Creating your own mythology – how cool! And loads of fun! We write in an era where readers embrace modern and new myth. When Bram Stoker penned Dracula, he took an obscure legend, gave it its own rules and a new mythology was born. Today, we understand the social action and values for vampires, werewolves and zombies. This is newly created mythology has been embraced by generations of readers. In Tolkien’s books, the fantasy world received a new mythology Middle Earth and that lore, that mythology, is still embraced by people today.

There are those who argue that because myth is defined as being of the distant past, that it has its own cultural criteria and that it requires organic growth in a culture, that it can’t be instantly created. Humbug! Myth is a way for people to reconcile the paradoxes of life – the things that don’t make sense to us. How was life created? How do the gods and people interact? What are the rules for interaction? Apply it to everyday life and we can call it religion. Apply it to books and we call it world building.

And perhaps that is the difference – scholars will argue that because what writers create isn’t part of the everyday, ordinary belief systems for people, then it isn’t legitimate myth. But who draws that line? Who determines when an idea crosses that line? And does it matter? Is it any less compelling? I think not. We no longer believe in the Greek Pantheon of gods yet they’re as popular as ever in literature like in Rick Riordon’s Percy Jackson and the Olympian’s series. Do we have to believe in those specific gods for the mythology to be relevant, to explain creation, our relationship with the world, our struggle with life’s paradoxes and our need to have legitimate heroes to inspire us?  Not at all. When we delve into other people’s belief systems, we challenge and enrich our own. We discover new ways to escape and to solve problems.

Mythology creates rules. How do heroes, people and proto-people (vampires, werewolves and the like) behave? What kills them (silver bullets, kryptonite or a stake through the heart)? Who are the gods, and what are their rules? How did creation happen and what happens after death? Why are their problems? Can man solve them or is he powerless?

We’ve established that not only can we create new mythology we must do it to explain the rules of the new worlds we’ve created. And many myths born of ancient legends and modern science are being created and believed by people (no judgements here). This is the mythology of ancient aliens coming to earth for their own purposes and seeding mankind (biologically and technologically). It is all a way to rationalize, to understand our history, what makes us human and to explain the anomalies and paradoxes of who we are and where we’ve come from.

And where will the next new mythology arise? The future. Outer space, I think. With the newly emerged and proven theories of space and time and the universe expanding faster and faster (not more slowly as some would believe) to end up in a black hole that swallows it entirely – like how do we explain that? Mythology, that’s how. A futuristic mythology born of predicted apocalyptic events. How cool would that be?

In creating the mythology for my books, I look closely at the world I’ve built along with the premise of the story. Mythology is about explaining how things came to be. Why they are the way they are. Why people believe as they do. It’s answering these questions that makes a world unique and believable. In one series, I asked what makes this one item so valuable? Why is it such a threat? How did it get where it is? What happens now that it’s been loosed upon the world? What do people believe about the item and their power to change destiny?

In the historically-based fantasy series I’m currently working on, the creation and afterlife myths mythology are crucial to how this world acts. The problem is, there is very little information about societal beliefs for the time period I’ve chosen to write about and I’ve been scouring academic journals for months. And that, for a writer, is perfect! From minute tidbits of factual information on tools, trade and astronomy, I’ve got just enough information to ground the story in history yet enough leeway to create a whole new mythology as to why things were done the way they were. This has forced me to really see the world through my characters’ eyes and in doing so, their actions and reactions have a genuine truth. And in doing that, the story has become so real, so alive and so fascinating!

You can take more modern or current historical events such as the decay of an empire, an evil despot trying to conquer the world, invading armies, geological tragedies, interpersonal tragedies, whatever you wish – take these larger events and change the details of the experience. Create a new world, a new way of looking at things, a new mythology which your characters use to explain their circumstances, their world, why the scourge seeps through the country – use all that to create and influence your hero, your proto-humans and your society. Or, take one of the ten basic creation myths, put you own spin on it and ask yourself, how would this influence a given society? Again, Rick Riordon did this in his series when he brought the Greek gods to America. Neil Gammon has his own unique spin on mythological figures come to the Americas in American Gods.

So go for it! Create new worlds with ground breaking, mind bending mythologies. There’ll always be a flick of our modern realities and value systems in them, how can there not be? Besides, those bits of our world in them is what will make the issues, the dilemmas and the challenges ring true for the reader. Mix, mash and have fun with it.

In tomorrow’s post I’ll talk about how I create new mythology for my worlds.

Happy mythology building!

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The God Mars

Mythology can be seen in many aspects of our lives from the names of the months to the stories we tell our children. Even the days of our week, words that many of us use daily, are remnants of these past gods and their influence upon the world.

This will be posted on a Tuesday. A simple word that probably resonates more to you as the second day of the workweek than an old homage to the lost gods. The real story, however, relates Tuesday with the Roman god Mars. Mars, or Tiw in Old English, is the Roman god of war, and second in the pantheon only to Jupiter. Tuesday (Tiwesdæg) is a reminder that Mars was always watching with his spear raised, and that you only lived in peace because you won the war.

Next we look at Wednesday. Wednesday was named after Wōden, the Old English equivalent of the Norse god Odin. Wōden and Odin both of whom gain their origins from the Roman god Mercury, who is the messenger of the gods. His appearance was very close to that of Hermes to include the winged shoes and the herald’s staff. He is attributed as being a psychopomp, which is a being who guides the dead to the afterlife. There are even stories of Mercury bringing dreams to people as they slept.

Thursday is probably easily recognizable these days as remembering Thor, the Norse god of thunder. Thor is well known for his giant hammer, Mjolnir. This hammer had the ability to return to Thor’s hand when thrown. Even with all his power, he wore a belt that doubled his strength. He is known for his temper and was a dangerous warrior. Thor was a favorite god among the working class. Many wore necklaces of Thor’s Hammer and asked him for blessings of fertility.

Friday was named after Freya, the Norse goddess of sex, beauty, love, and fertility. She was awesome. She was beautiful, a leader, and she had a chariot pulled by cats! She owned an amazing necklace that was coveted greatly and a cool falcon feather cloak. Back in the day, Friday was considered a lucky day. It was a day to get married, have children, plant crops, etc. This was all due to the blessings the goddess would grant on her day.

Of all the days of the week, Saturday is the only one that maintains its Roman origin. Saturday is named after Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture and harvest. Saturn’s influence can be seen in Roman lore as a golden age, or time of abundance, among men.

