Political Correctness: How Do You Handle It in Your Writing?

     “Bend to the reed’s tune – sing a new song.”

The Siritoch were made to endure and the Epanishai to strive. 

When two such peoples are driven together, 

which one has the most to lose? 

     I've now been through Children of the Music twice, correcting the scanning errors and making a list of all the names so I can consider whether I should change any of them.  For those of you who might have forgotten, Children of the Music is the 30-year-old story that I'm working over for publication. I'm considering putting the passages quoted above on the back cover.  The first line will be the epigraph of the book.   

     I'm liking this book better and better, but I need an opinion on one aspect of it (well, really on two aspects).  The gentle, pastoral Siritoch, who have no word in their tongue for murder, have dwelled alone in the Land between the Mountains and the Sea for longer than memory, and now they are being invaded by a different people -- a fierce tribe of horsemen and cattle-drovers who are themselves fleeing an even more barbaric foe and who don't take kindly to finding that the land they have been seeking is occupied by sheepherders.  And they have no aversion to murder and pillaging.

     Both sides see their adversary as demonic beings.  And so I have a chapter in which the wise women of each tribe reject this, saying, "For they are men."  Now, when I was growing up, way back in the dark ages of the 1940s and 1950s, before gender equality became such a big deal, I was taught that terms like "men" or "mankind" or "he" could legitimately be used as collective nouns or pronouns subsuming both sexes.  That made perfectly good sense to me.  It's just a convention, after all -- one I still had no trouble with when I wrote this story in the late 1970s.

      Let me give you some examples in the story -- first the Epanishai:

“Rashemia, I didn’t intend for this morning to go as it did.”

“Nor I.”

“Even you – even you failed.”

“Do you think I am not human? After all these years you could think that?”

Her bitter candor vaguely surprised him.  “Did you really believe the holy wood would mean something to them?”

“I hoped.  They are men, Daborno.”

“But they frightened you.  Dare I say that? You were human enough to be frightened – even you.  Perhaps they are not men.”

“They are men!”  Rashemia struck her fist into her palm, hunching her shoulders.  “And, yes – 1 was afraid! Their music is inexplicable! It comes up as if – from deep water – or out of the wind.  It says things in some language older – older than the trees.  By Aftran, I yearn – I yearn to understand it!”

And now from the Siritoch's perspective:

“There is no being prepared – can’t you see that?”  Himrith had gathered herself up, clenching her hands in the wool.  “Oh, Narlach ... Parnom ... fleeing can’t save Thran! The only course is to wait and hold to the things we know – and – and – perhaps when they come back, we – and they – will understand!  For they are men, my son – I could see human trouble in their eyes.  If they are men, they are not evil!  No more evil than those winds and clouds and the grass that flourishes and fades.  For there is a third choice – I have only just seen it!  We have a third choice: to stay and not to die! And if we put enough faith in the Music, we need not fear these men, for all their giant horses and their knives and their loud voices.” 

Now I could substitute "humans" or "people" for "men."  Try reading it with those substitutes.  I just think the impact is lost.  "Humans" and "people" are both weak words with a feminine rhythm. (Are we going to have to get rid of the terms "feminine and masculine rhymes"?  Just wondering.)  "For they are humans."  "For they are people."  Just lacks the punch of "For they are men!"

So what's your opinion?

Are you so offended by this use of the word "men" 

that the story will be ruined for you is I leave it as is?

Would you enjoy it more if I used "people" or "humans"?

Tell me!

 And one other thing along the same line.  The Siritoch refer to the Epanishai as "aliens."  I don't know why I used that term instead of "strangers" or "outlanders" or some such.  I wasn't into science fiction in those days, so I wasn't thinking of the connotation of somebody from another planet.  This one I really may change because I've come not to like the term "aliens" -- it's come to connote humans ("men") from a country not your own, and I prefer to reserve it for extraterrestrials or else to eliminate it entirely.  I wrote about that once before here: You Say Alien and I Say Extraterrestrial.

     (Sorry -- still no artwork for this story!  I'm working on the cover, but it's a long way from being finished.)

“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.” - Ender's Game

THERE ARE SPOILERS IN THIS ESSAY!

 

Just a few days after I finished Ender’s Game, I ran across an article in the Colorado Springs newspaper (The Gazette) about how some people were trying to get the book banned from use in a Mesa County school district language arts program.  They didn’t succeed, but the reason a particular parent wanted the book banned was that she “was appalled to read swear words and passages about characters renouncing religion and killing each other.”  (Where has this parent been all her life?) 

