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I'm writing...sci-fi? (Or, "Help!")
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-09, 04:22

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
True, good point. That would take a bit of time. My brain is still waking up and wasn't quite putting the scales into context with all you'd described here.
Oh, OK. I was getting a little confused there (maybe my brain is falling asleep, haha). I'm like "I know technology advances quickly, but that quickly!? Damn!" By the time anyone built a building to house their supercomputer cluster they wouldn't need it any more because a desktop would be more powerful, ha ha.

If you're ever feeling more awake (and bored)...do you agree that 30 years (until the existence of a single 12 petaFLOPS processor) sounds about right-ish? Or is that too long? I think I'm going to leave it peta- for now, but I could always bump it up to exa- if I wanted to buy another twenty years.

The important thing is mainly the numbers. "peta-" fit the symbolism the best but that part isn't integral. I'd rather be not crazy unbelievable.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2010-06-09, 06:31

In semi-related news: Scientists embedd a biologically powered transistor inside a cell membrane

Quote:
The research could lead to new types of man-machine interactions where embedded devices could relay information about the inner workings of disease-related proteins inside the cell membrane, and eventually lead to new ways to read, and even influence, brain or nerve cells.

"This device is as close to the seamless marriage of biological and electronic structures as anything else that people did before," said Aleksandr Noy, a scientist at the University of California, Merced who is a co-author on the recent ACS Nano Letters. "We can take proteins, real biological machines, and make them part of a working microelectronic circuit."

...

To this basic cellular structure the UC scientists added an ion pump, a biological device that pumps charged atoms of calcium, potassium, and other elements into and out of the cell. Then they added a solution of adenosine tri-phosphate, or ATP, which fuels the ion pump.

The ion pump changes the electrical charge inside the cell, which then changes the electrical charge going through the transistor, which the scientists could measure and monitor.
And, yeah, 30 years seems reasonable.
  quote
Capella
Dark Cat of the Sith
 
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: Rochester, NY
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2010-06-09, 12:58

(Hijacking the thread to rant about modern sci-fi with Robo's gracious permission and indirect complicity!)

Robo’s original post brings up some things that have generally been bothering me for some time when it comes to science fiction. Most of these bother me enough that I could do separate rants about each of them- and, in fact, I may wind up doing that eventually. But these are the highlights of the main things that bother me about modern science fiction.

1: The genre doesn’t know what the hell it is or wants to be.

What is science fiction? Ask 4 people and you’ll probably get 4 different answers. Set in space? Set in the future? Aliens? Rayguns? Spaceships? Robots? Events inexplicable without something that doesn’t exist in the current world of today? Can it be none of those things? The genre itself doesn’t seem to know what it is, and I think that leads to some problems. Like the camps that form up arguing about what it is. The fact that people have either widely varying definitions of science fiction, or that they hold the stereotyped view of it in modern culture (male-oriented aliens, spaceships, rayguns, and slutty women), gives the genre an identity crisis that I think harms it, because if you stick to the limited view of popular science fiction, I think you miss out on a lot of the potential of the genre.

That’s not to say that the stereotypes are bad, necessarily. I’m a Star Wars, Star Trek, classic Battlestar Galactica fan. I love my share of aliens, robots, fighter pilots IN SPACE, phasers and lasers, etc. I have no problem with it and it’s comfort food for me. You can also do some great things with the standards of the genre; David Weber, Elizabeth Moon, both spring to mind as military sci-fi with spaseships and lasers that’s done right. It’s just that that’s not all that the genre can offer.

(If you asked me, personally, I’d shoot the labels “science fiction” and “fantasy” and merge the works traditionally classified under both under the label of “speculative fiction”; fiction that dares to say “what if?” The fiction that decides to change an element (or elements) of the world we’re familiar with, and then explore the logical outgrowths of how things would change were those elements to be different. There’s just so many times where the line blurs that I’d rather not have there be a line at all.)