Sunday, named for the Norse goddess Sunne (or Sunna) also known as Sól. Sunne rides across the sky in her chariot pulled by the horses Allsvinn and Arvak (meaning “Very Fast” and “Early Rising”.) Sunne is said to be pursued by a wolf named Skoll. (In fact, Eclipses are said to be the cause of the wolf getting close enough to take a bite out of the sun.) Sunne will continue until the Ragnarök, the ‘end of days’ for the gods. During Ragnarök, many of the gods, such as Odin, Thor, Tyr, Heimdall, etc, will be killed. Sunne herself is said to be finally caught and consumed by Skoll. Once this happens, Sunnes daughter will take her place and provide sun to a new world of peace and love.

And we’ll end with a beginning. Monday gets its name from the old English Mōnandæg, or Moon day. The Greek Goddess of the moon is Selene, or Luna to the Romans. She is depicted as a beautiful woman with long black hair. She rides across the sky in a silver chariot that is pulled by either a pair of horses, a team of oxen, or even dragons. She is well known for her love affairs, including one with Zeus, the king of gods. Selene is a favorite among poets and authors for the love of the moonlight.

So, what does this have to do with writing? Looking at the history and myth behind simple words we use to tell what day of the week it is does more than tell a nice story, it adds depth to our world. You can take one word and link it back to centuries of people and gain an understanding of how their minds worked. As you build your worlds, maybe you should take some time and look at how the past has influenced and defined the people and their beliefs. It can be the little things that not only provide a little bit of depth and dimension to your world, it can be a fun exercise to get your ready for writing in a new world.

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When I’m waiting at the bus stop, I see all kinds of people.  People with skin colours from cocoa to olive, from toffee to porcelain.  People in turbans, in hijabs, in saffron robes.  People wearing crosses, pentacles, Stars of David.  People of all ages, of all income levels, speaking a variety of languages.

When I’m writing, I want to reflect that kind of diversity in my stories.  Unless there’s a specific story-based reason for everyone to look the same, believe the same, and exhibit the same behaviours, I like my fiction to encompass the wide variety of human experience.

Growing up, I read a lot of stories based on Greek and Roman myth, Biblical personages, fairy tales, Norse legends, King Arthur.  The prevalence of these tales made sense in a historical context; these mythologies form the bedrock of modern Western culture.  I also found a few precious collections of different mythologies, containing very different personages:  Nanebozho, the Ojibwe trickster.  Rama, the hero from India.  Fox spirits from China.  I loved these stories.  I’d memorized Cinderella and Snow White.  These anthologies provided me with something new, something different.  As I grew older, I found that readers, and publishers, are increasingly open to stories featuring a wider diversity of characters, based on legends and mythologies from all over the globe.

Full disclosure time.  I’m white, female, of predominantly German ancestry, in a relationship with a man.  But I write about all kinds of people.  People whose life experiences I cannot base on my own; people whose cultures I was not raised in.

I have to be very careful when I write about these people.

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking something from another culture and using it to suit your needs.  To an extent, all cultures in contact mix and borrow from each other.  Suburban youth listen to rap songs about life in the hood; Canadian teenagers read Japanese manga; people all over the world go to movies based on American comic book characters.  There is, however, a tension in these relationships, particularly when a group with power plunders groups with less power, taking their symbols and distorting them, commodifying them, stripping them of their cultural context and selling them.  There is also a tension when people “try to be something they’re not,” particularly when this means they act out of fantasy and idealization rather than a true understanding, or forget their own heritage in the attempt to ape someone else’s.  Appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes (think of how Vodun, aka “voodoo,” struggles to be recognized as a religion), water down symbols (it’s hard to take a powerful symbol seriously when you can buy it as a T-shirt or fridge magnet), and confuse with partial understandings and half-truths.  Borrowing mythology from cultures not my own is tricky.

And yet, to write only about white, heterosexual people of European ancestry is both dishonest (in that it doesn’t reflect the totality of human experience) and dangerous (in that it insinuates these are the only people worth writing about).

The beauty of fiction is that it demands that I, as a writer, develop the ability to see through my characters’ eyes.  I need to know what motivates them, what their dreams are, what their fears are, what their goals are.  Their point of view makes sense to them and I need to understand it in order to figure out what they will do next.  I need to see them both in the context of their cultures, and as individuals, whose behaviours and beliefs may vary a little—or a lot—from their cultures’ norms.

And so I imagine what it would be like to be a man.  Or a lesbian.  Or a Hindu.  Or an Asian woman.  Or someone who lives in the 18th century.  I learn about issues these groups face that I do not, in the hopes that my portrayals are based on reality and not on stereotypes.  I do my best to portray the myths of other cultures with respect for the context in which those myths were created, and with the reverence I would give to the figures of my own childhood.  And I aim to honour, rather than use; to share in, rather than take.

It’s a balancing act, and I can’t please everyone, but when the alternative is to write about a world where everyone is White and European and middle-class and straight, I’ll take some risks, and do some research, to build a world that’s an honest portrayal of the human experience.

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A guest post by Michael A. Rothman.

For a fantasy writer, it’s very convenient to create your own world – because you follow the rules that you set. Much like the famous Twilight Zone saying, you control the horizontal and vertical.

However, what if you want to embark on a journey that isn’t quite set in the mundane world you’re familiar with, yet you might be exploring some of our world’s mysticism? Things like numerology, religion, and legends are all fodder for creative authors to take advantage of.

Why would someone choose to dive into what is essentially someone else’s world? Use its characters and storylines?

The answer is rather simple – people are already familiar with the beliefs of certain religions. That being said, if your story relates in some way to something familiar, you’ll have a premade audience that will instantly relate in some fashion to your work. Think about it. How many people are familiar with the parting of a particular sea, or the turning of water into wine?

These images are only the beginning, consider other concepts that have been leveraged such as fortunetelling or numerology. In the case of numerology, Dan Brown in the oft-cited bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, uses numeric sequences as clues. He poses many what-if’s that people could go ahead and investigate on their own.

In fact, I just recently finished a manuscript that leverages numerological concepts that follow both a religious and numerological theme. The earliest forms of the bible were written in Aramaic (same lettering system as Hebrew). From this, a numbering system that assigned numbers to letters and words was formed and is oftentimes referred to as gematria. Many studies associated with the bible and its hidden meanings use gematria as a form of numerology. An example of such a thing would be where I use an upcoming villain’s name as a code. His name is Bedsem. It’s a play on words in another language, but suffice it to say that I’ve used the gematria system to associate a numeric value to it. One that people might recognize with a simple illustration.

Yes, I’m guilty as charged. I’ve crossed several genres of religion and “sciences” to associated my villain’s name with what is oftentimes posed as the ultimate villain.

