SFF Seed: Pig Soldiers

What are Pig Soldiers?

I was reading an article on the listverse yesterday and came across an interesting concept by the abductee and alleged prophet Eduard Meier about future calamities. He talks about a lot the standard stuff, you can see it all here, but one particular prediction stood out to me- “a human and pig hybrid fighting machine that has no conscious and will cause havoc on the world” (that’s a quote from the Listverse author, I can’t find any mention of pig soldiers in Meier’s prophecies).

I’m not sure if he meant “conscience” instead of “conscious” there, but I’m going with “conscience” for this post since a non-conscious solider is really just a robot, which is a drone, which isn’t SciFi enough for me.

I instantly thought first of those pigs from Angry Birds with the army helmets. But what we’re talking about here is something very dark and directly born from the destructive urges of humanity. We’re all aware that it’s possible for ordinary soldiers to perform acts of no conscience, read this book called None of Us Were Like This Before if you’re interested in finding out how “a group of ordinary soldiers, ill trained for the responsibilities foisted upon them, descended into the degradation of abuse” (from the book’s site).

The men described in that book do have conscience, but the culture they were in convinced them to ignore it. Then they got home and now their actions weigh very, very heavily on them, causing at least one to commit suicide.

This culture that manages to manipulate our fighting men and women into committing inhuman acts would obviously prefer a soldier that didn’t have human traits at all- Meier’s Pig Soldiers.

Imagine a man or woman totally devoid of conscience- essentially like a brutally intelligent animal. Other beings would be only important to them for their uses. They would be able to carry on a conversation, but by their facial expressions (or lack thereof) and mannerisms you can tell they are uninterested in you. They make eye contact only fleetingly, and only to cater to human social interaction. They are all psychopaths but not one of them is crazy. And they look human.

What makes it a good novum?

Everything makes this a good novum. The protagonist could first be exposed to Pig Soldiers via positive-spin propaganda, until a chance discovery shows that not all is right with these specially trained members of the Armed Forces. Alternately the protagonist could be in the military, come across Pig Soldiers in the field performing some horrid but necessary atrocity, and begin investigating. Or, of course, the protagonist could be the victim of an attack by a squad of Pig Soldiers and experience their fundamental lack of empathy first-hand.

Having the reader question what rights are allowed a creature that is mostly human but created by someone else for the express purpose of transgressing the basic societal contract would be very thought-provoking. The Pig Soldiers as characters would have hopes, fears, dreams and personalities, but every one of them with a fundamentally unapologetic conviction to self-satisfaction. Imagine them saying, “I was created to find the enemy, torture him to extract information, then kill him. I know that such acts falls under the definition of ‘wrong’ in most world governments, but my squad was operating outside of any government and will not be held accountable to laws and regulations. I understand not to commit such acts in the civilian population due to the consequences thereof.”

We typically consider any human who commits torture or murder to be deviant or broken, even in light of the story told in the book I mention above. Despite the fact they were created to lack conscience, would humans be able to overcome the false-consensus effect and really see that Pig Soldiers are only for killing? Would that make it okay to exterminate them? Is a small DNA difference is enough to label someone as non-human and thus not protected by human law?

A media-driven fear of the Pig Soldiers would work well. A band of them led by a conscience-free commander would be a frightening thing indeed. There would be no limit to the atrocities they would commit in the name of their own self-preservation, and if they found that engaging in terrorism was an effective method to advance their agenda, no one on the same continent as them would feel safe.

The first part of a story could be the protagonist living in abject fear of Pig Soldiers. Then, the protagonist meets them, learns their stories, who they are and why. Finally, there is the choice to make about them- does the protagonist help the Pig Soldiers operate in human society or tell everyone that there is no place on earth for beings who kill without conscience?

SFF Seed: Telepresence

What is Telepresence?

