Tag Archives: The Sea-Wagon of Yantai

7 Ways to Start Your Science Fiction Short Story

Oh, those choosy readers! So pressed for time, so easily distracted. If you don’t begin your SF short story in an imaginative, attention-grabbing way, they won’t read further. Let’s find out how to hook them.

Author Charlie Jane Anders wrote a great post citing seven killer openings for SF short stories, with classic examples for each one. I highly recommend her post.

Here, in brief, is my take on her list, with examples from my stories:

1. Set the Scene. Put us ‘there’ right away. Immerse us in the strangeness of your setting. Most SF stories begin this way. Use when setting is important, but get to the plot’s action soon after.

Personal Example, from “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai:”

2. Introduce Conflict. Hit us with the problem first. What is your character dealing with? Fill in other details later. Good way to hook readers, but a bit chancy if your bomb’s a dud, or if the rest of the story doesn’t live up to its start.

Personal Example, from “A Tale More True:”

3. Mystify. Intrigue and confuse us. Cast us in without knowing our bearings yet. A risky way to start, but when it works, it works well.

Personal Example, from “The Cats of Nerio-3:”

4. Gather ‘Round, Children. Have a talkative narrator speak to the reader in third person, often addressing the reader as ‘you.’ Often used in humor stories, but you need to keep that narration intriguing, and sustain it.

Personal (though approximate) Example, from “Reconnaissance Mission:”

5. There I was. Have the talkative narrator, the main character, self-identifying as “I,” speak to the reader in first person. Often these stories start in a reflective, essay-like tone. Helps readers identify with the main character right away, but you need to get to the plot action and the scene-setting soon after.

No Personal Examples

6. Start With a Quote. This can be a quote from another document, or (more often) a character speaking. Good way to introduce a character’s personality right away, but if done wrong, this beginning can come off as juvenile.

Personal Example, from “The Unparalleled Attempt to Rescue One Hans Pfaall:”

7. Open With a Puzzle. Combine 2. and 3. above to introduce a conflict while also mystifying. This is the most difficult of the seven methods. Great when it works, but awful when it doesn’t.

Personal Example, from “Moonset:”

You should work hard on the opening lines of your short stories. Try several, or all, of the examples above until you hit on one you feel is right. Attempt, in a sentence or two, to (1) grab the reader, (2) introduce the main character, (3) present or suggest the conflict, (4) set the mood or tone of the story, and (5) perhaps give a hint of the ending for circular closure.

Now go out and grab your readers, using the methods of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 21, 2021Permalink

Technoethics and the Curious Ape

In the movie Jurassic Park, the character Ian Malcolm says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Today, I’m focusing on another technology topic, namely ethics in technology, or Technoethics.

Wikipedia article “Ape”

Our species is innately curious and inventive. We possess large brains and opposable thumbs, but lack claws, shells, great speed, camouflaged skin and other attributes employed by animals to attack prey or to avoid becoming prey. These circumstances make us natural toolmakers.

From the beginning, we found we could use our tools for good or evil. The same stick, spear, bow and arrow, or rifle we used to kill a rabbit for dinner could also kill a fellow human. The different outcome is not inherent in the tool, but in the heart of the person employing it.

For each new technology in our history, there was at least one inventor. This person took an idea, created a design, and often used available materials to assemble the new item. Were these inventors responsible for, in Malcolm’s words, stopping to think if they should?

With some technologies, like the plow, the printing press, the light bulb, and the automobile, it’s certain their creators intended only positive, beneficial outcomes. The inventor of the automobile could not have foreseen people using cars as weapons, or that one day there’d be so many cars they’d pollute the atmosphere.

With other technologies such as the spear, the warship, the canon, and the nuclear bomb, the inventor’s intent was to kill other people. Why? The usual rationale is twofold: (1) My side needs this technology so our wartime enemy does not kill us, or (2) If I do not invent this technology first, my enemy will, and will use it against my side. Given such reasoning, an inventor of a weapon can claim it would be immoral not to develop the technology.