Consider that with numerology, you have the ability to pose many “what if” type of questions to the reader. Take certain “coincidences” in the world and make them go “hmm”.

A word of caution, though. Some people might take offense.

Let’s face it, as authors, we will inevitably write something that people will take offense with. I recall having a scene in one of my earlier books where I had two twelve-year-olds holding hands when one of them decides to give the other a kiss on the cheek.

Wholesome, right? Not a big deal, you’d think?

Well 99% of the responses came back on stating how refreshing and wholesome the book was and how nice it was to have something that was “safe” for the kids to read, yet was an epic fantasy. I only mention this because I got one or two comments that inevitably crucified me (ok, maybe poor choice of words considering context) because I was treating kids as sexual objects who shouldn’t look at each other that way. And to think most people don’t believe we live in a puritanical society. Hah!

When you begin to leverage certain things that people might consider a pseudo-science, you might not get too many critics – unless you’ve botched up your facts. However, once you dive into religion or certain cultural affectation or historical references, that’s when the people who take offense can most certainly come out.

For instance, Salman Rusdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses. It won many prizes and was critically acclaimed by the literary establishment. All good things. Good until such time as some very conservative followers of a particular religion took great offense. Since the book does touch on one of the prophets from this religion, there were those in the conservative community that didn’t appreciate the way their prophet had been characterized. Given this belief that their religion was being assaulted, there were calls for the author to be killed.

Needless to say, this is the extreme of such possibilities – but when you leverage the topic of religion, it needs to be with both eyes open. Understand how others would appreciate your work or possibly misunderstand your intent.

I’ve spent years informally studying religion, numerology, and related topics – so I’ve been cautious about introducing these things. Nonetheless, these are tools in an author’s toolbox that are easy to deploy, and they can be a powerful draw to an audience that is a match for your subject matter.

***

Mike has had a long career as an engineer and has well over 200 issued patents under his name spanning all topics across the technology spectrum. He’s traveled extensively and has been stationed in many different locations across the world. In the last fifteen years or so, much of his writing has been relegated to technical books and technical magazine articles.

It was only a handful of years ago that his foray into epic fantasy started, but Mike is a pretty quick study. He’s completed a trilogy, has a prequel under consideration with editors, and is actively working on another series.

In the meantime, if you want to see his ramblings, he lurks in the following social media portals: Twitter – @MichaelARothman, Facebook, his blog, and his books.

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Artist, Jonathan Roberts

Guest Post by Jonathan Roberts

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now.

A map shouldn’t be pretty.

I know what you’re thinking – those posters of Middle Earth are gorgeous. Of course a map should be beautiful! But for worldbuilding purposes a pretty map is a Very Bad Thing. Beautiful things are precious, and we tend to want to leave precious things pristine and untouched. When we’re building worlds we need to break things, and often. So, out with any thoughts that we’re making a pretty map. We’ll be making a functional map. In fact we’ll be making many maps, one after the other. In exactly the same way that your notes are not the final manuscript, a map isn’t the final world. It’s a visual notepad, and you should be crossing things out, erasing sections and rebuilding from scratch as you go along.

So we won’t be needing photoshop today, we need a pad of scratch paper and a pencil. Ready? Right, let’s build a world.

First of all, think about the world you need to build. In many cases this is a defined area that’s much smaller than the planet you’re on. Very few stories truly span a globe, so let’s begin by cutting down to the area that the story explores. This keeps the work focused on a reasonable area, and means there will always be distant and mysterious lands to explore down the line.

In your tale there will be nations, city states or power centers of some form. Start by making a note of their relationships to one another. Are they at war? Are they aloof? Do they feud over resources or are they closely allied? Think over the things that make them stand out. Are they famous for their expansive grain fields? Their iron? Their navy? I’m sure you can see the theme here. Nations are defined by the geography they inhabit as much as we define the geography by the nation. A nation with a large navy needs sea access, but it should also have natural defenses like a mountain range that allows the nation to neglect other military forces in favor of its navy. Two countries at war need to be close, and need to have a means of attacking one another.

Focus on major terrain at this point–how much coastline and mountain range. Make notes about other terrain that comes to mind–the tulip fields of Alak’tor, the salt mines of Keshel. Those will come in useful later.

It’s now time to start our map. Grab a pencil and faintly draw in circles where your nations are. Nations that are allies or at war should be close. Those that rarely interact should be farther away, or have an insurmountable natural barrier between them. Drawing circles on a map may sound easy, but this stage can take a few tries to get the relationships right.

Stage 1: Circles. Yes, these are 6 interconnected nations!

But circles aren’t really a map. Let’s draw some coastlines. Think about which of your nations need large coastlines and which should be landlocked. Then let your pen wander. Really – avoid straight lines. Coastlines are jagged and broken things. If your line doesn’t look like it was plotted by a drunken ant, you’re doing it wrong.

Step 2: The coastlines. Keep them broken and randomized.

Now let’s lay in some mountains. Mountains tend to form ridges. Avoid the temptation to fill in whole blocks of land with mountains. Instead, lay them out in wavy lines. They often follow the edge of a coastline (think the Andes). From a story point of view, they form obstacles for your heroes and they create natural boundaries between nations, or between nations and the great unknown. Mountains also create boundaries between climates. So if you need a desert in one area and a jungle in the other, you’d better place a mountain range between them to stop the rain from the jungle getting to the desert.

Step 3: Mountains – they shouldn’t be pretty, inverted triangles do the job just fine.

Next up, we have rivers. Rain falls on mountains and runs downhill to the sea. It always flows to the lowest point – and there’s always one lowest point. This means that rivers don’t branch as they flow to the sea, they only join. So – no rivers going from coast to coast. At some point that requires water to flow uphill. No lakes that have two separate rivers leading to the sea – remember, only one lowest point leading out. Think of a river like a tree. There’s one trunk where it enters the sea, but a panoply of branches reaching towards the mountains.

Rivers are also strategically important. There’s hardly a river mouth in the world without a town on it and most great cities lie on a river. If you know where your cities are going to be, make sure there’s a decent sized river flowing through them. Equally, rivers make great defenses. It’s hard to build a wall all the way along your nation’s border, but it’s almost as hard to get an army over a well-defended river as it is to have them scale a wall.

Step 4: As rivers run to the coast they only join, they never branch.

Add some hills to the edge of your mountain ranges. Lay in some forest and see how it looks. Remember, don’t be precious. If you don’t like it, start on a new sheet of paper. Sketch another coastline. Turn it upside down.

When you’re happy with the terrain, go over the pencil lines with pen, and erase the pencil–including your nation boundaries. Scan and photocopy the map. Go away and have some food.

