Space for Rent: The Allure of Retro-futurism

Tweet of the Day: This Road…It Leads to Nowhere!

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What is it about visions of future’s past that entices us so?

From Cyberpunk to Clockwork-Punk, science fiction is plunging back though its own history in full revival mode.

You can’t get any more postmodern than that!

The aesthetics of each of these sub-genres has a lot to do with it. The whirling gears, the crank of diesel engines, or curved fins of a rocket ship. I believe the attraction comes from what the fact that we lack those things today. We are surrounded by technology (type-type-ahem-type some more) yet it is packaged in glossy exteriors and easy access user interfaces. We don’t know what is underneath the hood. Modern tech is designed to create a smooth layer that separates us from the machines inner working. While it makes the technology accessible it also keeps us ignorant. When was the last you knew enough code to fix that .dll error that popped up in your screen? I bet you even know what a .dll file is, what it does or even dare to touch the mouse after the prompt pops up. Retrofuturism lets us see the wires, gears, and smoke which makes it visually accessible.

Which leads me to another point, nostalgia. The irony of lets say steampunk it that it could be called a sort of “Industrial Romanticism.”

Yes, I am well aware of the obvious contradiction in terms.

The fact remains that we are waist deep in the information age and are well aware of the dangers of modern technology to desensitize, strip our privacy or even destroy all life as we know it. Retrofutirsm hearkens back to an era where technology could still save us from ourselves. A time when we were at the cusp of  wondrous discoveries right out our fingertips: airships, robotic servants, smart homes, silicate life on Mars. Remember that these genres are basically revivals of earlier episodes of science fiction, which in turn gives us three things: a vision of today as seen through the lens of those that came before us, a vision of the past reflected in those projections of the future and a look at ourselves in the way we look at those past projections.

Which leads to the following question: where the hell is my jet pack?

All the projections fell short. We should have, at least, colonies on the Moon, while constructing atomic rockets to reach Mars and have some serious face time with those wacky tripod invaders. And why do we feel that way? Because socially we are still in the 20th century. Kids born in the year 200o are only 12 right now, they won’t really come of age until the end of this decade. Our collective experience is still rooted in the last millennium and so are our perspectives of our past and future, still hoping for the promises of the past to come true in our lifetimes. Looking at the past brings back the wonders that actual science once teased and know has stripped away.

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World Building Wednesday: Organizing Your Notes RPG Book Style

Tweet of the Day: Flesh Blood

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Ah young eager world builders, you have it all:

Characters and character illustrations.

Locations.

Cultures.

Maps.

In depth history, both social and political.

Songs.

Poems.

Famous battles.

Military doctrine.

Technological development.

Extensive timelines and calendars.

Secret histories, conspiracies and legends.

You have it all.

And it is all a big mess.

You keep churning out this stuff, because it is oh so fascinating, but where does it fit in the narrative, or how does it create a coherent whole? I’m sure you have it all figured out in your mind, but it will take more than mental gymnastics to transform megabytes of data into a coherent narrative. Thankfully there is a group of people whose job is to create and organize reams of world building information into useful volumes.

Tabletop RPG Designers.

Any well designed game book, such as a rule book, campaign book or module will condense the data in clear format that allows for easy reference. This should be the goal of any world builder, not only for themselves but for their stories as well. A typical (median as opposed to industry standard, which ironically there isn’t any although companies set their own internal standards) “world book” is set up thus:

1. Introduction/Background
2. Places of Interest
3. Adventure Seeds/Introductory Adventure
4. Supplementary Materials

The opening introduction is the most important organizing element since it gives the flavor to the text, sets the limits of the book and in the case of a writer engaged in world building creates a connection with the story to be written. Remember you’re organizing the elements of the story you’re about to write. Here is a good place to define genre/sub-genre as well.  If you have a time line of events, it usually goes here.

