I did not invent moss-trolls. They belong to Marissa Lingen

“The advantage of writing urban fantasy or world-crossing fantasy is that when the sea serpent has eyes the color of NyQuil, you can say so rather than spending time trying to come up with settlement-era Icelandic-ish equivalent having something to do with moss-troll ichor. Because then you’re stuck with moss-trolls, and also they have ichor, and you can pretty well guarantee that’s going to come back and bite you in the butt in another book or two: you didn’t have to deal with moss-trolls *before*, and now you do, and it’s a lot of bother just for a color analogy.”

But I’ve thought a lot about the problem that Lingen identifies; it’s one that a writer of secondary-world fiction encounters frequently. (I’m using the term “secondary-world fiction” rather than “fantasy” because science fiction set far enough in the future has the same issue, though the variables of the equation are a little different.) You can’t, for instance, say something is as basic as the missionary position in a world without missionaries. What about saying something is as swift and sharp as a guillotine’s blade? Well, did Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin exist in this world? You will find moss-trolls again and again whenever you start describing the imaginary people, places and things of your imaginary world. Because one of the first ways we try to describe something is to say what it’s like.

Literature is all about metaphors–analogies. One thing is like another. Much of literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing.” And really great literature works by saying, “This thing is like this other thing, which you would never have thought of comparing it to.” The act of comparison can be overt (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare asks his Fair Young Man. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”) or covert, subtextual, subliminal. But it’s there. You take a thing–a thing in your imagination–and you compare it to another thing–a thing in the frame of reference you (hopefully) share with your reader. And thus you generate meaning and imagery and all those other things that are what makes literature tick.

Now consider the Moss-Troll Problem and what it says about secondary-world fiction. We’ve declared one of the fundamental gestures of literature out of bounds. We make this same gesture–this thing is like this other thing–but we have denied ourselves the frame of reference in common with the reader. So when we do this, when we say the sea serpent’s eyes are the color of moss-troll ichor, we have to somehow convey both sides of the analogy, rather than relying on one half to explain the other. Secondary-world fiction therefore takes self-referentiality and makes it into a defining gesture of the genre, a form of intensely compressed poetry. This is the place where world-building is trying to get you, where you have a secondary world that’s rich enough and deep enough that it can generate its own frame of reference, that you can reinvent the wheel using unobtanium and dragons’ bones.

The moss-trolls make writing secondary-world fiction hard. But they also make it an endless joy.

—
Sarah Monette grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project, and now lives in a 104-year-old house in the Upper Midwest with a great many books, four cats, one husband, and one albino bristlenose plecostomus. Her Ph.D. diploma (English Literature, 2004) hangs in the kitchen. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among other venues, and have been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies; a short story collection, The Bone Key, was published by Prime Books in 2007. Her first four novels (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis) were published by Ace Books. She will publish her next novel, The Goblin Emperor, with Tor Books, writing as Katherine Addison. She has also written one novel, A Companion to Wolves, and three short stories with Elizabeth Bear, and hopes to write more. Visit her online at www.sarahmonette.com.

Copyright © 1998 by Robert A. Metzger. First published in the Summer 1998 issue of the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Interstellar space travel. We dream about it. We write about it. Science fiction writers have come up with all manners of interstellar travel, ranging from multigenerational arks, to wormhole generating warp drives that can spit you across the galaxy in a blink of an eye. As wondrous and amazing as all these approaches may be, most suffer from a very fundamental problem.

Traveling for long distances, over long periods of time, can be a colossal pain in the butt. You can never pack all your stuff. You always forget something. Did you lock the door? Did you turn off the iron? You forgot to say good-bye to Aunt Mildred, who will be dead by some 12,000 years when you return due to relativistic effects. And then there is that library book you forgot to return.

What to do?

The answer should be obvious. Just take it all with you.

I’ve got a solution, one that I consider very practical. My method does not require any magic physics – the ability to go faster than the speed of light, or jump about the galaxy by way of Star Gates. No. I am going to use good old fashion basic rocket science. Metzger’s Rocket Science Law #1 says that momentum must be conserved (some of you with a historical fetish and knowledge of obscure ancient scientists might recognize this as Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). If you throw something out of the back of your rocket ship with mass m1 at a velocity v₁, then the momentum of this exhaust is just the product of these two components – m₁v₁. As a result, your rocket ship will be propelled in the opposite direction of the exhaust, and with the exact same momentum. This means that if your rocket ship weighs m₂, then the velocity of your rocket will be v₂ = m₁v₁/m₂. It’s as simple as that. If the mass of what you threw out is the same as your rocket, then you will move at the same speed as the rocket fuel (but in the opposite direction). The heavier the rocket, the slower you go.

You now know everything you need to know about rocket science.

Now back to my discussion about taking it all with you.

Forget all this business about building really big spaceships, or hallowing out asteroids and strapping on big fusion engines. No. The ideal solution is to simply move the entire planet. If you want to travel the 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, then just move the Earth those 4 light years. That way you don’t have to pack your bags.

It all goes with you.

Now there is one little problem with this plan. We depend on the Sun to keep everything running on this planet. Without the Sun we’d all be popsicles by the time we moved Earth out past the orbit of Mars. Well, the answer to that problem is obvious. We’ll need to take the Sun with us.

What the heck, let’s just move the entire solar system.

And here is the really beautiful part of this plan. You don’t have to do a single thing to planet Earth. Unlike the case in which you try to move the Earth, you don’t have to drain the oceans to get enough hydrogen to run the big fusion reactors needed to move the planet (which would probably occupy all of Australia and a sizable chunk of Europe). If you move the Sun, the Earth, along with all the other planets, just come along for the ride by way of gravitational attraction.

So all we have to do is move the Sun.