When you come back, try the following experiment. Ignore your previous nations. Look at the virgin world with a new eye. If you were founding a country in the world, where would you start? What would be the key strategic choke points? Look at the world as if you were playing Civ. Where are the resources you need to defend, what lands would you try to annex? Use some colored pencils to sketch in different nations and boundaries. Edit the rivers if you need to, move things around. You’ve got lots of copies of the map–experiment.

Once you have a layout you like, we’ll add cities.

Step 5: Hills and Forests, add them wherever you see fit. These are easily moved.

Cities are where they are for a reason. They don’t just appear up in the middle of nowhere. Population centers need food, water, trade and security. Rivers can provide all of  these, which is why towns and cities tend to spring up at river mouths. Locate your capitals in places that are easily defended and that have good transport connections to the rest of the nation. Place smaller cities in key locations, whether that’s in the heart of a mining community on the edge of a mountain range, at a key strategic river crossing, or a market town in the middle of leagues of prime cattle-ranching land. At this point, also mark in major fortifications.

Step 6: Place cities, towns and fortifications.

With these indicated it’s a simple matter to place the roads. These will connect the major cities, the main food producing regions, and any other major trade routes.

You now have a perfectly functional map! But remember, nothing is set in stone. Each time you run through this process your map will be better. Each time you sketch the map you’ll have new ideas. As you continue to write about your world you’ll come up with new thoughts on what terrain you should have, how two countries relate across their border, where a great wilderness needs to be. Redraw the map – it’s there for you. Both your map drawing and your text will be better for the relationship between map and story.

And when your manuscript is ready to go from draft to final, your map will be ready to go from sketch to illustration. But that’s a post for another day.

Step 7: Colored and finished!

If you want to learn about the art of mapmaking, then check out the Cartographers’ Guild, or my own tutorials.

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Sixteen-year-old me dried off after a long summer evening languishing in the family hot tub with one of my best friends from high school. The discussion that evening had been scintillating. With the tangy scent of chlorine still hugging me like a toxic cloud, I opened the patio door and stepped into the house, my damp feet sinking into the now-soggy carpet. I draped the towel over my shoulders and made my way towards the living room, where my friend was already spread out on the couch. I was pleased he hadn’t gone straight home; true, it was well after midnight, but I was awake. I wanted to converse. I wanted to think!

My friend Troy and I spent many late nights deep in conversation while the rest of the house slept, but this particular night in 1998 was the granddaddy of them all. I don’t think we went our separate ways until 5:00 a.m. In the intervening hours, for some unbeknownst reason (I may never recall the exact circumstances that inspired this), we took out a pad of paper and began to sketch out a history of the coming hundred years or so. What would be the defining events of the twenty-first century? Would mankind colonize space? How about the moon? Mars? Perhaps other, more exotic locales? How would we get there? What technologies would we use? How long would it take us to develop them? How would politics contribute to these endeavors? And perhaps more importantly, how might politics hinder them?

We weren’t interested in wild flights of fancy. This was a sober-minded effort to gauge the direction our society was moving in and extrapolate it to its most probable outcomes. And perhaps the oddest part of all is that there was no inherent “story.” No, this was an undiluted act of futurism. We were thinking on a grand scale, laying out the broad strokes of history, albeit a future history. It wasn’t until the following October that I zeroed in on a particular timeframe in our nascent world and decided to set a story there.

On the subject of future studies, Wikipedia says there “is a debate as to whether this discipline is an art or science.” Now, I understand that Wikipedia isn’t the most reliable research venue, but that statement really hits the nail on the head. You see, I was an artist and Troy was a scientist. All these years later, I’m releasing my first novels and he’s a globetrotting geophysicist—but that artist/scientist partnership is crucial. I need the balance it provides. Not that I don’t do my own research (I do a lot!), but it’s helpful to have a watchful eye appraising the more outlandish ideas in my first and second drafts.

This might sound limiting—and I’ll grant that in many ways it is limiting. But as a hard science fiction writer, I love those limits. Placing limitations on the way the world functions on a practical scale, forcing myself to find ways to work within the confines of occasionally unyielding science, often forces me to explore more interesting story possibilities than I ever would have been able to uncover if I had allowed myself to play against a completely open canvas.

What kind of limits am I talking about? They’re mostly in the realm of physics. A big one is gravity. In Star Trek, for example, technological hand-waving allows for the existence of artificial gravity, simplifying ship design and scene mechanics (believe me when I say that having characters float around in unpressurized compartments presents huge scene-blocking challenges… especially if they have to fight to the death). Warp speed allows ships and characters to gallivant from planet to planet the same way we move around in cars today. For space opera, these conventions are accepted and welcome. But what kind of story develops when you embrace the fact that it could take years (or decades) to get to one’s destination? What kind of story develops when you embrace the realities of living in space or on another planet, right down to the nitty-gritty, inconvenient details?

The answer is the kind of stories I like to read. In my experience, scientific inconvenience breeds creativity. I’m constantly asking myself, how does a space elevator work? What kind of propulsion are we likely to use to get to Mars a hundred years from now? What kind of spacecraft might we design for the purposes of traveling into deep space? What kind of fuel might it require, and where might that fuel come from? What kind of resources will be valuable, and how will we access them? These questions lead invariably to conflict, and from those conflicts are born all manner of plots that resonate with me (and hopefully readers) because of their firm basis in probability and reality.

And then I run my ideas past someone who’s smarter than me (in Troy’s case, much smarter than me). That’s a human resource no writer should ever go without.

Not that there’s anything wrong with writing a story about a moon-sized Death Star (that might cost 850 quadrillion dollars to build, by the way). There’s room for everyone under the sci-fi umbrella!

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Guest Post by Quincy Allen

Steampunk, at its purest and most basic, is anti-establishment fiction in a Victorian setting that adorns an adventurous stage with impossible gadgetry driven by steam, clockwork, aether and Tesla coils. Imagine 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein or The Time Machine, but with more goggles, zeppelins, corsets and guns … oh, and the odd zombie, vampire or mad-scientist thrown in for good measure. But that’s just the textbook answer … or would be if a textbook on steampunk existed, anyway.

Commercially, steampunk is a growing sub-genre under the rather wide umbrella of science fiction and fantasy. It’s intriguing that steampunk as an aesthetic has been branching out into other genres, including romance, horror, paranormal and pure fantasy. Or is it the other way around? Is steampunk an underlying aesthetic or is it window dressing? Those questions are best left to the purists and the marketplace.