I’m sure there are unsung examples of would-be inventors refusing, on ethical grounds, to develop a new technology because they feared the consequences. The only example I can think of, though, is Leonardo da Vinci. Although he had no qualms about designing giant crossbows and battle tanks, he drew the line at submarines. Though at first excited about giving a submarine design to the Venetians for use against the Turks, da Vinci reconsidered and destroyed his own plans, after imagining how horrible war could become.

That example aside, the history of humanity gives me no reason to suspect future inventors will hesitate to develop even the most potent and powerful technologies. It’s our curious ape nature; if we can, we will. Only afterward will we ask if we should have.

As a writer of technological fiction, I’ve explored technoethics in many of my stories:

  • In “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” a Chinese submarine inventor intends his craft as a tool of exploration, but an army officer envisions military uses.
  • In “The Steam Elephant,” a British inventor sees his creation as a mobile home for safari hunters, but then imagines the British Army employing it on the battlefield. Only the narrator character fears what war will become when both sides have such weapons.
  • In “Leonardo’s Lion,” da Vinci actually builds his inventions, but hides them away and gives clues to the King of France about where to find them. The King never sees the clues, but decades later a ten-year-old boy does, and must decide whether the world is ready for these amazing devices.
  • In “The Six Hundred Dollar Man,” a doctor imagines how steam-powered prosthetic limbs would have saved crippled Civil War soldiers, but fails to foresee how super-strength and super-speed could turn a good person bad.
  • In “Ripper’s Ring,” a troubled Londoner in 1888 comes across the Ring of Gyges that Plato wrote about, an invisibility ring. Possession of that ring changes him into history’s most famous mass murderer.
  • In “After the Martians,” the survivors of an alien attack in 1901 take the Martian technology (tripods, heat rays, flying machines) and fight World War I.

As we smart apes start playing with bigger and more deadly sticks, maybe one day we will stop and think if we should before we think about whether we can. Hoping that day comes soon, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 10, 2019Permalink

Retreading Worn Trails: Path Dependence in Technology

A few weeks ago, I mentioned I’d be discussing technology topics in this blog from time to time, along with the accustomed advice for beginning writers. Today I’ll delve into path dependence in technology.

I’ve long found it fascinating how people deal with new technology. Occasionally, developers of a new invention will copy the appearance of an older one. They don’t do this to ease adaptation for the user, but rather to reduce the risk of failure. By starting with something proven, with available parts, and making only a few changes, innovators increase the chance of their invention’s success.

This is the technological aspect of the larger term ‘path dependence,’ since historical precedence frames the inventor’s decisions. Only later does the new invention diverge in form from its predecessor.

You won’t find path dependence in all new technologies, but it’s most often present in evolutionary, versus revolutionary, developments.

Robert Fulton’s Nautilus of 1800
  • As a former submariner, one of my favorite examples of path dependence is the shape of submarines. Early submarines intended for long transits, like Fulton’s Nautilus and the military subs of World Wars I and II, resembled surface ships. They had ‘U’ or ‘V’ shaped cross sections, not ‘O’ shaped. Only later did submarine designs deviate from the standard surface ship configuration.
Benz Patent-Motorwagen from 1885
  • The automobile is another example. The first automobiles resembled the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them. Subsequent automobile designs departed from this model.
  • E-mail is another example of path dependence. The term itself refers back to the postal mail that came before electronic mail. In the early days of e-mail, people also formatted their messages as they had with traditional letters.

I’ll also cite three examples from my own stories. These are all fictional inventions, but are path dependent in the sense that their appearance sprang from predecessor technologies.