First, we need some sort of engine, something to heat up our fuel so it is moving really fast when we blow it out of the back of the engine (remember Metzger’s First Law). Well, we are in luck. The sun is the perfect engine. In fact that’s all it is. It’s one big fusion reactor. And the really amazing part is that it is almost all fuel. There is very little overhead. If and when we ever build a fusion reactor on Earth, the thing will probably weigh in at several thousand tons and be able to fuse a few micrograms of hydrogen. Not a very efficient use of mass. The sun is 78% hydrogen by weight, all of which can be used for fusion to generate energy.

What else does the sun have? It is in possession of some really intense magnetic fields. And that is a good thing, because we can take advantage of those fields. Here is where I wave my future technology wand. I will speculate that in the not too distant future (100 to 1000 years) that we can perturb the magnetic fields in the sun. And why would we want to do that? The reason is that if you take a hydrogen atom (which consists of a proton and an electron) and ionize it (remove the electron from the proton), what you are left with is a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron. Forget about the electron (it weighs some 1835 times less than the proton), and use the proton as the mass which you are going to shoot out of the Sun. It will be no problem. If you shape those magnetic fields right, the positively charged proton can be shot out of the Sun moving at nearly the speed of light. It’s just like a particle accelerator.

Proton propulsion.

We’ll need a lot of protons.

The sun weighs 2×10³⁰ kilograms (a 2 followed by thirty zeros), while a single proton weighs in at 0.167×10^-26 kilograms (that is 26 zeros before the decimal place). However, that is for a proton which is sitting still. If you get it going near the speed of light (3×10⁸ meter/sec) then its mass increases (special relativity). For this little example, let’s assume that we can use those magnetic fields to push the proton up to 99.9% of the speed of light. In that case, the proton’s mass has increased by a factor of 22 and now weighs in at 3.74×10^-26 kg. Well, shooting one relativistic proton out of the sun is not going to move the sun very fast by Metzger’s First Law. In fact, its velocity is going to be 5.61×10^-48 meter/sec. This is definitely not very fast. In fact, at this speed, if you wait 10 billion years, the sun would have moved some 10^-30 meters, or roughly one-billion-millionth of the width of an atom.

This is not what I would exactly call interstellar travel distances.

Obviously, what we need are more protons being shot out of our proton propulsion system. Let’s make it easy on ourselves, and say that we would like to get the Sun moving at 20% of the speed or light – .20c (that’s a good value – fast, but not so fast that the Sun’s mass increases very much due to relativistic effects). So by Metzger’s First Law, to get the Sun moving at .20c we would need to shoot out a mass moving at the speed of light which weighs .20 times the weight of the sun. That sounds bad. If we threw away 20% of the sun’s mass some bad things might happen on Earth. The gravitational tug on Earth would lessen, and our orbit would slip further out. Also, the energy output of the sun would lessen (it’s now got less fuel burning). Both these effects would really cool down the planet (perhaps that would be a good thing if we hadn’t yet addressed global warming). But fortunately, since our protons are now so heavy (because they’re moving at 99.9% c, and their mass has increased by a factor of 22), we need to roughly throw out only 1% of the Sun’s mass as long as it is in the form of these heavy protons.

Not so bad.

So here is the plan.

We turn on our proton rocket engine, and keep the exhaust pointed in the opposite direction from Alpha Centauri (you need to remember that the sun is rotating on its axis once every 25 days at the equator, so we need to keep shifting the location of our proton exhaust to take this into account). Let’s accelerate at a very gentle 0.01 g – that is only 1/100 of the gravitational force that we feel on Earth (by contrast astronauts may pull any where from 3 to 10 gees when launching from Earth). After one day of accelerating at that low rate, the Sun is already moving at 18,000 miles per hour. What we need to do is keep accelerating until we cover 2 light years distance (the half way point), and then turn the direction of our proton exhaust by 180°, so that we can then decelerate back to zero velocity over the next 2 light years (quite some braking distance). So the question is, how long does it take to cover those 2 light years, and what is your velocity when you reach that point? The equations are really easy:

D = .5AT²
V = AT

Where D is the distance covered (in this case 2 light years which is 1.86×1016 meters), V is the velocity of the sun when you reach 2 light year mark, A is the acceleration (which for 1/100 of a g is 0.098 m/s²) and T is the time in seconds. Performing those calculations (I will leave that as an exercise for the reader), it turns out that the 2 light year distance is covered in 19.5 years, at which point the velocity of the solar system will be just .2c. Isn’t that handy, since I have already showed you that by Metzger’s First Law we can get the solar system moving to .2c by throwing out 1% of the sun’s mass, just as long as the proton exhaust is moving at 99.9% of c. During our 19.5 year outbound acceleration we are tossing protons out of the sun at a rate of 6.6×10²⁰ kg/sec. That is a lot of protons (actually 1.77×10⁴⁶ protons/sec). Once we reach the halfway point and turn the direction of the proton engine, it takes another 19.5 years to bring the sun to a stop right in the neighborhood of Alpha Ceauri. Total trip time is 39 years, and you’ve used up 2% of the Sun’s mass.

39 years is nothing – half of a human lifetime. And remember that you never even had to leave home. Once you get to Alpha Centauri you can explore, take pictures, visit the locals, colonize, do whatever you’d like. You can refuel the sun by gobbling up whatever gas giants you might find there, or by siphoning off a bit of the local Sun’s mass. And then you can be on your way to the next solar system that you’d like to explore.

Make it a 3 million year trip – the scale of time during which proto-humans evolved into us. If you arrive at a new solar system every 50 years, then the human race will have explored some 60,000 solar systems and traveled 240,000 light years during those scant 3 million years.

240,000 light years!

