Unabashed

You know, when I said the planets must be lining up because of all the weird I’ve been seeing, I didn’t know they really were. Interestingly, in this article the author claims that planetary alignments “are nothing more than the visible clockwork mechanism of our natural skies,” and that the myths associated with those movements are all erroneous. Well, number one, a myth is by definition erroneous, or at least a myth is an imagination, invented idea or story or concept. Number two, the author fails to consider all the weird that occurs when the planets line up just so. It’s like saying the full moon has no impact on people, and yet, ask any ER nurse or doctor and they’ll tell you that on full moon nights the ER fills up quicker and fuller than usual, and usually with a healthy dose of weird. I’m not saying it’s not a myth, but in my mind it’s a dangerous thing to dismiss anything too quickly, and I think there are still inexplicable things in this vast Universe we live in. In fact, I think it’s downright simple to presume that everyone who believes there is significance in such celestial drama are wrong, when you have no proof of that yourself.

But it is a nice blog (even though it is way too heavy on the advertising), and the author did point out that the planets were all aligning for our entertainments. So go read Universe Today (just pull the RSS feed like I do and you don’t have to bother with the irritating mass of adspace).

Photograph by Richard McCoy.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: full, legend, lined up, lining up, Mars, moon, myth, order, regulus, Saturn, universe

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

NASA pic culled from Brent_Zupp:

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Earth, Mars, moon

This is just a hoot. (I’ve listed the theories here, comments added are my own.)

1. The Moon Landing was a Hoax: This would make a lot of people liars. People who I don’t believe are liars. A dozen astronauts, along with everyone at NASA, Houston, politicians…okay, I can see the politicians keeping up a lie, but the astronauts themselves? I don’t believe it. The lunar landing happened the year I was born (1969) and, for my entire life, I’ve considered it the greatest accomplishment of the human species. I’m proud that it was accomplished by Americans. A lot of my interest in Science Fiction evolves out of this great achievement. It proves that the impossible is possible. I won’t let you take that away from me.
2. Face on Mars: I don’t know what it is, but it’s spooky looking. NASA is now saying it’s just an eroded mesa, that their newest images of that area prove it. I’m fine with this; frankly, I can’t imagine why science would lie about it. They spend so much time searching for proof of life on other planets, and according to this theory, now that they’ve found it, they’ve covered it up. That smacks of stupidity to me.
3. Flat Earth Society: It’s hard to imagine a more stupid idea.
4. The USA 193 Spy Satellite: I don’t really think this qualifies as a conspiracy. There were probably many reasons we shot this satellite down, and probably all of them are right to one degree or another. It’s done. Who cares why it was done?
5. Planet X: Another planet in our solar system. Right. One that you can’t see, even though you can see several others even with a naked eye. And, of course, the government doesn’t want you to know about it, so they force observatories to shut down so they can keep it a secret. This is what southerners call malarkey.
6. Roswell/Area 51: This is the most believable of all of these.  
7. Illuminati and Majestic-12: Lizard people…I’m not going to say it’s impossible (the lunar landing taught me that anything is possible, remember?), but highly unlikely. And the theorists propose that the fact that there’s no proof of the Illuminati’s existence proves they do exist. Sounds like a lot of people who really, really like conspiracy theories.  
8. 2012 and the End of the World: Another spooky one, but one that can’t be discarded out of hand (you know, because it hasn’t happened yet). The calendar is there, it has a definite end point: December 12th, 2012. The mysterious circumstances of the Mayan civilization’s disappearance lends another level of creepiness, along with their mad religious practices. Did they know something? Were they able to connect with some essential energy of the globe that we can’t put a feeler on? Animals will head for high country during floods, giving credence to the fact that there are energies that we aren’t tuned to. If the Mayans were able to somehow tap into that… who knows? We’ll know in about 5 years. 
9. Shifting Poles: Yeah, so the poles are shifting. But the people who subscribe to this theory believe the Earth is about to flip. Literally. It’s another one of those doomsday theories that can’t be proven true or false. Maybe this is what happens in 2012?
10. The Dead Cosmonaut: Maybe the spookiest theory of all, the Russian left to die slowly and painfully in space. I don’t know if it’s true, but if it is there’s not much that could, or should, be done about it. The Russian government should of course acknowledge the failure, apologize to the family and such, and maybe let the guy’s name be known. What else would there be to lose? Why keep it a secret? Just because it’s a failure? As conspiracies go, this one is really, really lame. If this actually happened, I can’t conceive of a reason it should be kept secret.

