Unabashed

I love the Big Idea series John Scalzi is doing. I like reading about the genesis of an idea, how it came to be written. If I had an opportunity to show John Scalzi my Big Idea–which I don’t, since the book is not published–I might tell him that my idea has a lot to do with bringing science to fantasy. It might look something like this:

I love stories where there are invisible worlds set within the world we live in. The idea that someone is right there, standing next to you, but you can’t see them because they’re in this other place. The first time I remember thinking about that was in high school, when we were talking about the Mayan culture that just disappeared off the face of the Earth, without a trace. While everyone else was thinking drought or war or famine, I was thinking that they must have evolved into a higher state, and then transitioned into a separate reality from the physical one we can see.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint…there are a lot of writers who utilize the “world within a world” plot to great effect, but they always seemed to miss one important detail that I always wanted to see expounded upon: how did the invisible world come to be in the first place? Once I began wondering in that direction, the book Modern-Day Mythica wrote itself.

The story evolved from the concept of an energy mass that encircles the globe, that flows across the surface of the Earth like a river, from north to south. That energy is called the Wash. And everywhere that the Wash touches ground it forms pockets of reality within reality, some large and some small, attainable by certain doorways which are difficult to find and even more difficult to access, unless you really know what you’re doing. But to simply go that far with the idea still wouldn’t have satisfied my curiosity of how the Wash itself came to be, in order to form these pockets of reality. And that was the point where the idea became my Big Idea. The complexity of the concept is vast, but it fits perfectly within the scientific laws of the universe, if you can accept that there is one ingredient in the universal stew that remains undetected and unaccounted for: the energy of the Wash itself, which originates from a celestial body once in orbit around the Earth, when the Earth had two moons in the sky.

The implications of this are much more far-reaching than might initially be thought of: the presence of a moon that is unaccounted for, that disappeared some ten thousand years ago and is unrecorded except perhaps in some arcane hieroglyphs drawn on cave walls, could have a devastating impact on how science looks at history. With two moons, Earth’s time line could shorten considerably. Things that might take millions of years today, such as the formation of mountain ranges, might have only taken thousands of years in an environment where there was so much more gravitational pull on the planet’s surface. The tides would have been greater, earthquakes and volcanoes much more frequent…essentially, everything that science has applied to a timeline would have to be compressed into a much tighter margin, because things would have been happening so much faster than we can account for today. This is important because it enables the scenario where the ages of mammals and dinosaurs could have overlapped, and it is entirely feasible in the real world. Indeed, this is a scenario which is entirely possible, one which I do not believe can be proven incorrect. That was the essential Big Idea of the book.

But what happened to the moon, one might ask. Well, this is the point where the story leaves the plane of the real world and delves into fantasy or science fiction. The moon, a crusty, charred satellite with a surface composed primarily of slate, is the source of the energy of the Wash. Some combination of minerals and exotic materials, in an environment of intense heat (such as the core of the moon, which happens to be molten), releases the energy, which is copious enough to encompass both moons as well as Earth. This shared energy is a fuel for magic, making the impossible possible in many ways. For instance, the cocktail of energies allow for the existence of creatures on the moon in question, which could not exist in any world where magic is not possible. And furthermore, the influence of the energies allows for those creatures to migrate to Earth, lending credence to the ancient myth of dragons.

In Modern-Day Mythica, dragons are pivotal characters, striving to reach the cool blue comfort of Earth once again. But they were banished long ago, by means of a spell woven by a man, using the inherent energies of their home moon itself. For thousands of years the dragons have been seeking to undo what was done, and once were able to expose a rift between Earth and the realm to which their moon had been banished. This rift allowed the energies of the moon to once again enter Earth’s atmosphere, forming the Wash, and enabling magic within its borders.

This work is unpublished and unagented, although it is under consideration at this time. Read the first five chapters here.
Crappy cover art was contrived by myself, with a ganked photograph from here (the cover art is crappy, but the photo is pretty cool).

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Big Idea, black moon, book, John Scalzi, legend, Modern-Day Mythica, moon, myth, mythos, story

There are lessons to be learned over at Whatever. John Scalzi announced the winning entrants (two runners up and one grand prize) for his Zoe’s Tale ARC contest this morning and it occurred to me, as I read the entries (many of which were really good), that it might be better to be published on the Whatever than in a publication dedicated to the exact same type of material. There are a lot of creative types who read Scalzi regularly, so it just makes sense that they’ll write some really good material in response to his request. And this is where it gets kind of interesting: When the contest started out it seemed like it was just a fun little thing; you might even go so far as to call it gimicky. Someone send in something funny, entertain me, and I’ll give you this book. But then I started reading the entries. I saw mostly what I expected to see: nothing you could really call a submission, just little anecdotes and humorous quips people were writing on the fly. But a few of them are good, very good, as you can see by the winners. I began to realize that these weren’t just little humorous quips, these are stories.