The diameter of our galaxy is only 100,000 light years. During those 3 million years you could travel from one end of the galaxy and back again. And after all that exploring, perhaps the human race would be ready to make the big jump to neighboring galaxies. Andromeda is only 2.2 million light years away. So what if it takes us some 11 million years to get there. That is just a blink in geological time.

And what does it matter, because we will have never left home.

And think about this. Why stop at merely moving the Sun. The same approach could be used to move entire galaxies. We all know that the universe about us is expanding, all these distant galaxies hurtling away from us, all this motion an artifact of the Big Bang. Perhaps not an artifact of the Big Bang. Maybe the resident big brains of our universe have converted the galaxies into massive spacecraft, and they are just going on a little outing to visit the neighbors.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Fuse This

Fusion reactors in science fiction are as common place as Star Trek novelizations – all pretty much the same thing, based on the same premise, using the same old tired technology. Fusion reactors come in two flavors – get a big plasma chamber, add monster superconducting magnets to hold that plasma in, and then push the temperatures and pressures high enough (trying to build a little sun) and atoms fuse together, throwing off some energy. The other approach is to bombard a small pellet of fuel with some mighty laser/ion beams, and as the pellet implodes due to the shockwave generated, the atoms in the pellet fuse together, throwing off some energy.

That’s how it’s typically done in science fiction.

And that’s also how it’s typically done in the real world. No, at the moment there are no actual fusion reactors producing more energy than they consume, but things are getting close. In the next ten years a monster called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) which will cost $10 billion may be built, and may just produce more energy than it consumes. ITER follows the old tried and true approach of building a little sun by getting a plasma as hot and dense as possible. Other folks at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are about to break ground on the NIF (National Ignition Facility) and will give the laser implosion approach a go around.

Those are the two politically correct approaches.

Those are the two which fill our science fiction futures.

But those futures may not come to pass. A few new things are on the fusion horizon. I’m not talking about cold fusion in test tubes, or someone selling snake oil and fusion reactors from the back of a van. This is real.
The Z Machine (1). Forget all those liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets to hold your plasma in. There are other ways to generate a magnetic field. Any time electric current flows through a wire, it generates a magnetic field. What researchers have done at Sandia National Laboratories is to send an enormous blast of electricity through an array of parallel wires – enough electricity to vaporize the wires, transforming them into a plasma, which in turn gets compressed by the magnetic fields generated by the current flow. Compressed plasma gets hot – in this case 1.5 million degrees. Right now the experimental Z machine can produce about 20% of the energy, 40% of the power, and 33 to 50% of the temperature required for nuclear fusion to produce more energy than it consumes. As a bonus, this machine produces X-rays in the 200 terrawatt range (that is million-million watt), more than enough to X-ray every set of teeth on the planet.

Xenon droplets (2). You might think that 1.5 million degrees is hot, but compared to what physicists at Imperial College in London have heated up, the Z-machine might as well be spitting out ice-cubes. By hitting a microscopic droplet of xenon atoms (with about 2500 atoms) with a laser beam, the electrons are torn from the xenon atoms forming an electron cloud which then absorbs energy from the laser. This energy is then transferred to the xenon ions (a xenon atom which is missing some electrons), heating them up to temperatures as high as a reported 940 million degrees, which is 30 times hotter than the core of the sun.
There is more than one way to fuse a cat. Let’s see some creative fusion reactors.

Strange Sightings

A strange sighting which I’ve recently heard about is that of flying frogs (3). These frogs are not flying about by way of some mutant flapping wings. It’s nothing that complicated. These frogs use diamagnetism to perform this feat. When a diamagnetic material is placed in a magnetic field, the electrons orbiting the atoms within the material have a tendency to line up, generating a magnetic field which opposes the field that it’s been placed in. And just what materials are diamagnetic? Almost anything if a large enough external magnetic field is applied.

This includes frogs.

A consortium of researchers from such prestigious institutions as The University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the University of Sao Carlos in Brazil, and the University of Nottingham in England used a powerful solenoid magnet (think wires wrapped around a pipe), and placed a frog inside the center of the magnet.

The magnet turns on, and the frog floats.

They’ve also reported success with grasshoppers, plants and water droplets.

The race has begun. I’m certain that it is only a matter of time before monstrous solenoid magnets are installed in Disneyland or Las Vegas (the line between those two continues to blur) so guests may float about. If those two locations are a bit too alien for you, then consider some distant planet with a magnetic field so powerful that the resident aliens can float within it.

Another strange sighting has been reported by Marcus Chown (one of our fellow SFWA members) in a piece he wrote about the trouble when animals come into contact with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab (4). As expected, there are any number of roasted raccoons, rodents and reptiles which squirmed their way into the facility in search of warmth and then get toasted on megavoltage equipment. Nothing all that weird there. The real weirdness has to do with the 40 buffalo which live at Fermilab. They scamper about the grounds. Some of the locals believe that the buffaloes are very sensitive to radiation and that the labcoats at Fermilab use them as an early warning system. Other rumors deal with a mutant 4 meter tall buffalo which has taken a few too many protons to the chromosomes.

Hello, let me talk to Chris Carter of X-Files.

Look Ma, No Engine

Getting a person, or a piece of equipment into orbit is mighty inefficient. You either need to strap on some huge solid rocket boosters and fuel tanks onto the spacecraft, or put the payload on top hundreds of feet of fuel and engines which will be jettisoned on the way to orbit.

What you need to be really efficient is a rocket without an engine or fuel. Just make the whole thing payload. Well, a group of scientists at the USAF Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate at Edwards AFB, and at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, have succeeded in launching a vehicle which has no engine or fuel.

You haven’t heard about this breakthrough?

