MARS - Not for Your Winter Vacation

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In our SF tour of the Solar System, Mars holds a prominent spot. It’s our most Earth-like sister planet. There’s actually some water present; temperatures are sometimes above water’s freezing point. If we travel to another planet, it’s the first choice. A human colony could potentially survive there.

We aren’t going: not with current technology. The projected trip is a minimum two years, one way. The astronauts would arrive with ten percent of their brain cells dead and developing cancer, from cosmic radiation. We’d need a perfectly recycling ecosystem onboard that would last five years. We haven’t sustained one on Earth for six months yet.

Though writers have created unusual native Martian life, no Martians will be waiting when/if we land. We’ve tested repeatedly. Martian water was once abundant; the temperature is in the right range. Life just didn’t happen. There’s no Martian life now and no trace of any past life-forms. Though it sometimes hits 25ºC (80ºF) on the Martian equator in summertime, there’s no Mars surface that doesn’t fall below freezing nightly.

Humans would be limited to warmed suits, with oxygen, and sealed bases. Nevertheless, Mars can be terraformed. The polar “ice” caps are mostly frozen CO2, but there’s water, too. We need solar-powered Martian satellites that convert sunlight to microwaves. Microwaves beamed continually at the polar caps would release both water and CO2. We can give Mars a greenhouse atmosphere.

Excess CO2 is Mars’ friend; colonists would still require respirators for possibly centuries to come. Hardy lichens that grow on Antarctica would grow there now. We simply seed the polar areas; photosynthesis begins. Unfortunately, the photosynthesis that ups oxygen content steals the heat-holding CO2. We have to get the water content up, too, to produce more oxygen. Perhaps we could generate another greenhouse gas, such as methane, as we lower the CO2 content.

Good news: There’s plenty of water out there (but not on Mars). We’d need automated ships to the Asteroids. (Some have a high water content). With an attached rocket, a water-bearing asteroid could be crashed into the non-settled side of Mars, raising the temperature and releasing atmospheric H2O. There may be mountain-sized icebergs in Jupiter’s ring; Saturn’s rings are an unlimited supply of ice chunks. We could nuke Europa, blowing icebergs into space, to be steered toward Mars.

You may have been hearing a background sound like rupturing a hippo. We pause while the shrieks of the science purists die down. Would we dare to violate the pristine purity of Mars and/or Europa before they’re studied? You bet your bippy we would.

We’re SF writers. Of course we dare! That’s why we can’t quit writing. If humans are going to the planets, we’ll be going for human reasons. Profitable adventure is ‘way ahead of scientific purity. Those afflicted with the Mt. Everest Syndrome (“Because it’s there.”) aren’t going to wipe their feet before they step out on a new world.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Writing Through The Ages

by Andrea Colasanto

Gary K. Wolf is the author responsible for creating Roger and Jessica Rabbit, and all of Toontown. His groundbreaking 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? served as the basis for the $950 million blockbuster film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. His newest novel, the highly anticipated third in the Roger Rabbit series, Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? releases in just a few short weeks, on November 29th. This is clearly a guy with some serious and successful writing chops—but have you ever wondered how an author of this magnitude actually writes?

Gary takes some time with Musa to explain his process throughout the years; interestingly enough his first method in the 1970s reflects his exact process today!

I started writing my first Roger Rabbit novel in 1976.

I would write out my passages in longhand on yellow lined paper using a No. 2 pencil. Then I would type them out on the typewriter I got in high school, a portable Remington manual. Portable being a relative term since the thing weighed almost as much as our black and white, tube-type Emerson cabinet television set.

I would edit those typed pages using my pencil. If a passage had to be eliminated, I would cut those lines out of the page and paste the page back together using Scotch tape. If a passage had to be moved, I would cut that passage out and paste it in the proper position, again using my trusty roll of Scotch tape.

This resulted in pages of wildly different lengths. Some only six inches long, some nearly two feet.

I would then retype what I had done, and repeat the process. Doing that over and over and over until the book was done.

I would retype the book one last time in a clean draft using White-Out to cover any typing errors.

Then, to my great delight, along came the miracle of word processing.

I was working as a copywriter for an advertising agency that specialized in promoting hi-tech companies and products. One of my clients was Wang, a major mainframe computer manufacturer. Wang had developed a small computer they called a word processor. They intended to sell it to companies for use by secretaries.

They gave me one of their word processors to try out.

I rapidly discovered that the Wang word processor mimicked exactly the way I worked. I was able to type, cut, and paste. Except without having to physically print, cut, and tape.

My writing speed increased dramatically.

I took nine years to write Who Censored Roger Rabbit? The Wang turned me into a veritable speedball. I pumped out the sequel, Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit? in four and a half years.

I remember having a meeting with the top execs at Wang. I suggested to them that perhaps they were thinking too small. They should position their word processors as personal computers and sell them to individuals. They looked at me like I had suddenly grown a second head. “Who would want a computer in their house?” asked one of the senior vice presidents. The other executives agreed. What a silly idea.

Which is probably why, today, Wang is a footnote in computer history and Apple rules the world.

But I digress.

I went from the Wang to a series of other word processors and eventually personal computers. I currently use a home-built desktop machine I put together myself with the help of a grade school computer whiz who lives down the street.

I wrote four more novels on those personal computers.

Then I decided to write the long awaited and highly anticipated third Roger Rabbit novel, Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?

For this one I had a set deadline. The previous two Roger novels were published by big New York publishing houses. These publishers were extremely flexible about release dates. Whenever I finished the book, that was when the book got published.

Who Wacked Roger Rabbit? came out as a digital book. The big sales day for digital books is the last Friday in November. What digital book publishers and on-line book sellers call Black Friday. You miss Black Friday, and you might as well consign your book to the digital Buck-a-Book bin because you will have missed the majority of your sales opportunities.

In order to finish the book on time, I had to keep writing it during the eight weeks I spent in China.

Obviously, I couldn’t take my desktop machine.

So I looked into laptops.