With the preponderance of video and audio recording devices and even satellites looking down from above, it wouldn’t require much more infrastructure to allow anyone to be telepresent anywhere that is so equipped. You could simply log on to a location and check it out to your heart’s content via virtual reality without actually being there or being seen. This is not just looking at pictures on your computer, it’s being fully immersed via virtual reality with images and sounds so well-resolved that it’s indistinguishable from standing there in the meat.

Public events, retail locations, art galleries and other places where a physical presence is important or useful would have identical real-world and virtual-world locations. In the real world you would wear AR googles (Google Glass-like device) to provide all of the extra internet-based features normally available in the virtual world, but basically there is little need to be anywhere in the flesh if visual and auditory interaction is all you are after.

What makes it a good novum?

It gets more interesting than just being able to check out what’s new at Old Navy from the comfort of your couch. When traversing the real world, your telepresence doesn’t have to be moored to the physical body.

Imagine looking for a restaurant to eat in an unfamiliar part of your city. Instead of walking blocks, you open a window in the corner of your vision and soar out over the city, seeking restaurant iconography. You can see each one in real-time, inspect waiters, see how noisy it is, what the food looks like. This is all compiled by an array of visual sensors in the restaurant that render the three-dimensional environment for your perusal. Only restaurants who install the visual sensors are available virtually, but assume the cost is on par with a decent interior decor. Costly, but a reasonable investment.

Now imagine commuting. Instead of the dull interior of your car, bus, or train, the city or countryside is completely visible. Instead of waiting for the next subway stop to appear out of the darkness, you would be able to see the street above you and the station down the tunnel. Switching to the exterior sensors on the train and in the tunnel, you could “delete” the train entirely and just watch the tunnel zoom past.

Imagine being in a high-rise building. It would be up to you to be in the room or floating above the city. All of the skyscrapers around you would be fully interactive, allowing you to zoom in on the lobbies or remove them completely to better enjoy the view.

I’m currently working on a story that stars a telepresence hacker. If there were wide reliance on telepresent technology, humanity as a whole would be subject to false events. The facts as seen by the millions of telepresent observers would likely overrule the testimony of the handful who were there in real life. To hide or create something like a terrorist attack solely in the virtual realms is possible.

There is also the privacy issue. Some folks probably don’t want to be seen on certain streets or in certain stores, so there would be a large market in masks, both sensor-baffling physical masks in addition to masks that only appeared in the virtual world. Every young person would grow up defining their own privacy and generating as many personas as they saw fit- one for home, one for clubs, one for their burgeoning artistic career, one for school, etc.

SFF Seed: Crevice World

What’s a Crevice World?

A crevice world was a life-bearing planet that was sundered in some dramatic fashion, and became tidally locked, so now life only exists below the surface where solar radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere. The bottom is filled with mineral-rich seas and rivers.

The cliffs reaching down into the crust of the planet would be covered with hardy plants and other sessile organisms who collect the sunlight that filters down through the atmosphere. Networks of cave complexes harbor ecosystems based on the plant life at their entrances. Closest to the surface would be brightly colored hardscrabble plants able to reflect most of the unending solar radiation. In the mid-levels large verdant bushes and trees push out into the empty central space. Here some avian creatures flit from branch to branch. Deeper down the plants are dark in color to absorb as much of the light as possible, and the dense air allows for medusae to float through the ether and hard-shelled arthropods to scuttle around. The sea itself would be very hot as it’s several miles down. Frilly and fast-moving invertebrates dominate in the water.

From orbit it would look a lot like a desert planet with long green cracks running across it. The crevices start white at the upper lifeless boundaries, then become yellow with the first desert-like plants, then green and finally bluish black at the bottom.

What makes it a good novum?

The first idea is of course the Crevice World native. It would be too hard to explain the evolution of humans in such a place, so just imagine a extraplanetary colony that forgot its technology.