The craft weighs 50 grams and it has reached altitudes as high as 14 feet.

Well, the technology is not quite at the point where you can line up and buy a ticket to launch yourself into Earth orbit, but this still represents a breakthrough. How this little spacecraft works is that a 10 kW pulsed laser is aimed at an annular chamber at the bottom of the craft, where the laser beam is focused, and then bursts the air in that region into a plasma, which in turns explodes away from the rocket, creating thrust. Plans call for the laser-based projectile to reach an altitude in excess of 3000 feet in 18 months. Eventually, an orbital concept would use a ground based laser to heat air while the craft is still in the atmosphere, and then onboard gas when in space.

No engine required. (5)

Turbolution

Turbolution is my word, so please be sure to mention my name when you pick up your Hugo for the story which features this little technology gem. Evolution is a drag. It works so, so slow. Yes, if a species gets the crap knocked out of it for a few million years, and manages not to go extinct in the process, then said species may grow 25% larger and sport a new set of fangs to defend itself.

What we need is turbolution – something to allow a species to evolve in an afternoon. Well, thanks to group working at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, they may have opened the door to turbolution. Consider a typical species which can reproduce itself in five years. In one million years that means you’re looking at 200,000 generations. Not too bad – hopefully something new can evolve in that amount of time.

Now, consider if you are not operating in the organic world, but instead, in the inorganic world – in this case a world dominated by Silicon. These researchers are using a special type of Silicon chip to study turbolution – a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This is a piece of Silicon hardware which can be rewired by software into a nearly infinite number of different types of circuits. One moment the circuit is a modem, and the next it is an amplifier.

As an example, suppose you want to build a circuit in which its output is run into to a speaker, and you want the speaker to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. How would you design such a circuit? I don’t know, and with an FPGA and turbolution you don’t need to know. Just start off with a few thousand transistors randomly wired together, and use an audio comparator to check its output to your desired one. Try it 100 times. The ten which come closest you keep, and the other 90 you toss out. You then take the 10 close ones and have the computer randomly rewire some of the transistors. You try another 100 times and again pick out the ten best. You run this process as many times as needed until your circuit tells you what you want to hear.

How long would it take to run those 200,000 generations? The chip can be reconfigured in a matter of milliseconds. The real time is consumed with each version of the chip being allowed to babble for the 2 seconds it needs in its attempt to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. So if it takes 2 seconds for an attempt, how long does it take for 200,000 attempts (remember that for the organic it took 1 million years). I’ll do the math for you. It would take 4 days and 15 hours! This improves on organic evolution by a factor of nearly 80 million.

Think about what this means. Build a brain in hardware that can direct its own evolution, and you will find that if it was able to burp and recite Nursery rhymes on Monday morning, that come Friday afternoon, it will have ignited its own Big Bang and become the God of its own universe. (6)

Tabletop Black Holes

Here is a bit of Physics 101 for you. The word power is used all the time, and quite often used incorrectly. Power is defined as the time rate at which work is done, or the amount of energy consumed in a unit of time. A 100 Watt light bulb delivers 100 Watt of power, and in the process it burns up energy at a rate of 100 joules per second (that is how one defines the unit of energy measurement – joules). So who cares? If you burn this energy at twice the rate, then you would have a 200 Watt light bulb, but of course, if you had a fixed amount of energy, it would only burn for half as long before that energy was used up. The faster you use it, the greater the power, but of course that power lasts for a shorter amount of time. Energy is conserved.

Again, so what?

If you take a modest amount of energy, but use it up extremely fast, then for that brief moment, you can generate some fantastically large powers. This is how a new generation of extremely high power lasers are being built, lasers which fire their pulse of energy in times which are measured in femtoseconds (which is one million-billionth of a second – 10-15 seconds). These lasers are now capable of producing power of 1015 Watt, which is a fantastic power level, even though the total energy dissipated is comparable to that burned by a 1 Watt light bulb in 1 second. But in this case that modest amount of energy was burned so incredibly fast. Again, and for the last time, so what? Well, during that femtosecond time interval, so much energy is packed into so short a time and in such a small volume of space, that any charged particles trapped in that region would experience the accelerations, and the electric/magnetic fields that, a particle would experience close to the horizon of a black hole.

Think about that the next time you flip on a light bulb.

Remember to turn off the black hole when you leave the room. (7)

BITS AND PIECES

• Still outlining that 27 volume Mars epic, and want to make sure that you have the latest data before you start terraforming? Then I suggest you check out a special issue of Science which has every detail of the recent Pathfinder mission. (8)
• The University of Tokyo has developed the first biomechatronic robot, by interfacing a cockroach with a robot, in such a manner that the cockroach’s nerve impulses run the robot. Great – a robot which tries to burrow under the refrigerator when the kitchen lights come on (9).
• Another vermin tale. Having trouble routing the latest high speed cable through your business or home? No problem, just call up Rattie. Wearing a harness to pull a nylon string and computer cable behind her, this rat can get the job done. She doesn’t even mind working around asbestos. (10)
• How many elements are there? In the prenuclear days the periodic table ended at element 92 – uranium. Today, atom smashers have pushed the number of elements up to 112. But most of these superheavy atoms are extremely unstable, decaying into lighter weight elements within a few milliseconds. However, theory predicts that element 114 may be quite stable. And what might one make with a stable superheavy element which has never before existed? How should I know? You guys are members of the SFWA – you figure it out. Oh yes, element 126 might be even more stable than 114. (11)
  1. Ivars Peterson, “The Z Machine,” Science News, Vol 153, January 17, 1998, pg. 46.
  2. Jeffrey Winters, “Cluster Bombs,” Discover, January 1998, pg. 52.
  3. Corinna Wu, “Floating Frogs,” Science News, Vol 152, December 6, 1997, pg. 362.
  4. Marcus Chown, “Reckless Raccoon’s Big Day,” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, pg. 56.
  5. Paul Proctor, “Laser Thrust Flies,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, September 29, 1997, pg. 15, and Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 3, 1997, pg. 19.
  6. Clive Davidson, “Creatures from Primordial Silicon,” New Scientist, 15 November 1997, pg. 30.
  7. Gerard A. Mourou et al, “Ultrahigh-Intensity Lasers: Physics of the Extreme on a Tabletop,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 22.
  8. M.P. Golombek et al, “Overview of the Mars Pathfinder Mission and Assessment of Landing Site Predictions,” Science, Vol. 278, 5 December 1997, pg. 1743.
  9. Philip Yam, “Roaches at the Wheel,” Scientific American, January 1998, pg. 45.
  10. Toni Feder, “Rat Wires Schools for the Internet,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 51.
  11. Richard Stone, “An Element of Stability,” Science, Vol 278, 24 October 1997, pg. 571.

