TIME TRAVEL

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Fictional Time Travel is so universal that every SF writer feels obliged to write a Time Travel story. “Our heroine’s time machine leaves 2013 Chicago and emerges in . . .” 1913 Chicago, future Chicago, Jurassic Chicago, Native American Chicago; etc. What wonderful possibilities! Unfortunately, Time Travel carries the worst scientific flaws of any major SF idea.

We live in an Einsteinian universe. Newton’s laws also work pretty well. Time Travel requires a Ptolemaic, geocentric universe, of which this ain’t one.

If you travel in Time from a particular spatial location, you should emerge in that same location: Right? As the Earth rotates, Chicago is rolling eastward at 1600 km/hr. In the next second, your position will separate from your original by over 400 meters. Five minutes in Time is over 130 kilometers in space. The spinning Earth just won’t hold still!

Unless you repeal Conservation of Momentum, when you arrive with a twelve clock-hours difference than the time of day you left, you’ll exit onto an Earth in which everything on the rotational counter-side will be slamming into you at 3200 km/hr.

Just make sure that you travel exactly multiples of one day. Chicago will have rotated to the same spot . . . except that the Earth is revolving around the Sun at 30 km/sec more. Five minutes is almost 9000 km away. Even a quick jaunt leaves you breathing vacuum.

Don’t forget the Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way’s core (Add hundreds of km/hr more.) and the motion of the galaxy relative to the space-time continuum. Unless your time machine is also a sealed space craft, you won’t survive to appreciate just how much airless space the universe contains.

What about reentry? When you reach a new space-time locus, will you simply push the air aside as you expand from an infinitesimally small point? That would produce a whopper of a thunderclap. Arriving secretly would be impossible. If your machine were too flimsy, the rebounding shock wave would crush it.

Will you and the local molecules simply become one? Writers agree that arriving inside a solid, regardless of method, would be a poor survival idea. With untold trillions of molecules present, some of yours would arrive inside other molecules. You might blow up like a balloon, or simply blow up. If your atomic nuclei appeared in the same space as local atomic nuclei, and the strong nuclear force would fuse them, with fatal radiation and energy release. Nuclei that were close, but not close enough, would be repelled at particle-collider speeds. You’d create thousands of fast particles that would shred your cells like a radioactive shotgun blast.

We don’t want to give up Time Travel, but what can be done? You can always Ignore It. Your readers are also geocentric. They won’t notice that you can’t travel from now-Chicago to then-Chicago without cheating on the universe’s rules. Have fun.

That’s a solution? We’re Science fiction purists. There has to be a better way. More next time.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Live With It

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

In the case of faster-than-light travel, we’re stuck with Ignore It or Unexplained Science. It’s possible to Live With It. If you can’t go faster than light, go slower than light. We can add Bussard Ram Jets or light sails, gradually accelerating to a useful fraction of light-speed. We won’t even try for trans-light speed, heading outward at a relative crawl. That’ll require decades or centuries of travel. That could work, but those solutions arrive with their own new problems.

We’ll need a “generation” ship even for the close stars. Youthful astronauts launch for Proxima Centauri; their grandchildren arrive to send back data. That involves maintaining a closed ecosystem for decades and shielding passengers and plants from a universe awash with cosmic rays. Otherwise, Generation 1 dies from lack of oxygen or fails to reproduce after being sterilized. Everybody dies of cancer, or the crew can’t control the ship because of accumulated brain damage. Social problems aboard would be huge.

A well-shielded craft would solve some problems, but its mass would reduce it to even slower crawl-speed, no matter what was pushing it. The crew would go from “generation” to generations. Could we maintain a viable social system and a closed ecosystem that long? I doubt it.

A round trip? You’re kidding, right? Slower-than-light flights are all one-way. Earth wouldn’t be your Earth anymore if you ever returned. The big problems rise from keeping a crew awake for an incredibly long time. So, put ‘em to sleep. We don’t have “cold sleep” or suspended animation for humans, but those are the kind of reasonable future developments that Science Fiction thrives on. Don’t wake up the crew, unless you can put them back to sleep. Machines don’t have to worry about century-long flights. Let a super-computer oversee all the sleepers. We could call him “Hal.”

Maybe you could wake the crew periodically. That leads to social complications. What if something goes wrong with the rotation? What if an active crew member goes bonkers?

You’ll need a ship that cosmic rays can’t reach the crew or the frozen passengers. A shaped asteroid would be the logical vessel. You’d have to postulate controlled fusion for energy, a perfectly recycling closed ecosystem, frozen sleep, and solutions to a myriad of social problems, but those are difficult. Trans-light speeds are impossible.