Places of interest is a way of organizing the material according to geographical area. Each location, be it a town, city, country or planet gets a description, along with characters and cultural notes/history. This is also the place to put your visual arts skills to good use with maps, character illustrations and depictions of key locations. These can come in handy when describing characters or remembering not only the location of any given place but its relation to the rest of the world/universe.

Since we are still in the world building stage, you haven’t put pen to paper as far as the story is concern. Perhaps you have multiple ideas, or like to try your hand at some shorts set in this particular world. This is where the RPG designer would put adventure seeds, i.e. ideas for game masters to get them started in creation of their own adventures. These usually come in the form of an open ended paragraph:

The adventurers meet in a tavern when a man with blood in his hands burst through the front door. He falls on his knees in front of the heroes and scream, “They are coming!” before collapsing on the floor….

You could do something similar as a form of in document brain storming. Other designers include a short introductory adventure meant to showcase the setting and the rule set. This might be the place for a prologue or any shorts you create.

The last section is for supplementary materials, such as character sheets, fold out maps, tokens and anything else the designer wishes to add. Since most of this stuff is for your own use, this might be the temporary open area where you put all those eureka moments before breaking them down and placing them in their right place.

One interesting thing about game books is that they tend to have areas meant to be read by all the players involved, while certain materials are meant for the Game Master’s eyes only. This might be the best tool in the RPG designer toolkit for world building as far as the speculative fiction writer is concerned. Remember that the bulk of the data you create in the process of world building is background material, that is, only meant for your eyes only. It puts you in the mindset that some information is meant for your readers while the rest is only useful to you. So putting an asterisk on this information allows you to avoid spilling the beans too early and trains you in careful art of info dump avoidance.

I hope this helps you navigate the deep waters of world building.

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Wizards’ World War (s.2) Dispatch 20: Bargains

Tweet of the Day: Would Your Story Benefit From A Distant Narrator?

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Season 1 - Dispatch (s.2) 1 – Dispatch 19 – 21

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2356 Firs Link, Formby, Merseyside, UK,  2 august, 06:39 hrs GMT

I woke up in a dazed. My eyes blurry from last night tears. Half remembered dreams swam through my head.

Sleeping in a strange bed never helps. When was the last time I slept in my own bed?

I headed for the bathroom to get a shower but Owen had beaten me to it. He brushed his teeth with nothing but a thick towel around his waist.

“Oh sorry!” I said.

He looked at me. A cold current of despair dripped into me. I did not know if it was a his own or a reflection of mine. Then I felt nothing. His attempt to control his emotions sucked up mine as well. He stood rooted in place, unwilling or unable to turn away. He could read my emotions but his thoughts were lay in some distant shore.

He spat out the toothpaste, “I’ll be out in a minute.”

Owen plunged his hands underneath the faucet. He rubbed them over and over again. This time the emotions flowed free; anger, fear, revulsion, pain, and….

“I-”

“Don’t-”

“-love-”

“-say-”

“-you.”

“-it!”

His words smashed into mine.

Why did I just say that? Did I say it or was it him? Or maybe I’m still dreaming.

His shoulders slumped, “I thought I lost you. When I heard the shot, I mean. I killed them. I kept going,” he rubbed his hands faster under cold water, “and going and going. More and more, I wanted more blood, more death, more everything…more you.” Tears ran down his cheeks in long silver streaks. “I’m a dammed monster, a selfish brat, an unclean beast…I hurt you and I though I lost you and…” His chest heaved.

I wrapped my arms around his head.

“Shhh, it’s okay. We all make mistakes.” I kissed him just above the ear, “It’s okay.” The emotional void where he pushed down all his emotions threatened to swallow me whole. I felt myself dragged into him, into nothingness. “Come back to me Owen, please. I got you into this mess. I’m sorry. I used you-”

He buried his head in my chest, “I owed you, for what I did, I owed you. I hurt you and I can’t fix you. I can’t fix anything,” he said. It was a plea for help. Our emotions roiled together at the edge of the abyss. Too much, too fast, too soon, too real.

