Author: Samuel Johnston

Professional software developer, unprofessional writer, and generally interested in almost everything.

Four Things I Learned From The Uplift War

A little while back I finished reading David Brin’s first Uplift Trilogy with my kids. It was an interesting experience for a few reasons:

  1. It was published in 1987, which is a period that (to me, at least) doesn’t feel old enough to qualify as “classic” sci-fi, but is certainly old enough to see how the genre has changed and compare to more modern stuff.
  2. I originally read it when I was in my early teens, possibly before I even had an inkling that I wanted to be a writer. Now I’m a middle-aged dad writing my own sci-fi. It gives me a very different perspective.
  3. I read it out loud. This is something I pretty much never did before I had kids, but now I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. Reading aloud is slower, and different in ways that are a little difficult to quantify.

1. Life Goes On

The Uplift Trilogy encompasses three stories that take place in the same universe, but are only very loosely related. Interestingly, The Uplift War doesn’t even resolve the loose plot that ties the last two books together: the scout ship Streaker fleeing from alien armadas with secret information that may upend the galaxy-spanning pseudo-religion.

Each story in the series is wrapped up by the end of the book, but the backdrop is a galaxy in flux, and the larger picture is left unresolved. Startide Rising follows Streaker as it crash-lands on an inhospitable planet, and the crew fights mutiny and the threat of the aliens giving chase. They escape, but they’re still on the run.

The Uplift War is about the invasion of Garth, a small and battered Earthling colony world, invaded by one of Earth’s most dangerous enemies. By the end, the invasion is foiled and the Earth gains some new allies, but the outcome of the war is far from certain.

For some readers, I have no doubt that this lack of resolution on a grand scale would be frustrating (especially before Brin wrote a second trilogy in the same universe). For me, it makes the setting feel more grounded, more real. The story of this particular place and time may have a beginning and an ending, but the galaxy keeps on turning. Just like in real life, there are always loose threads and uncertainties.

2. Don’t Use Difficult-to-Pronounce Names

Okay, this might be a little petty, and it was admittedly influenced by the fact that I was reading out loud.

Here are some character names from the book: Uthacalthing, Athaclena, Mathicluanna, Prathachulthorn. Oh, and also Robert, Megan and Benjamin. Can you guess which ones are aliens and which ones are Earthlings? Well, you’re probably right about everyone except for Major Prachachulthorn, the most shallow and under-utilized villain of the series, and decidedly human.

Oddly, I am perfectly willing to deal with names that are difficult to pronounce when they come from a real culture and are just unfamiliar. And I have little doubt that if we ever make contact with real aliens, they’ll have impossible-to-pronounce names, if they have names at all. But made-up alien names composed entirely of X’s, Z’s and punctuation are deeply irritating to me. I’d much rather sacrifice a tiny bit of verisimilitude for a heaping helping of readability.

On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that it’s an effective and easy aid to the reader to make all your important character names very different, especially in books with huge casts of characters like these. These unpronounceable names are pretty good in that regard. You’re not likely to confuse Uthacalthing with Prathachulthorn. Or Benjamin.

3. Appendices Suck

Okay, The Uplift War doesn’t actually have appendices. It has a glossary and cast of characters and two different maps. I’m talking about pretty much everything that takes up pages before or after the story itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love maps. Maps can be art. I play TTRPGs, and let me tell you, you’re going to see some maps when you play those games. In fact, I think maps are much more suited to something like that. The maps in The Uplift War aren’t art. They’re bare-bones representations whose purpose is clearly just to show you the basic lay of the land.

The glossary and cast of characters read like reference material. Because they are.

All of these things solve the same problem: what if the reader gets confused? The answer to that question should be fixing the story so that they don’t get confused. If the reader can’t remember which character is which, that means you have too many characters or they aren’t interesting enough to remember. If the reader is confused about the lay of the land, it means you haven’t described it very well. And if the reader doesn’t understand how to conjugate verbs in elvish…well, then your name is probably J.R.R. Tolkien and you should have just written a separate linguistics study for your made-up languages.

World-building should happen in the story, not in appendices.

