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.

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.

New Lands and New Possibilities

by Chris Pavesic

Speculative fiction is not a new invention. It has existed at least since Beowulf (probably earlier, but without print or other recorded versions we cannot say for sure). Indeed, speculative stories cover the globe and are found in all cultures and in all epochs. In these tales humans place their sense of wonder about the world and its creatures, life, death, love, hate, and the other mysteries. Authors use speculative stories to try and help them understand the world around them and bring readers along for the imaginative journey. The territory just beyond the borders of their experience becomes their artistic playgrounds where anything (and everything) is possible.

There was never an era in recorded human history when people did not wonder what might lie beyond the next hill (or beyond the next star-system); those storytellers—and then authors—filled the blank spaces on their maps with their imagination. The authors of speculative fiction—writers like Homer, Malory, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Stoker, Poe, Wells, King, and Rowling—and the stories they and others created—Beowulf, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Mists of Avalon, The River of Dancing Gods, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Hunger Games —are part of our literary and cultural touchstones. These authors worked at filling in (and then expanding) the map with the worlds they envisioned— Discworld, OZ, Gormenghast, Wonderland, Xanth, and Pern to name just a few.

In uncharted places, some cartographers would write the warning “Here There Be Monsters” on maps. Writers of speculative fiction were never content with this, however. Questions about the types of monsters, their purpose, the reasons for their creation, and their motivations needed to be answered, and indeed answered in the most entertaining way possible. The men and women who battled against them needed to be described and honored in print for their achievements and explorations, even if the battles were only in our imaginations. Conan, Drizzt, Haroun, Coraline, Stark, and Dresden—Joseph Campbell described these types of literary creations as “the hero with a thousand faces” because these archetypes appeared again and again, always ready to start down the path and begin the hero’s journey in these new, uncharted lands. And because they were interesting—because we wanted to see how they fared against both the figurative and literal monsters—we readers would follow these heroes into the speculative landscapes. What we learned on these journeys about our own lives, world, values, beliefs, and so forth was just as illuminating as what the heroes learned about their fictional world(s).

Being a reader (as well as a writer) of speculative fiction, I realize that I can picture many of these landscapes more clearly than I do many of the places of the “real” world. Without much effort I can pull memories of pushing through pine trees covered in clumps of snow like Lucy just before she reaches the lamp post in Narnia, I can remember the terrifying, oppressive darkness and ruined grandeur of the dwarf mines in Middle Earth (and also the quiet English-like flower and vegetable garden settings of the Shire complete with the round doors of the hobbit holes), and I can recall the thrill of standing on the deck of the Neverland pirate ship, complete with the smell of the sea and the splash of the salt water on my face. (And because I am an avid reader of these stories, I need to stop this list before it grows intolerably long!) These settings unfolded the marvels and perils of all that I had always suspected was just past my immediate horizon—indeed just over the next hill; I just had to muster the courage to start my own hero’s journey and find them for myself.

By publishing speculative fiction, Penumbra has joined this vast literary tradition. With each issue the authors add new dimensions and nuances to the unexplored places on the map. New worlds are envisioned by authors and new landscapes are explored by readers who are yearning to push past the borders of their experience to see places that are out of reach only for those who lack the imagination to make the voyage. In the pages of the magazine readers may discover (in highly personal ways) other arrangements and interpretations of experience that directly relate to their daily lives. In those new imaginary places on the map, we may indeed find a sense of wonder—complete with monsters and high adventure—and we also may broaden our knowledge of our own world and find new inspiration to continue on our own hero’s path. Anything (and everything) is possible.

Chris Pavesic lives in the Midwestern United States and loves Kona coffee, fairy tales, and all types of speculative fiction. Her stories, “Going Home” and “The World In Front of Me,” have been published in Penumbra EMag. Between writing projects, Chris can most often be found reading, gaming, gardening, working on an endless list of DIY household projects, or hanging out with friends.

Stay in touch with Chris on her blog.

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.

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.

Sure Fire Ways to Procrastinate

by Kendra Leigh Speedling

Writers write every day, they say. It makes sense; the thing that separates writers from People Who Have Ideas is actually writing, and it's easier to keep at it when it's part of a routine. Writing every day not only helps you improve the writing itself, but means that you finish things. It's the advice that comes up in every book, blog, or interview about writing. Write every day.

I would like to extol the virtues of writing every day, but since the most I've done this week is open a Word document before launching myself away from my computer with a wail akin to that of an injured baby manatee,* that would make me a hypocrite.

