Yearly Archives: 2015

Agent of Argyre, FICTION

Preparing for a Kappa Fight

Life is full of challenges, everyone can tell you that. One day you may be on top of the world only to find yourself waking up the next day with signs of a nosebleed and a complete inability to remember where you left your pants. This is normal, or at least as normal as some people can get, so all we can ever really do is learn to live with the random things that may befall us in our lives. But not all things that could happen to us are random acts of nature or stupidity. No, some things are coming to challenge you directly and aren’t going to just let you brush them of. When that happens, are you ready to face your inner demons? Or even your outer demons?

Case in point: swimming or even walking on the waterfront can be dangerous. Sure, you’re probably thinking about things like undertow, flash floods, and not being beach body ready. But there are bigger things to consider, worse things to deal with, you’re going to need to be ready for the real threat of the deep. And the question is: when that happens, are you ready for the ultimate challenge?

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It’s a three foot tall turtle man and it’s out to kick your ass. You’ve got mere seconds to react and it is coming after you with all the ferocity of a celebutante that thinks you’ve taken a picture of their bad side. What will you do? What will you do? Continue reading Preparing for a Kappa Fight →

Observations, WTF

Marvel’s “Creative Differences”

Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter – there’s a damn good chance you have no idea who that is. And you couldn’t be blamed for that. Despite being a major businessman since the late 80s and worth 3.8 billion dollars, no one really knows Ike. Even Steve Jobs gave more interviews and appearances. And, as far as we know, Ike could be a brain in a jar considering the last photo anyone seems to have of him is from 1985.

Ike Perlmutter

So you can be excused for having no idea who he is and assuming his business decisions are being relayed from a screen with his face on it like Arnim Zola in Winter Soldier. But, as they like to say it, “you will know him by his deeds”, and Ike’s been pretty active on that front. Even if you have no idea who he is, you’re familiar with his work and it looks something like this.

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So when news broke not long ago that Marvel Studios was going to cut Ike and the “Creative Committee” out of decisions from here on and report only to Disney, some people were surprised. After all, Ike is a pretty damn good business man. Having come to the US with practically nothing, including no formal education, Ike managed to rise through the business world to eventually own Toy Biz. Before long, he leveraged that to become the largest shareholder of Marvel and, now, the largest private shareholder of Disney. This is a man who literally had nothing and somehow ended up with everything. Yet they’re deciding he needs to be cut out of the equation. It’d be a mystery to most, but a very simple answer lies behind it all…

Ike’s an asshole. And, frankly, miserable to work with… Continue reading Marvel’s “Creative Differences” →

Miscellaneous, Mythology

Mythology Monday: Lucky Horseshoes

Lucky charms, they’re magically delicious, but also a little confusing. Generally the damn things don’t make any sense and most of them are powered by belief in bullshit. But bullshit has a source, like a lake feeding a river… of bullshit. After all, there has to be some sort of origin to these things or it becomes fairly easy to poke holes in the “logic”. Rabbit feet aren’t too lucky to the rabbit that lost them. And if pennies you pick up really were going to give you good luck for the rest of the day, there are a lot of old people who should be millionaires.

penny-jar

But some charms aren’t just good luck, having entire rituals around them that don’t make a whole lot of sense either. The horseshoe is a great example of this, not only being considered good luck but having contradicting and specific methods of using it. If you turn it one direction it’s supposed to do one thing, the other direction and it does another, you can even use the horseshoe wrong in some cultures and have it work against you instead of for you. And that all leads to one very important question…

What the hell is up with the horseshoes? Continue reading Mythology Monday: Lucky Horseshoes →

Agent of Argyre, Alterpedia, FICTION

Alterpedia: Kappa

In the Alters’ World (and the series of books found here), creatures of legend reveal themselves to the world. Born through genetic abnormalities, defects and mutations, the Alters have lived for centuries as outcasts of human society, hiding their true nature from the world while colorful stories have been written by many to describe what they’ve seen. How are these creatures different from what was described in the stories? What relationship do they have with humanity? Every entry of the Alterpedia will delve into a new creature from around the world. This week we cover:

Kappa

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Small, turtle-like and mischievous, Kappa are said to roam the waters of Japan and remain hidden in the depths, awaiting those who would stray too close to the waterfront. Long used as a story to warn children of the dangers of going too near to the water, Kappa have long been blamed for drownings and mishaps on or near ponds, rivers, and the sea.  Ruling the waters, swimming naturally like a fish and holding a deep connection to it – to the point of needing those very waters to survive, they are incredibly territorial. Images of them have been created throughout the centuries, depicting them tormenting humans who stray too close to their territory.

But what are the Kappa? Why do people believe them to be so malicious and how is it they came to represent all the dangers lurking within the waters?

Are they really demons, or are they something else? Continue reading Alterpedia: Kappa →

Observations, Sci-Fi, Writing, WTF

WTF Wednesday: The Hugo Debates

The Hugo Awards, one of the great awards of speculative fiction. Sure, most people outside of the speculative fiction circles have no idea what the Hugo Awards are, but inside those circles it’s like being anointed as one of the geek chosen. A look through the Hugo Awards nominees and winners will show you a list of people who have gone down in history as legends of the genre. And it usually operates fairly quietly in the background, known of but not much focused on.

Then, all of a sudden, this year there was buzz about it, something juicy was going on. For a genre that constantly wants to be legitimized, this is big news. After all, we’ve been the basement dwellers of the literary world for decades now and the sudden buzz about one of our big achievements was a sign some of us could come out into the light finally.

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Though some of us are too far gone

Except… that buzz was about how the Hugos were embroiled in a political debate on the validity of social commentary in science fiction. A group backing a “Sad Puppies” slate wanted to bring back golden age sci-fi and get rid of the “SJWs”. Of course, this sort of talk doesn’t go unnoticed and it immediately saw opposition from multiple directions. The debates were fierce, sometimes petty, and often contradictory. But, from the outside of the debate, the only thing you really could have gotten from it would be a single message:

“Science fiction traditionally hates social commentary.”

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This is why we can’t have nice things, people… Continue reading WTF Wednesday: The Hugo Debates →

Observations, Sci-Fi, Writing

Fermi Paradox 3 – Filter Ahead?

So for a while I’ve been talking about the Fermi Paradox and the different scenarios at play in what may have happened and what may be happening. Thinking about it in depth is a good practice for scifi writers because it makes minor changes to the general scifi space story. There’s a chance we could be the big dogs in the universe, there’s also a chance that there are a lot of alien civilizations out there but the effort of colonization is restrictive. Both of these present interesting concepts to work with, most of them setting up the idea that first contact would have us being the invaders (even if accidentally).

But it would be dishonest to discuss the Fermi Paradox without talking about the elephant in the room. There’s a chance that, not only does the Great Filter exist, but we haven’t run into it yet. I don’t subscribe to the theory much myself, for reasons I’ll list as we go, but the possibility is still quite real. For a lot of people this tends to be doom and gloom, but for me?

Well, it’s not like I’d survive it, so at least I could take some inspiration from the possibilities. Continue reading Fermi Paradox 3 – Filter Ahead? →

Miscellaneous, Observations, Sci-Fi, Writing

Fermi Paradox Part 2 – No Filter?

Recently I raised the idea of the Fermi Paradox and the possibility that the “Great Filter” might be behind us. In my view, that raises a lot of interesting questions that scifi writers could get a lot of mileage out of. The idea that life is so hard that it needs to have a great deal of luck to get to even our level is something that would greatly change the typical dynamic of most scifi stories to date. We could be a relatively rare form of life, maybe even among the first, that has achieved our level of intelligence.

But that does require that our specific circumstances are unique, which brings us back to the original premise. With a universe so complex and so ancient, you would have to imagine that our pattern of events isn’t completely out of the ordinary. It is entirely likely that most worlds in our universe have experienced at least one major extinction event once life has formed. And, while the easy assumption is that the Great Filter is when one of those extinction events can’t be recovered from (like what may have happened to ancient Mars or the like), we have to assume that surviving those events can’t be too unique either.

