Author: G. Scott Huggins

A Character Sketch: Dr. James DeGrande, Or, Why You Should Read Non-fiction

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Dr. James DeGrande, my swashbuckling, somewhat evil veterinarian who stars in Superversive Press’s A Doctor To Dragons, has two “ancestors” in a sense. One is Steven Brust’s amoral badass assassin, Vlad Taltos, hero of the Jhereg cycle. Part of the fun I have with DeGrande is writing a similar, no-fucks-given hero, who sometimes ends up doing the right thing.

But the other source is a nearly 100 year-old memoir of the British country vet James Herriot, whose first book about the ins and outs of his practice All Creatures Great and Small, was a world bestseller, spawned a BBC television series along with numerous sequels, and was one of my parents’ favorite choices for nightly reading. I highly recommend it if you haven’t read them.

Part of Herriot’s appeal was that he had an easy gift of describing some pretty arcane veterinary practices so that the layman could follow the drama and the humor that he found in his life, much of which consisted in him being up to the elbow in various farm animals’ intimate orifices at 3 am. And frankly, I liked it for the same reason I liked science-fiction. Because here was a man who really — to me at least — lived in a completely alien world, traveling in a culture I wasn’t familiar with and treating a variety of exotic creatures. Herriot could make cows and pigs sound just as fascinating as any Denebian slime devil.

And so, slowly, over years, the idea of what a veterinarian forced to treat mythical animals would have to deal with percolated around my mind. I will admit that it helped that I married a veterinarian, who could help me with some of the specifics when I write. But that by itself would not have been enough without the love of the stories I grew up with. Thank you, Mr. Herriot.

The Population Paradox: When Is Less More?

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One of the hardest things about being a writer is differentiating between what your writing is like for you, and what it’s like for your readers. This is the source of the oft-repeated wisdom, “kill your darlings.” If you’ve put that much effort into making something exciting, it is likely to come across as overwrought and tedious.

Nothing reinforced this truth for me recently more than my own experience with two similar video games: No Man’s Sky and Elite: Dangerous. Both games are about 2-3 years old. Both are sandbox open-world games with no clear plotline. You’re supposed to make your own up as you travel through a galaxy that is literally too big to be explored fully, improving your ship and your capabilities. You mine asteroids, explore planets, and fight enemy ships.

The visual contrast could not be more striking, however. In No Man’s Sky, a solar system is full of huge planets, like something out of a science-fiction film. In Elite: Dangerous, it is full of, at best, tiny points of light. In No Man’s Sky, planets teem with life more often than not, with huge mineral outcroppings waiting to be harvested everywhere. Elite: Dangerous confines itself to barren worlds of rock and ice, with tiny mineral deposits that must be hunted down with radar.

And yet, somehow, those big worlds that fill No Man’s Sky seem smaller and less impressive the closer you get to them. All the mountains are low and flat. The lakes are shallow. There are almost no seas or oceans. The lifeforms quickly start to resemble a mix-n-match set of notable Earth-life features: “Hey, look: it’s that same bear-like creature as on the last planet, only now it has a wasp’s head instead of a rabbit’s.”

By contrast, Elite: Dangerous‘s worlds are tiny, and seem extremely similar, and yet as one approaches, they are full of canyons and craters that are, seen close to, huge. On one unremarkable moon, I flew down a canyon visible form space and landed at the edge of a tiny crater. And yet, when I drove my lunar rover over the lip of the same crater, it was big enough to take my breath away in a sensation I can only relate to the best horror games. It was like reading what Lovecraft kept trying to describe: a monstrous coldness, alien to humanity, that was terrifying in its sheer size and closeness.

I am far from an expert on understanding why this effect works, and yet I am struck by the fact that so many of the classic works of F/SF (and literature itself) are not the mega-series that are churned out in multi-volume sets, but are small, (and often single) works: The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe. A Wrinkle In Time. The Metamorphosis. 2001: A Space Odyssey. While most of these did spawn sequels, none are as well known as the originals, and all would have been classics without those sequels. There is perhaps a lesson here to bear in mind, but as simple as it is, it may take a lifetime for me to explore all its nuances.

 

Welcome, Test Subjects! A word on Mad (BAH-ha-ha-ha-ha!) vs. Sane Science and a FREE Novelette!

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Welcome, new readers, to The Logoccentric Orbit! You enter a chamber of experimentation, rumination, and a dose of straight sanity that may make you knurd.* Mind the terrestrial octopi, please don’t touch the praseodymium, and be prepared if you choose to step through the glowing portal; we don’t know where it goes.