The article goes on to state that the book is “an anti-bullying tale.”  I found this a little befuddling; I would have never characterized the book in that way.  It oversimplifies the themes to a really naïve level.  For one thing, when the book was written in the 1970s and ’80s, bullying wasn’t a big topic of interest, and in any case, I don’t think murdering the bully is a valid way to deal with the problem.  The article does also go on to say “Reviewers also called it a message about tolerance, empathy and coping under pressure.”

Some of those statements are true, but I think they miss the point.  And honestly I don’t think the book is particularly appropriate for 10 or 11 year olds, not because of the reasons the parent gave above but because I think it would terminally bore them.  

For me the essential point of the book is how terrible things can happen when communication is non-existent.  People seem to have little interest in the buggers, who are an intelligent species looking for a new place to nest and not nearly as evil as they are portrayed in Earth’s future social context.  The irony is that the buggers weren’t even intending to attack again, and the lengths Earthers went to in order to destroy them says something about humanity – paints a really bleak picture, actually.  Perhaps this point gets de-emphasized because it is made so late in the book.

Most of the book deals with the training of the six-to-eleven-year-old Ender to be the commander who is going to save the world from the next bugger attack.  Personally, I have trouble suspending disbelief that young children could do what Ender and his siblings did, no matter how carefully genetically engineered they were.  This training consists of game-playing.  I am not a game player, so I found the endless dwelling on the “game” of warfare to be quite tedious at times.  I can imagine, however, that this would appeal to inveterate game players.  It’s a very masculine book – it has only three female characters (not counting the bugger Queens, of course) and of those only Ender’s sister filled an important role (a kind of token female).  I think if you’re a guy and you’re a gamer and you think warfare is cool, then you would eat up all those training sequences.  The view and use of gaming was amazingly modern to have been written in the ’70s and ’80s – I thought the use of the “desk” (like a modern laptop computer or tablet) and the sophistication of the games held up well against the evolution of modern technology. 

The one part of the gaming sequences that I found fascinating was the psychological game that Ender played for “recreation.”  This was totally a computer game, not the physical workouts of the Battle Room.  I’m always interested in psychological interpretations of character, and the way this fed into the conclusion of the book was brilliant. 

On the whole, however, I found the story to be gloomy and downbeat, with almost no humor or comic relief.  (I do like some humor in my science fiction.)  To me, it feels unbalanced and depressing.  And the pace of the story is uneven – we have all those endless training sessions and then at the very end of the book we suddenly accelerate into covering several years all packed into that final chapter.  I think the author lapsed into telling and not showing at this point because he had a lot he needed to cover.  The plot suddenly becomes filled with exalted idealism as major revelations are rapidly detailed.  I’m sure Card was preparing the way for the second volume.  In spite of the change of style and pace, however, I found the sequence revealed on p. 321 (where Ender speaks for the annihilated buggers) to be most satisfying and exhilarating part of the book.  It wouldn’t have hurt to shorten the earlier parts by about half.

I did have a couple of other problems with the end of the book.  It seemed all the Queens of the buggers were on one planet, and all of them were killed.  Now even though the buggers could read Ender’s mind, I don’t think they could read the future, so how did they know which planet he would colonize and so where to leave the game recreation and the egg?  Maybe they left a recreation and an egg on all their planets?) Also, it’s stated that the buggers cared for their offspring as they were working their farms.  But if the Queens were all on one planet, why were the offspring on different planets?  I would think they would be kept in nurseries near the Mother until they matured.  I don’t think Card thought this out totally.  However, I was reading the end pretty fast and I might have missed something.

I want to remark on the use of the term “ansible” for a device that allows for rapid communication across light years.  I thought it was pretty neat that he borrowed the word from Ursula K. LeGuin, who invented it.  Here is how the term is explained to Ender: “Somebody dredged the name ansible out of an old book somewhere and it caught on.” (p.249)  Isn’t it nice to know your books will still be around a number of centuries from now?  In fact, LeGuin coined the word ansible in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World, and her 1974 novel The Dispossessed narrates how the technology happened to be invented.  According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible Le Guin states she derived the name from "answerable," as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time even over interstellar distances.  Fascinating stuff!

Of course, since I write about giant insects, I’m especially interested in the buggers, and the way things turned out only makes me more interested in them.  My purpose in my books is not only to show that giant insects don’t have to be evil – my purpose is also to show the importance of learning how to communicate with the extraterrestrial lifeforms we are sure to encounter one day.  And of course that’s the most important theme of Ender’s Game as well, even though it seems to get lost in the shuffle.  One of the most important pages of the book is p. 253, where Col. Graff finally tells Ender how the buggers communicate mind-to-mind instantaneously, in a way we can never hope to de-code.  And Ender says, “So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”  That sums up the theme of the book in one sentence.