The usual excuses apply—day job, other obligations, frustration with everything I'm attempting to work on at the moment—but writers work past these things, I've been told. Writers power through scenes even when they feel like they'd get a better result letting the cat walk over the keyboard.

In this particular climate, write every day starts to feel less like advice and more like a rebuke. Where's your discipline? the malicious brain imps will whisper. Don't you know that real writers write every day? The subsequent spiral of guilt and recriminations generally culminates in a realization that I've spent the last three hours alphabetizing my bookshelves so I don't have to acknowledge the fact that I have a manuscript I haven't touched in two weeks.** It eventually evens out again, but I could do without the 3-4 day period where I feel like I'm the laziest person in the entire universe. I used to keep a spreadsheet to enter my word count for each day, but had to stop when each 0 started feeling like a reflection of my worth as a person.

So absolutely, make time for your writing. Try to write every day, or as often as you can. Enjoy those days when it's easy; sit down to write even when it feels your plotline and your life are having a contest to see who can collapse into a gooey mess first. If you really, really can't bear to look at your manuscript on a particular day, write something else: something short, something silly, something about your world, something you don't intend to ever see print. But if you, like me, find yourself sacrificing your sanity for the sake of a word count, don't beat yourself up if a few days pass without anything resembling productivity. You've had a break, and now you can get back to writing.

In the end, it doesn't matter if you write 2000 words a day or 100, write every day, every other, on weekends, in the mornings or evenings or under the light of a full moon. What matters is that you write, and keep writing, and remember why you wanted to write things in the first place.

*I don't actually know if manatees wail, so this may be horridly inaccurate. If you have identified it as such, you clearly know far more about zoology than I do, and can feel free to imagine the animal of your choice.

**The fact that there is an entire website dedicated to the concept of cat vacuuming assures me that I'm not entirely alone in this regard.

Kendra Leigh Speedling's short story "They Shall Know Us At the End" appears in the July issue of Penumbra. She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a major in English and a minor in Asian Languages and Literatures. She is a 2011 Dell Awards finalist, and will someday master the art of productivity.

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.

Bolts of Lightning

by Chris Pavesic

Speculative fiction has been a favorite genre of mine for years. I like the ideas in the fiction; I like the short story length. It gives a writer a chance to work on his/her craft; in essence, it gives a writer a chance to be a wordsmith.

Writing comes down to creating connections—making that momentary bridge between the writer and the readers—and those connections are made through words. In its basic sense, writing is a means of transmitting the thoughts and images that reside in a writer’s brain to a reader in the most effective and accurate fashion. In a letter to George Bainton in 1888, one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, described the desire for this accuracy in the following way: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

This is what I look for in speculative fiction—words or phrases that can make that connection between the reader and the writer with the force of a bolt of lightning. This is what I search for as a reader and this is what I strive for as a writer—the amount of impact that will make a story memorable.

Recently I had that “lightning bolt” reaction when reading Ken Liu’s speculative fiction story, “The Paper Menagerie.” A friend of mine had a similar reaction when reading Brian Grigg’s “Wendell, Custodian of the Galaxy,” published in the March, 2013 issue of Penumbra (a story that I really enjoyed as well!). What causes that “lightning bolt” reaction with a reader? I know when it happens to me as a reader, but it is something I continue to work on each time I put a metaphoric pen to paper.

Many of my short stories start out a great deal longer than their finished versions. I pare them down, looking for those essential words or phrases that will connote as much meaning to a reader as an entire paragraph. This is not an easy task; changing one paragraph can alter the entire meaning of the story. This is where multiple drafts come in, and why I am grateful for the technology we have today. I can save one version of a story, make changes, and go back to the first version if I prefer it with a mere click of a mouse button. (I almost cannot imagine writing and revising with pen and paper the way that Twain did!)

If all this goes well, I will create a connection to my readers with my words. They will interiorize the thoughts and images from my writing. They will see the characters, experience the emotions, and wander in the storyscape I create. We will have that momentary bridge of understanding, complete with a lightning bolt or two.

Chris Pavesic lives in the Midwestern United States and loves Kona coffee, fairy tales, and all types of speculative fiction. Her story, “Going Home,” is the featured story in the June, 2013 issue of Penumbra. Between writing projects, Chris can most often be found reading, gaming, gardening, working on an endless list of DIY household projects, or hanging out with friends.

Stay in touch with Chris on her blog.

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.