Some of my favorite science fiction are things like Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series. Is Darkover science fiction? It takes place on a planet with low technology and high levels of what’s basically magic, but there’s also spaceships involved. That classes it into science fiction, but also blurs the line with fantasy somewhat; the Darkover novels set in the period of Darkovan history when Darkover has no contact with its spacefaring brethren would certainly be classed as fantasy if you didn’t know about the colonization of the planet, for example. So where does it fall?

Or take LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Clearly sci-fi, with the ansibles, spaceships, and aliens, and yet it is sometimes overlooked because it’s basically a xenoanthropological study of this society with a unique gender system. The science is really just a setting of trappings to legitimize the questions, rather than the focus of the story. Which leads me to…

2: Too often, the science becomes the focus.

There’s always a certain level of science and technology in science fiction. The problem is that there are occasions where authors get caught up in showing off their technology or how awesome their ships are, and they neglect the rest of the story. The rest of the story can become the vehicle with which to show off their cool research and development, and it neglects or even outright sacrifices things like characterization or plot.
Even some of the greats get caught in this trap. I love David Weber- I think he’s a master of compelling plot and vivid characterizations and I’m going to cite him later as doing several things right- but I don’t want to read pages about the technical details of Manticoran (or Havenite, or Solarian, or whoever) technology. I really don’t. I mean, yes, it can be important for the sake of the plot to know that the Manticorans have advanced fire control systems, or pods that allow them to throw more missiles, but we don’t need pages and pages on the technical details, or long descriptions of what the missiles are doing every time they get launched or some new technical wrinkle shows up. Save this kind of thing for your series bible or forum postings or tidbits for eager fans who want to know it. I just want to know who’s winning, losing, and getting killed in the battle, and the mass amounts of technical detail really get in the way, as far as I’m concerned.

In contrast, I really like Elizabeth Moon’s work. I really liked the Vatta’s War series because Moon gets into exactly the technical details you need to grasp the plot of the work, but she keeps it simple, accessible to readers, and doesn’t bog the story down with more than you need to know. I think that’s exactly how the science should be handled; make it clear it’s internally consistent and you know how it works, make the parts the reader needs to know to grasp what’s going on clear, and then get the science out of the way and get back to the meat of the work.

3: Characters

This is related strongly to 2. I don’t know what it is about science fiction, but I often find it terribly disappointing when it comes to characterization. People are puppets with faces and names, moving here and there to suit the demands of the plot. They have no independent existence, no motivations, and generally just don’t feel like real people. I’m thinking here not just of fiction, but of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Beyond Picard and Data and to an extent Word (mostly developed in Deep Space Nine), everyone else just felt like mouthpieces for the plot! They didn’t feel like actual vivid people who could really have been inhabiting this place. In contrast, Deep Space Nine handled this wonderfully with even secondary characters. The secondary characters like Jake Sisko were so much more defined than “primary” TNG characters like Troi or Crusher or LaForge that I want to cry. There was potential in the character concepts, how did it all fall through?

Now, I admit to being really biased here, because I do a very characterization-based writing style, and I know it. Before I even have a plot- and often I don’t have plot- I have characters, and I try to make them as three-dimensional as possible. The audience needs someone to sympathize with, and it’s a lot easier to sympathize with and root for- or hate- someone who’s got real feelings, flaws, motivations, and a personality, rather than a cardboard cutout moving about on their little popsicle stick along the rails of the plot.

(I’m not going to bother listing bad examples. We can all think of some.)

There are examples of good characterization, of course. I refer again to Elizabeth Moon and David Weber; both of these authors have strong, dynamic characters who really feel like people. Even better, both authors aren’t afraid to have their characters screw up. They don’t have them be author’s darlings and always draw all the right conclusions from the data. I can think of times Kylara Vatta did something stupid, or Honor Harrington misread things and caused problems for herself. In terms of television, I refer again to Deep Space Nine’s entire cast.