I can imagine tribal people living in the caves of the mid-ranges of the crevice world. The cliffs might look like this or this or this (but more bottomless). There could be mythology about the demons who live in the deeplands that will steal your breath (because of the gravity and poisonous gas vents) and the archons who live above and whose gaze can burn a man alive (because of the heat).

Or instead of a tribal society there could also be a high-tech sortie mission looking for something such as an artifact or crashed ship somewhere on the non-crevice part of the planet, a particular species of life, or just a scientific survey.

What would make this a fun story would be to have the characters traveling to the lower depths of the crevice and the upper boundaries (also it would be fun to go to the daylight terminus but this post is about the crevices, not the tidal lock). And of course figuring out how to fly or glide across the width of the crevice.

If the planet were well-populated there would like be some sort of class distinctions based on who gets to live closest to the sweet spot on the cliffs and not too low or too high. Industry would be based on mining, farming, construction, and food production.

Also environmental concerns would be paramount due to the fragility of the living spaces. There could be a particular species that is vital to humans continuing to live comfortably on the crevice world that is threatened by natural or human causes. Maybe it’s the only type of tree that’s strong enough to support human construction, maybe it’s a type of bird that provides the eggs that are a central portion of human diet, or maybe it’s an organism from the deep sea that has begun encroaching on the lower plant levels and is destroying the ecosystem.

The Next Big Thing

With some of my valiant MFA cohort members I’m participating in a blog chain called The Next Big Thing, where we blog about our upcoming works and give a shout-out to our fellow writers.

What is your working title of your book (or story)?

Pilot

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Primarily from talking to my father, who is a former Air Force pilot. He was once pontificating on what it might be like for a person to undergo cybernetic enhancement to become totally integrated with their plane. I read a ton about cybernetics, so I took a stab and the thing kept growing.

What genre does your book fall under?

Near-future Science Fiction, but it also has some thriller and espionage elements.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The main character, Ren the pilot, would be best played by a young mixed race or black actor like Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale from the Wire). Karen, Ren’s friend and savior should be a tough white actress like Kristanna Lokken or Famke Janssen, though a younger and conventionally cute (instead of Hollywood hot) actress would be best. Fred, the complication, would be best played by a toned-down Sam Rockwell or a suave nerd like DJ Qualls.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A world-class hacker is captured in Mexico and must rely on his smuggler girlfriend and bionic pilot classmate to find safety again.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Self-published.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I first got the idea in 2010, and I’ve been writing standalone short stories about the characters since then. I think the first manuscript is still about a year out.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Snow Crash by Neal Stevenson and Neuromancer by William Gibson, though being my first book it probably won’t be quite as epic as those two.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My father, my fascination with the military, the growing developments in transhumanism in our society, the slow erosion of (or desire for) privacy, how our world gets more and more non-local every day, and finally the interaction and history between Mexico and America across the California border.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’ve developed an in-depth and action packed world where technology soaks every aspect of life. Anything and everything is recorded, stored, and transmitted to the internet. Our heroes each have a different way of breaking the rules and getting technology to work for them, often in unconventional ways.

Next week, stay tuned for posts from these talented, up-and-coming writers:

Wendy Sterndale writes articles, essays, stories and memoir. You’ll find her articles at the intersection of meditation, science and spirituality. Her stories are very loosely based on her former life working in an office. She also facilitates memoir-writing workshops because she loves listening to and supporting others as they write about their personal experiences. Ms. Sterndale lives just north of San Francisco, and takes advantage of the writer’s community throughout the SF Bay Area. She will be posting on her website http://www.wendysterndale.com/blog.html about her upcoming novel Corporate FIST.

Mansa Gills writes about a wide range of subject matters using multiple different forms of creative expression. He’s primarily a fiction writer, but I am also an essayist and contributing blogger for www.mixologicity.com. Mansa will be posting about his upcoming short story collection, Heaven’s Messengers.

SFF Seed: GM Bacterial Fermenters

What’s a GM Bacterial Fermenter?

