that while they’re reading the book

What are the strengths of alternate history? Well for starters “what if” is one of the most basic questions of human existence, right up there with “why”, and everyone likes to try and answer it. Furthermore, “what if such-and-such had happened” is one of the most common forms of that question, whether it’s in regard to something stupid we’ve done or something stupid someone else has done. So obviously stories that revolve around  just that question are going to interest us.

Secondly, there’s a lot of room for controversy in how a person chooses to answer that question. The people who read a lot of alternate history are also the type of people to have reams of facts to draw on to test the author’s conclusions and will get a kick out of doing it. And then getting on the Internet and rehashing it with everyone they know and thousands of people they don’t. And they will do this at length and in excruciating detail.

While some of them may need a job, a girlfriend or some other aspect of a life they are lacking, they are an impassion fanbase and there’s nothing that will propel the growth and maturation of a genre like an enthusiastic group of people telling you what you did right and what you did wrong (but mostly the latter.)

Alternate history, like many scifi based or scifi related genres, is still young. But it’s also rapidly expanding its appeal and maturing. Sure, sometimes the plots are flat or unbelievable but scifi was the same way a hundred years ago and now… well, now its at least not as bad as it was.

Alternate history is a genre to watch, not only because its fun and interesting, not only because it’s changing from a genre just starting out to a genre that is starting to demand a place of its own in literary circles, but because reading it makes people more interested in real history, and trying to figure out the details of what they just read. What was based on real history? What did the author make up? To answer those questions they’ll learn more about their own past and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Adaptations: Kill/Edge

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The subject of turning a book into a movie is one fraught with strong feelings. It happens a lot. Some of the most anticipated movies of the last year (and the year to come) are based on books. But it never fails that something gets left out, some character gets left on the cutting room floor, you name it. There’s a lot to the process of adapting a book and you can never make everyone happy. So it was with some surprise that I learned that the movie Edge of Tomorrow was based on a book.

And not just any book, a Japanese novel called All You Need is Kill. Naturally, I had to see it.

Of course, first I needed to read the book, which took some doing, then I took the time to track down both the graphic novel adaptations. One was a Japanese manga, one was a traditional American graphic novel. Both were extremely faithful to the book, the only real difference was the art style and how much got cut (it wasn’t a whole lot in either version.)

So when I sat down to watch the movie I was kind of weirded out because I knew that it was going to be wildly different. Did I like the movie? Yes, I did. It was a good movie that entertained and said something simply but forcefully about human nature, both good and bad.

This is not a review of the movie, so I’m not going to give you a full length breakdown of the plot or what I liked and didn’t but that’s what I thought in a nutshell. Now I’m going to talk about what I got out of the movie vs. book in terms of adapting fiction for the screen. And, since such things are totally unavoidable in this context be aware:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS 

Let’s look at what changed and why I think it worked.

Okay, obviously a lot changed from book to movie and I do mean countless things, large and small. The appearance of the mimics, the alien menace of the story, was changed from what were basically big green blobs to something that would look more impressive on screen. Keiji Kiriya transformed from a Japanese person to an American and got renamed William Cage (although Keiji does get the nickname “Killer Cage” in the novel so this is not entirely a departure.) Rita Vrataski is now a Brit rather than an American. Things take place in Britain rather than Japan. The troops are on an offensive operation rather than a defensive one. The list goes on.

Mainly, though, I want to look at the big changes and they start off about as big as it gets.

Theme 

Kill is about determination against despair. When Kenji gets trapped in his time loop it wears him down and breaks his spirit until his humanity is dubious at best. Rita pulls him out of it by offering him companionship and a way out but, at the same time, she has to at least suspect that only one of them is getting out of the loop. In the end Kenji escapes but is still alone. His humanity is still very much in question.

But in Edge the theme is much more about courage overcoming fear. A fair argument can be made that Cage fighting with the certain knowledge of a do-over if he fails doesn’t count as real courage but that is exactly why his loosing the power to jump back in time before the final battle is so significant. We see that, even with no safety net, Cage has transformed from a man who flees from what needs to be done to a person who passionately pulls others along in their duties. As Sergeant Ferrell would say, he has been purified in the crucible of glorious combat. He has become more human, more willing to stand by others and sacrifice for them if need be.