Any of those would have worked. Except in my opinion they would have been useless to me when I returned home and went back to my desktop machine.

I decided instead to get an iPad. I could use the iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard, turning it into an ersatz laptop. Then, when I got home, I could either sell the iPad on eBay or use it for whatever people used iPads to do.

To my great surprise, the iPad changed my writing forever.

I swiftly discarded the keyboard. I’m a very fast touch typist, and the keys did not suit my fingers.

Instead, I used the virtual keyboard and a stylus. I wrote the entire novel one letter at a time. I found the experience to be very similar to the way I first started writing, when I used yellow lined paper and a No. 2 pencil.

I carried the iPad around with me in a red fabric shopping bag I bought for the equivalent of a nickel in a Chinese grocery store.

I worked on the book whenever I had spare time. In Chinese airports, in Chinese hotels (usually in the lobbies, the only places with Wi-Fi), on Chinese airplanes, on Chinese boats on the Yangtze River, in Chinese buses, once in a Chinese pedicab.

The book came together quickly and well.

My wife, who accompanied me on the trip and was usually by my side when I wrote, told me that I started talking to myself. Reciting the book out loud as I wrote. I was completely unaware of that. Although I was aware of getting strange looks from people around me as I sat writing in bars and restaurants.

When I got home from China, I continued to work on the iPad, even though I could have gone back to the desktop. I carried the iPad with me everywhere. I worked in libraries, coffee shops, college student unions, yoga studios, gyms, wherever I happened to be.

The book came together so swiftly and so easily, that I can’t ever envision myself going back to writing on the desktop machine.

I even used the iPad to write scenes for the new movie I’m writing.

My programs include Final Draft for screenwriting and Pages for novels. Because Pages won’t support the Track Changes program my editor uses, I also use Office HD.

Yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m writing this on the iPad, too.

Just goes to show, you can teach an old dog, or an old rabbit, new tricks.

Read more about Jessica Rabbit in Gary K. Wolf’s novel Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?, available now in digital-only publication from Musa Publishing.

Gary K. Wolf hass written many short stories and nine novels. He is well known for two kinds of writing. His science fiction novels include Killerbowl, A Generation Removed, The Resurrectionist, Space Vulture an old-school, throwback, pulp science fiction novel which he co-wrote with his childhood friend Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers. His newest is newest Typical Day. Both Killerbowl and The Resurrectionist are currently in production as major motion pictures.

His other kind of writing isn't as easily categorized. Gary calls it fantasy fiction. He was told early on by a marketing executive at a major publishing house that this kind of writing wouldn't sell. Because there was no place for it on the bookstore shelves. It's not a regular novel, not crime, not science fiction, not romance. He was wrong. Who Censored Roger Rabbit? did indeed get published. It went through sixteen printings, and became a visual reality in Disney/Spielberg's $950 million blockbuster film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The film won four Academy Awards and the Hugo Award. Walt Disney Pictures has also purchased film rights to the sequel novel Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

One of his newest novels The Late Great Show! is solidly in the Roger Rabbit style fantasy category. Those who enjoy Toontown tales will most assuredly like The Late Great Show!, too.

Gary K. Wolf currently lives in Boston, but regularly travels around the world.

Venus - Not Just a Pretty Face

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Returning to our tour of the planets: Venus is the next from the Sun. It has near Earthlike gravity, but no moon. The good news is that it’s a unique environment. The bad news is that that environment is impossible for human life.

On a balmy day at the Venusian north pole, the temperature drops to a mere 600ºC. If you set out a block of lead, it would melt like margarine during a sunny Earth afternoon. Venus experiences a runaway greenhouse effect. Solar energy that enters its atmosphere stays there. At the Venusian equator, the temperature reaches 800ºC. The atmosphere is many times denser than Earth’s. Pressures are enormous.

The Venusian air is made of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. There’s limited water. Even at room temperature, it would eat your lungs or skin for a snack. Worse, it’s never still. Hurricane winds of 500 km/hr blow continuously. The constant roiling and overheating lead to lightning. A few seconds on Venus sees more lightning hits than a day on Earth. No spacecraft From Earth would last more than minutes there.

We’ll assume that you’ve jumped the enormous hurdles of months-long travel times, closed ecosystems in flight, and radiation exposure. You’ve reached Venus: Now what?

It’s a little late to Ignore It. Past writers (Burroughs, Heinlein, Brackett) could set adventures in the steamy Venusian swamps, but you can’t get away with that. In the near future, you’ll have to use Live With It. Venus’ raging atmosphere and impossible heat have to be useful for something unique. You’re the SF writer: Work on it.

Unexplained Science can work, but only in the far future. Before we can exploit Venus, interplanetary travel will have to have become common. Could we terraform Venus? Twenty kilometers above its surface, the temperature drops to 15ºC (60ºF). The atmosphere is thin. We could take an airborne algae from Earth and a bacterium able to metabolize sulfuric acid, and play games with their DNA. Given enough lab time, we could create a hybrid organism that could float high enough to begin diminishing the CO2 and breaking down the acid, with its large potential chemical energy. After a few thousand years, we could reduce the planet’s temperature, transform the atmosphere, and begin seeding the surface with more complex plants. That takes a lot of patience.

Postulate anti-gravity. Build Cloud City, floating above the hostile atmosphere. All you need is a reason to be there.

Move an asteroid from beyond Mars and give Venus a moon: no atmosphere; plenty of shielding; many problems eliminated. Perhaps it could be a way-station to Mercury.

Build a Venusian beanstalk in orbit, with its “tail” intentionally dragging in the atmosphere. (You might use another metallic asteroid for your materials.) Sulfuric acid is a valuable industrial chemical that Venusian orbital factories might use. The excess heat, transferred up the beanstalk as electricity, could be used to power those same factories.

Timing is everything. We won’t be visiting Venus anytime soon.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Reach for the Planets

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Before we visit the stars, we need to reach the planets. Each presents unique problems, but all share nasty holdups. Travel time will be measured in months or years. We presently can’t sustain humans in a closed ecosystem that long. Never mind interstellar voyages: You’re going to need suspended animation for humans to reach any planet.

