Yes, this curve shows averages. The point is in the comment: the more business entities screw with creative decisions, the more the distribution of the curve shifts left, toward an abundance of suck and a dearth of quality.

I love quality entertainment. Why is there so little of it on TV or in the movies? Why is it that most really good shows seem doomed to short runs and early cancellation (especially if they’re in niche genres like science fiction), and shows that hold high promise in the conception have the spark leeched from them before they ever hit prime time?  That people want superior storytelling is evident in the runaway success of shows that have flourished in the cable oases, with less (or different) corporate pressure to please advertisers and willingness to take risks. I could list a good number of those shows (The Wire and Sopranos on HBO; Mad Men on AMC; many others), but my point here is about the movie and tv productions that suck.

There are reams and reams of them. Some of this is due to the law of averages: the average production, statistically speaking, is going to be exactly that, and about half of what’s out there will be worse than average. That’s the good old bell curve at work for you. But that’s not the only reason sucky shows and movies get made.

Old Habits Die Hard

The other reason is the legacy system of Hollywood production, which sets up a dynamic that permits, even encourages, bean counters and executives to fiddle with creative decisions until they are “certain” they have a hit on their hands (pardon me while I ROFL for a while), or at least have a show that won’t scare off advertisers and create negative feedback from viewers.

Here’s a snippet I read recently that brought this home to me. This is the tiniest isolated instance touched on in this reportage, but it happens day in, day out, and in much more egregious measure than this, throughout the traditional entertainment media establishment. This anecdote is about the award-winning performance of Bryan Cranston in the phenomenally successful Breaking Bad:

[I]n typically nearsighted network fashion, AMC initially hesitated when his name came up. As the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, tells it, “There was concern originally: ‘This is the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which is night and day from Breaking Bad. Why do you think this is the guy?’?” A longtime X-Files producer and writer, Gilligan had cast Cranston as a menacing racist in a 1998 X-Files episode. “We needed a guy who could be scary and kind of loathsome but at the same time had a deep, resounding humanity. When Malcolm went on the air, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t realize he could be so funny!’?” To convince AMC, Gilligan distributed copies of Cranston’s X-Files appearance: “That was all it took.” (source: http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/55303/. Registration may be required to view, but is free.)

Well, yay that they saw the light eventually in this one instance, but why are they even involved in such decisions in the first place?  That’s outrageous. Why did Gilligan even have to make a case to have the actor of his choice approved for casting? Yes, I understand this is “business as usual” in Hollywood, but I don’t care: that legacy system has long outlived its usefulness.  It is designed to put entirely too much creative control in the hands of pedestrian business people who have never been enlightened by an artistic vision in their life. I don’t care if it’s their money. Sure, let them argue about what show concept they are willing to finance. Casting is a creative decision that should be strictly up to the director, series creator, or other primary creative running the show, and not be mucked with by anyone else.

Collaboration, or Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

In the “collaborative” (cough) model of movie making and tv production, anyone with a financial stake in the show or  a producer title figures they have creative input that’s just as valid as the originators of the concept. Sometimes that input is valid, but it is more often the case that constraints are dictated on the basis of an executive having been in the business for so long and fancying they know “what the market wants.” Or because he or she has a stack of (unproduced) screenplays they authored in their file drawers, and is eager to jump into someone else’s project with “input”. (Can we say “blocked artist”?) Or because unnecessary financial constraints are imposed that reduce an exceptional production to something pedestrian.

Do we have to show so many zombies? Can't we just hear them instead?

This is why so many creative shows are strangled in infancy by the production machine that dominates our entertainment industry. This is true even in the cable outlets which have ventured to tell daring tales, but which are still structured in the Hollywood studio manner.

AMC, for instance, produces some wildly talented shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead) but it seems they manage to do this in spite of themselves. They forced a parting of the ways with Frank Darabont, the creator and showrunner of The Walking Dead,  over budget disputes that would have limited his creative vision in ways he didn’t want to compromise.  Wanting to cut costs by 20%, AMC felt qualified to judge artistic elements like the need to shoot in outdoor locations, or whether it was necessary to show the zombies in this zombie-apocalypse series.  Not doing so was cheaper, so that was the kind of limitation they sought to impose, and the sort of issue that contributed to Darabont’s departure from the show.