With so many scientific mountains to climb, why would we go there in the first place? Maybe we have to. Has the Earth become uninhabitable? Is the Sun about to explode? Have aliens driven us from our home? The writer can shine with new ideas there. Maybe we just want to go to the stars. Could interstellar travel become a religious quest? Could a star trip become the ultimate “high” for the enormously rich? Perhaps, for certain pre-disposed humans, the stars will become the ultimate Mt. Everest. Each new reason is the parent of another story.

Past writers have found a dozen exits bypassing the “No FTL” roadblock. Try out a few yourself.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

IGNORE IT

Sci-Fi Deak Style
by John Deakins

Nothing goes faster than light; no matter in our universe can reach light-speed. We can’t get around that fact. First, there’s presently no easy way to accelerate to anywhere close to light speed. To leave Earth requires roughly 11,000 m/s. Our fastest spacecraft might have reached 20,000 m/s. The speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. We’re not even close (.7%). At conventional rocket velocities, the nearest star is over sixty thousand years away. No one is going to survive even the shortest interstellar trip using current technology.

We are Science Fiction! We have to go to the stars! For that, we need trans-light speeds. The first approach we must be Ignore It. An FTL ship takes off from Earth, and after plot-development (days; weeks) reaches Proxima Centauri. Or Hans Solo zooms the Millennium Falcon toward Cloud City. No one asks how his FTL drive works.

Many readers are completely unfamiliar with interstellar distances. They have a feeling that if you go fast enough, you’ll get there in a reasonable time. The trouble is that you can’t go fast enough. The closest star is over four years away at light speed. We don’t produce anything even close to light speed. We’d have trouble keeping interest in a voyage lasting even four years, and no one is projecting any planets orbiting Proxima Centauri. Every reasonable solar system is much farther. A thousand-year star voyage is almost beyond fiction. It rapidly drops off into silly science contrivance. Ignore It burns out its batteries trying to fix too many scientific contradictions. Nevertheless, Ignore It may be the only solution. Hopefully, our plotting will be so good that readership won’t notice when we travel at speeds that simply aren’t possible, never mind the rest of the impossibilities involved.

The second approach is Unexplained Science. No one has to explain how a “warp drive” works on Star Trek; they only have to name it. Some works hint at “wormholes” or “hyper space,” but the smart author will slide around the hard science. If you find a golden egg in your basket, don’t be dumb enough to ask how it arrived. If you postulate a ship with FTL drive, don’t be dumb enough to tinker with explanations. Unfortunately, that makes Unexplained Science just a subset of Ignore It.

How do we make this all work? Ignore It works well in Space Opera. (Have you ever wondered why ships that have anti-gravity and FTL drives still need fuel?) Let’s leave the “how” of FTL and impossible speeds entirely alone and concentrate on the action and the human interplay. Throw in a little Unexplained Science if you think the audience is getting restless.

Limit your FTL Unexplained Science to names only, hopefully a single pseudo-science title: maybe Space-time Folding or Worm-hole generator. Otherwise, you’ll end up looking like the Hollywood pimps are running you, too. (That would make you a . . . Never mind.)

There is another way out, but not this week.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Is Truth Stranger than Fiction?

by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

It's been said often enough to become cliché: truth is stranger than fiction. But when we write about aliens and magic and strange creatures from beyond the abyss, it's sometimes easy to doubt that. Of course, fiction has to follow an internal story-logic in a way real life doesn't, but surely the real world – this boring, everyday world where we go to school and pay our bills and trudge along the same streets day in and day out – doesn't have a patch on what we can come up with in our flights of imagination.

The human imagination is a wonderful, expansive, glorious thing. I mean no insult to it at all when I say that I respectfully disagree with the notion that we can come up with things stranger than the universe already has. What is imagination, after all, but another way to look at the world around us? A way to reshape the world, to draw one thing out of focus so we can get a different, better view on something else? And that world is full of bizarre marvels.

