This is a short one, because I just got back home from the book launch at Analog Books here in Lethbridge - a fantastic independent bookstore that everyone should check out.
It was small, just myself and a few friends, but the bookstore was open a bit late tonight and I did a little reading for people! I also served up this delicious pineapple cake, in a vegan version (we used an egg substitute).
But you're not just here for the (virtual) pineapple cake and apple cider - you're here for the book.
As mentioned, The Meaning Wars Omnibus is finally out - not only in ebook form, but also as a paperback and a hardcover!
It's exclusively on Amazon right now, for KDP and promotion reasons, but I may change that if people speak up. (Amazon really likes to lock authors down with exclusivity, sadly.)
I'm so proud of how this turned out, and Kateryna Kyselova did a bang-up job on the cover! Christy Foster was of tremendous help on the formatting. You couldn't go wrong by hiring either of them.
I have a few blog articles on the backburner, but my biggest priority right now is actually my NaNoWriMo project - Monsters and Fools. That's right - it's taken ten years, but I'm planning to release the long, long-awaited sequel to The Underlightersin spring!
Look, it took a long time to figure out the plot...but I finally got it done. Stay tuned to this space for more updates on what I'm doing - when I get time for 'em, that is. This has been one crazy year so far...
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Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cats. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people’s manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.
After I'd spoken to a client yesterday, I found myself binge-watching (and listening) to a number of short video essays about Greek and Roman history, and a bit of Egyptian history, on Youtube. The purpose was to help research and enhance our Dungeons and Dragons campaign's storyline and setting - which I should probably write about at some point - but it yielded a most unexpected fruit.
Last night, I found myself lost in a very enjoyable dream with a cohesive and interesting plot; as soon as I woke up, I did as I sometimes do after such a dream, and took notes as best I could, in hopes of capturing the story. But the story's setting was decidedly post-apocalyptic - not Greco-Roman in the least, at least not on the surface.
How did the one result from another? Well, I do have a developmental and line-edit of a post-apocalyptic book on the queue right now - a third installment in the superb and bold (and inclusive!) Eupocalypse series by Peri Worrell. (Other platforms to snag books can be found on a drop-down menu on the book's GoodReads page, so I'm including those henceforth.) Dealing with a potential future in which all plastics and petroleum products suddenly break down, the series is an enjoyable, elegantly written, and ultimately hopeful story about a tremendous, world-shattering catastrophe - as well as a cautionary tale about our reliance on plastics and petroleum products.
In my free time, I have been working through The Odyssey at a pace slightly slower than continental drift, but I recently read Emily St. Mandel's Station Eleven, and I'm currently reading Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea, a trashy but incisive work of dystopian cyberpunk (which may, admittedly, be a redundant phrase, as cyberpunk is seldom cheerful).
Now - how does all this fit together?
Well, here's the key - civilizations on Earth have gone through phases of development, growth and expansion, internal struggle, and ultimately, either collapse or transition. It happened for the august and remarkable Egyptians; it happened for the Greeks, and it happened to the Romans. Yet all of those peoples persist to this day, and while their populations have changed or interacted with invading or arriving forces, their cultures, ultimately, are not dead.
We have the benefit of thousands of years of history as a mirror, and perhaps it is unsurprising that we cannot but ask if we are participating in the same patterns. The answer is "probably yes, somehow" - but the conclusion is decidedly hopeful nonetheless.
The way we run through potential scenarios and hypothetical risks (not unlike the brain while we sleep at night, busily creating its illustrative dreams from scraps of our experiences) is through storytelling and fiction.
Surprise! I'm a writer, not just an editor
As long-time readers may know, and as newer readers may not be aware, I myself write primarily in two genres - dystopian fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction, both of which fall into the broader categories of science fiction and speculative fiction in general.
Where speculative fiction broadly encompasses all fiction a) including at least one element changing the setting or reality from our own and b) subsequently asking, "What if?", its subset science fiction accomplishes these aims primarily by taking inspiration from biology, climatology and the earth sciences, technology, astronomy, psychology, and medicine. Magical, non-Earthly, or transhuman elements may also sneak in there. Fantasy does so by pulling both from history and (arguably) from non-scientific or trans-scientific ideas, usually based on magic (which is about going beyond the boundaries and limits of science).