  • When I came across a claim that someone had invented a prototype submarine in China circa 200 BC, I decided to write a story about that. Accounts of this feat from 22 centuries ago were vague, so that freed me to create my own version. In “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” my protagonist inventor, Ning, patterns his submarine after the horse-drawn wagons of the period. I assumed my inventor would make minor alterations to a vehicle type with which he was familiar.
  • In writing my story “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” I toyed with the notion that Heron (sometimes written as Hero) of Alexandria might have found a practical use for the toy steam engine he built in the First Century AD, that of propelling a ship. Of course, he wouldn’t have envisioned a propeller-driven ship with an 18th Century style steam engine. My story features an oar-driven galley, with eighteen of Heron’s spinning metal spheres driving the oars.
  • In “A Tale More True,” my protagonist constructs a gigantic coil spring intended to launch him to the Moon from Germany in 1769. Count Federmann knows nothing of aerodynamics (let alone the effect of acceleration on the human body), so his capsule is merely a small metal house, square in shape, with a pitched roof. Again, this innovator chooses a shape with which he’s familiar.

Do you know of other examples of path dependence in new technology, whether real or fictional? If so, leave a comment for—

                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

January 6, 2019Permalink

What’s Silkpunk?

You thought this blog-post was the last word on the various ‘punk’ subgenres? Wrong. Meet the new member of the punk family: Silkpunk.

Author Ken Liu invented the term Silkpunk to describe the genre of his latest novel, The Grace of Kings. In this post, he defined silkpunk as “…a blend of science fiction and fantasy…[drawing] inspiration from classical East Asian antiquity. My novel is filled with technologies like soaring battle kites that lift duelists into the air, bamboo-and-silk airships propelled by giant feathered oars, underwater boats that swim like whales driven by primitive steam engines, and tunnel-digging machines enhanced with herbal lore.”

This newest member of the Punk Family is unlike the others in that it’s not represented by a power source or engine type. Perhaps, though, in a metaphorical way, it is. The Silk Road was a trade network from China to Europe that empowered China.

Congratulations to Mr. Liu for coming up with the term Silkpunk. However, with all due modesty, I must say, stories of that type are not new. My own story, “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai” belongs in that genre as well.

In my tale, it’s 206 B.C. and China is torn by warring dynasties. A young warrior, Lau, receives orders to verify the legend of a magic wagon that can cross rivers while remaining unseen. He encounters Ning, the wagon-maker in the seaside village of Yantai. Ning has constructed an unusual wagon that can submerge, travel along the bottom of the Bay of Bohai, and surface in safety—the world’s first practical submarine. Ning enjoys the peace and beauty of his undersea excursions; he won’t allow the military to seize his wagon or learn its secrets. Lau must bring the valuable weapon back to his superior. In the hands of these two men rest the future of the submarine, as an instrument of war or exploration.

My story was inspired by vague references I’d read about someone inventing a submarine in China around 200 B.C. A second inspiration for my story was Ray Bradbury’s tale, “The Flying Machine.” One of his lesser-known works, it’s a wonderful short story, and would certainly qualify as silkpunk, with its kite-like bamboo flying machine with paper wings.

Another silkpunk story that predates the invention of the subgenre’s name is “On the Path,” by fellow author Kelly A. Harmon. Within it, Tan is a farmer, following the path, when the seal on his soul-powered plow bursts, releasing all ghosts from its reincarnation engine. The ghosts flee to Tan’s tangerine groves, reveling in their freedom. One of the souls is Tan’s deceased uncle, Lau Weng, and Tan must offer hospitality. Souls laboring in the reincarnation engines grow more solid as they work off their past lives’ debts and prepare to be born again. Freed from the engine, Lau Weng and his ghostly compatriots rely on Tan and his wife Heng to support them. Caught between death and re-birth, Lau Weng will do anything to remain alive. Tan is honor-bound to provide hospitality, but must feed his family, too, and he can do nothing to stop Lau Weng. Everything changes once Lau Weng takes over Heng’s body.

Thanks to Ken Liu (and others), silkpunk may well catch on in popularity in North America and Europe. Here are four reasons why:

  1. Like steampunk, silkpunk comes ready made with its own aesthetic, with fascinating clothing for costumes, and a characteristic look for gadgets, etc.
  2. Silkpunk is a completely new world, ripe and wide open for writers and readers to explore.
  3. To Western readers, silkpunk will seem exotic and enthralling.
  4. For Western readers, silkpunk represents a chance to learn about new cultures and different philosophies.