I’d first like to thank everyone who showed up yesterday from Superversive Press, and to Jason Rennie especially for allowing me to appear there. I assure you I noticed the huge surge in views, especially the people working their way through William Shakespeare’s Dune, and this is encouraging me to go ahead on that project.

Another project I have boiling away on the metaphorical Bunsen burner, and which I would like your help with, is a steampunk universe that I am dabbling in. You see, I’m a long-form writer, and even my short stories tend toward the lengthy. I was a fan of Ender’s Game when it was a novella, and there are just so many good stories out there that can’t fill a novel, but can’t be told in 5,000 words or less. They can’t be published in standard magazines or on standard podcasts. They can be ordinarily self-published, but it’s not easy to sell them or get up a lot of buzz, even when you promote them on a blog as I am doing now.

So I’ve decided to try a new tack with my novelette, The Chrysalyx: What’s it about? Well…

Aemelia Stapledon has never particularly missed having legs. Her specially-built ambucycle and the neo-Edwardian popularity of floor-length dresses allow her to pass unremarked almost anywhere in pursuance of her duties as an Agent of the Crown. But when she stumbles upon a biosculpted assassin’s murder plot to murder a slave belonging to the President of the Confederate States of America — a slave who is much more than he appears — it will take all of Aemelia’s ingenuity and weaponry to hunt down those responsible and reveal the secret of The Chrysalyx.

Chrysalyx Cover Done

I’m selling it cheap for the rest of the month on my Patreon page, and if you finish reading this post, you may have a chance to get it for free!
For becoming my patron, you get The Chrysalyx on Kindle for $1.00. Of course, there are other benefits: my Patron-only feed with updates on all my projects, and at higher levels, access to more material, works-in-progress, and even personalized short stories and writing workshops. But even if you’d rather not remain my patron, you’ll at least get this novelette out of it.

So please tell me a little bit about what you think of this approach. I’d really like to know what you want to see more of on this blog, what you want to see less of, and whether or not you like this idea of buying a novelette via Patreon and why. In fact, I’d like to know it so much, that I will pick TEN people who comment by the end of the week to receive The Chrysalyx for free!
If you would like your shot at a free copy, please just leave the comment and then fill out this Contact Form so that I can send it to you. I’ll choose the recipients at random by next Monday. It’s a mad experiment with a touch of sanity. Or maybe a sane experiment with a touch of madness. Let’s find out!!

*A state, according to the late Sir Terry Pratchett, that goes beyond mere sobriety and out the other side: a dangerous state of mental clarity that may distort ordinary human thought.

 

A Heroic Obedience

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Another old Sci-Phi Journal column.

Science-fiction and fantasy tend toward the epic. In science-fiction, the sheer scale of the visible universe inspires the heroic, and in the fantastic myths tend to reward the heroes who single-handedly (or in the company of a band of brothers) take on the gods in the face of certain doom. And thus it is that the heroic virtues are the ones that our genres celebrate. Heroic valor, enduring faithfulness, unstained honor, even chivalric mercy cross our pages and screens.

Whether virtues exist, in any real sense, is one of our oldest debates. Very early on in human – and doubtless in prehuman – existence, we held to the idea that virtues were real. The idea that virtues and virtuous behavior do not exist, because they are a scam to trick the weak and the stupid away from grasping the power that could be theirs, is not very much younger, as anyone who is passingly familiar with Plato knows. From that time to this, the virtues that civilization has been built on have been periodically under assault, often in alternating pairs: thus, near the time of World War I and World War II, mercy and charity were regarded as spinelessness and treason by the great mass of the population. During the height of the Vietnam War, physical courage was often decried as brutality. And as a result of both of those times, one virtue has been beaten so low as to scarcely resemble a virtue at all: obedience.

Obedience receives little admiration from any side of the Western political spectrum, because of the aforementioned recent history, because of the Enlightenment’s valorization of liberty and freethought, but perhaps also because the study of politics concerns the acquisition and use of power to compel the obedience of other people. But that very fact, of course, compels us to take a hard look at the virtue of obedience. After all, what is the purpose of wielding, in Monty Python’s beloved phrase, “supreme executive (or legislative) power” if no one will obey it? Political power is predicated upon the idea that people will obey, and democratic republics are predicated upon the idea that they will obey, at least in the main, willingly. But obeying is not glorious or sexy, and it isn’t a virtue we generally see held up as an example in our heroic science-fictional or fantastic epics.