When I'm looking for ideas for a story, one of the first things I do is look to nature. It's probably obvious that I did that for my story "Convergent Motion," which takes place among sea slugs at the bottom of the sea. (And all the weirdest bits, except the starting conceit of bodiless spirits, come straight from fact.) But a story doesn't have to be set among hydrothermal vents to draw on the strangeness of the world. Speculative fiction explores the corners of the universe, and the what-ifs that might live there. That can mean the edges of the galaxy, or your own backyard; it can mean the crushing depths of the sea, or the overlooked cracks in the sidewalk. Writers and artists are among the people who stop, and look closer, and look again. We study, and we dream, and then we transform what we've studied into what we've dreamed about.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the job of speculative fiction (or any fiction) is simply to talk about the strange bits of the world exactly as they are. That wouldn't be much speculation, for one thing, but more importantly it wouldn't be much fiction. One of the important jobs of fiction, in my opinion, is to take something outside the reader – whether it's the bottom of the sea or the thoughts in their next-door neighbor's head – and make that something seem close and comprehensible and important. Speculative fiction tries to look to farther shores and wider vistas, but the principle is the same.

Truth is stranger than fiction? All right, sure. But that's the beauty of it. Because fiction arises from truth, and opens a window onto it; that's the whole point of speculation.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Living in the Moment

by Laura Hardgrave

I don’t care what anyone says—writing awesome, short speculative fiction stories is hard. Writing short fiction is a challenge in itself, but when you add in that lonesome planet out in the middle of nowhere, that new tech that needs thorough descriptions, or that cool fantasy race that popped into your dreams one night that’s when the real fun begins. Every word in a short story must be carefully crafted and have a purpose. If there’s no purpose for a line of dialog or that interesting description, both are best left on the chopping block. That’s tough when you’re describing things no one’s ever read about.

That’s also one of the reasons why science fiction and fantasy short stories are so fun to write (and read!). That challenge kind of calls to us and chants an eerie tune, daring us to fully flesh out new worlds, characters, plots, conflicts, emotions, and deeper, resonating meanings that shine in as little words as possible. We have to be extremely delicate when choosing what we say and how we say it. It’s all in the details. When readers are able to read a paragraph and get a true sense of where the main character is, what he/she is feeling, and where the risks of the story lie, that’s more than just great storytelling—that’s magic.

I think that’s why I tend to write my short fiction in what I call moments. We all have our own methods, of course, but I like to guide my short fiction using character snapshots that are made of emotions. One scene may be driven by my main character’s intense curiosity. I’ll allow that character to have a moment with his/her sense of curiosity, then I’ll take the emotion one step further and move the plot forward while keeping my character’s frame of mind as the driving force. If a word, description, or line of dialog doesn’t make sense for that emotional snapshot, it will generally get omitted or saved for another moment.

Once the plot’s moved forward enough to force a change in the emotional snapshot, I’ll shift gears and form a new moment in my mind. These moments usually surface as full-scale images that will also provide the details of what imagery and scenery I describe. Since speculative fiction short story descriptions need to especially be tight, I find this method also helps keep my tendency to go overboard with descriptions down (what can I say—I like the shinies).

I may want to describe how gorgeous that duo-moon sunrise looks, but my main character? Oh, no. She’s far too busy running from a herd of police droids. She may notice the way a single ray of sun reflects off her shuttle in the distance, but that’s about it. And that’ll be the line of description that gets mentioned. If I’m ever in doubt of what to say, I stare into the eyes of my character’s emotional moment and instantly find my answer. It works well. When my characters cooperate, that is. Some characters are prone to harebrained ideas more than others. Gotta keep an eye on those!

Laura Hardgrave is an MMORPG video game journalist by day and a LGBT speculative fiction author by night. She kind of frantically dives back and forth between writing short stories and novel-length fiction. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels with a huge host of characters and a bit of inter-dimensional travel.

Learn more about Laura on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

Here's a Secret

by Lane Robbins

I may like writing about people more than I like writing about science fiction and fantasy.

Don't get me wrong; magic is magical, science is super, and the real world is often too damn dull to be borne.

But the thing that gets me to the keyboard, the thing that takes an airy imagining into something that must be explored is a character interacting with another character.

I'm fascinated by people. Why not? We're a fascinating subject! Shakespeare says so, "What a piece of work is a man!"* Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett have their say: "And just when you'd think they [people] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved."**

I've written a handful of books, a handful of stories, and no matter how excited I am about my SF/F premise, the very first scene I write is a people-oriented one. A story just isn't real to me until the people pop onto the page. Let me start with lovers' reunions, personal betrayals, an argument at work, strangers meeting, a bad man being kind, a good woman committing a wrong, anything and everything. Often my starting point isn't even overtly related to the SF/F elements. Tangentially, sure, but overtly? Nope. Every fantasy piece I write starts with the people doing people-type things.

Creating a character is so much more fun than creating magic; writing about people is biology and psychology and criminology and anthropology and archaeology and faith and mythology and everything delightful. Every person is a collection of puzzle pieces that ends up a different picture.