But how do dystopias and post-apocalyptic fiction actually work? How do we define them exactly? A fair bit of digital ink has been expended on this topic, but I think it comes down to two very specific iterations of the question.
The question is, "What if everything changed?" In the case of a dystopian book, the question is, "What if everything got worse?" In the case of apocalyptic fiction, it's "What if everything broke?", and in the case of post-apocalyptic fiction, it's, "What do we do after everything breaks down?"
How these questions are answered, and how they change in specific instances - for the much maligned YA romances set in post-apoc or dystopian worlds, the question is, "How do we love after everything breaks/when the worst possible thing happens?"
But the more I thought about dystopian and post-apoc stories in broad strokes, the more I came to a conclusion that surprised me: dystopian books, even the famously grim 1984 by George Orwell, always posit that change is possible. So in a sense, what the two genres have in common - apart from literally meaning "bad world" and being about "a broken world" respectively - is that they both aim to answer, "and now, what do we do next?"
"It's not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder, when the death of your civilization precedes you."
To cope with the loss of one's civilization is an almost unimaginable task, but that is what these types of fiction set out to do - and in the process, to ask, "How will we rebuild, and what will we create?"
And from that, as grim as it may seem, we can look to history and feel a sense of hope. As much as Percy Shelly wrote about Ramses in "Ozymandias" as a king's statue broken and abandoned in the desert, we still know and speak his name to this day. We know he was an exceptional and fecund king who brought peace to the Nile kingdoms and built great and beautiful monuments that have outlasted even Time itself. And we are learning more each year about our ancestors. So as much as the Egyptian civilization - which lasted five thousand years and was so old that Cleopatra lived closer to the discovery of flight and space flight than to the building of the pyramids - has fallen to ruin and dust and the sands of time, it's also fine.
We remember. We speak the names of the fallen. And as Terry Pratchett, author of the magnificent Discworld series put it,
“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
Even if the worst possible things happen, these dark and dire settings are about what we remember, and ultimately, what we rebuild. Post-apocalyptic and dystopian books aren't about the end of the world - they're about a disruption in civilizations and our worlds, and how we carry on and return to greatness.
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Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partners-in-crime and their cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and nightmares, as well as social justice issues. She is currently working on the next books in her series, other people's manuscripts, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible. Find her all over the internet: The mailing list * Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook *Tumblr * OG Blog
Been a while, hasn't it? I have an enormous backlog of ideas, but I'm letting my fragile brain rest after completing a draft of The Meaning Wars, so that means it's time to return to my blog. I'd love to write more often this year, and any reader suggestions or requests for content are very welcome. What do YOU want to see?
Until I know the answer to that question, I'm going to share some thoughts that are, shall we say, pertinent to the current sociopolitical situation in the world. Specifically, when it comes to science fiction, who calibrates the heroes' moral compass? To understand authoritarian organizations and to resist them better, it doesn't hurt to look at a couple of the 'nicer' examples. It's hard to fight what one doesn't understand, and unlike a Lovecraft story, fainting isn't going to get us out of this situation. So let's talk about goodest of the bad guys!
Who are we rooting for?
Sure, it's easy to romanticize the rebels, but what are the consequences of that action? I'd argue that giving protagonists in dystopian fiction carte blanche in terms of resistance methods is a bad idea. People have to do what they have to do, but let's be honest about those actions and their cost. Still, doing the nice things or not punching Nazis isn't always an option. Every dictatorship story requires a cast of tough, ethically grey people in the spotlight, because the nice people tend to be the collaborators.
In the case of The Hunger Games, the resistance movement has some very fractious members who seem keen on seizing power. In Rogue One, it's clear that the Alliance isn't as tidy and unified as it seems in the later films. Cassian's actions, which I won't spoil, also make it clear that horrible tactics aren't out of the question. In my beloved Farscape, the storyline soon makes it clear that while Peacekeepers are sometimes hypocritical or oppressive, they do have some ethical standards, and are still often less evil than some of their employees or collaborators. However, standing up to them drives the characters to steal ships and sabotage infrastructure, as well as kidnap people. Sometimes they even just walk away from a situation when the more morally correct answer would be trying to interfere and support the people in fixing it.
However, the balance between altruism and self-preservation in dystopian settings is one of the things that makes them so captivating. Therein lies the appeal. As in real life, even good people have to make bad decisions, and the lingering popularity and love for Firefly over a decade and a half later show that people need imperfect heroes. But one of the interesting things about the show is that the organization the heroes are resisting, The Alliance, isn't...all bad, and the heroes are highly questionable.
