Kosmosaic Books – G.L. Breedon

A few weeks ago I came across Brandon Sanderson’s First and Second Laws (of magic) at his blog and they sparked a great deal of thinking.

The two laws are:

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

Sanderson’s Second Law of Magics: Limitations > Powers

Sanderson goes into detail explaining each law and how it affects his writing. His first law is pretty simple. If the reader doesn’t understand how magic works in your world it will be harder for them to believe you when you use it to save the hero/heroine. He likes magic systems with clear rules and boundaries. So do I. But if you don’t, and your magic system has no rules (which makes it hard to call a system) then you need to make sure the reader understands this as well – again, so they will buy into your use of magic to save the day. (The same can easily be said for technology in sci-fi).

His second law is a little more intriguing. He’s essentially saying that what makes a character interesting (and the magic system interesting) is not what they can do with magic, but what they cannot accomplish. The power of their magic will help save them, but the limitations of their magic will put them in peril – and it is the peril what will help readers identify with the character and keep turning pages.

I thought those were both great observations. Reading them made me wonder not just how they can positively affect my own writing, but what other rules about magic I might find helpful.

I did a lot of research on creating magic systems before constructing the ones in The Wizard of Time and The Young Sorcerers Guild series. Both have similarities, but they are very different, each with clear rules about what the magic can do and what is required to accomplish it. For me the interesting thing about magic is not how it can help the characters, but how its use can cause problems. Magic is basically breaking the laws of physics in different ways, so I think when you break the law, there should be some consequences. Maybe not all the time, but certainly when a character uses magic in a big way there should be some big repercussions that play out in the plot and directly affect the character in question, as well as other characters that might get caught up in the ripple effects of the magic.

This is all useful thinking right now because I am in the process of figuring out how Gabriel’s use of magic can cause problems in The Wizard of Time Book 2. But it is also thinking that brings other laws and rules to mind.

The first is obvious – Arthur Clarke’s 3^rd Law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Which leads to Larry Niven’s corollary law: “Any sufficiently rigorously defined magic is indistinguishable from technology.”

The third popped into my head because I was thinking of it in relation to plot the other day – the Pareto Principle, usually called the 80/20 rule. A few business examples (from Wikipedia) illustrate the point:

• 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers
• 80% of your complaints come from 20% of your customers
• 80% of your profits come from 20% of the time you spend
• 80% of your sales come from 20% of your products
• 80% of your sales are made by 20% of your sales staff

This gets translated to all kinds of things, like 80% of your enjoyment comes from 20% of what you do. So that got me thinking about how the 80/20 rule might relate to novels. I’m not sure that it does really, but I suspect it might. I can certainly see how it relates to most non-fiction. In nearly every case of a non-fiction book I’ve read, 20% of the text provides 80% of the meaning and importance. Most writers don’t have that much to say, but they still need to fill 300 pages to get published.

So, if the 80/20 rule does relate to novels, does that mean that 80% of a reader’s enjoyment comes from only 20% of the novel?  Since I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about plot these days, as I revise the plot outline for WOT #2, I’m wondering if 80% of the story and action is found in 20% of the plot?

Again, I’m not sure if that holds true for most novels, and this is mostly a thought experiment, but I can see how keeping that rule in mind when plotting and writing might help to bend those numbers in your favor. When you think about a story and the plot that tells it, how much of it is essential? Sure there is a beginning, a middle, and an end (supposedly you’re not supposed to allow new beginnings, multiple middles, and double endings), but how much plot can you cut out of a story and still have the essence of the story present? In many cases – a lot.

How many times have you read a novel and thought that things were happening to the characters just to have things happening to the characters?  How many times have you thought to yourself the so-so novel your were reading might have made a great short story? Or that the film you were watching should have been a TV episode?

I think both films and novels can get trapped by a self impose structure that actually works against the story that is being told. Romantic comedies are a perfect example of this. Valentines was a few days ago and there was an article about why so many romantic comedy films fail to satisfy audiences.