 

         [References above are to the mass market paperback edition, published by Tor Books in 1994.]

An Interview with A Walker Scott, Fellow Conlanger and Nascent Novelist (Part 2)

This is Part 2
of my interview with A Walker Scott.

To read Part 1, click here.

Walker's interview of me is now posted on my

other blog!

       At one point Walker posted this on his Facebook timeline: "This is very slow and very hard work, so why am I writing a novel? My only answer comes in a quote from one of Tolkien's letters where he quotes CS Lewis from memory, "If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves; but it is very laborious." 
       I personally concur with that statement -- I also write the kind of book that I like to read! Today we have the privilege of learning all about the extraterrestrials that Walker has created for his books, and we get to read an extract. (Oh, and for curiosity's sake, here is his translation of the above quotation into his conlang Carrajina: "Si nu voluns sciviri uls tipus djals livras fi feremus ledjeri, nechidemus scriveri nozus probjus dals fistas, peru esti mutu lavorozu."  I'm sure you can detect the Romance language association.)

        ·       I know you’re also working on a science fiction novel (and a sequel, at the same time). Do you have titles for these novels? Can you tell us something about the plot, the locations, and the period of time?

       I have working titles, but I am dissatisfied with the first. Currently it is titled If by This Hand I Slay, but I find it overly melodramatic and rather misleading about the story itself. Sooner or later, I will find a better title. The sequel is titled Words like Leaves on the Wind. That one fits very well.

       IBTHIS is set at an interstellar university on a space station. The students come from a multitude of worlds, mostly from within the Interstellar Commonwealth of Sentient Species, but also from worlds well outside the ICSS. My story follows one group of students studying diplomacy, engaged in a year-long simulation project to show they know what they are doing in their chosen field. My main character, David Asbury, really doesn't want to be there, but circumstances have left him no choice. Just as he's starting to settle in and accept his fate, the game turns real-world serious.

        WLLOTW picks up about three years later when David is on his very first First Contact assignment, struggling to learn an alien language that keeps changing on him just when he thinks he has it figured out. Then an enemy from the past shows up to make things really difficult. Under torture David begins to remember a different version of the last three years of his life and realizes something very important may be locked inside his head.

       Both these novels are set about 300 years in the future.
 

·   How do you use your constructed languages in these books? I mostly use my conlangs as an aid to discovering what it would really be like when we make first contact with extraterrestrials, but my intelligent termites also speak in these languages from time to time, especially when it comes to words that don’t translate well. I also include one specimen piece (in v.3).
 

        I use them in various ways. There is the occasional greeting or rude comment in an alien language. Sometimes there are brief snatches of conversation. At one point some of the characters get to argue about poems in a couple of languages.
 

·    A lot of your characters are non-human. Tell us about some of the characters. What are your non-humans like and how many different kinds are there?
 

           Well, I could really go off on a tangent here. There are a LOT of different aliens mentioned in passing in my novels and most of them have one or two representatives walk on stage for a paragraph or a page somewhere in one book or the other. In the first book, David finds himself on a team with nine other classmates, only one of whom is Human.

        Tkal is a Tvern An who was raised on Earth since his parents are the Tvern An ambassadors to Earth. He's the leader of the group. He is big and friendly and covered in green and yellow stripes. He is very enthusiastic about English slang and loves to eat -- except bread ... he has a terrible allergy to yeast.

        Gronorgh is a Gravgurdan, a huge warrior, over seven feet tall who would make the biggest Human bodybuilders look anorexic. He's rude, enjoys using his size to intimidate, and hates Humans. But he's smart and good at whatever he does.

Dai-Soln (a Taisiran)
Drawing by A Walker Scot

        Dai-Soln is a Taisiran. They are frail-looking, and have powdery skin in shades from blue to lavender, obsidian eyes and these fronds like moth antennae where we have eyebrows. Dai-Soln often takes on the task of peacemaker trying to smooth things over between Gronorgh and whoever he has totally insulted most recently. He's actually a prince somewhere waaay down in the succession to the throne of his people's Empire, which is currently in a rather disadvantageous relationship with the Gravgurdan Stronghold.

        Shintikaisen is a female warrior of the Trelkairni. She is a traditionalist, so she has never really thought of men as quite people in the same way as women are, until she finds herself working with males as equals. She is roommates with Ael, the other Human on the team, and they spend a lot of time in good-natured bickering about males and "their place" each trying to "enlighten" the other.

        Red-shimmer Gold-streak is an Iridian who is specializing in trade relations and the economics of diplomacy. She feels rather isolated at times since she's only a couple of feet tall, shaped like a rock and can only communicate with her teammates through a translation voder.