On Writing Advice

by Michael Hodges

Writing advice all tends to blend into wallpaper. And soon it becomes like that old peeling stuff in your kitchen you pretend isn’t there as you glance back down at your coffee cup. I could write about using too many “ly” adverbs, or not to use “and” too often in one sentence (Mr. McCarthy would disagree), or even suggest copies of On Writing or The Elements of Style. I could say “find your voice”…something I think is more about writing a lot and consuming stimulants than performing Jedi mind tricks. These are all fine things. But you probably know them.

Discussing one aspect of writing will almost certainly segue to others. There’s an ecosystem here, an unavoidable connection. We void these connections at our own peril.

In our daily paths, we try to make that separation. We are closer to the plump raccoon that sneaks onto our porch at night than we like to think. There are things out there—living, breathing things that share our space in this world. The raccoons, the bats, the geese, the frogs, this frenetic symphony amongst the soggy parks and brown rivers that we pass on our way to Costco or whatever the next big box store is. If we are holding coffee, perhaps we can avert our gaze once more.

We are slaves to the sun. We are forced to wake and sleep, wake and sleep in the rhythms that have brushed this planet for billions of years. But today, and maybe just today, you are free. The world is more than credit and bills and our paths amongst the strip malls.

What is real? What is important?

Writing is one of them. You know this or you wouldn’t be here. And I guess this leads me to pluck a single focal point for this piece:

Awareness.

It’s the writer’s best friend. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, in their classic song “Do You Realize” asked, Do you realize, we’re floating in space?

No shit. We’re floating in space. Once you are aware of this truism, you are already ahead of the game. The writer, at his or her desk is at that moment, floating in space. Your mind is the sun, your hands the rain, your writing software the caked plains of Northern Africa.

What is important? What moves you? Can you feel all of this about you? The violence and the love and the dying and birthing? There are few things we have control over. Writing is one of them.

So go. Create your own universes within universes. Today, you are the creator, and the characters in your stories will wake and rest to the sun of your mind.

Michael Hodges resides in Chicagoland, but often dreams of the Northern Rockies. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He is represented by FinePrint literary, and hard at work on a new novel. You can find out more on his website.

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.

A Moment with Lindsey Duncan

If you could give an aspiring writer any one piece of advice, what would it be and why?

The one piece of advice I would give an aspiring writer is to know yourself. Books on craft and fellow writers have a lot of theories about the best way to write whether insisting it is crucial you write first thing in the morning every day, requiring an outline, decrying outlines as stifling to creativity, telling you that humor or elaborate prose or stories about garden gnomes don't sell and it doesn't get any clearer with editors. More than once, I've had a story rejected by one venue where the editor cited a specific element of the story as their reason for rejection and the next place I submitted it, their editor loved the very same element.

To decide which advice to take and which to ignore, you need to know who you are as a writer and how you work. Do you need the discipline of daily sessions? Are you a night-owl and likely to get your best work done after midnight? After years of trying to push through writer’s block, I finally realized that usually, when I block, it’s my subconscious telling me I’m coming up on a plot hole I haven’t worked through yet – so now, rather than trying to force it or giving up, I stop and consciously analyze what’s going on in the work. Part of knowing your process, though, is not taking the easy route. If you know you need breaks to recharge and incubate ideas, take breaks – but don’t let the break itself become a habit.

The same applies to the style of your writing. Do you enjoy vivid descriptions and unusual metaphors, or do you prefer to write streamlined and to the point? As long as you’re not grinding the story to a halt to immortalize a patch of moss or conversely, not giving enough information to picture a scene, it’s almost a guarantee there are readers for whom your prose is just right. Knowing which you are can help you identify problem spots in your fiction. You’ll know to scan for places to cut or hunt for long stretches of barely interrupted dialogue to fix the dreaded talking-head syndrome.

Don’t worry about fads and should-nots. I’m reminded in reading an intro for Robert Asprin’s Myth series that he was told humor didn’t sell. His series took off – long before Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels dominated the public consciousness. Conversely, with the speed of publishing, by the time you latch onto a trend, it’s likely to have passed.

You might need a detailed outline before you begin, or you might need nothing more than a name and a core concept. If you’re the latter type – a pantser, as in “by the seat of your” – go into the process knowing the final draft will probably need more revision and rewriting. I’ve discovered I don’t need any kind of outline for novels, but what I do need is near-exhaustive world and character-building. With the backdrop and cast fully fleshed out, I can write as a pantser and still create a (relatively) smooth plot in the first draft.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is invaluable in analyzing critiques or editor comments – deciding what to keep and what to change. While it’s always important to pay serious attention to amassed evidence of a problem – when every reader / editor is saying the same thing – this self-knowledge helps you decide what to do with conflicting opinions or outliers. Otherwise, you’d drive yourself mad trying to edit to everyone’s liking.

