Science Fiction Backgrounds

To keep things plausible, you may want to take a couple of months and peruse the TV Tropes list of "So You Want To Write A..." links and examine the ones relevant to your science fiction novel/game. Such as:

etc.


For science fiction authors and game designers who need a quick plausible scientific non-obvious background to inspire their next novel, there are one or two in this website. Here is a list of links that will send you directly to them.

Apocalypse
Assorted ways your continent, planet, solar system, galaxy, or entire universe could be destroyed.
Assorted Station cultures
Interesting situations and circumstances for various space stations
Asteroid Belt Athens
How a series of asteroid colonies can spark a Renaissance.
Asteroid Mining
Notes about the hard life of meteor miners
Asteroid Mining Crew Transport
An exquisite fusion drive transport from a 1981 Boeing study commissioned by NASA. Along with the schedule to service a 5,000 person Ceres mining coloy.
Asteroid Revolutionary War
What happens when King George of Terra clashes with the George Washington of the asteroid belt?
Bamboo
Interstellar colonists are going to need a building material that is a renewable resource. Let me tell you about the miracle of Bamboo!
Battle For 16 Psyche
Rival asteroid-mining megacorporations will be doing battle to win the mother-load of asteroid Psyche
Boomtown
Opportunistic space stations that sort of form by accretion.
Bussard's War
Space combat is one thing, but it doesn't get more hard-core scientific than combat between Bussard Ramjets.
Cape Dread
How a colony on the Martian moon Deimos can become the propellant supplier to the entire solar system
Corporate Technological Disruption
Any technological development that threatens the profits (or existence) of a megacorporation will be ruthlesslessly suppressed by said corporation. Which will make hot times for the poor people developing said technology.
Customs Police In Space
Around crowded space stations the Customs Police have to inspect ships for contraband and do safety inspections to certify the ships. Which puts them at direct cross-purposes with the ship owners. Hilarity will ensue.
Cyclical History
Or the rise and fall of the Galactic empire. Its been done to death but it never gets old.
Elemental Bottleneck
How Terra's monopoly on phosphorus delayed the Martian Revolutionary War. And the situation becomes grim as Mars Colony covertly tries to find alternate sources of phosphorus, while a panicky TerraGov does their level best to suppress this. Which science fiction authors would find to be a nice juicy explosive situation full of dramatic possibilities.
Empires and Energy
How an energy crisis leads to a galactic empire crisis
Fabulous Locations
It always helps to set the story at a cinematically spectacular planet or location
Flyaway Engine
Atomic rocket engines that automatically detach and go park in orbits to remove the radioactivity. What could possibly go wrong?
Hanjin Shipping
The abrupt bankruptcy of a shipping line results in a very entertaining situation
Interstellar Communication Monopoly
The Empire/Megacorporation has a monopoly on faster than light radio, and will go to great lengths to keep it that way
Interstellar Communication Relay Station
Applying Victorian semaphore telegraph towers to outer space
Interstellar Piracy
Notes about the wild world of deep space pirates
Interstellar Privateers
Notes about the wild world of deep space privateers
Interstellar Smuggling
Notes about the wild world of deep space smugglers
Interstellar Trading
Notes about the wild world of deep space traders
Lady Space Taxi
Victorian suffragettes were liberated by bicycles, oppressed female space colonists may be liberated by space taxis.
Laser Guard
Commercial laser power stations can rent laser time to laser thermal rockets. But the military will not be happy about warship-destroying laser in civilian hands. So they might just nationalize them.
Life Support Algae Dangers
The algae which is a vital part of a spacecraft's closed ecological life support system might mutate and produce deadly toxins. And genetically engineered safe algae might be guarded with draconian patent-protection lawsuits like a futuristic Monsanto.
Lurkers
The homeless problem on space stations
Mos Eisley Space Station
Notes about how a station or part of one can be come a great hive of scum and villainy.
Mutually Deadly Biochemistries
Certain biochemistries are mutually deadly. Human biochemistries use lots of hydrogen-sulfur bonds. If an alien biochemistry used nitrogen–sulfur bonds, we might actually dissolve each other.
Orbital Ghost Town
A boom-town that springs up around an orbital propellant depot is jsut one technological disruption away from dying off into a ghost town.
Orbital Tax Havens
Various unethical but lucrative reasons to expand into space
Paleotechnology
Interstellar archeologists digging in the ruins of an extinct high-tech alien civilization might very will unearth some high-technology. Hilarity will ensue as the archeologists try to run to the patent office, space pirates try to dry-gulch the archeologists and swipe the tech, and megacorporations threatened with technological disruption hire assassins to kill everbody and destroy the tech. A simple outline can be found in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Pilgrim Observer
A rather famous scientifically accurate spacecraft, that turns up in several guises. It has a thousand and one uses!
Pirate Havens
Pirates need infrastructure too
Project Orion Battleship
The biggest, baddest, most terrifying scientifically accurate warship ever.
Psyche
Solid-iron asteroid could be site of the steel mill of the Asteroid civilization
Resource Curse
Planets settled because of rich mining deposits of Something Profitable (or paradise planets who suddenly have the misfortune of Something Profitable being discovered) tend to rapidly become authoritarian dictatorship hell-holes. Just the sort of depressingly exciting place to put your protagonists.
Ring Raiders
An amusing civilization based around Saturn's Rings
RocketCat's Universe
The outline of an entire starter universe for you to tinker with.
Santa Guard
Santa Claus machines are perfect for establishing an interplanetary base or colony. But they are also perfect for cranking out hundreds of weapons of mass destruction. They will have to be guarded.
ScrapTown
Shipbreakers chop up old spacecraft. But if the ship is huge, it might be colonized instead.
Shady Space Stations
Where you can get anything ... for a price.
Ship Market Disruption
When a trader's or transporter's spacecraft becomes obsolete due to technological disruption, times become financially tough. Which creates lots of angry ship owners. Which can drive exciting plots for your novel.
Space Business Opportunities
Various valuable services usable as business models for space corporations. Or as the business model for novices trying to establish a space business in the raw cut-throat space frontier.
Space Station Functions
A list of jobs commonly performed by space stations. It should spark some ideas.
Spaceguard
This is a motivation for spacegoing nations to establish a space military service. If asteroid miners are actually moving asteroids, everybody is going to want lots of warships to ensure that one isn't "accidentally" dropped on their nation by an enemy.
Spaceguard Problems
Spaceguards also have the problem of "Who Will Guard The Guardians?"
Spaceguard Problems2
The Spaceguard concept does not scale well. When it breaks down, an entertaining situation occurs.
Spaceport Functions
A list of jobs commonly performed by spaceports. It should spark some ideas.
Star-Town
The spaceport red-light district
Submarines in Space
Reactionless drives ain't scientific at all. But if you postulate their existence, there is a long tradition of using such things to turn a submarine into instant starship.
Thalassocracy
How the spacefaring civilizations can enslave the planet dwellers
The Three Generation Rule
Space habitats have a limited lifespan because societies are lazy.
Tourist Season
How Hohmann windows can create a Martian Tourist Season, and Martian Convoys.
Wagon Train in Space
A plausible excuse for an inhabited solar system, by re-hashing American pioneer days
Weird Astronomy
The entire page is a list of strange astronomical objects just begging to be made into a science fiction story

Harris Classifications

In his article Staying on the Cutting Edge of Science Fiction, James Wallace Harris notes if you study the history of science fiction ideas, they break down into a limited number of areas:

  • Interplanetary travel
  • Interstellar travel
  • Alien life forms
  • Artificial beings (robots, AI, digital life, artificial life)
  • Predicting future social structures
  • Predicting future politics
  • Impact of new technology and inventions
  • Impact of new science (anti-gravity, multiverse, higher dimensions)
  • Utopias
  • Dystopias
  • Post-apocalypse and collapse
  • Post-humanism (mutants, clones, mental powers)
  • End of humanity, end of the world

The focus of this website is on interplanetary and interstellar travel. But I have a few odd pages devoted to some of the other ideas.

Here is a mind map of one possible way to divide up science fiction ideas:

Stealing History

For authors, creating the background for a novel from scratch is a daunting task. Authors writing historical novels have all the work done for them, they just have to read a few history textbooks. Science fiction novelists on the other hand, have to roll their own. That's a lot of work.

If you are trying to write your own future history, legendary SF author Isaac Asimov shows the way. He took the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, filed off the serial numbers, replaced "Roman Empire" with "Galactic Empire", and thus wrote the Foundation Trilogy. (I jest. Asimov did much more than that. Asimov is one of the giants of science fiction and his Foundation trilogy is rightly considered to be one of the best SF series ever written, period.)

As an example, Bill Baldwin's rollicking space opera The Helmsman Saga is obviously based on World War II, with scenes reminding one of The Battle of Britain and The Dunkirk Miracle.


Noted SF author Ken MacLeod said "History is the trade secret of science fiction." This is yet another example of RocketCat's observation on science-fiction worldbuilding: "Everything Old Is New Again." Also remember the old bromide: "Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense."

Keep in mind that you do not have to copy the historical record slavishly, even real history doesn't do that. It has been said it is not quite true that "history repeats itself", so much that it is more like "historical situations reoccur." More flippantly John Colombo said "History never repeats itself but it rhymes."

For example, in Asimov's FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE: Asimov based character of Emperor Cleon II directly on the historical Roman Emperor Justinian I and the character of General Bel Riose was directly based on the historical General Belisarius. However, Asimov mixed and matched the historical models for different novels. In the novel FOUNDATION, the Foundation represents the historical Byzantine capital of the Byzantine Empire while the Galactic Empire is the historical Roman Empire. But in the novel FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE the Foundation represents the historical Medieval Catholic Church and it was the Galactic Empire representing the Byzantine Empire. Asimov did not slavishly copy real history when it fit the plot better to alter attributions.

If you want to use Rome as a model for your galactic empire but find Gibbon's Decline and Fall a little overwhelming, there is always the Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire. If you want something in between, try The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak. For a "crossover" science fictional history, read here. And go to The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy and read the entry "COSMIC BACKGROUND HISTORY".


You can use other sources besides history.

Mythology and legends in general are good, and any of those which are based on the Monomyth in particular. Just ask George Lucas.

Glen Cook's marvelous novel SHADOWLINE is a re-telling of Norse mythology. Only instead of Norse gods, it is about futuristic mercenary companies. The mercenary leader Storm is an Odin figure, sending two telepathic flying lizards around to spy in the same way Odin sent Huginn and Muninn. He has robot drone aircraft flying around various battlefields. If they spot some soldier who is valiant, when the soldier is killed the drones swoop down and carry off the body. The soldier is brought back to life by advanced medical techology and given the opportunity to enlist with Storm's mercenary legion, to fight and be reborn forever. This parallels the Norse tales of Valkyries and the undying warriors of Valhalla.

Author Emil Petaja has a series of scifi novels based on the mythology from the Finnish Kalevela. Authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt also used the Kalevala as source materials for their 1953 fantasy novella "The Wall of Serpents", part of their Incomplete Enchanter series.

STARSONG by Fred Saberhagen is a retelling of the Orpheus myth. As is FOOL'S RUN by Patricia McKillip and GOAT SONG by Poul Anderson.

And of course both STAR WARS: EPISODE IV - A NEW HOPE and THE MATRIX are directly based on the monomyth.


Epic literature and opera can be harvested by the scifi author as well.

FORBIDDEN PLANET is pretty much a science-fiction version of Shakespeare's The Tempest

THE GAP INTO CONFLICT: THE REAL STORY by Stephen R. Donaldson is a interpretation of Wagner's Ring Cycle set in scifi.

SPACE CHANTEY by R. A. Lafferty is a satirical futuristic version of Homer's Odyssey. And the DIES IRAE TRILOGY by Brian Stableford is also a science fictional version of the Odyssey but in full trilogy form.

You can easy use cheesy old TV shows in lieu of epic literature. I always thought that the old show Tales of the Gold Monkey had a rocketpunk feel. Set in 1938 in the South Pacific, a flying boat doing island hopping, a colorful crew, with three huge empires (the US, Germany, and Japan) rattling their swords at each other. Friendly and enemy spies (one posing as a torch singer in the bar, the other posing as a man of the cloth), a Dragon Lady with her bodyguard, a bar with hints of Casablanca-like intrigue, and a shrewd island governor.

Just replace the aircraft with rocketships, the ocean with space, the islands with planets, and the nations with interstellar empires. Instant Buck-Rogers-like universe.

HISTORY IN SF

The real history of the world and the many Alternate Histories which might have replaced it are extensively featured in sf stories of Time Travel and Parallel Worlds, but sf writers have also drawn much inspiration from history in designing hypothetical futures. Sometimes, like Charles L Harness in Flight into Yesterday (May 1949 Startling; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men) and James Blish in Cities in Flight (1950-1962 var mags; omni 1970), they have made use of actual theories – from Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) in the former case, Oswald Spengler in the latter – which have claimed to detect authentic cyclic patterns in history; more commonly, though, they have simply borrowed the past as a convenient template. Thus Miles J Breuer and Jack Williamson replayed the story of the American Revolution as the story of the revolt of the Moon's colony against its Earthly masters in The Birth of a New Republic (Winter 1931 Amazing Stories Quarterly; 1981 chap); Robert A Heinlein later did this more convincingly in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (December 1965-April 1966 If; 1966). Isaac Asimov gave to this process of borrowing a new gloss of sophistication in the first phase of his Foundation series (stories May 1942-January 1950 Astounding; 1951-1953 3vols; as The Foundation Trilogy omni 1963) by inventing his own futuristic science of Psychohistory, by which Edward Gibbon's retrospective analysis of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is transmuted into Hari Seldon's prophetic analysis of the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Seldon's Plan, however, can change these deterministic prophecies by social engineering. Interestingly, a later novel by Asimov, The End of Eternity (1955), argues as strongly against social engineering as the Foundation series argued for it.

Toynbee eventually recanted the cyclic theory outlined in A Study of History (1934-1961 12vols), and the earlier quasideterministic theories of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) and Spengler's Decline of the West (1918-1922) never quite attained academic respectability, but the attractions of such theories to sf writers are obvious. Blish's fascination with Spengler became deep, respectful and altogether serious, and A E van Vogt drew inspiration from Spengler in The Voyage of the Space Beagle (stories July 1939-August 1943 Astounding, May 1950 Other Worlds; fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary 1952). Toynbeean ideas continued to echo various writers' works, including Frederik Pohl's and C M Kornbluth's "Critical Mass" (February 1962 Galaxy), in which they are quoted directly, Frank Herbert's Dune (fixup 1965), which seems to draw on Toynbee's picture of the Janissary-supported Turkish courts of the later Middle Ages, and Larry Niven's A World Out of Time (fixup 1976), which uses the Toynbee-derived notion of "water-monopoly empires" – i.e., empires founded on irrigation control. Philosophers of history who dealt in Near-Future climaxes rather than recurrent cycles – G W F Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883) are the most obvious examples – have naturally been of less interest to sf writers.