“I hurt because I love you, it hurts because you love me. Gwen, the miserable bitch!” I said.

I moved so fast his towel almost dropped. He placed one hand on my cheek, soft yet firm, “Don’t you ever say that, you hear me, Gwendolyn MacLir. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, to anyone. You saved millions,” he gasped for air, “you fought monsters for all of us. Even for….”

“You, yes….”

We stayed there  in a half embrace for who knows how long. We could not get any closer but did not dare draw apart. We kissed a few times, short, haunted, wet kisses. I taste of what we wanted, we needed. We craved a little bit of solace and a lot of forgiveness. I wanted forgive myself for manipulating his guilt.  He wanted forgiveness for an act of youthful desperation.

Neither of us could forgive ourselves.

The tide receded. We let go. He left me alone in that tiny bathroom. Alone with my thoughts and my body. As each piece of clothing hit the floor, the scars of a dozen battles came to view, some white and well healed, others still read and painful. I stood under the hot water. I poured over every pore of my skin. The drops pushed back the dreams, the pain, back to the deep well they belonged. Owen has his pit I had a well. The difference was that he buried his emotions less they swamp him and everybody around him. I kept mine deep, to be summon at will whether it was anger, hatred or even fear.

But how many times can I go back to that well before it runs dry?

The droplets didn’t have the answer and neither did I.

Owen waited for me just outside the door encased in an emotional block of ice. He handed me a prepaid mobile.

“We  verified the information and are ready to meet under per-aproved protocols,” said the voice on the other side of the line.

“Understood,” I said. I switched the phone off. “Toss it. We gotta another meet,” I said to Owen.

He handed me Excalibur with a nod.

Back to work.

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TV Tropes Monday: Fantastic Racism

Tweet of the Day: Writing Excuses 7.22: Microcasting

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The sad truth is that folks don’t get along. They tend to hate on those of different skin color, sex, sexual identity, age, religion, nationality, wealth and even hair color. So it should come as no surprise that we see the same in speculative fiction. When the hate is to and from different mythological/fantastic/alien species, its called Fantastic Racism. What better way to drive a conflict (especially of the genocidal/end of times type) than with some old fashion hate.

Them smelly orcs deserve the sticky end of my spear, says I!

Often used as a metaphor it can lead to several problems such as:

1. Hey! Watch where you drop that anvil! The moral of the story comes off as being extremely heavy handed.
2. Strawman has a point: Turns out that your friendly neighborhood vampire just seduced and snacked on your brother. Yeah the one you thought was a nice girl.
3. Space Jews: Yes, she is a drudic princess, don’t ya know! Except this time it ain’t funny, especially when you throw in the flamethrower.

Still, the allure of this trope remains strong. It builds conflict (or has conflict already built-in), give a credible flaw for a hero or serves to signal to the audience that “Here be the villains!” and just like in real life, it can be a minefield of pain.

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Weekend Roundup: May 20 – 26

Tweet of the Day: Creating Book Series: Great Idea or Think Again?

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This week started a bit weird then sort of even out a bit then it hit a wall.

Delightful, no?

I spent all Sunday and most of Monday through early Wednesday thinking about Diesel Punk, Greek gods, magic and interplanetary travel. I have a vague idea of what I could do with it, but nothing really firm for now. Like so many ideas roaming around my brain pan, it could become something or slink back into the proverbial mental trunk.

Will see, but for now, the week in review:

• Sun: Wacky ideas come to light in Harmony of the Spheres.
• Mon: Things take a darker tone in TV Tropes- Eldritch Abominations
• Tue: And then back to disjointed in WWW- In Dreams 
• Wed: With all the thoughts about weird worlds, how do you create a sense of history for them?
• Thu: Nothing to see here, move along.
• Fri: Space for Rent: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

So that was the week. But wait there is more….

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I would like to thank Neyska for giving me a second Versatile Blogger Award. I shall hence forth refer you to the original award ceremony to answer all your questions. Have a nice day!

