Learning to Let Go

Hello Reader!  As I'm drafting query letters for agents and really analyzing the meat of my novel, I frequently come upon an unavoidable fact.  My novel has very little believable science fiction.  A lot of the technology I employ isn't nearly as well researched as something like the Hyperion series, my alien species fall into the two arms, two legs trope of most genre fiction, and while I love the superpowers my main characters have there's little concrete explanation for them.  I rock back and forth from fantasy and sci-fi, often in the same sentence, while expecting my readers to manage the tonal shifts.

Because of this glaring weakness too ingrained in the story to truly rectify, I focus on its strength: character relationships.  Now I'm not saying that the novel has good character relationships, I'm not that boastful.  You can be the judge of that.  I'm just saying that relative to other aspects of the novel (like the sci-fi tech and fantasy elements) it's a much stronger element.  These relationships, between teenagers just starting their adolescence, are of course fraught with angst and melodrama.  But they're also informed by my life.

When you're a teenager, every problem in the world seems like the apocalypse.  You feel alone in trying to stop this immense silent doom that no one else understands.  Sure some of you may not have felt that, and good for you.  La dee da.  But either way, the whole teenager thing provides good drama to write about.  There's nothing like the raw emotions of a fourteen year old to propel a plot.  The problem with me using this aspect of my life, my adolescence, to inform the adolescent relationships in my novel, is that I don't know much about my adolescence.

Yes, this is my rage face.  Beware.

It's not fair to say that I had it stolen from me.  It was very much a two-way street.  But for five years I was best friends with someone who, at the end of the friendship, revealed that a lot of important things that had happened between us was a lie.  A lot of those important things involved my relationships with other people. A lot of those important things involved how I thought I was perceived by others.  A lot of those important things involved how I perceived myself.

I can't begin to tell you how fucked up I was because of it, because I don't know the extent of the damage.  I have no idea how far those lies actually spread.  But lord did it make me angry.  A sort of wrath overcame me, a debilitating rage that I couldn't control.  I know when it comes on too, but it's like a drug.  I always felt better after I roared at someone.  More than once I've alienated and freaked people out by screaming at them like this.  People who care about me and like me.

I TOTALLY DO THIS!

But who really does like and care about you?  That's the takeaway I got from those five years.  It's all ephemeral, these feelings and warm-hearted grins people give you.  It can go away in an instant, because if you're not careful you'll let yourself get caught in a trap of trust and vulnerability built on lies and social niceties.  Betrayal is around every corner, a wraith ready to prey upon all the good feelings you desperately want to hold onto.

Of course, that's all of my vengeful bitterness talking.  None of that is a healthy way to live.  But the kind of clarity I have about the issue now only happened when that best friend came back into my life.   And told me that all of the lies revealed to me, all of the exposed deceit, all of the torturous arguments that turned me into a blithering lunatic, were fake.  That it was all done to let go of me, because this best friend didn't see any other way to cut off the unhealthy relationship.  DRAMA.

Beware crossroads demons...they like to kiss.

When something this jarring happens, you can go one of two ways.  Either you believe the person, thereby changing everything you've ingrained in yourself for years, or you can disbelieve a person and restart the same arguments you thought you had put to rest years ago when you refused to speak with the person ever again.  Believe, and change yourself, or disbelieve and get wrapped up in all that shit all over again.

I did neither.  I chose not to care.  I chose to accept the notion that I may never know the truth about that part of my life, and just be okay with it.  There's a point where you just get exhausted by hate.  And it's at that point, when there's nowhere left to go, that you just build your own damn street to drive on.  It's that kind of lucidity I want to bring to Briok and his relationships.  Ultimately, Briok's tale is a bildungsroman - a coming of age tale.  But a lot of syfy coming of age tales involve blatantly supernatural confrontations with evil.  It's really cool to read, and I'm guilty of lapping them up just as much as the next person.  But they aren't real, or relatable.  They're just cool.

This pedo clown monster came from Stephen King's mind.  Ya.  Swallow THAT.