Characters need to be rich and vivid. They need to have flaws, of course, or else become a Mary Sue character. But they also need to have motivations and a life beyond the page. They need to seem like real people that you could sit down with and have a conversation with. They need to be shaped by their history, their surroundings, their experiences. They need to sometimes make bad decisions because that’s in their nature to do so, rather than do everything perfect- even when if they were a real person they wouldn’t have- because the plot demands they be perfect. And this is something that can be all too rare in science fiction.

3a: Female characters.

This may have to be a rant all its own, because it makes me want to eat things. It really does. First, because too often a female character is either hyper-feminized and sexualized to the point of bordering on the caricature, or are basically a male character with a female name and boobs attached. Second, because female characters almost always get paired up romantically with a male character, while male characters can take or leave romance; there’s often the implication the female character needs a relationship to have a fulfilled life, while there’s never such a pressure on the male side- there, the romance is a token, a trophy conquest. There’s rarely a realistic depiction of romance on either side, but the pressure is slightly less awful on the male characters.

This is in large part because of the male-dominated nature of science fiction, both in terms of authorship and readership. There’s also a flaw in the general popular perception of science fiction. I don’t want to be sexist and say that male writers can’t write female characters successfully, because people like David Weber clearly prove me wrong. But I think that male authors tend to write more male characters and add a female as sort of a “token” female because they should have one, and less because they happen to have a successful concept. (There are, of course, occasions where female writers write very female-dominated works and have token male characters. Writing sexism goes both ways, I’m afraid.)

Readership plays a role because, frankly, there are vocal aspects of the readerdom that are male and are only looking for female characters to serve as their titillation, and not to be active, dynamic people in their own right. This has been changing as time goes on, but there still is a very strong social stigma of science fiction as a male social activity that hasn’t entirely been worn away by time and female readers and authors. The problem is that it’s hard to change that without fiction that appeals to women and non-traditional science fiction readers, and the problem is that without those readers such fiction doesn’t sell or it doesn’t sell well enough to be heard about, and the genre keeps getting stuck in this rut that hasn’t changed yet.

I want to see female characters where their femaleness doesn’t matter. I want to see a character who was conceived of as a character first and a woman second, rather than “oh I need a girl, what should she do?” I take Weber’s Honor Harrington as a great example here; Honor is a deeply fleshed out character who rings first and foremost as a real, actual person, and only second registers as a woman. Likewise, Moon’s Kylara Vatta, or Haris Serrano, are strong characters who are people first women second.

This may seem counterintuitive when I’ve complained about the fact that women in sci-fi are sometimes men with a female name. But in those cases, it genuinely feels like it could have been a male character with no change; like the character was written, and then someone decided to go “oh nevermind they’re a GIRL” and went back and changed all the names and didn’t change anything else.

I want a sense of characters, male or female, where the author actually sat down and had a deep rich character concept and built around it. I don’t want the sense that this is the token character tossed in for sex appeal or a false sense of diversity. I want characters who are fleshed out, fallible, and interesting first and foremost. I shouldn’t get the feeling that this girl is here so that there is a girl, and not there because she belongs there.

I could keep going on, but this has gotten really long; apologies in advance for the TL;DR. And anyways, these are the 3 things that have been bothering me most lately as I read. I wanted to do something on culture and on developing proper aliens (or fictional human cultures, for that matter!), but that I think will come another time. These are just what came up when I read Robo’s OP.

"A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger!" - Darth Baras
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-09, 14:14

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella View Post
1: The genre doesn’t know what the hell it is or wants to be.
This is one of my pet peeves too. To me -- and I know I'd get hate mail for this elsewhere -- sci-fi (like fantasy and western) is almost more of a setting than a genre. "Sci-fi" isn't a type of narrative, like drama, comedy, mystery, or romance. When you write sci-fi, you have to be writing in one of those genres (or others, like lit fic). You can't write "just" sci-fi. That would be like listing spaceship specifications without any characters or narrative (which some creators admittedly come close to).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
(If you asked me, personally, I’d shoot the labels “science fiction” and “fantasy” and merge the works traditionally classified under both under the label of “speculative fiction”; fiction that dares to say “what if?”)
Personally, I'd go a step further and just classify them as fiction, as all fiction (by definition) deals with what's not real, even if most of the time it's more down-to-earth, like "what if Sue had a terrible divorce and had to learn to believe in life after love?" or "what if there was a secret message coded in Renaissance artworks?"