4. Don’t Write Sexy Alien Girls

This trope was worn out before Captain Kirk started seducing every green-skinned babe in the galaxy. It feels like adolescent wish-fulfillment. Which is fine, I guess, if that’s what you’re going for. But it’s out of place in otherwise serious sci-fi.

If your hunky main character absolutely has to fall in love with a hot alien, at least have the good sense to make them a sentient cloud of nuclear plasma or fire-breathing kaiju.

Reblog: On “Prose-Forward” Writing and the Pleasures of Different Genre Conversations — Lincoln Michael

Good Lord, Lincoln Michael is a treasure. He lives with one foot in genre fiction and one foot in literary fiction, and he’s erudite enough to use that vantage point to illuminate the literary landscape.

Every time I read one of his Substack articles, I come away with five tabs open for further reading, and a whole new vocabulary to describe topics that I had vague ideas about, and which he has described with exacting precision.

In this post, Michael suggests that the common discussion of “invisible vs. visible” prose is shallow, and Max Gladstone’s tension between “textured and aerodynamic” prose adds to the conversation. He follows that up with a discussion of yet more theoretical axes for comparing fiction: plot-forward and prose-forward.

As an author who is published about equally in the SFF ecosystem and literary fiction ecosystem, this is a topic I think about a lot. It’s very easy to say “all these labels are false and mean nothing!” And obviously as someone who writes both SFF and “literary fiction” I think the binary is bullshit, the snobs on both sides are annoying, and all of these terms are fluid, overlapping, and spectrums. Etc. At the same time, questions of what gets called literary and what is embraced or rejected by SFF readers is a practical concern. Saying “it’s all bullshit” or “it’s all just marketing” doesn’t change the hard reality of where your work gets published, whether you have shots at awards, and how readers will find or fail to find your work.

…

I often hear SFF people ask why some speculative writers are embraced by the literary world and others aren’t. I think “prose-forward” is much of the answer. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that “prose-forward” writing is the defining quality of what is called “literary” in general. (Note that in my view authors can be simultaneously literary and genre. This is a Venn diagram, not a binary.)

Prose-forward doesn’t mean a specific style but rather that the prose itself is an integral part of the work. The texture of it, to use Gladstone’s metaphor. That texture might be dense and lush like Southern Gothic or gritty and minimalist like dirty realism or a million other things. But the literary world places great focus on the texture of sentences, whatever that texture might be.

I’m a big fan of anyone who can get past the supposed binaries that people love to define for these kinds of topics, and Michael is great at sussing out those details and making me want to dig deeper.

Check out the rest of the article at Counter Craft…

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 28

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

Remember When This Book Had No Dialogue?

Having just written yet another chapter that is almost entirely characters walking and talking, it’s hard to believe that this book started with a single character, completely alone in the wilderness. For the entirety of Act I, Christopher had nobody to talk to. God-Speaker had his tribe, but even in those early chapters they didn’t have much to say to each other, and I purposely limited their vocabulary and the ways they communicated.

In Act II, that began to change. Christopher was slowly introduced to more people: Amaranth, then the exiles, and finally the people of Razor Mountain itself. God-Speaker built up a society around himself, becoming more sophisticated and social.

Now, in Act III, I’m finding that every chapter is stuffed full of dialogue by necessity. Dialogue is a fantastic tool for rolling out exposition in a natural and interesting way. I need to resolve all the mysteries that were set up along the way, and that means getting a lot of information across. Dialogue is great for that.

The potential downside of all that dialogue is the way it slows the pacing. Dialogue naturally tends to slow a story down, because it feels like it’s happening more-or-less in real time. An entire chapter of dialogue can span only a few minutes of time within the story. Narrative description, even when it’s flowery, can often pack more time and more events into fewer words.

I’m trying to keep the dialogue tight to counter this slowing effect, but I’m sure I’ll come back later and find more that I could have done. For me, dialogue is one of the hardest things to edit, because changing something early in a conversation can cause cascading changes throughout the rest of the conversation, like redirecting the flow of a river.

Parsing Feedback

Feedback for this book has been a strange beast. I get some real-world feedback before I publish a chapter, then it goes out onto the blog, Wattpad and Tapas, where it (sometimes) gets more feedback, mostly in the form of comments. And sometimes I’ll get comments on chapters that I wrote months ago, as new people find the story. This process, with a publicly available serial story is a very different experience from writing the whole book and then getting feedback from a curated group of people.

