Worldbuilding dates and times

One of the things that writers have to keep track of is details of characters and - when you're messing with multiple worlds or other factors - dates of events.

I've been working on a spreadsheet for Snug Ship, and thought you all might be interested in a glimpse of the spreadsheet I did while writing In Arcadia.  Lining up Earth time and Muinan time involved so many errors...

Story status, and the Line between Appropriation and Erasure

I'm currently still working on The Towers of the Moon, the small collection of short stories in the Trifold world (showing what happens on the trip to France in between Pyramids and Tangleways).

I am so not a short story writer.

By which I mean I have so far written a novelette (Two Wings) and am halfway through a novella (Forfeit).  Then there should be an actual short story (possibly called The Queen of Hades if I don't outright call it Ned's First Kiss).

I started thinking about stories set in France while in Paris in 2014, walking along the Seine getting a feel for the landscape and wondering what would France look like in a world where local gods 'Answered' their people, effectively protecting and preserving many cultures that have been erased in our world?  Would it be steampunk Asterix and Obelix?

Okay, I never seriously considered steampunk Asterix and Obelix, but I would pay to see some concept art.

In the end, I chose for the gods of France to not Answer.  France instead was invaded - briefly by Rome, and then the people of the "Green Aesir" (which is what I've been calling the Germanic gods who are very very similar to the Nordic gods) - and later by the Cour d'lune, which are "sort of low gravity Fae dragon people", and don't call themselves gods at all.

Basically, I erased both France's true past, and her early cultural history, and replaced it with an invention of my own.

Writing the Trifold series - any alt-myth series - requires many decisions regarding appropriation and erasure.  I've been thinking this over lately after reading numerous thoughtful essays about JK Rowling's "History of Magic in Northern America", which appears to have involved conflation of multiple different traditions and beliefs.  The essays ask (or state an opinion on) whether it is ever okay to 'mine' other cultures for their beliefs in order to write fantasy.

Now I'm Swedish on my father's side, and Swedish/Danish/Scotch/French/English on my mother's side.  But mainly Australian.  I would not feel at all comfortable embarking on a series that used Australian Aboriginal cultures and beliefs as a basis - the closest I've come to that was a short story, Blue, that positioned the POV character as an outsider who is "welcomed to country" (a tradition that has grown up in Australia to acknowledge that we occupy a land stolen from its peoples).

But while I am not very French, my great-grandfather was.  Does that make France 'open season' for me?  I was born in Sweden: is Loki mine?  If a people runs around invading other countries and attempting to imprint its culture onto the locals (as Rome did), does that make their culture mine?  I'm using the Latin-based alphabet to write this blog, after all.  Half my language is based on Rome's.

And what of Hades?  Can I mine Greek myths, since Rome's gods apparently were rather strongly copied from Greek gods, just with judicious tweaks and renaming?  If I've had Rome's gods Answer, does that mean they're really the Hellenic gods?  And who gets to play in the traditions of Egypt, whose cultural disconnect was so complete that the language was lost - and yet Egypt is surely populated with the descendents of the people of Kemet.

At one point when thinking this through during the drafting of Pyramids I started wondering whether an alt-world/alt-myth series was really a good idea.  Or, at the least, whether I should confine the story very strictly to Sweden and England.  But that's a different form of erasure.  How could I start with our world, with its thousands of cultures, and only ever mention two?  That seemed rather the worse route to take.

The end result is a story that is primarily focused around cultures that I have some connection to, choosing to include cultures that have been part of the 'primary interchange' in Europe (eg. the Hellenes) while acknowledging that there is so much more world out there, and providing an outline of its shape.

This involves a heap of extra research.

The Trifold version of North America, for example, is called Stomruria (at least by the Norse, and the people who were first told about the place by the Norse).  For a book that does not mention that continent at all, I spent a lot of time researching First Nation tribal boundaries and beliefs, all because I wanted to acknowledge the place existed, and give a tiny glimpse of that vast continent by the inclusion of a Wabanaki fencing master (Wabanaki being a country in north-eastern Stomruria).

I don't intend for my characters to visit Stomruria at all in the series, but to write in this world at a point where all the continents are known and interacting with each other, I had to have some idea whether Stomrurian gods had Answered, which of them had Answered, what impact that had had on tribal boundaries, what those boundaries would be after a millenia or so, and what they would call themselves.

There isn't a way to get an alt world 'right'.  Not being completely, immensely, insultingly wrong involves much side-reading.  But I now know (or have at least read - my memory sucks) the names of many African kingdoms that I never knew existed.  I know which side of a continent 'Thunderbird' belongs to.  I now know about the Lady of Yue and her influence on the art of the sword.