The Pulp magazines inherited from the dime novels (see Dime-Novel SF) two striking "mythologized" versions nineteenth century history: the first, of the USA's western expansion, which glorified the "frontier spirit", and the second, of Europe's exploration and colonization of foreign lands. These myths (see also Social Darwinism) were transferred to sf, where they became the animating forces of countless stories about the exploration of the Solar System and the Colonization of Other Worlds. "Out from Rigel" (December 1931 Astounding) by Robert H Wilson, which dramatizes the conflict between two spacemen on the "sandy plain" of a strange planet for the love of a girl back home, may be taken as a characteristic example of the former, while Brigands of the Moon (March-June 1930 Astounding; 1931) by Ray Cummings, with its competition between the imperial powers of Earth and Mars (representatives of the former evidently all-white; those of the latter somewhat – confusingly – less so) to exploit the resources of unexplored worlds, illustrates the latter. The reflection of these mythical versions of recent history has maintained a tenacious hold over the images of the future contained in Genre SF, and has been elaborated in various ways, sometimes painfully naive and sometimes quite extraordinary. (The phenomenon is not, of course, restricted to fiction; the idea of space as a "high frontier" requiring conquest by bold pioneers informs much actual political rhetoric, and may be regarded as NASA's guiding myth.) It is not only US history per se which is reflected in stories of space pioneering; US writers have been perfectly willing to adapt "relevant" bits of more distant history, producing not only a subgenre of Medieval Futurism but such images as those in Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (July-September 1960 Astounding/Analog; 1960), H Beam Piper's Space Viking (1963) and Ben Bova's Privateers (1985). Anderson has been a particularly prolific and artful borrower of entrepreneurial models from the past, taking in explorers, privateers, merchant princes and all manner of military empire-builders.

From entry HISTORY IN SF by The Encyclopeda of Science Fiction
Example

Me:

Here is an example for you to stretch your authorial muscles a bit. First, read this entertaining account by a historian who goes by the internet handle of John Bull:


John Bull:

     Let's talk about the point after WW2 where the Knights Hospitaller, of medieval crusading fame, 'accidentally' became a major European air power.
     I sh*tteth ye not.
     So, if I asked you to imagine the Knights Hospitaller you probably picture:
  1. Angry Christians on armoured horses
  2. Them being wiped out long ago like the Templars
  3. Some Dan Brown bullsh*t
     And you would be (mostly) wrong about all three. Which is sort of how this happened.

     From the beginning (1113 or so), the Hospitallers were never quite as committed to the angry, horsey thing as the Templars. They had always (ostensibly) been more about protecting pilgrims and healthcare. They also quite liked boats. Which were useful for both.
     Over the next 150 years (or so), as the Christian grip on the Holy Lands waned, both military orders got more involved in their other hobbies — banking for the Templars, mucking around in boats for the Hospitaller. This proved to be a surprisingly wise decision on the Hospitaller part. By 1290ish, both Orders were homeless and weakened.

     As the Templars fatally discovered, being weak AND having the King of France owe you money is a bad combo.

     Being a useful NAVY, however, wins you friends.

     And this is why your first vision of the Hospitallers is wrong. Because they spent the next 500 YEARS, backed by France and Spain, as one of the most powerful naval forces in the Mediterranean, blocking efforts by the Ottomans to expand westwards by sea. To give you an idea of the trouble they caused: in 1480 Mehmet II sent 70,000 men (against the Knights 4000) to try and boot them out of Rhodes. He failed. Suleiman the Magnificent FINALLY managed it in 1522 with 200,000 men. But even he had to agree to let the survivors leave.

     The surviving Hospitallers hopped on their ships (again) and sailed away. After some vigorous lobbying, in 1530 the King of Spain agreed to rent them Malta, in return for a single maltese falcon every year. Because that's how good rents were pre-housing crisis in Europe.

     The Knights turned Malta into ANOTHER fortified island. For the next 200 years 'the Pope's own navy' waged a war of piracy, slavery and (occasionally) pitched sea battles against the Ottomans. From Malta, they blocked Ottoman strategic access to the western med. A point that was not lost on the Ottomans, who sent 40,000 men to try and take the island in 1565 — the 'Great Siege of Malta'. The Knights, fighting almost to the last man, held out and won.

     Now the important thing here is the CONTINUED EXISTENCE AS A SOVEREIGN STATE of the Knights Hospitaller. They held Malta right up until 1798, when Napoleon finally managed to boot them out on his way to Egypt (Partly because the French contingent of the Knights swapped sides). The British turned up about three months later and the French were sent packing, but, well, it was the British so:
THE KNIGHTS: Can we have our strategically important island back please?
THE BRITISH: What island?
THE KNIGHT: That island
THE BRITISH: Nope. Can't see an island
     After the Napoleonic wars no one really wanted to bring up the whole Malta thing with the British (the Putin's Russia of the era) so the European powers fudged it. They said the Knights were still a sovereign state and they tried to sort them out with a new country. But never did. The Russian Emperor let them hang out in St Petersburg for a while, but that was awkward (Catholicism vs Orthodox). Then the Swedes were persuaded to offer them Gotland. But every offer was conditional on the Knights dropping their claim to Malta. Which they REFUSED to do.

John Bull:

     It's the 1900s. The Knights are still a stateless state complaining about Malta. What that means legally is a can of worms NO ONE wants to open in international law but they've also rediscovered their original mission (healthcare) so everyone kinda ignores them. The Knights become a pseudo-Red Cross organisation. In WW1 they run ambulance trains and have medical battalions, loosely affiliated with the Italian army (still do). In WW2 they do it too.
     Italy surrenders. The allies move on then...
     Oh dear.
     Who wrote this peace deal again?

     It turns out the Treaty of Peace with Italy should go FIRMLY into the category of 'things that seemed a good idea at the time'. This is because it presupposes that relations between the west and the Soviets will be good, and so limits Italy's MILITARY.

     This is a problem.

     Because as the early Cold War ramps up, the US needs to build up its Euro allies ASAP. But the treaty limits the Italians to 400 airframes, and bans them from owning ANYTHING that might be a bomber. This can be changed, but not QUICKLY.

     Then someone remembers about the Knights.

     The Knights might not have any GEOGRAPHY, but because everyone avoided dealing with the tricky international law problem it can be argued — with a straight face — that they are still TECHNICALLY A EUROPEAN SOVEREIGN STATE.
     And they're not bound by the WW2 peace treaty.
     Italy (with US/UK/French blessing) approaches the Knights and explains the problem. The Knights reasonably point out that they're not in the business of fighting wars anymore, but anything that could be called a SUPPORT aircraft is another matter.
     So, in the aftermath of WW2, this is the ballet that happens:

     The Italians transfer all of their support and training aircraft to the Knights. This then frees up the 'cap room' to allow the US to boost Italy's warfighting ability WITHOUT breaking the WW2 peace treaty.
     This is why, in the late forties/fifties, a good chunk of the 'Italian' air force is flying with a Maltese Cross Roundel. Because they were not TECHNICALLY Italian. They were the air force of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

     And that's how the Knights Hospitaller ended up becoming a major air power. Eventually the treaties were reworked, and everything was quietly transferred back. I suspect it's a reason why the sovereign status of the Knights remains unchallenged still today though.
     And that's why today, even thought they are now fully committed to the Red-Cross-esque stuff, they can still issue passports, are a permanent observer at the UN, have a currency...
     ..,and even have a tiny bit of Malta back.

Me:

OK science fiction authors, ready to become creative? Start with the history you have just read.

Change the timeline from the past into the future. Change the location from Europe and the Mediterranean to a spiral arm of our galaxy. Replace sea-going ships and airplanes with combat starships. Replace fortified islands with orbital fortresses. Change the names of the various factions to new names that sound futuristic.

Voila! Instant bizarre, but real, background for your next novel. And most of the background historical events as well. Start customizing it to your novel's needs and quite quickly you will have something special.

Further material can be easily found by simple Google searches, or from historical texts. There is even a TV Tropes page.

And I'm sure if you ask around among historians, they can point you at other equally bizzare but entertaining historical events that you can mine for your story backgrounds.

GUIDED BY PAST HISTORY

      For some reason, possibly because of the awful title, for which I emphatically disclaim responsibility, “Black Friar of the Flame” is taken as the quintessence of my early incompetence. At least, fans who come across a copy think they can embarrass me by referring to it.

     Well, it isn’t good, I admit, but it has its interesting points. For one thing, it is an obvious precursor to my successful “Foundation” series. In “Black Friar of the Flame,” as in the “Foundation” series, human beings occupy many planets; and two worlds mentioned in the former, Trantor and Santanni, also play important roles in the latter. (Indeed, the first of the “Foundation” series was to appear only a couple of months after “Black Friar of the Flame,” thanks to the delay in selling the latter.)

     Furthermore, there is also a strong suggestion in “Black Friar of the Flame” of my first book-length novel. Pebble in the Sky, which was to appear eight years later. In both, the situation I pictured on Earth was inspired by that of Judea under the Romans.

     The climactic battle in “Black Friar of the Flame,” however, was inspired by that of the Battle of Salamis, the great victory of the Greeks over the Persians. (In telling future-history I always felt it wisest to be guided by past-history. This was true in the “Foundation” series, too.)

From THE EARLY ASIMOV by Isaac Asimov (1972)
ADAPTING SETTING FROM HISTORY

The Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 3rd century bc was a very complex region. The three empires founded by the successors of Alexander the Great were collapsing. They were locally powerful, but none was a superpower. Usurpers and secessionists complicated their politics.

Leagues of city states—the Achaeans and Aetolians in Greece proper, others in Asia Minor—had their own interests. New kingdoms, particularly that of Pergamum, were growing at the expense of their neighbors, and barbarians—both Celtic and Illyrian—were becoming regional powers instead of merely raiding and moving on.

Rome was still in the wings but the violent morass would shortly draw her in, ending both the chaos and her own status as a republic. (The region's enormous wealth and complexity, in my opinion, inexorably turned Rome into an empire.)

I adapted this setting for Paying the Piper. The general background is that of the war between Rhodes and Byzantium, ostensibly over freedom of navigation. It was about as stupid a conflict as you're likely to find, during which the real principals licked their lips and chuckled while well-meaning idealists wrecked their own societies in pursuit of unobtainable goals by improper means. Much of the military detail is drawn from the campaigns of Phillip the Fifth and his allies against the Aetolian League, particularly the campaign of 219 bc which culminated in Phillip's capture of Psophis.

I guess it isn't out of place to add one comment about the study of history. Knowing a good deal about how cultures interacted in the past allows one to predict how they will interact in the present, so I'm rarely surprised by the daily news. But I regret to say that this understanding doesn't appear to make me happier.

From a background note to PAYING THE PIPER by David Drake (2002)
READERS ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE FORM

Star Trek uses a system of warping space to make their ships fly faster than light. Warping space is a long time tradition in SF, and the ensuing battles bear a striking resemblance to the battles between warships. This is no accident. Many space battles are written as though they were sea battles because the readers are familiar with the form, and besides, it's less work for the writers.

In fact, in the original Star Trek series. the episode that introduced the Romulans was written exactly like a duel between a destroyer and a submarine (the cloaked Romulan ship being the submarine). I know that because I recognized the movie from which they were cribbing their plot. It was The Enemy Below, with Robert Mitchum as the American destroyer captain and Curt Jurgens as the German U-boat captain.

From THE ART OF SCIENCE FICTION, VOLUME 2 by Michael McCollum (1998)
DEPLOYING THE MONOMYTH IN SPACE OPERA

So: in the ongoing investigation of space opera, I've looked at cliches, I've tried to come up with a rough definitional general rule ... but I've avoided what's possibly the largest elephant in the room, namely, plot structures.

A key aspect of space opera is that it's about epochal events and larger-than-life characters. Most genres can be written to work in a variety of modes; for example, consider the difference in the level of melodrama in spy thrillers betwee James Bond and Graham Greene's The Human Factor. Similarly, high fantasy can be quietly introspective and pastoral, or focus on the clash of kings and dark lords, and horror can run the scale/focus gamut from The Yellow Wallpaper to The Stand.

But space opera is different: it's almost impossible to conceive of a space opera with a plot that revolves around the eqivalent of a middle-aged English professor's mid-life crisis as he carries on a furtive affair with one of his female students under the nose of his long-suffering wife (the somewhat cruel stereotype of the MFA-approved Great American Novel). I mean, you could do it, but your professor would have had to have invented a new type of FTL drive that threatens to revolutionize interstellar travel, the student is a spy from a cartel of space traders and is trying to get the blueprints out of him before she stabs him in the kidneys (because: lecherous middle-aged prof, ew), and his wife—the professor of political science at Galactic U—is actually a retired assassin (and just wait 'til she finds out about the student). Into the middle of this quiet literary novel of academic infidelity and domestic lies, we then add an evil religious cult of alien space bat worshipers who want to steal the new space drive to equip their battle fleet when they sweep in from the Orion Arm to bring fire, the blaster, and the holy spacebat inquisition to the Federation, and when they kidnap the professor his wife and his grad student have to work out their differences to get him back before he cracks under (well-deserved) torture and gives the fanatics the ultimate weapon ...

(Huh. Actually, that'd make a cracking space opera; just not one of mine. Anyone want to borrow it?)

I stand by my point: you can't write space opera without ramping up the stakes to melodramatic levels. (Well, maybe you could if you were Iain M. Banks, but he was special that way.) The need for romanticist drama is one of the pillars of the sub-genre. And one of the recurring core tropes of the genre, which is so fundamental you can hardly call it a cliche (any more than boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl is a "cliche" in genre romance) is the Campbellian Hero's Journey.

If you are reading this blog you are familiar with the Hero's Journey monomyth because it's ubiquitous in our mythology and entertainment. Campbell derived it from studies of myths in many cultures, publishing his exposition The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949: his theory was that major myths from various world cultures can be traced back thousands of years and share a common cyclic template (with roughly 17 stages). Since then, it's been used repeatedly by entertainers as a construction template; for example, Christopher Vogler more or less codified it as a recipe while working for Disney studios. The plot of the original Star Wars trilogy was an explicit appropriation of the HJ cycle by to George Lucas (to be fair, before Vogler's codification); it's no accident that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father (Vader is Dutch for "Father") or that the fight between Skywalker and Vader in The Empire Strikes back is one that Skywalker loses—but survives to re-fight more successfully later. A key feature of the monomyth is that the hero leaves home on a quest, faces challenges, confronts and is struck down by his father/the darkness, then rises again, atones/achieves enlightenment/excellence, and triumphs in a final struggle that represents maturation.

Campbell's work isn't uncritically or universally accepted, to say the least, and there are variants on it: for example, Valerie Frenkel critiched him for focussing exclusively on the male variant of the Hero's Journey. It turns out that there are plenty of recurring myths where a version of the monomyth applies to women, with similar but distinctively different recurring stages focussing on the heroine's progress from girl to mother. Rather than fighting to defeat/overturn the parent, the heroine's struggle is to become the parent: rather than returning to the original home but as master (the male branch of the monomyth) the female version has her joining a new household as its mistress and new mother or goddess/priestess.

Yes, this is all horribly gender-stereotyped. But I'll take a stab in the dark at diagnosing its origin: the stages in the monomyth echo the mammalian K-selective reproductive cycle—on hitting puberty the young adult leaves the nest/parents, goes looking for a mate, meets and overcomes obstacles (competitors and predators), finds a mate, forms a new mated pair. In the case of humans or other primates there may also be issues about troupe/pack hierarchy to be resolved. Yes, there are problems with this: it doesn't map onto social structures once established settlements and agriculture become the norm and the young adults are expected to stay home and plough the fields. But the monomyth remains deeply appealing because the mythic framework it builds on has very deep roots that go all the way down to primate reproductive biology.

The monomyth doesn't have to be melodramatic: you can, at a pinch, apply it to that stereotypical MFA lit-fic novel of lecherous middle-aged academics without too much trouble. (The journey is one of internal psychological discovery, the threats are the protagonist's inner demons, the allies are the psychiatrist, the crisis/conflict is one of understanding ...) But as often as not, it's a structure for heroism: melodrama acts as a spice, raising the stakes and giving us a reason to pay attention to the protagonists, for their deeds are significant and implicitly may affect us (or the proxy the author has provided for our viewpoint).