That said, I’ve been getting great (that is, useful) feedback on the last couple chapters. Hopefully that means readers are engaged and excited about the direction the story is going. It’s really helpful to see what questions readers have and what they’re wondering about at this stage.

As mysteries start to resolve and questions get answered, I think readers naturally become more and more aware of the questions that haven’t been answered yet. Getting feedback on what readers are wondering about is really useful here, because it can tell me whether I’ve really answered some questions as well as I think I have. It also tells me what I should emphasize in upcoming chapters.

So, if you’re reading and you have feedback, please drop me a comment! It’ll only make the story better.

Next Time

Chapter 28 turned out to be a long one—so  long that I broke it in half. In Chapter 29, Cain and Christopher will confront the cabinet, and more will be revealed about what happened in the years while God-Speaker was gone from Razor Mountain.

Razor Mountain — Chapter 28.3

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

They walked to a less populous, more industrial-looking neighborhood at the edge of the main cavern. Christopher felt a sense of familiarity, even more so as Cain led him to a door and unlocked it. Once again, they were back in the maze of dull hallways.

“We might still be able to turn your unexpected arrival to our advantage. If it surprised me, then the others are even more in the dark.”

“There’s just one big problem,” Christopher said. “I hardly remember anything, and what I do remember is a disconnected jumble.”

“Well,” Cain said, “we could wait for you to recover more of your memories, but everyone has their spies. They’ll all find out eventually. If we give you more time, we give them more time.”

“Including the killer, if they’re still around,” Christopher said. “How many of the original secretaries are still working?”

“Most of them,” Cain said. “Everyone has just gotten older. The Secretary of Justice was replaced. The Secretary of Education died of cancer ten years back. Her deputy took over as well. That’s been the way that succession has been handled. But her deputy wasn’t as interested in the role once she found out more of the details of the job, so we had to pull the next in the hierarchy. There’s too much distrust in the group for any kind of election process.”

“If we reveal…me…what was your plan?”

Cain stopped walking and looked at his watch.

“There’s a cabinet meeting scheduled for today, about thirty minutes from now.”

“I just sit down with them and tell them I’m God-Speaker?” Christopher said.

“Something like that. I can do as much of the talking as you’d like.”

“And then all hell will break loose?”

“Undoubtedly. Some of them might be willing to believe, especially if you can offer them some proof. Others will be skeptical. If the person who killed you is in that room, they’re going to be extremely worried.”

“It’ll paint a target on my back,” Christopher said.

“You’ve already got a target on your back,” Cain replied. “This way we’ll know to watch out, and everyone else will be watching too. If we wait, we won’t know when or if they know about you. They’ll still have an opportunity for a cover-up. If we reveal you to everyone, then you can hunker down and wait for your memories to return. The traitor will know that they have very little time. They’ll either slip up, or be forced to flee.”

“So I’m the bait,” Christopher said.

“You are the bait.”

“I’m not entirely excited about this plan,” Christopher said.

Cain nodded. “Do not misunderstand. I am only making a suggestion. The moment you opened your eyes in that room, you became my leader again. You are God-Speaker. Whatever you want to do, we will do. I’ve spent half of my life trying to bring you back, and I didn’t do it to order you around.”

Christopher sighed.

“No. I’m practically a stranger here now. You’re the one who has been in the middle of this for years. If you really brought me back here, then I think it’s only right that we continue to follow your plan.”

“You say that like this is all carefully thought-out,” Cain said. “The truth is that I’m improvising.”

Christopher felt a twist of fear in his stomach, but also excitement. It would be dangerous, maybe deadly.

“Then let’s improvise together,” Christopher said.

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 28.2

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

The walk back up from the depths was slower. Christopher felt shaky and a little weak, like he had been running laps for too long. They took the elevator back up into the utility hallways, where every corridor looked more or less the same. Christopher recognized it, or at least pieces, in a way he hadn’t before. This was familiar. This was home.