The sci-fi/fantasy aisle is the only aisle in a bookstore where a laugh-a-minute comedy and a tearjerking existential drama and a 3,000 page war chronology could be found side by side. This is a way of putting those stories into a ghetto where they can be more easily dismissed, much like considering "animation" a genre when it's really only a way of producing the picture. The saddest thing is that the sci-fi/fantasy community has for the most part internalized this dismissal, leading some authors to believe that there "sci-fi" is a narrative genre. This has directly lead to one of my biggest problem with sci-fi and especially fantasy, which is sameness. ("You can write about anything you can dream of -- why are you all writing about romanticized versions of medieval Europe?")

Ideally, mysteries set in space would be shelved with mysteries, not with romances that just happen to take place in space. Sci-fi devoted toward asking/answering the Big Questions would be shelved with the philosophical fiction, and sci-fi devoted solely toward showing of the author's research would be shelved with the bad fiction.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
2: Too often, the science becomes the focus.
A litmus test that many speculative fiction authors have a problem with: Take away everything fantastical and see if it works. Set it in Iowa. If it still works, if the characters are still interesting, you have a good narrative. A good sci-fi story has to be a good story first, and many writers seem to have a problem with this ("you're dismissing what makes our genre great!"), but it's true. It doesn't matter how well thought-out your interstellar warp scheme is, that won't make up for a mediocre everything else.

For all the talk about "hard" sci-fi versus "soft" sci-fi, it sort of amazes me that it's assumed that "hard" and "soft" modify science, and that's the distinction within the genre, not modifiers for fiction, like "science mystery fiction." It's sort of a warped (ha!) perspective.

With many scenes in "Still" -- especially in the pilot -- a just-tuning-in viewer wouldn't have a clue that it's "sci-fi," because those scenes aren't. This is intentional. Not every scene involves science. It amazes me how much sci-fi focuses only on the alien aspects of the universe, as if all the characters have stopped having lives. Domestic disputes aren't going anywhere, sadly, and a well-written argument will always be more interesting than a "realistic" rocket booster launch sequence.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
3: Characters
This is really my biggest problem with most sci-fi and fantasy, and (along with its insular focus) probably the biggest reason why it's not popular with more people. Sometimes it seems if you write a book in the sci-fi genre, you're essentially writing a book for people who don't care about characterization -- naturally a small segment of population.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
Before I even have a plot- and often I don’t have plot- I have characters, and I try to make them as three-dimensional as possible.
Me too. Aside: It shocks me how many people ask "So what's more important, characters or plot?" as if they weren't just both sides of the narrative coin. In very well-written stories, "plot" can usually be defined as how the characters grow. If you don't have characters, you don't have a narrative -- you just have a bunch of stuff that happens to people nobody cares about. But people always act like my answer is wishy-washy, so I usually add this:

People will like a story for its plot, but they'll only love it for its characters.