This is not just the normal tension between budget constraints and a director’s artistic vision and ability to implement within cost.  At the time this dispute occurred, Walking Dead was “the most successful show in the history of basic cable.” They had a runaway profitable hit on their hands precisely because of Darabont’s vision, but still felt free to jump in in ways that impacted creative decisions.  “It’s not broken, but we’ll fix it anyway.”   This is par for the course in the “many cooks in the kitchen” atmosphere of Hollywood-style production.

I’m boggled that anything worthwhile ever manages to make it through the labyrinth of systems like that, which I think account for the endless hours of drek passing as mass-media entertainment in this country. (Others share my disgruntlement on this point; here’s a good rant from The Angry Black Woman on this topic).

The Tech Cure For TV Mediocrity

Rosa

But there is one silver lining here. The technology revolution we’re experiencing right now has put hugely powerful production tools into the hands of independent filmmakers. Such artists can now create shows and movies previously impossible to make without the support of a studio system and industrial-sized budgets – and do it on a single desktop computer, if one has to low-end the process. And because the lion’s share of the actual film-making takes place in a computer, and likely in a home office/studio, this allows individual artists and independent filmmakers to be answerable only to themselves and their own creative vision.

Even more importantly, this growing wealth of creative output is readily available online, and in particular at YouTube, where 48 hours of viewing material is uploaded every minute¹. Online outlets provide the distrbution, and on the production end we’ve finally reached a tipping point in the density and availability of media tools. The fruits of this magical combination are now emerging online. I’m seeing things of amazing sophistication and superior storytelling surfacing ever more frequently on the web.

This trend may be intensifying now, but it has been going on since the middle of the last decade. Some established producers have had the ability to put complete webisodes online, either to enhance existing series (Ron Moore with Battlestar Galactica webisodes), or to introduce a story concept in hopes of it getting picked up for production (Amanda Tapping’s initial Sanctuary webisodes); or an unknown artist creating originals like the very clever Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager webisodes that predated these and became a regular web-based entertainment series.

The trend I think is heating up now, though – especially via YouTube – is of many short films intended to portray an artist’s story world, their capabilities, and perhaps to lure funding for a lengthier full-blown project, as well as more and more story series like webisodes.

I predict this refreshing type of media production will only become more commonplace, and that our next big wave of good entertainment series will start to emerge from the web, not from television, cable, or movie studios.

Some samples of superior creativity of the sort I see happening:

Archetype, by Aaron Sims
Dark Resurrection, the Italian Star Wars fan movie
Dragon Age: Redemption
Portal: No Escape, by Dan Trachtenberg
Rosa, by Jesús Orellana. Embedded at end of this post.
The Gift, by Carl E. Rinsch.

Not all of these are by solo artists like Orellana, laboring alone in their garrets over a hot laptop in post-production (Dragon Age is done under license from Bioware and presumably some production funding from them as well). But the fact that the web is the premier venue of choice for such content says much about the direction this new media is flowing in. And many other samples online are simply inspired productions by people passionate about their storytelling. These little gemstones may not stay on the web – hopefully many will get picked up and turned into tv productions and major-release films, as has happened with Orellana’s Rosa, and find large audiences – but the web is becoming the incubator for this wealth of creativity.

May we see much more of this in the future.

Portal: No Escape

_____

1 There’s an astounding quantity of material being uploaded to YouTube: 3 months worth of non-stop viewing every 24 hours. YouTube now contains more hours of media than were produced by all of network television in the last 60 years. If you want to hit a large audience and get maximum exposure for your video, YouTube is the place to be.

 Related Posts

Smoking and Race on Pan Am: a CYA Start From a ‘Mad Men’ Competitor

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Why TV Productions Suck and How YouTube Will Save Us
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In the interests of discussing world building, I want to mention some of the considerations I had when defining these fae, and also conundrums because of our cultural understandings of this kind of folklore.