Cain led him out into the city. They stuck to the side streets. There were people going about their business here and there. Christopher felt like someone who had moved away from the town where they were born and raised and returned for a visit many years later. Most of the familiar landmarks were in their expected places. In fact, very little had changed. He found himself studying the faces of the people they passed, looking for any that he recognized. An older woman stood out to him, but he couldn’t place her or summon her name from his jumbled memories.

Their journey was accompanied by a faint murmuring, and Christopher eventually realized it wasn’t the voices in his head. It was Cain talking to himself. He seemed to be having a mumbling internal debate.

“You seem uneasy,” Christopher said. He wondered at the choice of words. Would he have said it the same way before his visit to the chamber below the cavern? Was he speaking, or was it God-Speaker? Was there a difference?

“I had so many plans,” Cain said. “Years upon years of plans, and none of them worked out. Then you fell out of the sky, quite literally, by the stories I’m told.”

“This wasn’t part of the plan?” Christopher asked.

“Not exactly. All at once, everything is falling into place. I wasn’t prepared, but we just have to make the best of it.”

“And how do we do that?” Christopher asked.

“Exactly what I was trying to figure out,” Cain said.

“What’s the situation?” Christopher asked.

Cain looked up, his distracted gaze refocusing, as though seeing Christopher for the first time.

“Of course. I’m sorry if I overstep my bounds. It’s just that you’ve been gone so long. We’ve had to make do.”

Christopher laughed. “Assume I know nothing about what’s going on. Overstep away. I’m not even sure I know who I am yet.”

“There’s something very important,” Cain said. “Do you remember what happened to you, before…”

A flash of memories assaulted Christopher. Pain and blood. The dark office. Falling. Scrambling. A looming shape and a glint of light on the edge of a knife. The memories did not form a neat sequence. They tumbled out in a disordered mess, like some cartoon closet overflowing with forgotten things.

“I was stabbed,” he said. “It was unexpected.”

“Yes,” Cain said. “We found your body. Your former body. Do you know who did it?”

Christopher tried to piece the memories together. He had known the person in the moment, but the memory was focused on other, more immediate concerns. He shook his head.

“No. Someone I knew. Someone I trusted.”

“Do you remember a face? A name? Anything?”

Christopher could sense long pent-up frustration behind Cain’s words. He shook his head.

“It’s all a blur. I remember the pain and the knife. I don’t know whose hand held it.”

Cain sighed. “This is the mystery that has haunted me these long decades while you were gone.”

“There were no clues?” Christopher asked. “I…it was a meeting with someone.”

“You had many meetings, every day,” Cain said. “But who you were meeting with was not common knowledge. You had a tendency to keep things secret, unless others really needed to know.”

That word, “secret,” reverberated within Christopher. It was deep in his core, the desire to hide things, the inability to trust, the unwillingness to let his guard down, or show any weakness. For all the good it had done him.

“I think you’ve probably barely begun to understand the secrets I’ve kept,” Christopher said.

Cain smiled.

“These things happen over a few thousand years.”

“There were no clues left behind?” Christopher asked.

Cain sighed. “Precious few. There are surveillance systems throughout the city, but not in your office or home, or the immediate surroundings. At least none that we were able to find. Nobody knew who you might have met with, or nobody was willing to say.”

“What about the office itself?”

“There was plenty of blood,” Cain said. “Two or three smeared footprints that yielded no matches. No murder weapon ever found.”

“So whoever killed me was never caught?”

“Things got messy fast, once you were found,” Cain said. “The cabinet met, and accusations were thrown around. There’s no hierarchy among us, and nobody trusted anyone. The investigation was difficult because of it. There was a sort of trial held, but you can imagine how well that goes when everyone is simultaneously prosecutor and possible suspect. In the end, we held a vote. The Secretary of Justice was imprisoned.”

“You don’t think he did it?” Christopher asked. He couldn’t call up a memory of the Secretary of Justice.

“She,” Cain said. “There was some circumstantial evidence, but nothing concrete. Nothing that would have held up in an actual court. It wasn’t a trial, more like a desperate attempt to put the thing behind us and try to keep the place running.”

“Who do you think did it?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t know. There wasn’t enough evidence to say. I abstained from that vote.”

“What happened after that?”

