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Messages - Galvatron

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Author Craft / Re: Your Pet Urban Fantasy Cliche Peeves
« on: June 28, 2013, 04:28:40 PM »
Quote
I'm pretty over the dom/sub, alpha/beta thing.  There's not much new that's being brought to the table on that topic, and very few authors truly explore the idea in a rational way (as opposed to shallow kink fulfillment).  I think Jacqueline Carey is the only one who has who I find interesting still.

I totaly agree, its not that its a bad idea but its been done so many times I just want something new

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Cinder Spires Books / Re: ???????
« on: June 21, 2013, 09:49:16 PM »
HEY!!  I hope we aren't getting the talking cats purely as villains.  My cats are playful, humorous, communicative, relaxing, and when I'm not feeling so good they sit with me quietly and keep me company.  Of course, to any skinwalkers out there who just turned into a rat or a bug, they're villains, all right.

FAIR PLAY FOR FELINES!

im 100% sure all cats are plotting to kill us at all times, and everything they do is designed to further that goal

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Author Craft / Re: POV's and whatnot
« on: June 21, 2013, 09:09:15 PM »
Now this only my personal opinion, but I do not like books with more than one POV if its first person.

Also, even with third person,  I enjoy either one POV or a few, 3-4 generally feels good to me.

My issue with two POVs is if I end up liking one more than the other, I end up dreading the start of a new chapter when I have to switch from the character I like more and it can lead to me putting the book down at chapter breaks more often.

Now if you can do both charcters and keep both equally interesting it could work, and just because its not my cup of tea doesn't mean others wouldn't enjoy it.

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 12, 2013, 05:30:43 PM »
Depends on whether the story you want to tell needs someone who plausibly knows that stuff or not; if you're writing a competent professional in their field, or a reasonably educated person within the context of the setting, for example.

Telling for the sake of telling is a character-building technique, though.

Imagine a first-person narrative being written by an explorer on a new planet.  She has an in-universe audience in mind, the people back home who are going to be reading her report.  The stuff she explains to them - the stuff she needs to explain to them - is a very powerful tool for characterising her, for characterising them, and for establishing what the setting's details are like - particularly in terms of what's obvious to her and her in-world audience but not to the real-world reader, and vice versa.  ("These people call this stuff coffee but it's flat and bitter, and worst of all, they serve it hot.") 

There are some amazing (and successful) novels doing clever things with this kind of thing - Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, for example.

I agree, but the trouble I see, or more the thing that really grinds my gears are when the obersvations dont fit the character.

Say the character is not educated, maybe instead of a scientist its a gunslinger, the types of obersvations the charcter would be related to an in universe audience should be different.

When the character should be looking for possible ambush points, but is instead telling me about the history of an ancient alien race or talking about how a ships FTL drive works (unless the character has been shown to have an undestanding of this type of thing) comes off as more of an info dump.

So I suppose what I am getting at is whats be related to me as the reader should make sense from the point of view I am getting it from, and it makes no sense that the on screne character would know or notice a certain thing Id rather find out about that information later and in a way that fits the narritive better.

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 12, 2013, 03:50:49 PM »
Absolutely, you want to alienate as few readers as possible. The danger though, is that a lot of Sci-Fi has this tendency to go into unnecessary detail about how technology works, with character discussing or thinking about advances in a way that real people just never do.

There was a short story written, and I can't for the life of me find it, where the writer describes two people in a modern setting going on a plane journey. It's funny to read, because ordinary people don't think about the aerodynamic properties of air travel, or how amazing it is that a network of satellites in orbit around the planet allows for instant communication through handheld devices, even when traveling through the sky.

So if you write a book, say a noir detective story set on a human colony, it's going to be difficult to slip in a scene where your detective thinks about how the colony was founded by a liveship that travelled for thirty years on a one-way trip from Earth, or that it's fortunate that scientists managed to figure out a way to stabilize wormholes for interstellar travel. You run the risk of taking the reader out of the story, breaking the flow in a very recognizable way to explain the setting to the reader. If the detective is investigating the death of someone related to the man who developed the technology allowing the colony to be founded, then you have a perfect way to introduce that information, but not every story needs that.