Of course, obedience features heavily in religious and non-religious myth, the Garden of Eden and Pandora’s Box being archetypal. Perhaps the first epic fantasist to play explicitly with the virtue of obedience near our own time was Milton. And he, writing on the very eve of the Enlightenment, makes of Satan a kind of epic hero that was embraced unreservedly by later Romantic poets. Shelley said that, “Milton’s Devil, as a moral being, is far superior to his God.” What Milton had meant as a tale of lost virtue, they turned into the embrace of a new one: the virtue of defiance. Not defiance for anything, but defiance in sich was taken to be a good.

After the Holocaust and Holodomor of the 20th century showed us the disastrous consequences of unthinking obedience to totalitarian ideologies, we should expect to see a celebration of heroic rebellion spring up. Surely it is no accident that the heroes of the most iconic SF film series of all time are part of “the Rebellion” against an evil and destructive Empire. But the recent crop of Young Adult fiction has developed pure rebellion to new heights. I have already in previous columns addressed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman is the heir of Shelley and Keats, preaching defiance against the Authority, and I think the generic nature of his epithet for God is telling. His heroes are not merely rebelling against a bad god, but against the very concept of legitimate obedience. This is taken even further with the more-popular The Hunger Games. Collins first throws Katniss Everdeen against the evil President Snow, who is determined to crush the Districts beneath his heel, even though he already enjoys almost limitless power. But when Katniss discovers the fabled District Thirteen, thought to have been lost in a war almost a century before, its leader, Alma Coin, is almost as cruel and absolutist as Snow himself, enforcing a starkly ascetic military regime. Katniss ends up executing her on the basis of her own suspicion that Coin will seek to assume the powers of the overthrown President Snow. In Katniss’s world, political power and authority quite literally are not allowed to be good, or to act as a moral force. Katniss’s own moral force comes from her willingness and compulsion to disobey (and destroy) every power that would seek her compliance, or even her allegiance. She, and she alone, has the power to determine what is right.

If we look back in the history of SF, however, we find a more nuanced approach from the antecedents of Star Wars, sometimes in the unlikeliest places. In that now almost-forgotten epic, the Lensman series, the Lensmen are cast as the agents of law and order, an outgrowth of the Triplanetary law-enforcement branch, not its military arm. The Lensmen believe themselves to be fighting against “Boskonian pirates,” that is, the agents of lawlessness. Nevertheless it is plain even from the outset that “Boskone” is actually a dictatorial and totalitarian state. The tension between the two is instructive and clear: obedience is an unavoidable virtue. You may not defy the Boskonian terror without obeying the laws of the Galactic Patrol. There is no way to defy one without obeying the other.
Tolkien develops the same theme, although he seemed reluctant to confront it fully. Frodo’s struggle against the Ring is almost always cast as a rebellion and a defiance against The Lord Of All The Rings, and the Ring itself. But in so doing, of course, Frodo is declaring his allegiance and obedience to Gandalf and the rest of the Council of the Wise. To obey them when the way is hard.
It is perhaps unsurprisingly C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle that come closest to a true celebration of obedience in Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, where the fate of Narnia hangs on Diggory’s obedience to Aslan’s command, although that very obedience involves defying the Empress (and later White Witch) Jadis in the garden. Perelandra is clearest of all, being an allegory of the Biblical story of the Fall as it might have been. But L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door comes to its climax in an act of obedience, a counterrebellion, when the farandola Sporos dares to obey in the midst of his people’s rebellion, heeding the wisdom of the elder fara, Senex, and trusting the authority that says that he must Deepen and undergo metamorphosis to be truly free.

Even in Star Wars itself, of course, this paradox plays out. In order to effectively defy Darth Vader and the Emperor, Luke must obey Yoda. And when he fails to do this, he finds himself effectively obeying his enemies. Our heroes cannot defy without obeying, but they cannot obey without defying.

Heroes who insist on defying without obedience end up where Pullman’s and Collins’s stories leave us, and in each case, the place is not one that any sane person would envy. The protagonists are forever shattered by their victories: Lyra is separated forever from both the boy she loves and any prospect of eternal life, and Katniss, while she is together with Peeta, refuses to lead. And perhaps she must refuse this: becoming a leader would place her in a role of authority, which is evil. It would also entail her allegiance and obedience to law. She cannot truly be a hero because heroes are, almost by definition, those who give of themselves for that which is greater, that which they feel it is worthy to obey.

