Curtail Your God-Envy

You may not believe in God and I'm not going to try to dissuade you, but you realize that others believe in God. Christian dogma characterizes deity with three omni-words: Omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. Deity can do anything; deity is everywhere; deity knows everything.

When I was a tender lad I would daydream about these omnis and of them I figured omniscient was the best. If you know everything, you can compensate for not having the others. (I think humans commonly fantasize about deity and all religious conflict is between competing fantasies.)

There's a problem with omniscience I did not recognize as a youth: My brain ain't big enough.

When you're a tender lad and everything's new you think your mind is Limitless (great movie by the way). After you acquire a few college degrees you realize the old noggin can't hold everything. So, despite my God-envy, I just don't have the hardware capacity for the job.

Christian dogma says that man is made in the image of God.

MY dogma says that the writer performs in the image of the Creator.

The writer knows what he's thinking about when he sets the valise down on the train platform. S/He does not know Hemingway's lost manuscripts are in the valise. S/he knows why the girl waits outside the train station for a passenger who never comes. And s/he knows the boy kept her picture tucked into the edge of the jet's artificial horizon. The writer knows the last thing he did was touch that picture when he crashed in Pakistan. The writer knows that years later the other boy will never learn what his wife is thinking when she looks wistfully to the west.

Did you get all that? I left out some connective tissue in that last paragraph. Omniscience can be hard to follow. That paragraph had only a finite number of words. Each word bears a finite semantic content. Its length is limited by your attention span and my ability to articulate.

So, the takes his exhaustive knowledge of the story, then chooses the parts that will fit in a novel. The poor writer does not realize s/he's doing this and s/he chooses poorly. I advise you think of all the sensa impinging upon your body right now. A lot of that never makes it to your consciousness. Like the temperature of your left heel right now. Your mind filters out the unimportant sensa and you are aware of what's left, like I'm aware of the words on the screen right now.

(When someone advises the writer to "show, don't tell" that is an exhortation to write words that depict sensa to the reader for the reader to interpret. Interpretation should be left to the reader.)

To solve these problems the reader needs to define a Point Of View (POV). Most commonly, this means you decide upon a POV character whose sensa, perceptions, and some interpretation are presented to the reader. The best way to think of a POV character is as a lens through which the story is projected to the reader. God or some other omniscient being may be chosen as the POV character.

This brings to mind another problem of omniscience. Omniscience causes trouble for storytelling. In a whodunnit, the omniscient storyteller knows it was Mrs. White with a Rope in the Library who committed murder most foul on page one. The omniscient storyteller is just holding out on you as s/he/it strings you along for the next 250 pages.

That's why you want to think very carefully about what you the writer knows about the story, and what you want the reader to know about the story. In each scene you need to choose someone in that scene who can present the narrative to the reader. Sometimes perspective is in-your-face obvious like Rashomon or Arrested Development season 4. Often it is less so.

This is a decision you need to make when you're writing your story.

A rookie mistake is to start a scene in the POV of one character, and then in that same scene disclose to the reader things that the POV character cannot know.

One of the coolest things I noticed when I started writing was a trick I saw Ernest Hemingway do. In "The Killers" he tells the story from the POV of Nick Adams. Toward the middle of the story, the narrative shifts to events that happened in another room.

For a moment, I thought, "Hemingway freakin' committed POV drift!" Then I read a little more and Hemingway explains that the cook was in the other room and the cook related the events he'd witnessed at that time to Nick Adams. Then I thought, that's awesome.

I know some writers tell the whole story from a single POV character. I think those are the best writers. Others will stick with one POV character in a chapter and change only at chapter breaks. Or even scenes within a chapter. I generally growl at my friends in writers group when they move from one POV character to another POV character without some clear line of demarcation in the prose.

I had a lot of fun once writing a first-person POV character who I kill off in the second-to-the-last chapter. The last chapter consists of his ghost floating to the enemy starship's bridge moments before he witnesses it blow up and he's joined by a lot more ghosts. It's a gimmick, and if you think you want to try something like that, have fun.

You know your story and you should think of what your POV character can directly experience in the story. This argues against making your space opera hero the Galactic Emperor, or an Admiral of a giant space fleet (and it generally feeds into that avoid superlatives and Mary Sue's  thing). Instead, a guy whose job is to swab the decks may have the better view of the action. Emperors and Admirals tend to do nothing but sit in meetings and read reports. Yeah, that'd make for riveting action.

If you've got a space marine, you'd better get him cross-trained in sensors or something, because you owe it to your readers to let them know what's going on. And if he's in mushroom mode (kept in the dark and fed horse dung) that'll be less interesting than those meetings & reports in the last paragraph.

So, take a look at your story from 10,000 feet, and pick through the most interesting events therein. How can you plausibly put one character at the center of all those events. Then ask yourself, can I tell this story from that character's POV? Curtail your God-envy.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

Mind The Gap

Ric Locke died and he wasn't as well known as some of the other writers I've loved, but he reminded me of all those who have gone before.