Personally, I think they missed the biggest conspiracy of all. The fact that the moon does not exist. I don’t believe in the moon; it’s just a mass hallucination, or it’s just an image projected into space using a big camcorder. I still haven’t entirely discredited the theory that it’s just a big hunk of cheese. I’ve even written a song about my beliefs:

I don’t believe in the moon,
I think it’s just a hallucin-a-tion,
I don’t believe in the moon,
maybe it’s an Earth-based projec-tion!

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: area 51, conspiracy, flat earth, landing, lunar, moon, planet x, roswell, Space, theory

Wrapped in full darkness in the middle of the exceptionally silent forest as the eclipse began: deadstill. I lay down on the cold uneven ground, staring up for the calm extravaganza, imagining the blaze of sun on the far side of the world, brilliantly encompassing half the globe where life is shrill, humanity volatile, sweating. Reaching past Mother Earth and touching the pale white moon, sunlight was still a tangible thing, a thing I could inspect, collect in a small wooden box, if only in moonbeams. The moon, a tiny speck of luminescence in the Sea of Liquid Infinity, was creeping behind Earth’s shadow to hide.

Gradually the invisible life around me, the hiding, silent masses, began to liven, becoming an outburst as the eclipse progressed. Unsettled critters, scurrying chirping clucking clicking mewling screeching, howling. The tempo of my heartbeat intensified; I didn’t have their senses; I didn’t know what was wrong. All I could see was the purple hue of that which is always white, fading to black, blotting to nothingness. I couldn’t conceive of why it would affect them as it did; all the same, it excited me. It made me remember that, as an animal, I am quite stupid. I don’t feel the palpitations of mother nature, I’m not in tune with the discord of the universe, I can’t experience oneness with the everlasting, like they can. I was a separate, singular entity, soaking up the experience like rainfall, not really wanting it to end.

Soon the moon crept back into the light, and the normal pace of life resumed, for them. For me, it never altered course. The soft night buzzing, a pleasant but cacophonous melody of the still and invisible and multitudinous, pleasing night sounds to accompany me back along the moonlit path, the bone-white glow of the full moon all around me.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: full moon, lunar eclipse, moon, night, wildlife

Suspension of disbelief is a useful tool for writers, especially to writers of speculative fiction. But how much artistic license are readers willing to allow a writer? Like most authors, I read quite a bit about the craft of writing, and I read an article sometime last year concerning the suspension of disbelief. I don’t remember where the article was from, one of the writer’s magazines, I’m sure, but in it the author stated specifically that it would be ludicrous to imagine people accepting a piece of fiction that involved humans and dinosaurs cohabitating the planet. Now, the novel I was writing at that time, Modern-Day Mythica, does not take place in the past, but some of the principles that are described in the book, things that make the amazing part feasible, depend a little bit upon the reader’s willingness to accept that humans and dinosaurs might have cohabitated the planet. So it should come as no surprise that since I read that article I’ve basically worried myself sick over it. Will the reader be able to forgive me this transgression? Ah, but there is a caveat, one which I hope will explain the how in a way that will be completely believable.

One thing to keep in mind here is the difference between fantasy and science fiction. For fantasy, especially when written in the Real World, the one in which we live, there’s usually a doorway into Another World, and that doorway is magical, it doesn’t require any exposition as to how it works, it simply is what it is, whether it just appeared, or it was created by a magician, whatever. The difference (to me) is that in SciFi, we want to know how the door works, explained as scientifically as possible.

For Mythica, as with most of my writing, my writing borrows from both genres: I like the fantasy to be explained by science, that’s why I prefer the tag “Speculative” when referring to my work. Also: when I’m writing something I want it to ring true, or possible, much as SciFi might read. For that reason I like to use modern-day (or near future) Earth for most of my settings. There are some more successful authors than me of fantasy who use modern-day settings. Authors like Stephen King, who, along with Peter Straub, wrote The Talisman, a story about a boy who travels to the “Territories,” a reality connected with ours somehow, but separate enough to be invisible unless you are among the duly initiated. But the vast majority of fantasy fiction writers write more like Tolkien, who shucked it all and created his own world to set his fantastic epic in. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just saying. Of course, those are just two examples from the many, but they are two of the most notable works of fantasy in the world. Either method, obviously, works well enough to sell piles of books. But at what point is the suspension of disbelief overpowered by the impossibility of an idea? And is it harder to write fantasy fiction based in the real world than in a fictional world? Well, uh, yeah, probably, that is, if you want it to ring true or even possible.

In my story Mythica I utilize a similar concept as King/Straub used for the Territories in The Talisman. But in Mythica, the reason for the alternate reality–the science of it–is explained. But it’s the exposition of that theme that’s got me concerned.