Cosmic rays will leave every (normally shielded) astronaut with brain damage and cancer. Jupiter and its moons are also a hot-spot of radiation, because of Jupiter’s near-brown-dwarf status. Suspended animation will require lead coffins, in addition to other problems.

Mercury, innermost, would allow us to use the Sun’s gravity as an assist inbound. We’d have to fight it outward bound, unless we use the Sun as a gravitational slingshot. Even so, we’re talking 1.5 to 2 years for flight. Solar radiation increases as you move toward Mercury.

Mercury’s solar face is a maelstrom of heat and radiation. There’ll be no landing there. It’s still very slowly revolving; every square meter was blast-furnaced sometime. Smelted metals – gold, platinum, uranium - will be accessible from almost any landing. Unlimited energy exists only a few kilometers from the light-dark demarcation line.

Mercury’s back face remains near 20ºK. The Sun never shines there. Energy would need to come from broadcasting satellites using solar super-power. Except for scientific studies, there’s not much reason to land there.

The only barely habitable area is Mercury’s twilight zone, at the demarcation line, at most a few kilometers wide. We could set up a station, in shadow, not too far from solar power, and mine heavy metals. Outside, we could use the element lead the way we use copper on earth. Lead becomes super-conductive in Mercury’s shade, and there ought to be plenty of lead available.

Problems? Getting there will be the biggest problem, but let’s set that aside. Mercury has oxygen, as metal oxides in rocks, but it has no elemental hydrogen or nitrogen. Those must be imported from Earth. Those essential elements were cooked out and lost into space long ago. Once again, we require a closed ecosystem (which we have yet to create) only the humans must remain awake.

As an inner planet, Mercury will have higher than Earth’s background radiation. All building materials will be radioactive, not enough to kill immediately, but enough to sterilize, cause cancer, or produce brain damage, over long exposure. That means either a terminal deployment, or regular, hideously expensive and difficult crew rotations.

How do you approach Mercury? For the flight, Ignore It works best. Concentrate on the need for humans to be there. Remember: If your story line is powerful enough, the reader won’t ask embarrassing questions about suspended animation, radiation, or missing elements. If the human need is great enough, every problem can be moved over to Live With It. Every Mercuryman will plan to die there or in transit.

If you use Unexplained Science, create a radiation-proof energy field for ships and Mercury base. Good luck. Using real science, Mercury remains almost out of reach.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and lives in Arkansas. As an author, John has fantasy novels in print from the Barrow series.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Gary K. Wolf Wants YOU!

by Liz DeJesus

Are you a fan of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Did you know that this movie was based on a novel titled Who Censored Roger Rabbit? and that it was written by a novelist named Gary K. Wolf?

Do you have questions you’d like to ask the author? If so, this is your chance! I’m honored to interview Gary K. Wolf and ask him questions about his writing and his upcoming novel Who Wacked Roger Rabbit?, but I wanted to give the fans a chance for input.

For example:

What does Roger Rabbit have for breakfast in the morning?

Does Jessica Rabbit always look that good?

Does she have a bad hair day?

What does Eddie Valiant do on his days off?




The questions will be sent to Gary, and maybe your question will get picked! For what, you ask? Not only to be answered but for a chance to win a giveaway once the interview is posted.

Hmmm…interview, fan questions answered, and a giveaway. What’s not to love? Please post your questions right here in the Comments section.

Gary K. Wolf wrote his first short story when he was in the third grade. The teacher told the students to write about their summer vacation. Gary wrote about his trip to the moon! He always did have an over active imagination.

He's gone back to the moon many times since. Also to places in the galaxy far, far beyond that.

To date he's written many short stories and nine novels.

Gary is well known for two kinds of writing. His science fiction novels include Killerbowl, A Generation Removed, The Resurrectionist, Space Vulture an old-school, throwback, pulp science fiction novel which he co-wrote with his childhood friend Catholic Archbishop John J. Myers. His newest is newest Typical Day. Both Killerbowl and The Resurrectionist are currently in production as major motion pictures.

His other kind of writing isn't as easily categorized. Gary calls it fantasy fiction. He was told early on by a marketing executive at a major publishing house that this kind of writing wouldn't sell. Because there was no place for it on the bookstore shelves. It's not a regular novel, not crime, not science fiction, not romance. Gary asked the executive what he would do if he got Gulliver's Travels, The Wizard of Oz, or Alice In Wonderland? He thought for a moment and said he couldn't sell those either.

He was wrong. Who Censored Roger Rabbit? did indeed get published. It went through sixteen printings, and became a visual reality in Disney/Spielberg's $950 million blockbuster film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The film won four Academy Awards and the Hugo Award. Walt Disney Pictures has also purchased film rights to the sequel novel Who P-p-p-plugged Roger Rabbit?

One of my newest novels The Late Great Show! is solidly in the Roger Rabbit style fantasy category. Those who enjoy Toontown tales will most assuredly like The Late Great Show!, too.

Gary K. Wolf currently lives in Boston, but regularly travels around the world.

Liz DeJesus was born on the tiny island of Puerto Rico. She is a novelist and a poet. She has been writing for as long as she was capable of holding a pen. She is the author of the novel Nina (Blu Phi'er Publishing, October 2007), The Jackets (Arte Publico Press, March 31st 2011) First Frost (Musa Publishing, June 22nd 2012) and Glass Frost (Musa Publishing, July 2013).

She is also a member of The Written Remains Writers Guild.

Liz is currently working on a new novel.

Unexplained Science

Sci-Fi Deak Style by John Deakins

There’s another approach to Time Travel that creates space travel instead. Your Unexplained Science involves a device that moves in Time, separately from moving in Space. The Earth, however, is in constant high-velocity motion in Space. Thus, when you activate your machine, you’ll leave Earth behind and end up in the Great Vacuum . . . which is exactly what you want.