Most good steampunk literature has a strong sense of being part of real world history. It’s real history told with a twist … a change in the very fabric our knowledge that turns the impossibilities of steampunk into an alternate reality more compelling and vibrant than the history itself. The question is, how does a writer achieve this?

The answer? Research.

It would be foolish to suggest that every writer of every steampunk story researches actual events and then merely applies and alters them. There are many examples of researched and un-researched steampunk that are good reads and are commercially successful. However, a writer can increase the likelihood of both a good story and its success by delving into real history—even at a cursory level—and then playing with it as a god plays with the fabric of the universe. After all, truth frequently is stranger than fiction.

For me, it is critical to create a moment in time where my fictional history deviates from the real one. Doing so allows me to extrapolate from that moment in time and rationalize the existence of both magic and impossible technologies in a recognizable but alternate nineteenth century. Imagine a world where witches are as common as blacksmiths, the railroad was surpassed by zeppelin transports and fully functional artificial limbs are a reality, albeit an uncommon one. And all derived from a single change, a critical moment gone awry in the history of the Catholic Church.

The irony is that the altered moment I refer to—the assassination of Pope Gregory IX in 1227—is not even mentioned in the manuscript I’m currently editing. What is important is the  awareness of this “revisionist” history. Because of it, I understand the reason why witches were not exterminated. I know why the populace didn’t die off from The Plague and how technology flourished a hundred and fifty years too early. This awareness lends itself well to understanding the social, political, economic and cultural influences that shape characters and culture .

History is awash in a variety of extremely colorful characters that can give—with a little bit of research—a truly genuine and vibrant feel to an invented history. For example, while researching the American West of the 1870s, I discovered real people like Emperor Norton (yes, America had an Emperor in the nineteenth century) and Bloody Bill Anderson, who was a brutal and ruthless advocate of both slavery and the slaughter of anyone who believed otherwise. Both historical figures are in my manuscript, and they add both color and validity to what is a very alternate history.

I’m not suggesting that a writer of steampunk needs to be a historian. Far from it. However, steampunk authors owe it to their readers to be familiar in the aesthetic and at least some of the significant people and events of the time. An adventure story traversing Europe and the East Indies in the early nineteenth century should mention the East India Company or justify why it doesn’t exist. A story set in America in the 1860s should address the Civil War or eliminate the war completely. A steampunk story set in China during the Victorian period should mention British influences there or find a reasonable way of working around them.

In the west, we refer to the nineteenth century as the Victorian Era as a direct result of Queen Victoria and the British Empire’s influences. However, that period of human history was an exciting time all around the world. More and more steampunk is reaching out to the four corners of the Earth and exploring it with truly interesting explorations of world cultures.

Steampunk audiences understand the historical setting in one way or another. When you take pen in hand (or finger to keyboard) you’d best have a few ducks in a row. Not only will you be drawing upon actual history to invigorate your writing, you’ll be giving your readers easy markers and handholds to lock onto as you fiddle with the space-time continuum.

Quincy has been published in multiple anthologies, online and print magazines, as well as in one omnibus. His steampunk version of Rumpelstiltskin is under contract with Fairy Punk Studios, and he’s written for the Internet radio show RadioSteam.  His novel Chemical Burn—a finalist in the Rocky Mountain Writers Association Colorado Gold Writing Contest—was first published in June of 2012, and has been picked up by Fantastic Journeys Publishing.  His new novel Jake Lasater and the Blood Curse of Atheon, will be on sale this summer, and he’s writing an off-world steampunk-esque series.  You can follow his ongoing exploits on FaceBook and at www.quincyallen.com.

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The trick to writing good medicine is starting from what makes sense. There are all kinds of medical mistakes in fiction that get laughed at by those in the know; these tend to go beyond the big ones, such as people walking away from getting CPR, even in the field. I recently watched a movie where a main character had what was called “heart failure” without so much as a cough or a wheeze; they collapsed quietly to the ground and when a monitor was placed on their chest (without exposing the skin, of course), it showed the heartbeat still in a lovely sinus bradycardia, slowly cycling down to zero with the big flashing green numbers growing ever smaller. What did the paramedics do? Chest compressions. No atropine, no external pacers, nothing. Of course the CPR (and a kiss from a lovely woman) brought him right back, at which point he began chasing the bad guys straightaway without so much as a warning from the paramedics that a trip to the nearest cardiology ward might be a bright idea.

Now I’m not saying that one must be a cardiology expert in order to bring a bit of high stakes medical peril into the story, but you do have to have a vague idea of what you are talking about. To continue the cardiac arrest example, only five to ten percent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests without external defibrillation survive, and even then, survival involves rapid transport to the nearest emergency room with blasts of epinephrine, a search for the cause of the cardiac arrest, and often times a prolonged hospital stay involving deep sedation and therapeutic hypothermia. You could avoid those things for the sake of your story, perhaps, but it would be nice to at least recognize of the seriousness of the event. In the end, of course, it all boils down to doing research and asking for help, if needed and available.

This rule usually applies most when dealing with fiction that takes place in the early twenty-first century with human patients as characters; the rules become more complicated when dealing with fantasy or science fiction settings. George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire does a great job of dealing with the nasty complications of unsanitized wounds in a medieval setting, and even obliquely references characters having epileptic seizures and inflammatory conditions such as gout, all in terms that make sense given the feudal setting. Many science fiction authors do amazing work in plotting out the various biological facts and medical needs of various alien species or evolutionary offshoots, usually taking off from known species and medicine that we are familiar with in our day-to-day lives and extrapolating from there. But these different styles and genres have that starting points from the well-established medical canon, and then letting the needs of the story take over. One of my favourite writers, who is also a good friend, has characters in her work with plant-based biology, and every time she talks about chloroplasts and carbon dioxide I start to smile. I also forgive any small errors, being in a much more charitable mood after seeing her work earlier in the story.

By now you may be detecting a theme in these posts, and that’s fair. It all comes down to doing your research, knowing (or having a fair idea of) what would happen medically in any given situation, making adjustments for the time and the place that you’re working with, and then deciding how much license your story needs to take with those elements. These really isn’t much point in trying to be pedantic; example above notwithstanding, most people don’t know the elements of advanced cardiac life support and will overlook or forgive most errors. But you don’t have to be exhaustive in order to have at least a partial grasp, and it’s always better in your research to consciously decide to leave details out than not to be aware that they exist in the first place. Even if you’re going the full-out fantasy route and plan to have your healing be with magic rather than moxifloxacin, it’s still not a bad idea to have an idea of what would happen in the medical realm and then figure out a way to have your healer’s spell do the arcane equivalent.