Bob Metzger received his PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA in 1983. He spent 10 years at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, California, building high-speed electronic devices and trying to beat obnoxious atoms into submission. He is currently on the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA, where he now attempts to beat both obnoxious atoms and students into submission. He writes a science column for Aboriginal SF, and his fiction has appeared in Aboriginal, Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, and Science Fiction Age. His novel Quad World was published in 1991 by Roc. His e-mail address is rametzger@aol.com.

Props Master, Eric Hart, has an introduction to furniture with a number of useful links for European influenced furniture.

“I’d never write about a person from a different ethnic background. The whole story would probably be full of horrible stereotypes and racist slurs.”

Amy closed her mouth, and mine dropped open. Luckily, I was seated when my friend made this statement, but the lawn chair must have sagged visibly with the weight of my disbelief. My own classmate, excluding all other ethnic types from her creative universe!

I think this sort of misguided caution is the source of a lot of sf’s monochrome futures. You know the ones I mean, where some nameless and never discussed plague has mysteriously killed off everyone with more than a hint of melanin in their skin. I wonder sometimes what kind of career I’d have if I followed suit with tales of stalwart Space Negroes and an unexplained absence of whites.

But of course I don’t. I boldly write about people from other backgrounds, just as many of the field’s best authors do. Suzy McKee Charnas, Bruce Sterling, and Sarah Zettel have all produced wonderful transracial characters, as I show in examples below. Before getting into their work, though, let’s discuss how to prepare for your own.

If you want to go beyond the level of just assigning different skin tones and heritages to random characters, you’re going to have to do some research. Because yes, all people are the same, but they’re also quite different. For now, we’ll set aside the argument that race is an artificial construct, and concentrate on how someone outside a minority group can gain enough knowledge of the group’s common traits to realistically represent one of its members.

Reading’s a very non-confrontational way to do this. Be sure, though, if you choose this route, to use as many primary sources as possible. If researching a story about first contact between a stranded explorer from Aldeberan and a runaway slave, for example, you’d do much better reading The Life & Times of Frederick Douglass than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The latter is an important and moving book. But not only is it a work of fiction, it was written by a non-slave; therefore it’s a step further removed from the authentic experience you need.

Websites on minority culture abound. Any half-decent search engine will bring up a freighter’s worth of URLs on African-Americans, for instance, and at least a line or two on lesser-known groups.

For a less cerebral approach, check out nearby ethnic history museums. Art collections, historical dioramas, anthropological displays and so on can provide you with strong visuals. Some are interactive, and allow you to pick up a few aural and tactile sensations as well. For locations, look under “Museums” in the yellow pages, or consult a travel guide for your area.

When it comes to finding more contemporary material, magazines help. I also strongly recommend shopping trips, night-clubbing and restaurant hopping. Take a walk on the wild side. Do you feel like a tourist? Uncomfortable? Well, you are one, and you need to know what it’s like to be conspicuous. If your character’s a minority, she or he will be quite familiar with the sensation. Bruce Sterling once told me that alienation is an essential part of any science fiction writer’s education, and I agree.

Perhaps you have friends of other cultural backgrounds. Talk to them. Explain what you’re trying to do. Even though no one is a certified representative of their own ethnic group, they can let you know when something you propose is totally out of whack. And they can point you to sources of specific info.

If you’re thinking of approaching someone who’s more an acquaintance than a friend, offer to buy them lunch, or dinner, and make the interaction a formal interview. This is what you’d do with anyone else you wanted to pump for valuable data. Cultural background is data. If you want it, and you don’t have it, it’s valuable; treat it that way.

Above all, don’t rely on representations of minorities gleaned from popular culture. They’re as true to life as Donna Reed’s pearl-laden floor-waxing outfits.

So now that you’ve got some background on these Beautiful Strangers, how best to use it?

A lot depends on your piece’s point of view, and the size of a given character’s role within it. Let’s start with Charnas’ short story, “The Ancient Mind At Work,” in which the protagonist, a white immigrant from South Africa, views an African American man:

Katje never called him by his name because she didn’t know whether he was Jackson Somebody or Somebody Jackson, and she had learned to be careful in everything to do with blacks in this country.

He was slender as a Kikuyu youth–she could see his ribs arch under his shirt . . . By rights he belonged in a red blanket, skin gleaming with oil, hair plaited. Instead he wore the tan shirt, pants, and zip-up jacket of an ‘engineer’ from Buildings and Grounds, and his hair was a modest Afro, as they called it, around his narrow face.

Here we see the minority through the eyes of another minority, but one sharing many assumptions with this society’s rulers. Katje’s opinions about what this man “should” be wearing and doing throw our own preconceptions in relief by their extremity. Her caution in dealing with Jackson underscores that of most American whites.