The Fae As We Know Them

Tinkerbell

If I were writing a book in a Celtic setting, or with similar Gaelic or Welsh roots, I could go on at length about the sidhe (pronounced shee), and trust that most well-read readers will understand what I am referring to. If I delve into the older notions of fairy folk, we quickly leave the Disneyfied concept of Tinkerbell behind and come instead to the god-like early inhabitants of Ireland and the realm of the grand heroes of the Welsh Mabinogian and other epic tales of lore.

If I want to wax archaeological and evoke collective memory of a real people who came before recorded history, I may speak of the Tuatha de Danaan, and many readers will think, then, of the people said to live in those lands before the coming of the Celts: people who had the old knowledge and were displaced by newer folk until they became but a memory of magic under hill and in remote woodlands that we retain today.²

Urban Fantasy

Contemporary urban fantasy has not been reluctant to mine this rich vein, with fairy kings and queens, dark and light courts, and sidhe walking among humans a not-uncommon occurrence at all.  The parallels with J.R.R. Tolkien’s elves are not to be missed: a people beautiful and fair, tall and commanding, imbued with magic and understanding of nature that surpasses that of men.   These sidhe are fair or dark in intentions, and often terrible in their beauty and guile.  Today’s urban fantasy resurrects this collective memory of the fae as something awesome.  This reframes the diminutive, beneficent-but-often-capricious-mischief-makers of much fairy tale lore, and treats them in a much more imposing manner.

A perfect example of this comes from the prologue of one of Karen Marie Moning’s books. She has made a name for herself in the urban fantasy market, and this description of the fae as she interprets them captures the grandeur and power that lurks (too often forgotten) at the edges of what we blithely define as “fairy”:

“I discovered that…[we were] descended from an ancient Celtic bloodline of sidhe-seers, people who can see the Fae – a terrifying race of otherworldly beings that have lived secretly among us for thousands of years, cloaked in illusions and lies.” (Moning; Fae Fever, Delacorte Press, 2009)

The Fairies. Emily Gertrude Thomson, 1878

As a native English speaker who grew up with fairy tales, and delved into folklore and myth at a precociously early age, all these implications and more swirl around the word “sidhe”.  When I speak of “fairies” I think of some tiny winged thing flitting about the garden.  When I speak of the fae-folk, or simply just “fae”, I am speaking of something else entirely. The word “fae” invokes the roots of the word “fairy”, and the concept of “faery” as the land where the fae dwell.  “Fae” refers to magical non-humans like the sidhe, but not just the sidhe: a folk who are grand, powerful, innately magical, able and willing to contend with humans when they must, or when they wish.

So now I come to my question, and the thing which prompted world building.

What Are the Fae If They’re Not in Great Britain?

In dealing with Sir Ulbrecht, I’m dealing with a German. The obvious question arises:  do they have fae in Germany? Surely the sidhe, as such, are a very Welsh and Irish concept, but it seems to me that the fae, of which they are a representative part, cannot be an idea (or a fact, if that is your reality)  limited to this one little corner of the world.

Casting about Europe, and towards Germany in particular: what are the most powerful fairy folk in that cultural setting?  Logic and folkloric sense suggest they must have something more than the household imps and ‘wee folk’ which seem common all over Europe. But if Germans have an equivalent of the sidhe or the fae, I was unaware of it.

So off a-googling I went. I have the advantage of being fluent in German, and was able to spend some productive time at Google.de. This quickly showed me that, indeed, central and western Europe also has a tradition of fae. Like us, one end of their spectrum includes small, household-oriented, relatively innocuous (although potentially pesky) sprites and wee folk, “goblins” and related types.  It echoes the understanding of “fairies” as nature-related spirits, generally beneficent yet oft-times mischievous, a folk who are invisible at will, who can gift the newborn with talents, and who can remain unseen to everyone but innocent children, who can see them at any time.

But where, here, are the fearsome dark fae that western lore suggests and modern interpretations have strongly established?