Finally, the most unique part of any writer’s work comes from the individual. I’m not saying that you have to bare your soul in print or write solely based in personal experiences – disagreeing with both these concepts is part of my identity as a writer – but rather that no one else has your precise combination of opinions, beliefs, personal style … and a hundred other things, besides. I’ve always agreed with those who flip the old “write what you know” adage on its head and say that the real goal is to “know what you write” – and the most important subject for a writer to know about is themselves.

Lindsey Duncan is a life-long writer and professional Celtic harp performer, with short fiction and poetry in numerous speculative fiction publications. Her contemporary fantasy novel, Flow, is available from Double Dragon Publishing. She feels that music and language are inextricably linked. She lives, performs and teaches harp in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Learn more about Lindsey 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.

Make Them Feel

by Heidi Kneale

One day my film professor said to us, "Here is a piece of white paper and a ping-pong ball. I want you to photograph it."

Okay. White ping-pong ball on white paper. First thing through my mind: why? Second thing through my mind: how hard can it be?

Pretty difficult, when there's a catch. "Everyone's shot must look different."

So while the rest of us were trying for closeups, long shots, angular shots, and all sorts of funny shooting, one bright spark went off on his own.

When he'd come back, he had his shot. In a dark room, he'd lit the ping-pong ball with a blue key light and a red fill light from down low.

He succeeded in showing the ping-pong ball in a different light. It was dark, moody and evocative.

Unlike all the other plain white shots of ping-pong balls, this one stirred something in our souls. And he walked away with an A+ for the assignment.

This ability to evoke emotions in our audience is also vital in writing. We want our audience to feel empathy with our characters and take them on the same journey. The hook that grabs a reader is the one that entices them to make an emotional investment in the story.

Open your favourite novel and read the first page. What emotions stir in your heart? From the very beginning, that author managed to grab you and never let go.

As authors, we don't have the benefit of lighting to create mood and atmosphere. We must rely on words--words with subtle shadings and similar meanings to elicit an emotion.

What emotion/s do you feel from the first page of your favourite novel? What words bring out that emotion?

Picking on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a favourite novel of many a romantic soul, her first opening lines are:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Certain words will evoke certain emotions. "Universally acknowledged," "must be," "truth so well fixed", "considered as the rightful property", will make people react.

The reactions will be different from person to person. But they will react. Pride and Prejudice is all about characters' emotional reactions, and Austen does an excellent job in stirring these various emotions in her readers as well.

As you read through this month's issue of Penumbra, make a note of your favourite story and what emotions it stirs within you.

Meanwhile, ever thought about photographing a ping-pong ball?

Heidi Kneale is an Australian author of moderate repute. By day she works computer miracles for the local library. The rest of the time she writes books and raises babies.

Learn more about Heidi on her website.

A Moment with Samuel Marzioli

Why did you choose to write speculative fiction instead of another genre?

Perhaps it started in childhood. That always seems like the time period people dredge up to explain their current proclivities--some oddity post-infancy which maintained its edge throughout the years. And if so, who am I to go against the grain? Yes, let’s say it started in childhood, and we can blame my parents.

I was first introduced to spec fic when I was four and five. From books to movies, to comics, and books on tape, or even stories on vinyl. It was never a question for me if I would read or watch or listen. Only when. Because speculative fiction was a seamless part of my life, no different than school or bedtime, and I enjoyed it absolutely.

I remember when my family had just bought a brand new laserdisc, and we invited our family friends over for dinner and a movie. The dinner I’ve long since forgotten (maybe spaghetti?), but the movie stayed with me ever since. It was Star Wars, original and unbutchered, and--even for a kid whose idea of a great time was any 80’s video game turned cartoon--I was pretty damn impressed. Sometime later that year I remember sliding out of bed one dark night and making my way to the living room after a fit of sleeplessness. There I found my father reclining on the couch and on the TV another sci-fi film that I hadn’t seen before. I asked my dad if I could stay up and watch it too, and he said yes. That film was Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Many nights my brother and sister and I would snuggle up beside our parents in bed and they’d read us works by the masters of children’s speculative fiction: Roald Dahl, E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum and more. Sometimes they’d even pull out a few issues from one of their many long white, and dusty, comic boxes and we’d follow along the pictures as they read to us Judge Dredd or Groo the Wanderer. In fact, it was Judge Dredd and Groo more than anything else that made me want to read. Because I soon became impatient waiting for my family to absorb the next adventure from these characters of absurdist sci-fi and ridiculous sword and sorcery, respectively.