So: Space Opera. Take the monomyth as a framework for how the action unfolds, and mix it up with melodrama. Then add space ships, ray guns, and wide-scale travel backdrops. Arguably the monomyth comes first, before the background: although some of the more skilled authors of the sub-genre spin their plots within the constrains of a background world, and sometimes manage to avoid the monomyth completely. (I'd go so far as to say that "Matter" by Iain M. Banks is an almost complete rejection of the form, as is "Look to Windward" ... actually, I suspect IMB had his own different idea of a story structure in mind for the Culture novels: as often as not they're epic tragedies ("Consider Phlebas") or illustrations of the limits of heroism.)

But if you're trying to spin a space opera, and you're reaching for a plot skeleton that works, the monomyth is your friend. Here's an exercise for the involved reader: take my dysfunctional Galactic U professorial marriage from the beginning of this essay and use the monomyth structure to come up with a plot, climax, and ending that delivers a satisfactory sense of closure. You might first want to consider who you are focussing on—the lecherous male prof, his spouse the academic with a dead-and-buried past (she thought) as an assassin, or the grad student with the secret mission. Then you need to consider what stage of the Hero's Journey you are joining them at—for there's no reason to assume the story starts at the beginning, rather than in media res. Next, work out what challenges and allies they might encounter on their way to the climax and resolution, and what role the other characters play in their quest. Finally: what is the prize they're seeking, how do they achieve it, and at what cost? For added points, see if you can find a way to twist the standard Hero's Journey cycle to apply a surprise climax to it—for example, by spinning this steamy menage-a-trois with added murderhate and alien space bats so that it appears at first to be one protagonist's journey but then switches track and turns out to be about one of the others (your classic example of this would be IMB's "Use of Weapons") ...

From DEPLOYING THE MONOMYTH IN SPACE OPERA by Charles Stross (2016)

Gaming Worldbuilding

But what if instead of stealing from history for the background for your scifi series, you want to actually make your own background, not re-use history, but are not sure if you are up to the challenge?

The answer is simulation. There are mathematical techniques that can indicate historical trends.

I can see your eyes glazing over already. But don't panic. If you are allergic to mathematics, there is a simpler method that is far more fun. What if you made it a game?


Submitted for your approval are two role-playing-games: Microscope (should get both Microscope and Microscope Explorer) and Diaspora (latest version). Microscope creates the historical background, while Diaspora's cluster creation system creates the map.

These are table-top role-playing-games. In practice, they are simply more structured versions of the childhood game "Let's Play Make-Believe." The archetypal TTRPG is Dungeons & Dragons, you may have heard of it.

There is a slight complication. To use technique to generate worldbuilding information for your SF novel you will need two or more creative people, counting yourself. It doesn't work well if you try it solo. The point is that a small group can make a much more interesting and multi-leveled background than any single person can (unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien, in which case you can stop reading right here). In fact, with a good group the creativity level goes up as the square of the number of players (e.g., three players are nine times as creative as one player, not three times as creative). So using these particular RPGs makes the group like a very focused brain-storming session, bouncing ideas off each other and everything. The fact that these are games means the process is a lot of fun for everybody involved.

For either of these games, the author will have to recruit at least one other player. The players must be creative people. It helps if they are also frustrated story-tellers. Best of all is when the players are other authors. Both games assume that the players have strong narrative skills. Both games also assume that the players are good at inventing plot twists and other interesting complications.

Obviously friction is reduced if they are a personality that plays nice with others. Also obviously it works best with extroverts, introverts who are afraid of speaking up will not contribute much. As a side note, it might be prudent for the author to get the other players to sign some sort of legal document about ownership of the intellectual property being created. Just in case.


Microscope

The purpose of a Microscope RPG game session is to create an epic history.

The supplement book Microscope Explorer has a chapter "World-Building: Games Collide" with notes on how to adapt the game into a process to generate a background history for a novel.

Other RPGs require one player to be the "Game Master", but in Microscope there is no game master, only players. In addition to the game manuals, you will need some 3x5 (or smaller) index cards plus pens or pencils. Microscope requires two to five players, it seems to play best with three or four players.

Unlike other RPGs, the players will not have a set character they play. Instead they will mandate historical changes, and role-play pivotal people at key points in the generated history.

You also will not play the game in chronological order. You the player may know about "future" events but be surprised by events happening in the past.

The history is built from the outside in. The players start with the big picture: the grand scheme of history, then focus on carving out the small details. In other words: the history is built like a fractal.

It is also possible to use Microscope to flesh out a pre-imagined history. You just have to establish the part that are set in stone.

Unlike using Diaspora to make the map, using Microscope to make the history means you have to play out the entire game. Using Diaspora to make the map means you can stop playing at the end of the pre-campaign universe creation phase.

Here is a good over-view of Microscope, from a person who was intending to use it in the creation of backgrounds for campaigns to be used in other RPGs. Reviews are here and here. The game is played with index cards on a table, but there is an iOS app Microscope Journal.


Diaspora

Diaspora is based on the FATE RPG system. The Diaspora game book is the only manual you need to play. It is easiest to play using special FATE dice, but it is possible to use ordinary six-sided dice. Diaspora is best with three to five players. As a side note: Diaspora is a game intended to resemble the old Traveller scifi RPG using the FATE system as a foundation.

Relevant to our interests is the first part of a new Diaspora game campaign. In it, the players do not role-play their characters in an adventure. Instead they create the layout of their game universe, and create their characters.

This is unlike most other RPGs. In those, the Game Master creates the map, situation, and other parameters of the campaign (either by inventing them or by purchasing a pre-made campaign module from the publishers). In Diaspora, the campaign is created by the players in a collaborative process. In this respect (as with other aspects of the FATE system), much of the power and control of the game lies with the players, not with the game master as is common.

As another side note, I will observe that this is a stroke of genius. The players become quite emotionally invested in the campaign background, since they helped create it. The result is also much more rich and multi-layered than any single game-master could possibly make all by themselves (this is the feature that made me alert to the possibility of using the game as an aid to science fiction authors). I have read many reviews of Diaspora where the reviewer started (as per the rules) with the players creating the campaign. The reviewers noted that the players fell in love with the campaign background they created, and vowed to use the background even using a different RPG than Diaspora to play with.

Most other RPGs have the players "roll-up" their character's stats and write their back stories independently. This means when they meet for a gaming session, their characters do not mesh well. The game master starts with some lame introduction along the lines of "all you rag-tag individuals just happen to meet in a bar one fine night...". But in Diaspora, as part of the character creation process, the characters start out with some history with each other.

Now remember that I said Microscope was used to make the background history, while Diaspora was for the map.

The above image is a Diaspora Cluster map. A, B, C, D, E, and F are solar systems, places the players can visit. They are connected by "sliplines", which are basically wormholes. The wormholes are fixed. This means that a starship at system F can jump to system C or system E, and no other. Poor system A only has a wormhole to system B. Transport hub system C has wormholes to B,D, E, and F.

Since the length of the wormholes are all the same, the above diagram is a type of graph called a node map. The actual positions of the solar system is superfluous, the important thing is their connections.

Note this is an abstract representation. In the game the circles are solar systems. But for the author's purpose they can be planets, space habitats, continents, city-states, the turfs of various street gangs in a city, etc. Further abstractly, they can represent political connections between noble families, lines of control between organized crime gangs, lines of communication between bureaucratic agencies in a government, alliances between interstellar empires, the power structure of factions in a War of the Roses style dynastic struggle, the structure of urban districts and suburbs in an Akira-like cybertech city, warring Medieval fantasy kingdoms, etc.

The best number of systems is from six to ten, divided up among the players to write their backgrounds and local color (with input from the other players). The connections and basic attributes are established by die rolls but the rest is all pure creativity.

In Diaspora terms, the creatively made descriptions are in the form of game "aspects." These are pithy one-liners describing a major feature of the location. An aspect is a free form descriptor of something notable about the planet or whatever.

(This paragraph explains how aspects are used in regular Diaspora game play. If you could care less, skip to the next paragraph) Like other FATE games, playing Diaspora resembles a round-robin storytelling session. The players are basically collaborating on telling the story. During play, a player can attempt to change the story a bit, add a plot complication or whatever. This requires a successful roll of the dice. With any game-required die roll, if any aspect present is relevant to the intention of the roll, the player gets a bonus to their roll. Example: say Player Alfa wants to add a plot complication to the situation. They decide that Player Bravo is going to have their pocket picked by a street urchin. None of player Alfa's aspects are relevant, neither are any of player Bravo's aspects. However, they are at a location called "Mos Eisley Spaceport" which just so happens to have an aspect of "A Great Hive of Scum and Villainy". That is relevant to getting one's pocket picked. So player Alfa gets a plus-one bonus to their die roll, making the chance of success easier.

When a player is creating the system(s) assigned to them, some aspects are suggested by the rating for the system (the randomly rolled values for the systems technology level, environmental level, and resources level). For instance, if the enviroment level is 1 (One garden world and several hostile environments), the player might be inspired by the thought of who is living on these planets and invent an attribute of "The Rich have all the desireable real estate, and the poor are rather upset about that".

Other attributes come straight out of the twisted imagination of the player, e.g., "We all live in flying cities floating over the deadly depths of a gas giant". When the SF Author reads that, interesting plot ideas are inspired. Such as how this makes it very easy to dispose of contraband. Or a dead body. Just dump it overboard and the gas giant will crush it into component atoms, never to be seen again...

Aspects of a solar system might relate to politics (“Balkanized,” “A benevolent monarch,” “Turmoil!”), philosophy (“Hopelessness is a way of life,” “Every man for himself,” “The Law above all”), geography (“One vast desert,” “Basalt plains,” “Underground cities”), hydrography (“Waterworld,” “Poisonous lakes”), local astrography (“Neutron star,” “Deep in the dark nebula,” “Life in an asteroid belt”) or history (“Once was great,” “Won the battle but not the war,” “Remembering the yoke”).

The next step in universe creation is rolling for the placement of wormhole links and creating attributes related to the consequences of the linkages. The player in charge of creating System A notices that it has only one solitary wormhole link. The player decides that System A is not going to get much traffic, and will get zero traffic just passing through. They further decide that one of the consequences of that is the system will be relatively impoverished, with not much interstellar trade to bring in money. After thinking it over some more, they decide that another consequence is this will obviously be a system in the boondocks, a dead-end system out in the sticks. The player in charge of creating System C may or may not conclude that by the same token the system is going to be relatively wealthy and cosmopolitan since they are at the crossroads of the entire network of wormhole links. And so on.

After that, you examine the systems you are creating with respect to the entire cluster, and give each system an aspect reflecting their place in the implied web of trade and politics. The players discuss this among themselves to reach a consensus.

The final step is creating the characters the players will use. The SF author may find some of these characters interesting enough to also use in their novels. The characters start from a one of the systems, which colors their initial personality. For instance, a character born in System A will be from a disadvantaged neighborhood, while one in system C will be more upwardly mobile.

There are stages in defining a given character. Some stages has the player owning the character collaborating with another player. For instance, the stage "Moment of Crisis" is about some life event that changed a character, and it must involve the character of the player sitting to your right at the gaming table. This ensures that the characters have some prior history with other characters.

Yes, all this sounds like a weird way to play a game, but in practice it is a lot of fun and it results in some superior world-building.

There are examples of Diaspora cluster creation here, here and here. There is a description on how to adapt the Diaspora Cluster Creation system to politics or medieval villages here. Standard Diaspora has the circles being solar system, with randomly rolled values for systems technology level, environmental level, and resources level. If the circles are other things, different levels may be needed. For instance if the circles are political parties perhaps the levels are technology level, resources level, and morality level. And instead of wormhole links, the connecting lines could be lines of conflict between parties. There are some other suggestions here.

It is quite impressive the rich maps they managed to create in only a few hours, while having tons of fun doing it. The emotional investment all the participants have in the results are great for game sessions but do not directly help a science fiction author. Unless it encourages the players to eventually purchase your novel since it is set in the universe they created (remember, the author might need to have the players sign some sort of legal document with respect to ownership of the intellectual property created).

Understand that the point of this is to make a background map for your SF novel. Once you have made it, you don't have to play the rest of the game (unless you want to).

There is one other part of the Diaspora initial creation phase that is useful for SF authors.

During game-play, it is useful to make an Fate Zone Map ("aspect map") of the fine details about an important location: space station, spaceship, skyscraper, neighborhood, spaceport, whatever. "Important" meaning "critical parts of the story plot will happen here". These are usually made by one or two players. The zones are tagged with aspects, which are used for playing the game. But for an SF author, the aspects are useful notes about the general character of the location.

For instance, in the Spire Prodigus aspect map, the location "Flop City" has the aspect "Hide Your Valuables", while the location "Underzone" had the aspect "Anything For A Price." Which tells you more or less all you need to know about those locations, your imagination and sense of logic can fill in the blanks. For a writer the location map will be useful crib notes to help keep the details straight.

If a person can move from any location to any other location, you do not have to bother drawing connecting lines. Lines are only needed if travel is channelized. For instance: you'll need line from the Prison Main Gate loc to the Security Checkpoint loc then to the Main Hallway loc then to individual cells. Make notes on the lines about any special requirements needed to travel on the line, e.g., cannot use line from Security Checkpoint to the Main Hallway unless you manage to pass a security scan. If an individual location cannot be entered unconditionally, but has no line leading to it, just put the entry requirement notes on the border of that location.

In the Audion Station aspect map, the legend in the lower right has aspects for the entire station:

  • Just Don't Ask Where We Got This
  • The Eyes and Ears of this Space Sector
  • Held Together with Spit and Bailing Wire
  • Re-purposed Military Hardware
  • What Safety Regulations?

Individual locations have all the station aspects, in addition to their own unique aspect(s). Location "Fire Control" has the aspect "More Like Fire Anarchy Amirite?" and the location "Sensor Array" has the aspect "We Are Listening."

Managing Assumptions

For a science fiction author, nothing makes your stories not age well quite as badly as an over-looked assumption. Sadly, they are almost impossible for an author to spot. And in any event the author has better things to do, like writing the story.

The classic example is all those pulp scifi stories where the protagonists unthinkingly light up their cigars and cigarettes inside their spaceships. If they all perish of asphyxiation by fouling their air supply with tobacco smoke, they will get zero sympathy from RocketCat. But for the scifi authors, everybody smoking like chimneys was just one of those over-looked assumptions. An assumption so universal as to be invisible to the author.

Don't be smug, chances are that your stories will contain similar egregious flaws only visible fifty years from now. Even now young children are puzzled by stories where the protagonists use something called telephone directory yellow pages to find numbers that can be dialed into wall mounted phone. And more recent stories have mysterious things called "dial-up" internet connections, which are cut off if somebody else in the house picks up the telephone handset.


More forgivable is when the author makes a good faith effort to predict the future, but badly misses the mark. At least they tried.


The general precaution an author can take is making a diversion. You throw in some very odd futuristic detail to remind the reader that they ain't in Kansas any more. And hopefully distract the reader so much that they fail to notice any over-looked assumption you mistakenly left in. For instance, Robert Heinlein was fond of mentioning in passing how the door dilated open.

CIGARETTES 1

      "Lights are off because relays opened when the crash short circuited them." Morey and the entire group were suddenly shaking.
     "Nervous shock," commented Zezdon Afthen. "It will be an hour or more before we will be in condition to work."
     "Can't wait," replied Arcot testily, his nerves on edge, too.
     "Morey, make some good strong coffee if you can, and we'll waste a little air on some smokes."
     Morey turned and went to the galley.
     Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small plastic balloons with coffee in them.
     They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about, the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which Zezdon Afthen introduced.
     "Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stopped working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while the air in the storage tanks is used up."