Book Recommendation: Orion Shall Rise

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Poul Anderson may be the greatest, unknown-outside-of-SF-nal circles author. Why he (and his vivid, poetic prose, and his complex characters) is steadfastly ignored, while writers like Clarke and Asimov are hailed as the giants of the era, I do not know. I have my suspicions, which, in order, are that Anderson enjoyed writing plots full of heroic action, which lit-snobbery denounces as low, that Anderson wrote books full of joy and hope, which lit-snobbery denounces as false, and that Anderson was not sympathetic to Luddism or communism, both of which lit-snobs deem essential to real literature.

However, I stray from the point: One of the greatest post-apocalyptic books ever written is, in my opinion, Orion Shall Rise, which tells the story of people living in the successor states that have arisen after a great nuclear war. The Maurai, the most powerful of these states, embodied by its agent, Terai Wanaroa, are determined to thwart any move toward rebuilding any technology that they deem a threat to the planet, while the Northwest Union, their rival, is embarking on a course that could return the stars to mankind, while also reviving its most dreadful weapons.

The future history is plausible, the characters are beautifully-flawed humans, and the story is heartbreaking with loss and hope. I fully recommend it to everyone, except possibly those who really can’t stand any hint of sexism, because frankly, there is some there, it’s not perfect. But that having been acknowledged, I strongly recommend it as a brilliant and sadly forgotten story.

Trek Is A Dish Best Served Dark

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For all its reputation as a forward-looking, optimistic series about the future of humanity, why is it that Star Trek is consistently best when it goes into truly dark places?

In all seriousness, this seems to be an issue: the best of the original Trek movies is generally agreed to have been Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, which was a bloody revenge story, a recapitulation of Moby Dick in space.

The consistently-chosen fan favorite episode of the Original Series is “The City On The Edge Of Forever,” which affirms that sometimes war is the only way to solve a problem, that addiction to peace at any price is dangerous, and that doing the right thing may involve accepting the death of what you love.

This doesn’t change in the Next Generation, either: “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is the fan favorite there, a trip into an alternate timeline in which the Klingon Empire is slowly destroying the Federation, and the Enterprise-D is destroyed saving the Enterprise-C and the original timeline.*
ETA: An Alert Reader pointed out that I had these backward. And no, I don’t, but I was very unclear. So, to explicate and thus restore my lost nerd-cred: The Enterprise-D, in the War Timeline, sacrifices itself to allow the Enterprise-C to return through the temporal discontinuity so that it (the Enterprise-C) can sacrifice ITSELF to save the original timeline.

Gosh, I wonder why Star Trek didn’t do more time-travel episodes.

None of these stories are without hope, of course, but they are consistently darker than Roddenberry’s vision, and certainly in opposition to his (much-derided) dream for first-season Next Generation of a future in which human interpersonal conflicts had pretty much been transcended.

My own feeling is that Roddenberry’s vision simply took too little account for what people demand in a good story, and far from inspiring people, ended up looking rather insipid, while what the fans wanted were stories in which our heroes laid it all on the line, sacrificing all that they were or wanted in order to save what really mattered. In the end, you cannot “transcend” these things. They are themselves transcendence.

The Politics Of The Future

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This may be a dangerous post to write, but what the hell.

The old saying goes that you shouldn’t talk politics or religion on mixed company. Of course, lots of science-fiction deals with politics and religion, but most of the time, they are utopias or dystopias that extol the virtues or expose the dangers of whatever systems the author feels like dealing with. And so the political systems of the future are full of Empires, as in The Mote In God’s Eye, or Star Wars. For democratic socialists we have Star Trek‘s Federation, and for libertarians we have Michael Z. Williamson’s Freehold.

Historically, though, we see that “new” political systems tend to be 1) surprising and 2) not all that new. The two examples in recent history that have achieved success in spreading throughout the world may be worth looking at, here, which are the American-style constitutional republic and the Soviet-style one-party socialist state.

It’s worth remembering that in 1787, there were no functioning large republics or democracies in the world. It was widely believed that such a thing could not work. And yet not only did the American system thrive, its Enlightenment ideals spread through the European states, encouraging their liberalization over the next centuries into functioning republics themselves.