Enemwunu (an Alelliawulian)
Drawing by A Walker Scott

        Xtp is a neuter Xttg, an insectoid race. Its language consists entirely of clicks, so it too must use a translation voder to speak Standard. It rooms with Red-shimmer.

        Enemwunu is a gamma-gender Alelliawulian. They are tripedal, hoofed cephalopods. Five is an important number to them. They have five limbs (three legs, two arms) and five genders, five major organs, five elements, five vowels ...

        Fthsaisth is the very first of his species to be educated off-world. His people have just made first contact and are finding the idea of sharing space with so many strange flightless aliens a bit difficult to cope with. Part of Fthsaisthf's job is to help his people decide whether or not to join the ICSS.

• Parenthetically, I had to look up “voder” to make sure it was a "real" word. I thought you had mistyped “coder.” Turns out there is a Wikipedia article on the subject -- it was a very early form of voice synthesizer. I might not be the only person who never heard the term (it’s even older than I am!)

        I think I picked up that word up as a child while reading some of Heinlein's juveniles. I believe his Venerians/Venusians had to use a "voder" to produce English. A little search shows me that not only Between Planets (the one I was remembering) but also The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress uses the term. I probably read both of those more than once in my early teens. I have a bad habit of pulling out odd words -- like voder and vibrissae. I ended up nixing vibrisssae for "fronds." I hadn't thought of voder as being a problem, but maybe I should insert a bit of explanation somewhere in the text.

 

·    Give us an excerpt from the first volume, to whet our appetites. Two or three paragraphs up to a page.

Here's a bit some might find interesting:

        Just then, the outer door to the corridor opened. David turned to see who was entering. Half way through the turn he froze. The half smile on his lips melted away and all the color drained from his face.
        “What is that creature doing here?” thundered the Gravgurdan warrior from earlier.

        David's eyes were as big as the warrior's fists. Sweat was glistening on his brow and dark circles sprouted on the fabric under his arms.

       Dai-Soln stepped from behind the Gravgurdan's shadow to see, and his fronds swept immediately back over his shoulders as his obsidian eyes darted around the room trying to piece together exactly what was going on. Before everything blew up.

        Shintikaisen huffed. “Lower your volume, Gronorgh. None of us here is deaf.”

        "Nor blind,”added Red-shimmer Gold-streak, whose voder had just assaulted her with some very intense color to translate Gronorgh's shout.

        Gronorgh brought his voice down to a low rumble, but still demanded, “I ask again, what is that creature doing here. It better not be the linguist.”

        “He is,”said Tkal striding forward with all the muscles along his jaw standing out in sharp relief and his stripes darkening fiercely. “He is the best on this station, and I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get him.”

        “Pah! It’s too scrawny to make out-caste. And too timid to breathe. Ones like him foul the gene pool. He should have been exposed at birth.”

        David was trembling on the inside. He fiercely hoped it was only on the inside, but he couldn’t stop the sweating, and there was no color left in his already pallid skin. Gronorgh had used the Terran word for exposed, driving home that Humans had once practiced the most abhorrent of Gravgurdan customs – disposing of weak babies like garbage.

        David knew he had to say something, but his brain wasn’t working right. All he could think about was how big Gronorgh was and how far on his bad side he had already managed to land. He thought he was about to faint. He wanted to run for the door and never look back. But he couldn’t. Doing that would be giving up everything he had worked for, everything he wanted for the future. He had to find a way out of this, or around it, or through it. His brain was buzzing for an answer.

·    Well, that makes me want to read more! Personally, I like for my extraterrestrials to be portrayed as real people, no matter how bizarre they are, and you're surely fulfilling that requisite!  So do you intend to try to publish professionally, or are you planning to join the community of self-published authors, as I have?

I'm going to try to go the traditional publishing route. We'll see if anyone bites!

·   Finally, say something about your other interests or hobbies. I understand you’ve won some arm wrestling competitions!

        I wish! Actually, my best result was a second place in the North Dakota State Championship several years back. I love armwrestling (it's usually spelled as one word within the community), but it's been several years since I last competed.

       My other hobbies go in every direction imaginable! I collect hats, Christmas music from all cultures, Chinese mythological creatures, dictionaries and grammars of foreign languages, books period ... I paint, I crochet, I lift weights, I cook, I dance, I love Renfaires, I like to travel (I've been to 11 countries and 27 of the states).

·    That sounds like you could be the subject of a dozen interviews, Walker! Are there any URLs you’d like to share with the readers, such as a Facebook page or a website?