The article was amusing, but I think the real problem with romantic comedies (and many films and novels) is a slavish adherence to a formulaic conception of three act structure. It usually goes like this:

Act 1 – Girl (because nearly all romantic comedies these days are from the perspective of a woman) meets Boy; Girl (who is somewhat neurotic because apparently slight neurotic women are supposed to be funny) and Boy (who is generally a bit of a jerk – I call this the Mr. Darcy syndrome) are initially repelled by each other, but secretly somewhat attracted (I suspect because she has daddy issues and he spends too much time watching porn to understand women as people); we spend some time learning inconsequential things about individual backgrounds of Girl and Boy, at the climax of Act 1, Girl and Boy are thrust together in some, hopefully, interesting way.

Act 2 – Girl and Boy spend the next hour getting to know each other. Girl realizes Boy is not as big a jerk as she thought he was. Boy sees that Girl’s neurosis is actually quite charming, Girl and Boy realize they like one another (but usually not enough to actually kiss – unless they have sex – it’s usually one or the other), and at the climactic moment of Act 2 – forced by the Iron Law of Three Act Structure – one of them (usually the Boy being a jerk again – unless it’s the Girl playing out her daddy issues in reverse) does something completely out of character and against all common sense, to sabotage the relationship and break the couple apart so that…

Act 3 – Girl and Boy spend the next 20 minutes realizing what an awful mistake he/she/they have made and finally reunite for that climactic movie-ending, all-questions-answering, no-more-problem-creating kiss. Roll credits.

For me, at least, I think the application of the Iron Law of Three Act Structure is the main reason why my general reaction to romantic comedies (and action films, and now that I think of it, almost all films) is blah! Treating three act structure like an iron law and forcing formulaic formatting on to the plot of stories makes them blandly predictable. Everything is telegraphed. The reader or viewer knows what is going to happen because they have seen the same thing happen at the same moment in countless other novels and films. For instance, why are so few romantic comedies about married couples (and I don’t mean the ones where the characters spend the whole story either cheating on each other or thinking about cheating on each other)? Why is it that no one seems to believe that people in a loving and committed relationship can be funny? The only exception to this seems to be when children are added to the married couple comedy. Apparently, kids are always funny.

So, wait, where was I before I started this diatribe against the misuse of three act structure? Right. The 80/20 rule.

If we can accept the proposition that in general 80% of the enjoyment of a story comes from 20% of the plot, how can we change that? With good, multi-layered structure. The sort of thing that most books on writing (whether for film or stage or novels) tell you. Each section, chapter, or scene of the story should either expand our understandinf of the characters, advance the plot, or resonate thematically in some significant way – preferably the chapter or scene should do all three.

For myself, I need to examine why each part of a story is there and how it can advance those three things (character, plot, and theme). If a scene or chapter doesn’t do those things, I need to figure out how to change it, or I should probably get rid of it. Sometimes a scene can only be about plot or character. If plot and character are the things we tend to enjoy most about a story (and I’m assuming we tend to enjoy them more than descriptions of settings), then by careful plotting and writing we can hopefully get to a point where the reader is getting 80% of their enjoyment from 80% of the story.

I think I’ll call this the 80/80 Goal. It’s clearly not a rule or a law – just an aspiration. And I think you can’t really ask the reader to enjoy 100% of your story. Everyone has different tastes and the average reader is bound to find 20% of the story they don’t really connect with.

Now let me propose something else, based on this discussion of the 80/20 rule, but thinking of Sanderson’s two laws of magic: A character’s use of magic should only solve 20% of the problems in the story but this same use of magic should create 80% of the new problems the character will face. I think I’ll call that the 80/20 Law of Magic.

Not only does this restrict how I can use magic to get out of situations that put the characters in danger, it also means that each significant use of magic has consequences that will reverberate throughout the plot, creating new difficulties and conflicts to be overcome. It will also mean that characters will (hopefully) restrain themselves in the use of magic – because, like violence, it leads to more of the same.

Maybe this will be a corollary to the 80/20 Law of Magic – Magic only leads to more magic.

I’m not sure about that, but it’s a fun idea to play with. In fact, I can’t say that I’m sure about any of what I wrote above. Maybe I’m 80% sure about 20% of what I wrote. Or am I 20% sure about 80% of what I wrote? Regardless, I now that 100% of the time I spend blogging is time I’m not working on the next novel. So…Time to break some rules.