The Fates

The Germanic heritage of the fae, it turns out, is much more cognizant of its connections to not only the early roots of the word, but its implications from the lore of the classical world.  “Fae”, we learn, is a variant of the original Latin for Fates (fata): the goddesses who ruled man’s destiny. Quite common in Germanic lore are fae who are closely tied to the fate of a mortal human.  They predict your fate; they may help determine it by gifting talents. And, as one source explains,

“The foretelling of fate – or prophecy in general – and spinning are the two fundamental characteristics of the fae.”³

This European lore obviously harkens back to a time when the Fates included those goddesses who spun out the fate of man, as per the mythology of the classical world. Here too is the remembrance of the Germanic and Scandinavian Norns – female beings who rule the fates of gods and men. In later times Norns became associated with weaving the past, present and future, but originally may have been simply focused on the flow of time and a man’s fate within it.

In either case, these concepts of fae do not seem to have carved out quite such a strong niche in common folklore as the versions from more westerly parts of Europe. German lore has plenty of heroes, gods, dwarves, giants, and magic, and a collection of supernatural women (the “white women”, Bechta, sirens, and others) who are often called fae but whose Norn-influenced roots are often seen in their sooth-saying and fate involvement.  yet it seems that fairies in the sense of “fae” discussed above are surprisingly scarce. Even the epic collection of folklore made famous by the Brothers Grimm has fae in only a few places, as in the tale of Sleeping Beauty who is both cursed and blessed by fairies.

If we take “elves” to be fairies, the diminutive helpful folk of farm and field became demonized by the Church during the Christianization of Europe, and these entities were cast as evil, mischievous spirits, the “Alb”. That connotation remains in contemporary language, such as the word “Alptraum” (literally, ‘elf dream’) for “nightmare.”⁵  Germanic fairies are often more grim than merely magical spirits. Like valkyrie, they are often a force for death, such as the erlking (the elf king) who abducts travelers or preys on children.⁶

“Grim and powerful” is a good place to start, but it is not developed enough.  Now, what is an author to do when she needs a sidhe-like depth of field in a land where that is not the dominant tradition? Why, she develops it, of course.

Developing the Fae

The Erl King - Steiner 1910

I am working with an alternative timeline in QVT, one in which magick is real.  The traditions of fae and the supernatural here are more obvious and pronounced than they are in our own timeline.  Conveniently for me, German folklore has much in common with Scandinavian and Norse lore, sharing similar cultural roots from tribal times.  When we back up and look more broadly at these traditions, and not solely at the subject of fae, it is clear that German folklore contains a supernatural landscape with room in it for complex beings and complex interrelationships. As a brief overview in Wikipedia notes,

As in Scandinavia, when belief in the old gods disappeared, remnants of the mythos persisted: Holda, a “supernatural” patron of spinning; the Lorelei, a dangerous Rhine siren derived from the Nibelung myth; the spirit Berchta (also known as Perchta); the Weisse Frauen, a water spirit said to protect children; the Wild Hunt (in German folklore preceded by an old man, Honest Eckart, who warns others of its approach); the giant Rübezahl; changeling legends; and many more generic entities such as the elf, dwarf, kobold and erlking.

This is actually a pretty well-rounded foundation for my purposes. Combining this with my expanded understanding of Germanic fae, I am able to go in some new directions, and elaborate upon fae that have a more powerful presence in the world of QVT than in our own historical reality.

A helpful starting point here is the “elf king’s daughter”, the Danish precursor to the erlking⁶ made famous in poem by Goethe, and written about in German poetry and lore as well.  This fae is beguiling and cruel, seducing men for her own amusement and quick to take offense if they do not please her or comply with her wishes.  Now here is a figure who cuts much more closely to the commanding and alluring sidhe of the western isles.

While in contemporary lore a lot of different nature spirits have been lumped together all under the heading of “fairies”, in QVT I separate them out again, and classify more exclusively as fae only those who bless or curse mortals, who can give talents and gifts, who can foretell and influence a human’s fate.  Like the Germanic nature spirits who are their close kin, though, I leave their dwelling places in similar locations: in groves of trees, at bodies of water, or in rocky gorges. Fae like Perchta reward diligence and punish laziness, perhaps even disemboweling the lazy one; this streak of danger is a hallmark of Faery in this setting. Although Honest Eckart may warn of it, the Wild Hunt may still travel the land, destroying the unwary caught in its path. Offended fae may take out their ire upon mortals, or may be strong allies if appeased.  The fae are interested in the fate and doings of mortals, and may befriend humans, especially children, but they are a fickle folk and often self-interested, ready and able to punish those who offend them.