Sci-fi and fantasy creators usually don't understand this, and they instead tend to focus on action, plot gimmicks ("It turns out that the fairy tale world is really North Dakota in the future!) or philosophical quandaries. You can build a good story on these (The Matrix), but they had better be really damn good. Building a story on characters is a much safer bet.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
3a: Female characters.
I've already covered this, but naturally, I agree with every word.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
The problem is that it’s hard to change that without fiction that appeals to women and non-traditional science fiction readers, and the problem is that without those readers such fiction doesn’t sell or it doesn’t sell well enough to be heard about, and the genre keeps getting stuck in this rut that hasn’t changed yet.
...and this is the most depressing thing. And not just for fiction: if you believe that art has the power to change the world, which I really do, then you also have to believe that it goes both ways, and that art can changed the world for the worse. I'm trying to think of sci-fi heroines that I'd want some purely theoretical daughter of mine to look up to, and it's hard to think of many. (It's hard to think of many good male role models, too, but this mainly due to poor characterization. And all the space hookers.) And without realistic heroines to inspire young women, I fear life might end up imitating art.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
I want to see female characters where their femaleness doesn’t matter.
Or rather, where their femaleness (and all the hopes and fears and insecurities in a male-dominated world that it entails) does matter, in dictating the realistic motivations of a character who (*gasp*) exists as their own complete, fleshed-out entity, rather than existing only in relation to the statue-esque men.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Capella
I want a sense of characters, male or female, where the author actually sat down and had a deep rich character concept and built around it. I don’t want the sense that this is the token character tossed in for sex appeal or a false sense of diversity. I want characters who are fleshed out, fallible, and interesting first and foremost. I shouldn’t get the feeling that this girl is here so that there is a girl, and not there because she belongs there.
Really, a "false sense of diversity" is a common problem with sci-fi, usually due to the poor characterization -- the black guy really is The Black Guy, the girl really is The Chick, and the lesbian really is only there for the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss. It gets even worse when alien cultures are added, aliens who are both startling familiar and often inexplicably fascinated with us. The entire point of much sci-fi seems to be to state that, in the words of pictures for sad children, "In the future, being rich and white will be even more awesome."

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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Capella
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2010-06-09, 14:50

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
This is one of my pet peeves too. To me -- and I know I'd get hate mail for this elsewhere -- sci-fi (like fantasy and western) is almost more of a setting than a genre. "Sci-fi" isn't a type of narrative, like drama, comedy, mystery, or romance. When you write sci-fi, you have to be writing in one of those genres (or others, like lit fic). You can't write "just" sci-fi. That would be like listing spaceship specifications without any characters or narrative (which some creators admittedly come close to).
This is a good way of thinking about it. Sci-fi and fantasy are the settings in which you build your story, while the real genre is what the story's actually about. This is one of the things I really like about paranormal romance as a subgenre- it admits what it is openly and proudly. It's romance first and foremost with paranormal setting and character types. Science fiction and mainstream fantasy could learn a LOT from PNR, actually, given that PNR tends to have a strong focus on the characters (for the sake of the romance, naturally, but it's still valid.) I like to read some PNR authors and just skip the porn scenes and just read for the rich characterization and fantastic plot. But now we're digressing from the topic, sooo...


Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
This has directly lead to one of my biggest problem with sci-fi and especially fantasy, which is sameness. ("You can write about anything you can dream of -- why are you all writing about romanticized versions of medieval Europe?")
This is definitely a large problem with the genres, and something I'm hoping to work on in my own work. I mean, I don't necessarily have a problem with it if you make it detailed enough to be interesting: I don't mind that Weber is doing "yet another space opera with two big multi-system giants" because he fleshes out Manticore and Haven and gives them distinct philosophies, social and economic systems, etc. What I do have a problem with is when there's two empires at war and they're both so alike you have to wonder what the hell they're arguing over.

In my fantasy world, for example, I'm trying to make distinct and obvious differences between the culture of the protagonists and the surrounding cultures. This involves developing things like a language, a religious system, a set of cultural beliefs and attitudes, etc. When I'm done fleshing that out, I'm going to draw at least the outlines of the culture and religion of the other nations, so that I can make clear contrasts. It's still your standard "there are mages and a class system" society, but I'm trying to give it enough detail and richness to really make it unique.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
If it still works, if the characters are still interesting, you have a good narrative. A good sci-fi story has to be a good story first, and many writers seem to have a problem with this ("you're dismissing what makes our genre great!"), but it's true. It doesn't matter how well thought-out your interstellar warp scheme is, that won't make up for a mediocre everything else.
This, this, this, THIS.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
It amazes me how much sci-fi focuses only on the alien aspects of the universe, as if all the characters have stopped having lives.
Again, amen. Human nature is going to be human nature, and there's going to be fears, hatreds, sex, love, friendship, jealousy, and all the other little bits of our nature in the future.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
In very well-written stories, "plot" can usually be defined as how the characters grow. If you don't have characters, you don't have a narrative -- you just have a bunch of stuff that happens to people nobody cares about. But people always act like my answer is wishy-washy, so I usually add this:

People will like a story for its plot, but they'll only love it for its characters.
Another excellent point. And this is a huge problem with the genre. So often the characters are cutouts, and you don't really care what happens on either side. That's why I think Weber's late Honorverse novels are so successful; because he gets us into the head of the Havenites (the enemies) as well as the Manticorans, we start to sympathize for both sides, so it matters a lot more when everything blows the hell up.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
Or rather, where their femaleness (and all the hopes and fears and insecurities in a male-dominated world that it entails) does matter, in dictating the realistic motivations of a character who (*gasp*) exists as their own complete, fleshed-out entity, rather than existing only in relation to the statue-esque men.
That works too. I'm just worried that someone trying to do that would be doing it badly and thus falling back into caricature. I'd love to see it done in the hands of the right writers, though.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
Really, a "false sense of diversity" is a common problem with sci-fi, usually due to the poor characterization -- the black guy really is The Black Guy, the girl really is The Chick, and the lesbian really is only there for the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss. It gets even worse when alien cultures are added, aliens who are both startling familiar and often inexplicably fascinated with us.
This is why I want to see better alien culture development and characterization. Don't make me go have to write my rant on that, I did my 2k for the day in the above post :P

"A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger!" - Darth Baras
twitter ; amateur photographer ; fanfiction writer ; roleplayer and worldbuilder
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jdcfsu
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2010-06-09, 14:58

Derailing slightly from the essay explosion and back to the year question. I know you already got an answer, but my NASA friend shot me a quick email and basically said it really won't be all that long at all:

Quote:
According to SP, the machine will become operational next year and will have a theoretical peak computing capability of 16 petaflops. While this will supposedly be achievable by connecting up to 16,384 Power7 nodes, IBM doesn't expect the initial performance to surpass the 10-petaflops mark.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/IBM...nois,9229.html

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ezkcdude
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2010-06-09, 15:54

Is science-fiction "great" when it transcends genre or defines it?


(My one-sentence question-as-response to the sci-fi debate.)
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billybobsky
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2010-06-09, 16:41

With the two points of data given in this thread so far, we have enough information with the assumption of an exponential increase in processor calcs per second to derive a base ten logarithmic lifetime of approximately 5.25 years. That is to say, the flops of a single processor increases 10 fold every ~5.25 years. You are asking how long until we have a single processor that runs at 12*10^15 flops from a single processor running at 120*10^9 flops. A similar calc gives 5 lifetimes (exactly) which corresponds to ~26.5 years.

Remember, however, that not all flops are equivalent, our brains are not interconnected identical neurons. The technology to develop processor designs that do better than simply simulating a brain versus actually emulating it hasn't been developed as of yet.
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
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Join Date: Jul 2004
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2010-06-10, 14:06

Thanks!

Totally unrelated question: Is it possible to give a character the same name as yourself and not have them be a total Mary Sue/Gary Stu? I just think the name fits. It's not like I'd be naming them in my honor or making them The Wesley or using them as a vehicle for wish fulfillment or anything. I mean, he's straight(ish) and he ends up with a woman (ew!). So yeah.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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billybobsky
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2010-06-10, 17:37

i think it's a bit odd. but whatever.
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jdcfsu
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2010-06-10, 21:22

I don't think it's all that strange. When I used to write stuff (I should find time to do more) I would name characters Jason all the time. People often mistakenly call me Jason and it's just a name that always sounded good to me.

