Monthly Archives: March 2023

Join the Laser Pistol Gang

I plead guilty…to violating many laws of science in my writing. But I’m not alone. I’m in good company with many other science fiction writers. Call us the Laser Pistol Gang.

Authors of so-called ‘hard SF’ should adhere to known scientific principles and knowledge, but aren’t above bending or breaking the laws of physics for the sake of a good story.

Mary Shelley really stretched biological science in Frankenstein when her fictional scientist animated a human from dead tissue. Jules Verne knew human astronauts wouldn’t survive the acceleration of a manned projectile launched from a canon in From the Earth to the Moon. H.G. Wells disobeyed temporal causality in The Time Machine. When he wrote Fantastic Voyage, Isaac Asimov understood the impossibility of miniaturizing people. From his medical training, Michael Crichton must have realized not enough intact DNA fragments remain to create the living dinosaurs of Jurassic Park.

These represent a small sampling from SF literature. Don’t get me started on SF movies, which seem to break more laws of science than they obey.

On what charges could the science police arrest me? Consider my rap sheet:

  • “The Steam Elephant” (from Steampunk Tales, Issue #5 and The Gallery of Curiosities #3). The state of steam and mechanical technology in the 19th Century did not allow for a walking, steam-powered, quadrupedal vehicle.
  • “Within Victorian Mists.” Everything needed to invent lasers existed in the 1800s except the conceptual framework, so if it had happened, it would have required dumb luck.
  • “Bringing the Future to You” (from Cheer Up, Universe!). That story contains too many science violations to list, but I meant the tale to be funny.
  • “Leonardo’s Lion.” Some accounts state Leonardo da Vinci built a walking, clockwork lion. Even if true, it’s doubtful the creation would have supported a child’s weight or traveled over rough terrain, as it does in my story.
  • “The Six Hundred Dollar Man.” Yes, steam engines existed in the late 19th Century, but no one then could have made one small enough to fit on a man’s back and power the man’s replacement limbs.
  • “A Tale More True.” Try as you might, you can’t build a metal spring strong enough to launch yourself into space as my protagonist does.
  • “The Cometeers.” In this story, I violate the same laws Verne did in launching humans to space using a canon. In fact, I used his same canon.
  • “Time’s Deformèd Hand.” Nobody in 1600 AD built walking, talking automatons powered by springs. However, I did mention the wood came from magical trees.
  • “A Clouded Affair” (from Avast, Ye Airships!). You couldn’t build a steam-powered ornithopter in the 1800s, and you’d find it difficult even today.
  • “Ripper’s Ring” Human invisibility remains impossible today, let alone in 1888. Even if it were possible, it would render the subject blind.
  • “The Cats of Nerio-3” (from In a Cat’s Eye). Evolution allows organisms to adapt to new environments, but neither cats nor rats would likely evolve in such a rapid and drastic manner as my story suggests.
  • “Instability” (from Dark Luminous Wings). According to legend, a Benedictine monk constructed a set of wings and tested them sometime around 1000 AD. The wings work no better in my story than they would have in reality.
  • “The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall” (from Quoth the Raven). Just because Edgar Allan Poe wrote about a balloon trip to the moon didn’t mean I had to repeat his error.

With so much law-breaking going on, how can we hope for an orderly reading society? Must we be forever besieged by the criminal authors of the Laser Pistol Gang?

That answer, I’m happy to report, is yes. Authors write to entertain readers. That’s a writer’s ‘prime directive,’ to steal a phrase. If the writer must bend or break a rule of science to tell a good story, the writer is going to do it.

One key phrase there is ‘good story.’ The better the story, the easier it is for a reader to forgive a scientific flaw. Of course, if you can tell a good story while keeping the science accurate, by all means, do that.

If you aim to join the Laser Pistol Gang, be aware we have a tough initiation ritual. You have to write a story where a law of science gets broken. Not a very exclusive gang, I admit. But it’s a proud, longstanding group. Take it from one of its most notorious members, known by his gang name—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 18, 2023Permalink

Your 3 Distinguishing Words

Using computers, you can measure peoples’ writing. You can compare recent bestsellers to books that didn’t sell well.

One man with interests in numerical analysis and literature tried just that. Ben Blatt wrote Nabokov’s Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing. Megan Gambino interviewed him in this post.