Cain shrugged. “Some of the others pretended that it was resolved. Myself and one or two others quietly decided to keep looking into it. The Deputy Secretary of Justice was promoted to the council.”

“No more murders?” Christopher asked.

“Not among us. Murder isn’t unheard-of in Razor Mountain, but it’s rare. There’s been nothing that seemed related.”

“I would have assumed this person was trying to consolidate power,” Christopher said. “Maybe it was really just a grudge.”

“Maybe,” Cain said. “Maybe they were after power, but they knew that another killing would completely upend the system. Putting the Secretary of Justice away at least had some semblance of a resolution to the whole bloody ordeal.”

“Was there some attempted coup then?” Christopher asked.

“Nothing so obvious,” Cain replied. “Just years of endless jockeying for power. Arguments over little slivers of administrative control that fall somewhere between our individual domains.”

Christopher shook his head. “Of course, I never bothered to think about what might happen if I were gone.”

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Razor Mountain — Chapter 28.1

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher lay on the floor, groaning.

“What did you do to me?”

Cain still stood in the doorway of the room, as though he were blocked by an invisible wall.

“What does it feel like?”

Christopher rolled onto his back and struggled to push himself to the edge of the room, eventually coming to rest with his back against the curved wall. There was a deep thrumming behind it, an endless note played below the range of human hearing.

“It feels…crowded,” Christopher said, squeezing his eyes closed, hands pressed against his temples.

He lay with the wall inches from his face, a matte gray, not-quite-metallic texture with strange shapes etched into the surface. But it was distant and unreal, like an image on a screen. Christopher felt lost inside his own head, a misty void filled with half-formed shapes. They milled around aimlessly, whispering. They were lonely, desperate for someone to listen to them, but Christopher also sensed a frustrated haughtiness; a royal irritation. They needed him, and they hated him for it.

It was possible to ignore the voices only because there were so many of them. If he concentrated, he might be able to pick out coherent ideas, but when they all washed over him it was just noise. That noise was a carrier signal, and he could follow it back to its source.

It was above, in the darkness and the weird, eye-rending purple light. Or perhaps it was in the walls, or the mysterious throb of hidden machinery beneath his feet. Despite his difficulty tracking its physical location, he was sure that it was buried with him under the mountain. Mentally, he had no trouble following that thread back to its origin. It was a vessel and a prison. It had brought the voices here, saving them from one disaster, only to deposit them into a new one. The voices had brought their tools with them, but they were unable to use them.

Christopher found himself laying on the floor in the fetal position. Cain squatted in the entrance to the room, watching him with some sort of pent-up emotion that Christopher couldn’t read. The scene barely registered.

Christopher found a place of memories. With a jolt, he recognized them as his own. They were past lives, a long, unbroken sequence back through time. He could see they were there, but he couldn’t fully process them. They went back so far that the world, the people, became almost unrecognizable.

When he reached the end of this human lineage, it didn’t stop. Shrinking back in horror, he saw another sequence of lives. The voices. They went back much farther, in endless generations before humanity; before any life on Earth was more complex than sludge in a fetid tide pool. They had experienced so much, and knew things far beyond human understanding.

He reeled away from those ancient, foreign memories, but the sequence of human memories called to him. He felt his connection to them. They wrapped around him like a warm blanket that threatened to suffocate. He could see flashes of the past, moments of memory, but they were jumbled and confused.

Instinctively, he found a balance between this new internal world and the external world he had lived in before entering this room. He couldn’t tell if it was something he had discovered or something remembered. In any case, he sat up, his head no longer spinning. He took a deep breath.

“I think I understand,” he said.

“Do you remember?” Cain asked. Christopher could sense the excitement under the calm facade.

“Some things,” Christopher said. “This place…jostled everything loose. I remember your face. I remember you, but younger. I know bits and pieces. I think it will take a while for everything to come back.”

“Do you remember who you are?” Cain asked.

“Tutanarulax Qatqa,” he said, his tongue stumbling over the strange words. “I’m God-Speaker.”

Cain nodded.

“But I’m still Christopher. It’s…not comfortable.”

“You never told me what it was like,” Cain said, “so there’s not much I can do to guide you.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Christopher said. “I hardly told anyone anything. This is so odd. It’s like seeing different viewpoints out of each eye.”