Once you get away from Earth’s gravity well, escape velocity drops off by the inverse square law. If you allow the Earth to move out from under you on its own journey by 50,000 km, its pull becomes negligible. You’ve just created cheap interplanetary flight. Instead of kinetic launching, which currently costs $2 million/kg, you’ll expend only the energy to run your time machine.

Stories in Martian or Asteroid conclaves have always depended on Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’d destroy most economies to send out more than a handful of people. The enormous flight times are also a problem. We can’t sustain a closed ecosystem for the time required. A conservative guess for Mars is two years, one way. You’ve just created a way to cut travel time to months instead.

Good news: The Solar System as a whole, including you, has the same relative velocity in terms of the galaxy and the cosmos. Popping off Earth only enough to ignore its gravity won’t leave you hopelessly between stars, unless you try to go too far. All you wanted was off Earth, and you’re there!

Space is bigger than anyone really appreciates. You can send out repeated flights, and never have to worry about Flight 2 materializing inside Flight 1. By the time Flight 2 launches, the whole Solar System will have moved thousands kilometers in its orbit around the Milky Way center: You’ll be in pristine vacuum.

You’ll have to spend a lot of computer time calculating how “far” to move temporally, so that you take advantage of the sling-shot effects of the Earth’s rotation and revolution. You’ll want whatever help Conservation of Momentum can give. Space travel will still be expensive. Going to Mars? Let the Earth’s motions help throw you in the right direction, but leave its gravity behind.

We’ve solved all the problems: Right? The technology of move-in-Time/move-in-Space has to be kept Top, Top Secret. Sure, you’re going to launch your Mars expedition by popping your craft, say, five minutes backwards in Time and pushing off toward Mars, sans gravity. What happens if you only move, say, a tenth of a second?

Your device could end up inside the Earth’s crust. Its atoms and the crustal atoms would fuse; you’d generate a neat, homemade nuclear explosion. A terrorist could simply set up under New York, send a few pounds of rocks a fraction of a second in Time, and New York would rain down over the Eastern Seaboard. Retaliation could lead to Nuclear Winter and the extinction of Homo sapiens.

Children, be careful with your toys: more problems next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom now retired and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Unexplained Science

by John Deakins

Time Travel always requires Unexplained Science. You have to have a time machine. The “machine” might transfer human consciousness, move you bodily, or accidentally suck you through a time-warp. Even (ugh!) Romantic Fantasy needs a magic mirror or something. Remember the dangers of over-explaining? Unexplained Science is a subset of “Ignore It.” There ain’t no time machines, and the science to produce one is nonexistent.

Time travel will work if your time machine is actually a time-and-space machine. You’ve re-invented the Star Trek transporter, emphasizing movement through Time instead of transportation through space. You can travel to past-Chicago if your machine compensates for the thousands of kilometers by which past-Chicago is separated from present-Chicago and somehow sloughs off all that nasty kinetic energy and momentum difference between the two. That’s asking a lot, but Star Trek repeatedly “beams up” people, inevitably involving Time as well as space. There’s only Gee-Whiz “Science” behind the “transporter.” I’d be almost embarrassed to use it.

You can Live With It. We all already travel in time: forward only. A human in suspended animation, could “skip ahead” to the future. Perhaps you foresee a future that great past SF authors haven’t envisioned. Going backward in Time, however, is out of the question. Almost every writer has been forced to go with Ignore It. How embarrassing! Is there no hope?

You wouldn’t think that it’d take long to exhaust Live With It. What you really want is to stay in a fixed location relative to the Earth, as you travel in Time. Why not pick an unchanging object on the Earth, like a piece of dense metal, and “lock” your time machine to that? Your (fictional) machine would always arrive in the same relative position to its “Time anchor,” even as the planet moves around. It would be best always to travel to the same relative day-hour-minute-second as the time you left. Thus, there’d be only minor differences between your beginning momentum and arrival momentum. The Time anchor could absorb small momentum differences, like catching an incoming carrier jet on a tail-hook. Travel too “far” in Time would create too great a momentum difference, however, and the anchor might melt or explode. Can you say, “One way trip?”

You now have a workable time machine. Think of all the wonderful complications you can generate. What if your “time anchor” hadn’t actually been in as “fixed” as you thought? Somebody moved it, and nobody told you. You could end up on another continent in an alien culture. What if the “solid” anchor you depended on hadn’t always been as solid as you assumed? What if the math was wrong and, after a certain number of years, solid molecules had moved beyond their apparently fixed positions?

Why were you time traveling at all? Is the past a “fixed” continuum, no matter what you change? Is the past flexible so that you change the future by your slightest action? What about the paradoxes? It’s time to have fun again.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IGNORE IT

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Nothing goes faster than light; no matter in our universe can reach light-speed. We can’t get around that fact. First, there’s presently no easy way to accelerate to anywhere close to light speed. To leave Earth requires roughly 11,000 m/s. Our fastest spacecraft might have reached 20,000 m/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. We’re not even close (.7%). At conventional rocket velocities, the nearest star is over sixty thousand years away. No one is going to survive even the shortest interstellar trip using current technology.

We are Science Fiction! We have to go to the stars! For that, we need trans-light speeds. The first approach we must be Ignore It. An FTL ship takes off from Earth, and after plot-development (days; weeks) reaches Proxima Centauri. Or Hans Solo zooms the Millennium Falcon toward Cloud City. No one asks how his FTL drive works.

Many readers are completely unfamiliar with interstellar distances. They have a feeling that if you go fast enough, you’ll get there in a reasonable time. The trouble is that you can’t go fast enough. The closest star is over four years away at light speed. We don’t produce anything even close to light speed. We’d have trouble keeping interest in a voyage lasting even four years, and no one is projecting any planets orbiting Proxima Centauri. Every reasonable solar system is much farther. A thousand-year star voyage is almost beyond fiction. It rapidly drops off into silly science contrivance. Ignore It burns out its batteries trying to fix too many scientific contradictions. Nevertheless, Ignore It may be the only solution. Hopefully, our plotting will be so good that readership won’t notice when we travel at speeds that simply aren’t possible, never mind the rest of the impossibilities involved.