Will Silkpunk someday rival Steampunk in popularity? I don’t know. I’m a writer. If you want a psychic, don’t call—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 4, 2018Permalink

Near Misses in Technology

For six years I’ve used this blog to aid beginning writers, but starting today I’ll occasionally take on other topics. Technology is fascinating to me, and today’s topic is those near misses in history when someone developed a technology before the world was ready.

What do I mean by ‘near misses?’ I’m talking about when an inventor came up with a new idea but it didn’t catch on, either because no one saw the possible applications or because there was no current need.

When you compare the date of the invention to the much later date when the idea finally took off, it’s intriguing to imagine how history might have been different, and how much further ahead we’d be today.

You’ll get a better idea of what I mean as we go through several examples.

Computers

The Antikythera Mechanism was likely the first computer, used for calculating the positions of celestial bodies. Invented in Greece in the 2nd Century BC, it contained over 30 intricate gears, and may have been a one-off. It is interesting to speculate how history might have been different if they’d envisioned other uses for this technology, such as mathematical calculations. Imagine Charles Babbage’s geared computer being invented two millennia earlier!

I was fascinated by the Antikythera Mechanism and the mystery surrounding its discovery in a shipwreck, so I wrote my story, “Wheels of Heaven,” with my version of those events.

Lasers

It’s puzzling to me that inventors came up with radios (1896) before lasers (1960). After all, radio involves invisible electromagnetic waves, but lasers are visible light. Sure, the mathematics behind lasers (stimulated emissions) wasn’t around until Einstein, but with people monkeying around with mirrors and prisms, it’s strange that no one happened upon the laser phenomenon ahead of its mathematical underpinning.

Charles Fabry and Alfred Perot came close in1899 when they developed their Fabry-Perot etalon, or interferometer. Again, imagine how history might have been different if lasers had appeared sixty years earlier, before radio.

My story “Within Victorian Mists” is a steampunk romance featuring the development of lasers and holograms in the 19th Century.

Manned Rocketry

The first manned rocket flight may have been that of German test pilot Lothar Sieber on March 1, 1945. It was unsuccessful and resulted in Sieber’s death. The first successful manned flight was that of Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union on April 12, 1961.

But did Sieber and Gagarin have a predecessor, beating them by three centuries?

There is an account of a manned rocked flight in 1633, the trip made successfully in Istanbul by Lagâri Hasan Çelebi. It’s fun to imagine if the sultan of that time had recognized the possibilities. My story “To Be First” is an alternate history tale showing where the Ottoman Empire might have gotten to by the year 1933 if they’d capitalized on Çelebi’s achievement.

Submarines

The earliest attempts at underwater travel come to us in legends and myths. Highly dubious accounts tell of Alexander the Great making a descent in a diving bell apparatus in 332 BC. There are vague references to the invention of a submarine in China around 200 BC. True submarine development really got its start in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s.

Still, think about how much more we’d know today about the oceans if the ancient accounts were true and people of the time had make the most of them. My story “Alexander’s Odyssey” is a re-telling of the Alexander the Great episode, and “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai” is my version of the ancient Chinese submarine.

Steam Engines

In 1712, Thomas Newcomen developed the first commercially successful steam engine. Later, James Watt and Richard Trevithick improved on Newcomen’s design.

However, these inventions were preceded by Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria in the 1st Century AD. He developed a small steam engine called an aeolipile, though he considered it an amusing toy.

What if Heron had visualized the practical possibilities of this engine? Since the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution, could humanity have skipped ahead 1700 years technologically? My story, “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” imagines a practical use for Heron’s engine along with a reason it didn’t catch on.

Other Near Misses?

You get the idea. I am intrigued by the number of times inventors hit on an idea, but society failed to recognize it and take advantage of it, so it had to wait until much later. Are there other examples you can think of? Leave a comment for me. Your thoughts might well be featured in a post by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 4, 2017Permalink

Judging Covers

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but some of your potential readers will, and you don’t want them wincing at the sight of your book. Today we’ll be judging covers, or at least reviewing what makes a good one.