More than anything, this thematic change is what lets the film adaptation get away with all the other changes being made. Determination and resolve are a big deal in the East but often Eastern philosophy puts an emphasis on pushing through until you find out what you’re working towards. On the other hand, courage is knowing what you’re working towards and putting aside personal fears in favor of what needs to be done. It’s more universal, easier for American audiences to understand and, perhaps most importantly, healthier for the audience.

Main Character 

Keiji is a raw recruit about to go into his first battle. He’s untested but honest and he knows what needs to be done and fully intends to do it. Over the course of the story he becomes jaded, to the point where he no longer cares whether the people around him live or die. They’ll just come back the next time around, after all. True, meeting Rita gives him renewed purpose for a time but we’re not sure what he’ll be after the close of the story, with Rita gone and the burden of winning the war with the mimics on his shoulders.

Cage, on the other hand, is an Army Major, a ROTC graduate and a man of business. He’s also determined to avoid the front lines if possible – in short, he’s a coward. He learns to fight much like Kenji does, by going through countless iterations of one battle, but to a certain extent it looks like going through the motions. He does change in some ways. Like Kenji he gets colder as he loops, at least for a while, but he also learns more about the people in his unit and what makes them tick. Courage begins then. Sure, it’s Rita who comes along and fans it into a fire but, by the end, Cage is fully on board.

The character of William Cage is where the adaptation really shines. All You Need is Kill tries to be a coming of age story but it leaves us unsure of what the newly minted man is going to look like. But Edge of Tomorrow clearly defines the character at all points along the way – who he was, how he changes and what that man is likely to look like in the future.

Presentation 

In the book much of the iterative nature of the story is told to us. We’re given the framework of the thirtyish hours Keiji lives repeatedly and then the differences are spelled out for us. This is the right call. Prose is one of the clunkiest ways to tell an action oriented story so cutting out as much detail as possible is where you have to start, not where you need to end up.

But Edge of Tomorrow is a movie and it exploits the fact that it can show us five seconds of action four times in only twenty seconds. These rapid replays of events, showing us how Cage is adapting to obstacles, aren’t in the book because they’d just be too clunky but they work for the movie. In them we see Cage doing the same things over and over again in rapid succession to show us how his thinking works, then later we see him working with Rita to set up ever more complex plans, then finally we seem him start referencing events we’ve never seen but we can now clearly tell he’s lived through before. It all culminates when Rita asks, “What do we do now?”

When Cage says, “I don’t know, we’ve never made it this far before!” We laugh because we’ve seen all the meticulous planning happen and we know what happens when Cage reaches the end of it – he goes from a prescient supersoldier to somebody a lot like us. And that means things are getting interesting.

What I like most about seeing a half a dozen slightly different iterations of the same scene is that we can see Cage’s character growth spelled out in his face. He goes from being caught up in his own affairs to aware of the army around him, then his unit particularly and finally his partner Rita in particular. And as he gets more and more used to the idea that he can die he becomes more and more disturbed every time she does…

Ending 

All You Need is Kill doesn’t have a happy ending. Edge of Tomorrow does. There, I said it. Are you happy?

Because I was.

Yes, I get that, unless the main character dies at the end of a book, technically the story isn’t over yet. That means there’s no permanent happy ending to be had because life naturally has ups and downs. But it’s okay to end your story on a moment of triumph. People do get those in life and it is okay to celebrate them.

Keiji never really gets a win in All You Need is Kill. It’s sad, really. He puts in the time and does the work but still comes out behind. Yeah, I know some people think that’s how the world works but if that’s all your story has to tell you then it’s not very useful.

So maybe Edge of Tomorrow is a little pat. Maybe Cage is getting off easy, walking out with the aliens defeated and a legit shot at the girl he’s come to know and love. But you can’t tell me he didn’t earn it. He passed through the crucible and cast off cowardice, he was sure he had no chance to get back and enjoy any of the fruits of his labors and he still chose to suffer and die in the hopes that others might live. And in the end only two other people on the planet would believe his story if he told it. So it’s not like he’s a big shot hero. Just a guy with some unpleasant memories and a shot at a slightly better life.

In the end, All You Need is Kill and Edge of Tomorrow are both about character growth. But the film adaptation took some major gambles in changing the theme and main character to make, not a story better suited to its target audience, but a better story on the whole. And I am of the opinion that they succeeded. Not because they made the protagonist American instead of Japanese, or made his name easier to pronounce, but because they made him a person more worth trying to be like.

In my book, that’s always an improvement.