I came across this film in progress called Man Conquers Space on the Sci-Fi Movie Facebook page. It’s an amazing retro-future history documentary of a space program that never existed, but that every space geek dreamed of in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Since I grew up reading Popular Science magazines from the 1950s and a great set of 50s encyclopedias my grandparents had, I too envisioned the future of space travel and exploration though that brightly, rose-tinted lens of 1950s space optimism. It was a sad day when I was old enough to realize that the future that I was dreaming about – a future of space stations, moon bases, missions to mars, and regular space travel – was unlikely to be realized in my lifetime.

Sure, we have the International Space Station, but the US no longer has a Space Shuttle to build and service it. We now rely on the Russian’s unreliable Soyuz space craft to service and staff the ISS. The next US space fleet is still years away and will not be composed of reusable craft. Private companies are, thankfully, trying to step into fill the gap and expand access to low earth orbit, but even with government assistance, there are some big hurdles to overcome before private space travel is regular, reliable, and safe.

The website for the Man Conquers Space film project has a great background story page with a detailed future history providing the dramatic rational for the film. I love future histories.  The idea is simple – a sci-fi fictional history of the future, generally used as a backdrop for several stories or novels. Neil R. Jones seems to have created the first fictional future history with his Professor James stories (published between 1931 and 1951). I grew up reading the stories in Robert Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow future history, Larry Niven’s Known Space future history, and Jerry Pournell’s Codominium future history, among others. I was always fascinated by a detailed vision of the future. It’s the sort of world building that lends a bit of realism to stories. Recently, I’ve found the future history of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth and Night Dawn series captivating. A solidly created future history in sci-fi is akin to a vividly imagined world in fantasy. Both are backdrops for the story to take place in, but the level of detail, and the consistency of that detail, lends the story a deep patina of realism that makes it easier for the reader to suspend his or her disbelief.

Back in the mid-1990s, I wrote a script called Future History. It was a story about a man and his robot meeting a woman and her rocket ship in the year 2000 AD – as envisioned by the sci-fi pulp magazines and novels of the 1940s and 50s. I haven’t looked the script in years, so I have no idea how good or bad it might be, but I while hunting for something else in my digital files, I came across a Guidebook to the Future – a future history I had written up for the script and formatted as a guidebook for the screenplay agents I was hoping to entice to represent me.

I got go so exited watching the teaser film for Man Conquers Space that I decided to post the guidebook for my Future History script. I may post the script itself sometime soon, but I think I’d want to read again before taking that leap.

Follow this link for Future History: A Guidebook to Tomorrow.

Last week there was a great interview in The Atlantic with Professor Tim Maudlin, who teaches the philosophy of physics at New York University. It’s a really interesting interview and it got me to thinking a number of things all at once.

The first thing it brought mind was the question of how philosophy, the love of wisdom, is applied to the various fields of human endeavor and study. Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Ethics, etc.. A few weeks ago I posted a blog about the difference between the fundamental questions asked by Science, Religion, Spirituality, and Philosophy. But this article started me thinking that a Universal Philosophy might encompass all of these questions. A universal philosophy might be able to examine the relationship between these questions.

The attempt to create a universal philosophy, a sort of theory of everything, that I am most familiar with is the Integral Philosophy of Ken Wilber. Wilber has spent the last thirty years working on philosophical framework to encompass religion, spirituality, psychology, and science. It’s a little to expansive and complicated to explore in detail, but the heart of it is a system he calls the quadrants of knowledge – a simple chart that shows outlines the relationships between the different areas of understanding. Wilber builds on the idea of holons by Arthur Koestler. A holon is both a thing unto itself and part of a whole. Wilber then arranges the different holons of the cosmos into quadrants. The quadrants are created from the intersection of two dichotomies: the interior/exterior and individual/collective. This presents four areas: individual interior (psychological), collective interior (cultural), individual exterior (physical/behavioral), collective exterior (physical/social). He then further extends levels of development within each quadrant (atom, molecule, cell, organs, bodies, etc.). You can see the chart below for a better idea of what I’m describing (from Kheper.com ).

