Category Archives: Sci-Fi

Miscellaneous, Sci-Fi, Writing

The Fermi Paradox And You – 1 – Filter Behind Us?

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The universe, it’s vast, old, and full of interesting shit. We constantly gaze into the heavens and look for things no human has ever seen before. But with each passing year, more and more people begin to question whether or not we’re alone in the universe. Early on in our development we were fairly certain this was the case. After all, we thought the stars were just pinholes in the heavens, windows to the realm beyond, or even lanterns hung to keep our nights from being total darkness. But as time went on we became aware that we were much smaller in the cosmos than we believed.

It was inevitable that we would start to picture aliens being everywhere, even on planets in our solar system. There are countless stories about Martians from before the time we realized it was a barren wasteland. Even after discovering it was a big ball of rusty dust, we’ve had people who still insist that the world is still populated or was populated until very recently. After all, this clearly looks like a face (before you see the higher resolution pictures that prove it was just a shoddy camera).

threefaces

But as that search for extra terrestrial life continues, people have started to become more and more concerned about the Fermi Paradox – the idea that we may be alone in the universe and that, somehow, someway, life that should be plentiful just simply isn’t. Combined with our natural obsession with the Apocalypse (which, you’ll recall, also had a lot to do with being unable to see beyond ourselves) and I’ve seen a lot of people declare the great filter is out there and it’s going to get us.

So… is it? I don’t think so. Continue reading The Fermi Paradox And You – 1 – Filter Behind Us? →

FICTION, Sci-Fi, Writing

World Building Pt. 2 – Bend Don’t Break

Building a world from scratch can be difficult. As I said the last time, you’ll find that each detail needs to be woven into the world and into other details as you evolve from the central point. But, while this is the natural course of events, one has to remember that there are still some restrictions to just how far you can go.

Some time back I wrote about the fact that everything needs to be rooted in the real world on some level. It’s not that you should be restrained from letting your imagination go wild. But as you let that imagination run wild, there will be details that are going to need to be there for the sake of just making it feel like something people can relate to. A truly abstract world is not one that anyone will be able to recognize, understand, or become attached to. They may analyze it, deciphering it a bit at a time, but as they do they will inevitably do so by comparing it to the real world. No matter what you do, someone will try to tie it to the world they know – and that’s not a bad thing, just a natural one.

So the question is really… how far can you go before it starts to become unreasonable? Continue reading World Building Pt. 2 – Bend Don’t Break →

Observations, Sci-Fi

The Female Ghostbusters – Competing With A Ghost

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Months ago there was an uproar on the internet as the nerd community started to lose its shit over the fact they were going to do an all female cast for the next Ghostbusters film. Frankly, it was embarrassing for all of us as we watched parts of our community lose their god damn minds. But, after a while, it started to subside and people returned to sanity where they just stopped giving a shit about what gender their Ghostbusters were. Unfortunately that peace was short lived and this picture came out to light a brand new fire under the ass of assholes.

Ghostbusters_1

About now some people are going to roll their eyes and assume that I have some sort of gender politics bullshit reason for seeing these people as assholes. But a lot of these people are failing to recognize the fundamental flaws in the very basic structure of their argument. Not only is casting it as a female group not going to ruin the franchise, it’s probably the only way this franchise was ever going to get off the ground again. A lot of people are crying and saying this is ruining their childhood and destroying the legacy of “Ghostbusters”. But you know what actually “ruined” Ghostbusters?

Ghostbusters_ii_poster

Yeah, that thing. And I’m going to be honest with you, Ghostbusters II shows us exactly why the cast has to be female. Continue reading The Female Ghostbusters – Competing With A Ghost →

Miscellaneous, Sci-Fi, Writing, WTF

Good Sci-Fantasy vs Apologetics

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By now it’s likely no secret that I like a little peanut butter in my chocolate or vice-versa. If you’ve followed the blog, I write about Science Fiction and Fantasy almost interchangeably at length and I’m pretty adamant that Clarke’s Law is true. For those who don’t know what that means, any science sufficiently advanced is virtually indistinguishable from magic. It sums things up pretty well for me because the world’s worked that way forever. When we couldn’t understand lightning bolts, we thought gods did it, and certainly there are things in the universe today that we don’t understand which are still being attributed to higher powers.

rushdie
I’ll never tire of pointing this out

The rule’s a simple reminder that any time you go really advanced with your crazy Sci-Fi tropes you’re practically skipping into the realm of Fantasy. But the same is true in the other direction, something I’ve always held near and dear to my heart. If you were to take something truly magical and then approached it with science in mind, there’s a lot of it that just happens to click really well. Hell, I wrote whole books and countless tweets about the concept.