This is a good point, Im not a fan of having a character go into info dump mode, and there are a lot of characters in a sci fi setting that probably are not going to know the mechanics of FTL drives / space ships/ worm holes/ the history of the galaxy.

Some people will know it, but even if the character is a scientist, have them just spit out info for the sake of telling me is annoying.  Of course thats just my taste, but id rather have it worked into the story in a meaningful way

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 09:26:46 PM »
That is absolutely true. Maybe I should explain the term pigfarming. On a Swedish rpg-forum, they coined the phrase for settings that basically had very low levels of magic (if any), and that well the high-end stuff you played were maybe one village's cattleraid against another village. Basically the idea that everying back in mediaeval (or other such period) times were damp, grey, and just plain sucked, and that you would die from blood poisoning if you as much as scratched yourself. As opposed to stuff like D&D where you are expected to have a golf-bag of magical weapons and batman's utilitybelt of magical goodies (and if you don't well you won't stand a chance), yet noone reflects on how the abundance of such magic would affect the world.

/Ulfgeir

lol got it, please excuse my hill billy ways, I thought you ment the actual farming of pigs

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 09:23:25 PM »
Pigs aren't up there with the most efficient ways to generate food on a starship of finite size; even presuming people still wanting meat, I can see poultry, fish or guinea pigs as a sight more efficient.

(In my particular setting, cats are essentially extinct, after a couple of incidents where people realised that carnivores smart enough to track down all the weaknesses in your tightly managed ecosystem but not smart enough to realise why taking advantage of those weaknesses is anti-survival are a Very Bad Idea for starships or space stations.  For values of "incidents" with five-figure-plus casualty counts.)

Indeed, the only thing is I wasnt just talking about how life on a starship goes, more that there are things going on down on the planets and not just on the ships.  Somewhat how firefly does it, lots of ships and all but also lots of people that just live on one world and dont travel around and live a fairly primitive/older life style.

Basiclly saying you can have the starships and space travel, but still have a fairly normal non advanced life on the ground at the same time.

If that makes sense lol


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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 07:59:37 PM »
I would also caution againts worlds were normal things like pig farmers dont exist, unless you have a good reason why no one wants to eat bacon anymore.

Just because man can travel the stars doesnt mean we dont still want a bacon cheese burger.

And I would imagine pig farming could still be a down and dirty job, its always been that way and there is a good chance it always will be. It was gritty and dirty in the bronze age and its still dirty now, putting a man on the moon would have seemed a mircle to the Spartans, not so much a mircale to us, running a pig farm is still a gritty and dirty thing.

Everything doesnt need to change, of course you could come up with new ways to do things, thats up to you, and one of the reasons I enjoy writing science fiction more than any other genre =)

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 06:29:39 PM »
There is nothing wrong with bio-tech in sci-fi, there is plenty of room for that sort of thing to be worked in.

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 04:42:20 PM »
Very very true lol

I think being consitent is as much a factor as any.  No one claims Star Wars to be hard science fiction, the tech helps make the setting the story is told in possible and fun and adds a smidge of wonder, though some of that is as much magic as tech.  Space is simply the setting.

Now the Forever War is on the other end, much of the story comes from the side effects of traveling the stars, its kind of the key point to the entire story.  In this one, space and how its traveled becomes the key plot device.

Each works.  But you couldnt bounce back and forth between the two, going from hard to soft and back and forth can really muck up a good science fiction story.

And of cousre there is nothing wrong with Space Fantasy, Warhammer 40k and Star Wars are two of my favorite and as far as my opinion goes, they are both fantasy stories in a space setting.