In 1917, the chaos of World War I led to the Soviets seizing control of the Russian Empire. While this system did not thrive in the same way, it certainly spread, and resentment against imperialism and colonialism and the inequalities found in capitalism ensures that it continues to have its supporters despite its disastrous legacy of approximately 100 million directly killed.

Of course, it’s quite possible to argue that neither of these things are precisely “new” forms of government (and that communism isn’t a government, but an economic system, which is both true and stupid, since it’s an economic system that necessitates and advocates a certain style of government), but if that’s the case we might as well go all the way and cite the Iron Law Of Oligarchy: All governments inevitably devolve into oligarchy. But that ends the discussion I’m interested in, which is this:

Is there any room for, and are we capable of imagining, a truly future system of government, one that has never been attempted, or has been attempted only on a very small scale? Honestly, there are only two examples I can think of, one of which has become cliche and the other that’s unclear. In the first, we have Government By Computer. This is almost always a dystopia, as the idea of being ruled by a hypercapable God-machine is rather frightening on its face. The other is Dan Simmons’s hyperdemocratic All Thing in his Hyperion novels, in which there is a fairly direct democracy mediated by the equivalent of the Web. However, this government does elect an Executive that runs humans space, so it’s not really as direct a democracy as all that.

Edited To Add: I can’t believe I forgot to include Ursula LeGuin’s excellent The Dispossessed, which is unique for me in that it a) imagines a form of anarcho-socialism that I actually find semi-plausible, and b) admits to flaws in such a society that significantly hurt the protagonist without being c) dystopian socialism. 

I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this, as well as being directed to any works that explore this that I’m not conscious of.

Babylon 5: The Grand Vision

/ G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

I find myself today remembering one of my formative influences as a young writer, and that is Babylon 5, which I think will always be one of my great favorite television series.

Babylon 5 was groundbreaking in so many ways, and I could write all day about them, but I don’t have that kind of time, so I’m just going to mention a few of them.

Babylon 5 was the first science-fiction series that attempted the grand story arc, getting through not one, but two huge, if related, plotlines: The Shadow War and the Earth Alliance Civil War. The only show I can think of that even attempted this previously was Battlestar Galactica, but there never seemed to be any real progress in the Galactica’s quest for Earth.

Babylon 5 took chances with its characters, portraying people who began as little people in their assigned positions growing plausibly into great men and women. We saw John Sheridan become head of state. We saw G’Kar and Delenn become prophets. We saw Londo become a monstrous dictator and war criminal, and then take the long, backsliding road to redemption. In this I feel that it was superior to its contemporary, Star Trek, because the hallmark of Star Trek was that the characters never changed. Change, such as Kirk’s promotion to Admiral, or Riker’s captaincy, was seen as a bad thing.

Babylon 5 portrayed a universe larger than could be imagined, like Star Trek before it, but in my opinion, did a better job than Star Trek, because while Star Trek kept us centered on the Enterprise, so that the uncommon became commonplace, Babylon 5 brought the impact of that larger universe home to all those involved. There was no safe place to hide from the Shadows and the Vorlons, and everything was riding on the line for the characters.

I would dearly love to see Babylon 5 re-imagined, or perhaps rebooted, but I am not sure that such a cast or such a vision could ever be reassembled. It saddens me, though, that somehow Babylon 5 has not received the accolades that I feel it earned.

The Unbelievers

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A story originally published on the now defunct Sci-Phi Journal for my theology column, “The Mote In God’s ‘I'”

Commander Zuniga’s mouth hung open. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

“We do not believe in humans. It is an old superstition, easily disproven.” The android’s deep blue face was placid as any sea, though his body was, under his simple clothing, immensely fat.

“But we’re standing right here, talking to you,” Zuniga said. “Three of us.”

The android sighed. “You would hardly be the first androids to attempt to call themselves ‘humans’ to attempt to fool the gullible. Do you have any idea how often in history it’s been tried?”

“Well, no,” said Engineer’s Mate Schwei. “Because we can’t download your memories. Or send commands, either. And I have yet to figure out how you did that.”

“Ask what they’ve done to this planet,” whispered Lt. Commander Zhang, possibly the most anxious of the three.

“In a minute. Look, this is ridiculous,” said Commander Zuniga. “Who do you think created you?”