From this starting point, I can now see the fae culture and society I need to grow to support the events in my novel.

I’m not going to elaborate on this in any more detail here. Not only would it be spoilers, but I have also written enough of a tome on the subject for one blog post. Nevertheless, I hope this examination of the topic shows some of the concerns I had in researching the lore, identifying the disparities between what I liked in fae, and what was on offer in a certain culture, and how I found a way to reconcile them that makes sense within my alternate history universe.

To be notified about developments with Queen Victoria’s Transmogrifier, where these aspects of faery will be found in my writing, I invite you to join my mailing list. (Subscription form is in the top left column on this page.)

____

1.  Fae. See this discussion for etymology of the word.

2. For a good concise overview of the origins of legends of the sidhe, see this interesting page at author Sarah Woodbury’s site. For a wonderful book-length folklore excursion of this and other types of fairy folk, see Wirt Sikes’ 1881 book British Goblins, online free at Google Books.

3. “Eigenschaften der Feen.” (Properties of the Fairies.)   Das Reich der Feen (The Realm of the Fae). http://www.feenreich.de/feen/wesen-04.html

4.  See discussion of Norns at Wikipedia.

5.  “Eigenschaften der Feen.”  (“Attributes of the Fae.” ) Das Reich der Feen. http://www.feenreich.de/feen/wesen-04.html

6.  “The Erlking.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlking#cite_ref-Byrne_1-0

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Alternate History Part 2: Of Highwaymen, Ghosts, and Rural Surrey

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: The Fae: Fairy Folk, or, the Sidhe By Any Other Name
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A rise of at least 2 meters (~6 foot) in the world’s sea levels is now virtually unstoppable.

Sit with that for a moment.

“Unstoppable.”

No matter what we do now to rein in greenhouse gases, the processes that initiate significant sea level change are already underway. A tipping point in the ice melt processes has been reached. The best outcome, said Rahmstorf, would be that after temperatures stabilized, sea levels would only rise at a steady rate “for centuries to come,” and not accelerate. This assumes we can halt global warming after about 1.5 degree C increase.

Realistically speaking, though, given political issues and climate change denial resistance from the various ostriches on the scene – the much more likely scenario is that humans collectively will not be able achieve the 1.5 degree C limit, in which case the rise in sea level will be much more rapid.

Rahmstorf’s best guess is a one meter rise this century, assuming three degrees warming, and up to five meters over the next 300 years. This and other estimates are also affected by unknown variables such as what will transpire with large sheet ice at the poles, and transient sea rises, which are different from long-term global sea levels. Should the climate heat up more than that, or sheet ice or transient events occur, it is easily possible to see a 2 meter rise this century, and possibly much more. (For considerable discussion on this and related points, see the excellent content at Real Climate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists.)

But the tipping point is already here, and passed. That means global processes are underway with their own inexorable march towards ever more melting ice and rising seas. This will proceed at its own pace, as inevitable and unstoppable as the rising tide.

This is not a distant eventuality, but a sea change (literally) whose effects we will see within our lifetimes. By 2050 certain populated coastal areas will be significantly impacted by this impending change in sea level. It is no exaggeration to say entire cities will be flooded or submerged: a 2-meter sea rise will, for example, obliterate built-up urban areas in the southern San Francisco Bay, including parts of San Jose. It will submerge chunks of the Port of Los Angeles, threaten Washington D.C., and drown portions of the densely built Jersey shore and industrial New York waterfronts. Low-lying coastal islands off the Carolinas, Florida, and along the Gulf Coast will simply vanish.

Most people have not even begun to contemplate (much less plan for) the real-world consequences of such a fantastic change in the world as we have known it.

Part 2 in this series:  What Does a 2-Meter Sea Rise Look Like?

Part 3 in this series:  Global Warming in Science Fiction

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: New York Under Water: Sea Level Change This Century
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I am floating in space, looking at a galaxy swirling through the void. I can see that it is made of stars and planets.¹ I realize that most of those planets are teeming with life, and all those people seem so small from this perspective, but I know they loom large in their own lives, just like I do in mine.  What must be large worlds to them are not even spots I can see from here. But if I could zoom in, like with my microscope,² I could see it all.