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Space for Rent: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Tweet of the Day: Freudian Friday: Xander Harris

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Caveat, I am not asking for money.

I don’t need any money.

Okay, I do need it, but I’m not asking, nor receiving.

Nor am I associated with the site below, but I think it is a cool idea whose time has come.

I’m talking about Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. I’ll let the woman behind the project explain:

As a gamer, a pop culture critic and a fan, I’m always working to balance my enjoyment of media while simultaneously being critical of problematic gender representations. With my video web series Feminist Frequency,  I look at the way women are portrayed in mass media and the impact they have on our culture and society.

THE PROJECT

With your help, I’ll produce a 5-video series (now expanded to 11 videos) entitled Tropes vs Women in Video Games, exploring female character stereotypes throughout the history of the gaming industry.  This ambitious project will primarily focus on these reoccurring tropes:

• Damsel in Distress
• The Fighting F#@k Toy
• The Sexy Sidekick
• The Sexy Villainess
• Background Decoration

Cool, no? I don’t always agree with the premises presented in Feminist Frequency, but I do agree that these issues need to be brought to light and discussed. How else are we going to learn if we do not confront?  It’s good for the industry and for gamers. So keep an eye on this, I think it will be very interesting indeed.

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World Building Wednesdays: A Sense of History

Tweet of the Day: Strings of Retaliation – 9a – Saskia

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Yesterday I came across this blog post concerning a new literary movement within speculative fiction called “The New Weird.” The blogger did not focus on the definition of this new movement (at least new to me) but he did touch into something that I found intriguing as well:

At last, it all makes sense. My ambivalence to New Weird, I think, comes from the sense of absent history noted above. This normally wouldn’t present much of a problem, yet New Weird works that set out specifically towards creating the sense of a separate, secondary world create a sense of disconnect by not giving those worlds any sense of a past. There is no feeling of historical change; the setting feel static, suspended outside of time, and yet attempt to give an impression of “pastness”. Wierd fiction, from which the New Weird supposedly draws inspiration, doesn’t have this absence. Either history wasn’t a concern, in which case there was nothing to be absent from, or else there was a palpable feeling of the ancient past bubbling up and wreaking havoc on the narrative present.

How can you build a sense of history for something that is completely fictional and many times deliberately different from our own experience?

An pivotal question that lies at the heart of world building, since most world building is the creation of extensive background for characters/events/places in the world/universe of a particular work. The real problem in fact is not building a believable history to your story but how do you transmit all that stuff that is in your computer folder (or notebooks) to the reader without drowning them in info dumps. There are a few tropes that speculative fiction writers can invoke to inject historical depth to their stories:

• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Model a culture or cultures on existing historical ones, in part or in whole. Can be problematic in that it can appear either as cheap imitation or failure to do the research.
• Standard Sci-Fi History: Sci-Fi stories tend to share a common historical background to explain how humanity reached the stars and beyond. Differentiating your work from the rest can be as difficult as maintaining the audience expectations once they see this trope in action.
• Apocalyptic Log: Loved by game designers such as Bethesda and BioWare it sprinkles (or showers) the world with records of past events, such as books, audio logs, and video recordings. Can lead to excessive info dumps in print which is why most of this stuff is skipable in games.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Almost always serves as the basis for a Standard Fantasy Setting. It’s FCC taken to its logical extreme and tends to suffer from the same problems.
• Used Future: Uses a certain visual aesthetic to convey a sense of history through the wear and tear on objects. It works but requires a solid reason why people continue to use something that is clearly in disrepair and in need of maintenance/substitution.

A few sub genres of speculative fiction avoid the hassle of invoking one or more of these tropes by either setting the action in contemporary times (Urban Fantasy) or in today’s world with a twist (Alternate History).

The tropes above are just tools for your writing tool kit. For more you can listen to this podcast.

