Welcome to the second of several Down From Ten Feedback shows. This one is episode ten, part two of the Dealing In series of feedback shows, where I and several friends answer your emails and talk about whatever comes up. This time, I’m joined by Metamor City and Down From Ten cast member Chris Lester, New York Times Bestseller Gail Carriger, and producer/actor/cartoonist Kitty Nic’Iaian. What do we talk about? An incomplete list, in no particular order:
Food
Pacing
Screenplays
Chekov Soulless
Racism and bigotry in the Victorian world
Douglas Adams
Thomas Mann
Cultural change throughout history The Death of the Author
Focault
Deride
Shakespeare
The Royal Shakespeare Company
POV characters
George R.R. Martin
Neal Stephenson
Shakespeare
Employing Symbolism in writing
Tee Morris
In the “should have done this a long time ago” department, I’m going to start offering up a semi-regular link salad digest. These are links to articles, books, lectures, and other cool stuff that I’ve run across in the course of my ill-fated attempt to grok the universe. They also tend to feed my creative churn, both in fine details (i.e. research) and in gross grist (i.e. ideas). Whether for that reason or because of the “cool stuff” factor, I hope you’ll find things you enjoy here.
This week’s Link Salad contains elements of science, sex, publishing market reports, book reviews, and is garnished with interesting cultural tidbits. Here you go: Continue reading ‘Link Salad, Oct 13 2010′
Today (well, technically tomorrow) is Columbus day, the day when residents of the New World used to celebrate the onset of colonization, and the formation of the dozens of nations that have peopled North and South America for the past half-millennium with their bronzed, clean-limbed, healthy living, civilized ways; the opening of the new frontier, the opportunity to bring civilization and salvation to the savages, and hew a new way of life out of the flesh of the previously un-touched wilderness.
It is now perhaps more popularly known as “white guilt” day, the day when people who are culturally descended from those early settlers and the people they conquered go into reflexive spasms of regret over the conquest of a paradise uncorrupted by the sins of European so-called “civilization. It brought environmental catastrophe, plagues, wanton slavery, and ugliness hereto unseen on the face of the earth. Continue reading ‘Columbus the Scumbag?’
May 19, 2010 is an interesting day in the history of the world, though its significance passed by unnoticed by most people – even people who watch for momentous events. But today, two thing happened that will, in their knock-on effects, change the world in ways every bit as profound as the discovery of DNA.
One of them comes to Scientific American belatedly (it was originally published on May 16) from the atom smasher at Fermilab, which may just have answered the fundamental question of existence: Why are we here?
I’m not talking metaphysics, I’m talking physics. There’s been a problem in fundamental physics that goes like this: Matter and Antimatter are both created out of the probabilistic churning of the quantum foam in the vacuum all the time – and then they annihilate one another. It’s this kind of probabilistic interaction that produced the Big Bang, but if matter and antimatter annihilate one another, then why should there be anything at all?
Well, after crunching a couple decades worth of data from Fermilab, it looks like occasionally, in special circumstances (like those that prevailed at the time of the Big Bang), the quantum foam produces about 1% more matter than antimatter, so when all the annihilation happens, there’s a residue.
Assuming that the data holds up, we now know with quite a lot of surety why we’re here: because we, and the rest of the universe, were in that one percent of matter which didn’t get annihilated.
But more important than that is the scientific paper today out of AAAS from the lab of Craig Venter, the man who invented shotgun sequencing, the method of DNA sequencing that is now the most widely used in the world. In a modest paper entitled CREATION OF A BACTERIAL CELL CONTROLLED BY A CHEMICALLY SYNTHESIZED GENOME, Venter and his team announced something that will change the world every bit as profoundly as the printing press once did: The creation of an artificial organism.