As it is, they are published–on Whatever, which is one of the most-read personal blogs on the internet. Not a venue where you’d expect to find good fiction unless the author published something himself, which he rarely does.  What’s interesting to me is that, even though it was a very informal forum, we got to see the whole process unfold right there in the comments section. Every entry (or submission, as it were) is readable by anyone. The three best, as judged by the site owner, got their very own dedicated post right on the front page of the site. There is a curious lack of linkage to their websites, at least for those who provided websites to be linked to. I would have thought a winning entry would get a link on the front page too, but you have to dig back through the comments of the ARC contest post to find out where their websites are (JS must be greedy with his Technorati ratings handouts). (JS advises me this was just an oversight and has been corrected). But even without the link, that’s a lot of great exposure for a writer or blogger.

These entries may not be a fit for SF&F or Strange Horizons, but they’re no less entertaining, and I would come back and read more if I thought more would follow. This is a serious feat that I’m wondering if anyone else will pick up on. It would be interesting to see more contests like this one, basically asking for fiction (I know there have been some of these before, I just haven’t seen many done so well). Most of the time if someone asks for fiction, even if they provide the theme, they’ll get a lot of 3k-word stories that are basically just more of the same. This time, the stories responding to the theme “The evening of August 19, 1994. What can you tell me about it?” were actually interesting (for the most part). And I generally don’t like to read short fiction.

I didn’t write an entry myself, but I did keep checking back to see what was being written. Maybe next time I’ll give it a try. And yes, I’ll go ahead and say that it would be nice to see Whatever do this as a regular feature. I’d do it here if I had half his readership and, you know, some stuff to give away. The results could be looked back upon one day as visionary.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: blog, blogger, Contest, Fiction, John Scalzi, markets, stories, Zoe's ARC

**Spoiler Alert** 

Something I’ve been thinking about lately: SciFi movies, more of them, please? Oh, and try and make them better, k? Here’s an idea: Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi, a book that is utterly primed for adaptation, and I don’t even see much of a way for them to ruin it. Look at the Hollywood history of putting the wrong actors in roles; the list is as long as the list of movies themselves. I’ve commented before that Rachael Taylor was an utter flop as IT genius Maggie Madsen, as well as a host of others. I’ll add to the list Halle Berry; she’s just too damned pretty to be Storm. Rebecca Romijn, she of the amazing body, who was perfect as Mystique in the X-Men series, but was a total bust (no pun intended) in The Punisher. The problem is that often Hollywood casts people that are too pretty for roles in which obviously less-pretty people belong. Such is the case with Maggie Madsen, and the same is true for Romijn’s Joan in The Punisher. But the reason she was perfect for Mystique is also the reason she–or any overly-pretty actor–would be an ideal fit for OMW the Movie. In OMW Scalzi has already craftily eliminated the problem of the exceedingly-pretty, not-believable-as-a-person actor, because everyone recruited into the Colonial Military is given a new and improved, genetically enhanced body that, while it retains the donor’s DNA and general appearance, is made much more physically appealing. The point being, you could cast the hottest people in Hollywood for the roles in OMW, ugly them down for the first thirty minutes of the film, and then just paint them green and give them cat’s eyes.

I’ll add that, like most people, I’ve read OMW’s one-star reviews and, frankly, I don’t understand it. It’s a testament to the fact that people just don’t like the same material, no matter what. In my opinion, OMW is easily the best SF book of the past ten years (at least of the ones I’ve read. And that includes all of Charlie Stross’s books, which I love also, but which aren’t quite as good as OMW). I just don’t get it.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the casting of OMW: the Movie:

• John Perry - Brad Pitt
• Jane Sagan - Rebecca Romijn
• Somebody else - Will Smith
• Somebody else - Orlando Bloom
• Somebody else - Charlize Theron
• Somebody else - Clive Owen
• Somebody else - Ken Watanabe

There, that ought to get them started.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Fiction, John Scalzi, movie, Old Man's War, OMW, Rebecca, Romijn, Science, scifi

John Scalzi and Subterranean Press has released Scalzi’s novella The Sagan Diaries (12,500 words) on the internet as a free read and/or download.

The Sagan Diaries falls in between Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, and is highly recommended.

They’re also releasing a 500-copy limited edition of You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop into a Coffeeshop, a book on writing from Scalzi, a full-time writer since 1991. It’s $35, but it comes signed and touted as a very attractive book. (I bought one of them :-)

If you don’t know who John Scalzi is, here’s the bio quip from the Subterranean website:

John Scalzi is author of Old Man’s War (which Publishers Weekly described as a “virtuoso debut” in a starred review) and other novels, as well as the author of the bestselling “Book of the Dumb” series of humor books. He’s also the proprietor of The Whatever, one of the most-visited personal Web sites on the Web. A full-time writer since 1991, Scalzi currently resides in rural America with his family and big fat Internet pipe to keep him busy. Visit him at www.scalzi.com.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Coffeeshop, Diaries, John Scalzi, novella, Sagan, Subterranean, Whatever