Do you have any tips for creating a sense of history in your stories?
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Wizards’ World War (s.2) Dispatch 19: In Dreams

Tweet of the Day: New Weird Weirdness

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Season 1 – Dispatch (s.2) 1 -Dispatch 18 - Dispatch 20

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Gwen won’t let me play with the bunny!

The Lady by the Pond stirred the water.

“Tell me young knight, tell me of what dreams may come.”

TOM!

“He was my brother. Why did he do that? Why….”

“She is old and her hold is strong. The Earth rumbles beneath our feet, the skies darken above our heads.”

“You don’t know do you?”

Give it back Tom. It’s just a baby!

I won’t hurt it! See it’s fine.

Tiny black eyes stared at me. Fretful eyes.

I can’t protect you.

London city is Burning Down…Burning Down…Burning Down, Burning Down…London City is Burning Down…

My…Fair…Lady!

“You chose your path, he embraced his. Move on child or let the ancient enemy win.”

There drew he forth the brand Excalibur,

And o’er him, drawing it, the winter moon,

Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth

And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt:

For all the haft twinkled with diamond sparks,

Myriads of topaz-lights, and jacinth-work

Of subtlest jewellery.

“Tis the reason you came you came to me, is it not? To change the course of the rapids, to steer clear of the storm.”

“I know not the path to take.”

“Do not refuse to hold the hand that guides you nor listen to your heart.  Follow the one you are already on.”

I’m sorry Gwen.

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TV Tropes Monday: Eldritch Abominations

Tweet of the Day: Into the Gothic World of the Monk

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They come from realms beyond comprehension….

Things man was not meant to see…..

Abominations that oozed non-Euclidean geometries….

Madness incarnate…..

Destroyers of worlds…..

Enter the Eldrich Abomination, exit Sanity….

These things, for a lack of a better word (although you may no lack words after you see them, just words that make any sense what so ever), are evil incarnate, except that such mundanes concepts such as good or evil rarely if ever apply. They also lack any semblance of good syntax.  In short, which in itself is absurd since they defy all measurements, they are of, from and breathing Chaos. Whatever they were, are or will be is not good for us. Worst of all….

…they don’t care.

We are ants in their dark garden, to be ignored at best.

While, as the tropes page points out, Lovecraft made these gibbering monstrosities popular, they are, literally as old as time itself. Just scroll down to the Mythology and Religion link. It starts with the Judeo-Christian God, yes the G-Man and goes down from there. It may well be part of every mythic cycle, from Nothing to Everything, with the earlier iterations (such as the Chaos) giving birth to Chthonic beings which were personifications of basic natural concepts such as Sky or Earth and either supplanted or conquered by more refined entities who in turn, while still wild were more human like and represented the forces of nature either harnessed for or coexisting with more advanced concepts of civilization such as Love, Justice or the State.

Yet the lure of the older beings, the true originators, remain and part of that fascination is that they embody forces that we know exists but still can not comprehend (at least fully) such as the powers that create or destroy universes or what lays beyond our physical/scientific understanding of existence. That is why today, in spite or our scientific knowledge, and perhaps because of it, Eldritch Abominations surface in all manner of spec fiction as embodiments of Chaos versus Order or as a way to put humanity in perspective against the background of a truly titanic and ancient universe.

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Harmony of the Spheres

Yeah, something like that.

 

Tweet of the Day: Extra Credits: Harrasment

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Head full of ideas: music of the spheres, steampunk/dieselpunk, alternate history, retro future, League of Nations, Eldritch Abominations, Amazons, magitek and so much more. It all started last night when I borrowed a game book from my cousin at the end of our regular game session. He mentioned something about John Carter from Mars and that sent the old mental cogs for a spin. It could turn out to be nothing, a flash flood of ideas that sweeps by my neurons only to disappear as fast as it came or it could germinate for a long time in some dark corner of the mind until it comes at me nearly fully form and begging to be written.

If nothing else, it is a nice mental exercise on a gray Sunday afternoon.

When was the last time you had one of those, mental storms, I mean?

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