What if there was a sci-fi/fantasy hero who dealt with evil not just on a supernatural scale, but on a very personal one too?  What if the true villains of this character's story weren't the evil aliens who want to kill him, but the untrustworthy friends who push him further and further towards bitterness and cynicism.  You and I, we aren't defined by our confrontations with Gollum, or the Dark Lord, or the happy-go-lucky best pals we can sometimes cross paths with.  We're defined by how we deal with bad things happening to us, and whether or not we came out of those situations whole.  No matter the genre, our shitty relationships with people (and yes, our great ones too) should be reflected in literature.  And not in the creepy, pseudo-pedophile way Stephen King does it.  Here's the weekly excerpt:

            “What are you talking about?”

            “What do you mean what am I talking about?  It’s a great idea!”

            Briok sat in his seat, gawking at Proteus.  For his part, Proteus had a crooked grin plastered to his face in an attempt to convince Briok.  “Water?  I’ve been playing football and violin all my life.  What makes you think I’m going to suddenly change everything and do Water?”

            “You’re not going to be changing everything.  You’ve got the body for it!  Besides, what else are you going to do with your free time?  Young prince lessons?”  Proteus turned to Carma, who was busy flirting with Evron Tennyson from afar.

            Proteus rolled his eyes in disgust, “Will you stop eye-raping him and help me out here.”

            She turned around scowling, “What?  He doesn’t want to play, leave him alone.  Besides, I don’t see why he shouldn’t keep doing violin.  You’re really good at it Briok.”

            

Until next time then.

A Whole New WOOOORLD

Hello Reader!  Welcome to the first of multiple blogposts on world-building.  What is world-building?  Click that link and you'll find out.  But a quick and dirty summary of the concept, is that sometimes in Syfy literature you've got such fantastical concepts that they wouldn't fit into the already present world around us.  So you have to build a whole new world around your concepts, justifying them, explaining them, giving them context so that the reader can feel immersed in your story.  And so you don't look like a damned fool for putting proton cannons in the 18th century.  Even if it's a really cool idea that the Revolutionary War was fought with laser guns.

George Washington vs Zombies, a movie I'd pay to see.

What's the essence of world-building?  In fantasy, there are certain rules to world-building that you can't really break.  Science and technology are scarce.  Men must have beards.  If they don't, they're either smarmy weasels or elves.  And swords have to be ubiquitous.  If you can, name them.  In science fiction, you've also got a set of rules.  Don't go outside the realm of science, otherwise you'll look really foolish.  You don't have to include aliens, but if you don't have them, have something scarier to take their place.  And set your story in the future, please.

These rules aren't followed all of the time, but if you pay attention you'll see them in full effect in almost every single Syfy story.  Why?  Who knows.  They'are archaic and extremely limiting.  I took a Screenplay class my last quarter in school, and it was very enlightening for several reasons.  But it was also extremely restrictive.  When going over my plot and my story - for that class I decided to adapt my novel into a screenplay - the TA of the class decided that I could not have the world that I had built.  It would simply be impossible to sell to an audience, much less producers who would be buying my work.

Sometimes I want to punch Syfy authors in the face.

In the year 3096, on Earth, you would expect a post-apocalyptic society that's torn apart by perpetual struggles for resources and plagued by disease.  Or a utopian civilization hellbent on keeping a lid on just how screwed up everything's become.  Neither idea is very appealing for a story, and not just because both are excruciatingly cliche.  They are also really unrealistic.  How many times did people like Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley warn us of our impending doom?  And it didn't happen.  Look at the Cold War.  Everyday, Americans were told that they could be blown off the face of the planet.  And it didn't happen.  Because it works, and it sells, Syfy authors give very little credit to humanity.

But look at us.  We've survived plagues, we've survived genocides, we've survived famine and wars and bloodshed and nuclear crises.  We are a hardy bunch, worse than cockroaches and more resilient than we expect.  So what if we did end up in a apocalyptic war against invading aliens who have superior technology, strength and numbers to us.  And instead of being utterly destroyed, we end up in a détente.  The aliens, their plans and reasoning unknown to us, get a portion of humanity's land and in exchange they lay off the whole command and conquer bit.  So now, instead of a really droll and overdone plot about humanity FIGHTING BACK, you can have something far more nuanced and interesting: humanity struggling with peace.