Then my camera-eye-view starts to pull back. The galaxy gets smaller. Other galaxies come into view. Then more, and more. I realize I’m in a stream of swirling globs of stars, the galaxies looking more and more like specks. It’s like they floating around, in motion, all  flowing somewhere. Then I realize they ARE flowing somewhere. They are cells, and I am looking at a vacuous bloodstream, as it were, in some giant body.

I came completely awake then, kind of amazed at what I’d just experienced. Without articulating the thought, that vision gave me to understand there is a macrocosm in the microcosm, and likewise the reverse.³  Not the usual fare of childish insights, I know. I realized that at the time, just as I realized I’d grasped something unusual that would alter my perspective on things just a little. (Or maybe more than a little…)

So. This brings me to this FANTABULOUS set of photos.  One is a network of neurons from a mouse brain.  The other is an image from a computer simulation by astrophysicists of how the universe evolved.

I can’t really see much difference – but then, according to my 7-year-old self, there isn’t any. That the universe looks like a neural network makes perfect sense to me. And that a neural network looks like the universe – ditto.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s just way cool.

~~~
1.  You are shocked, I’m sure, to learn that I was a geek from early on. I was already mistress of my own telescope, since my birthday a few months before the conversation with Mrs Cole.  The scope was a present from my brother Don, who promptly set it up in the driveway at night and showed me how to see the moon in it.   He always gave me presents that stretched my brain. And taught me chess when I was small, too.

2, The microscope came the year before the telescope. I spent hours looking at the cooties in dirty water with horrified fascination.  Yech.  I was much happier with the chemistry set that came when I was 8.

3. It also caused me to question what we perceive as reality, as did another vision around that same age frame. But that is a discussion for later.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Are We a Universe, or a Speck? – the Macrocosm Inside
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Details about urban planning aren’t sexy and don’t surface too often in fiction – not even in science fiction, where you’d think we’d spend some brain cells thinking about how people might live in the future.  Granted, we read about the end product – urban life, whatever its form – but often very little of the process or rationale that lead there.   Yet I find that process interesting. I think about sustainable living and how we are ever going to make sense out of the morass that many of our cities have become.  In my science fiction I’m always curious what choices and priorities lead people to live as they do.

Here’s part 1 of a 2-part post on this topic. This is written pretty much from the Sa’adani point of view.  There are implicit and explicit assumptions built into this discussion that stem from a Sa’adani cultural framework (such as the statement that “a city’s emotional focus is on communal life”). Whether it is or isn’t, that at least is the Sa’adani cultural ideal, and where they believe energy ought to be going in the management of small-scale urban living.  Obviously I could write another book elaborating on these background assumptions alone. But never fear: I’m not going to.   I’ll just let this piece speak for itself.  With no further ado, then:

 Cities in Sa’adani Thought

A city is a center of community, a more mature form than the village or town which is its predecessor.  Its emotional focus is on communal life, not merely on the economic benefits of having services and products clustered closely together (although for practical reasons such features are of course not ignored).  A city nurtures and shapes the life of the spirit, of the community, family and individual through creative expression, learning, philosophy and spirituality.  Chau-sen deities associated with cities never lack for avid followers, a reflection of how a city becomes a nearly personified thing in the mind of those who live there.

A city is also a self-organized unit for defense under the patronage of its leading House, Houses, or clans.  According to the ancient ideal, a city is self-sufficient at its core, able to withstand sieges and fight off attacks, and produces what it needs to support itself even in time of war or famine.  In diversified and eclectic economies, complete self-sufficiency is less often required for purposes of survival, but the ideal is still cherished, inspiring urban thinking and influencing many initiatives, such as energy self-sufficiency or encouraging the production of a variety of goods rather than specializing in only a few.