The second approach is Unexplained Science. No one has to explain how a “warp drive” works on Star Trek; they only have to name it. Some works hint at “wormholes” or “hyper space,” but the smart author will slide around the hard science. If you find a golden egg in your basket, don’t be dumb enough to ask how it arrived. If you postulate a ship with FTL drive, don’t be dumb enough to tinker with explanations. Unfortunately, that makes Unexplained Science just a subset of Ignore It.

How do we make this all work? Ignore It works well in Space Opera. (Have you ever wondered why ships that have anti-gravity and FTL drives still need fuel?) Let’s leave the “how” of FTL and impossible speeds entirely alone and concentrate on the action and the human interplay. Throw in a little Unexplained Science if you think the audience is getting restless.

Limit your FTL Unexplained Science to names only, hopefully a single pseudo-science title: maybe Space-time Folding or Worm-hole generator. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like the Hollywood pimps are running you, too. (That would make you a . . . Never mind.)

There is another way out, but not this week.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Living in the Moment

by Laura Hardgrave

I don’t care what anyone says—writing awesome, short speculative fiction stories is hard. Writing short fiction is a challenge in itself, but when you add in that lonesome planet out in the middle of nowhere, that new tech that needs thorough descriptions, or that cool fantasy race that popped into your dreams one night that’s when the real fun begins. Every word in a short story must be carefully crafted and have a purpose. If there’s no purpose for a line of dialog or that interesting description, both are best left on the chopping block. That’s tough when you’re describing things no one’s ever read about.

That’s also one of the reasons why science fiction and fantasy short stories are so fun to write (and read!). That challenge kind of calls to us and chants an eerie tune, daring us to fully flesh out new worlds, characters, plots, conflicts, emotions, and deeper, resonating meanings that shine in as little words as possible. We have to be extremely delicate when choosing what we say and how we say it. It’s all in the details. When readers are able to read a paragraph and get a true sense of where the main character is, what he/she is feeling, and where the risks of the story lie, that’s more than just great storytelling—that’s magic.

I think that’s why I tend to write my short fiction in what I call moments. We all have our own methods, of course, but I like to guide my short fiction using character snapshots that are made of emotions. One scene may be driven by my main character’s intense curiosity. I’ll allow that character to have a moment with his/her sense of curiosity, then I’ll take the emotion one step further and move the plot forward while keeping my character’s frame of mind as the driving force. If a word, description, or line of dialog doesn’t make sense for that emotional snapshot, it will generally get omitted or saved for another moment.

Once the plot’s moved forward enough to force a change in the emotional snapshot, I’ll shift gears and form a new moment in my mind. These moments usually surface as full-scale images that will also provide the details of what imagery and scenery I describe. Since speculative fiction short story descriptions need to especially be tight, I find this method also helps keep my tendency to go overboard with descriptions down (what can I say—I like the shinies).

I may want to describe how gorgeous that duo-moon sunrise looks, but my main character? Oh, no. She’s far too busy running from a herd of police droids. She may notice the way a single ray of sun reflects off her shuttle in the distance, but that’s about it. And that’ll be the line of description that gets mentioned. If I’m ever in doubt of what to say, I stare into the eyes of my character’s emotional moment and instantly find my answer. It works well. When my characters cooperate, that is. Some characters are prone to harebrained ideas more than others. Gotta keep an eye on those!

Laura Hardgrave is an MMORPG video game journalist by day and a LGBT speculative fiction author by night. She kind of frantically dives back and forth between writing short stories and novel-length fiction. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels with a huge host of characters and a bit of inter-dimensional travel.

Learn more about Laura on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

Here's a Secret

by Lane Robbins

I may like writing about people more than I like writing about science fiction and fantasy.

Don't get me wrong; magic is magical, science is super, and the real world is often too damn dull to be borne.

But the thing that gets me to the keyboard, the thing that takes an airy imagining into something that must be explored is a character interacting with another character.

I'm fascinated by people. Why not? We're a fascinating subject! Shakespeare says so, "What a piece of work is a man!"* Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett have their say: "And just when you'd think they [people] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved."**

I've written a handful of books, a handful of stories, and no matter how excited I am about my SF/F premise, the very first scene I write is a people-oriented one. A story just isn't real to me until the people pop onto the page. Let me start with lovers' reunions, personal betrayals, an argument at work, strangers meeting, a bad man being kind, a good woman committing a wrong, anything and everything. Often my starting point isn't even overtly related to the SF/F elements. Tangentially, sure, but overtly? Nope. Every fantasy piece I write starts with the people doing people-type things.

Creating a character is so much more fun than creating magic; writing about people is biology and psychology and criminology and anthropology and archaeology and faith and mythology and everything delightful. Every person is a collection of puzzle pieces that ends up a different picture.

You put a dozen people in the same situation, and you get a dozen different results. Even the people who make the same choices might do so out of different motives. Any mystery reader can tell you that there are a dozen reasons or more to commit murder, good, bad, or indifferent.

People who are reluctant witnesses to a bank robbery might feel fear, rage, envy, despair, or excitement. They might fight back, faint, cry, or take advantage of the situation in some bizarre way—the clerk in the back who takes the time to burgle her co-worker's purse before she hides; the manager who starts dreaming of the raise she'll get for this if no one gets shot. Pretty much anything you can imagine, someone can conceivably do. People are amazing and awful in endless combinations. And that realization is more exciting than almost any magic trick. It's a form of magic all its own--people's ability to be surprising and affecting and just plain fascinating.

So I write SF & Fantasy—life is so much more interesting with magic after all--but primarily it's all a way to explore the amazing things people think and the amazing ways people behave.

Humans, can you believe it? Aren't we amazing?

*Hamlet. Act II, scene ii.

**Good Omens. p 26

Lane Robins was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. As Lyn Benedict, she writes the urban fantasy Shadows Inquiries series: Sins & Shadows, Ghosts & Echoes, Gods & Monsters, and Lies & Omens.