I've basically revealed the bare bones of the world in my novel.  The wrathful Howlas invaded Earth around 2020, inciting a war that was only eventually stopped by the Decadent - the frightening use of a dozen well-placed H-bombs near the planets atmosphere, setting off a chain reaction that decimated the Howlas' forces.  Over the course of the next one thousand or so years, the Howlas and humanity's allies (Nymphs, and sometimes the Hyths) would clash with each other.  Halfway through that period, the Mags enter the fray, coming out of hiding to fight their ancient enemies the Howlas.  It all ends in the Fourth World War when the Howlas, the Mags, Humans and Nymphs all come to a stalemate.  From there on out it's an uneasy peace for 26 years, which is where the novel starts.

Now that's a world I'm interested in, and not just because I wrote it.  Seriously.  How does society function, when you've got a thousand years worth of cross-species intermingling going on?  Where do the basic functions of society like money, culture, holiday celebrations, education go from there?  How is segregation dealt with?  How is language dealt with?

Can humans and aliens fall in love?  Without the gross implications of alien sex?

I guess a really immediate way to relate to this kind of world is to look at Mass Effect.  Yes, the video game does have some elements of the whole "aliens are way better than humans and we're all just shitty shitheads who can't do shit", but overall it's a great portrayal of a society that has fully integrated - to the best of its ability - humans and aliens.  They have wars and they have drinks together.  They don't all speak the same languages, but they've all got the same problems - more or less.  So keep that in mind when you read the bit of world-building I try for here.  Let me know what you think in the comments!

            Residents of The Cliffs gathered along the enormous stone staircases and balconies, children flitting in and out of open apartment doors chasing each other with water pistols and handfuls of sand.  Each apartment was connected to the other through a complex web of tunnels that had been blasted into the stone.  Navigating them could take a lifetime, since very little technology was integrated into the city. 

            Laughter filled the air, one of the few times that the atmosphere was ever festive.  The Cliffs had been designed long ago as a welfare city for Atlantia, but the project had never been quite successful.  A din of music and various quartets vying for a simple coin or two to pay rent or worse mixed in with the general hustle and bustle.  Cars upon cars kept pulling up to the sandy sidewalks, dropping off families as the driver went off, looking for a half-decent spot to park, some of them yelling into cell phones, others yelling at the dog to stay in the car.

Branching off from the Speedway that ran throughout the country, a road led straight into a gorge bound by two cliff faces.  Etched into these monoliths were apartments and shops, an entire cityscape bustling with life.  The Cliffs, as the gorge was called, opened up onto a gorgeous harbor that was normally filled with small ships, rafts and surfers. 

            But today, the sandy shoreline was bursting with families rowdy teenagers who had come to see the Annual Water Exhibition held between Atlantia Upper School and its vicious rival Magna Boulevard Magnate.  The atmosphere was ferocious.  It was always warm in the Cliffs, as if the harbor was a trap for heat from the sun.  This seemed to elevate the tension that was already high between the rival teams, with even their mascots – a shark for Atlantia and a lion for Magna Boulevard – coming to blows.

Is the length too long?  I'm trying out this new thing where I end each blogpost with an excerpt.  Let me know in the comments!  Until Next Time Then!

Hierarchy of Race

Hello Reader!  The title of the blog post sounds like something you'd see from my other blog right?  And you know, it probably would be a good topic to discuss there too.  But for now, I feel like it's super relevant to the "legend of a work in progress".  It's probably one of the most important considerations I made in creating my characters and shaping the species (be it Human or alien) they come from.

It's stupid how gorgeous he is, right?

In case you don't know what the Hierarchy of Race is, here's a link to Professor Michael Hunt's paper.  He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and has written a book about how racial ideologies have shaped US foreign policy.  To sum up what he says though, there's a very real race hierarchy in people's minds that informs them in their day-to-day interactions.  This guy is black, thus he is less than an asian, who is less than a white.  And so on and so forth.  While this may not be true for everyone, and I would argue that for the majority of people it is not true, it's apparently a really big part of US foreign policy and you can't deny the fact that it's a huge part of the American legacy.