From INVADERS FROM THE INFINITE by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1932)
OBSOLETE TERMS 1

      'All systems functioning normally,' said Hal. 'Two minutes to ignition.'

     Strange, thought Floyd, how terminology often survives long after the technology that gave it birth. Only chemical rockets were capable of ignition; even if the hydrogen in a nuclear or plasma drive did come into contact with oxygen, it would be far too hot to burn. At such temperatures, all compounds were stripped back into their elements.

     His mind wandered, seeking other examples. People — particularly older ones — still spoke of putting film into a camera (today digital cameras are standard), or gas into a car (soon electric cars will be standard). Even the phrase 'cutting a tape' was still sometimes heard in recording studios — though that embraced two generations of obsolete technologies.

From 2010: ODYSSEY TWO by Arthur C. Clarke (1980)

Underestimation

A common failing of with those who write future histories is a failure to take into account Future Shock, that is, the rapid progress of technological advancement. Refer to the "Apes or Angels" argument. Consider that one hundred years ago the paper clip had just been invented, Marconi had invented the wireless radio, the Wright brothers had invented the airplane, and the latest cutting edge material was Bakelite. Assuming that technology continues to advance at the same rate, all of our flashy technological marvels of today will look just as quaint and obsolete in the year 2100. And in 2500, they will look like something made by Galileo.

Remember, this assumes that the rate of technological progress remains the same. The evidence suggests that the rate is increasing.

When it comes to futures histories in various SF novels, the main failing I have noted is a failure of scope. While you may read novels with orbital beanstalks, immortality drugs, virtual people living in digital cyber-reality, nanotechnology, transhumanity and post-humans, Dyson spheres, teleportation, zero-point energy, matter duplicators, time travel, cloning, and cyborgs; you almost never find an individual novel that has all of these things (although Greg Egan's DIASPORA comes close, and the Orion's Arm project comes even closer).

This is because future history SF novels are not meant to predict the future, so much as they are meant to illuminate a specific point the author is trying to make.

This topic is gone into in more detail here.

I am once again stunned at the insistence that Star Trek has to be allegorically relevant, but if it must, I'd prefer it take on more scientific/ethical issues, like a justification for banning genetic enhancement. or how a society with FTL, molecular replication, and teleportation has managed to sidestep a technological singularity.

Star Trek is considered by many to be the public face of SF, it's flagship. I hold by my belief that to retain that title it needs to take it up a level: travel out into some heretofore unexplored quadrant and find that it is heavily populated by Type II Kardashev cultures, Lovecraftian ancients, Kirby-esque star gods, Matrioshka brain AIs trying to tap reality's source-code, post-singularity societies like Banks Culture, Wright's Oecumene, or Hamilton's Edenists, etc.

In short, Trek needs to catch up with the rest of science fiction.

Cliches and Tropes

SMEERP
“Call a Rabbit a Smeerp“
A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)
From TURKEY CITY LEXICON (2009)
BAT DURSTON

(ed note: This is the origin for the insult that a hack scifi author is writing a "Bat Durston". This is when a lazy scifi writer is trying to create a space western by taking an existing cowboy western and frantically calling a rabbit a smeerp on every story element in a desperate attempt to convince the reader that they are at Alpha Centauri instead of the O.K. Corral)

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing...and at that point, a tall lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."


Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhange of rim-rock...and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high bolder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

"Rear back and dismount, Bat Durton," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."


Sound alike? They should — one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!

What you will find in GALAXY is the finest science fiction...authentic, plausible, thoughtful...written by authors who do not automaticallly switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction...for people who also know and love it.

From the rear cover of the first issue of GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE (1950)
THE SHARED JARGON OF SF

One of the central features of SF after John W. Campbell's reinvention of the field in the late 1930s has been an expository style in which, rather than being directly told the important features of a fictional world, the reader is encouraged to half-consciously deduce them from clues dropped by the writer. Thus, for example, a writer who wishes to establish that most people are telepaths in his future might make his viewpoint character's first line "What would it be like to wake up in the morning and be unable to read minds?". Or (to cite a well-known example due to Samuel Delany) a writer wishing the reader to imagine with him a future of intense space industrialization might throw in a casual reference to "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt".

Reading SF is, accordingly, a learned skill of some complexity. First, one has to learn to actually see sentences like "What would it be like to wake up in the morning and be unable to read minds?" rather than editing "unable" into "able" and missing the point. Then, one has to develop at least casual, imagistic knowledge about things like the asteroid belt and magnetic monopoles, in order to be able to interpret "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt" as something more meaningful than (as Delany puts it) a gaudy purple word-noise.

It is thus clear that the process of reading SF involves merging the stream of prose presented by the writer with a rather large amount of special context. To some extent, of course, this is true of any genre of fiction or art not set in the reader's everyday world — readers of Westerns (for example) need to know what a Peacemaker is, and why a vaquero might throw a lariat, and what he throws it at. But the context an SF reader (and writer) needs is unusual in some important respects.

First, there's a lot more of it. To fully decode "the monopole mines in the asteroid belt" it's not sufficient merely to know what the asteroid belt is and what a monopole is (a theoretically possible but not yet observed particle with an isolated "north pole" or "south pole" charge). You need to have a fair idea why people might want them enough to mine them (for use in tiny but very powerful motors, as it happens). You need to know something about the history and economics of extractive industries in frontier areas, enough to predict that Belt miners are going to be a pretty rough-necked crowd to be playing around with all that space technology, and that there's likely to be something not totally unlike the wild and wooly Nevada mining camps of the late nineteenth century going on out there among the flying mountains.

Second, a lot of that context is about things that don't exist yet. A novice reader of Westerns has a fair chance of having enough knowledge about the American West to read a Louis L'Amour novel without tripping over unknown concepts. The American West existed — perhaps not as dramatically and mythically portrayed, but it existed. There's lots of implicit and explicit knowledge about it floating around in the general culture. You can go into any hat store and buy at least a reasonable imitation of a ten-gallon hat.

A reader of post-Campbellian SF has none of these advantages. It's not sufficient to understand a single history; one needs to have a working grasp of a large number of possible futures — to be able to draw inferences from the text of an SF work that are roughly parallel to the author's intended ones, even though both author and reader are imagining a world that has never existed!

So stated, the task before writer and reader seems well-nigh impossible. And yet, SF writers do successfully communicate with their readers (if perhaps only with their readers...). And experienced SF readers show every sign of being able typically to synchronize with a writer's world vision without even mental effort significant enough to be noticeable. How can this be?

The answer, almost never stated as such but implicitly understood by all SF fans, is that the SF genre over the last fifty years has evolved a sophisticated code of shared signifiers for describing counterfactual worlds. The gravamen of this essay is that these signifiers (the jargon of SF) function not merely as a set of isolated signs but as descriptions of a stock set of prototype worlds which they logically and conventionally imply, and which permit writers to specify mainly what (if anything) is unique about their world vision rather than what is shared with the rest of SF.

Critics unfamiliar with the field (and even some familiar with it) frequently miss this point. To see why, we need to take a look at the different ways a reader or critic may respond to SF jargon.

In looking at an SF-jargon term like, say, "groundcar", or "warp drive" there is a spectrum of increasingly sophisticated possible decodings. The most naive is to see a meaningless, uninterpretable wordlike noise and stop there.

The next level up is to recognize that uttering the word "groundcar" or "warp drive" actually signifies something that's important for the story, but to lack the experience to know what that is. The motivated beginning reader of SF is in this position; he must, accordingly, consciously puzzle out the meaning of the term from the context provided by the individual work in which it appears.

The third level is to recognize that "ground car" and "warp drive" are signifiers shared, with a consistent and known meaning, by many works of SF — but to treat them as isolated stereotypical signs, devoid of meaning save inasmuch as they permit the writer to ratchet forward the plot without requiring imaginative effort from the reader.

Viewed this way, these signs emphasize those respects in which the work in which they appear is merely derivative from previous works in the genre. Many critics (whether through laziness or malice) stop here. As a result they write off all SF, for all its pretensions to imaginative vigor, as a tired jumble of shopworn cliches.

The fourth level, typical of a moderately experienced SF reader, is to recognize that these signifiers function by permitting the writer to quickly establish shared imaginative territory with the reader, so that both parties can concentrate on what is unique about their communication without having to generate or process huge expository lumps. Thus these "stereotypes" actually operate in an anti-stereotypical way — they permit both writer and reader to focus on novelty.

At this level the reader begins to develop quite analytical habits of reading; to become accustomed to searching the writer's terminology for what is implied (by reference to previous works using the same signifiers) and what kinds of exceptions and novelties convey information about the world and the likely plot twists.

It is at this level, for example, that the reader learns to rely on "groundcar" as a tip-off that the normal transport mode in the writer's world is by personal flyer. At this level, also, the reader begins to analytically compare the author's description of his world with other SFnal worlds featuring personal flyers, and to recognize that different kinds of flyers have very different implications for the rest of the world.

For example, the moderately experienced reader will know that worlds in which the personal fliers use wings or helicopter-like rotors are probably slightly less advanced in other technological ways than worlds in which they use ducted fans — and way behind any world in which the flyers use antigravity! Once he sees "groundcar" he will be watching for these clues.

The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees "groundcar" he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author's reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.

The better an SF writer is, the more subtly and effectively he will play off against the experienced reader's analytical skills. At the highest levels, SFnal exposition takes on the nature of a delicate, powerful intellectual dance or game between writer and reader, requiring much from both and rewarding both very richly.

Indeed, to true aficionados of the genre this game is the whole point of SF, the unique quality which elevates it above other fictional forms. This attitude explains much about the genre that outsiders find obscure and annoying — the intimacy between fans and writers; the indifference or outright hostility to conventional "literary values"; the pervasive SF-fan complaint that outsiders "just don't get it" and (when they deign to approve of SF at all) like all the wrong books for all the wrong reasons.

It is not, however, the purpose of this essay to issue a general apologia for SF and the attitudes of its fans. Rather, we are concerned here with the rules of the game — the ways in which the shared context which makes SF intelligible evolved, is represented in the minds of writers and readers, and is communicated to new readers and writers.

SF readers and writers have only finite memory and processing time to spend on the genre. Therefore they can have only a finite set of templates or archetypes to use as references in the game of communicating constructed worlds with each other. How (one may reasonably ask) can one particular finite set of prototypes have become established as the references that hold the genre together?

The set of possible prototypes is, first, strongly constrained by the way the universe works. No SF fan would, for example, believe without a lot of explicit convincing argument in a culture that uses both laser cannons and stone-throwing catapults as war weapons. Techno-logic says this doesn't happen, and the central constraint of the SF game is that the author gets only a very limited number of implausible premises before the suspension bridge of disbelief collapses.

To the extent we understand a "logic" in history and social structures, that constrains prototype worlds as well. A writer can erect a Galactic Emperor, or can describe by implication a relatively un-coercive interstellar society with secure property rights, unrestricted travel, a free press, etc; but if they're both going to be in the same world at the same time, the Emperor had better be a consitutional monarch rather than a bloody-handed despot casually shipping people off to the thorium mines.

At this point we must explicitly admit that to speak of prototype worlds is a bit of an oversimplification. Prototype worlds do exist (and there are reasons we'll discuss in a bit to cast the discussion in terms of them) but there are many possible-world templates of less than whole-world size. An excellent example, taking off from the previous discussion of "groundcar", is the template for "flitter technology", which we can express partly as the following series of statements and implications:

  • Flitters have roughly the speed and altitude limits of a light plane but are capable of vertical or very-short-field operation.
  • Flitters have about the cost range of a present-day automobile.
  • Flitters effectively never fall out of the sky. (Otherwise they would be deemed too dangerous for widespread personal use.)
  • For the previous statement to be true, flitters probably use some unknown form of no-moving-parts antigravity technology or reactionless drive. Be unsurprised if the world features other possible applications of exotic physics and force field technology, such as force shields, exotic energy weapons, and a faster-than-light drive
  • If ground transport is still used at all, either the reasons are ceremonial and sentimental (as with horse transport today) or something about flitter technology makes it uneconomic for long hauls of large payloads.
  • Roads no longer exist, except possibly as isolated museum pieces for groundcar fanciers.
  • Urban architecture is no longer structured by a street grid; expect lots of parks and pedestrian malls instead.
  • There is virtually no habitable untouched wilderness left on Earth.
  • Sub-planetary governments probably no longer exist. If they do, they somehow manage it despite being effectively unable to control cross-border transit.
  • And more...

Notice that this prototype has both a defining logical consistency and hooks to other prototypes — for example, the fourth item implies the existence of a "force field" or "exotic physics" template that groups together antigravity, energy weapons, and a faster-than-light drive.

When enough of these prototypes hook together, one has a prototype world. And this is in fact often what happens in an SF reader's head as he comprehends the clues a writer has scattered about in a work of SF. But previous discussion has centered on the idea of a prototype world because those, too are entities recognized by readers — and, in fact, every prototype of less than whole-world size started out life as a fragment of a prototype world!

Thus, for example, one of the prototype dystopias in SF looks like this:

  • The society is rigidly stratified along birth-caste lines.
  • Birth castes are produced by technological manipulation in creches.
  • Either caste is obvious from physical appearance, or people wear uniform-like clothes which display their caste affiliation.
  • Having a child outside the creche system is highly illegal.
  • Conformity is maintained by inculcation of a a religious or quasi-religious ideology in which the mythic founders of the society play a central role, with an effective secret police as backstop.

This prototype dystopia may be set on a starship, in a hivelike fortress-city, or on an ecologically devastated future Earth. The background technology may be nearly that of present-time Earth or include interstellar travel and nanotechnology. Nevertheless, it's hard for anyone who has read the original to miss that this prototype is essentially a fragment of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1934) running around loose.

In some cases (like this one), most SF fans can instantly name the source story of a prototype world or fragment in some seminal work of the genre. Indeed, perhaps the best single-sentence definition of a seminal work in SF would be this:one that originated a still-recognized template world or major fragment.

In other cases, the prototype world becomes sufficiently detached from its original source(s) that they are no longer readily identifiable. For example, here is a prototype world that has been extremely widespread in SF since at least the early 1950s. One might call it the "Galactic Federation" template:

  • Earth humanity has faster-than-light interstellar travel and has spread to dozens or hundreds of extra-solar planets (transit times on the order of weeks).
  • Key technologies include FTL, personal flyers, and energy weapons; may include forcefields; do not generally include advanced biological manipulation, matter transmission, or nanotechnology (or there may be taboos that prevent application of these to humans).
  • Human space is dominated by a single political unit with a democratic federal structure, with individual planetary governments sending representatives to a galactic senate.
  • The federation government has a military monopoly. but lacks either the capability or authority (or both) to routinely interfere in events below planetary level.
  • Planetary law varies, but most worlds share a common legal framework including property rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and unrestricted travel.
  • The older worlds, closer to Earth (the "core" or "core worlds") are wealthy, heavily urbanized, and (for story purposes) boring.
  • The frontier (the "fringe") is a rough, challenging environment (most stories are set there). New worlds are constantly being scouted and opened to colonization. There is usually a specialist service of the federation government, quasi-military in structure but distinct from the military, dedicated to exploring new worlds.
  • The economic structure is a relatively laissez-faire capitalism. In the core regions, planetary governments are more powerful than corporations. On the fringe the reverse is occasionally true.
  • The federation may be in occasional or regular contact with nonhuman aliens beyond its frontiers. If so, relations are generally peaceful (otherwise the federation's political structure would become more centralized and militarized than in the standard prototype) though there may be tension, occasional minor flare-ups and may have been a significant war within historical memory.
  • And more...