So Sci-Fantasy is, to me, a natural genre. A lot of people out there believe that you can’t really blend these two and that you end up ruining both in the effort to avoid choosing either. But from where I stand, science is fantastic to begin with, it may explain everything, but those explanations are wonderful in so many ways we never could have imagined. Don’t get me wrong, I still love some robots, but I can definitely see the allure of wanting to make some of the things from legends of old into something tangible.

Just one thing… Continue reading Good Sci-Fantasy vs Apologetics →

Sci-Fi, Writing

World Building Pt. 1 – The Butterfly Effect

Writing an original work can be hard, especially in genres that present not just original characters and themes but entire worlds. Speculative fiction genres like fantasy, scifi, and even urban fantasy to a lesser extent, feature a great deal of legwork to make something feel believable. I recently wrote about how you would write the future in a realistic fashion, and about how you could introduce dragons into a non-magical world, but both of these are just fragments of a much larger concept that could use some attention.

There are many tutorials out there about how to write good characters and how to make situations feel more plausible, but very rarely do we go to the grand scale of building the entire world these characters would live in. This, in part, is because world building isn’t something you have to do in most genres – the world was already built for you. You don’t have to go to great lengths to build the world around a period piece taking place in the Victorian era. Instead, for those genres, you just have the one piece of advice: “research”.

But for us in the more fantastic genres, there’s a lot of work that we have to go through to make things really flow for our audience. Often we are using old tropes presented by our predecessors to try to assemble them like lego blocks to fill in that world. Sometimes, we may even go out of our way to create an alternative to the tropes we’ve already seen, but inevitably we will still fall into a well worn groove despite our efforts. After all, if you’re using parts of a world created before you and then writing a story that fits the human perspective, you’re going to have a high chance of hitting something that someone else has already done. This is a great deal of why so many fantasy and sci-fi stories read the same.

So how do you create something that feels “fresh” without having to completely reinvent the wheel? Solid world building. Continue reading World Building Pt. 1 – The Butterfly Effect →

Futurism, Observations, Sci-Fi

A.I. Ethics

A few years ago I wrote a post about the fact we were creating new life in the form of machines and that we needed to be careful about how we approach the idea of morality with them. We usually approach the subject in such simplistic forms, with 3 laws that somehow work “perfectly” or with the assumption the machines would either forever serve us or eventually destroy us. We never consider them as another potential lifeform, only as further technology which we will either control or destroy ourselves with.

It wasn’t a bad post, as far as my early posts go, and I think the point I made there is still perfectly valid. But with a new Terminator on the horizon, Age of Ultron being a hot topic last month, and Ex Machina receiving great reviews – the topic has been on my mind again. You see, each of these approaches the concept of Roboethics and Machine Ethics in different ways, but still come to the same general premise: it won’t go smoothly.

“The robots are coming and they’re going to take us out.”

We say it jokingly all the time, but on some level we really believe all of the media we’ve put out. We are, on some level, afraid of the machines we’re currently building. It’s easy to see that we’re going to have something that is stronger and smarter than us in the near future and that scares the crap out of us.

But should it…? Continue reading A.I. Ethics →

Sci-Fi, Writing

Writing Sci-fi: Safe Assumptions of Alien Life

When writing fantastic adventures through space, it’s inevitable in most cases that you’re going to have them step out of that ship and encounter something not of this world. They could find the ruins of an ancient civilization. They could find an unknown spacecraft not of any design they’ve ever seen. And, of course, they could just run into some…

aliens

Yes, aliens, they’re everywhere in space no matter what you may think about the Fermi Paradox. It’s inevitable that there’s something out there, somewhere, which is at least as advanced as we are. Sure, cosmic filters and all that are a possibility, but they’re a possibility born out of insecurity and assumption of facts without evidence. So don’t worry sci-fi writers, even if we haven’t made contact with anything yet we’re more than sure to make contact with something in the distant future.

But when you get around to making these alien lifeforms there tends to be a problem in how exactly we’re supposed to bring them to life. Sci-fi is full of tropes on just what exactly an alien creature is supposed to look like and almost all of them stem from something we’d find down here on Earth. More than one novel has described their aliens as being “insect-like”, quite a few rubber faces have been glued to actors over the years, and one time there was an Outer Limits where the advanced alien intelligence was a talking Raptor.

raptor

There’s just one problem: science says that anything that evolved on an alien world has likely taken a dramatically different turn than anything we’ve seen before. So what exactly should we expect those aliens to look like? How do you go about creating something that isn’t supposed to be like anything you’ve seen before? Well, at that point you’re going to have to make some assumptions… Continue reading Writing Sci-fi: Safe Assumptions of Alien Life →

Futurism, Observations, Sci-Fi

Humanoid Mecha – Silly Or Practical?