So… what kind of situation do we have if the Filter doesn’t exist? Continue reading Fermi Paradox Part 2 – No Filter? →

Agent of Argyre, Alterpedia, Alterpedia Historia, FICTION

Alterpedia Historia: Journey To The… East

(I hate that I have to say this, but this is a fictional account of the history of a fictional world. I do not believe these things, nor should you, as I am making them up. If I receive any comments that I did not do my research into these events, you will be mocked.)

In the Agent of Argyre series of books, there is an organization called the Alter Control Task Force. Though ostensibly an organization for policing activities of the Alter race, an attempt to prevent an eventual race war, they are actually representatives of a city-state on the ocean: The Republic of Argyre.

The Republic of Argyre, an artificial island anchored to an oceanic ridge in the pacific, is a city-state established by Alters for the sake of harboring their kind and establishing a relationship with the mainstream human population. Despite being an artificial island and attached to no primary landmass, the city’s structure is capable of potentially supporting all 12 to 15 million active Alters on the planet.

How did a race of people who’ve lived in hiding for centuries manage to construct such a city? Why would they build their city in the middle of the ocean? Where did they get the resources for such a task? In the Alterpedia Historia, we will answer these questions and discover the history of the Alters. Today we address…

Continue reading Alterpedia Historia: Journey To The… East →

Mythology, Mythology World Tour, Writing

Mythology World Tour: Creatures of Central Africa

The Fantasy Genre has long been dominated by the religions and customs of countries touched on by the Crusades. While this makes sense, with the familiar image of a knight wandering foreign lands being key to the genre itself, there has been stagnation in recent times. As such, I’ve taken it upon myself to look into the cultures of the world and find fascinating details about other mythologies often overlooked by the genre we so love, going on a bit of a tour of world mythologies.

When we were last in Central Africa, I devoted a bit of time to some of the creation myths of the region. But once the world came into being, the reality of where they lived was sure to set in. As noted a couple times before and only half in jest, nature is the real master of Central Africa and Humans have really only found ways to out-maneuver it.

And, because mythology is often crafted by the things people are afraid of or have to explain to themselves over time, it was inevitable that a place with one of the greatest rain forests on the planet would give rise to stories of cryptids and beasts lurking in the darkness. In a place where you could easily be lost in the wilderness or attacked by creatures in the dead of the night, it is no surprise that one of the gods of death of the region, Tore, is known to take the form of a leopard to personally attack.

In fact, most creatures in the region have at least one of three traits: they’re either big, shapeshifters, or hungry… go figure. Continue reading Mythology World Tour: Creatures of Central Africa →

FICTION, Sci-Fi, Writing

World Building Pt. 3 – Presentation

World building is a difficult task. Speculative fiction opens up so many possibilities that any other genre wouldn’t offer, but there are challenges that present themselves in the process of doing it. First you have to make your snowflake, forming a complex structure from multiple questions building on top of a base element. Then, as you build it, you have to figure out just how far you can really take it before the audience tunes out. You get both of these right, you should have a pretty solid world to give to people. This groundwork is something you need to figure out before you start writing, because after that point you’re going to find that trying to keep track of it all in the process of moving forward is going to be harder to do. You don’t build your ship as it’s on the water, that’s never going to work in your favor.

Once you get that all constructed, however, there are still some things you’re going to want to keep in mind. Even though the world itself might be everything you want it to be, making people see that world and giving it to them in a way they can process is still a tricky situation. Presentation is, in itself, part of how you make that world come to life for the people who don’t have the advantage of seeing it as clearly as you do. A lot of this comes down to simply writing well, but there are still some things which are unique to speculative fiction because of that challenge of building a world mostly from scratch. You have to find a way to feed them that world, a bit at a time, and make sure it produces exactly the effect you want.

How do you present your world to that audience? How do you make them see it the way you do without getting in your own way? That can take some practice… Continue reading World Building Pt. 3 – Presentation →