Having read most of Wilber’s work, and much of the source material he used in formulating his theory, I find that I agree with the majority of his Integral Theory. There are problems with it, and there are some folks who think there are a lot of problems with it (see the writings at Integral World for a critique of Wilber’s theory, and in some case, Wilber himself.) I find his Integral Theory, a useful lens through which to examine the world and a means of seeing the interconnectedness of our individual lives with the cosmos around us. I’ve used it extensively in writing my non-fiction book exploring the connection between spirituality and globalization, The Chrysalis Age, and my feature film Dark September Rain, which explores what a spiritual response might be to an event as horrible as Sept. 11^th.

However, while Wilber’s Integral Theory does provide a proposition for the relationship between the different aspects of existence, I don’t think it qualifies as a complete Universal Philosophy. The chart above is a great map the different quadrants at different levels of development, but it doesn’t help understand the relationship between the various holons at these levels in or between quadrants. A Universal Philosophy would, I think, attempt do that – explore the relationship between the questions of the different philosophical arenas, especially Science, Religion, Spirituality, and Ethics.

I don’t really have the time to come up with a fully functional Universal Philosophy (assuming I could) but it is an idea that I think I know I want to explore in my writing. Which brings me to the next thought that the interview with Maudlin prompted – How can sci-fi and Fantasy be philosophical fiction?

One of the things that I have always found most alluring about sci-fi is that there has always been a tradition of writers asking big questions, and if not directly trying to answer those questions, at least probing them in interesting and thought provoking ways. Because science fiction stories are almost always about ideas, often more so than character or plot, there has always been a strong philosophical streak in the genre. Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice is a perfect example of what I think represents philosophical fiction. In fact, after the sci-fi set up of the neutrino message from space, it seems increasingly focuses on philosophical questions.

So, how can a Universal Philosophy, a philosophy of everything, be articulated and explored in science fiction and fantasy? Sci-fi and fantasy are genre fiction, which to me means that they are far more concerned with things happening. I suspect this is why so many sci-fi stories, especially from the Golden Age, focused on ideas more than characters (see this great report by the BBC in the 1960s prior to the launch of Dr. Who). Ideas drive plot. Not that characters are not important. They are the means by which the ideas are explored and explained, often in lengthy info dumps or “philosophical semi-Socratic dialogue scenes” (Stranger in a Strange Land comes to mind).

It is one the reasons I think science fiction and sci-fi writers are prone to utopianism. What better way to explore the utopian ideals of your particular ideology than in some fictional future (Walden Two, Ecotopia Emerging, 2150 AD, Looking Backward, etc.).

I’m not really interested in promoting a particular ideology in my writing. I’m more interested in exploring the appropriateness of different ideologies or philosophies in understanding the cosmos and how to see the relationships between them to get a clearer vision, not just of reality as we experience it now, but of how to structure our personal and collective futures. Of course, I suppose the notion that is even possible is a bit of an ideology.

Regardless, I think sci-fi and fantasy are perfect playgrounds for philosophical explorations, as long as it is integral to the story, complements the plot, and is actively lived by the characters. Otherwise, it’s easier to write an essay.

I need to post a blog, but I’m a bit pressed for time working on Wizard of Time #2 (still no title), so as  a placeholder until I can come up with something interesting, I figured I’d post a collage of my favorite sci-fi film posters. These aren’t my favorite sci-fi films (some are) just my favorite posters.

Hope you enjoy.

A few days ago I was looking through my old computer files for the stage play version of a screen play I wrote back in the 90s. I couldn’t find the play (seems it is lost on some 3.5” floppy disk), but I did come across something I had written in 1996 that seemed like it might be fun to post.  (For those interested, the screenplay was Moonlight Serenade, and while it seems the stage version is lost for good, I have been thinking that I should re-write it as a novel some time soon.)

Apparently I wrote a Chronology of the Atomic Age – or as I put it in the subtitle: A Chronology of the Effects of Nuclear Physics on the Genre of Science Fiction Literature and Film.