All these implications are present, to an experienced SF reader, the instant a writer says "the Federation" or anything recognizably similar. Among other instances, this is the prototype of the Star Trek universe's "United Federation of Planets".

From E.E. "Doc" Smith's space operas in the 1930s through William Gibson's original cyberpunk novels in the early 1980s, the most important works in SF have been those that created or solidified new prototype worlds — and with them, new jargon, new signifiers that eventually became signatures of the prototypes as they drifted free of their sources to be used and transformed and re-worked in new works of SFnal imagination.

This is why the shared jargon of SF is so important to understanding the field as a whole. It maps in miniature the structure of the prototype worlds that readers and writers hold in common.

TOWARDS A TAXONOMY OF CLICHES IN SPACE OPERA

Some of you might remember the Evil Overlord's List, a list of all the generic cliche mistakes that Evil Overlords tend to make in fiction (16: I will never utter the sentence "But before I kill you, there's just one thing I want to know."). I think that it might be a good idea to begin bolting together a similar list of the cliches to which Space Opera is prone, purely as an exercise in making sure that once I get under way I only make new and original mistakes, rather than recycling the same-old same-old.

This is not an exhaustive list—it's merely a start, the tip of a very large iceberg glimpsed on the horizon. And note that I'm specifically excluding the big media franchise products—Star Wars, Star Trek, Firefly, and similar—from consideration: any one of them could provide a huge cliche list in its own right, but I'm interested in the substance of the literary genre rather than in what TV and film have built using the borrowed furniture of the field.

  1. Planetary civilizations

    This subheading covers common cliches/mistakes made in discussing inhabited (Earthlike) planets and the people who live on them.

  2. Space and cosmology

    Common blunders in cosmology, planetography, orbital mechanics, and related.

    • Moons are good, the more the better!
    • Suns are good, too, the more the better!
    • ... Especially if one of them is a giant. (Those never explode or flare messily.)
    • Planetary ring systems are picturesque, not dangerous
    • Planets have a diurnal period precisely 86,400 Earth seconds long
    • Planets rotate east-to-west
    • Planets have magnetic poles that approximate their rotational axis
    • Planetary gravity can be approximated to a point source for purposes of calculating orbital dynamics
    • All satellites orbit the equator
    • You can change orbital inclination easily
    • Stuff in orbit doesn't change orbital inclination spontaneously
    • Geosynchronous orbit is easy to get to
    • If you are in geosynchronous orbit away from the equator you still hover over the same spot on the planetary surface all the time
    • Planets are close together
    • Concentric planets orbit the same distance apart
    • The flight time between planets in an inner star system is the same as between planets in the outer system
    • Asteroids are so close together that you can hide between them
    • ... but they never clump into planets
    • Asteroidal dust makes an irritating ping as it bounces off a ship's hull
    • ... for some reason you never run into it at multiple km/sec
    • Actually, hitting a space rock or other spaceship is no big deal, a bit like being in a minor car accident
    • ... Even though the kinetic energy released by an impact increases with the square of the velocity, and you're travelling hundreds to millions of time faster
    • Gas giants are good for mining volatiles
    • ... Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial
    • ... Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)
    • All comets have tails
    • ... they're sort of hairless and scaly, like a [sarcasm limit exceeded - Ed.]
    • Rocky planets are either airless or shirt-sleeves worlds with breathable air
    • Pay no attention to Venus, runaway greenhouse worlds are imaginary
    • Big stars are as long-lived and likely to have planets as dwarf stars
    • Supernovae happen routinely and are no big deal
    • Interstellar space is totally empty
    • ... You can fly as fast as you like without worrying about dust particles
    • You don't have to worry about interstellar gas, either
    • ... Except when there's not enough of it to keep your ramscoop accelerating
    • Incidentally? Ramscoops totally work! (Larry Niven said so in 1968.)
    • You can go fast enough to experience relativistic time dilation without worrying about the pesky cosmic background radiation blue-shifting into hard X-rays and frying you
    • You can forget all about hitting the occasional interstellar 4He nucleus with some multiple of the energy of an alpha particle, several million times a second
    • ... Don't worry about hitting the electrons bound to the neutral hydrogen either, gamma photons totally aren't a thing
    • You can use handy black holes and neutron stars to make handbrake turns in space
    • You an also use gas giants to make handbrake turns, at high relativistic speeds
    • Don't let the fact the space is full of exciting high energy physics put you off going there, squishy meatsack-persons!
  3. Biology

    Biology is complicated—so much so that many SF authors suffer from Dunning-Kruger syndrome in approaching the design of life-supporting planets.

    • All planets harbour a single apex predator that eats people
    • All planets harbour is a single venomous insect/reptile analog that poisons people
    • The native flora and fauna use a biochemistry that we can derive sustenance from
    • ... This includes weird-ass micronutrients
    • Pay no attention to the native microbiota, they're harmless
    • ... You won't even suffer from hay fever! Much less systemic anaphylaxis.
    • Ecosystems are robust; why not let your ship's cat stretch her legs whenever you land?
    • ... This goes for your ship's rats, too
    • Planets only have one class of plant-analog and one class of animal-analog
    • ... Only Earth has reptiles, amphibia, fish, birds, insects, mammals, fungi, etc.
    • Terraforming is really simple; you can do it with algae capsules delivered from orbit
    • There are no native parasites that might eat Maize, so we can turn the entire largest continent into a robot-run plantation
    • ... Soil exhaustion isn't a thing
    • ... Terrestrial constraints on agriculture don't apply on other planets
    • You can keep a starship crew healthy and sane indefinitely using a life support system running on blue-green algae, tilapia, and maybe the odd soy bean plant
    • Life support systems are simple, stable, and self-managing
    • It is safe to put bleach down the toilet on a starship; your algae/tilapia/soy will totally deal with it it when it comes out of the recycler
    • Vitamins? Naah, we'll just genetically modify the crew to make their own
    • If you implant humans with the gene for chlorophyl they can magically become photosynthetic
    • ... Okay, if you add the genes for RuBiSCO and the C3 pathway they can magically become photosynthetic
    • ... Because of course two square meters of skin is enough surface area to photosynthetically capture enough energy for a high-metabolic-rate mammal to live off
    • Humans can too hibernate/deep sleep between star systems! All you need is a cold enough chest freezer
    • ... Just as long as their intestinal flora go into cold sleep at the same time
    • ... and so do the low metabolic rate arctic pseudofungi spores they picked up at the last planetary stop
  4. Economics

    Fingernails-on-blackboard time for me. (See also: Neptune's Brood)

    • New Colonies may be either agricultural or mining colonies; rarely, resort colonies
    • Everyone uses Money to mediate exchanges of value
    • Money is always denominated in uniform ratios divisible by 10
    • Money is made out of shiny bits of metal, OR pieces of green paper, OR credit stored in a computer network
    • There is only one kind of Money on any given planet, or one credit network
    • The same kind of Money is accepted everywhere as payment for all debts
    • Visitors are always equipped to interface with the planet-wide credit network
    • Planetary credit networks are incredibly secure except when the visitor needs to hack into someone else's bank account
    • Barter is a sign of primitive people who haven't invented money
    • People who rely on Barter are simple, trusting folks (and a bit stupid on the side)
    • Inflation? What is this, I don't even ...
    • Deflation? What will they think of next?
    • Sales tax? What's that?
    • Income tax? What's that?
    • Import duty? What's ... (rinse, spin, repeat)
    • You can get a loan from your friendly bank manager whenever you need one
    • Bank loans accrue interest
    • If you fail to replay a bank loan you may be arrested and held in debtor's prison
    • ... Or sold into slavery
    • ... Or your organs can be seized
    • ... Because your body is just one of your fungible assets, right?
    • ... And harvesting organs for transplant surgery is a universal practice
    • People on planets have not heard of Ponzi Schemes
    • People on planets have not heard of Credit Default Swaps or the Black-Scholes equation
    • If money is made of shiny bits of metal or green paper, banks have vaults where they store lots of money
    • Money sitting in a bank vault is worth something
    • Visitors to a Colony can print fake currency without fear of consequences
    • Visitors to a Colony can leave their money with a bank between infrequent visits without fear of consequences
    • Banks are stable, because ...
    • ... The planetary government will never let a bank go bust, because ...
    • ... The galactic emperor will never let a planetary government go bust, because ...
    • Traders on starships land on planets to load and unload cargo
    • ... Or they carry their own orbit-to-surface shuttle
    • ... Which is as easy and safe to operate as a fork-lift truck
    • Cargo is bought and sold in starports
    • It is profitable to ship crude break-bulk cargo like timber or foodstuffs between star systems because starships are cheap and easy to repair and operate
    • Break-bulk shipping in open cargo holds has never been improved upon
    • Multimodal freight containers, EDI/EDIFACT standards for commerce, bar codes, bourses, and RFID technologies are just inferior and unnecessarily complicated alternatives to a bazaar or indoor market
    • Insurance underwriting? Arbitrage? What's that? (rinse, spin, repeat)
    • All cargo starships need plenty of unskilled deck hands to help load and unload cargo
    • All cargo starships need gun turrets to fight off swarms of space pirates
    • ... Cargo starships with guns can fight off space pirates
    • Cargo starship crews can fix battle damage
    • ... All it takes is enough duct tape and determination
    • ... Because space pirate weapons are as deadly as shotguns, not H-bombs
    • ... And starships cost no more to build and operate than a 1920s tramp steamer
    • Space pirates will happily open fire on a cargo ship to damage it before boarding
    • Space pirates need to board cargo ships in order to steal their cargo
    • ... And impress/conscript/enslave their crew
    • Piracy is a huge problem for space traders
    • You can tell the difference between a pirate and a space trader with a glance
    • A cargo captain in a hole might easily turn to smuggling to improve their bottom line
    • Navies are a lesser threat to smugglers than random encounters with pirates
    • Nobody has ever heard of end-user certificates or bonded cargo
    • Nobody ever thinks to ship their high-tax cargo via a free port or use complex financial arrangements to avoid customs duty without having to hire a dodgy armed ship with a poor credit rating
  5. Politics

    • Planets have a single unitary government (or none at all)
    • Planetary governance is no more complex than running a village or small township
    • ... This is because the planetary capital is a village or small township, not, say, Beijing or Mexico City
    • If there are two or more ethnicities represented on a planet their collective politics are simple and easily understood by analogy to 20th century US race relations
    • All planetary natives everywhere speak Galactic Standard English, or Trade Pidgin
    • New Colonies can't afford police, detectives, customs inspectors, or the FBI
    • New Colonies don't require visting spacers to conform to local dress codes or laws
    • New Colonies don't have gun control laws
    • New Colonies don't have laws, or if they do they were written by a mad libertarian
    • Despite the lack of laws, nobody underage drinks in the saloon
    • ... Nobody underage works in the saloon rooms you rent by the hour, either
    • ... Nor is there an extensive school truancy problem or much illiteracy
    • On reaching pensionable age, all colonists are forced to retire and deported to the Planet of the Pensioners
    • There is no unemployment because happy smiley frontier needs cowboys or something
    • If the planetary government is a democracy, the new Mayor will be elected by a town meeting
    • If the planetary government is an oligarchy, the new Patrician will be elected by a town meeting (of oligarchs, in the back room of the saloon)
    • If the planetary government is a theocracy, there will be only one sect of the planetary religion and no awkward long-standing heresies that are too strong/embedded to suppress
    • ... And there will be direct rule by Clergy, along the lines of an oligarchy: no Committees of Guardians of the Faith, no separation of executive and legislature, none of the complexity and internal rivalries of Terrestrial theocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia)
    • If the planet is a colony of the Galactic Empire, the new Planetary Governor will be appointed by the local Sector Governor
    • ... It's Governors all the way up (until you hit the Emperor)
    • Monarchy is the natural and perfectly ideal form of government
    • Only an Imperial Monarchy can ensure the good local governance of a myriad of inhabited planets scattered across the vast reaches of deep space
    • Monarchies are never a Single Point Of [Galactic] Failure
    • Monarchs are never stupid, mad, ill, or distracted by a secret ambition to be a house painter instead
    • Viziers are Always (a) Grand and (b) Evil. (At this point, let's just #include the regular Evil Overlord list, m'kay?)
    • Democracies are always corrupt
    • You can always bribe your way out of sticky situation if you're from off-world
    • All planetary legal systems work the same way (some remix of Common Law, constitutional governance, and trial by jury).
    • The standard punishments for a crime range from a small fine, to slavery in the uranium mines for life (about 18 months), to an excruciating death
    • Trials are swift and punishments are simple and easy to understand
    • Justice is always punitive/retributive/exemplary, never compensatory/preventative/rehabilitative, much less poetic/cryptic/incomprehensible
    • ... If the Author disapproves of the death penalty, substitute mind-wipe for the death penalty (like, there's a difference?)
  6. Culture

    • There is usually only one culture per planet
    • ... Sometimes there are two, to provide for an oppositional plot dynamic
    • ... Pay no attention to the blank spots on the map
    • ... And especially don't go looking for the unmarked mass graves
    • Planetary natives are either Colonists or Indigenous
    • Indigenous peoples are either Primitive or Advanced (and Decadent)
    • Advanced Indigines either don't have space travel or gave it up (see: Decadent)
    • Primitive Indigines are either Tribal or Mediaeval
    • Mediaeval Indigines invariably recapitulate the politics of the Hundred Years War
    • Visits to Mediaeval Indigenous Colonies can be approximated to a side-quest into Fantasyland
    • If the planet is a Colony it is either a Lost Colony or a New Colony
    • Lost Colonies may resemble Primitive Indigines but never Advanced
    • New Colonies resemble Tombstone, AZ, circa 1880
    • New Colonists live in log cabins, ride mules/horses and carry ~six-guns~ blasters
    • ... You can find logs (cabins, for the construction of) everywhere on planets
    • ... They're like abandoned crates in first-person shooters
    • Psychologically speaking, everybody is either WEIRD or Primitive
    • Primitive (non-WEIRD) people are stupid and unimaginative
    • WEIRD people accept and embrace change and innovation; non-WEIRD people reject both
    • Colonies are usually modelled on WEIRD 1950s cultural norms
    • Colony People come in two genders
    • The Women on New Colonies are either:
    • ... Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen (because colonies need babies)
    • ... Dungaree-wearing two-fisted starship-engineering-obsessed lesbians desperate to get off-world
    • The Men on New Colonies are either:
    • ... Manly plaid-shirt-wearing heterosexual farmers breaking sod in the ~west~ new world
    • ... Dastardly drunken muggers waiting behind the spaceport saloon for an unwary spacer
    • QUILTBAG: huh? Who are those people and why doesn't somebody cure them?
    • ... (Alternatively: everybody is QUILTBAG, pale patriarchal heterosexual penis people are extinct)
    • Clothing invariably obeys some regional dress code that has been observed on Earth in the past thousand years; in extreme cases 1950s business attire will serve to avoid attracting undue attention
    • You can recognize someone's gender on any planet because:
    • ... Women wear dresses or skirts with make-up and long hair
    • ... Men wear pants (or occasionally suits of armour)
    • ... Hijra? Hermaphrodites? Transgender? Asexual? What are those?
    • On some planets people go naked, except for body paint
    • ... This causes no problems, whether social or practical
    • Colony Planets are invariably a Crapsack World that people are desperate to escape from, unless they're the planetary governor or some species of NPC
    • The only place worse than a Colony World is Old Earth
    • Old Earth is
    • ... An over-crowded overpopulated hell-hole
    • ... An over-regulated bureaucratic hell-hole
    • ... A poverty-stricken backwater and hell-hole
    • ... Destroyed
    • ... Lost (because everyone in the galaxy somehow forgot the way home)
    • ... Mythical (and many people think it never existed)
    • ... Somewhere to run away from
    • ... (Rarely) Somewhere to run to
    • Slavery is
    • ... Ubiquitous
    • ... No big deal
    • ... Illegal but all the bad guys do it
    • "the best thing we ever did for them; they're much happier now"
    • Humans are free; aliens are slaves
    • Humans are slaves; aliens are free
  7. Technology - space travel