You put a dozen people in the same situation, and you get a dozen different results. Even the people who make the same choices might do so out of different motives. Any mystery reader can tell you that there are a dozen reasons or more to commit murder, good, bad, or indifferent.

People who are reluctant witnesses to a bank robbery might feel fear, rage, envy, despair, or excitement. They might fight back, faint, cry, or take advantage of the situation in some bizarre way—the clerk in the back who takes the time to burgle her co-worker's purse before she hides; the manager who starts dreaming of the raise she'll get for this if no one gets shot. Pretty much anything you can imagine, someone can conceivably do. People are amazing and awful in endless combinations. And that realization is more exciting than almost any magic trick. It's a form of magic all its own--people's ability to be surprising and affecting and just plain fascinating.

So I write SF & Fantasy—life is so much more interesting with magic after all--but primarily it's all a way to explore the amazing things people think and the amazing ways people behave.

Humans, can you believe it? Aren't we amazing?

*Hamlet. Act II, scene ii.

**Good Omens. p 26

Lane Robins was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. As Lyn Benedict, she writes the urban fantasy Shadows Inquiries series: Sins & Shadows, Ghosts & Echoes, Gods & Monsters, and Lies & Omens.

Learn more about Lane on her website.

SCI-FI DEAK STYLE

Science That Doesn’t Work In Science Fiction. . . But Has To

by John Deakins

The first word in “Science Fiction” is “Science.” “SF” includes Speculative Fantasy, but Science Fiction is supposed to remain pristine. The Science has to work. Readers expect the paranormal in fantasy, but Science Fiction must stick to the rules of the universe. Certainly, every hard SF story springs from some scientific aspects that have fictionally altered. When we adventure in the Asteroid Belt, both writer and reader are aware no humans have yet reached the Asteroid Belt. That’s why they call it fiction. We’re all in on the inside joke: We all know we’re lying. The object is to make the lies entertaining.

Once we’re committed to the Asteroid Belt, however, writing rules change. The remaining science must be correct; the logic must be consistent. Our flights among the orbiting rocks must obey the Newton’s laws. Our spacecraft can’t be towed by a dragon flapping its wings. A wizard can’t wave his wand and transport us instantly to the next rock. An Elf isn’t going to lead us down tunnels inside magically orbiting mountains. We’re obliged to stick to scientific facts. Our fiction is like an exotic SF game, but we’re only allowed playing pieces that actually function in this universe. We must follow if>>>then logic: If certain current scientific knowledge has been altered, then a story follows thus…

Some of the greatest fun of SF writing is the amount of mayhem we can create from behind our keyboard. We can destroy the world with an asteroid impact, nuclear war, or plague. We can suffocate our astronauts in unforgiving vacuum. We can kill space colonists with unnamed pestilence or human-devouring monsters. We can deliver supernovas, rampaging aliens, and fatal time paradoxes. We can alter history or bring humans to extinction. It’d be a shame to see our reign of terror end just because we’re shackled by science’s rock-hard rules.

The trouble is that scientific laws are hard, cold and unyielding. There is nothing sadder than a beautiful theory killed by an ugly fact. For the Science Fiction writer, that sadness occurs when a beautiful story idea is gored by an ugly scientific principle. For example, Burroughs’ Mars and Venus just aren’t there. We’d like to ride a thoat across the lichen-covered plains or explore the steaming Venusian swamps, but we simply can’t do that in Science Fiction. Alas, the Mars of red princesses is fantasy only.

Science is supposed to be the mainstay of Science Fiction. What happens when Science gets in the way of Science Fiction? Sometimes the story-telling urge is so powerful that it makes us willing to slide around our own dogma. To get that story written, we are (shudder!) willing to commit adultery on science. The result is often an offspring that really needed an abortion.

What are we going to do, then? (Funny you should ask that, since that’s what this blog’s about.) Over the next weeks, we will push Science Fiction into several deep science pits and try to rescue it. Stick around.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

DOING IT ALL OVER AGAIN

by Bruce Golden

When you talk about "wishing you had it to do over again" or going back and changing one thing in your life, you have to realize that you would be tinkering with your entire timeline. It's like the time paradoxes of countless science fiction tales. You change one little thing and that alters an infinite amount of outcomes.

We've all thought about "what if I hadn't done this" or "if I had done that," but have we really pondered the consequences of such do-overs? You could wish you never entered into that failed marriage, but then you wouldn't have the children you now have and love so dearly. You might have had aspirations for a different profession, but who knows if you would have ended up a disbarred lawyer or a disgraced politician.

