Hatches

The "Tewa taco" scene is finally done. And it ended up overstuffed like a Mission burrito.

(For those who don't know, the American burrito is considerably larger than its Mexican ancestors. In SF's Mission District, they came up with a way to steam the burrito in order to fit even more inside it.)

There were a lot of constraints going on there. I did want to do more of the thing I just did above; the processual view of things that I've had Penny doing since the first book (if only to underline that she is an archaeologist). So spotting, say, a connection between the red soil around Santa Clara (many houses are painted that same color) and the famed Santa Clara blackware. 

I also wanted to keep this scene low-key, without conflicts -- and that meant without uncomfortable questions -- because the theme here is a moment of peace. And on top of all of that, I find it harder writing about Native Americans than I did shamelessly exoticizing the French. That means a lot of the obvious things like "how do you say that in your language" are things I don't feel right including.

(Yet for some reason, I get three words in Navajo. And none in Tewa, which I had intended for my focus. In part this is because the character we get closest to is Mary Cartwright, who is Tewa but doesn't want to share. The Navajo man, Edward, we got those three words from is someone they both encounter as an outsider.)

The process of getting though this whole sequence went long enough I forgot the details of my outline. Besides, discovery writing. Some stuff doesn't feel right now that I've looked at it longer. But I've more or less got it figured out now and I am ready for the Sheep Ranch scene and the Atlas crawl. 

The latter went a strange direction. I'm going for a Fallout sort of vibe now, and Penny is discovering a series of short poem-like writings scattered about the place by a prior urban explorer, notes I'm calling an "apocalypse log" after the thing that's in so many games.

But I am seriously considering opening up a C emulator or something and writing a bare-bones text generator for these. I want them to be poetic and I've had my (recent) fill with poetry. I want it to be mad and mad is hard to write. And I just thought of this and I've got so much to write already to finish this one anyhow...

So I don't have a next book yet. At this point, I usually have another Athena Fox I already want to write. I do have three, rather more fantastical, projects in the wings...but I was thinking today how much they are not so much a problem of theme, but one of philosophy.

The philosophical thing that's beneath my Steampunk Venus story (well, almost everything is beneath them, being as you can't land on the surface of Venus and live)...anyhow, that's about the inertia of systems.

Yeah, sounds thrilling.

Basically, that politics and culture, technology and government and industry, all of these things are complex structures because they need to be. You can make a stone axe with two stones. You can't make a turbojet without factories making the parts you build the factories out of that make the parts. At least that many layers deep, and probably more.

A city-state with its necessary physical infrastructure (um, floating above the acid clouds, anyone?) and the relationships with other polities is going to be big, and have a lot of interconnected systems, and have a lot of history and a lot of cruft.

And this is set against the backdrop of a Venus that someone started terraforming. Or something. The planet is changing, and ecosystems especially when they interconnect with some crazy high-temperature chemistry get really, really complex and potentially chaotic.

There are villains, because people are people and some of them are gonna angle for "what's good for me" regardless of the cost to others. But mostly there is inertia, the inertia of past choices and present command structures and fragile economics and the big-ass problem of changing the spark plugs while the damned engine is running. 

The tension of the story is whether humans and their systems can move faster than the changing environment of Venus.

 

Which actually said the way I just did makes it seem interesting. Regardless, I am thinking a lot more about the new idea, my engineer-hero space opera. To sum up the theme of that book, it's post-processual. Err, that is, it is about how structural understandings are a powerful tool -- as long as one understands their limitations.

So there's a lot of that structural understanding going on. Some of it weaponized. But, and especially once some of it has been demonstrated, it gets abused by people who want to take the process without the caveats, or worse, take the results without the process at all. 

That's the watsonian. On the doylist side, this is plot written by one of the older underlying conceits of science fiction as a form; to start with a question, and then consider the implications.