And it's also a huge part of science fiction and fantasy.  Look back on a lot of the classics in either genre.  You'll see a definite partitioning of races based solely on the fact that they are who they are.  Yes, in Lord of the Rings the Quenya fought a war with the Noldorin and they certainly don't shy away from marrying into the race of humans.  And in science fiction once in a while you see aliens turning on each other politically like Estraven's struggle against his native Karhide in Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.  But the vast majority of science fiction and fantasy (syfy) novels have a set number, kind, and relationship for the races that populate their books and authors do not deviate from these set standards.  Orcs are always stupid, trolls are even worse, and elves are badass gorgeous people.  Humanity is either in charge of a system of worlds and corrupted, or fighting against an organized system of worlds and pure.

Poor kid...

Sure, you can hide behind the idea that these are tropes, motifs, structures that have worked before and can totally work again.  I agree that they're fun, but I also posit that they are outdated.  I'm tired of reading about the same old relationships, I'm tired of reading about the human protagonist saving the aliens because their weirdo ways saved him/her, I'm really freaking tired of reading about the same political, societal relationships between the perennially creepy species and the always beautiful ones.  It's kind of ridiculous how stagnant things have become.

Syfy was meant to be a world of endless possibilities, where the problems and issues of the real world can be explored and extrapolated on a dramatic scale.  Interesting interpretations should abound, not ossified hierarchies that don't even exist.  Why can't the Elves be hoodlums and the Orcs be the dignified ones?  Where does it say that every future society has to be a dystopia ruled by despotic aliens/humans?  Everything is the same same same.  Ugh.

Funny face, lulz

Why is it that after a war between aliens and humans, the political and societal effects aren't explored?  Don't you think that aliens would intermingle with humans?  That humans would influence aliens, that after millennia some of them might even adopt our religious systems?  Why is it a fact that the religions of today die out in the future?  After two millennia we still have Christianity, what's another two?  Often I feel that the attachment to these tropes, especially concerning how aliens or fantasy races are developed and interact with each other, is built off of laziness.

Laziness, however, is a lazy answer.  More probable is the idea that the whole genre of syfy is losing its focus.  People are beleaguered with spectacle and awe, an empty miracle of technology that will only hold a person's eyes without ever touching their soul.  And the easiest way to deliver this spectacle is to not push the envelope, to leave the bells and whistles of syfy be.  There's no challenge for the audience, and none for the creative mind.

Such a badass, so good at world building

But it's a lot less fun.  Maybe, after all of this complaining, I should throw out there what I'd like to do with my races.  Maybe.  I find it to be self-serving, a "Gotcha!" moment that is rooted in arrogance.  I do not think that I have achieved whatever level of creativity is needed to abolish the old stereotypes.  I only ardently wish that the work I am doing now is seen in that light.  I want to shake things up, I want to break barriers.  The Howlas aren't a single, mindless race of beings.  There are Howlas who hate other Howlas, who are Christian and Jewish, who love humans and hate themselves.  Humanity is not weak but burdened, under the thumb of no alien species and in detente with all of them.  Argh, I'm digressing.

Either way, I think syfy needs to change.  Orcs shouldn't always be stupid and ugly, aliens shouldn't always be war-mongering.  It'd be nice if authors and filmmakers and showrunners could have some creativity, and even more so it would be nice if they respected the audience.  Until next time then.

Franzen & Fantasy

Hello Reader!  I recently began reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a 2001 novel that has been called by numerous critics and readers "the best novel of the millenium's first decade".  Heavy stuff right?  Definitely.  The novel deals with consumer-driven America and a very broken, very dysfunctional family's attempt at having one last Christmas together.  It gives the reader a rather cruel, incredibly stark, and unapologetically brutal depiction of this family's faults and worries, each imperfection clearly outlined without the slightest hint of empathy.

Which doesn't make it bad.  In fact, Franzen's objectivity in writing is masterful.  Most other authors would feel the need to inject some sentimentality in order to lure the reader into a false sense of pity.  Not Franzen.  He relies only on his prose and the events of these characters' lives.  And his writing is absolutely brilliant.  Metaphors are created without relying on default images.  He uses a Nordstrom bag filled with old letters to describe an old woman's paranoia and frailty.  Details are thrown at the reader without hesitation, as if Franzen has a secret well full of them.  It's amazing how much the guy has made up in his own head so his story will work.