I have only vague memories of researching and writing it. At the time I was living in a shoe-box with two of my friends on the Upper East side of Manhattan, subsisting on infrequent work as a production assistant or grip/electric for commercials and music videos, and writing as much as I could with the copious amounts of time off. I must have wedged this little chronology in between a couple screenplays.

It’s a fun piece. I haven’t done anything with it, other than proof it once. It ends in 1996, and I haven’t extended the chronology to encompass years since.  It would be much more interesting, I’m sure, if I took the time to hyperlink all the references, but time spent doing that is time I could be spending writing the next Wizard of Time novel. Considering that many of the very nice reviews I’ve been getting at Amazon lately mention the desire for a sequel – I think it’s clear where my time is better spent.

I’ve created a new page for Odd & Ends and posted the Chronology of the Atomic Age there.

The Dark Shadow of Spring has a new cover. I was never happy with the old cover.I’m hoping this one helps sales a little. It will also make it easier to create a unified look for the four novels in The Young Sorcerers Guild series.

From October 2000 to spring of 2002 I took sabbatical to research and write a non-fiction book about the relationship between spirituality and globalization – examining the intersection between personal transformation and the transformation of the world.  I called the book The Chrysalis Age. As part of that book I wrote a short dialogue between Science, Religion, and Spirituality. The book never found a publisher, so I am in the beginning stages of editing it down and indie publishing it.

I was thinking about the book and that dialogue the other night and I wondered about Stephen Jay Gould’s phrase “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” which he uses to suggest that Science and Religion operate in separate realms that need not be in direct conflict with one another. Essentially, Science investigates the external world of facts and process, and Religion investigates the internal world of morals and meaning.

Which left me wondering where Spirituality falls in that map of understanding.  And then, I started wondering what the essential questions were that are posed by Science, Religion, and Spirituality and how the those questions relate and how they create conflict between these three realms of inquiry. If we put Science and Religion in two separate boxes, does Spirituality sit in a box between them, mediating their differences, or does it have one foot in both boxes, or does it refuse to sit in a box at all?

Richard Dawkin’s critique of the Non-Overlapping Magisteria proposition points out that the belief in a supreme supernatural being is outside the realm of morals and meaning and squarely in the middle of the realm of how the universe works and why. In fact, it seems to me that the realm of morals and meaning was largely divorced from religion by Enlightenment Philosophy. So, do we need to add a fourth category of Philosophy to the equation?

Also, do we have to differentiate between Religion and Spirituality? I think we do, and I think that difference can be summed up as Theology vs Mysticism. I think of theology as the rules and rationalizations of a belief system and mysticism as a trans-rational experience of reality (see an excerpt from The Chrysalis Age  –Transformation and Transcendence for a more in depth definition of spirituality).

Some central questions for each realm (off the top of my head and without research to support them):

I find that an interesting (if partial) list of central questions. Obviously, some of those questions occur in more than one realm of inquiry – which is the source of the tension between them. The cause of that tension is the means of inquiry that are used to examine the questions of each realm.

Science relies on the examination of factual evidence, observation, and predictive reasoning to prove or disprove a hypothesis suggested to answer a central question. Religion relies on a host of things to try and answer its central questions: insight, visions, traditional stories, inductive reasoning, etc. Philosophy tends to rely on deductive reasoning and observation. And Spirituality relies largely on direct inner experience.  No wonder they can find it difficult to play nice.

Of course the most interesting question to me is how can I explore these issues and the relationships between these realms of inquiry in the science fiction and fantasy I write? A month or so ago I wrote a couple of blogs on how to explore religion and spirituality in science fiction and fantasy.

To me, these questions raise another question in relationship to storytelling: How can my characters explore these questions? Importantly, which realm the characters explore the question from it will impact not only how they investigate those questions, but how they will interact with and conflict with other characters. The nature of how the questions are posed in each realm and how they investigated has an impact on how much conflict there will be between one realm and another and within realms. Conflict is the heart of drama. For instance, while it is not uncommon for people in the realm of Science to disagree with one another, they don’t launch wars and murder other scientists based on these diverging opinions. Yet in the realm of Religion, this sort of violent conflict has historically been common place.