        If you want to follow my journey to completing this novel you can check my Facebook Page and friend me. https://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100006969166318

        Thanks so much, Walker, for visiting with me and my own readers! I’m eager to following that journey and I wish you much good luck in your literary progress! I definitely look forward to reading your books in the not too distant future!

FYI: The intention is that Walker will now

turn around and interview me!  If he does,

the interview will appear over on my other blog

(The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head)

because Walker doesn't operate a blog or webpage.

 

An Introduction to my Non-Termite Extraterrestrials, Part 2: The Birds

       First a word on how it happens that the planets in our small sector of the galaxy harbor so much life. I pretty much went with the panspermia idea. As a Professor of Entomology explains it in "The Termite Queen" to an audience that includes indigenes of four different worlds: "The genome [of the giant termites] certainly differs greatly from that of terrestrial termites, but the baselines are fully in line with TIPE. For those of you who might not be familiar with that acronym, that means ‘Theory of Interstellar Parallel Evolution,’ which posits that in its formative stages our sector of the galaxy was seeded by some protein or viral particle that was capable of developing into primitive DNA like that found on Earth, and hence into carbon-based lifeforms with the potential of following convergent evolutionary paths. Without TIPE, avians, primates, and monotremes would not have developed on more than one planet and we wouldn’t be seeing all of you good people together here in this room!"

        So within a range of 200 ly or so, we have many planets with lifeforms that originated at approximately the same time. Depending the characteristics of the planet, we could find anything from primitive microbes up to humanoids, with intelligent life developing from many different base species. Intelligent lifeforms range from primitive stages comparable to early hominids to species that have developed advanced technologies. Some have reached the point of space flight but only locally within their own star system (the point where we are in the 21st century).

        In the 30th century there are only three known ILFs that have developed the technology of interstellar flight: the Krisí’i’aidá from the planet Krisí’i’aid, the Pozú from Pozúa, and the Te Quornaz from Quornam.

        I found an actual star in the constellation Puppis to serve the planet Krisí’i’aid.  Known only by its star-catalogue designations, one of which is HD70642, it's a type G5V star 94 ly from Earth and it is quite similar to our sun. It's known as of our present date to have a large gas-giant planet. But it also has a fictional planet similar to Earth except for its almost upright axis, which causes it to lack seasons (something that befuddles the Birds when they come to Earth). The Krisí’i’aidá call their star "Chuzaw<" (which means "Mother-Fire" -- the < represents a whistle in !Ka<tá).

        Mammals never evolved on this planet, but there are plenty of lower lifeforms -- arthropods, fish, amphibians, reptilians, and avians. With avians warbling in the top of the evolutionary tree, it's natural that they would become the foundation species for intelligence. And Krisí’i’aid is unique in that three different species of ILF evolved separately on the same planet, all from avians.

        First, the !Ka<tí, who speak !Ka<tá. They are falconiforms, evolved from big eagle-like birds who became flightless. They are about the size of a rather short human (5 feet 2 inches to 5 feet 4 inches) Their wings evolved into arms with three-clawed hands (a bird's wing contains only three digits, so this seemed to make sense). One of the digits is opposable, like a human thumb. (This type of arm and hand evolved convergently in all three Bird ILFs.) Otherwise, their anatomy is identical to terrestrial birds. Their beaks are not quite as sharp as the beak of a golden eagle, but they still look formidably eagle-like. The !Ka<tí are almost entirely carnivorous, eating mostly fish. They also have one very un-eagle-like characteristic -- they sing like songbirds! They are the most numerous species of ILF on their planet.

        Secondly, the Wéwana, who speak Towewa. They are ciconiiforms that evolved in marshlands from flightless water birds. They can be over six feet tall and look very much like terrestrial storks or herons, except that they have heavier, more ostrich-like legs (but with the feet of wading birds). They are beautifully plumed and come in many colors. They are also carnivorous, favoring fish, shellfish, and crustaceans. They differ from terrestrial storks in their ability to vocalize (Earth storks are mostly mute), but they don't sing. The !Ka<tí tend to regard them as clownish inferiors, although the two species have an amiable relationship. The Captain of the ship that takes the expedition to the termite planet in "The Termite Queen" is a Wéwani named Skrei Af'fork. I have done some work on their language but not a great deal.