Learn more about Lane on her website.

SCI-FI DEAK STYLE

Science That Doesn’t Work In Science Fiction. . . But Has To

by John Deakins

The first word in “Science Fiction” is “Science.” “SF” includes Speculative Fantasy, but Science Fiction is supposed to remain pristine. The Science has to work. Readers expect the paranormal in fantasy, but Science Fiction must stick to the rules of the universe. Certainly, every hard SF story springs from some scientific aspects that have fictionally altered. When we adventure in the Asteroid Belt, both writer and reader are aware no humans have yet reached the Asteroid Belt. That’s why they call it fiction. We’re all in on the inside joke: We all know we’re lying. The object is to make the lies entertaining.

Once we’re committed to the Asteroid Belt, however, writing rules change. The remaining science must be correct; the logic must be consistent. Our flights among the orbiting rocks must obey the Newton’s laws. Our spacecraft can’t be towed by a dragon flapping its wings. A wizard can’t wave his wand and transport us instantly to the next rock. An Elf isn’t going to lead us down tunnels inside magically orbiting mountains. We’re obliged to stick to scientific facts. Our fiction is like an exotic SF game, but we’re only allowed playing pieces that actually function in this universe. We must follow if>>>then logic: If certain current scientific knowledge has been altered, then a story follows thus…

Some of the greatest fun of SF writing is the amount of mayhem we can create from behind our keyboard. We can destroy the world with an asteroid impact, nuclear war, or plague. We can suffocate our astronauts in unforgiving vacuum. We can kill space colonists with unnamed pestilence or human-devouring monsters. We can deliver supernovas, rampaging aliens, and fatal time paradoxes. We can alter history or bring humans to extinction. It’d be a shame to see our reign of terror end just because we’re shackled by science’s rock-hard rules.

The trouble is that scientific laws are hard, cold and unyielding. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. For the Science Fiction writer, that sadness occurs when a beautiful story idea is gored by an ugly scientific principle. For example, Burroughs’ Mars and Venus just aren’t there. We’d like to ride a thoat across the lichen-covered plains or explore the steaming Venusian swamps, but we simply can’t do that in Science Fiction. Alas, the Mars of red princesses is fantasy only.

Science is supposed to be the mainstay of Science Fiction. What happens when Science gets in the way of Science Fiction? Sometimes the story-telling urge is so powerful that it makes us willing to slide around our own dogma. To get that story written, we are (shudder!) willing to commit adultery on science. The result is often an offspring that really needed an abortion.

What are we going to do, then? (Funny you should ask that, since that’s what this blog’s about.) Over the next weeks, we will push Science Fiction into several deep science pits and try to rescue it. Stick around.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Asking Jamie Lackey

Who are three authors you admire--and why do you admire them?

1. Bruce Coville

Bruce Coville writes middle grade science fiction and fantasy books. I've been reading his books for most of my life--many of them over and over again. Whenever I'm tired or stressed or depressed, I can pick up one of his books, finish it in a couple of hours, and feel better about the world.

They're fun stories with engaging characters, and they have really rich themes. His books shaped me into the person I am today.

2. Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold writes both fantasy and science fiction novels. Her Vorkosigan series is set in one of the most interesting science fiction universes I've ever read, but her real strength is in her characters. Everyone in one of her books feels like a real, rounded person. Her Hugo and Nebula-winning Paladin of Souls is one of my very favorite books.

3. Peter S. Beagle

I've loved The Last Unicorn for longer than I can remember. I made my parents rent the movie over and over again. I love the beautiful, lyrical, poignant nature of his writing. His fiction, both novels and short stories, all come alive through his almost magical prose.

Jamie Lackey earned her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. Her fiction has been accepted by over a dozen different venues, including The Living Dead 2, Daily Science Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She reads slush for Clarkesworld Magazine and is an assistant editor at Electric Velocipede.

Learn more about Jamie Lackey on her website. Follow her on Twitter, and like her on facebook.

Coming to You Live

by Gary K. Wolf

INT. DAILY SHOW SET - RETURN FROM COMMERCIAL BREAK

JON STEWART
Welcome back to The Daily Show. Our guest tonight has been called a gull, a dirty dog, a booby, a goose, a cootie, an old goat, a cat's paw, a horse's ass, a gibbering gibbon. He's actually a very funny bunny. Let's hear it for Roger Rabbit!

SFX: Audience applause.

Roger comes out. Trips, falls over his own ear. Gets up, grins sheepishly. Bends his ear back into shape. Sits down in guest chair across from Jon.

ROGER RABBIT
Hi, Jon. P-p-p-pleased to be here!

JON STEWART
Glad to have you. Tell me, Roger, what's the hardest thing about being a Toon?

ROGER RABBIT
Avoiding erasers. No, fading in sunlight. No, being bonked on the head by anvils and sledge hammers, and grand pianos. No, keeping a straight face at operas. No, falling in love and having your heart thump so hard you look like your chest is sprouting a valentine.
(Contemplates, scratches head with ear.)
Shucks, none of that's so bad.

JON STEWART
We've both been in the movies. In fact, some call my films as cartoonish as yours. Describe your worst experience in Hollywood.

ROGER RABBIT
That's easy. The time the Friars invited me to a celebrity roast. Their menu included rabbit stew, hasenpfeffer, rabbit dip, Welsh rabbit, rabbit McMuffin, and country fried rabbit, all you can eat. They seated me on the head table.

JON STEWART
You seem like such a down-to-Earth rabbit. Has stardom changed your life?

ROGER RABBIT
A little bit. I get to play baseball with the Simply Splendiferous Stellar Somebunnies. The March Hare, the White Rabbit, Peter Cottontail, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Thumper, Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, Br'er Rabbit, the Playboy Rabbit, the Easter Bunny, and me. I'm third base. Thumper's the ball. That skinny scamp Bugs, he's the bat. Big old Peter Cottontail's the right field wall.

JON STEWART
You've been called a wild hare. Any truth to the persistent rumor that you're a wolf in sheep's clothing?