But I don't like the book.  I just can't wrap my head around it.  It's engaging, only because the writing is a river of discontent and malformed values that I can't help but follow.  The events of the novel I could do without.  I don't want to read about how a disgraced college professor fulfills his lust for a former student by masturbating on his comfy leather chaise, and in the next few paragraphs learn that that college professor's Parkinson's-rattled father is sitting on the same leather chaise eating hors d'oeuvre.

It's level of detail is disgustingly magnified and, in a way, kind of arrogant.  The entire writing style reminds me of a bemused parent watching over a struggling child, one of those kids who valiantly attempts to stuff the triangle piece in the circle hole.  Franzen has stated before that the entire novel was a memorialization of the Midwest...but is that from the perspective of a guy who was educated at Swarthmore and lives on the Upper East Side of New York?

His apparent arrogance aside, I think I'm just biased against books like this.  There isn't really a redeeming factor about any of these characters.  Even the father, who has dementia, is given the same brutal treatment.  And while that does say something about the American character, I need heroes in my novels.  Therein lies my beef with literary fiction.

The subset of fiction has, in my ill-educated opinion, become a medium of retreat for the incredibly well-educated authors of America.  For no better reason than "they can" are their books esoteric in nature and highly specialized for a specific group of people: those who have enough time in the day to read. These people don't have to work nine hour days then return to a hectic home where they must clean the house, their kids, make dinner or buy it, and then attempt to catch up on the extra work they've accumulated because they couldn't get it done at the office two hours away, three with traffic.

No, the people that avidly read Franzen, or Foer or Chabon, come back from work with their house sparkling and their children tucked away.  They read at night before they go to bed because they had been lounging beforehand and need a good way to ease into their dreams.  Novels that they read are filled with the moans and groans of first world problems, setbacks self-inflicted and relationships devoured by our own greed for more.  Most people aren't like that.

I'm Back

Hello Reader!  Sorry I’ve been out for so long, Blogger and I were having a tussle and it took me a while longer than I thought it would to win.  Anyways, I should update everyone on the status of my contest participation.  The Shirley Collier Prize people have not contacted me, and June 4^th was the day to do so.  I’m hoping against hope that this lack of response is due to the fact that I am not a Humanities major, which was one of the requirements to participate.

Or it could be that my manuscript wasn’t up to par, which it wasn’t.  One hour before the deadline I found that a portion of a chapter had actually been spliced to another chapter when I was still editing the manuscript.  I was shocked and scared out of my mind.  Without that portion, the chapter was short and meaningless.  So instead of doing my best to fill in something within the next hour, I panicked, deleted the paragraph I had written while editing, and submitted.

Plus, I’ve found a glaring inequity in my story overall.  The Proxy Wars: Dramatis Personae is one of four books in a volume.  But it’s not being released at the same time as the other books.  Thus, it is absolutely imperative that the novel stands on its own as a story with a singular theme and plot.  Dramatis Personae does not.  It has a theme, definitely.  But its plot does not support the theme, because there isn’t a standalone conflict.  Dramatis Personae serves as the introduction to every character I will use in the first volume of the story.  And it only does that. 

For there to be a plot, the novel requires a problem introduced near the beginning of the story.  And by the end of the novel, this problem needs to be solved.  I have allowed my characters to run around and solve every problem presented to them “off-stage”.  I only depict the consequences of their actions, which leaves me a few meager settings to set my action, long conversations, and brutal scenes of exposition.  By brutal, I mean infodump. 

While this is all fine to have, without action happening in between I am left with a tome of philosophy rather than an engaging page-turner.  At least, that’s what I feel.  To alleviate this problem, I’m going back to Book 1: Dramatis Personae and revamping every chapter one by one.  It’s going to take longer than I want, but I need to do this.  I understand that as an author, I will never truly be satisfied with my work.  I understand that this perfectionism could work against me.  But if I can achieve this feat within the year, I promise I will not touch the novel until I have found an agent.  The fact that I have spent six years on this novel without making any inroads with the industry both confuses and saddens me.  Of course, I will only enter the business of publishing until my manuscript is absolutely ready.  But to get it that ready, I have to give my theme a plot. 

Onto other news, I’ve begun ideas for short stories that I want to submit to various contests and literary magazines.  Yes, they will stick to the same genre – science fiction – but I am not going to shoot for the epic space opera that I want The Proxy Wars to be.  I’m not going to write about what my ideas are, mainly because they’re just ideas.  At any point in time they could change and morph into something else.  But I'm hoping I'll be able to finish them before the summer and have them published in a magazine, or submitted to a contest.  Bakhayr, we'll see.  Until next time then.