As science has given, modern humanity evolved into its current state about 200k years ago and didn’t populate North America until about 10k to 20k years ago. Dinosaurs, of course, were long gone by millions of years by then (unless you count the turtle and the alligator and the shark and the many other holdovers who lived through the supposed meteor strike that spelled doom for dino-nation). But me, I grew up a fan of Conan of Cimmeria and Hyboria and one of the elements I loved most was that, if you looked at the map of Hyboria that Robert E. Howard drew up for the character’s homeland, it bears a striking resemblance to our own world before the continents drifted apart, when the world’s oceans framed a single super continent we now call Pangaea:

“between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas” ~Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (2003)

That little map made the stories ring true for me, even though science tells me it was impossible, that humans didn’t arrive for millions of years after Pangaea split into separate land masses. It made me see possibility that civilization was older than we believe, and filled with magic and monsters and even swords and steel.

One of my challenges while writing Mythica was to make its unbelievable part somewhat believable, much the same as Howard did with Hyboria. I wanted you to be able to read it and believe that it might have been possible, and I believe I have, except for that one small point: dinosaurs. People can’t live alongside something that died out 65 million years ago. Can they? Can intelligent people–and people who read speculative fiction are, generally–suspend their disbelief long enough to accept that it’s possible?

My only defense for this is to say that, in my story, real-world science is inexact because of a number influential events that science doesn’t account for. For instance, the storyline in Mythica involves a once and second moon orbiting Earth. The second moon is smaller than the first moon, but it’s half as distant, so it appears to be larger in the sky. This single entity justifies so many things in the story:

1. There is no scientific proof that the moon ever existed, since it disappeared over 200,000 years ago.
2. While the second moon was in orbit, Earth was not a very happy place to live. Two satellites tugging at the Earth’s surface would have caused Earth’s plates to shift much faster than is currently believed. Mountains would have formed much more quickly, continental drift would have happened much more quickly. Volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, tidal waves, etc, would have ravaged the planet’s surface. Not to mention the fact that the planet might have been slower in its own orbit; days might have been longer, years, longer.

It is conceivable, in my mind, to believe that the second moon could have accounted for a sort of speeding up of time, even though its orbit was slower. If a geologist looks at the rate of continental drift today, she might say that it took millions of years for Pangaea to split apart. But if there was a second moon, it could have happened in thousands. Hundreds? I’m no geologist, but in my very basic understanding of geology, a second moon would have had a monumental impact on Earth’s surface. So, if our history involves an unaccounted-for outside influence, isn’t it conceivable that the dates we’ve assigned to certain events are erroneous? That billions of years of history, based on one single missing moon, could now be thought of as millions instead? It might not affect how we view the 15 billion-year history of the universe, but it might change the history of planet Earth considerably.

Furthermore, by allowing for this shortening of time (periods, epochs, eras), it would mean that that the age of dinosaurs and the age of man were a lot closer than we now believe. And it would allow that those ages might even overlap. We have no proof that a giant meteor struck the Earth to end the age of dinosaurs, all we have are theories and hypotheses. And I (of course) have no proof that a second moon ever orbited Earth. But, in theory, is that any less possible? As for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, my hypothesis on this is forthcoming…

So what happened to the second moon? Well, for my story, which is a work of fantasy, a magician banished the moon because he believed it to be the source of a specific scourge upon the planet. But there are other, scientific, explanations that we could consider. Perhaps the would-be meteor that supposedly hit the Earth struck the second moon instead and sent it hurtling out of orbit. There are other theories of a second moon, one with a distant, 770-year orbit, perhaps this moon was once in a much closer orbit. But while science has accepted the possibility, if not the probability or downright fact, of the presence of a second moon, as far as I can tell no one has investigated any possible ramifications it.

So, for my story, the ramifications (and the science world can feel free to adopt this theory :-) of the disappearance of the second moon is this: Time sped up. Yes, time, real time. Without two moons dragging it down, Earth’s orbit sped up allowing it to encircle the sun in the 24-hour timeframe we’re used to. At the same time, Earth’s tectonic plates slowed their constant grinding, causing the planet’s surface to change much more slowly. While the moon was in orbit it’s possible that a person could watch the formation of a mountain range in their lifetime.

1. Time sped up.
2. Planetary changes slowed down.

With those two factors in mind, it is conceivable that our comprehension of the passing of ages prior to the disappearance of the second moon might be very, very wrong, and that the ages of dinosaurs and people may have overlapped.

Now, have the history books been rewritten yet? Can you suspend your disbelief long enough to swallow that load of garbage? I’d be interested to know.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Earth, Fiction, moon, second, Slate, story, suspension of disbelief, writing