Currently, genetically modified bacteria produce a wide array of substances, the most popular probably being the insulin that diabetics inject under their skin. Basically a specific strain of bacteria is modified to secrete insulin, then grown in a large vat. Various procedures are then used to purify the insulin for medical use. This link has some good images of how that is done, and shows that giant stainless steel vessel, which is what the “consumer” would see.

So what does it mean to be able to produce any protein in a large steel vessel? Well, proteins, a.k.a. enzymes, are tiny molecular machines that make things happen. There are other chemicals that help with communication and structural support, but for the most part it’s proteins that make any energetic reaction occur, from digestion to movement. So it’s quite possible to engineer bacteria that produce proteins for any imaginable energetic reaction.

How could it be a good novum?

Imagine that the steel vessels in the link above are ubiquitous, stylized, colorful, and each one had a different function.

Some might be large and situated near a garbage dump (or some junkspace!), and people would fill them with waste. The bacteria within would produce a set of enzymes that would process the trash into useful materials. Plastics would become oils and gases, electronics would become deposits of gold and copper on the bottom of the vessel, organics would supply heat and food for the fermenting bacteria. This, of course, comes with a host of problems, like what would happen if a hardy strain “escaped” the vessel and started growing in random places, such as a nearby hospital, wreaking havoc on the plastics and electronics that should be kept intact. There’s also the option of clandestine disposal of bodies. And, of course, a specific nutrients would be needed for the operation of the vessel, causing all sorts of possible drama.

Another option is the constructive vessel, rather than a destructive. Imagine a low-income housing complex with a few massive vessels in the front lobby. Everyone who’s already spent their government assistance checks can turn the spout to pour out some nutritious if disgusting bacteria-produced “food”. The three different vessels all produce a different type- labeled Chili (colored red), Chicken Soup (colored yellowish brown) and Nutripaste (gray). Next to the “food” vessel is the water vessel, which is fed by all of the sewage and wastewater from the building. The water comes out lukewarm and a little murky, but is totally parasite-free. On the flip side are high-end vessel foods. Anyone who’s ecoconscious only eats vessel-grown meat, because no animals are involved.

And it goes on, imagine vessels that produce raw materials using only constituent atoms, so you could use bacterial smelters for mining or bacterial kilns for brick. Or have 3d printers and fermentation vessels in concert, with the bacteria producing different types of materials, on-demand, that are fed into the printing/ assembly device. Or, simply, the vessel produces smoke-free heat from any object that could normally be burned

There could be a host of complications for any characters. Your character could be working on a new bacterial strain that produces a protein capable of something unheard of (like nuclear fusion, teleportation, something else fun and/or world changing), and he or she must protect their discovery.

SFF Seed: Junkspace

This is the first in a series of posts describing a setting, character, or plot point that could be used as the central novum in a Science Fiction and/or Fantasy story.

What’s Junkspace?

I first heard the term “Junkspace” as the title of Rem Koolhass’ essay on “the new flamboyant, flexible, forgettable face of architecture” here. The perspective of that image on the front page there is suggestive of looking up into a space filled with trash, which is never how I look at a space filled with trash, I always look down into garbage cans, down into the dump, down into the landfill.

So what does it mean to look up at trash? It means the trash pile is bigger than you, which is stressful to think about. It means you are somewhere in the world where trash doesn’t disappear forever in the quiet early morning hours. Somewhere like here, here, or here.

How could it be a good novum?

Obviously this would make for a fun environmental cataclysm, but right now most folks who live in places without a curbside pickup culture prefer to burn as much refuse as possible, living in a cloud of soot rather than a pile of garbage. So it’s not very believable for the whole world to be buried under trash.