With economic growth, cities also become economic centers, bringing together resources, production and distribution for the betterment of the community and the broader marketplace. Largely in consequence of this, it  is recognized that cities can easily grow too large and cumbersome. Especially when they prosper, people flock to abundance and the tendency is to let unchecked growth run rampant. But this quickly  leads to a city that is difficult to maintain, less inclusive of citizens and less able to serve their needs. It may also lead to political unrest, for the larger the city, the more anonymous and disconnected an individual feels when there are hundreds of thousands of residents – even millions – instead of manageable tens of thousands.  Ties of fealty to a liege lord and clan head are weakened, and the importance of the kin group forgotten.

This is a lesson that has been learned in past civil conflicts, and has left a hallmark on Sa’adani thinking about community life and urban development.  A Sa’adani governor would rather see three smaller cities work out shared borders and close economic intercooperation, than see the three meld into one large combined polity that loses touch with the needs of people, and becomes an inefficient, alienated, unsustainable urban sprawl.

 Old Ideals for Modern Times

In olden times, cities grew up around agricultural abundance coupled with military might. A lord’s fortress protecting an agricultural region became the center around which commerce and cultural life aggregated. With later shifts to industrial, information, and cyber-centric services, cities generally remained communal centers under kingroup leadership. Technology improvements permit people to live and work in a far more decentralized manner than during industrial eras, but they still gravitate physically to urban clusters for social and cultural purposes if less for business ones.

The result of Sa’adani philosophies and shifting urban life mean that across the Empire, a large number of citizens live in relatively small urban areas rather than singular sprawling megalopolises.[1]   Indeed, this is the Sa’adani ideal.  Where geography permits, this pattern is quite visible, with webs of interconnected urban centers dotting the countryside. Even where urban density and growth have forced small cities to grown into each other, the tendency is for localities to maintain their cultural and community identities, seeing themselves at worst as culturally distinct and unique wards or districts in a larger urban patchwork.

Since Sa’adani personal identity stems first from family and clan membership, second from kinship-related lines of fealty, it is customary for people to define themselves as being of X bloodline and “belonging”[2] to Y city which of course is also part of X bloodline’s heritage.

In places where the localized sustainable community pattern is not or cannot be followed, there are higher rates of crime and social and individual ills that result from a more stressful living environment and breakdown of social support networks. This is yet another argument, urban planners say, for limiting growth to small, sustainable cities.

The solution the Sa’adani have evolved to this challenge is the creation of the Sheo Evos [SHAY-oh AY-vohs]: the “Flourishing Communities”, today shortened simply to “she’vos”.  It is not just a philosophy, but a specific prescription and urban planning approach to create the ideal Sa’adani living circumstance.

More about she’vos cities will follow in part II of this post.

_____

1.   A notable exception to this is in the CAS Sector (setting of Mainline), where kin groups are a weak bond, and urban complexity for the sake of economics of scale has long been a standard. This is one more reason Cassian culture and living circumstances often feel especially foreign to a native Sa’adàn: it is congested, commercial, individualized, anonymous, and not kin-based.

2.  The verb for belonging is ’gesoin’, another meaning of which is “to be a part of”. This implies a person is inextricably connected to their urban polity.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Urban planning in science fiction
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PFC Janelle Zalkovsky in Irag 2006

I’m a woman and a U. S. Army veteran. That puts me in a small class of authors who, like Elizabeth Moon and Sandra McDonald, have military experience and also write military science fiction.

I have long loved military science fiction. Even had I not been inclined to play soldier, volunteer for Civil Air Patrol, or long for an ROTC program that did not exist in my high school, I would still have gravitated towards this sub-genre. It distills so much that is heroic and gritty into inherently conflict-oriented stories where ethics and survival factors often play interesting roles. Naturally, I’m a big fan of Gordon Dickson (what a feast the Dorsai! series was when I discovered it as a teen); John Scalzi; David Drake, and others. But it is always wonderous to me to see a woman’s name on a book of military science fiction.

The evidence of our past and present wars notwithstanding, as a culture we don’t usually associate women with the military, or going to war, or being responsible leaders in potential combat environments. Even I, who have this personal experience behind me, always feel a bit of cognitive dissonance, a mental double-take moment, when I learn of a female author who writes military sf. I am doubly interested if I discover that she also has military experience, because then I am curious if and how that experience comes through in her writing.