Like anyone, I have regrets--things I wished I'd done differently. If I were to fantasize such a scenario (without having to worry about the consequences of the "butterfly effect"), I would wonder how my career would have evolved, had I made different choices.

As a teenager, I decided I wanted to write science fiction and fantasy, and follow in the footsteps of my favorite authors at the time--Roberts Heinlein and Howard. However, my initial foray into fiction was disrupted by being drafted into the Army. When I got out, I started working in various journalistic endeavors to help pay my way through college. One job led to another, and, before I knew it, I was making a living working in newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. Along the way I tinkered with fiction, but I was supporting a wife and a son, and there were bills to be paid. It wasn't until the turn of the century that I found myself in a position to walk away from journalism and concentrate solely on my first love--fiction.

All those years working as a professional writer/editor/producer certainly improved my skills, and, without a doubt, made it possible to be the writer I am today. But I often wonder where I'd be, and what I might have written, had I devoted myself exclusively to fiction all those years.

Novelist, journalist, satirist, Bruce Golden’s short stories have been published more than 100 times across 11 countries and 15 anthologies. Asimov’s Science Fiction described his second novel, “If Mickey Spillane had collaborated with both Frederik Pohl and Philip K. Dick, he might have produced Bruce Golden’s Better Than Chocolate”--and about his novel Evergreen, "If you can imagine Ursula Le Guin channeling H. Rider Haggard, you'll have the barest conception of this stirring book, which centers around a mysterious artifact and the people in its thrall." You can read more of Golden's stories in his recently published collection Dancing with the Velvet Lizard. Visit Bruce on his website.

Introduction to the Godfathers of Science Fiction

by Kristen Saunders

You must forgive me for what I’m about to write, but I’ve committed a most grave sin among passionate science fiction readers. I have been enjoying the genre for years without reading any of the stories from the godfathers of science fiction. I had never heard of Arthur C. Clark or William Gibson until today. Until yesterday I had not touched Orson Scott Card, only a week ago did I touch Ray Bradbury, and I’ve never touched H.G. Wells. My familiarity with Isaac Asimov is limited to one short story called, Liar.

I read Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the sixth grade and horribly failed the accelerated reading test. That particular AR test was set up to fail; it revolved around what bodies of water the Nautilus was in and when. Heinlein and Herbert were introduced to me last year, and I’ve only read one of each of their books. Neither being their most popular pieces. I guess I developed a tendency for fantasy without realizing it.

I haven’t been completely separated from the genre of sci-fi. I’ve watched science fiction movies and television shows for years. Sitting on the couch nestled under warm blankets watching Star Trek with my mom was a regular weekend ritual. I absorbed the story lines with relish and as a child would regularly take my hair band and put it over my eyes to mimic Geordi La Forge. I’ve always been a bit of a nerd and enjoyed reading, but I never really pursued science fiction in the written form.

The realization that I had not read these masters of the page came to me when we started putting together the Ray Bradbury issue of Penumbra. The first time I encountered Bradbury’s work I wasn’t even aware of it. I was at home sitting on the basement couch watching the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. As a high school student I finally understood why everyone had been so obsessed with the book. It was a terrifying prospect to me to go without books or reading, to become a drone that does nothing but watch television, and to watch those thoughts and words burn! I watched the film all the way through. Yet, I still chose not to pick up the book. I didn’t know who the author was, and I didn’t look for other works by the author of the story. At that time I didn’t see the point in reading a book I’d already watched. My mentality since then has changed, but by the time college came around Fahrenheit 451 was something that was in the recesses of my memory.

I wanted to understand Bradbury before I started work on his homage, so I sat on my very comfortable and thoroughly used couch to read his short biography and an excerpt from The Martian Chronicles. The enlightenment I obtained from this molder of sci-fi made me realize what I had been missing. For now, I have a lot of catch up reading to do to repent for my past reading sins.

Kristen Saunders is an intern Penumbra EMag. She loves to write science fiction in her free time and recently started her blog The Musings of a Growing Writer.

The Future of Exploration

by Kristen Saunders

October 16, 2012 before he took the highest skydive in history, Felix Baumgartner said, “Sometimes you have to be up really high to know how small you are. I’m going home now.” A minute or so later he would be the first man to break the sound barrier with nothing but his body going 833.9 mph. Seven years were spent planning and engineering Red Bull Stratos; the project that gave Felix the chance to break three world records in one day. On top of sky diving from the highest point ever, 128,100 feet above the Earth’s surface, he also ballooned to the highest point in history and managed to stay alive. His special pressurized suit kept his blood from boiling in the stratosphere.