90% of statistics can be made to say anything 50% of the time.
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-10, 21:51

Quote:
Originally Posted by jdcfsu View Post
I don't think it's all that strange. When I used to write stuff (I should find time to do more) I would name characters Jason all the time. People often mistakenly call me Jason and it's just a name that always sounded good to me.
I just worry, because people look for meaning in weird places sometimes, and I don't want people to think that Character X is an Author Avatar and represents me just because we happen to share a name, or that he's supposed to somehow "be" me in the future or something. I mean, Stephen King has written enough stories for Castle Rock to be populated with dozens of Steves, but most authors generally try to avoid that sort of thing for those reasons (that, and the instant Sue Sirens that go off). Not that Stephen King doesn't have plenty of other still-obvious Author Avatars, but still.

It's just one of those things that only becomes a problem when you start writing stories in Our World. In my fantasy stories, A) nobody has English names, B) I write under a pseudonym anyway, and C) there's usually a clear author stand-in with the narrator figure. But none of those apply to sci-fi or television writing.

Of course, none of this matters because it's highly unlikely that viewers would ever know my name; the series wouldn't be billed as Roboman Whatever's Still unless I became the next Stephen King in the meantime. But, you know, some people just like to worry...

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
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Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-18, 00:08

By popular request, I give you:

The Secret to Writing Television

Are you ready?

L.U.S.T.

Long Unresolved Sexual Tension. It's what television runs on. All you need is one Mulder and one Scully and the L.U.S.T. produced can fuel the show for, well, exactly seven seasons, in that case. (Pity the show ran for nine.)

Now, it can be difficult to set up L.U.S.T., if you don't know the secret. There is a secret art to making L.U.S.T. blossom, as my sensei once told me, and as his sensei once told him. Here it is, in its original form of haiku:

Put seven people
On a fully enclosed set
With only six bunks

POW! Instant sexual tension. Spaceship, submarine, mysterious bunker -- it doesn't matter; your characters will be ricocheting off the walls, and each other, and producing the glorious byproduct of plot in the process. It's that easy.

L.U.S.T. is not to be confused with Long Overwrought Sexual Tension, which is what happens when you take too long and people stop caring about the resolution, as seen on...well, shows.

•••

While I was bizzumping this thread, I figured I'd also quote this bright individual, who also quotes Faulkner, and together they say everything I was trying to say earlier in the thread in far fewer words.

Quote:
Clichés are not in themselves necessarily bad, but their overuse shows that the writer has forgotten what separates the strong tale from the hollow: "the human heart in conflict with itself," as Faulkner said. Where there is this conflict, the tale stands; where the conflict is absent, the tale falls flat, and in neither case does it matter how many ships get blown up.
From this nifty site.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote
Kraetos
Lovable Bastard
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Boston-ish
 
2010-06-20, 22:09

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
Okay, so, the best thing about writing sci-fi as opposed to fantasy is obviously robots, and of course I had to have one. (Well, more than one, but one "main" one.) I won't bore you (any more than I have ) with the details, but he's based on three processors, with a combined 18 petaFLOPS of processing power (a multiple of nine, significant? In one of my stories? No way!). The most powerful of his processors runs at 12 petaFLOPS.

That is, of course, far more powerful than even any massive supercomputing cluster today, and it's one processor that has to fit inside the chest cavity of a bulky but humanoid robot and run on batteries without exploding. What I want to know is, with reasonable assumptions made regarding Moore's law and the like, about when would such a processor be available (using Earth technology)? I can't quite figure out the maths myself. I get that it's probably going to be a very vague estimate but I just want to make sure it's sometime later than next week but before the heat death of the universe. Are we talking, like, 50 years, or 500, or...?
These kinds of details are usually handwaved away for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Whenever I need to reference computer speed of capacity in my books I use the perennial favorite, quad.

Logic, logic, logic. Logic is the beginning of wisdom, Valeris, not the end.
  quote
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-20, 22:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraetos View Post
These kinds of details are usually handwaved away for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Whenever I need to reference computer speed of capacity in my books I use the perennial favorite, quad.


I'm just trying to make the series more...grounded, I guess? Like, it takes place (mostly) on Earth, in this century.

But I still might make something up, like "18 petaQuOPS!" or something. It's not very important, only the numbers are.

This is something that's more important:

Last Question.