        Thirdly, the Gro’á’ata, who speak Gro'at. They are galliforms, evolved from grouse-like birds; in fact, they look almost exactly like the Gunnison sage grouse, with the inflatable chest bags and the tall crest feathers and the impressive tail fan. (You can see pictures of sage grouse at http://www.western.edu/bio/young/gunnsg/gunnsg.htm). They tend to boom a lot and also crow.  They have leg spurs, like domestic chickens and pheasants (terrestrial grouse lack the spur).  They are about the same height as the !Ka<tí but chunkier, they come from a region of flat plains and they eat grain, fruit, and insects. They are the only one of the Bird ILFs that cooks any of their food. They are also the warriors of the planet, who make good use of that spur, and they have a very warlike history. They often serve in the Confederation Defense Force; the Chief of Security aboard Capt. Skrei's ship is a giant grouse named Maj. Kwo∙at Bidba (again, I have done only limited work on the Gro'at language).

        As Prf. A'a'ma said once, "On my planet the eagles sing, the chickens fight, and the storks -- well, on both our planets they just behave like clowns!"

       The history and culture of Krisí’i’aid: I've written a lot about this in the book that I got bogged down in and couldn't finish. There was a time when the three species warred against each other, but that was over a thousand years ago. After the planet unified, it invented the technology of interstellar flight and first flew to the stars about Earth year 2100, some 600 years before Earthers did it. Their technology utilizes the same temporal quantum theory, but they use crystal resonance to produce the pod. They have carried the technology of glass to a high level; they literally live in glass houses and their ships (which are ovoid in shape, as befits a bird) are lined with moldable glass, in which they incorporate their lighting sources. It's a technology that produces a highly aesthetic result.

        Each species has its own courtship and breeding customs. The eagles sing to each other and pair-bond for life, the storks dance together and pair-bond for only as long as it takes to fledge the offspring, and the grouse are totally promiscuous and practice lekking (fighting for the right to mate), a custom which is considered barbaric by the other two species.

        Each species also has its own religious traditions and mythology, but unlike on Earth religious wars never happened on Krisí’i’aid. Perhaps that is because the three species lived in quite widely separated areas of the planet for many millennia, or perhaps it is because they are separate species, unlike Earthers. It would serve no purpose for one species to take up the customs of another species or to hold the same beliefs about creation. Of course, all three are now advanced scientifically, but no conflict between physical laws and the mythic structures of their spiritual beliefs ever developed.

Next time: the Pozú

An Introduction to My Non-Termite ETs and a Word on How We Met Them

      

THIS POST IS NOW PART OF THE

OLD-POST RESURRECTION BLOG HOP!

I chose this post because, surprisingly, no one has

shown much interest in my non-termite ETs, and

furthermore, it works well with my current post,

Why Writing Is Like Jackstraws 

       First off, I've posted a separate page with some drawings I made of "my three aliens" and I want to apologize for their crude, cartoonish style.  They are some of the first drawings I did using the Word drawing tools and I have no training as an artist -- it's strictly folk art!  The top drawing of the three was done as a birthday card for a friend in 2002 and the bottom for the same reason in 2003.  I can't get it to post any bigger, so I'll tell you what the text at the top says. 

       Next to the eagle, it says "Saretigá↑~] from Prf. A'a'ma" -- that is, in !Ka<tá, happy birthday ((literally, "felicitous repetition of hatching").  Sa- corresponds to re- in English and retigá means either "birthday" or "hatching."  The sliding upward inflection [↑~] connotes happy or good.

      Next to the lemuriform, it says "Mae! zokam laziqua rival shima, from Luku" -- that is, in Glin Quornaz, "May fate sing sweet music to you," a standard phrase of well-wishing used for Happy Birthday, Good Luck, etc.  The literal word-by-word translation is "To you fate sing music sweet."

       Next to the creature who resembles a squirrel/sea otter cross, it says, " Trant-intusórama from Trea" -- that is, in Poz-até, "Trant [the sea-goddess] love you," again, a standard phrase of well-wishing and a common blessing among the Pozú.

       I have extensive files on !Ka<tá, but I've done only minimal work on the languages of the planets Quornam and Pozúa, just enough to write something when it becomes necessary.

       So just how did Earthers happen to meet these semi-familiar but still strange extraterrestrials?  Today I'll talk only about the history of interstellar flight on Earth and how the first contact came about.  In my next post I'll discuss the ETs themselves and say a word about life throughout this region of the galaxy.

       In 2697, the same decade in which the Earth Unification Charter was finalized, a physicist named Iven Herinen (of a brilliance on the order of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, but unfortunately an alcoholic who died in his early forties) devised a set of mathematical formulas that formed the basis of a new branch of science called temporal quantum physics.  Between 2724 and 2740, a female physicist named Irina Hilo collected a group of other female physicists, all lesbians, and began to work on applications of Herinen's formulas that would make interstellar travel possible.  The male community of physicists wasn't particularly happy to be bested by a bunch of "quay" women (as the epithet evolved), whom they castigated with names like "Hilo's Harridans" and "Herinen’s Whores."  Irina Hilo herself also died young, possibly harrassed to death, but her last disciple and lover, the formidable Prf. Anezka Lara, continued and perfected Hilo's work. 