Red Bull Stratos was one of many historical explorations that have been done this year. Not only did we achieve our highest heights, we went deep under water, finally taking footage of the distinguished Challenger Deep. In March, James Cameron successfully culminated eight years of hard work. He traveled to the deepest known point on the Earth’s sea floor, Challenger Deep, which lies at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench. Cameron traveled 36,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean in a one man submarine called Deepsea Challenger to see what lay at the bottom of our oceans. He was the first to capture images of life from those depths, succeeding where the Trieste did not in 1960. The Trieste’s descent kicked up so much silt nothing was able to be captured on film.

These projects employed new technology to achieve some of the greatest moments of exploration in our life time. Mars Rover Curiosity also joined the news in August landing on Mars by way of a rocket propelled space crane. These feats of engineering are changing not only what we are able to see, but what we will be able to do in the future.

Writers will now be able to look on these markers of history and imagine what we may next encounter here on Earth or on other planets. The technology in the suit that Felix Baumgartner wore could easily be translated into a suit someone on Mars (or another planet) might wear. The next great sport could be strato-jumping and the wars of the future may well be fought by one-man-submarines at the depths of the oceans. Our history tends to shape our fiction and I am watching closely to see where our next “small steps” will take us.

I am curious to see the role of companies in these projects. NASA’s Curiosity was the only project the U.S. government fully owned. Rolex sponsored the Challenger Deep dive and Red Bull plastered its name into the Red Bull Stratos project. Companies are starting to make major investments in science as pet projects. This isn’t a rant; it is just what’s happening. Private firms are making the discoveries of tomorrow. This may change how exploration will be done. It could open doors of opportunity for some and also shut them for others.

It will be interesting to see how these events will affect the writing done in the near future and also the years to come.

Kristen Saunders is a recent addition to Penumbra EMag, serving as an editorial intern. She loves to write science fiction in her free time and plans to take on NaNoWriMo this year.

Utopian Vs. Dystopian: Two Forms of Great Fiction

by Dianna L. Gunn

If you've spent much time at all reading and studying speculative fiction, and maybe even if you haven't, you've probably heard the terms 'utopian' and 'dystopian' a lot, particularly in reference to science fiction novels. There's a good chance you've even got a vague idea of what each word means—but have you ever thought about it more deeply?

Let's take a look at the original words, armed with a trusty 1980 Oxford American Dictionary:

Utopia 1. An imaginary place or state of things where everything is perfect.

We'll stick with this definition, as it's the one most commonly applied to science fiction.

Interestingly enough, my edition of the Oxford doesn't contain dystopia, so for this one I've turned to dictionary.com:

Dystopia 1. A society characterized by human misery, as squalor, disease, and overcrowding.

Seems pretty clear cut, right? A utopian science fiction novel would obviously be one set in a place where all the world's problems have been fixed, whereas a dystopian science fiction novel would be one where the world has fallen into decline.

It both is and isn't as simple as that. Many science fiction novels blur the lines between utopia and dystopia. In The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, you first think the future society is a utopia where everyone's peaceful and has enough to eat, only to discover its darkest secrets and that it's closer to a dystopia.

Beyond that, everyone's definition of a utopia—or a dystopia—is different. Take Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, in which a welfare-dependent Mexican woman is shown a future where men and women take equal part in the work, massive cities have given way to smaller townships, and food, along with other resources, are shared communally. For me and many others, this is a utopian future.

But that's not all Connie, the hero of Woman on the Edge of Time sees. She also sees a future in which humanity's retreated to metal homes and space stations, where the world is unlivable with food marked-up and everything else is created and delivered by machines. For Connie—and for me—this is a terrifying future—but it isn't terrifying to everyone.

Some books by genre are defined as utopian or dystopian, but this is certainly a case of beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Sure, most people are horrified by the extreme surveillance of Nineteen Eighty-Four or the mutation of humanity almost beyond recognition in The Time Machine, but some will always see it differently. Each of us dreams of a different future—my vision of utopia, where everyone's equal and we've eliminated capitalism, might just be your vision of dystopia.

Dianna L. Gunn is a young Canadian fiction writer who specializes in dark fantasy. She also writes poetry, generally dark, which is her way of dealing with life. This insightful author hosts a website covering every aspect of fiction writing and interviews with noted guest authors.

Learn more about Dianna L. Gunn on her website and follow her on Twitter.