    • Running a nuclear power plant is kid's business; even a drunken college drop-out can be a ship's engineer
    • Rocket motors are simple to maintain and operate, too—they never break
    • Reaction mass is incredibly dense, cheap, and easy to stash away in a spare corner
    • ... It never runs out
    • ... It doesn't require special handling procedures
    • ... It's never toxic, cryogenic, teratogenic, radioactive, or corrosive
    • Oxygen is freely available in space
    • You can go as fast as you like if you just accelerate in a straight line
    • Spaceships accelerate at right angles to the direction the occupants experience gravity in
    • Spaceships are:
    • ... bilaterally symmetrical
    • ... rugged and able to survive impacts with other objects
    • ... easily maintained by semi-skilled labour/shade tree mechanics
    • ... about as complex as a 1920s tramp steamer, or maybe a deep-sea fishing trawler
    • ... easily piloted
    • ... can stop on a dime
    • ... available second-hand in good working order from scrapyards
    • ... have wings and an undercarriage, like a biplane
    • ... You can hear them coming a parsec away
    • Generating electricity aboard a spaceship without solar panels is easy
    • ... So is getting rid of waste heat
    • ... The bigger the spaceship, the easier it gets (because the square-cube law doesn't exist)
    • ... The Death Star would totally not melt itself with its waste heat whenever it fired its planet-zapper!
    • Faster than light travel is easy
    • ... But the jump drive is fuelled by unobtainium
    • Causality violation: what's that?
    • There are no regulatory frameworks or licensing regimes for starships
    • Nobody would ever think to run a starship up to 50% of light-speed and ram a planet
    • ... Even if they did that, the effect wouldn't be significantly worse than a 1940s atom bomb
    • There's no regulatory framework for shuttlecraft, either
    • ... Because nobody has heard of Kessler syndrome
    • ... Also, a space shuttle in-falling from low earth orbit totally doesn't arrive at ground level with kinetic energy equal to about ten times it's own mass in TNT, because if it did it would be a field-expedient weapon of mass destruction
    • Flying a spaceship is not only easy, it's easier than flying a Cessna
    • Spaceship life support systems are simple to maintain and repair and very forgiving
    • Spaceships communicate across interplanetary or interstellar distances by radio
    • ... Interplanetary radio works instantaneously
    • ... Interplanetary radio communications are as easy to operate as tuning your car stereo to a new AM channel
    • GPS works in space beyond low earth orbit: who needs navigation skills these days?
  8. Technology - Pew! Pew! Pew!

    • Radar gives us an instantaneously updated map of everything in a star system
    • ... But stealth technology is totally a thing!
    • We can't detect spaceships by looking for their infrared emissions against the 2.7 kelvin cosmic background temperature
    • Also, spaceships can hide behind planets or asteroids indefinitely without using their engines or knowing the bearing of the enemy they're hiding from
    • Laser beams are instantaneous, don't spread or disperse, and can melt anything
    • ... Except a force field that somehow refracts/bends/absorbs the confused photons
    • Missiles, with a constrained (small) propulsion system, can overhaul a much bigger/less constrained spaceship at great range
    • Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties don't bother to count Free Trader Beowulf's point-defense nuclear missile battery for treaty purposes—only naval nukes count
    • Gun turrets have to have a glassed-in canopy and a gunner inside or they won't work
    • Also, human gunners can totally draw a bead on a hostile pirate ship maneuvering a few light seconds away. Fire control computers, not so much
    • Boarding actions have mysteriously made a come-back from the 1850s.
    • Guns are still bang-sticks that require a human to point them at a target
    • Stun-guns have no unpleasant after-effects
    • Bullets are brainless
    • You can dodge laser beams
    • Fisticuffs are universally considered to be the optimal way to resolve a sincere difference of opinion over complex commercial interactions
    • All starships need to carry armed guards, or at least a gun locker full of blasters for the crew when they're visiting a Colony planet
    • Knife missiles—who ordered that?
  9. Aliens

    • Aliens are multicellular organisms with nervous systems and musculoskeletal systems
    • Aliens communicate in language
    • ... Using noises
    • ... Emitted by their mouths
    • ... At frequency ranges we can perceive
    • Aliens are individuals
    • Aliens are eusocial hive organisms
    • Spacefaring aliens are conscious
    • Aliens are WEIRD people with latex face paint or funny haircuts
    • ... Because primates are a universal deterministic outcome of evolution on all worlds
    • Wittgenstein was wrong about talking lions. (If they could speak we'd find what they can say fascinating—mostly because we'd be waiting for them to mutter, "I wonder what those bipeds taste like?")
    • Aliens build starships sort-of like humans, but with wonky furniture
    • Aliens are interested in us (see Wittgenstein above)
    • Aliens want to trade with us
    • Aliens want to exchange bodily fluids with us (ewww ...)
    • Aliens want to induct us into their civilizational-level fraternity/sorority and make contact in order to teach us the house rules
    • Alien species only have one dominant culture
    • Alien species are noteworthy for their universally applicable stereotypy, utterly unlike us complicated and divergent human beings
    • Aliens have a much longer history of spaceflight than humans, but unaccountably failed to stumble upon and domesticate us during the 11th century
    • Aliens have religious beliefs because they have the same theory of mind as human beings and attribute intentionality to natural phenomena (see also: Daniel Dennett)
    • Alien religion resembles those of a human culture that thrived prior to 1000 CE and is now considered quaintly obsolescent by most humans
    • Aliens can't control themselves
    • Aliens are unconditionally hostile
    • Aliens are robots
    • ... Robot-aliens are just like alien-aliens, only more alien, because robots
    • Aliens are incomprehensible
    • Aliens have no sense of humor
    • Aliens have a human sense of humor
    • Aliens have been extinct for millions of years, but:
    • ... have left treasures behind in their death-trap-riddled tombs
    • ... their ephemeral technologies still work flawlessly
    • ... If humans trip the burglar alarm, they're coming back—and they'll be mad
    • ... they're extinct because they Sublimed
    • ... they're extinct because they became Decadent
    • ... they're extinct because they suicided
    • ... (robot-alien remix): they're extinct because they tripped over the Halting Problem
    • ... they're extinct because (insert dodgy social darwinist argument here)

Luke Campbell: re: "Planets rotate east-to-west".

     While this might be a cliche, it is also the definition of east and west.

     You have two poles of rotation on a planet. Looking down at one, the planet spins clockwise, looking down at the other, the planet spins counter-clockwise. You choose the one where the planet is spinning counter-clockwise as the north pole, and the other as the south. Since west is defined by the direction 90 degrees counter-clockwise from north (and 90 degrees clockwise from south), and east in the opposite direction, this means that planets always "rotate east-to-west" and celestial objects always rise in the east and set in the west (with rare exceptions, such as moons orbiting faster than a planetary rotation period).

From TOWARDS A TAXONOMY OF CLICHES IN SPACE OPERA by Charles Stross (2016)
OVERWRITTEN COLLECTIONS OF TROPES

      As I mentioned in my last entry, I've been watching Babylon 5 lately. It's not a perfect show, but it has one big advantage: it's consistent and believable.

     Contrast this with Doctor Who. Doctor Who is fun to watch, but if you think about it for more than two seconds you notice it's full of plot holes and contradictions. Things that cause time travel paradoxes that threaten to destroy the universe one episode go without a hitch the next. And the TARDIS, the sonic screwdriver, and the Doctor's biology gain completely different powers no one's ever alluded to depending on the situation. The aliens are hysterically unlikely, often without motives or believable science, the characters will do any old insane thing when it makes the plot slightly more interesting, and everything has either a self-destruct button or an easily findable secret weakness that it takes no efforts to defend against.
     But I guess I'm not complaining. If the show was believable, the Doctor would have gotten killed the first time he decided to take on a massive superadvanced alien invasion force by walking right up to them openly with no weapons and no plan. And then they would have had to cancel the show, and then I would lose my chance to look at the pretty actress who plays Amy Pond.
     So Doctor Who is not a complete loss. But then there are some shows that go completely beyond the pale of enjoyability, until they become nothing more than overwritten collections of tropes impossible to watch without groaning.

     I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

     Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
     I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

     Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

     So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.

     Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

     Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
     So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
     ...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

     I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).

     So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable.

From STUFF by Scott Alexander (2010)

Cliche Gallery

artwork by Stephanie Fox of io9.com

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by Cam Magee and Caitlin S. Griffin

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Inventing Names

INVENTING NAMES 0

      The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called — in the local language — Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

     The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

     Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod ('Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is') and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.

From THE LIGHT FANTASTIC by Terry Pratchett (1986)
INVENTING NAMES 1

(ed note: Fantasy author and reviewer Lin Carter is talking about the nouns invented by fantasy writers for their novels. Mr. Carter is a tad pompous and tends egotistically to use his own work as a shining example of proper usage, but he does make some good points.)

      Now, as for Imrryr, “the Dreaming City of Melniboné,” it is a name so beautiful as to be worthy of Dunsany himself.
     But R’lin K’ren A’a…
     R’lin K’ren A’a!
     If names were meant to be eaten, that one would give you indigestion.

     Now what, exactly, are the criteria we use in judging invented names? “Aptness,” suggests Auden, correctly enough. This quality of aptness is an elusive one, hard to define. But we recognize it when we hear it—the Proper Name—and no other name will do. For an example of this, we turn to the first page of Burroughs’ novel Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and we read:
Upon a massive bench of polished ersite, beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant pimalia, a woman sat. Her shapely, sandaled foot tapped impatiently upon the jewel-strewn walk that wound beneath the stately sorapus trees across the scarlet sward of the royal gardens of Thuvan Dihn, Jeddak of Ptarth, as a dark-haired, red-skinned warrior bent low toward her, whispering heated words close to her ear.
     Acknowledging the self-evident fact that this is a simply brilliant way of opening a story—scene, setting, mood, and characters all sketched out in one swift stroke of the verbal brush—notice those invented names. “Pimalia” and “ersite.” The blooms of the flowering pimalia tree. Massive bench of polished ersite stone. We recognize it when we hear it—the Proper Name—“and no other name will do.”
     “Pimalia” sounds like the name of a flowering tree; “ersite” sounds like a kind of carven stone. This is precisely what Auden meant by aptness. Now let’s try it this way:
Upon a massive bench of polished pimalia, beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant ersite, a woman…
     NO. That simply will not do at all. The invented words —purely nonsense words, without derivation or meaning—just cannot be used interchangeably.

     Let me employ a further example of aptness in name-invention, turning this time to the Fields We Know. Amid the brooding starkness of the great Salisbury Plain of England rises that tremendous stone monument dating from neolithic times that we know as Stonehenge.
     Stonehenge… taste the word on your tongue; roll it around in your mouth; listen to it … Stonehenge. The word has a slow, stately grandeur to it. The syllables are ponderous, weighty as the great stones themselves.

     Now imagine it called “Piccadilly”!

     It simply doesn’t fit, does it? The true name has a ponderous and mysterious grandeur to it—it is right there, in the slow, heavy roll of the evenly accented syllables. But “Piccadilly” is a brisk, almost humorous word; it sounds trivial, jingly. You simply cannot substitute it for the real name.
     For the real name, Stonehenge, is the Proper Name, and somehow we recognize it as such when we hear it.

     Now, beyond aptness, what other criterion comes to mind by which to judge invented names?
     In a letter dated September 2, 1957, to the youthful fantasy novelist Jane Gaskell, our old friend C. S. Lewis touched on many interesting topics concerned with the craftsmanship of fantasy writing. Prominent among these was the topic of invented names: Lewis concluded that they “ought to be beautiful and suggestive as well as strange; not merely odd.” (The italics are my own.)
     Moorcock’s “R’lin K’ren A’a” is certainly strange, certainly odd; with equal certainty, I can say it is neither beautiful nor suggestive.
     Leigh Brackett, when she avoids the Celtic glossaries, can coin beautifully. In The Secret of Sinharat, such names as Berild, Narrabhar, and Delgaun are fluid and lovely. Clark Ashton Smith is a master at this, coining names at once odd and beautiful: Malygris the Magician, Satampra Zeiros, Phaniol, Tirouv Ompallios, Maal Dweb, Ralibar Vooz in “The Seven Geases,” Tsathoggua, Mmatmuor, and Sodosma.
     And Dunsany, of course, the master of them all. Remember the heroes of the City of Victories?—“Welleran, Soorenard, Mommolek, Rollory, Akanax and young Iraine.” Or Thangobrind the Jeweller, or Lorendiac in “The Fortress Unvanquishable,” or Lirazel and Alveric and Ziroonderel, the witch who dwelt among the thunders in The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Or the warriors in that fine tale “Carcassone,” who dwelt in days “when Camorak reigned at Am, and the world was fairer … Gadriol the Leal, and Norn, and Athoric of the Sleety Sword, Heriel the Wild, Yarold, and Thanga of Esk.”
     And Vance, the current reigning master, can turn off some beautifully polished names when he has a mind to. There is “Dorwe Coreme” in The Eyes of the Overworld, and “Claude Glystra” in Big Planet, and “Pharesm the Sorcerer.”

     In my own stories, I try to match the savor to the sound and the sense: “Thongor,” has grim weight to it, solidity, and the ring of clashing steel. The character is obviously a fighting-man; you can sense that from the sound of the name alone. “Sharajsha” suggests, at least to my ear, a mysterious and vaguely Oriental magician —which is exactly what the character is. The name has weight and importance: it is impressive. Elsewhere, in my newly-launched series of stories laid in the legendary isles of Antillia, needing a name for a wealthy and fabulous metropolis, I coined “Palmyrium.” The name was derived from an extinct nation of the Near East called Palmyra, whose queen, Zenobia, was crushed by the Roman Emperor Aurelian—but that is irrelevant. The name of the capital of an empire should sound like what it is, and to my ear something in the very sound of “Palmyrium” echoed the music of the imperial.

     How do professional fantasy writers invent names? They use a number of different systems. Some of them, more linguistically talented or experienced than the rest of us, build their neocognomina by scientific techniques. Professor Tolkien, a linguist by avocation and a philologist by profession, invented the languages used in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings before he ever turned his mind to inventing the world in which these languages would be spoken, much less writing stories about his world of Middle-earth. (Such, at least, is the persistent rumor, which has yet to be denied ofiicially.)
     Few of us have ever gone to the length of inventing an entire language for our imaginary worlds, Tolkien being the rare exception. However, if a series continues long enough, the author generally tends to work up a sizable vocabulary of coined words. Burroughs did this in his Mars books, for example. Such words usually are made up for specific needs—“jed” for king, “jeddak” for emperor, “haad” for mile, “od” for foot, “safad” for inch. Burroughs, you see, was clever enough to realize that to employ modern English terms in his narrative would “break the mood,” so to speak. He had a diflicult enough time convincing the reader to accept his Martian locale, without tossing in jarringly anachronistic terminology. Coleridge would have understood his reasoning, surely!
     “Anachronism” is not quite the word for this sort of thing, but no one has coined a better one. “Anamundism,” perhaps.