The Alliance allows sex workers to control their own situations and at least tries to make sure colonists have food. Obviously, the secret science torture program and the initiative that created Reapers are bad, but the rest of the systems exist in a functioning democracy that doesn't have to bow to warlords like Niska, To put it another way, there aren't all that many differences between The Alliance and Starfleet.
In the context of authoritarian benevolency, Starfleet deserves a mention. They do have a lot of power within the interspecies alliance, and sure are happy to let their somewhat colonialist explorers to regularly break the Prime Directive ('we don't interfere except that it's what we do on every episode'). They have good intentions and mostly function well, but have done some really sketchy things. All governments have dirty laundry. It doesn't justify crimes against humanity, but what about times when crimes against humanity are the 'solution' to taking down an enemy? Certain events in Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind, and the Japanese internment camps of WWII or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are vitally important real-world instances.
The ends of taking down an oppressive state may justify the means, but how far? The collaborators deserve what they get, but how far does that go? There is a point where the demand for justice shifts into a thirst for revenge, and the reasons for this are perfectly understandable. The thing is, a state IS its people. Rebelling against the state does also mean fighting people with wives and kids and pet dogs at home. Yes, they chose to be there, but questioning why and how can also help prevent further mobilization of bigotry and injustice. If, that is, the (usually white) heroes can restrain themselves from gleeful payback time.
The price of peace and stability
One of the reasons dystopian governments are often very controlling is that it's perceived as the trade off for mere survival. Warhammer 40K and the Cthulutech setting both make use of this, so that there are no 'good guys' and one ends up rooting for the totalitarian side just because they're ultimately working for preservation. In this respect, there's an uncanny overlap with a lot of rebel factions, in that ends do sometimes justify the means.
Sometimes, however, the price is far greater than the results; the populace in 1984 is in poor health, tends to die in the army, and is very ignorant. At least many dystopias, such as the one in The Giver, try to justify their techniques by pointing to the over all health and sustainability of the population. Even then, the government in 1984 is very ineffectual in its way. It's NOT a stable system. The government keeps a huge chunk of the population ignorant and keeps the intellectuals working so hard on propaganda that they can't question what's going on. The crumbling infrastructure of plugged sinks and stinking cabbage and food shortages - in contrast, to say, the Alliance's elegant infrastructure in the Core - shows how badly this particular system is running.
Are dystopias hyperbolic and foolish?
However, all of this may sound very objective and distant, a problem that does plague sci fi. Talking about monster hoards and invasive alien species and plagues and sexual and reproductive control can feel ludicrous in the context of current events, which aren't usually as lurid. And sometimes rebelling in fiction quells the urge for real action when necessary, imply naysayers.
There's a lot of salt and contempt for dystopias these days, partly because people assume that they are frivolous make-believe experiments in losing privilege for mostly white readers. That's not entirely without merit, but considering how many dystopias are aggressively post-racial and diverse, I'd argue that it's more about showing oppression in more than one context.
And finally, fiction offers opportunities to explore both sides of a discussion without having to invoke real atrocities or cheapen them, which can be stressful for survivors. Israel and Palestine's relationship certainly looks like a modern-day dystopia, not to speak of the current American government, but trying to talk about ethics in that context seems insensitive at best. Fiction allows us to explore possibilities without exacting a human cost for the experiment. And because of that safety, understanding how the rise to power happened can just be easier and less horrible when viewed through the lens of sci fi. And that is important, because seeing institutions as a group of people rather than an immobile and immortal bloc also makes them easier to defeat.
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Thanks for returning to the nest. Leave a comment and say hi! I want to hear from you. Keep up with the new releases by getting on the mailing list. Buy my books on Amazon, and keep up with me onTwitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and the original blog. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out!
Now, all the writers I know can anticipate what I'm about to say, but for those who prefer consuming media to making it, it may be a surprise. Art sucks. It's not just that drawing symmetrical eyes is difficult. Sure, there are fandom politics to deal with, as a recent ridiculous blow up in the Steven Universe fandom demonstrated. But sometimes, writing a storyline is just plain brutal.