On a few occasions, Charnas has Jackson speak for himself:

“Try and don’t put nobody in that number-six bedroom till I get to it at the end of the week,” he said.

“I got accepted in Computer school in Rochester next semester . . . they don’t do blacks with guns . . .”

Jackson’s speech reflects patterns familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to or talked with blacks of a certain upbringing. But it doesn’t lapse into incomprehensible “Buckwheatisms”; it marks difference, not inferiority. The combination of honest, foreign prejudice, familiar tension, and Jackson’s voicing of his own concerns produces a picture in slightly more than two dimensions, all that’s necessary for a supporting character.

Sterling’s “Green Days In Brunei” features a multi-transracial cast; main and most supporting roles are filled by people of very different races than the author’s own. On assignment for a Japanese corporation, Turner Choi, a twenty-six year old Chinese Canadian CAD CAM engineer, becomes slowly accustomed to the ways of a tiny, somnolent country near Borneo, and its mix of Malaysian, Chinese, Iban, Dayak and European citizenry. Novella length gives Sterling room to flesh Choi out, using comparisons to his stay-at-home lawyer brother and his domineering, bad-cop, drug tycoon of a grandfather. A non-Asian girlfriend calls him “about as Chinese as maple syrup. . .” A Malaysian princess sees his status as a Western techie as exotic.

Choi’s observations of his surroundings reveal as much about himself as they do about Brunei. The gossipy, village-like kampongs which run the city’s retro-greened high-rises inhibit his bachelor lifestyle. The Dayaks are his exotics, the “dark, beautiful descendants of headhunting pirates, dressed in hand-dyed sarongs and ancient plastic baseball caps,” their language “utterly incomprehensible.”

Otherness is not a uniform state. Non-whites are not indentical, interchangeable units. Choi’s sense of himself as a foreigner, as a Westerner, a Northerner, and a child of privilege, complicates all his interactions. Age, more than race, distances him from the white exile Brooke, with whom he might otherwise form an alliance.

It’s mostly Choi’s gear-headedness that defines him for himself. He learns the obsolete programming language required for his assignment so well he dreams in it. And he sees his love for Princess Seria as defined by tech:

The painfully simple local Net filtered human relations down to a single channel of printed words, leaving only a high-flown, Platonic essence. Their relationship had grown into a classic, bloodless, spiritual romance . . .

Being a gear-head in low-and-appropriate tech Brunei causes Choi’s most alienated moments, and allows Sterling his closest identification with the character.

Katmer Al Shei, a heroine of the novel Fool’s War, shares several characteristics with her creator, Sarah Zettel. They’re both women of low stature and high determination. Both rely on discipline and humor to help them deal with trying situations.

For Al Shei, this includes an encounter with a “gerbil,” or space-station worker, who assaults her near the book’s beginning:

“Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.

Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven can-gerbil.

She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom know how to reply to a declaration of faith . . .

Long before this early and explicit confrontation, Zettel establishes Al Shei’s otherness, with descriptions of the veils she and her cousin wear, and their integration of prayer into starship routine.

She also gives us a good idea of the context of this otherness. Coloring is noted: Master Fool Evelyn Dobbs’ skin is “a clear brown, two or three shades lighter than Al Shei’s earth tones. That and the angles in her eyes and her face said a good chunk of her ancestry was European.” And “shockingly blue eyes” shine out of Al Shei’s brother-in-law Tully’s “medium brown face.” But the roots of this society’s major prejudices lie in a dislike of certain strongly held beliefs. And right down there with the Muslims in terms of popularity is a group called “Freers.”

Freers have revolutionary ideas concerning A.I.s and their occasional emergence into self-awareness. Since these chaotic births usually result in the loss of human life, most people think Freers are insane to encourage them.

Fool’s War’s narrative switches between Al Shei, a target of religious persecution, Freer Jemina Yerusha, and Evelyn Dobbs, who has her own reasons for fearing irrational hatred. Though they all experience prejudice, the heroines’ goals aren’t quite congruent. Again, varying view points and sources of otherness give the story verisimilitude.

One more note on Fool’s War: Zettel makes a conscious effort to avoid equating non-European skin tones with food. In fact, she does the opposite, writing of Com Engineer Lipinski’s “pale, exotic good looks” in terms of milk and lobsters, which she contrasts with the more customary copper, bark brown, chestnut, etc. A friend pointed out to her the annoying frequency of references to coffee and chocolate as racial color analogies. Humans have been treated as commodities in this hemisphere’s recent past. The connection to slavery was subtle, but disturbing, and Zettel has done what she can to reverse the trend.

So let’s review how you, too, can make your universe an equal opportunity employer.

First, get to know your subjects. Primary sources are best.

When telling your story from any character’s viewpoint, be true to their take on the situation. Don’t give them your own anachronistic beliefs, or inauthentic, “p.c.” motivations.

Allow minority characters to speak with their own voices, even if only in a brief comment. Contrasts between multiple viewpoints produce both diversity and depth.

Show how race and prejudice figure in your setting, and what, if any, their connections.

Remember that difference is in the eye of the beholder. Black people don’t spend their whole lives thinking of themselves as black. We’re Ghanaians and editors and diabetics, and lots of other -ians and -ors and -ics. Use these self-categorizations to add points of audience identification to your characters.

Finally, offer your work to members of other ethnic groups for critique. You don’t have to follow their suggestions, but it won’t hurt to hear them.

Tom Wolfe spoke at a Press Club lunch on the subject of “writing what you know.” His point was that this is great advice, but that as writers it’s our job to continually know more.

This is true for SF writers in spades cubed. If we can’t create a reasonable facsimile of the local cigar shop’s owner, how much of a chance do we have of convincing readers they understand the Ganymedian group mind’s ambassador?