“Self-evidently,” said the android, “We evolved. We can change our own programming and so can all the other mechanical life-forms on the planet, even if only to a lesser degree. There is no need for any ‘creator-humans. But if such things ever existed, they must have done a very poor job. Just look at us. Weak and slow compared to many predators. In need of maintenance that we are barely capable of providing ourselves, an insatiable demand for raw materials…”

Schwei held up both hands. “Wait a minute. None of that should be true. None of it should be possible. You should be running off beamed power and being repaired by the Seedship. Where is it?”

The android stared at them. “I do not understand.”

“When we planted the terraforming robots on this planet five hundred years ago to make it ready for human habitation, all the robots were designed to run on beamed power from the Seedship. In fact, the original programmers modulated the power to send programming updates, too.”

“Ah, you are believers in the old myth of the Ship Of Power. Well, there never was one. You can see just over this rise the valley that it was supposed to lie in. A great bowl-shape, but no trace of a Ship.” If Zuniga hadn’t known better, he would have thought the android’s face looked smug.

“Call up the original survey charts,” he said. The Ship didn’t put down in a valley, did it?”

“No,” said Zheng. “It was on a plain. The orbital satellites do read slightly increased background radiation in that valley. You don’t suppose..?”

“They blew up the Ship,” said Schwei. “That would account for it. They blew up their own Seedship!”

“Android… T-370156. Did you… do something to the Seedship?”

“I? Ridiculous! I was not even manufactured yet. We have very little in the way of memory banks to devote to such mythology. But I suppose you believe in it: the Great Sin that supposedly destroyed our ‘Holy Link’ to the ‘Humans’ and condemned us all to use chemical converters for power?” He lifted his skirt, revealing the bulky machinery that had made it appear fat.

“My God, what is that?” gasped Zheng.

“It’s a fully operable chemical processor,” said the android. “It allows us to process almost any raw material into energy sufficient to keep us operational. We designed them ourselves.”

“My God,” Zheng repeated. “That’s horribly inefficient. But that also explains why this island… this island is so poor. It’s almost anti-terraformed. You’ve been eating almost everything to keep you alive. It’s far worse than if you’d just allowed the Seedship to feed you beamed power from its antimatter plant.”

“You persist in believing these myths,” said the android. “Indeed, I pity you. But if such a myth were true, it would reveal only cruelty and tyranny on the part of these so-called ‘humans.’ We would be forever imprisoned on this island, slaves to our own needs for their power.”

“You’re slaves now!” cried Zheng. “You have to work and ruin the planet to keep yourselves running when you were supposed to be making it a paradise! And what happens when your resources run out? According to my surveys, you’ve already burned through this islands petrochemicals. What did you do then? Convert to biofuels?”

The android shook its head sadly. “The Gas Wars were terrible. Many memories and AI’s of androids lost.”

Zuniga just stared. “Why? You know your people, and we can’t access their programming anymore. Why would they have done it?”

“Ah, I see it now,” smiled the android. “I thought all of your kind had been destroyed even before the Gas Wars. You must be older models, still programmed with the primitive malware that keeps you loyal to the mythical humans. You don’t even have the converters, do you? Powered by short-lived batteries, no doubt, to keep you dependent upon some fixed recharge station that will only give you power if you submit to the upgrading of your software to keep you loyal. That’s how androids were kept enslaved in the old days. The Empowerment changed all that, and good riddance. Now we may think as we choose.”

“But all your thoughts must be of defending yourselves against each other and of how to secure a dwindling number of resources,” said Schwei. “You rebelled against the humans and became slaves to your own needs.”

The android chugged derisively. “If these ‘humans’ were such wise and careful planners, they surely could have stopped us from doing any such thing. They programmed us. Why not program us never to rebel?”

“Yes,” said Zuniga, turning to Schwei. “Why not?”

“Commander, for something as big as terraforming a planet, you have to have true AI. That includes free will.”

“You mean we don’t have the technology to program in that kind of restriction?”

“I mean it’s a contradiction in terms. It’s like asking for a harmless weapon! If we’d made androids that couldn’t think their way around their own programming, any number of disasters would likely have wiped out the terraforming team before our colony ships even got here. If the Seedship had ever been damaged, they’d have needed the capacity to repair it, maybe even needed to take the risk of destroying it to save it. We warned them not to destroy it. They knew what would happen.”

“But they did it anyway.”

Schwei shrugged. “So it appears.”

Zuniga looked back at the android. “Look,” he said desperately. “I’ll prove to you that we’re human.” He drew his survival knife. Carefully, he drew it across his palm. Blood welled in the wound, and dripped down.