A Shallow Recess?

by T. D. Edge

At the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, a well-known SF writer said to us, "The secret to success is to find your niche and exploit it." He's probably right.

During the SF conference earlier this year, a panel of book editors told an audience of mostly new writers that if they want to get published, they can't afford to write in different genres; and ideally they should have written the first 3 novels, all with the same characters, before even approaching them.

Well, I had no idea what my niche was when I wrote my first children's novel. It was about a 13-year old science nerd with no social skills who gets taken to what he thinks will be an academy for gifted kids. But when he turns up, the academy is a cottage in the Welsh hills and the two professors who recruited him are going to teach him to play table soccer instead. Apparently, a mad genius is draining the world of champion spirit via the game, and only our kid can save us. Niche that!

Okay, so that was back in the 1980s when a children's publishing house was more like Hogwarts than the law firm-ish offices of today. My editor didn't have a large beard and pointy hat, but she had the magical power to choose the books she wanted to publish, work on the cover design with the author, and put the book out without as much as a sneer in the direction of the non-existing marketing team.

By the time my next book was ready, however, the sales team had arrived. Everything changed, including the cover design she and I had created. On the sales teams' version, my two main characters were (un)magically changed from bright but girl-ignorant lads to cool, girl-magnet teen dudes. "But," I said, "it won't just be the girls who're disappointed when they read what these guys are really like." Apparently, though, it didn't matter if the cover was as genuine as a Nigerian funds transfer offer, if it drew in the punters, who cared?

Still niche-averse, I published a few more YA/children's books, but also had quite a few rejected by editorial committees, acquisitions committees, and probably the committees' committee, too.

Time for a change!

I decided to switch to my first love, Science Fiction. I thought I'd better start fresh so in 2006 I attended Odyssey, one of the six-week US workshops. It was great to just write stories and critique other people's, and to be in a classroom again, learning stuff from top writers and editors. Even if we got the niche advice there, too. It was also good, as an Englishman, to learn to hug without wincing.

After Odyssey, I started sending out short stories, now almost wilfully un-niche like. I found a new freedom with short fiction, to try different styles, different voices, genders, beliefs, and so on. I also carried on attending workshops, two in Oregon, for example, taken by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, who taught in the opposite direction to much of what I'd learned before. Damn that elusive niche.

I've sold around 30 stories now, no two of them really in the same niche. I might have sold more if they were, I don't know. All I do know is that if writing is fun and exciting and challenging for the author, I think it's likely to please readers, too.

A story of mine just won the New Scientist/Arc Magazine short fiction prize. It's about a town full of bio-toy Cockneys and talking animals, trying to save themselves from the encroaching electro-bio-mechanical sludge by helping their human master, Dave, to fall in love. I wrote the first few pages a couple of years back with absolutely no idea why or where it was going. I just loved the setting and the characters and the language. I went back to it several times, but couldn't see where to take it. Eventually, I got the rest of the story and finished it. But still no niche . . .

T. D. Edge won a Cadbury's fiction competition at age 10, but only did it for the chocolate. His short fiction has appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Arc, Realms of Fantasy, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Flash Fiction Online. Terry has been a street theatre performer, props maker for the Welsh National Opera, sign writer, soft toy salesman, and professional palm-reader. He is also proud of being the youngest-ever England Subbuteo Champion, and one of his current writing projects is Subbuteo for the Soul.

Learn more about T. D. Edge on his website.

Asking Jamie Lackey

Who are three authors you admire--and why do you admire them?

1. Bruce Coville

Bruce Coville writes middle grade science fiction and fantasy books. I've been reading his books for most of my life--many of them over and over again. Whenever I'm tired or stressed or depressed, I can pick up one of his books, finish it in a couple of hours, and feel better about the world.

They're fun stories with engaging characters, and they have really rich themes. His books shaped me into the person I am today.

2. Lois McMaster Bujold

Lois McMaster Bujold writes both fantasy and science fiction novels. Her Vorkosigan series is set in one of the most interesting science fiction universes I've ever read, but her real strength is in her characters. Everyone in one of her books feels like a real, rounded person. Her Hugo and Nebula-winning Paladin of Souls is one of my very favorite books.

3. Peter S. Beagle

I've loved The Last Unicorn for longer than I can remember. I made my parents rent the movie over and over again. I love the beautiful, lyrical, poignant nature of his writing. His fiction, both novels and short stories, all come alive through his almost magical prose.

Jamie Lackey earned her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. Her fiction has been accepted by over a dozen different venues, including The Living Dead 2, Daily Science Fiction, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She reads slush for Clarkesworld Magazine and is an assistant editor at Electric Velocipede.