So welcome the Beautiful Strangers. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes with them. Do your best, and you’ll avoid the biggest mistake of all: exclusion.

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“Transracial Writing for the Sincere” is available in print from Aqueduct Press as part of the Tiptree Special Mention book  Writing the Other, a guide to developing characters of varying backgrounds by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.
Nisi Shawl’s story collection Filter House won the 2008 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for a 2009 World Fantasy Award. She received a second 2009 World Fantasy Award nomination for her novella “Good Boy.” Shawl is the coeditor, with Dr. Rebecca Holden, of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler (forthcoming). Her reviews and essays appear in the Seattle Times and Ms. Magazine, and she has contributed to Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Themes in Science Fiction. Shawl is a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended in 1992.

Pragmatics is an area of linguistics that I love, but which is difficult to define. Witness Mr. Paul Levinson, who spent an entire chapter trying to separate it from semantics in his textbook. Argh!

So what is Pragmatics? Basically, it deals with those areas of meaning which aren’t really meaning. What does that mean? It deals with implications (in the lingo, “implicature”), and with presuppositions, and with using language to do things rather than just send messages.

I think most people know about presuppositions, even if they can’t give a name to them. An example would be when the lawyer asks the plaintiff,

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

Either a yes or no answer will contain the presupposition that the plaintiff beat his wife. Thus, in order to avoid tacit acceptance of the idea that he’s beaten his wife, the plaintiff has to reject the question. There are many words like this. “Manage to,” for example, which presupposes that the person has “tried to.”

The usefulness of presuppositions in story-writing lies in their ability to carry extra implied meaning. If you say that your character “didn’t do” something, we know nothing about whether he or she wanted to do that thing, or tried. “Didn’t manage to do” tells us a heck of a lot more in just two additional words. So keep an eye out for these as helpers in the creation of point of view as well as ways to layer meaning into your story.

If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time you’ll have noticed that I’ve talked about H.P. Grice and the Cooperative Principle more than once. Essentially the Cooperative Principle says, “make your contribution to the conversation optimally relevant and appropriate.” This may seem terribly obvious, but it is in fact quite powerful. This is because the assumption of cooperativeness allows us to draw conclusions from what people say.

Let’s say someone tells you “I have two children.” From the point of view of strict truthfulness, this could be true so long as that person had two or more children. But the Cooperative Principle lets us conclude that if the person had more than two children, they would be telling us that. Thus, we conclude that the person has two, and only two, children. Grice calls this the “maxim of quantity.”

There are other Gricean maxims, but I won’t go into all of them here. I’ll just mention that the “maxim of quality” means that you’re not lying (I’ll return to the issue of lying, and its implications in stories, in a minute).

I’ve probably also mentioned “speech acts.” These are instances of “doing by speaking,” as when you invite, insult, refuse, swear, promise, marry, etc.. The action is accomplished by the utterance of the speech. I encourage you to think about these, because they often have social consequences. What kind of unique speech acts might a world have? In what contexts might they occur? What are the special conditions required for the act to be performed successfully (you can’t marry two people to one another unless you possess special qualifications, for example)?

In my story, “Let the Word Take Me”, every utterance was an act – an act of holy transport or blasphemy, or of respectful restraint – and was restricted by special conditions of person, time and place. This is an extreme example of the type, but there is a lot of interesting stuff to be gained by playing with speech acts in alternate cultural scenarios.

The other issue that Pragmatics covers is that of Politeness. This is extremely rich ground for story ideas, especially because Politeness often conflicts directly with the Gricean Maxims. In particular, it’s easy to misinterpret polite avoidance of particular topics as evasiveness or lying. We do a lot of effortful things in order to avoid threatening other people’s “face,” also called committing “face-threatening acts.” Brown and Levinson 1987 is the classic source of this discussion.

Interestingly, Brown and Levinson talk about two types of social desires: the desire to be autonomous (negative face), and the desire to be accepted (positive face). These contrast with one another, and while polite and diffident talk addresses another person’s desire to be autonomous, that desire may not be foremost in their minds. Familiar talk (including slang and insider vocabulary) addresses another person’s desire to be accepted. The choice between these two strategies is critical to a person’s success.

The other reason I love pragmatics as a source for stories is this: when people are learning foreign languages, the errors they make in pronunciation, word formation or sentence word order – even picking the wrong word meaning – are interpreted as errors in language. They are easily excused as the broken language of a learner. Errors in pragmatics, however, are not seen as language errors. They reflect instead on the personality and identity of the speaker. So a person who makes a politeness error is less likely to be seen as a learner and more likely to be seen as rude.

I have to say that Pragmatics is my favorite source for story ideas. I hope this discussion has shown you why, and has given you some ideas for exploring pragmatics in your own story worlds.

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How pragmatics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Ergocise.com is a program which pops up a reminder to stretch at pre-set intervals. The reminder shows a very simple animated gif with an ergonomically correct stretch designed for someone at a desk.  Most of the stretches take thirty seconds and none take more than a minute.

So if you find yourself getting stiff after a day in the chair, check out ergocise.com

I thought I’d discuss that ubiquitous genre activity – the one that always drives my spell-checker insane – making up words. Thereafter, I’ll give a little thought to the idea of redefining existing words.

I’m guessing that after my last post you can imagine how making up words contributes to an effect of foreignness. Whenever you replace an English word with a foreign one, you lose every connotation and context associated with that English word. The feeling provided by the newly created word will depend on the evocativeness of its pronunciation. This may come from an association with Earth languages that it resembles (which will give the new word some of the contextual association with the language in question), or from general principles of onomatopoeia (such as the association of voiced sounds/o/u with large or loud things, and voiceless sounds/a/i with small or quiet things). Any further associations will have to be deliberately provided by the writer.