It gives me a lot to think about. Not really for The Young  Sorcerers Guild series, but definitely for The Starship Destiny series, and to a lesser degree, The Wizard of Time series. It will also have a huge impact on an epic fantasy series I’ve been plotting out for the last year or so. However, I doubt I’ll have time to write that for a year or two, so I have plenty of time to think about these questions some more.

It’s a busy week and there isn’t as much time for blogging as I would like. The day job is quite busy and I’m in the final stages of work on Summer’s Cauldron (YSG #2) so I can send it to the editors next week. I’m also reworking the cover for the first YSG novel, The Dark Shadow of Spring, to be more visually engaging and have a thematic look that will carry over for all four novels in the series.

I saw a fun essay at the AV Club about dystopian sci-films from the 1970s and it got me to thinking about the way the future gets represented in sci-fi. Actually, it got me thinking about more than that. I started out wondering why so few sci-fi stories (at least in film and TV) present a utopian tinged future and instead give us a glimpse of one or more versions of a dystopian nightmare. It also got me to thinking about how this dichotomy of utopia/dystopia plays out in fantasy stories.

Back in the fall I wrote a little blog about how our worldview informs the way we envision the future – as either darkness or light. I also had little reading list of utopia and dystopia lit.

My thoughts today are little different. It’s easier to find negative/dystopian sci-fi visions of the future in film and TV than positive/utopian visions. Star Trek, in all its various incarnations, is probably the most easily identifiable story set in an utopian, or at least semi-utopian, future. I think that is a strong component of its enduring popularity. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any other TV show or film that has quite that level of utopian appeal (Babylon 5, maybe – but I really can’t speak to that as I’ve never made it past the first season). The appeal to some future world where things will be better has a strong attraction for many people. Of course, it means that the stories will have to focus on building conflict and drama, not through struggles against or with society, but between characters, or between the utopian society and some external threat (the Romulans, the Klingons, the Borg, etc.).

The attraction of a dystopian setting for telling sci-fi stories is easy to see. A dystopian background creates foundational dramatic atmosphere for the story being told. Star Wars doesn’t work dramatically without out the evil of the empire. Battlestar Galactica wouldn’t have the same dramatic hook if the cylons aren’t trying to destroy the humans. A dark and stormy future makes it that much easier for the story tellers to capture the attention and the imagination of the audience.

I believe this same dichotomy of utopia-dystopian tension plays outing in fiction as well, both sci-fi and fantasy. In fact, I’ve always found it curious that so many fantasy stories, especially epic fantasy stories, are set in a version of the European Middle Ages, with magic added in. What’s curious about that, to me, is that I have always felt that while sci-fi is looking toward some golden (or dark) age in the future, fantasy is usually looking back toward some golden (or dark) age in the past. It’s curious that in looking back to some golden age of heroes and magic so many writers settle on the Middle Ages, rather than some point in pre-history.  But, maybe that setting is the perfect combination of these utopian and dystopian impulses. The golden age of magic and heroes set in the darkest ages of European civilization.

That actually brings me back to the AV Club essay which spent most of its time discussing Logan’s Run.  In a way, that film (and the book it was based on) area perfect combination of the utopian and dystopian story tropes. There is the bright golden future where everyone has every need supplied, but behind it is the dark reality of an early death, so that others can live long lives and control society at the expense of the young.

I must admit, these thoughts aren’t as coherent as I had hoped, but they will have to suffice, as I really need to get come editing done on Summer’s Cauldron.

The year 2012 brings with it an uncommonly large number of predictions for the end of the world. The wonderful geeks at NASA have created a page debunking the most famous of the predictions for calamity in 2012. There are summaries of it elsewhere. There are also folks that take it very seriously.

Most of these prophecies have their origin in the Mayan calendar and the myth of a fifth age to begin, after 5125 years, on December 21, 2012. Some think this will be a new spiritual age, others think it will be a new age born out of some apocalypse.