After you read this post, please check out Derek Murphy’s take on cover design here. He goes into more depth. Although I’ll only be discussing fiction covers, his post also addresses non-fiction.

Resources

Where do you get cover art? Here are some sources:

  • If you sold your book to a publisher, the publisher may do your cover. They will likely work with you and do their best to accommodate your preferences.
  • If you’re also an artist or graphic designer, you can make your own cover art. If you’re manipulating images found on-line, be careful not to violate public domain restrictions. Sites like Dollar Photo Club and Dreamstime offer thousands of images at reasonable prices.
  • You can pay someone to do your cover art for you. Perhaps you have an artist friend, or you can get in touch with a talented artist at a local high school or college through the art department. There are websites such as 99Designs where you can have artists compete to make your cover.

Techniques

Derek Murphy’s post spells out the secrets to good book cover art in detail, but his overall message is that people will only glance at a cover for a moment, so it has to grab them. Your cover has to convey its message in a couple of seconds. All eight of Murphy’s cover design secrets flow from this principle. I’ll discuss each technique with respect to the covers of my books, or anthologies in which my stories appear.

51aDCvEwjvL1. Make it “Pop.” Use contrast between light and dark, or opposing colors. The cover of 2012 AD uses that technique to show off the explosion.

 

 

 

 

2. Lots of space. Avoid clutter. LeonardosLion3fThe cover of “Leonardo’s Lion” is simple; the reader’s eye doesn’t have to wander all over to get the point.

 

 

 

 

ASteampunkCarol72dpi3. Make it emotional. Your cover should be beautiful; it should appeal to the heart and make readers feel something. Remember, readers of different genres react emotionally to different things. The cover of “A Steampunk Carol” has the brass gears that steampunk lovers enjoy, and adds the red and green flowers of Christmas.

 

 

4. Use a subtitle, teaser or tagline (and a review!). It’s an effective technique, but none of my covers so far have used this.

Cover art5.1jox6w Pick the right font (and effects). The font should be readable and should help deliver the book’s message. In Quest for Atlantis, the main title font has an ancient (or at least olden) look. For “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” the title font has an Asian feel.

 

 

RippersRing72dpi6WithinVictorianMists9. Make it personal (but not cheesy). It’s good to have people on your covers, though Murphy argues against silhouettes. “Ripper’s Ring” gives you a glaring Jack the Ripper. We did use silhouettes for “Within Victorian Mists” but I think we did it effectively, to convey dancing on clouds.

 

ATaleMoreTrue3f7. If it’s too hard, go simple. Murphy argues against trying to cram in all the ideas you’d like to convey. I think “A Tale More True” illustrates a reasonable amount of simplicity. The reader has to wonder how a tricorn hat ended up there.

 

 

 

Pageflex Persona [document: PRS0000039_00001]8. A little more on text placement. Murphy makes some additional points about text contrast with background, as well as fitting in short words (a, by, in, or the) in among the larger words. I like how the tower in Hides the Dark Tower seems to punch through the word ‘tower.’

 

 

 

As writers, we’re not expected to be great cover designers. If you are, or would like to be, then more power to you. For the rest of us, we must depend on (and pay for) the skill of others such as Derek Murphy. Leave the judging of book covers to the experts; that’s the advice of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 25, 2015Permalink

Secrets of the Past

Is it possible that some amazing things happened in historical times, but never made it in the history books? Today I’ll discuss the subgenre of fiction known as secret histories.

Wikipedia’s entry provides a good definition: “A secret history (or shadow history) is a revisionist interpretation of either fictional or real (or known) history which is claimed to have been deliberately suppressed, forgotten, or ignored by established scholars. Secret history is also used to describe a type or genre of fiction which portrays a substantially different motivation or backstory from established historical events.”

With secret histories the author can deviate from actual history as far as she’d like, but she must return things to status quo or else explain why historical accounts don’t align with her story.