ROGER RABBIT
Baaa. How do those stories get started? Just because I like to go out in my backyard and howl at the moon wearing nothing but fuzzy wool ear muffs, and Jessica's with me dressed as Little Bo Peep. I mean, who doesn't from time to time?

JON STEWART
Here's something that's always bothered me. Bugs Bunny performs nude. Why do you wear pants?

ROGER RABBIT
They hold my suspenders down.

JON STEWART
You're the master of wacky, bizarre, almost surrealistic comedy. I gotta ask you. Where do you get your ideas?

ROGER RABBIT
Well, Jon, it's real easy. Just use your imagination!

JON STEWART
Roger Rabbit. Starring this July in a short story in the hot science fiction magazine Penumbra.
(show magazine cover)
Pick up a copy at your local download.
(pause)
Roger, thanks for coming.

ROGER RABBIT
It's been my p-p-p-p-p... It's been swell.

SFX: Thunderous audience applause.

FADE TO BLACK.

THE END

Gary K. Wolf’s novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? became a visual
reality in Disney/Spielberg’s $950 million blockbuster film Who Framed
Roger Rabbit. The film won four Academy Awards and the Hugo Award.

Two of Wolf’s science fiction novels, The Resurrectionist and
Killerbowl, are currently in development as major motion pictures.

Learn more about Gary Wolf on his website and on Space Vulture.

Confessions of a Writing Addict

by Katherine Heath Shaeffer

I have to write. Specifically, I have to write science fiction and fantasy.

I can't stop.

It's not just a matter of writing for catharsis (though there's an element of that in my writing) or of writing the story that I want to read (though there's an element of that, too). It's not just a matter of honoring, through emulation, the escapist fantasies that got me through the toughest times in my life (and to this day the writing of escapist literature is one of the noblest pursuits I can imagine) or of contributing allegorically to whatever ethical debates are in vogue this season.

I write because I'm a writing addict. Writing is an addictive and self-destructive behavior.

I believe that writing requires a specific kind of sacrifice. As I write, I find myself donating things I remember and things I've dreamed to my fiction. Because, no matter how implausible the premise, in a way I am always writing from experience: my experience of being able to imagine what would happen in the case of my implausible premise. And as I write down memory and dream, I lose them. Not wholly. I'm not giving myself amnesia here. But I don't get to keep these thoughts and images as they were originally constructed in my mind, because I have reconstructed them, through writing.

It's like that family story that's about you when you were a kid: you know that the story is not the whole truth, but you hear it so many times that the 'traditional' version that your parents tell at Thanksgiving every year superimposes itself upon the 'whole truth' that you remember until one day, for the life of you you can't recall what the flaws in your parents' version were, so you just go with it. You and your family have lived with this version so long that it's the truth now, no matter what really happened.

It's like explaining last night's dream to someone after you wake up. Dreams often don't make sense, but the dream you had last night was so wild and interesting that you have to share it with someone, so you fudge the details a little, connecting point A to point B so that the fluidly juxtaposed images of your dreaming mind come together to make a story. Then, when you try to remember your dream, it is not the dream that you invoke but the story you told of your dream. Because we are humans and patterns are easier for us to remember than lacks-of-pattern. So. You've lost a dream but gained a story.

Maybe you write that story. And so it goes.

Even the most fantastic of tales are constructed from the building blocks of memory, just as you can draw a beautiful dragon using the building blocks you develop from studying the anatomy of birds, bats snakes and fish. Or turtles and pterodactyls. (Hey, it's your dragon. Draw what you want.)

It's like that scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Yes, I am dipping into the great well of Star Trek metaphors. Don't judge me.) In “The Measure of a Man,” Data refuses to allow his android body to be dismantled, studied, and reconstructed because he believes that, though his memories will technically stay intact, the 'flavor' of those memories will be lost. Data makes it sound like this is a horrible thing that can only happen to androids, but to me it just sounds like what happens to any of my memories, once I try to tell it.

For me, at least, writing is erosion. It requires sacrificing those loves and fears I hold closest to my heart and reconstructing them into tools. It requires breaking down what I feel, what I remember, what I dream and writing it onto the page in a way that a reader can access. I may lose the immediacy of the feeling, but sometimes, if I am very lucky, I can translate that immediacy -- or a version of it -- to the page.

This self-erosion is both bittersweet and exhilarating.

Katherine Heath Shaeffer is a writer and graduate student who lives in Gainesville, Florida with her boyfriend and three cats. She is the current Production Editor of the academic journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. She has a short story forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction. Katherine's article Beauty and the Body and the Beast, along with her short story The Witch, the Curse and the Prince were published in the May issue of Penumbra eMag.

Why Does A Fantasy Writer Need Shakespeare? by Nyki Blatchley

My set-up for writing is a desktop computer, with papers strewn in front of the monitor.  Music on my left, coffee on my right, the essential reference books on a shelf just above.  And, on the wall over the monitor, a print of the famous portrait of William Shakespeare, in case I need his advice.

What has Shakespeare to do with writing fantasy?  For a start, he wasn’t averse to writing the odd fantasy play himself, notably A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.  Beyond this, several other plays contain plot features we’d consider fantasy, such as the Ghost in Hamlet and the witches in Macbeth.  Shakespeare lived, after all, in an age when elements like ghosts, magic and prophecies were considered, if not matters of everyday life, then at least events that could well happen.  Like being hit by an asteroid, perhaps, although less terminal.

Today, we’re accustomed to thinking of science, magic and divine miracles as belonging in separate boxes, which we label respectively “fact”, “fantasy” and “matter of opinion”.  In the Renaissance, it was all science of one kind or another.  The alchemists who sought for the Philosopher’s Stone were the same people whose experiments led to the development of modern chemistry, while the heroes of rationalist physics and astronomy, as late as Newton, accepted that the stars they studied guided the fates of mortals.  Giordano Bruno, executed for heresy in 1600, embraced the Copernican system as much because it made sense of his vision of a living, divine universe as because the maths worked.