Not exactly new. In Asimov's The Caves of Steel every clue is rooted in something about that environment and the implications thereof. In his robot stories, each story is the working out of possibly implications of the Three Laws of Robotics. In Niven, plot points come out of his behaviorist view of his alien species. Oh, wait -- that Kzin wasn't smiling.

The purest form of this being right at the bread-and-butter are those gadgeteer sorts of books. Sometimes they invented something, sometimes it is something alien they are working out the possibilities of. But there is fast-paced, mad-scale development of this ideas in real time and that forms the backbone of the plot. 

And yeah, that goes back to the Edisonades. 

And that's what I've been wanting to see in an engineer hero. But even when the book was co-written with Mr. James Doohan himself it tends to stick with conventional fisticuffs and when tech is encountered, someone "techs the tech."

(That was what they actually advised outside writers to do on The Next Generation. Just write that with the planet about to explode, Geordie techs the tech and the Enterprise is saved. The regular staff writers will put the right technobabble in there. Which certainly works for story purposes but only underlines that the science and engineering is never the point.)

Doing a book which wears that Edisonade history on its sleeve, in which the characters actively talk about technical debt and design-for-manufacture, means it is an active part of the ideas being explored when your engineer-hero crawls into a duct to cross-wire a critical circuit. Not just some fine work by Matt Jefferies.

This sort of thing -- usually found in harder SF -- is akin to the mystery form that choses to play fair with the reader. I am reliably informed, however, that even in Ellery Queen's this style is not the most popular. Plays fair, in this context, means the solution is in the clues that have been provided equally to detective and reader. They can, and sometimes do, guess the solution before the detective does.

Really, though, there is much to be said on having what is at play be character and emotion. Us monkeys want to watch other monkeys dance, after all. Not stand in a blank room solving math puzzles. The point being, by both using an engineer hero of a particular mindset, and by making that sort of thinking about design goals and understandable compromises and the implications thereof an explicit theme and in-universe plot points, the process of solving those particular math problems becomes a thing our protagonist does and the reader (hopefully) enjoys following along.

That all puts me in mind of Holmes. Reading or watching him work now, it feels like he pulls it all out of thin air. He might as well be asking the Bat Computer for the answer.

But back when they were written, the often extremely structured lives -- in a class society with clearly defined trades and roles, with the esoterica of those trades rather less esoteric than the nature of a transducer-test technician is to us today -- meant his guesses were more believable. Some of it is the satisfyingly comfortable stereotypes, so his deductions felt emotionally right. Some of it was trivia that one could find someone who actually was a printer and confirm that, more-or-less, that was how it worked.

Maybe this is why back with Doyle, or with Christie, we could have these very structured mysteries, these locked-room murders and so forth. And why we've gravitated towards character instead, to the point where it perhaps doesn't even matter that the clue or the method of acquiring it is nonsense.

But alas, science has also increased in complexity and detail and thus in distance from the reader. You could present a clever bit with throwing a rock around an asteroid back when we were mostly in a Newtonian universe. Not saying it can't be done today -- but the clever things Mark Watney did took a lot longer to explain. The Martian spent a lot less time solving chemistry problems, and a lot more time going "Ahhr!"

Which sounds like I am talking myself out of Ensign Blue. Not necessarily. Maybe this stuff is too nerdy and the readership isn't there for as much as I want to put it. But the fact that I can do it, attracts me a lot more than the rather more hidden themes lurking behind those sulfuric-acid clouds.

Which brings me to mixed drinks. There's some potentially fun stuff in The Tiki Stars. Colonialism, exoticism, the commercialization of leisure. The uneasy balancing act in which "cultural appropriation" is but one slice and one label. That and a sort of fable about the birth of Tiki culture, taking the existing mythologies and re-mythologizing them in a different setting.

There's also a writerly question, about how much you can do and have fun with old-school pulp in this modern age.

But this is definitely the lesser of this trio, when it comes to having an interesting philosophy to work off of. There is, in plainer and simpler words, a lot less to say (or at least less that I am interested in saying).