For this reason, secret histories are not to be classified as alternate histories (as I mistakenly did here.  There is no permanent altering of history. Rather the world returns to the one we know. The thrill for the reader is seeing how close the world came to actually changing in some dramatic way.

Secret histories work well as thriller stories with assassins or spies, since they work in secret anyway. Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle are two examples.

I’ve written secret histories myself, but my stories involve technology, not spies or assassins. In each one I leave it to the reader to speculate how much further ahead we’d be if some inventions had occurred earlier.

9781926704012In “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” an inventor creates a submarine in China in 200 B.C. There are obscure references asserting that something of that sort actually happened, and those references inspired my story. The tale ends in a way that explains why more submarines weren’t made as a result of this invention.

steamcover5My story “The Steam Elephant” (which appeared in Steampunk Tales magazine) is a secret history in which a traveling group of Britons and one Frenchman are enjoying a safari from the vantage of a steam-powered elephant invited by one of the Brits. They get caught up in the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. This is intended as a sequel to the two books of Jules Verne’s Steam House series.

WindSphereShip4In “The Wind-Sphere Ship,” Heron of Alexandria takes his simple steam-powered toy and uses it to power a ship. If there had been a steamship in the 1st Century A.D., it boggles the mind to think we could have had the Industrial Revolution seventeen hundred years early and skipped the Dark Ages.

LeonardosLion3fAnother secret history is “Leonardo’s Lion” which answers what happened to the mechanical clockwork lion built by Leonardo da Vinci in 1515. In the story, humanity comes very close to seeing all of da Vinci’s designs made real, which would have advanced science and engineering by centuries.

TheSixHundredDollarMan3fI’d categorize “The Six Hundred Dollar Man” as secret history too, when a man fits steam-powered limbs on another man who’d been injured in a stampede. The story takes place in 1870 in Wyoming and it’s pretty clear by the story’s end why that technology didn’t catch on.

RallyingCry3f“Rallying Cry” is a tale about a young man who learns there have been secret high-technology regiments and brigades in wars going back at least to World War I. Members of these teams cannot reveal their group’s existence, so it fits the secret history genre.

ToBeFirstWheels5In “Wheels of Heaven” I take what is factually known about the Antikythera Mechanism, and weave a fictional tale to explain it.

As you can see, I like writing in this sub-genre. Imagine something interesting and imaginative happened in history, write about it, then tie up all the loose ends so that our modern historical accounts remain unchanged. Leave the reader wondering if the story could have really happened. History that might have been, courtesy of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 7, 2014Permalink

Dear Ray Bradbury

I just had to write to thank you, thank you, for the great times, the pleasures of reading your work.  There’s no sense letting a little thing like your death in 2012 prevent me from expressing my gratitude, is there?

220px-Ray_Bradbury_(1975)_-cropped-Sorry, I haven’t read all your books and stories.  I’ve read less of your canon than I have of Jules Verne’s, Isaac Asimov’s, or Robert Heinlein’s.  But, oh, the few of your books I digested left lifelong mental imprints:  Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, Now and Forever, and The Martian Chronicles.  In high school, I read your short story, “The Flying Machine,” and my recollections of it inspired my story, “The Sea-Wagon of Yantai,” written decades later.

At one point, you declared you wrote fantasy, not science fiction.  In my view you blended the two.  You made science sound like fantasy.

Moreover, your flowing style of writing contrasted with that of the hard-science fiction writers.  Their stories conveyed a love of machines, of science.  Yours proclaimed a love of word imagery, of the magic of English, of poetic prose.

The authors of hard science fiction told me tales of technical detail.  You sang me stories of marvel and wonder.

I guess I’m trying to say that I write more like those other guys, but wish I could write like you.

On occasion, you related a particular memory from when you were about twelve.  At a carnival, one of the performers known as Mr. Electrico touched an electrical sword to your nose which made your hair stand out.  You claimed he told you, “Live forever!”

In a very real sense, Mr. Bradbury, you will.  Thanks again.

                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

December 22, 2013Permalink