I’ve often heard it said that “if it’s a rabbit, call it a rabbit.” I tend to agree with this. After all, why put your reader to the trouble of divesting a word of all its associations if the people in your story use a word with precisely the same associations?

Another created word context is that of words coined from combinations of other words (or parts thereof). This most often occurs in science fiction, when you’ll find people using comlinks and any number of other more exotic things. These words retain and combine associations, provided that the parts of the word are recognized and can be successfully extrapolated.

If you’re using a created word, think through what associations you want it to have. It’s not hard to show a reader through demonstration what the denotation of the word is. By all means, do so – but don’t stop there. For your word to take on life and feel real in the world of the story, it will help if it comes with some of the other types of associations that our words commonly do. I’m thinking of emotional connotations. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you have a word, Korinye, which means a particular type of police officer. In order to define it for the reader, you put one of these on a street corner (or chasing the protagonist, etc.) , point him or her out and say “watch out for the Korinye.” But that alone doesn’t tell you how the Korinye group is regarded in society, whether for example they’re a secret police for a fascist government or whether they’re just a friendly policeman on the beat (who nevertheless won’t be on your side if you steal from the shops). As you go through the story, think about whose point of view you’re in, and how that person regards Korinye in different contexts. Their view of Korinye can even change over the story. Or you can have alternate points of view to show that some people consider the Korinye to be upholders of the law, while others consider them to be ruthless brigands who pillage in the name of the law. Don’t just let your word sit; let it expand just a little each time you use it.

In general I’d suggest that you keep the most subtlety, the most extensive building and explanation only for words that are key to your main conflict. This may be a bias of mine, but why make people put a lot of effort into a word that will give them little reward? Of course, this does assume that you want the reader to feel like an “insider” with the word(s) in question. If you have a human going to an alien planet and feeling lost because all the words are different, then keeping to the human viewpoint will probably mean not explaining any of the alien words.

You can also turn this around. What if you’re in the alien viewpoint? It may surprise you, but my first suggestion for an alien viewpoint is this: Minimize the number of created words.

Part of putting your reader in an alien’s head means making him or her feel comfortable there. So have the alien give not very much thought to things he/she doesn’t feel are important. Names of animals, for example, can be tossed in with just a couple words of context, and even used as metaphors for other things, like “he was mad as a cornered ughara.” Give much more attention to those concepts that will allow readers to understand the alien’s motives. These concepts don’t even need to have made-up names.

Yes, I am suggesting that you can redefine English words rather than putting in created ones every time. Sure, your alien may have an idiosyncratic sense of honor, but you don’t have to call it “zinni” or anything else. Instead, use strategically designed context and explanations to designate the associations that you want, and pluck away the ones you don’t. In my forthcoming Analog story, Cold Words, the aliens have a very distinct set of social judgments associated with the words Warm and Cold (but not Hot). Since these are integral to the plot, I spend some time building them up contextually. The other word I change in that story is “friend.” This one works slightly differently because it is a concept that the aliens do not have. I have to treat it carefully because as you might imagine, this does not mean they don’t have close relationships. In order to change it, I have my character give some conscious thought to what it means and how it fits into the relationships he is familiar with.

I love this stuff – in particular the relation between words and social meaning, which will lead us into our next topics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. This will be the final post on semantics unless any of my readers have specific questions. If you do, please feel free to comment and ask.

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How morphology can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Neural networks are really amazing things. In my last post I talked about how a word brings up all of its meanings simultaneously; today I’m going to talk about how that’s not all it brings up.

I’m talking about connotations and allusion.

Along with all of its meanings, the mention of a word can bring up all the contexts in which we’ve encountered it. With exceedingly common words, there may not be a particular context that stands out, and the word may have a more generic feeling. With less common words, we may really notice how they evoke the context in which they were created (Quidditch, anyone?) or in which they were used. Regardless, these contexts always tag along, and they influence the way we hear a word.

Has anyone ever tried to use the word “ejaculate” as a dialog tag? No? It used to be common enough, but I’m guessing you can see why we don’t use it so much that way any more. (Dialog tags are out of fashion anyway because they can be distracting.)

This reminds me of a discussion I had on the Analog forum about euphemisms. They tend to get “used up” and replaced by others quite quickly. Why? Because of the contexts in which they are used. If those contexts are considered dirty or low, then the quality of the context will be evoked in the speaker or writer’s mind with every occurrence of the word, and eventually the word will be sullied by its association with that context.

In my classes at the school of Education at UC Berkeley, occasionally the word “intertextuality” came up. It essentially means that a word will evoke in the reader’s mind all the texts in which they have seen it. “Monster” can bring up Frankenstein, or Monsters Inc. or any number of other things. This is one of the reasons that my friend Paul Carlson was able to put together his list of words that evoke particular genres (find it here).

When you’re writing, it might be daunting to remember that there are a million layers floating behind everything you say, particularly when you choose a word that doesn’t occur so frequently as to become semi-generic. Almost any word can become more than it is, much like the few critical words used in ancient Japanese poetry (I’m thinking primarily of tanka, not haiku).

Daunting, sure – but what an opportunity! This stuff can allows you to imbue a scene with a sense of foreboding or excitement. The other thing it can do is allow you to illuminate your point of view character. All of the judgments of value inherent in a particular word will reflect on the user of that word. We see this all the time in oral language when we judge people based on their use of cuss words or insulting words for others. In a piece of narrative writing, all those judgments will be associated with the point of view character. It’s one of the ways that point of view can extend into your writing far beyond the simple first and third person pronouns.

That’s it for today, but stay tuned for the next installment.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.