A good example of this is The Underlighters.Sure, I enjoyed writing it, but sometimes, I didn't. I just had to write it. Same goes for After the Garden. Both of those books have scenes that were just emotionally hard to write. I won't include any spoilers, because of course, I'd prefer that you buy and read them for yourselves, but people who've already read one or both will probably know what I'm talking about.
But why is writing--or art in general--so hard? Well, there are basically three reasons.
Writing and art can be tedious
Art takes time. Right now, I'm working on a new productivity method--fifty words a day, fiction or blog, no matter what. My birthday? Halloween? Christmas? Doesn't matter. I will still have to write fifty words, at a minimum, that day. Sometimes I blow past this goal and write five hundred or even two thousand words, and sometimes, I just barely squeak by with the two or three sentences required to make my goal.
I tried higher word counts, and all that did was frustrate me. I tried a 'no zero' method, and that just resulted in a surprising number of zero productivity days. Something about fifty words a day really motivates me. A close pal of mine sets writing time limits. Chuck Wendig recommends three hundred and fifty words per day. Stephen King, as many people know, writes about two thousand words per day (link). I spoke to Emmie Mears recently, and they tend to write several thousand words per day over a very short span, then take long breaks. The point is, you might have to fiddle with your personal minimum, but finding it is the key to productivity.
I used to wait for inspiration, but when it didn't show up, I was lost, and I let my readers down. The funny thing is, once I get the engine going, the muse tends to hop in the car and participate the way I wanted her to in the first place. Using my new limit, I've been able to finish a first draft of The Meaning Wars, the long-awaited third book in the series of the same name. Which brings me to...
Writing and art can be technically difficult and intricate
OH GOD, SEQUELS. The writers are nodding and biting their lips and gnashing their teeth right now (hopefully not at the same time, because ow). Readers may be shrugging in confusion. The thing is, in addition to the famous "soggy middle" syndrome, there's a lot of stuff to handle in a sequel.
For The Meaning Wars,I had to advance and entwine character narratives, but I also had to introduce a huge new source of tension. How would my war be fought? It took me a long time to accept that I'm just not a boots-on-the-grouund military sci fi writer, and that traditional ways of describing combat and conflict wouldn't do the trick. Instead, I listened to the news and worked on chapters until the lightning bolt hit.
When I realised that I would have to use legislation and small details to convey the sense of oppression, fear, and restriction my characters would face, I got stuck again. How in the nine Hells was I going to do that without a lot of annoying exposition? Then I realised that even though I was writing in the third person, I could use epistolary techniques like news reports, letters and messages, and announcements or broadcasts. From there, it got a lot easier. I just had to think about specific, frustrating restrictions from the real world, and model obstacles accordingly.
Still, I will be working on book four soon, and after that, Monsters and Fools - the final book in The Nightmare Cycle (see above re: the Underlighters). I'm scared as hell of that sequel because the same problems will be presenting, and I have even more connective tissue to lay down! But I'm still here, still writing a blog post about it, and still refusing to give up.
Writing can be emotionally demanding and exhausting
One of the projects I recently finished, Bad Things that Happen to Girls, was absolutely brutal. I've been pretty open about having mental illnesses, but referencing feelings from my turbulent youth and early adulthood was very taxing. The story isn't literally biographical, but it's got emotionally autobiographical elements, and that was hard enough. Some of the more vicious scenes of emotional abuse really took it out of me, and you don't even want to know how hard the ending was. But I'd been working on the story since 2006. It had gone through two full rewrites as I struggled to nail down the timeline and events, and then I had to get it edited. Compressing the timeline and wrestling the elements into place was bad enough, but the subject matter left me curled up on the couch more than a few times.
But I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I am so glad I've released these stories into the world, and I have so many more waiting to be set free. I will be in pain, frustrated, swearing, or just slogging away at a blog post in the future, and I can't wait. It's not that suffering makes you an artist--it's that being an artist makes you suffer. Creation can be gruelling and frustrating. And that's okay.
Special thanks to Emmie Mears, Chuck Wendig, and Delilah Dawson, as well as Sarah Dimento and Katie de Long, for letting me peruse their brains!
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Thanks for returning to the nest. Leave a comment and say hi! I want to hear from you. Keep up with the new releases by getting on the mailing list. Buy my books on Amazon, and keep up with me onTwitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and the original blog. This is the one and only SciFiMagpie, over and out!