Let me reiterate: Humans have now created, from scratch (the genome from scratch, that is), a life form that can reproduce, metabolize, and respond to stimuli. An artificial, designed genome runs the show. The ability to do this is something we’ve been seeking for centuries, and now that it’s here the implications are astounding. We now have the ability to, for example, resurrect extinct species, create designer organisms to dispose of pollution or convert electricity from sunlight, and that’s only the very, very tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Remember this date. In twenty or thirty years, when nothing in the world is the same and never will be again, you’ll have Craig Venter to thank for it, and May 19 will be the day on which you remember that it was today (well, yesterday now), that the human race became the author of an entire biosphere, rather than simply the usurping editor of the one in which we arose.
Free content – particularly in the audio fiction space – suddenly seems a lot less of a perpetual free lunch than it did six months ago, and it’s got a lot of folks freaking out in my corner of the Internet. Providers are dropping like flies this year! Matthew Wayne Selznick and J.C. Hutchins have both very publicly withdrawn from the podcast fiction space, and for the best reason there is: Money.
[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]
The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”
Stopping in quickly during a break in my hectic production and writing schedules to drop a handful of links that have recently blown me away in one way or another.
Finally, the single most mind-blowing introduction to Chaos Theory I’ve seen or read. Goes into the history, the development, and the implications of the most radically disturbing area of mathematics ever to come around. See it here and prepare to be astounded.
Enjoy! And stay tuned in the next few days for new episodes!
Are the New Atheists Bad for Science?
By J. Daniel Sawyer
In an article on Beliefnet this week, Michael Ruse argues that the “new atheists†are a “bloody disaster.†He argues using a mixture of caricatures, complaints, and criticisms, so before I go into why I think the man is full of organic fertilizer on the broader issues, I will address the salient ones:
When writing a period piece, whether that period is past or present, getting your terminology right is essential to maintaining the illusion. It’s also one of the easiest things to miss on a revision. Lest you think the following rant is thoroughgoing self-righteousness, let me preemptively explain that it’s not. It’s actually hypocrisy. You see, in the story I recently sold to Steampod, for example, the alternate history it takes place in had a different name for the appliance we call a “freezer,” and yet there was an instance where I unconsciously reverted to my native tongue, as it were.
Often, fantasy and historical fiction falls prey to this far too easily, because we don’t often question where certain expressions in our language come from. For example, you wouldn’t want to describe a complete package as “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” if the story you’re writing takes place before the seventeenth century when the musket became widespread in Europe. The reason? “Lock, stock, and barrel” are the three major components of a musket, and all three together means that you have everything you need to assemble one.
This kind of thing can shatter the illusion that you work hard to create, as it did for me in Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers” during the sloppiest moment in the film. At the battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn commands a brigade of elf archers to “fire” on the enemy. I can’t emphasize this enough: nobody in the history of the world has ever fired an arrow. The notion of “fire” being synonymous with “activate” was nonsensical before the invention of the first ever fire-powered weapon, the cannon in the 13th century in China (not introduced into Europe until much later). Even so, archers were not commanded to “fire” until many generations after bows, arrows, ballistas, catapults, and crossbows ceased to be used in military combat. When commanding archers, the term is “loose” or, less frequently, “release,” “arrow,” or “trip” – NOT “fire.”
To further the historical literacy among fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction writers, I recommend bookmarking the phrase finder and using it frequently when writing and proofreading. A good etymological dictionary and slang dictionary wouldn’t hurt either.
As we grow and learn about responsibility and darkness in the world, we often lose the ability to play at life, at love, and to take the kinds of risks that children take for fun every day. It’s an interesting paradox, because as our world gets freer and more prosperous, more of the jobs available to us – indeed the jobs that are most exciting and profitable – require the ability to play as well as the ability to work diligently.
Losing the ability to play is one of the more tragic things that can happen to a person. It’s at the root of a lot of the unhappiness in the world I’ve seen, and (from personal observation) it comes in play heavily during quarter-life and midlife crises.
The TED video below talks about the evolving state of play with regards to play, learning, economic innovation, and human flourishing. It’s worth the 18 minutes. Trust me
Today, I bring you physicist Brian Cox discussing the Large Hadron Collider and what it means for our understanding of the universe. Chock full of wonder, delight, and beauty – join me in marveling at the magnificence of the universe, and the fact that we are able to understand it at all.