Muses

Hello Reader!  This week, I'm going on a Supernatural binge.  Both on this blog AND my other blog.  Yes, I have two blogs.  Supernatural is a television show on the CW that has been going on for five years now.  Count that, FIVE years.  Yes many of you will say: it's just two pretty boy, white-trash brothers gallivanting across America trying to kill a couple boogeymen.  And it kind of is just that.  Except the show has humor, cleverness, is self-referential without being preachy, and a beyond stellar recurring theme: free will is great, but it also has its consequences.

But the one thing that Supernatural does that I'm most in awe with is make the surreal wholly bland, and the bland a part of elegant drama, possessing a beauty wholly ethereal.  There's a good reason why I say this.  Take for example the episode "Hammer of the Gods" just this past season.  Despite its clunky mythology surrounding Odin, Shiva, etc. the show managed to do something brilliant: explain why humans are better than angels.  Without being cliche, melodramatic, or preachy in any way!

Forgive me for the bad quality.  On the left is Gabriel, on the right is Lucifer.  They're brothers and they're discussing how Dad, i.e. God (swt), loves Humans more than Angels.  And how God is right.  "Damn right they're flawed," Gabriel says, "But a lot of them try...and you should see the Spearmint Rhino!"  How beautiful is that?  That reference to the strip club is brilliant, underplaying the soft sad music hitting us over the head in the background.  And it balances the dark theme with an airy tone that alleviates some of the tension.

Am I getting ahead of myself in describing this show?  Absolutely.  It's a popular, mainstream TV show on the CW.  THE CW!  Home to such scions of civilization as Smallville, Gossip Girl, and The Vampire Diaries.  Yet somehow, despite the trappings of popularity that shackle it, Supernatural soars above everything else on the boobtube.  The last episode wasn't incredible just because it asks the audience what the nature of God (swt) is and never answers the question.  The season finale was frikkin' awesome mainly because the goofiness that makes the show unique remained intact.  It carried the finale away from the apoplectic storyline to a place of common humanity that we could all relate to.  Case in point: an Angel calls an Archangel an assbutt.

Why is this important to me though?  Why is this goofiness so crucial that I'm dedicating both of my blogs to this one television show?  Because I want to write Supernatural.  I want to so badly depict surreal situations populated with real characters whose flaws make them who they are, and have far running consequences.  Is that too much to ask?  I do not think so.

In fact, I think it's what every science fiction novel should strive for.  You can read my rant about science fiction here, but in general there are so many problems with the way the genre has been written over the past fifty years I can't just relegate them all to one post.  So I didn't, and a little bit of my ire has leaked into this post.  Speaking in a blanket manner, science fiction has become more a contest of who can create better, more scientifically accurate worlds than the other.  Authors have pried themselves away from what makes any and all stories good: the humanity of it all.

Flaws are rich pools for diversity to be created and maintained, for plots to develop and push forward, and for characters to interact with each other in both heartbreaking and uplifting ways.  Take those flaws away from us humans, and we're just like the angels:

Following destiny like dogs, never forgiving, never learning.  We all know that isn't human.  We all know that doesn't make for a very compelling story.  And that's the kicker: I'm still astonished that a show I started watching just last November has taught and inspired me so much in terms of my writing.  Both Supernatural and Battlestar Galactica are huge influences on me (more on Battlestar next week).  But what Supernatural does, and what Battlestar sometimes didn't, was give weight to each character through their flaws.  Dean Winchester confronts Satan, pictured above, and Michael, the one Archangel powerful enough to kick Beelzebub's ass, while playing "Rock of Ages" by Def Leppard.  Goofy?  Stupid?  Reckless?  Unnecessary?  No, none of those.  That's Dean Winchester.

I want people to say that about my characters, about my story.  Briok just broke out into a fit of rage because someone yelled at him?  Was that childish?  Overdramatic?  Unnecessary?  No, that was Briok being Briok.  Can I get there?  Bakhayr, maybe.  Even if I don't though, I'd still be happy with myself.  Because I tried my very best to emulate a show like Supernatural, to paint a portrait of humans fighting aliens without pretension and heavy-handedness.  To tell a story, pure and simple.  Until next time then.