(ed note: Anamundism: a concept which doesn’t belong in the world of a particular text. The geographic equivalent to invented-world fantasy corresponding to anachronism in historical fiction. Example: "Taras Tarkas of Mars paid 300 dollars for a sword." Most common occurrence in scifi is the fact that all alien races can speak English.)

     So Burroughs, as I said, avoided breaking the mood, the “sense” of his extraterrestrial scene, with such anamundisms. Although I doubt that he ever drew up his invented Barsoomian languages systematically, in the course of writing his eleven books about Mars he had to coin quite a few words. Wherever he felt that a modern, familiar term would jar the reader, he introduced a neologism—“kaor” for “hello” is an example. And he was smart enough to devise these words with a suggestion of linguistic relationship: if “jed” means king and “jeddak” means emperor, we can deduce that the syllable “dak” indicates superior degree. He worked the same trick in inventing his Martian equivalents of terrene military ranks: “padwar” for lieutenant, “dwar” for captain, “odwar” for general. “Pad,” according to his system, must mean “lesser than” or “subsidiary” or simply “sub.” Thus, “padwar” means “sub-dwar,” or “sub-captain.” There is considerable fascination in unraveling this sort of internal data—it is a part of the lasting fascination of such series as the Mars books, the Oz books, the Sherlock Holmes stories, etc.
     When I began working out the milieu of my Lemurian books, I followed Burroughs closely in this, for I could see that his use of neologisms was not governed by arbitrary whim but clearly dictated by need. Thus, in my Lemurian terminology “sark” means king, “sarkaja” means queen (“aja” being the feminine ending), and “Sarkon” means king of kings, or emperor. I followed his lead in denoting military ranks, too; thus, in my system “otar” means the leader of a hundred warriors (“captain”), while “daotar” means the leader of ten such companies, i.e., a thousand men (“colonel”), and “daotarkon” means “colonel-of-colonels,” or “general.” You will notice that I am consistent in employing the suflix “kon” to denote superiority. (I also, and just for the hell of it, made up the Lemurian version of “kaor,” the Martian greeting: in my system it became “belarba” —be-lar-ba: literally, “I greet you,” from which it can be deduced that “be” means “I” and “ba” means "you.")
     I have now evolved a working vocabulary of about fifty or sixty words in the Lemurian language, not including the invented names of beasts, flowers, trees, and so on. I suggest this system to anyone who seriously intends writing a fantasy novel set in imaginary surroundings—and work out your terms in advance.

     NOT all fantasy writers are conscious of the problems of the anachronism and the anamundism, unfortunately. The British writer Jane Gaskell is, I’m afraid, a case in point. Her “Cija of Atlan” trilogy is excellent stuff and quite absorbing to read, but her casual and unthinking use of familiar, everyday terminology in heroic novels which purport to be set in lost Atlantis are, to say the least, terribly jarring. I am not talking about terms like “king” or “general” here, although it might be pointed out that the word “general” is a modern European term for which a noncommittal variant like “commander” could easily and unobtrusively have been substituted. No—she commits far worse bloopers than these.
     In discussing Zerd’s army—again, I would have preferred a term with less modern connotations: “host,” perhaps, or “legion”—we are treated to a positively staggering collection of anachronisms. “Uniform” and “poncho,” “regiment” and “battalion,” “the big brass” (used, of course, as a euphemism for “superior officers”) and “civilians” are bad enough; but before long the reader is asked to swallow anachronisms such as an army “goose-stepping to a blare of pompous bands” (The City, p. 47), soldiers wearing “shakos and epaulettes” (ibid, p. 50), and soldiers that “weren’t in formation” and “looked off-duty in spite of their proud uniforms.”
     Still further along we find terms like “H. Q.,” “front-line duty,” and “ration-allowances,” and by this point we are too numb to wince at the appearance of “non-coms,” “barracks,” or “sergeant.” There can hardly be any excuse for this sort of sloppiness. Surely Miss Gaskell knows that in antiquity there was no such thing as soldiers in uniform, marching to, God help us, brass bands. As her story leaves the army camp behind and moves into what I am sure she would not have hesitated to call “civilian life,” the barrage of mindless anachronisms continues. “Dandruff,” “vacuum,” “honeymoon,” “breakfast,” “pneumonia,” “Gosh!”—it’s almost as if she were doing everything she could think of to break the mood of her own story. “O.K., sonny, you’re hired,” says a shopkeeper in The Serpent. Another character has “a prominent adam’s apple.” She does this sort of thing interminably—whether from sheer ignorance, pure insensitivity, or downright carelessness, I hardly dare guess.
     As might be imagined, C. S. Lewis took her to task for this in severe terms: “In a fantasy, every precaution must be taken never to break the spell, to do nothing which will wake the reader and bring him back with a bump to the common earth,” he says pointedly in the letter to her mentioned earlier, concluding, “All magic dies at the touch of the commonplace.”
     Miss Gaskell errs blatantly in this manner, but the grand championship in the anachronism department goes to an otherwise virtually unknown writer named Karl Edward Wagner for the use of a single word. In 1970 a paperback firm called “Powell Sci-Fi” issued his Sword & Sorcery novel Darkness Weaves; at once inept and amateurish, the book was not without a certain narrative drive and a sense of pace and color. However, I wish someone had informed Wagner that in an imaginary Medieval-type world of sorcerers and swordsmen, no one is about to offer an assassin “two hundred dollars” to perform a dirty deed.

     IN the preceding chapter I pointed out, in reference to my novel The White Throne, how invented names could be worked into the flow of a scene. I also suggested that they be scattered throughout the alphabet with deliberate evenness.
     This is a point of some importance, I think. Beginners tend to invent names as exotic as all get-out, names beginning with Z’s or Q’s or X’s. A little of this goes a long way. Exotic-sounding names should be used carefully and with a precise purpose, as when naming alien gods, for example. Lovecraft and his colleagues did this quite well in their Cthulhu Mythos stories, “Cthulhu” itself being a good example. The name is diificult to pronounce, as the name of a thoroughly alien entity ought to be. Recall as well Lovecraft’s name for a subterranean city of the Deep Ones: “Y’ha-nthlei.” The name sounds and looks as if it was never meant to be pronounced by the human throat, which was more or less the idea Lovecraft was trying to get across.

     A worldscape filled with similar names, however, would impede the reader’s ease in following the story, and there is no good reason for doing that. It is far better—assuming that your world is one inhabited by human beings, or reasonably human beings, anyway—to develop the habit of coining names with a purpose. For example, in the opening section of The Lord of the Rings, Professor Tolkien tries to create in his reader a sense of being at home. He makes the Shire sound very like the familiar English countryside, not only by including in the minutiae of the Hobbit culture such everyday items as umbrellas, doorknobs, visiting cards and fireworks (for which he could be criticized, since these are glaring anachronisms), but also by making the names sound “Englishy.” “Shire” itself is an Old English term, while other nearby places bear names like “Bree” and “Rivendell” and yet others have suflixes familiar to the English countryside: “Trollshaws,” “Hoarwell,” “Ettenmoors.” Another clever device he uses to good purpose is to translate some of his names into their English equivalent meanings: the river “Baranduin” or “Brandywine,” the “Cuath1o” or “Greyflood,” the “Brunen” or “Loudwater,” Lake “Nenuial” or “Evendim.”
     Other writers have employed similar devices. Some have focussed on “the English look” of names: that is, so many British names are bisyllabic, each syllable consisting of a consonant followed by a vowel followed by a second consonant—Milton, London, Carter, Parker, Harlow, Warren, and so on. One writer who did this rather well was Isaac Asimov: in his famous Foundation Trilogy—an example of world-making which shows that the rules hold as true for science fiction as for fantasy—he creates a familiar sense of “at-home-ness” through coined place-names like Kalgan, Trantor, Dorwin, Hardin, and so on. Invented names of many of the characters have a very “familiar” sound to them: Hari Seldon, Hober Mallow, Lathan Devers. If anything, Asimov may have used this style of names a bit to excess, for his future galactic civilization lacks “alienness.”

     At any rate, a worldscape should include not only a few exotica, like “Unmoiqh,” but also familiar-sounding names like “Mallow” or “Rivendell.” But Englishy names have a deadly sameness of look and sound, and occasional words with un-English elements should be introduced, if only for variety. A glance at the nearest Rand McNally atlas suggests the enormous range and variety of names our own world oflers as example to those who would create new worlds: not only is there London and Rome and Paris, but also Teotihuacan, Budapest, Cairo, Algeria, Paramaribo, and Walla-Walla. Note that some of these end in vowels and others do not, that they vary from being monosyllabic to having five syllables, and that while some have familiar English sequences of consonant/vowel/consonant, others include exotic double-vowels, called diphthongs—the “ai” in Cairo and the “eo” and “ua” in Teotihuacan.

     Since a novel-length story in the genre could or perhaps should include up to one hundred invented names, sameness of look or sound or syllabic length must be avoided. Another gem from “Powell Sci-Fi” demonstrates how not to do it: in the course of a dismal heroic fantasy called Swordmen of Vistar, author Charles Nuetzel commits virtually every error imaginable in the delicate art of name-invention. Not only does he give male characters names with feminine endings, like “Xalla” and “Thoris,” but almost without exception the names in his book are bisyllabic: Thoris, Illa, Xalla, Opil, Muda, Rota, Vistar, Tagor, Rusis, Vayis, Fada, etc.
     Another example of “how not to do it” turns up in Ted White’s novel The Sorceress of Qar (New York, Lancer, 1966). White takes us on a guided tour of his invented world, but there is a rather depressing sameness to the sound of his names: Qar, Qanar, Zominor, Zanor, Azanor, Tanakor, Shanathor, Vagar—do so many of them have to end with an “R”? In all fairness to White, though, it should be pointed out that no less an author than Tolkien himself commits the identical error. A glance over the map of his Middle-earth shows country after country with annoyingly similar-sounding names: Mordor, Gondor, Harondor, Amor, Eriador, Erebor—again, do they all have to end with “or”? As far as I can figure it out, Tolkien was operating on the principle that everybody in his imaginary world speaks the same language, or spoke it when the countries were named, anyway, because “or” means “land,” according to his system. This rings false to me and I am tempted to consider it a mistaken operating principle on his part. Anyway, it was a mistake in style.

     One more example and we shall move on to other matters. Newcomers to the craft should be alerted to the fact that when coining names there is an almost irresistible tendency to make up names which begin with “T.” Frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea why, but I am aware of the tendency and have to watch out for it in my own novels. Beginners, however, not having noticed this, often go overboard with T-names. As an example, Dave Van Amam’s novel The Players of Hell (New York, Belmont, 1968) demonstrates what can happen when this tendency gets out of hand: in the first twenty pages of his book, Van Arnam throws no fewer than eleven names beginning with “T” at his reader—Taher, Thranor, Tron, Tza, Tir’u, Touraj, Tormitan, Tarmisorn, Tassoran, Tchambar, and Tholk. There is simply no excuse for this; Van Amam’s novel is a short one of about thirty or thirty-five thousand words, and eleven names beginning with the same letter would be too many for even a novel twice that length. Authors who commit this sort of error are simply going to confuse their readers, who can hardly be expected to keep these names straight in their minds, especially names that look and sound as much alike as “Tormitan” and “Tarmisorn” and “Tassoran.”

     Another letter to watch out for is “S.” Again, there seems to be an almost irresistible tendency for fantasy writers to coin names beginning with that letter. In the same twenty pages, for instance, Van Arnam tosses out Sezain, Shaiphar, Samand, Shagon, and Shassa. Van Arnam fairly rubs his reader’s nose in this: in a single sentence in Players of Hell (page 83), for instance, he clutters a single phrase with four such names (“deep in the mysteries of Tron and Lord Tir’u and Touraj of the God Lands of Tormitan”), while in the opening sentence of another novel, Star Gladiator (Belmont, 1967), he risks seriously confusing readers at the very start of his story by presenting them with two very similar names, this time beginning with “K” (“It was midnight in the capital city of Kallor when the Star Guards … struck the planet Kalvar.”).
     This sort of error is understandable, even forgivable, in the first work of a beginner. In faimess to Van Amam, I should remark that he has a remarkable talent for name-invention, despite his overuse of names beginning with “S” and “T.” The Players of Hell offers its readers excellent and memorable names, such as “Azelteram,” a fine name for a magician, and “Zantain,” which sounds like what it is—the name of a godlike immortal being of unguessable power.

     But never underestimate the importance of coined names. “What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare; to which I could answer, “Plenty!” Sometimes a superb name can all but rescue an otherwise inept story. A case in point here is a very forgettable novel by Robert Moore Williams called King of the Fourth Planet (New York, Ace Books, 1962), which is almost redeemed—but not quite—by a single brilliantly invented name: “the mighty mountain Suzusilmar.”

     I have been concentrating on what happens when name-coining is done poorly. When it is done well it is an enduring delight. Much of the magic and beauty in well-coined names lies in the element of mystery, for it seems beyond the power of imagination to explain the secret of the charm and lure of such names.
     Take, for example, “Barsoom” and “Oz,” which are to me two of the most magically evocative of all names —but why I feel this I do not really understand. Or the bizarre rhythm and music of “Uzuldaroum” and “Commoriom,” the capitals of Hyperborea, or the unearthly weirdness of “Zothique” and “Xiccarph” and the “Eiglophian Mountains” and “Mount Voonnithadreth,” and many another name coined by the incomparable Clark Ashton Smith. The very sources of such magnificent names are beyond conjecture, happily unlike the over-obviousness of Howard’s names, which de Camp in his exegesis traced to their origins with almost embarrassing ease.
     Burroughs also stands splendidly in the company of the masters of the naming craft. His “Warhoon” and “Zodanga” have a wild, barbaric ring of “strangeness” to them, and he was capable of extraordinary precision in such names as “the Great Toonoolian Marshes,” a name worthy of Klarkash-Ton in his prime.
     And also Lovecraft, who communicated a flavor of the weirdly alien in such thick, Hebraic-sounding names: Yuggoth, Yog-Sothoth, R’lyeh, Shub-Niggurath, and so on. (I have elsewhere discussed at length what I see as the Hebraic element in such names.) But in another mood, Lovecraft was also capable of lyrical, singing, beautifully exotic names, as in those coined during his early Dunsanian period: the Peaks of Throk, Pnoth, Mnar, Ooth-Nargai, Thalarion, llarnek, Kadatheron, Aphorat, Oriab, Bahama, and Hlanith on the Cerenerian Sea.
     These are rich and lovely and musical names, and purely Dunsanian in tone and quality. Which brings us to Lord Dunsany himself, in this, as in most other techniques, the supreme artist of the genre. The endless profusion of gorgeous and exotic names that poured from his swan’s-quill pen are so satisfying, so melodious, so savory, they beggar comparison:

     Goolunza and Poltamess and Babbulkund the City of Marvel; Allathurion and Sacnoth and Pondar Obed; holy Zaccarath and Bethmoora and Sardathrion; Peol Iagganoth and Pungar Vees and that mysterious great jewel called Ong Zwarba; fair Belzoond and the Athraminaurian mountains, and Zretazoola the city of Sombelënë the Centauress …

     Such names are beyond imitation and their magic is beyond our ability to explain.