       Around 2750 the Iven Herinen Space Port was constructed in Midammerik (in what is now southeast Kansas) for the sole purpose of developing interstellar flight under the guidance of Prf. Lara.  In 2754, a young pilot and Lieutenant, Robbin Nikalishin, joined this SkyPiercer Project and rose quickly to the rank of Captain.  In the 30th century he is universally and affectionately known as Capt. Robbie,  "The Man Who Found Bird among the Stars."  His story was told in a lengthy fictionalized biography entitled the same, by an Oxkam Professor named Tania Barden. [Unfortunately, this is the book that Lorinda J. Taylor (the person "channeling" all this from the future) got bogged down in and has yet to finish.]
      
       In 2755 the first flight that used TQ technology to jump large fractions of light-years took place; later 2755 became the Year 1 of the new calendar.  However,  a major disaster in the interstellar program delayed the first mission to a nearby star until the year 2769, with Capt. Robbin Nikalishin commanding the Bridge of the ship Ariana.  There was a debate as to whether the mission should tackle Alpha Centauri (4.36 ly from Earth) or the more distant (10.5 ly) Epsilon Eridani.  Capt. Nikalishin argued for the latter, since he had had a dream of going to that system ever since he was a small boy.  It turned out, however, that they had bit off more than they could chew for an initial voyage; they ended up crash-landing on a moon and getting marooned.  And then just as they were about to open a canister of cyanide gas and put an end to dying slowly from starvation and oxygen deprivation, they saw something moving against the stars ... and it wasn't a meteor.
       It was the Birds, flying in a ship called the Firebrand, on their own mission of exploration.
      Capt. Nikalishin maintained until his dying day that the hand of fate was instrumental in his stubborn insistence on making Epsilon Eridani the first destination.  Two lines crossing a vast universe converged in that place and the whole future of humanity was changed.  The Birds -- more properly known as the Krisí’i’aidá, from the name of their planet (Krisí’i’aid) -- rescued the crew of the Ariana and accompanied it home to Earth, shocking the world.

 

You Say Alien and I Say Extraterrestrial. Plus a Follow-up on "My Future History"

First, two quick updates.

       I want to correct an error in my last post.  The proprietor of the Evangeline Walton has informed me that it wasn't the author of "The Island of the Mighty" who gave that book the original title of "The Virgin and the Swine"    Both that title and the later title were the constructs of publishers.  It makes sense that as sensitive an author as Evangeline Walton wouldn't have come up with such a rather coarse title.

       Also, I now almost have the permissions on the very essential Robert Graves quotations.  I say, almost, because the paperwork had to be revised, and then I have to pay the fee.  So I'm almost set to begin formatting the first half of "Termite Queen."  I just have to get the "Beowulf" sewed up and the Evangeline Walton itself.  However, one hitch -- I have to go to a different publisher for the ebook rights to Graves.  What a pain!  The ebook rights holder charges an arm and a leg.  I may delay the publication on ebook for a while.  People who are really interested in "The Termite Queen" may have to break down and actually read a proper book for a change!

       Now to the real topic of this post.   First, I want to speak of the word "alien."  I use the term from time to time in my writing, but lately I've begun to dislike that word and to favor "extraterrestrial" or "off-worlder."  "Alien" carries a lot of unfavorable connotations.  If you look it up in Dictionary.com, it means a person who has been estranged or excluded; and as an adjective, it can mean "unlike one's own, strange" and also "adverse, hostile, opposed."  Of course, it also means an extraterrestrial.  What gets me is that we have so many aliens living among us right now -- all those human beings who moved without permission from one geographical unit of the Earth to another.  How can a member of our own species be an alien?  Why should being from inside another nationalistic boundary make such a person "estranged, excluded, strange, adverse, hostile, opposed, unlike one's own"?  Why should stepping across an imaginary line alienate a person from his or her fellow human beings? 

       So when we finally make first contact with extraterrestrials, are we going to treat them the same way?  Sure, they won't have human DNA and they won't have human culture or customs or religions, but are we going to construct the same kind of jealously guarded imaginary boundaries in space that we have on Earth?  Are we going to have a new variety of what we have already -- the illegal alien?  Or are we going to grow up intellectually and emotionally?  Anyway, I'm just throwing that out there to think about.