Trying not to be insultingly wrong is a reward in itself.

'Truly alien' aliens

One of the things I very commonly come across in SFF discussion is someone saying that the aliens/werewolves/angels/other things are 'truly alien' or 'look and behave just like humans', where one is a compliment and the other criticism.

Every time I come across this sort of thing, I stumble.  Not because I don't get what they're saying, but I wonder what boundaries they're intending to draw.

What makes an alien 'alien'?  While 'does not look human' is an obvious thing, here's my cat Cinnamon.  She doesn't look particularly human either.  Does that make her 'alien'?

Cinnamon and I are not much alike. She likes racing madly up and down corridors, scratching things, and has a magnificent twitch reflex should a string move suspiciously anywhere in her field of view.  She eats stuff that would make me vomit.  She has no command of English, though she's a rather verbal cat, and won't hesitate to meow loudly until her humans try to guess what she wants.  She isn't into computer games or reading.

And yet Cinnamon and I and thousands of other creatures are very alike.  Earth itself is full of things not so very unlike Cinnamon, and yet all theoretically different from each other.  All of them share a drive to reproduce (or, well, we wouldn't know about their species at all).  All seek food of some sort, and an ideal environment.  The more complex ones generally exhibit fear, aggression, curiosity, play and something that at least appears to humans as affection.  I don't think anyone is arguing that 'aliens' could not exhibit these qualities.

But these are animals, and not at the intelligence level of the type of alien that SFF readers are talking about – a being that would be able to communicate effectively with humans if given access to language lessons and whatever mechanical aids might be necessary, while remaining 'truly alien'.

I think we can effectively divide aliens into 'physically similar to humans' and 'have a strong dissimilarity to humans'.  Cat-ancestry people, for instance, might claw stuff and have a tendency to pounce, but they're still mammals, with live births, milk feeding, and the food-in/poop-out process.  Then you have, say, the 'piggies' from Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead (where reproduction is…different from the standard mammalian process) but otherwise these are creatures that exhibit a similar range of drives and emotions to humans.  Thirdly the 'completely different' – living rocks, or energy beings that have little to no concept of many human physical experiences – but could still presumably produce fear, aggression, curiosity, play, affection.  No-one is arguing that 'truly alien' aliens must not have emotion, or biological imperatives.  If you don't go in for large physical differences, a lot of what people point to as 'alien' seems to be "non-Western culture" – and if you got into the alien's POV, they would read very much as humans of a different culture.

Different cultures are very interesting!  Altered experiences caused by physical differences are also very interesting!  But surely we're not arguing that beings with cultural and physical differences are intrinsically non-human.

Cognative differences takes us into more complex territory.  Humans have cognative differences too, and I'm sure no-one who is talking about "alien aliens" means to say that non-neurotypical humans are 'alien'.  Where does the line get drawn?  We have humans with synesthesia.  We've seen robots depicted with depression, or aliens who in theory have no concept of lying, or don't understand death or love or friendship.  And, to be honest, most of this latter type of 'alien' reads as extrapolated concepts to me, constructed to create a plot.  I am vastly, vastly more inclined to believe that if we somehow overcome the echoing hollows of space and stumble across a few intelligent alien species…we'll get a bunch of creatures that look an awful lot like Earth creatures – and probably act like them as well.  Aliens because 'not from here', and with some physical differences, and big cultural differences, and not 'truly alien aliens' at all.

What do you all think?  If we started planet-hopping, would you be all that surprised to find mammals?  Cats?  Bipeds with roguish grins, a taste for scotch, and a nice line in leather jackets?  At what point do you throw up your hands and cry: "These aliens may as well be human!"?

Rule Blinkers

Every so often I run across a critique of someone's writing slating the piece for daring to begin sentences with conjunctions (and, but, etc).  And I look at my novels, proudly flourishing buts in every direction, shrug my shoulders, and go on exactly as before.

I write for clarity.  For pace.  For impact.  I will use sentence fragments.  I will gaily lavish any number of adverbs.  I will spit and hiss, answer, whisper, fill the air with said-bookisms.

So long as it works.

On every writing site or forum I've come across different lists of 'rules' - many of them incorrect (look at a few language usage texts and you'll see there's no rule against beginning sentences with 'and' or 'but').  Once you have a basic understanding of the tools you're using to express yourself, it's well worth checking 'received wisdom': too often it doesn't ring true.

Edit to remove ambiguity, to add emotional impact.  Make sure the words flow.  Cut the extraneous.  But don't clunk up your prose keeping to an arbitrary list of what some person on the internet thinks is 'good' writing.