So, do your research, make your adjustments (if the situation calls for it), and don’t overwhelm readers with details – you’re not trying to write a medical textbook, after all! Keep it plausible and grounded in realism, or at least with realism as a starting-off point, and you should avoid the worst of the errors, such as a kiss doing what atropine could not.

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A while ago, I was at a book reading by an intriguing new fantasy author at one of my local bookstores. I’m naturally curious about how ideas originate and evolve, so during the Q & A period I asked him what other authors in the genre influenced him. I had expected a laundry list of the classics of old—Tolkien, LeGuin, Eddison—or at least some mention of today’s bestsellers. But the stammered and confused response I received was along the lines of, “I don’t have any influences, I don’t want to talk about it.” I left the reading feeling a little perplexed and disappointed, yet not fully understanding why.

This wasn’t the first time that I had this kind of response. I’ve heard similar questions fielded at conventions with similar answers given. It’s not something that’s made sense to me—I’m always quick to spout off my favorite authors and the things they do that I think are amazing—and given my inclination for seeking the origins of ideas, I wanted to know why people were refusing to admit that they have been influenced.

Of course, there is the fear that of being called derivative. Many, if not most, authors fear this, myself included. In any genre, but especially in speculative fiction, originality is of paramount importance. After all, isn’t that what writing is? The creation of something new? This is a real, and I think legitimate, fear, but I don’t think it adequately described what I had been seeing with these authors’ reactions, since many authors who fear being labeled as derivative have no problem discussing their influences. Deeper digging was required.

I believe the answer lies with how many people view creativity.

On a superficial level, creativity is the process by which something new comes about. That’s not controversial, but there is dispute about where this new thing comes from.

The common view of creativity is that it is intuitive, that an idea is not truly new unless it plucked from the ether, and not at all associated with anything else in existence. This follows suit with how many of us actually experience a new idea: sometimes it just pops into your head, and you don’t know where it came from.

But if that were true, every new idea would be completely incomprehensible since it would be divorced from any context we could comprehend (which is much the state of nonrepresentational modern visual art, and why it turns so many people off). In order for this new creation to be meaningful to us, it has to have some place in the world as we understand it, and thus it has to relate in some way to the things we have experienced before.

I think that creativity works the same way, but in reverse: the creator takes elements of their experiences and combines them in new ways.

Einstein’s development of the theory of relativity is often considered to be a work of staggering genius and the pinnacle of scientific creativity, and rightly so. Most people have difficulty understanding relativity, and can’t imagine how anyone else could conceive of it. But Einstein certainly didn’t pluck it out of the ether (especially since relativity helped destroy the very concept of the ether); he developed it as an answer to the problems that had been found in Newtonian physics. He combined his knowledge of physics with observed measurements in a way that resulted in a completely new theory. Far from being divorced from reality, his achievement attempted to describe it totally.

Other forms of creativity are no different. The unicorn, for example, is a mythical creature that has permeated cultures throughout the world for hundreds if not thousands of years, and is often a symbol of the fantastic. Yet ultimately, the unicorn is just a horse with a horn on its head and magical powers. It is nothing more than the combination of these attributes, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a completely original creation.

Imagine asking the creator of the unicorn to describe it. “Well,” he would say, “it has a horn, and magical powers, four legs, hooves, a mane and a tail… but it is definitely not a horse or related to horses in any fashion.”

This is akin to what many of these authors are saying about their own works in their frantic scramble to distance them from those of their influences.

Some of the greatest works of literature have clear influences. Tolkien was influenced by mythology (no, he didn’t invent the idea of Elves, though his Elves were nonetheless a remarkable creation), The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan can in many ways be seen as a fusion of Dune and Arthurian legend (the Aviendha/Chani connection), and Steven Erikson proudly declares that he was shaped by Glen Cook’s writing, and a side-by-side read of Gardens of the Moon and The Black Company supports this (can you tell I’m biased toward fantasy?). Despite the fact that their works were influenced by many things, they still stand at the high-water mark of creativity in fantasy fiction.

Now, I’m not at all suggesting that you should become a complete hack. Tolkien already wrote The Lord of the Rings; we don’t need you to write it again. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t let him or anyone else inform your own stories, so long as your stories and the elements that comprise them are your own.

Nor am I trying to diminish your creativity as being unoriginal. Utilizing what exists in the world and combining it in new and fresh ways is really hard work. Just ask Einstein.

So if you find yourself famous someday and asked who influenced you, feel no guilt as you give us your laundry list, and honor those giants upon whose shoulders you stand.

*

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

P.S. My epic fantasy novelette, Dark Tree: A Tale of the Fourth World, is now available for free on Smashwords! I hope you’ll check it out!

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The spring migration is late this year but I only learned that because someone died.

A close friend’s death pulled me from my concrete world, forcing me to travel across endless prairie, to see spring repaint winter’s stark world with the tender greens waving away the north wind’s last cold breaths. And in my journey to mourn, I see the spring migration – gathering energy to fly to thawing northern nesting grounds by fervently feeding on the last crop’s stubble, not one stray seed left behind. A friend had died and with her, part of my heart died yet here was nature, hopeful, fervent, telling me the cycle must continue, that despite all that happens, life stops for no one.

This journey takes me back to the farmstead home where I grew up – right in the middle of the great spring migration. Flocks of Greater and Lesser Canada geese, cranes and Snow geese formed feathery swarms. Circling gracefully down to water, then like arrows shot into the sky they circle yet again searching for perfect feeding fields.

The choruses of honks and krooos carried by cool spring winds are a music once familiar, now alien, to my ears.  These choruses are the excitement of spring, the energy of rebirth and creativity and somehow, through my tears of grieving, I am stilled to peace.

A walk across stubble fields, still too wet for seeding, floods me with memories, once known in my youth but now seem otherworldly. Who was that person who remembers where the trees once grew, where cattle grazed in pastures, where weeds were pulled from garden rows at a nickel a pail? Who is this person who now deigns to wear sandals through straw stubble, ankles scratched – a child of the city now – alien worlds converging, lifetimes past and present merging.

Walking along a windrow, a prairie chicken is spooked from the grass. My partner is now lost in his memories of times hunting before pesticides and farming diminished this delicacy. As we share the past I realize that few words can bring to life the images, the memories, the smells, the aching muscles, the laughter accompanying sliding down haystacks in winter … time has made  the once familiar foreign. The migration darkens the sky above us as birds swarm debating if this field will yield enough scattered grain. I feel the noisy migration sweep my old ghosts away for their focus is on today  - it is all that matters and all that ever will matter.