“Do you need some time?”

“I’m fine,” Christopher said, standing. “I mean, I can stand up again without falling over. I can tell what’s real and what’s not. Mostly. But it’s going to take a while to integrate. Days, maybe weeks. It’s never happened like this before.”

They stood together in silence for a moment.

“That last jump did not go well,” Christopher said.

“Yes, I know,” Cain replied.

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The Internet Archive Lawsuit

For those who aren’t aware, there is a lawsuit brought by four book publishers against the Internet Archive over their “National Emergency Library” initiative, which ran for about 3 months in 2020. During that time, the IA allowed unlimited lending of the books they had digitized. The updated program, which is still in effect, allows one person at a time to “check out” books, copies of which are supposed to be held in reserve by partner libraries.

The initial judgement was handed down recently, and it was not in favor of the IA. The judge ruled that the programs did not fall under fair use protections, and the IA would need permission from publishers to make such programs legal.

People Have Opinions About This

Author Chuck Wendig wrote a post about it—apparently he got hit by one of those social media firestorms that just keeps flaring up periodically—and says that he opposes the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Nathan Bransford (author, former agent and current freelance editor) fully supports the lawsuit, and links a Twitter thread by Nate Hoffelder explaining why the IA’s programs are bad for authors.

There are a couple reasons each camp has to support the publishers or the Internet Archive. The supporters remind us that at the beginning of the pandemic, many library systems shut down their physical buildings, and the “National Emergency Library” program was only active for a few months to help people who otherwise would have gone to those libraries. The current program is designed to limit the copies lent out in a way similar to existing libraries, so it’s less problematic. And, of course, the handful of very extreme “all-information-must-be-free” people are shouting the things they always shout, namely that most copyright and intellectual property law is bad for the human race and should be abolished.

In the opposite corner, the arguments are almost exclusively for authors’ rights. The IA ran a program that did nothing to compensate the authors of the books lent out, and was therefore pure enablement of piracy. Even the more restrictive program, while supposedly reserving library copies for each copy lent out, doesn’t have stringent controls and isn’t working with the publishers. (It’s worth noting that libraries do pay for books, and authors get a cut of that. There are systems for this that have been worked out over the years and strike a pretty good balance between compensating creators and making books available to a lot more people.)

Of Course, There Are Caveats

I do not see many people arguing in favor of the big publishers, which is telling. The truth is that authors and consumers both often feel like they’re being abused by the remaining handful of publishing conglomerates. Nobody is all that excited to go to bat for them, aside from the paid lawyers. But publishers are often the ones who end up fighting battles that benefit authors, for the simple reason that authors mostly get paid when publishers get paid.

Finally, the library systems of today have some pretty big flaws. While the advent of e-books has made it possible to borrow from libraries without getting off the couch, publishers also took the opportunity to make e-book lending far more advantageous to themselves, requiring additional payments after an amount of time or number of borrows. Plus, you have Amazon controlling a huge swath of e-books and outright refusing to lend, smaller presses being much harder to find at your local library, and a ton of people in the rural US (and certainly throughout the world) that do not have local library systems available to them.

My Thoughts

I’m somewhat inclined to forgive the IA for the brief run of the “National Emergency Library.” The beginning of the pandemic was a bad time, and nobody really knew how it was going to go. However, I have to acknowledge that I come at this argument from a place of privilege. I worried about a lot of things during the height of the pandemic, but I had a steady job.

The vast majority of authors don’t make enough money from their writing to live above the poverty line. That means they mostly aren’t wealthy and have to rely on other income streams, like spouses or other jobs. It also means that many authors work hard and struggle to eke every dime out of their work. Authors went through the pandemic just like readers, but the IA’s arguments don’t seem to worry about how authors might have been affected by the uncompensated lending of their work.

In terms of actual law, it seems pretty likely that the IA will lose their appeals. To win, they would need to carve out some new territory under fair use, and this doesn’t seem like the kind of judicial climate (especially if it gets to the Supreme Court level) where that is likely to happen. I like a lot of other things the IA does, and I hope this doesn’t hurt them too badly.