The giants upon whose shoulders we stand. The giants whose shoes were several sizes larger than life. Shoes hard to fill.

My father was not a writer. Though he introduced me to Louis L'Amour, he wasn't much of a reader, either. He  died several years ago and news of other deaths take me back to the funeral home in Sparta, Michigan where we honored Dad.

My step-sister's husband loved my dad as much as any of us, and he spoke to me of what a good man Dad was. All I could think of in response was the challenge this posed to both of us as men. Can we be good men like Dad? We must be good men like Dad, because he's gone and someone else must do what he did.

There is a gap in this world. It is created by the loss of great men and women. It challenges each of us to do and to become their replacements.

Dad's death challenged me to be a better father, neighbor, and friend. When I reflect on the deaths of the writers whose prose I've enjoyed, I'm challenged to be a writer who can fill the gap.

I'm challenging you to do the same.

RIP Ric Locke

I just learned that Mr. Locke has passed away. Sadly, his excellent novel Temporary Duty will have no sequel. RIP Ric Locke: You were a better writer than this world deserved.

 Sarah Hoyt has blogged far more articulately about Mr. Locke here.

Temporary Duty

UPDATE: I just learned that Mr. Locke has passed away. Sadly, his excellent novel will have no sequel. RIP Ric Locke: You were a better writer than this world deserved.

   

When I love a book, I drop everything to write a review. I've posted parts of this on Goodreads and also on Amazon, so parts of what follows will be familiar to some of you.

I give this work 10 stars out of 5 because the author likes what I like and hates what I hate. Your mileage may vary: Do you love IRS agents? How about strutting martinets? How about regulations and abusive regulators? Do you think the Department of Agriculture should field a SWAT team?

Love these people and you'll hate Temporary Duty (TDY).

Now imagine 50 years in the future and that present trends continue. Bipartisan trends of bigger, more intrusive government. (I'm not hating on Democrats or letting any Republicans off the blame.) Bureaucracies naturally grow unless someone demands with career-ending force, "stop."

Thus when aliens show up to trade, there's a lot of needless trouble caused by the gubmint. The aliens can't get the Americans to sell them groceries. The only thing they get is the services of a detachment of F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets with their engines replaced with space-gizmos and weapons pods fitted with freakin' lasers that can pop popcorn.

With these aircraft come Naval aviators to fly them. They aren't pilots, and they will correct you if you say otherwise. Naval aviators are officers.

I was never in the military, but I did have a chance to work around a lot of military folks when I was younger. That's where I learned the concept of TDY. I got along best with the Air Force guys. They were "civilians in uniform" after all. The Navy guys were a bit high strung. I had a college pal who'd done four years as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard and after graduation from college he went back in as an officer. He described with great bemusement the differences between the castes--particularly, at mealtimes.


If you think officers walk on water, and enlisted men are pond scum that soils their shoes, you won't like TDY. But if you like a little blue-collar fun poked at the officers, keep reading.

Enter John Peters a second rate seaman in the US Navy. Someone has to clean up the quarters for the officers who'll be flying the birds before they show up. He and his buddy Todd are contracted to wield the mops and swab the decks. Peters got a West Virginnie accent thickern mollasses in January. But he's a quick study with the alien trade language.

When the regular Navy arrives a quirk in his orders places him outside the normal chain of command. This, plus the fact that the officers cannot be troubled to learn the trade language creates opportunities and conflicts with Peters in the middle of it.

They ship off to distant stars and adventures ensue.

Do you remember on Star Trek how they never had any money on the ship? Nobody had to polish the brightwork.

The alien trade ship isn't like that.

As the voyage progresses, we meet an interesting array of aliens in shapes familiar to readers of fairy tales. Each of them offer valued goods and services in trade.

The recurring theme in this story is that Peters has the right answers and the aliens are listening to him while higher ranking officers are ordering him to shut up. As a result, he alone enjoys financial opportunities that he pursues to his advantage.

Everything is quite civilized except for the occasional attack by space pirates. The officers may be jerks, but they do know aerial combat. The space battles are pleasing to read. As are the salvage operations afterward. Our hero manages to come away with some sweet pirate booty.

Some make block-headed claims that there is no character development. Peters starts the book as nothing more than a swabbie with a thoroughly blue-collar, enlisted man's view of the world and the Navy in which he serves. He goes along to get along. Right after the second pirate attack, he visibly changes into someone much more ruthless. I can't see him dispatching his kidnappers in the first chapter without asking someone's permission. By the last chapter he is manifesting leadership, inspiring his people, and leading a significant, uh, organization.

This is an excellent novel about which I can offer no higher praise. It is good, old-fashioned space opera the way they used to write it. If you like Heinlein, here's your huckleberry. If you like seeing young mid-shipman Hornblower repeatedly get beat up and treated unfairly, but persevere to grow into Lord Admiral Hornblower, read this novel.