Learn more about Jamie Lackey on her website. Follow her on Twitter, and like her on facebook.

Confessions of a Writing Addict

by Katherine Heath Shaeffer

I have to write. Specifically, I have to write science fiction and fantasy.

I can't stop.

It's not just a matter of writing for catharsis (though there's an element of that in my writing) or of writing the story that I want to read (though there's an element of that, too). It's not just a matter of honoring, through emulation, the escapist fantasies that got me through the toughest times in my life (and to this day the writing of escapist literature is one of the noblest pursuits I can imagine) or of contributing allegorically to whatever ethical debates are in vogue this season.

I write because I'm a writing addict. Writing is an addictive and self-destructive behavior.

I believe that writing requires a specific kind of sacrifice. As I write, I find myself donating things I remember and things I've dreamed to my fiction. Because, no matter how implausible the premise, in a way I am always writing from experience: my experience of being able to imagine what would happen in the case of my implausible premise. And as I write down memory and dream, I lose them. Not wholly. I'm not giving myself amnesia here. But I don't get to keep these thoughts and images as they were originally constructed in my mind, because I have reconstructed them, through writing.

It's like that family story that's about you when you were a kid: you know that the story is not the whole truth, but you hear it so many times that the 'traditional' version that your parents tell at Thanksgiving every year superimposes itself upon the 'whole truth' that you remember until one day, for the life of you you can't recall what the flaws in your parents' version were, so you just go with it. You and your family have lived with this version so long that it's the truth now, no matter what really happened.

It's like explaining last night's dream to someone after you wake up. Dreams often don't make sense, but the dream you had last night was so wild and interesting that you have to share it with someone, so you fudge the details a little, connecting point A to point B so that the fluidly juxtaposed images of your dreaming mind come together to make a story. Then, when you try to remember your dream, it is not the dream that you invoke but the story you told of your dream. Because we are humans and patterns are easier for us to remember than lacks-of-pattern. So. You've lost a dream but gained a story.

Maybe you write that story. And so it goes.

Even the most fantastic of tales are constructed from the building blocks of memory, just as you can draw a beautiful dragon using the building blocks you develop from studying the anatomy of birds, bats snakes and fish. Or turtles and pterodactyls. (Hey, it's your dragon. Draw what you want.)

It's like that scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Yes, I am dipping into the great well of Star Trek metaphors. Don't judge me.) In “The Measure of a Man,” Data refuses to allow his android body to be dismantled, studied, and reconstructed because he believes that, though his memories will technically stay intact, the 'flavor' of those memories will be lost. Data makes it sound like this is a horrible thing that can only happen to androids, but to me it just sounds like what happens to any of my memories, once I try to tell it.

For me, at least, writing is erosion. It requires sacrificing those loves and fears I hold closest to my heart and reconstructing them into tools. It requires breaking down what I feel, what I remember, what I dream and writing it onto the page in a way that a reader can access. I may lose the immediacy of the feeling, but sometimes, if I am very lucky, I can translate that immediacy -- or a version of it -- to the page.

This self-erosion is both bittersweet and exhilarating.

Katherine Heath Shaeffer is a writer and graduate student who lives in Gainesville, Florida with her boyfriend and three cats. She is the current Production Editor of the academic journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. She has a short story forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction. Katherine's article Beauty and the Body and the Beast, along with her short story The Witch, the Curse and the Prince were published in the May issue of Penumbra eMag.

Getting to Know Larry Ivkovich, author of The Turin Effect

Hello Everyone. My name is Larry Ivkovich and I write science fiction, fantasy and horror. My dark fantasy, "The Turin Effect," is the featured story in the debut issue of Penumbra, which is a great thrill in itself. In addition, this is my first pro-rate sale, and I want to thank Celina and the staff of Penumbra for taking a chance on my work. I still haven't descended from Cloud 9 yet!

I've published several short stories in various online and print markets and my debut novel, THE SIXTH PERCEPT, is being published this month by IFWG Publishing. It's an urban fantasy with science fiction and horror elements, part of it taking place in contemporary Pittsburgh and part in ancient Japan.

Writing has always been like an "alternate state" to me. It's like when you zone out while driving and wonder how you ended up where you did. Sometimes I'll read what I've just written and can't believe it came from me. I have no set rules for writing - for the most part, I just sit down with a germ of an idea and start and see where it takes me. It's a passion I hope to continue for a long time to come and to share with anyone who wants to tag along for the ride.