At 4 a.m., the winds change and I know, lying in the dark, protected from the diamond sky and sun’s first yawning, that it is time – that this is the last night of honking and krooing wakefulness and that silence will ensue. I leap from my bed to watch the geese and cranes, their last grazing of  grain speckled stubble fields completed, rise to the skies, circling, a choir in flight, summoning all to follow, their v-shaped lines flapping arrows aimed at northern nesting grounds.

Then, the earth gasps at the timeless glory of the final migration before relaxing with a sigh. But, the silence I expect never comes.

Instead, I hear the almost quiet – the earth’s soft belches and burps of spring moving to summer. Frogs croaking bass melody day and night, the percussion of duck calls, crows cawing oblivious to the frog’s melody, the crescendo and decrescendo of wind whispering then whistling through budding trees – the new, softer melodies of insects crawling over warming ground, farmers preparing the land for seeding, hoes working gardens. The south wind, carrying the frenzied migration northward now blends these spring choruses to new compositions.

Ah yes, the rhythm, the balance of the earth, timeless beyond man – these things I now ponder. And I also wonder about the worlds I create as I now sit in my walled home, in my city of concrete and asphalt and unearthly noise. Do my characters wander through worlds which gasp, belch and burp? Are they  aware of the subtle things which affect their lives? Am I aware of these things? Maybe. Maybe not. But I now know that sometimes we and our characters need to take the time to breathe – to feel the change, to feel the sorrow and the timelessness of life.

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10 reads worth your time:

Rachelle Gardner suggests your Train your Muse Like Your Train A Puppy.

Sonia Simone talks about the 7 Bad Habits of Insanely Productive People, all of which are relevant to writers.

The Red Pen Of Doom discusses Why Every Man Must Read A Romance and Every Woman Read A Thriller.

Over at Writer Unboxed, Sophie Masson discusses Updating Traditional Motifs To Create Fresh Fiction.

Jody Hedlund has 7 Setting Basics That Can Bring a Story To Life.

At Writers In The Storm Blog, Janice Hardy discusses 5 Ways To Bring Your Description To Life.

Terrible Minds lists 25 Reasons I Hate Your Main Character.

Jennifer Conner explains why you should care about Categories, Key Words and Tags.

The Huffington Post has three tips for getting your e-book off the ground.

Roni Loren discusses some bad advice about twitter.

Missed any Fictorians articles this week?

The Heart of Fairwood Press - Guest post by publisher Patrick Swenson

The Conflicts of Character Design – Matt Jones

Plumbing the Depths of Emotion – Brandon M Lindsay

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Welcome to our new feature, Sunday Reads.  This is a collection of the cool/interesting/thought-provoking articles we’ve read during the week.

I thought I was the only person in the world who hates chapter titles.  Apparently not, according to Navigating the Slush Pile.

Jami Gold made me laugh with her post Multiple Personality Disorder? No, I’m a Writer.

Over at YA Muses, they’re talking about how to create a satisfying end.

(And thank you to The Golden Haystack for drawing my attention to this post.)

Struggling with the difference between a pitch and a synopsis?  Check out Agent Kristen’s video.

Roni Loren has a great collection of books to cure a variety of writerly woes.

Over at Civil War Horror, Robert Walker talks about e-book pricing.

Magical Words has worldbuilding for writers who hate it (and it’s written by a fantasy writer!).

For a laugh: check out SlushPile Hell.

For fun: the sharpest teeth in the world.

For inspiration: real world locations for fantasy worldbuilding.

And just because it’s cool: an animated short of a post-apocalyptic world.

Happy reading!

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So you want to write a scene with a medical element to it. The bad guys have knocked the love interest unconscious, or someone needs to die of an awful disease, or you need to establish that your physician character knows (or doesn’t know) what she’s talking about. But you want to make sure you do it right – not too much detail but enough so that you don’t look foolish. How do you walk that line?

It’s probably easier than you think it is. First of all, big breath – unless you’re actually writing an article in The New England Journal of Medicine you’re probably not going to have to be exact. Readers don’t want verbatim quotes from a medical textbook, but rather details that enhance or propel the story, or help to define who the characters are. That said; you do get points for accuracy, or at least some form of plausibility.

In no particular order, here are some suggestions to avoid common pitfalls when it comes to writing medicine in science-fiction and fantasy

1. Nothing is absolute, within reason.  There’s no hard and fast rule to state that your medicine has to be accurate, and for many, engaged in world building of alien species or seeing the needs of the plot, being shackled to the rules can limit the creative work. That said, there are always certain things that people will pick up, especially if they have some medical knowledge of their own. The bottom line is that you don’t have to show yourself off to be an expert, but you should  be able to use common sense as to when you can fudge it and when you need to do research, or better yet, ask for help.
2. Avoid the common errors. That is, there are certain mistakes that are so common that you should just be able to avoid them as a matter of course. Just because people on TV or in movies can get up and keep going after being given CPR, that doesn’t mean you should write it that way. In real life, getting a pulse back after CPR is a rare thing, and if you do, it’s still more likely to lead to a screaming ambulance ride, a breathing tube and an advanced cooling protocol, and a stay in intensive care. Likewise, being hit on the head such that a character loses consciousness is a serious neurological emergency; at best it’s a concussion when they wake up, and at worst there could be serious bleeding inside the head.
3. The more crucial the point, the more specific you’ll have to be.  This stands to reason; if the medical plot point is minor then it won’t require as much detail in the story as something major. As an establishing fact of your alien’s biology, to say that there are three biological sexes can be a great way to establish difference. If your story depends on that fact for a plot point, you’re going to have to put some thought into how to describe that. It seems simple enough, but it means that if you’re going to trip up anywhere, this will likely be it. Do the research, think about what will or won’t work, and then go for it.
4. Alien/fantasy medicine can work best as a variation of what we know. If part of your story hinges on a fact of alien biology, one way to make it plausible is to use the human known version as a template and diverge from that. In “Star Trek”, Vulcans have green blood that is based on copper instead of iron. The writers didn’t just make that up, however; in our own bodies, iron is a key component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen in our red blood cells by binding its ionic form to oxygen. Copper ions are also used in our body – not for the same purpose, but it’s not a complete leap to suggest that evolution couldn’t use it for an analogy to hemogloblin. Likewise for organ structure or diseases or other biological facts; one way to get started is to vary from a known theme.
5. Alternatively, vastly different biology/medicine is better left to the imagination. If you are planning to detail the biology of a species or a race that is vastly different from ours, and you want to make it something completely unrelated to what we know – well, there’s no reason you can’t, but this might be a situation where it’s best to go for less detail instead of more. Getting bogged down into what makes everything so different and alien may end up overwhelming the reader. Better to stick with a few tantalizing details and leave the rest to the imagination without worrying too much about explaining.
6. The medicine serves the story, not vice versa. Finally, keep in mind that none of these suggestions trump the basic need for good storytelling, believable characters, and compelling plot. It won’t do you any good to explain your thesis about your alien species sixty-four chromosomes or your brilliant doctor’s ability to transplant anything into anybody if it swamps the fundamentals of good writing. Using medicine or medical characters in a story needs to move the story forward, not get it mired in exposition and detail.