Science Fiction

Hello Reader!  Today I'm going to go on a rant.  Be prepared.

I'm incredibly mad at io9.com.  Yes, it is a science fiction blog and thus may have a little bit more authority on what is and isn't science fiction.  But why is it that when a science fiction show decides to cross boundaries and morph genres, it is lambasted by the science fiction acolytes that once salivated over it like dogs?  Is it a classic case of the servant ruling the master?  Or is it just plain hubris on the part of science fiction writers and readers?

It could be both, but seeing as how I'm in the mood to rant I'm going to have to say it's the latter.  Science fiction does not and cannot box itself in, deliberately trying to restrict itself to the conventions of technology.  For if there ever was a time when religion is prevalent in society, it is now.  And all good art is a reflection of the time in which it was created.  Right?  I like to think so.

Anyways, I do not think that tossing religion into science fiction is heresy.  Rather, I think religion can strengthen a science fiction novel, tv show, movie.  It presents a dichotomy between that which can be explained, and that which cannot.  For those shows that are good, I mean.  For those shows that are great, science and religion intertwine to create a mishmash of the explainable and unexplainable.  Science CAN explain religion, and religion CAN explain science.  It's absolutely possible, and while Battlestar Galactica was an imperfect prototype of this model, it was by no means a betrayal of the genre.

By now, you're probably wondering what spurred this whole diatribe.  This article is what did it, as it bends over backwards to dump on God as a plot device.  The gist of it is that God in Battlestar Galactica is an improper device to explain many of the strange events that occur in the characters' lives.  God is unexplainable, that is the very definition of God.  It has rules, but can break them at any time.  It can even change its rules.  The writer of the article then compares this to Lost, and its God figure Jacob.  As a conduit for the show's mysticism Jacob serves as an explanation of the God-like powers that swirl around the island and is its stubbly, pouty face.

What beef I have with the article is that the writer states clearly that one path is better than the other.  That's only if you're a whiny kid who needs an answer to everything.  That's only if you approach the show, novel, movie as a work of hard science, grounded in steely contraptions and whizzing parts.  But Battlestar - along with Lost - has always carried with it a proud badge of mysticism, one that screams fantasy.  Does that negate it as a piece of science fiction?  Not in the slightest.

Because science fiction is not just the novelization of a scientist's greatest fantasy, or the serialization of a physicist's grandiose experiment.  Science fiction is the creation of a world programmed around its own internal history that seeks to answer questions about the essential elements of our humanity.  You do not need robots in science fiction, and aliens are extra credit.  What you need, and what is sorely lacking from many science fiction novels of today, is humanity.  Surrealism is perfectly acceptable, but if you're trying to say something about the human condition you had better damn well include a bit of humanity in your work.

To deny that the human condition involves religion or faith is stupid.  Just plain stupid.  Even the denial of religion is an involvement of religion.  If I'm going to write a realistic science fiction story, which indeed is my goal, I'm going to have to face the facts: religion is a huge part of people's lives.  Sure, you may say that religion is waning.  Atheists and agnostics are more and more prevalent.....in Europe.  But in the rest of the world, religiosity is reaching a fever pitch!  (To debate whether this is wrong or right, go here).

Anyways, I'm digressing like no other.  My beef was with io9 complaining about God in science fiction, and not having answers explained with whizbang scientific theories that fit in snugly with logic.  Well, Battlestar was trying for something.  It was shooting for depth, it was shooting for characterization, it was aiming for that elusive hybrid story of religion and science.  Maybe it didn't get there, but it was damn near perfect when it swung for the fences. 

When science fiction blurs the line between logic and faith, and asks the audience to come to its own conclusions, rather than feed some mythos to the reader/viewer, that's art.  That's drama, and that's beautiful.  If there's anything that my story aspires to do, it's to throw surreal situations at real characters and depict in the starkest detail their reactions to the hurly burly surrounding them.  I want to be like Battlestar, I want to blur the line between God and the machine.  If I do, if I accomplish this Herculean task, I'll have created something that speaks volumes above a novel or movie or television show.  I'll have connected to reality.  To get there then, my success depends on you. Until next time then.