In modern terms, a play like Macbethcould be regarded as magic realism, where witches, ghosts and prophecies coexist comfortably with political drama in the same way that the characters in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude speak to their dead ancestors and witness a girl levitating while going about their business  in an ordinary South American town.

Beyond the obvious parallels, of course, Shakespeare can be mined as one of the world’s great sources of archetypal plots and plot elements, along with the Bible and the great mythologies.  Tolkien certainly didn’t resist the influence.  There’s surely more than an echo of Macduff being “not of woman born” in the Witch King’s belated realisation that “no living man” doesn’t include a woman (or a hobbit).  Referring to the same play, the forest of the Ents closing in on Isengard and the enemy at Helms Deep seems reminiscent of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.

It’s not only the fantasy elements, though.  A large proportion of fantasy (though by no means all) is set in societies somewhat like one or another of Shakespeare’s plays, and singularly unlike our own.  You want to include high-level political plotting in your story?  Watch or read Julius Caesar for some tips.  Powerful rivals tearing an empire apart?  Antony and Cleopatra.  A king leading a (mostly) pre-gunpowder army on campaign?  Henry V.

And so on, from the complexities of royal succession in Hamlet to marriage expectations in Romeo and Juliet.  Of course, all this can be found by historical research, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Shakespeare should be the beginning and end of a writer’s background reading.  What historical research rarely gives, though, is a sense of the way people and events interweave, and the feeling of actually being there.

Shakespeare lived in the midst of all this.  Take the political plots, for instance: he was at least glancingly caught up in two of them.  In 1601, his play Richard II was said to have been used by the Earl of Essex to influence public mood ahead of his rebellion, since it portrayed a monarch being “legitimately” overthrown, although Shakespeare doesn’t appear to have been held accountable for this. 

More famously, in 1605, the Gunpowder Plot attempted to assassinate the King and his entire government and to seize control of the kingdom.  Shakespeare was related to several of the key plotters (though not Guido Fawkes) through his mother’s family.  It isn’t known whether he came under suspicion, but it’s not entirely impossible that his decision to leave London and return to Stratford, a few years later, may have been influenced by feeling insecure.

Although it should be taken as read, incidentally, perhaps I’d better make it clear that I have no truck with any of the crackpot theories about “who wrote Shakespeare?”  Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare: it was widely acknowledged at the time by both friends and enemies.  Far from the semi- literate peasant that the theorists portray, he was well educated (although he’d missed out on university) and middle class.  None of the other claims make any sense.  Besides the fact that the plays were clearly written by an actor, there’s the matter of the poems.  Certainly, if Bacon or Oxford had written plays, they’d have kept the matter quiet (though plenty of plays were produced anonymously, so there’d be no need for an elaborate deception) but there wasn’t a gentleman at court who wouldn’t have sold his soul to claim the sonnets as his own.

Most of all, though, Shakespeare’s characters are second to none in terms of realism and complexity, and realism of character is just as important in fantasy as in any other fiction.  Perhaps more so.  He’s not only given us some of the archetypal characters, from the squabbling lovers to the angst-ridden young man, but he’s also shown us how to use them to best effect.

There are risks, of course, in getting so drawn into his versions that the characters become stereotypes instead of archetypes.  Think of those endless couples in every type of modern fiction who quarrel all the time until they realise they’re actually in love, without the charm of Beatrice and Benedick to carry us over the cliché.  The point, of course, is to follow Shakespeare’s approach, rather than his results, and aim for the same freshness and believability he achieved.

Shakespeare’s leads are wonderful, but he also excels at portraying supporting characters – like Mercutio, who’s arguably the best character in Romeo and Juliet.  Though this was probably mainly due to Shakespeare’s own instinct against marginalising people, it also had a good deal to do with the set-up of the company he wrote for, which was a cooperative owned by the main actors.  In contrast to most other companies at the time, all the sharers expected a good role, and Shakespeare gladly obliged.

Nevertheless, he seemed to have had a deep feeling for people and their concerns, at all levels of society.  In a very early play, Henry VI Part 3, he’s portraying a country torn apart by the Wars of the Roses.  Most of the action shows us the warring dukes and princes, but in one scene, the King is faced with two unnamed characters – a father who’s killed his son, and a son who’s killed his father – who not only portray the kingdom’s suffering, but are also shown with every bit as much realism and sympathy as the leads, even though neither is on stage more than a couple of minutes.

I was introduced to Shakespeare very young at home and, by the time I got to “doing” him at school, I felt none of the boredom and sense of irrelevance of many kids in that situation, because I knew how powerful he could be.  I saw a lot of plays, as well as reading them.  I recall being taken to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Nightat Regents Park when very young and, even more memorably, Maggie Smith and Robert Stevens in Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare’s part of who I am as a writer, and I’m sure far more of my writing owes a debt to him than I’m aware myself.  I can think offhand of two scenes with distinct Shakespearean influence.  In At An Uncertain Hour, I have the Traveller wandering around the camp during the night before the crucial battle, very much as Henry V did before Agincourt, although with a rather different outcome.  And the novel I’m currently working on has a scene that fulfils a very similar role to the Henry VI scene mentioned above.

It’s not just specifics, though.  In my current novel, I was faced with trying to depict a complicated battle, both inside and outside a city, which involved several of my leading characters.  The approach I took was the one I’d learnt from numerous Shakespeare plays – Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth and many others – of using a barrage of short, sharp scenes, showing key events in different parts of the battle involving different characters, that built into an overall impression of what was happening.

All writers steal from other writers, and the better the writer, the more he or she is stolen from.  Everyone steals from Shakespeare, whether or not they’re conscious of it.  And Shakespeare, who was the biggest literary kleptomaniac of the lot, would have been delighted.

Editor's note:  Nyki Blatchley's story A Deed Without A Name is the featured story in February's Shakespeare-themed issue of Penumbra.  For more information on Nyki and his writing, please visit http://www.nykiblatchley.co.uk/ and read his blog on http://nyki-blatchley.blogspot.com/.