I do like the idea o taking away a piece of tech in a story, for example, having the Gellar Drive fail mid warp travel in the Warhammer 40k Universe creates all sorts problems for the characters to deal with =)

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 04:25:48 PM »
Very true, I just think its important to do a bit of planning so you dont end up making it hard to include things you wanted to do because the tech in your setting would make it silly or impossible.

Now as far as Star Wars goes, think about what it would be like if you take away the FTL ability or hyperdrives.

The amount of locations the characters can reach goes way down, infact it would become pretty darn hard for the Rebels to ever get far enough away from the forces of the Empire to be able to stage and equip an army, or even just avoid being killed.  And unless you are going to use a worm hole or some other method to cover the emense distance between solar systems you wouldnt be having a Galactic Empire, you'd have a more system based govenrment like the Alliance in FireFly, or the 12 Colonies of Battlestar.

The fewer systems you have in your story the less alien speices you will end up with.

You could take the hyperdrive out of Star Wars and still tell the same story, but the setting would be entirely different, and you might not have any Wookies, and thats a pretty big change over all.

Not saying there is a right/wrong way to do it, just know what you want in your story and make sure you tech supports those things.

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 03:44:19 PM »
A fair point, but I'd argue that those are really just set-dressings for the overall story.

If the story is "how do we get to our destination in time?" then if your characters travel by horse you use a different obstacle (treacherous countryside and bandits) than you would use if they can travel by rail (the next bridge has been sabotaged). The overall story and goal remains the same. The details are what changes.

Sort of, but to me its more than that.  How people and goods got from A to B changed quite a bit when trains came around.  In the American west, having the ability to ride a train across the country made a huge differnce from having to cross in wagons or sail around.

It had an impact on the economy, on the settlers, on the natives, it was a pretty big deal and changed the dynamics in America quite a bit.

Now I agree in a sense that it is dressing, but the dressing is going to have impact on how you build your world, and because of that, I think you should plan it out ahead of time.  For example if you want pirates but you are going to use FTL commincation and FTL travel and have a big government in the area, things like pirating become much harder to do.

Also when you are traveling in the vastness of space it becomes a somewhat bigger deal to me than when you are traveling around one planet.  Just my two cents

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 03:30:28 PM »
I agree with what Neuro is saying, to me, either writing or reading, the most intersting part of science fiction is the impact the tech has on the world/universe and the people in it, not so much how it works.

Also just because something is set in space doesnt mean it has to be super sciencey, just look at Star Wars.  Most of the tech in that universe has been around for a long time, its just part of that universe.  Heck you even get some magic thrown in.  Its not hard or real science fiction by any means, but its awesome =)

So for your example about communication, think of what your setting would be like without FTL communication.  To me it brings up images of a pre telegraph western setting, when letters had to be delivered and sending a message and getting a response could take days or weeks or even longer depending on how far that message has to travel.

That has a large effect on things like deploying military forces across a large region, tracking/catching criminals, the way planets communicate with each other.

All of those things change if you have FTL communication, its a minor detail that totaly changes the way tons of things work.

Either of them can be done well, but take some time to think of the effects of your tech choices and what kind of story you want to tell before hand.

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Author Craft / Re: Science-Fiction: How 'real' must a technology be?
« on: June 11, 2013, 03:11:27 PM »
In most science fiction there is going to be at least a little hand waving going on.  Thats ok.

I think alot of it depends on what methods or how real you want things to be

Just an example, look at the Battlestar Galactica series (the reboot) they use an FTL drive but never go into great detail on how it works.  You know its there, but they dont tell you how it works or what the science behind it is, and thats ok.  Its just a way to get from A to B, and of cousre when the FTL drive is on the fritz you get added drama.

On another note, if you look at the warhammer 40k universe, traveling through the wrap (and what lives in the warp) is a pretty big deal, and there is a bit more explanation about how it all works.  Of course, the entire system is made up for that setting so making up the details is perfectly ok.


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Author Craft / Re: Admiral's Trial uploaded!
« on: June 03, 2013, 03:14:23 PM »
Congratulations both of you, I'll pick them both up ASAP

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