Author, Graham Hancock wrote a really fun book back in the 90s exploring these ideas, particularly the notion that a polar shift might occur in 2012. It’s called The Fingerprints of the Gods. I read the book first as fun and then again as research for a screenplay.

The script was about a cascading series of earthquakes destroying the world and what happens when Jupiter’s moon Europa leaves its orbit and heads for Earth. It’s called, The Day the Sky Fell. Yes that’s an homage to The Day the Earth Stood Still. So is the script in many ways. You can find it as a PDF on my other website if you are interested. It’s a sci-fi story with a spiritual theme. I should probably look into rewriting it as a novel. It never attracted much attention as a screenplay. It would require too large a budget for one thing. In case you haven’t noticed, almost all big budget films these days are based on pre-existing material. So, I guess I really should re-write it as a novel, so maybe someone will be interested in it as a screenplay.

I wonder how many copies of a sci-fi novel you need to sell before Hollywood will become interested in the story. It doesn’t seem that you need to sell many copies of a graphic novel/comic book before Hollywood can justify turning it into a movie (with not so surprising results).

Maybe I should turn the story into a comic book. If only I could draw. And color.

But, I guess I need to get it all done before Dec. 21st. Actually, since I doubt the world will end, and I doubt there will be some great spiritual revolution, I’ll work on writing Wizard of Time – Book 2. If you’re interested in why I think a spiritual revolution would be a good thing, even if I doubt it will happen, you can check out an essay I wrote several years ago after researching and writing a book about spirituality and globalization.

I came across two things that at first seemed unrelated to me that later came together in my mind while I was walking home last night. The first is a fun blog over at Electrical Engineering Times. Clive Maxfield has a blog where he often discusses sci-fi geek stuff, because who better to enjoy sci-fi geek stuff than electrical engineering geeks. He has a post in which he listed his favorite generation ship sci-fi novels. There is a nice entry on Wikipedia that explains generation ships and gives some examples from literature and film. There is also booak by Simone Caroti called The Generation Starship in Science Fiction: A Critical History, 1934-2001. I haven’t read the book (it’s a bit pricey), but it sounds interesting from  the bits I’ve perused on Google Books.

Maxfield lists several novels: Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky, Brian Aldiss’ Nonstop (aka Starship), Gregg Bear’s Eon, John Varley’s Titan (which isn’t really a generation ship), and Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous with Rama. He also mentions the films Pandorum and Wall-E. The only one I hadn’t read or seen was Harry Harrison’s Captive Universe, which I promptly ordered used from Amazon.  However, Maxfield didn’t mention the Canadian TV series Star Lost (created by Harlan Ellison), which is a fun but, dated series.

It’s interesting how many generation ship stories revolve around a crew that has forgotten they are on a starship. I wonder why that is?

Something else I saw made me think about generation ships, or at least colony ships.  Physicist Marcin Jakubowski, founder of Open Source Ecology, is leading a team in assembling the Global Village Construction Set, an open source set of blueprints and instructions for fabricating the 50 essential industrial machines for a modern civilization. The intent is that communities and governments in developing nations can use this construction set to jump-start their societies and economies and create higher standards of living for their citizens.

That’s a great idea, and a huge help to people living in developing nations. Of course, my first thought was that these are the same 50 industrial machines that would be required for creating a modern civilization from scratch on a new planet.

And thought led me to thinking about the work of the folks at the DARPA 100 Year Starship Study and Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams blog. The 100 Year Starship Study was a symposium held this past October to explore the various disciples necessary to mount an interstellar expedition while Glister’s blog is a more personal exploration of the same subjects.

I’ve given some thought to what it might be like to live on a generation ship. The Celestial Blade (The Starhip Destiny – Book 1) takes place on a generation ship making a 2000-year voyage to the Andromeda galaxy in hopes of responding to a radio message. It’s not just humans, but several species, each in their own continent-sized compartment, making the journey. The story had less to do with the end result of the voyage and more to do with a mutiny, but it’s fun to contemplate the process of travelling great interstellar distances in a mammoth starship. Clearly it’s a theme that has resonated with some of the best sci-fi writers. Hopefully, my contribution to the sub-genre will be as entertaining and thought provoking