I can’t help but wonder, with our increased number of women in the military these days, and the higher awareness they have in the public consciousness (think Lorie Piestewa for good reasons; Lynndie England for bad ones), if military science fiction by women, featuring women, is not finally coming into its own. We have our own real-life female heroes and occasional villains in the U.S. military; perhaps a genre resonant with that fact will find a larger marketplace in the book-buying public than in the past.

This marketplace is giving a warm reception to former Navy officer McDonald for her recent book  The Outback Stars.  It is receiving excellent reviews (see Danger Gal[2] and Spacefreighters’ Lounge[3]) for being a compelling love story intertwined with a mystery and military duty aboard ship. The detailed military environment, which lends so much depth to the setting and plot, is  frequently given kudos by reviewers.  Elizabeth Moon has been a force to be reckoned with since her Paksennarion cycle, infused as it was with military sensibilities.  Her more recent Serrano Legacy books which feature protagonist Esmay Suiza, such as Once a Hero, are a gripping exploration of a space-faring military career and adventures against the backdrop of dynastic family and planetary politics, which are of course further enriched by her experience as an officer in the Marine Corps.

(I suspect there are other female science fiction authors who also write in this sub-genre and who are military vets,  but I don’t know their names or works off-hand.  If you, Gentle Reader, know of some others of this sort, please do mention them in the comments. I’d like to know who to add to my reading list.)

I’m eager to read works by these women, but this puts me in a bind at the moment. I must be very careful what I absorb in this sub-genre, or if I even read it at all, when I am engrossed in my own science fiction writing projects.  I don’t want other writers’ stories to color mine, because I have a military science fiction book of my own on the back burner.  Like my other science fiction novels, it is set in the Sa’adani Empire, and centers on the mother of the protagonist of  Splintegrate.  She is a career officer in the Imperial Navy. Why she abandoned her daughter as an infant and what she is doing elsewhere is a story that wants to be told.[1]  However, I need to do explore that story without other authors’ visions vying for head-space in my imagination. This means I have a long list of McDonald’s and Moon’s books to catch up on after I’m done with my Sa’adani navy book.  Once I’ve established the tropes and the tone in that book, then I will be less concerned about the ability of other works to insidiously affect my own.

I know I’m not the only author who compartmentalizes reading in this manner, but I’ve become pretty aware of it since I write in multiple genres. When I write science fiction, for instance, I don’t read anyone else’s science fiction. And when I write fantasies, I can’t read any other fantasies. Instead, I look elsewhere for my reading fix. For instance, while working on Splintegrate, I’ve had a great time reading about the 18t0s and ’60s in London, for a cycle of historicals I am planning to start in a couple years. It’s entertaining, it’s grist for the mill, and it is safely distant from science fiction. And yet…

The fact is, I miss reading military science fiction. I’ve read everything I can get my mitts on on by most authors who write in this field. No wonder I must write more of my own: I’ve exhausted the ready reading supply that’s available publicly. Meanwhile, it’s great to know that new stuff continues to appear in this sub-genre. And you know what? You probably aren’t under the same reading constraints that I am right now. If you haven’t dipped into military science fiction, I encourge you to give it a try. McDonald will satisfy readers who like a tight story that includes a compelling love interest; Moon will appeal to readers who like complex, large-scale concerns along with up-close and personal adventure and memorable characters. Both will satisfy the yenning for high drama aboard space ships.

And that’s just quintessential science fiction in my book.

~~~

1. If you want to keep posted on my military science fiction work-in-progress, the working title is Task Force 104 , and I’ll be giving exclusive updates on it now and then in my newsletter, Warped Space. New subscribers get a free short story as a welcome for joining. Check it out.

2.  Danger Gal is aka Lisa Paitz Spindler. She is the proverbial voracious reader who spits out entertaining and insightful reviews with scarey regularity, and is also doing reviews now for SF Signal (a great fan-based review source on the web).  You can catch Lisa’s blog here.

3.  Spacefreighters’ Lounge is hosted by Laurie Green, who has a particular interest in science fiction romance. The site is an eclectic retreat featuring book reviews and various oddments both informational and entertaining to the science fiction afficiando.  It’s a nice place to chill and browse around for a while.

See this post at Notes From the Lizard Lair: Women who write military science fiction books
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