While I feel strongly for fellow authors, I don’t have much sympathy for the big publishers. They’ve made e-book lending worse than it could be, in misguided attempts to crank up profits. This would be a great opportunity to reevaluate and improve the relationships between publishers and libraries.

E-book lending theoretically solves a lot of the problems of locality that physical libraries have. It would be great if libraries had a little more legal authority to force reasonable deals with publishers for lending (and maybe even prevent companies like Amazon from locking out lenders altogether).

If we’ve learned anything from the digitization of movies and music, it’s that you can’t eradicate piracy. From Napster to Kazaa to BitTorrent, fighting pirates is like playing whack-a-mole. Some people are determined not to pay, and digital goods are just too easy to copy. The way to fight back is to make your legally-sold digital product as cheap, easy-to-use, and high-quality as possible.

Reblog: The Grand (Chaotic) Master Plan — Daniel Gomez

This week’s reblog comes from StarNinja (a.k.a. Daniel Gomez), who discusses the problems with villains who craft master plans so perfect and unpredictable that everything the protagonists do plays right into their hands.

So there’s this thing that happened a couple years back where every movie villain had to be a meticulous, devilishly detailed, timed to the very millisecond, chaos magician master planner. If the good guys where competent and intelligent, the villain was even more so, disguising their super duperly complex schemes as “random chaos” that no one can predict because there’s no way to plan for this kind of madness!

What’s hard to portray in fiction is when a villain has to improvise. When something comes up the villain didn’t plan for, either thanks to the hero’s meddling or because of a cool twist thanks to outside actors, as a writer, your options are “villain improvises” or “it was part of the plan the whole time!”. Consider the “getting caught on purpose” trope we see a lot these days. If the heroes capture the villain in the 1st Act, it can’t be because the villain fucked up. No, they wanted to get captured from the start. Because if there’s chaos, it must be planned…?

I really do like the idea of throwing out the “master plan” trope, or at least having the master plan not always work out. It’s common writing advice to mess up your protagonist’s plans and force them to adapt. Why would it be any different with villains? Surely a villain who can adapt and overcome problems is even scarier?

Read the full post over at The Wormhole Less Traveled…

Invisible Cities — Settings In Search of Story

I have an imaginary city, and I don’t know what to do with it.

I’ve been building it, on and off, for years. It’s a setting without a compelling story attached. I’ve considered using it for a TTRPG campaign. I used it as the backdrop for a not-very-interesting NaNoWriMo attempt. I’ve thought about giving up on it and putting it on the shelf forever, but I don’t really want to. So I’ve been on the lookout for ideas; interesting ways to use a city like this in my fiction.

The best examples of cities in fiction still place the city secondary to the characters and plot: Ambergris, New Crobuzon, Ankh-Morpork—they are all intricately crafted cities, but they’re still backdrops to the real action. Ambergris is probably closest to the city as a character, and Vandermeer even includes a fairly dry history of the city in the original book. But the city is mixed up with a much larger milieu of interconnected characters, events and ideas (including the author himself) that that loop around each other in a kind of metatextual Ouroboros.

I picked up Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities because I hoped it would be a guide. It is a book about many imaginary cities, as described by the explorer Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Kahn. I hoped that it would show me some interesting new ways I might use my own city.

An Endless Road Trip

I hoped that a book about imaginary cities would be unabashedly focused on setting, but it really isn’t.

With the exception of occasional short dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn, every page describes a city. And yet, I couldn’t name for you any individual city, or tell you what’s interesting about it. Despite being a short book, it feels like an endless montage of places without any meaning or context.

The descriptions of the cities are well-written, and many of the cities are interesting. They are described not just in architecture, but in the culture of the people who live there, and sometimes even more vaguely, as the “character” of the city, the way it feels, without any explanation as to why.

There’s a city on stilts. A city dominated by a huge aquarium, where the people perform auguries by the movements of the fish. A city where the inhabitants pick up and move to an entirely new place periodically, leaving a series of municipal corpses in their wake.

Fifty-five cities come and go in this way. It’s a road trip with no stops, passing through city after city with only a brief observation, and then forgetting about it as soon as it’s in the rear-view mirror. It feels a bit like traveling a great distance, but not experiencing any of it.