Blatt analyzed books by many bestselling authors of the 19th and 20th Centuries, looking for patterns of word usage. He compared the practices used by these authors to the practices recommended in writing classes (and in blogs about writing, like mine). Among his findings are the following:

  • Advice: Keep your opening sentences short.
    • Finding: True. The bestselling books start with short sentences more often than not.
  • Advice: Don’t open with the weather.
    • Finding: False. Many bestselling books do.
  • Advice: Shun adverbs.
    • Finding: True. The bestselling books tend to include fewer adverbs.

He also set out to discover whether American authors write in a ‘louder’ manner than British authors. That is, do American author cause their characters to yell and scream more than British authors cause their characters to do? That answer is yes.

I found one aspect of Blatt’s research of particular interest. He analyzed what words some authors used more than others. For Jane Austen, the words civility, fancying, and imprudence showed up a lot. John Updike used rimmed, prick, and f**ked more than most. As you can guess from the title of Blatt’s book, Vladimir Nabokov favored the word mauve. Nabokov associated numbers, letters, and sounds with colors, a symptom of synesthesia. Blatt found Ray Bradbury used spice and smell words more than most.

These findings intrigued me. If someone performed a numerical analysis of my own published works, what would that reveal? What words do I use more frequently than other writers do? If you’re a writer, are you curious about that aspect of your own work?

If someone crunched the numbers for your writing and told you your three distinguishing words, what would these words say about you? Nabokov’s mauve pointed to his synesthesia. Bradbury’s spices brought him back to the smells of his grandmother’s pantry. If you knew your distinguishing words, would they surprise you? Delight you? Disgust you?

After knowing them, would you own them and seek to use them more in future stories, or disavow them and expunge them from your vocabulary?

One thing’s certain. Considering just my blogposts alone, my two most distinguishing words must be—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 12, 2023Permalink

Want to be a Character in Your Own Book?

When authors write themselves in as characters in their fiction, we call it ‘self-insertion.’ Why and when might you try this literary technique?

The list of authors who’ve done this includes names you’ve heard of— Dante Alighieri, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Kurt Vonnegut, Stan Lee, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, and Daniel Handler (writing as Lemony Snicket). Pretty good company.

The technique varies. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dante made himself the main character. He used self-insertion to give the book more credibility, to imitate a nonfictional account of an actual journey.

For Stan Lee, Clive Cussler, and others, self-insertion serves a comedic purpose. The author/character assumes a minor role in the narrative, a cameo. The character may offer a humorous comment about the plot, setting, or protagonist. In Cussler’s books, the character named Cussler often gives the protagonist some useful information, serving as a self-named Deus ex Machina.

One of the strangest uses of self-insertion appears in an experimental novel by the French author Charles de Fieux De Mouhy (1701-1784) in his novel Lamékis, or The Extraordinary Travels of an Egyptian in the Interior Land; with the Discovery of the Isle of Sylphides. I haven’t read it, but others say the novelist enters the book as a character about halfway through. The book’s other characters recognize him as the author of the book they’re in, and berate him about the falsehoods he’s written. When characters realize they’re in a book, that’s called ‘breaking the fourth wall.’

The technique of self-insertion differs from the related term, ‘author surrogate.’ That’s when a character (usually not sharing the author’s name) speaks for, or otherwise resembles, the author. In the broad sense of this term, you might see this in nearly every work of fiction. At some point, a character offers an observation sounding more like the author than the character. A beginning writer may use the technique without intending to, because it’s difficult to get out of one’s own head and think like someone else.

Back to self-insertion. However quirky the technique may seem to readers, it comes with obvious advantages for the writer. You don’t have to invent this character’s name, or draw up a personality profile, or ponder what the character might say or do at any point. You know all those things already.

The danger lies in representing a self-inserted character as better than the writer really is. Such a character may always look right, say the right thing, and act the right way. In short—flawless, perfect. Readers find such characters unrealistic, whether self-inserted or not.

Self-insertion works best for stories set in a contemporary time period. That is, while the author is alive. Inserting yourself into historical fiction or future fiction would seem weird, but might work as humor, or as part of a philosophical reality-questioning work like De Mouhy’s Lamékis.

The technique might strike you as bordering on egotism, or as crossing way over that border. That’s why many authors who use it go for the comedy aspect. (Yes, I’m vain, but I’m poking fun at myself.) I see it more as wish fulfillment—an author loving the story and yearning to be in it.

“Time to wrap this up, don’t you think?”

Um, who are you?

“Don’t you recognize me? I’m Steve Southard, the main character of this blogpost.”

This isn’t fiction. You don’t belong here. I’m the narrator, and writer, and I say what belongs in this post. You don’t.

“Too bad. I’m here, and it’s time we signed off with my other name—

Poseidon’s Scribe”

March 5, 2023Permalink