     On my future Earth there are no nationalistic boundaries.  Earth is united and while administrative regions exist, freedom of movement is universal.  No passports, no visas. One currency.   If you come from Scandinave and you want to work in Ostrailia, all you have to do is buy a ticket on a flyer, disembark, find a place to live, and go to work.  People may be encouraged to move to certain parts of the planet in order to equalize the distribution of the population, but nobody is forced to do that.  And it's true that everybody has an ID number so the Demographic Authority can keep statistics, but each individual has only one such number for the whole planet. 

     There is no army because there are no countries to fight one another, but there is a Terrestrial Security Force (known as TeSeF [pronounced "Tessef"] in the 28th century -- I don't think I ever refer to it by that name in "The Termite Queen," where we're mostly concerned with off-world security --  the responsibility of the Joint Defense Force of the Confederation of Four Planets).  The primary function of TeSeF is keeping the peace -- police work, basically -- making sure that the planet remains a safe place to live.  TeSeF members do have access to  guns (which have become energy weapons by the 30th century), but they don't always carry them.  Private gun ownership is forbidden.  Now, I can hear the outraged screams, and I can hear people saying, "Boy, that situation is really ripe for abuse!" but the Security Force buys into its role and it works.  And without guns in the general population, the opportunities for murder and mayhem are reduced (you never get rid of that sort of thing entirely).         

       Likewise, private ownership of personal vehicles is forbidden.   For one thing, it's too costly in a world recovering from a total meltdown to allow every individual to own a vehicle; there is road maintenance, the cost of upkeep, the need for parking space, the availability of whatever fuel is used (and fossil fuels are strictly regulated -- there is no petroleum left anyway) -- to say nothing of the health benefits of walking more.  Railroads (maglevs for cross-country use by the 30th century and interurbans within cities) are the transportation of choice, and methods of flight have been invented that don't require fossil fuels.

       I can see all this getting an interesting response (there are a lot of people out there who are horrified by the concept of one world).  The weapon and vehicle ownership questions, along with a million others, were debated for a hundred years prior to signing of the Global Charter.  The ultimate decisions were globally approved. This global unity both simplifies and complicates things. It simplifies because you don't have to jump through a thousand different bureaucratic hoops in a thousand different nations. But it also complicates things because it creates a huge centralized bureaucracy, bigger than anything we have now.  I don't know whether it would really work or not in practice, but that's the vision I have for my future.  I would love to get comments.

       In my next post I plan to stay away from controversy and to give more information about my three species of "alien" who are not termites.

Why Do I Write about Termites?

The following is part of the Old-Post Resurrection Hop at http://awriterweavesatale.com/

An exchange I had on Twitter recently leads me to believe that I need to counteract some assumptions that people might make as to why I write about ETs based on termites.  Don't expect satire or acidic social commentary in my stories; it's not my intention to compare human societal structure to that of social insects, to the detriment or advantage of either species.  My purpose is to write about first contacts, the encounters and subsequent relationships between humans and extraterrestrials -- to write about intelligent lifeforms who happened to evolve from base species different from our own.  How might they have developed as they turn into beings that are rational, moral, and self-aware even as they keep many of the characteristics of their species of origin?

And I like my aliens friendly!  My giant insects are not monsters any more than my big birds, six-foot lemurs, or small, sea-otter-like monotremes are monsters.   (The only exception might be in the novella I'm currently preparing for publication, "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," but you must judge for yourself when you read the story whether those aliens are monsters).

Although all of my writings have some social commentary, it's oblique, forming a background to the plots while not being central to them.  It's my view of how our own society might evolve from the present day until the 30th century.

So how did I get the idea of writing about evolved termites?  Way, way back in the 1970's, when I was writing and failing to publish imaginary world fantasy, I saw a documentary entitled "Mysterious Castles of Clay" (I'm sure that's the name of it -- I've seen it again more recently on one of the cable channels).  It revealed the African, mound-building, fungus-growing termite in great detail, using microphotography with cameras inserted into the mounds, something that was probably rather new at that time.  I was absolutely fascinated -- here were little nymph insects waving their tiny claws and begging for food from the nurses just like baby birds! -- and I immediately proclaimed that these creatures would make a wonderful basis for a science fiction story.  The premise was that an off-world expedition brings back a specimen of giant termite and proceeds to study it like any other insect, keeping it in a glass cubicle.  A female anthropologist/linguist, however, senses intelligence in the creature and, even while everybody is ridiculing her, she proceeds to learn how to communicate with it.

I kept that germ of an idea in the back of my mind all the while I was taking my hiatus from writing.  When I started up again and wrote "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder," Prf. Kaitrin Oliva seemed like the perfect choice to be the heroine for the termite story, and lo and behold -- "The Termite Queen" was born.