Next – writing a good doctor.

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When many, if not most, readers enter a fictional world, they want to stay there until they’re ready to leave. For us writers, that means having to avoid doing anything that pulls the reader out of our world. Failing in this task may make it difficult for a given reader to buy into our creation. They may set it down and move onto something else. If this happens, we’ve lost them.

Any aspect of storytelling is vulnerable to this. Someone breaking out of character, the introduction of a deus ex machina, and even poor handling of point-of-view are all good ways of infuriating readers, and rightly so: they are violations of an unspoken trust with our readers that the stories we are telling them are self-consistent.

Setting is an aspect of storytelling which is particularly vulnerable to this kind of violation, especially in genres where setting is important, such as in fantasy, sci-fi, and historical fiction (by setting, I mean all things related to world-building, such as culture, dress, geography, the laws of physics or magic, etc.). Read enough reviews in any of those genres and you will see that one of the widest criticisms is that the author described some event that could not or would not have happened in that context, and thus the reader was pulled out of the story. There’s a good reason for why this can be such a problem for a writer: setting, by its very nature, consists of a vast number of interrelated concretes. Consider the difference between a character arc and a city, full of people, buildings, roads, belief systems, cultures, and so on, and you should see what I mean. It’s very possible (and necessary) to track the shape of a particular character’s arc, but far more complicated to track the goings-on of every person and thing in a city. There are many ways we can forget a detail that affects the story later on, and thus cause one of those reader-losing violations.

Of course, simply not knowing how an aspect of your world works can also do this. Many of our readers are smart enough to know that you can’t ride a horse at a gallop while swinging a fifty-pound sword for five hours straight. As most writers should by now know, doing some research solves most of these problems.

But there’s another related issue that can be a little subtler, and it relates purely to a world’s self-consistency. Unless you’re writing an alternate history or time travel yarn, your Imperial Roman soldier isn’t going to call his wife on his cell phone, since cell phones didn’t exist back then. An obvious example, but things get a little trickier when you’re writing in a purely secondary (or, purely imagined) world.

I once wrote an epic fantasy story in which one of my characters was exhausted, and was described as feeling as if he had just run a marathon. While it seemed pretty innocuous to me at the time, someone in my writing group couldn’t buy into it, because the word “marathon” is named for the run of Greek soldier Pheidippides during the Battle of Marathon. And since such an event never occurred in my world, he argued, how would the concept of a marathon in the normal sense even arise?

Hearing his criticism was a bit of a wake-up call for me, and now I sometimes find myself watching out for the same thing with books that I read (as much as I’d rather just sit back and enjoy them). Of course, in my hierarchy of priorities, I’m going to put a satisfying plot over catching myself using the word “marathon,” but I still keep an eye out for something like that slipping in. Whether or not you’re that meticulous about your world’s etymology, rest assured that some of your readers will be.

* For another interesting post on the topic of word choice, check out the earlier post by Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, if you haven’t already.

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As a Software Engineer and Security Analyst, one of the things that always bothers me in modern media is how programmers and hackers are portrayed. There seems to be a common belief that they have almost magical powers to pull usernames and passwords out of the air or complete complex tasks in seconds. I know my complaint is common and that anyone in a specialized profession can share my angst, but I thought I would write a little bit on how it actually works. In order to maintain the tempo of your novel, you may be inclined to skip all my advice and use HollywoodOS (the fake Hollywood systems) but at least you’ll be more informed. I’ll try to talk about where we are and where I believe we’re going in the future.

Starting with programmers, we’re a group very similar to writers. All of our work is creative in one way or another. Most of us are given (or help create) a specification that defines what the finished project will be like. Consider this your outline that talks about each chapter and how the characters move around in it. And much like writing the pages of the novel takes time, writing a full application takes a while to code. This is changing even in our lifetimes, however. Frameworks exist that give the developer the ability to create fully functional applications in a short time. Consider this like having a library of plot snippets that you can freely take and insert into your novel. All that is left is to customize the look and flow between the parts. As this advances, I can easily see a future where ‘programmers’ just tell a system what they want, how they want it to look, and the resulting application is built for them.

Next we have the hackers. I will say that the term ‘hacker’ has many connotations and many of them are negative when they shouldn’t be. The word hacker itself is used to describe a group that enjoys the challenge of building new things. This can be that kid down the road that turned his wagon and lawnmower into an awesome go-cart, or even you as a writer. It also commonly talks about people who break software or computer security. Technically, this group should be called a cracker, but since using the term hacker to refer to this group is so common, I’ll bear it and follow suit.

Hackers have many different subsets and it’s hard to classify them as a group. I’ll touch on a couple of the subsets here, but I can’t touch on all of them. First, I’ll talk about the lower class members commonly (and usually derogatorily) called script kiddies. This group attacks using software or scripts obtained from various sources. While their methods are effective, they often do not understand the full mechanics of the attacks they are carrying out. They are quick to take advantage of systems that are out of date and not very well maintained, but are unable to penetrate well maintained systems that may not have any vulnerability already exploited. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a well organized group that gathered and used these scripts as a form of cyber-warfare.

The other side of that coin, and in my eyes the elite group, are the security experts. These are the members who write the code and find the exploits that the other groups use. This group looks the systems and start prodding them to try to figure out how they work. The simple way of looking at this group is like a spy attempting to enter an enemy’s base. They first scout it to determine how it’s configured and look at all the entrances. With enough information they can pretend to be someone else and walk through the front door, or learn the weak points and attack there. Most commonly, unlike the movies would have you believe, this process does not involve the user sitting at the login screen trying to guess the password. They involve lots of surveillance, analysis, and a great deal of luck.

There is one final group that should probably be included and that’s the social engineer. This is probably the most common type of hacker in television and tv. The social engineer doesn’t look at exploiting the computers, but rather the people who work on them. A social engineer attempts to deceive the users to give them information that can then be used to access the system. This information can be usernames, passwords, secret information concerning the infrastructure, or even just access to the secure systems themselves.

While this only briefly touches on these technological roles, I hope you find them useful in building your characters and perhaps making them a little more realistic. If you have any questions or comments, please ask them below!

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