( @ Capella)

Ep. 0.01-0.05 (IOW, the miniseries) each take place on Earth, all on a single day -- each episode is a character piece designed to introduce one (or in one case, two) of the characters. The characters won't ever actually meet unless a series is ordered, and the central conflict of the series is revealed in bits and pieces, sort of like a thread that runs through the episodes, which are mainly focused on each character's own conflicts. This is so the miniseries can be sold as its own unit and not only a backdoor pilot. So.

If the best thing about writing sci-fi is obviously robots, the best thing about writing television is obviously musical montages. I've always wanted one, but they don't work so well in books. And so there's one at the very end of the miniseries, which sort of caps the whole thing and ties it all together, showing where all the characters are at one* moment, even though they're all over the place. So.

The moment in question is a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. What I'm wondering is, on a clear night, how far away would a night launch (like the light trail -- the launchpad itself need not be visible) be visible from? I'm willing to be flexible with the geography of pretty much everything else to make the scene happen, so. Would it be visible from islands to the (little fuzzy here) south? I just want to know what I have to work with without breaking suspension of disbelief.

*) Technically, one character is on the other side of the world, and it's night where he is too, so his moment is technically ~12 hours later, made to look like the same moment through editing. He doesn't need to see the rocket launch/light trail, of course.

and i guess i've known it all along / the truth is, you have to be soft to be strong
  quote
Kraetos
Lovable Bastard
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Boston-ish
 
2010-06-20, 22:46

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post


I'm just trying to make the series more...grounded, I guess? Like, it takes place (mostly) on Earth, in this century.

But I still might make something up, like "18 petaQuOPS!" or something. It's not very important, only the numbers are.
Oooh, I really like petaQuOPS. In fact, I'm taking it.
  quote
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-20, 22:58

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kraetos View Post
Oooh, I really like petaQuOPS. In fact, I'm taking it.
Feel free. Quantum OPS? Quad OPS? Works either way.

And, let's be real, nothing can sound sillier than FLOPS, anyway.

EDIT: Post 694666 :O
  quote
curiousuburb
Antimatter Man
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: that interweb thing
 
2010-06-21, 07:12

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roboman View Post
The moment in question is a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. What I'm wondering is, on a clear night, how far away would a night launch (like the light trail -- the launchpad itself need not be visible) be visible from? I'm willing to be flexible with the geography of pretty much everything else to make the scene happen, so. Would it be visible from islands to the (little fuzzy here) south? I just want to know what I have to work with without breaking suspension of disbelief.

*) Technically, one character is on the other side of the world, and it's night where he is too, so his moment is technically ~12 hours later, made to look like the same moment through editing. He doesn't need to see the rocket launch/light trail, of course.


Shuttle to ISS generally launches on this alignment... always away from population/over ocean (for safety as well as ease of orbital rendezvous), but in principle could be similarly Southerly.

Nighttime visibility of boosters would easily extend into Cuba even if launched on the track above... if launched hypothetical SE track instead, MECO might be visible as far away as Northern bits of S. America.

Launch (2 min timelapse) from 115 miles away looks like this ----v



And that's Shuttle/SRB technology... something bigger might obviously be visible farther away.


As for your character on the other side of the world... launch itself wouldn't be visible, but reflection of sun off orbiting craft can be easily visible in dark sky locations. I've seen ISS/Shuttle dozens of times. Check Heavens-Above and punch in your location for your chance.

For example... from Litchfield England (time lapse)

All those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand.

Last edited by curiousuburb : 2010-06-21 at 07:28. Reason: clarification and links
  quote
Robo
Formerly Roboman, still
awesome
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Portland, OR
 
2010-06-21, 07:23

Perfect, that's exactly what I needed. Thank you so much!!!

Visible from Cuba is perfect. Perfect!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Curiousuburb View Post
As for your character on the other side of the world... launch itself wouldn't be visible, but reflection of sun off orbiting craft can be easily visible. I've seen ISS/Shuttle a few times. Check Heavens-Above for your chance.
That's what I was thinking, he'd see it ISS-style.
  quote
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