From this groundwork, and the accumulation of a few more years, I branched off into more mature works as well. There was some H. P. Lovecraft, Poe, and Shakespeare thrown into the mix, as well as Stephen King. Maybe a few books by Clive Barker, or Michael Crichton, and of course Douglas Adams and Robert Aspirin. Probably a ton of books of pseudo histories of supernatural beasties, and various bits of parapsychology, by the likes of Harry Price, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Cesare Lombroso, and Montague Summers.

If this seems a disparate mix, it’s because that’s how it began and that’s how it continued, and to this day that’s what I write. One day I may type a tale of terror involving spilled guts with gratuitous descriptions, the next a humorous space opera involving intergalactic toys and the enthusiasts that collect them. The fact is speculative fiction is a rich and rewarding set of genres, the pixie dust that infuses the mundanity of this world with true, honest-to-God magic. And I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Anything!

‘Cept maybe a literary book deal.

Samuel Marzioli still does all of his writing on a laptop outside, under an umbrella. His fiction has appeared several times in Penumbra eMag, once in Stupefying Stories, and is forthcoming in Stupefying Stories Presents, Space & Time Magazine and the "A Darke Phantastique" anthology by Cycatrix Press.

Learn more about Samuel and his current projects from his blog.

If I Could Redo One Thing In My Life

What would I change?

by Julia Nolan

I wouldn’t have stopped writing.

Let me provide necessary context. From eighteen to twenty-four, I was convinced that I was meant to be a writer. Although I had a very sensible engineering degree and a good job in my field, I also had literary aspirations. To achieve them, I set some goals. I’d write for an hour a day, then submit my stories. I figured success was soon to follow.

The hour a day soon became an hour a few times a week. My goal to receive feedback was stymied by my conviction that critiquers “didn’t get it”. And the vast majority of my submissions came back with form rejections. So after six years, I gave up. I still hadn’t done more than publish in a few token paying markets. The evidence was clear; I was a terrible writer. Deciding this was not easy for me, I abandoned all aspirations for nearly a decade, before I started writing again with a more mature perspective.

And what perspective was this? Mostly the realization that I’d been lazy. I had assumed since I was reading at three and writing at five, the first time I tried my hand at fiction writing, I’d be genius. What I hadn’t taken into account was that I’d thrown myself into an incredibly competitive field without any practice or training. (Consider what would happen if I had decided to perform open heart surgery despite my lack of a medical background. After all, I’d been studying science all my life, and had even completed a high school biology class. Surely open heart surgery isn’t that much more difficult…it sounds ridiculous when put that way, and yet a similar arrogance infected me.)

The second time around, I looked at things differently. I sought critique, even when it hurt, from writers whose work I respected. I read short stories and novels with a critical eye, trying to figure out what made them worthy of publication. I gave critiques, hoping to improve my own ability to judge good from bad. Eventually I applied for (and received), a position at Allegory which allowed me to get a feel for what it is like to read hundreds of submissions and accept only a very few. In short, I learned patience and humility.

By doing this, I improved.

Now I suspect I’ll never be Shakespeare or Stephen King (they’re both one of a kind). And I doubt I’ll ever be able to support myself by writing alone. (Fortunately, I like my day job.) But…I’ve gotten two stories accepted in publications I love and suspect that if I continue working more success will follow. Probably not as fast as I’d like, but there’s no hurry, either. If I continue to practice, I will continue to improve. And good publications buy good stories.

Why do I regret my earlier arrogance if it did no long lasting damage? Because if I had not wasted all those years, I’d be a decade ahead of where I am now. More importantly, writing has always been a source of pleasure. It helps to ground my thoughts, and to stretch my mind and imagination. Giving that up for nearly a decade because I thought I wasn’t “good” was a self-destructive act. If we only did the things we instantly excelled at, we’d do nothing.

Julia Nolan is a project manager of epic proportions. The other ways in which she wastes time include making elaborate costumes, dancing, singing, and playing with chemistry. She had work appear in Mars Dust and will have stories in Penumbra and Stupefying Stories. She also edits for the ezine, Allegory.