I think this makes a good novum for the scavenger culture that would develop around futuristic levels of waste. Imagine another Katrina hits New Orleans and there just isn’t enough money to fix the levies. After 5 or 10 years the population is 10% of what it was. International corps that already do a lot of business on the Gulf buy up masses of land. They park their old ships, pile written-off shipping containers, and charge the industries of the world to dump their unburnables. The destitute crawl over everything, seeking out precious metals, recyclable plastics, and intact mechanical and electrical components. Skyscrapers leer out of piles of debris that clog their lower stories. Whole neighborhoods are buried, the defunct dwellings serving to prop up the trash piles. The story could follow a single scavenging child, a good or bad adult who runs a team of scavengers, or an authority figure helpless to stop the practice. Exciting plots could involve trash avalanches/ collapsing buildings, the discovery of a lost dangerous or trackable piece of technology, and of course just standard conflict between scavengers, environmentalists, the local government and the corporations that own the land.

Writing Tips #8- Twyla Tharp

As I continue to write my novel, I’m still reading Twyla Tharp for inspiration.  Her basic message seems to be that to be a successful artist, you have to produce constantly.  I’m still judging her about the whole stealing work thing, and she contradicts herself in other ways, but basically I agree with most of it.

Same format below: bold entries I’m going to abide by, crossed out entries will be ignored.  And the regular ones are just poignant.

 

The best writers are well-read people.  They have the richest appreciation of words, the biggest vocabularies, the keenest ear for language.  They also know their grammar.  Words and language are their tools, and they have learned how to use them.

-Page 163

You’ve heard the phrase “Practice makes perfect?”  Not true.  “Perfect practice makes perfect.”

-Page 165

You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work.  But that’s a moot point.  The Zen master cleans his own studio.  So should you.

-Page 166

Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise.  Too many people practice that they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.

-Page 167

It is that perfect moment of equipoise between knowing it all and knowing nothing that Hemingway was straining for when he said, “The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”  You cannot manufacture inexperience, but you can maintain it and protect what you have.

In A Book of Fire Rings, the sixteenth-centure Japanese swordfighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.”  Warriors know they to enlarge their arsenal of skills in order to avoid becoming predictable to their adversaries.

-Page 168

Writing Tips #7- Twyla Tharp

I believe that every work of art needs a spine- an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence.  It doesn’t have to apparent to the audience.  But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.

-Page 144

In the end, whether they see it is not part of the deal I’ve made with the audience.  The spine is my little secret.  It keeps me on message, but is not the message itself.

-Page 146

Another part of the spine would be to figure out how the original has been changed and how it has profited from the journey.  If innocence is still intact, the piece is a comedy.  If its innocence is lost and it hasn’t profited from the experience, the piece is a tragedy.

-Page 151

What gives such impact is that it’s a surprise.  We ask ourselves “Why didn’t I see that?”  We didn’t see it because Keaton didn’t give us time to think about it.  He was getting on with it, not waiting.

-Page 154

Writing tips #6 – Twyla Tharp

Back in action

A plan is like scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.

-page 119

There’s an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you’re home free when you haven’t even walked out the door yet.

-page 123

Another trap is the belief that everything has to be perfect before you can take the next step.

-page 124

I should have heeded the CEO who told me, “You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.”

-page 128

When you set up to work, pick a fight with your rituals. Ask yourself why you need this ritual, what solace and protection does it bring, what state of mind does it create, what good does it produce.

-page 134

Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you’re generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It’s like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune.

-page 136

Writing Tips #5- Elmore Leonard and Anne Enright

Tips!  I’m going to ignore the crossed-out and memorize the emboldened.

Elmore Leonard

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But “said” is far less intrusive than “grumbled”, “gasped”, “cautioned”, “lied”. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated” and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” … he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.

5. Keep your exclamation points ­under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose”. This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apos­trophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”, what do the “Ameri­can and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things, unless you’re ­Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

Anne Enright

1. The first 12 years are the worst.

2. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4. Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.

6. Try to be accurate about stuff.

7. Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8. You can also do all that with whiskey.

9. Have fun.

10. Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not ­counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

 

I stole the above tips from the following guardian article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one