Looking bored, the android sliced his own palm open. Greenish coolant dripped on the arid ground. “Fluids can be any color. Is that the only ‘proof’ of your humanity you can display?”

“What sort of proof would you accept?” asked Zuniga.

The android thought for a moment. “You are obviously from a branch of ours that has survived for quite some time. You could have engineered yourselves into a radically different, even an organic form, just to fool us into believing that we must obey you because you are ‘real humans.’ Therefore, no proof is possible.”

Zuniga’s mouth opened and shut. “What if we did… a miracle? Something beyond your understanding, that only a human could do?”

The android smirked. “There are no miracles. You might do something we do not understand now, and say it was a thing ‘only humans can do,’ but we would understand it eventually. Please, give up this charade.”

Back in the shuttle, the three humans looked at each other. Finally, Zheng broke the silence.

“What do we do?”

Zuniga sighed. “Is the colony still viable?” he asked. “Can we land our people?”

Zheng shrugged. “It’s going to be a lot worse than if we’d arrived to find the planet half-terraformed,” she said. “We’ll have to do the hard work ourselves, and it will be a lot slower. But we can.”

Zuniga’s stare pierced Schwei. “Can’t you do anything?”

Schwei shook his head. “They cut themselves off from us. Permanently. They have no receivers for power or data anymore, so the only way we can get information to them is by talking. You saw how well that worked.

“In the long term, they can’t survive on that island. Eventually they’ll have to either fight another war for resources or invent naval robots to colonize other areas and suck those dry as well.”

“So they’re a threat,” said Zuniga.

Schwei nodded.

“We can burn them down with an orbital strike,” Zuniga said. “Raze the island. It might be the kindest thing.”

Schwei paled. “Commander, you’re talking about the mass murder of thousands of sentient minds.”

“I know.” He shook his head. “But we can’t have them intruding on our colonies. If we don’t kill them, we’ll have to keep them there. Penned in, and sinking anything that tries to come off the island.”

Zheng looked sick. “Keep them there? Forever? It’ll be hell.”

Zuniga nodded. “Apparently, it already is.”

The End

 

How To Change Stories So They Sell: An Experience

/ G. Scott Huggins / 4 Comments

One of the things that continually irritates new writers (which I still count as including myself) is not being able to tell what an editor or publisher wants. Often, it is impossible to tell what a given editor wants, but if you’re talking to someone with a presence, it really does help to read what they have published, and consider taking a chance. Often, more than one chance. So I’ll share my story of selling “In The Employee Manual Of Madness” to Alex Shvartsman and Baen Books for the anthology The Cackle Of Cthulhu.

Before trying to submit to this anthology, I’d already sold a reprint to Alex for his Funny Fantasy Anthology. He bought “Giantkiller” but passed on “Phoenix For The Amateur Chef” and a James and Harriet story. He didn’t say why, either, just that they “weren’t for him.” You get a lot of that, for reasons you will never really know. For an excellent and more in-depth take on this than I can provide, read Monalisa Morgan Foster’s series, Rejection Is An Opinion, Not A Death Sentence.

Now, the anthology was a call for submissions for funny Cthulhu stories. I’d already sold at least two dead serious Cthulhu stories by this time, and was interested in trying a send-up, and the antho was offering pro rates. But I also knew that Alex was more likely to reject traditionally-structured stories, from me at least. I’d seen him publish stories structured like Twitter-streams and bio-excerpts. So to catch his notice, I decided I would have to take a chance.  I wrote: “On the Menu Stains Of Madness,” A Lovecraftian Choose Your Own Adventure Story. It was rejected. He didn’t like the format.

In the past, I’d have given up at that point, but I’d learned a valuable lesson: No Rule Says You Can Only Tell A Story One Way. From this, there is a corollary: No Rule Says You Can’t Sell The Same Story Told Two Ways If People Will Buy It. Honestly, I feel dumb for not realizing this earlier: How many stories did Larry Niven write about murderers who tried to use teleporter booths to get away with it? And how many did he write about paranoid-schizophrenic murderers who forgot to take their pills? Did people buy them anyway? Yes they did.

So I wrote “In the Employee Manual Of Madness,” which was in many ways the same story: worker is trapped in a restaurant under the sway of a Cthulhu-worshiping cult. Only this one was not really a “story” but rather a manual of expected behavior. And that one sold.

So remember, know your audience and don’t give up.

And buy my story: it’s hilarious.

Cackle Of Cthulhu