No Resolution

Ultimately, I didn’t finish the book. I found myself less and less inclined to read it, and it sat on my desk for weeks.

I got to the end by skipping over at least a dozen cities. I skimmed the descriptions, hoping that some sort of connective tissue would become apparent—something that would tie these disparate places and ideas together. Finally, I just read the remaining dialogues between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn. Maybe they would discover some deeper meaning in this endless stream of cities.

Unfortunately, they did not. Even at the end, the dialogue between the explorer and the king didn’t come together in a satisfying way. There was no resolution, because there was no tension. I was given no questions to ask, so there were no answers I cared about. No last-minute revelation to salvage the thing.

In reading the glowing reviews of Invisible Cities, there is a lot of talk about the mingling of prose and poetry. I can’t help but feel that this book falls into the category of literary fiction that I find insufferable: fiction where the mechanics matter more than the content. It is a book full of beautiful writing, and many inventive descriptions of imaginary cities and cultures, and I can’t bring myself to give a shit about any of it. The characters have no depth, the plot is barely existent, and I find nothing to relate to on a personal level.

Setting is Not Enough

Invisible Cities was not the guidebook I was looking for. It didn’t give me any magic formula to craft fiction focused on setting. If anything, it reenforced my belief that a setting by itself—no matter how intricate and deep—is not enough to be interesting.

Razor Mountain Development Journal — Chapter 27

This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.

You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.

The Ol’ Switcheroo

This is it. The big reveal. The timelines have converged.

When I was working on the outline, I knew that I needed to show some of God-Speaker and Razor Mountain’s long history in the middle section of the book, but it quickly became apparent that I would have to limit the number of chapters dedicated to that history to not bog the whole thing down. However, I decided that I needed at least two chapters for this final part with Cain and Reed.

Firstly, I needed some time and words to build up these characters because of the pivotal role they play going into the last act. It also gave me the chance to set up a little twist. I placed Cain as the blatant bad guy, an echo of Strong-Shield, who had betrayed God-Speaker ten chapters earlier. I like to think I was a little more subtle in positioning Reed as a good guy, because he has God-Speaker’s implicit trust. That leads into the “small” twist when their roles turn out to be reversed.

The bigger twist is the nature of the connection between God-Speaker and Christopher. Admittedly, the structure of the book, following their two points of view, makes it pretty likely that there’s a connection there, but depending on how good of a guesser the reader is, it’s not clear what that connection is, or when it’ll be revealed. My hope, in layering the small twist and the big twist, is that the whole thing will be more impactful and feel like a bigger revelation. This, for me, is the most exciting part of the book so far.

This was a fun chapter to write, because it feels like I’ve been keeping a secret for a long time, and I no longer have to worry about accidentally giving it away. I’ve been perpetually worried that I’ll reveal something by accident. (I’ve accidentally swapped Christopher and God-Speaker’s names a few times, but as far as I know, I caught all of these slip-ups before posting. It still made me nervous that I’d miss one.

Beginning the End

This chapter is an inflection point: the end of Act II and the start of Act III. So the first thing it had to do was wrap up the middle of the book with an exciting reveal. But its other job is to usher in the final chapters by getting the reader interested in what is about to happen.

It provides some new questions to ask. How did Cain know about Christopher, and how exactly are Christopher and God-Speaker connected? What has happened between the cabinet members in the time since God-Speaker died, and is Reed still around? What exactly is Christopher going to do about all this?

That last question is a big one, because for most of the book Christopher has struggled to have some agency in what happens to him. A lot of shit happens to him—he’s a pinball in the first two acts. And while he makes decisions, it’s a little hard to tell how much those decisions are helping or hurting him.

My hope is that the reader is willing to accept that, for a while. But not forever. The protagonist has to have some control over what happens to him for the story to feel meaningful. The connection between God-Speaker and Christopher hints that he will have that chance in Act III.

Next Time

Having spent most of the book setting up mysteries, I’m thrilled to pretty much continuously reveal the answers for the remainder of the book. If writing Act II was like biking up hill, hopefully writing Act III will be more like coasting back down toward the big crash at the end.

See you in Chapter 28.