From IMAGINARY WORLDS by Lin Carter (1973)
INVENTING NAMES 2

I expect everybody has seen the xkcd cartoon I’m quoting in the title. I laughed when I saw it, and yet I love the made up words in Anathem. The word “speelycaptor” makes me happy. Yet Stephenson is breaking all the rules of making up words for science fiction. There’s a rule that says “no smeerps”. A smeerp is white and woolly and grazes on mountains, you can eat the meat and make clothes from the wool… and there’s no reason not to call it a sheep because it is a sheep. (This is different from Brust’s norska, which is exactly like a rabbit except that it eats dragons.) A speelycaptor is a video camera. Stephenson does have a reason for not calling it one, apart from the fact that it’s a videocamera but awesomer, which is to underline the fact that he isn’t talking about our world but a different world that’s like our world two thousand years in the future but awesomer. I already wrote about this.

Generally though, the argument in that cartoon is right—made up words ought to be for new things and concepts, and five per book sounds about right. You need more than that if you include names, but we’re used to remembering names. We may forget which city is the capital of which planet and need to be reminded, but we can keep track of characters pretty well. It’s words for things and concepts that are the problem—if a word is explained the first time it’s used and then just used as a normal word, the reader has to remember it every time. It’s like learning a language, and it had better be worth it.

Sometimes it really is worth it. I don’t believe in the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that you can only think about things if you have words for them. I don’t believe there’s a concept you can’t convey with a paragraph of English. But it’s much easier to talk about things with a word than an explanation. C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur books introduce the kiffish word “sfik”. Sfik means standing relative to everyone else. Kif are constantly assessing where they are and whether then can advance or retreat. We have words for standing like “authority” and “respect” and “face” (as in “losing face”) but none of them quite mean what sfik means. I used it in conversation the other day, when talking about the difference between usenet and blogs—on usenet everyone started off with the same amount of sfik, and gained or lost it by what they said. On blogs, those who can top post start off with inherently more sfik. Staying with Cherryh, in the atevi books there’s the fascinating term man’chi, which is what the atevi feel instead of love and friendship. This isn’t one we need, but it’s essential for talking about them.

Another useful term I’ve seen people using away from the book is “kalothi” from Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite. (UK title Geta.) Kalothi means evolutionary fitness to survive. The people on the planet Geta worry a lot about that as individuals, because of the harshness of their environment. It’s a useful shorthand term. And Kurt Vonnegut made up some very nice words for the way people connect to each other in Cat’s Cradle. I’ve been using “karass” and “granfalloon” for years, and clearly I’m not the only one.

It’s harder to remember the words that don’t work so well. Some writers have tin ears, and I know there are books I’ve cringed at because of the made up words. There’s Larry Niven’s ineffective fake swear word “Tanj.” It’s hard to imagine somebody really shouting that, and the fact that it stands for There Aint No Justice really doesn’t help. Acroynms aren’t your friend. Similarly there’s Doris Lessing’s SOWF in the Shikasta books, the “spirit of we feeling”. I’m embarrassed even typing it. Now this may be personal. There may be people for whom “Tanj” or “Sowf” is as delightful as “speelycaptor” is for me. People are different. One of the problems with making up words is that any made up word will alienate some readers.

It takes a lot to alienate me—as I said, I tend to actively like the funny words. If I’m reading something and there are nifty new words on the first page, I am pleased. They do have to be evocative and not irritating, but my general reaction to a funny word is a visceral pleasure that we’re not in Kansas any more. My aunt, on the other hand, can’t even read a historical novel with names she doesn’t recognise. “Speelycaptor” would be a big speedbump for her, and I think for a lot of non-genre readers.

Describing the Indescribable

THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN

"What does that look like to you, Dr. Benedict?"

Benedict studied the ball, put a finger into the notch that McEvoy had cut, and looked up, frowning. "It looks to me like a tennis ball somebody turned inside out."

McEvoy nodded. "Right. And how would you go about turning a tennis ball inside out?"

"I don't think I could, without cutting a hole in it to turn it inside out through." The psychologist tossed the ball back onto the desk. "Which, I gather, you did not do. What can I do for you, Dr. McEvoy?"


"Fine. Things were going along very well until one of my men devised a radically new refrigerating pump that worked far better than anybody dreamed it could. We got our test material—a block of tungsten supported on an insulated tripod in the refrigerating vault—down closer to absolute zero than we'd ever hoped for. Maybe we hit absolute and dropped below it…I don't even know that for sure."

The phychologist blinked. "I don't follow. From absolute zero, just where can the temperature drop to?"

"A good question," McEvoy said. "I can't answer it. Below absolute zero you might speculate on some kind of negative molecular motion. Maybe that's what we did get. Certainly something changed. The test block simply evaporated. Vanished. The tripod vanished, and so did the temperature-recording device. All we could see in the vault was a small, glowing hole in the center of the room where the block had been. Nothing in it, nothing. Just a pale, blue, glowing area about six inches across that looked to some of us very strangely like a hypercube."

"A hypercube?"

"A three-dimensional picture of a four-dimensional object; just as you can draw a picture of a cube in perspective on a flat two-dimensional surface like a piece of paper. It looks like a cube when you look at it, but it doesn't actually have any depth. This glowing area was in three dimensions—cubical—but the lines were distorted as if there were more than one cube in the same space. In fact, it looked very suspiciously like a four-dimensional hole in our three-dimensional space, as if the energy we had been applying had inadvertently cut through a corner or an edge of some…some other universe constructed in four spatial dimensions instead of three."

Ed Benedict was silent for a moment, staring at the tennis ball. "So you investigated," he said finally.

"We investigated…and you know from the doctor what happened."

(ed note, the people who looked inside the hypercube died of fright)

"What about this?" Benedict pointed to the ball.

"That's one of the characteristics of this thing we are able to investigate. That was an ordinary, normal tennis ball until we dropped it into the area of this hypercube. It came out the other side looking like this. I stuck a pencil into the area and it came out with a thin layer of graphite around a solid wooden core. A light bulb we pushed in just exploded and vaporized."


That was her anchor, then. Her mind narrowed on that single thought. She was here, and this unbelievable place was here, too. There was nothing she could comprehend, but at least she was surviving. All about her she was aware of lines, angles, circles, but none of them were right, the way they should be. Three perfectly parallel lines which met each other at ninety-degree angles to form a perfect square with seven triangular sides…

It couldn't be!

But it was. Right here, all around her. And she was here. It has to be so, she told herself. Adjust to it! She sensed that in crossing the threshold into this universe she had turned a corner, an odd corner, not like any corner she had ever seen before, but her own universe was just inches away, back around that same corner. And, even more strange, she realized that she could get back through to her own universe again any time she wanted to just by turning back through the same strange angle, now that she knew it was there.

Like a desk with a secret drawer, she thought suddenly. Hidden, concealed from view, nobody could get in without knowing where the release spring was. Once you knew that, you could open and close it at will. Of course, you might discover the secret drawer by accident if you were sawing a corner off the desk, but even so, you wouldn't be able to work it without knowing about the hidden release.

What was it McEvoy had said? "We think it may be a three-dimensional slice through a fourth dimension." And he was right. They had found the secret drawer by sawing the corner off the desk. Quite by accident the stresses they had been using on that tungsten block had inadvertently twisted a segment of three-dimensional space and torn a hole through into this place. Accidentally, they had thrown open a door, and nothing they had found inside had been comprehensible to anyone who had crossed through. A door into Nowhere…no wonder they had died of fright! With no training, no experience to fall back on. It was only her own individual experience, her own incredibly high ability to adapt that was shielding her now, and for all her skill her own mind was now reeling to maintain control.

From THE UNIVERSE BETWEEN by Alan E. Nourse (1965)
THE BRIGHT ILLUSION

(ed note: Dixon is dying in the middle of the trackless Sahara Desert. He encounters a weakly-godlike energy creature. The creature has a task and has been waiting in the desert for a long time looking for a human capable of accomplishing said task. Dixon notices a few bodies drying out in the sand, they failed the job interview. Across the myriad dimensions is another world that the godlike creature is destined to own. The world is currently owned by another godlike creature, Dixon can help overthrow it.

The creature transports Dixon through the dimensions, traversing vast spaces and surmounting numerous barriers. They stop, hovering over the world.)

      They had crossed gulfs greater than he could comprehend. They were suspended now above the world of their destination. He was to look briefly upon it, for even through the protecting walls of the light-bubble the thing that he would see was so alien to him that in his present form he could not bear to gaze upon it long.

     Then the light about Dixon cleared to translucence, and somehow he was looking out and down upon a scene that stunned his eyes with its violence. He had an instant's impression of a land that shrieked and raved with maniacal color beyond any conception of color as he knew it. He turned his eyes wincingly away and stared down at the scene immediately below. And though in point of actual space it must have been very far away, he could see everything quite clearly and with a wider radius of vision than he was accustomed to. It was as if in one glance he encompassed the whole circle of the horizon.

     The world below was one vast city that reeled away in terrace below crazy terrace out to a skyline that shimmered with white dazzle. And the colors that blazed and howled and agonized over the insane angles of the place turned him sick and dizzy. They were incredible angles and impossible colors, the tints and the tilts of madness—wild, staggering lines and arcs and jagged peaks, crazy inclines broke by ridges of eruptive color, zigzag bridges, buildings that leaned out in gravity-defying angles.

     All these incredible terraces mounted up and up in diminishing arcs to the topmost tier of all. This was small and smooth, though over its pavement the insane colors sprawled blotchily. And in the, very center a mighty column rose, blacker than any darkness he had ever seen before. On its height burned a pale flame.

     But the inhabitants! Dixon could see them quite clearly despite the distance. They were sinuous and serpentine, and their motions were blurs of swiftness, poems of infinite grace. They were not men—they had never been men in any stage of their evolution. And if the colors of the buildings were agony to his eyes, the living, unstable hues that writhed and crawled over the beings below were so frightful that his gaze rebelled. For this reason he never knew just how they were shaped.

     There was one standing just below the great black pillar whereon burned the flame, and of this he had the clearest view. It was boneless and writhing, livid with creeping color. Its single great eye, lucid and expressionless, stared from an unfeatured, mouthless face, half scarlet and half purple, between which two shades a wedge of nameless green broadened as he looked away.

     He had seen this much before the pellucid crystal began to cloud about him once more and the slow knowledge began its beat through his brain. He must look no longer, or something disastrous might happen to his be-numbed senses. He understood by now that it was not in his own form that he was to go out into the crazy land. He was sure, even without that seeping knowledge, that his own body could never endure the colors of the place, nor could his own material feet tread the dizzy angles. Many of the streets and bridges were too steep for human feet to walk.

     And he was understanding, as the slow waves flowed on, how different these people were from his own kind, Not only in appearance; their very substance was different from flesh and blood, the atoms arranged in different patterns. They obtained nourishment in an incomprehensible way from some source he could not understand. Their emotions and habits and purposes were alien to all his experience, and among them even the sexes were not those he knew. They were more numerous than man kind's two, and their functions were entirely different. Reproduction here was based on an utterly alien principle.

     When the pause came in the waves of knowledge, Dixon was a little dizzy with the complete strangeness of this place and with wonder how he would be enabled to enter it. He lay still, wondering, until the flow began — again.

     Then the knowledge of the way he was to be introduced into the strange god's domain began to surge in deliberate beats through his brain. It seemed simple, yet the magnitude of it was staggering. A sort of veil of illusion was to be dropped between him and these alien beings. To them, his form would seem one of their own. Through the veil his speech would be filtered and changed into their indescribable mode of communication. And to him they would have the appearance of humanity, their speech would be understandable, their curious emotions translated into familiarity.

     Even their multiple sexes would be resolved arbitrarily into two. For though this being could not approach any nearer the strange god whose flame burned upon the pillar, it seemed to have immense power even from this distance—in the crazy world below.

     The slow-beating waves made him aware that during his sojourn in the strange place he would be guided and in a measure protected, and that this knowledge would still flow through his brain. All this was possible, he understood, because of his own complete difference from anything in this world—such a difference that he would not cause even a ripple upon the surface of the god's consciousness until the time came for his overthrow.

     Then again the cloudiness began to clear, until Dixon was looking out through crystal walls upon that reeling city below. For an instant it shuddered with mad colors before his aching eyes. And then over the whole crazy panorama the queerest blurring came. He looked down upon a changing world wherein the wild colors faded and ran together and the staggering angles of that mighty vista below were obscured in structural changes whose purpose he began to understand.

     Before his eyes a splendid and stately city was taking shape. Out of the ruin of eye-wrenching color rose—tier beyond tier of white pillars and translucent domes. Roofs of alabaster formed themselves under a sky whose pallor was deepening into blue.

     When he tore his eyes away from that magnificent vista; terrace dropping away below terrace, crowned with domes and spires and columns wreathed in green, far out to the distant horizon, he saw that over the crowded streets with their swarms of multicolored horrors a stranger change was falling. Out of the mingling indistinctnesses of those colors without name, the semblance of humanity grew. People of noble stature and stately bearing, robed in garments of shining steel, took form before his eyes.

     In less time than it takes to tell, a metropolis of familiar aspect stretched invitingly under his gaze. That nightmare of colors was gone as a nightmare goes, leaving no faintest trace behind. Yet he knew as he looked down that in reality nothing was changed. The writhing people still flashed with infinite speed and grace through tip-tilted streets of gravity-defying angles. He blinked and looked again, but the illusion held steady—a stupendous city, smiling under a blue, familiar sky.

     And Dixon knew, even as he stared with caught breath at the magnificence of it, that in reality he stood at the apex of a city of madness that reeled away below him in tier after crazy tier, a nightmare of meaningless angles and raving color, through whose streets things writhing and dreadful and acrawl with living hues were flashing with movements of blurring speed. All this splendor was a veil across his eyes. What unknowable activities were really taking place below? On what nameless errands were these busy crowds bound? Then a little sound at his side turned him from the dizzy thoughts tormenting his brain, and he flashed an abrupt glance sidewise, alert for danger.

From THE BRIGHT ILLUSION by C. L. Moore (1934)
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
      When residing and touring in the North of England several years ago, I talked and lectured several times on the fourth dimension. One day after having retired to bed, I lay fully awake thinking out some problems connected with this subject. I tried to visualize or think out the shape of a four-dimensional cube, which I imagined to be the simplest four-dimensional shape. To my great astonishment I saw before me first a four-dimensional globe and afterwards a four-dimensional cube, and learned only then from this object-lesson that the globe is the simplest body, and not the cube, as the third-dimensional analogy ought to have told me beforehand.
     The remarkable thing was that the definite endeavor to see the one thing made me see the other. I saw the forms as before me in the air (though the room was dark), and behind the forms I saw clearly a rift in the curtains through which a glimmer of light filtered into the room …
     I forgo the attempt to describe the four-dimensional cube as to its form. Mathematical description would be possible but would at thè same time disintegrate the real impression in its totality. The fourth-dimensional globe can be better described. It was an ordinary three-dimensional globe, out of which, on each side, beginning at its vertical circumference bent, tapering horns proceeded, which, with a circular bend, united their points above the globe from which they started. The effect is best indicated by circumscribing the numeral 8 by a circle. So three circles are formed, the lower one representing the initial globe, the upper one representing empty space, and the greater circle circumscribing the whole. If it now be understood that the upper circle does not exist and the lower (small) circle is identical with the outer (large) circle, the impression will have been conveyed, at least to some extent …
     I have in a like manner had rare visions of the fifth-and sixth-dimensional figures … The fifth-dimensional vision is best described by saying that it looked like an Alpine relief map, with the singularity that all mountain peaks and the whole landscape represented in the map were one mountain, or again in other words as if all the mountains had one single base.

     JOHAN VON MANEN,
     Some Occult Experiences, 1913

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