Over the last couple of months, as Marvel’s next big movie geared up its hype train, one moment caught my attention more than any other. You see, I am a comic fan, but most specifically I am an Iron Man fan and have been collecting his titles for… 20 years.

Wow, I feel really old all of a sudden!

But that meant I’ve followed the Iron Man movies really closely in hope of seeing a lot of my favorite details brought to life in a new medium. And, frankly, one I’ve been waiting for since the Avengers itself was announced all those years ago was the Hulkbuster.

hulkbuster

Look at that thing! It’s beautiful! Several tons of Hulk-punching ceramic and metal. First seen in the 90s as one of the modular upgrades to the modular armor most famous for being in a cartoon and multiple Capcom fighting games, the Hulkbuster was the first real effort by Iron Man to create a countermeasure for any of his friends being brainwashed, converted, or having their powers stolen. Many other “busters” followed, but the Hulkbuster was the first, the best, and probably the one that gives me the most joy. Because not only am I an Iron Man fan, I’m a Mecha fan to boot.

Hulkbuster_(Modular_Addon)
Yes, I’m a nerd. No, I don’t care.

But there’s one question that always comes up, even among Mecha fans, that you don’t often hear a reasonable response to: Are humanoid mecha practical? Well… Continue reading Humanoid Mecha – Silly Or Practical? →

Futurism, Sci-Fi, Writing

Writing the Future

Good sci-fi is often a metaphor for something in our lives. Star Trek was dealing with a future where we came out of the other side of the civil rights movement and the cold war intact and better for it. George Orwell made a police state so convincing that the modern day governments apparently took it as a how-to manual. Philip K Dick often wrote about worlds where people were often convicted before they had done any wrong and where your identity was up for question – after one hell of a drug problem left a mark on him (seriously, A Scanner Darkly was based on his drug trips).

But writing good sci-fi isn’t just about having a metaphor in mind. There’s often a lot of great work that is based simply on an idea with great characters. Conversely, there’s a lot of stuff with a philosophy behind it that falls short of the mark because the actual sci-fi portion of it is so poorly handled. It’s the ones that find a balance between the fantastic and the relatable that endure for years to come.

This is particularly noticeable in writing the future or near future. When writing about something that’s rooted more in theoretical science it’s easy for that work to shift to just simple fantasy over time. The first true “Science Fiction” Novel ever was Frankenstein, but the casual observer today would sit it in the same category as Dracula and other fantasy stories. But when something is working on an idea of the future and sticking to the mundane, it becomes a lot harder to find a place for it. We couldn’t very well call some ideas we had in the past “fantasy”, but it’s hard to ignore how outrageous it now seems in hindsight.

learning machine

So how do you walk that line? How do you make your portrait of the future something that can withstand that test of time? Continue reading Writing the Future →

Observations, Sci-Fi, Writing

The Role of the Fan

Recently, I said that continuity has often been misused by the fans of various “geek” genres as a means of trying to control what happen within that community. You can’t change characters’ lives because continuity won’t allow it. You can’t introduce new characters who don’t specifically jive with the continuity. You can’t be a real fan unless you know all of the continuity.

It’s easy to see why our somewhat open community is so easily stigmatized as being this place full of bigots and close minded jerks. There’s controversies left and right over things that shouldn’t be very controversial. So Ultimate Comics Spider-man is a black latino kid… and…? It’s not like this fundamentally ruins the idea of a guy who crawls on walls and swings on webs. In fact, if anything, the biggest problem with Miles Morales isn’t the color of his skin but the fact he has a super power that makes him too strong.

venom blast
He just has to touch them!

And making Catwoman bisexual? How exactly does that ruin anything about Catwoman? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but her underlying character trait was she doesn’t care about the societal norms around her to the point she dresses up like a cat so she can steal other people’s shit. Looking at that, being a bisexual is actually one of the most normal things she’s ever done since the character was created.

But here’s the thing… most of the angry fans know that. Most of them aren’t even that concerned with identity politics. Sure, there are very vocal outliers who are there simply to spew hate. But you know what really gets under the skin of the average comic book, scifi, or fantasy fan?

You changed it, you changed their thing, and you didn’t even ask them permission (as if you needed it)… Continue reading The Role of the Fan →