Now, I am happy to report, Truffles has gotten strong enough that she can walk again:

She’s still rather unsteady, and can’t keep it up for more than a dozen feet or so, but this is more than we’d ever expected.

Tropes and clichés are a great tool with which to surprise your reader.  Wait, you might say, how can you possibly surprise the reader with a cliché? Well what exactly is a cliché? It is a situation that’s so familiar that the moment the audience picks up on the typical signposts, they already know how it will turn out. (i.e. any cop buddy film or spy thriller will almost always have the protagonist’s friend, ally, or boss turn out to be in league with the bad guys, and there will be a big reveal near the climax after everybody’s figured it out.)

Thing is, while clichéd plots are generally frowned upon, the fact that a certain set of circumstances leads the reader to a particular expectation can be used as misdirection to lead the reader to make the wrong conclusions without cheating or feeding them any misinformation. Take the deathtrap trope with the villain spilling all his plots to the soon to be dead hero. Typical stupid genre villain. But, what if he isn’t stupid, and put the hero in a stupidly escapeable deathtrap specifically to unload a whole mess of BS on the dude so he’d escape and lead all the good guys to Trinidad so the not so stupid villain can go to Madagascar and fire up his mega-death ray in peace.

You want to see this idea in practice, I have a rather pure form of the concept here.

But a 300K epic sprawl of a novel segmented into three parts can still be “tightly plotted.”  Here’s how.

1. There’s one main story problem that covers the arc of the work.
2. As many subplots (additional problems) as needed, but all impact or reflect the main one.
3. Every problem brought up is resolved somehow, somewhere.
4. Every scene does one of three things: Introduces a problem.  Makes an existing problem worse.  Resolves a problem.
5. Every significant character has a role in introducing a problem,  making an existing problem worse, or resolving a problem.
6. Character’s screen-time in the story is in direct proportion to their roles defined in #5.
7. The story lasts until the main story problem is resolved, at which point it ends.

And equal time:

And a bonus clip from across the pond;

Unless the writer has chosen to use an outsider as a protagonist – a common trick in fantasy, but much less so in science fiction – the only way the reader is going to learn anything about the world of the story is through info dumps. There are elegant and inelegant ways of info dumping. Having one character tell it to another character, who already knows it, is a particularly bad way. Nor is it unique to science fiction – see chapter two of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker for an especially clumsy example. Other techniques include footnotes, excerpts from a “Galactic Encyclopaedia”, or – and this is generally considered to be the only real way to do it – streamlining the exposition into the narrative.

This is more or less true, but there are is an issue I would like to address about this. First and foremost is this isn’t a SFnal problem, it is a literary problem. I hear people cry, “But, Mr. Swann, SF deals worlds and technologies that don’t exist yet, the reader knows nothing about them, thus the Info Dump is a particular hazard uniquely affecting SF.” To which I answer, how many bestselling mainstream books deal with places and environments the reader is probably unfamiliar with? How many historical novels?  Tell me that someone writing a spy novel set in rural China is not in danger of Info Dumping.

This is, in fact, one of the strengths of SF, rather than a weakness.  Because of the long struggle with this issue (it is particularly problematic in SF, just not uniquely to SF) good SF prose has incorporates a lot of tricks to, as Sales says, “streamlining the exposition into the narrative.”  Here’s a short, random, non-comprehensive list of tools in the sfnal toolbox.

1. Extreme Brevity.  Slipping a fact inside the present action of the story so it is nearly subliminal, a sentence or even a single word can speak volumes about the environment.  The classic Heinlein example, “The door dilated.”  Use the connotations of your words to imply things about the world.  When Greg Bear uses the term “hellcrown” you already have an idea of what it looks like and what it might do.
2. Immediate Relevance.  Exposition is short, and only brought up at the point where it has an effect on the story.
3. Anticipation.  Lost is the epitome of this little tool.  Little, if any, information about its universe is just given away.  The narrative is peppered with clues and hints, implications and inferences, to the point where every factual revelation is a dramatic high point.  The exposition turns from medicine to candy.
4. Momentum.  Watch Terminator again and ignore the 80’s hair.  Look at when we find out the whole backstory the first time.  It is in the middle of a chase scene after a third of  a movie’s worth of exposition.  The scene is masterfully paced so that the expository lump occurs right when there’s room for a breather, and the action picks up right afterward.
5. Emotion.  Every interrogation scene is expository.  Information becomes drama when one character doesn’t want to reveal it, or another character doesn’t want to hear it.

The idea of corporate governance seems at odds with our current reality, where the state is advancing its role across the board.  But, strangely enough, in the face of the most aggressive growth of state power in history, the idea is popping up in diverse places.

What if we’re watching the initial death-rattle of the nation-state?

And it would be interesting to see a take on the idea that isn’t dystopic.

Also like Scalzi, I’ve decided to stop with the default use of Amazon as the “book buy” link on my pages.  I’ve tweaked my template to give you the option to get my stuff from Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and Borders, as well as Amazon. As in the little screen capture to the right.

ON WRITING VILLAINS : One of the trickier aspects of writing fiction is coming up with believable villains. It’s tricky enough that some writers eschew the idea of a villain entirely, and simply have an antagonist who opposes the “good guys” for perfectly good and reasonable reasons. Nothing wrong with that approach, and some of the best drama can be drawn from the conflict of two mutually exclusive “goods.”

But sometimes you need evil.

Go read the rest.

Can you write SF about religion? It’s an interesting question because when people tend to think of Religion and SF, it almost always in terms of opposition. It is a dichotomy that tends to find advocates on both sides, from those of a religious bent decrying the inherent atheism of SF, and those SF partisans looking on and saying “yeah, so, your point is?”

Go read the rest.

Here we see the cover of the Blackstone Audio version of Wolfbreed coming out March 20th.  Much coolness, and it’s interesting seeing a cover that’s clearly influenced by Spectra’s cover, yet different.  I can’t wait to get this on my iPod.

Zoe doesn’t seem too impressed, but it may be because she can’t read.

If you want to buy it on-line, but you’re pissed at Amazon’s antics of late, you can buy it here. Or here.

But I recall reading here or somewhere that Paul Krugman and several other leading economic and legal academic-policymakers had come to their professions wanting to be … Hari Seldon.  Deeply attracted to the idea of a mathematically-based psychohistory.

It reminded me of other references to Hari Seldon I’ve heard at convention panels and such, very often in connection with economics. The macro-economic idea of predicting and manipulating society as a whole pre-dates Asimov by several decades, but his view of psychohistory in Foundation has become a seminal influence in SF and, at least subliminally, beyond. . .

And, it is, in fact a horribly dangerous concept. If you’re familiar with my series through the Moreau books, the Hostile Takeover Trilogy, and currently the Apotheosis Trilogy, you’ve seen me use psychohistory as a weapon, which, if it worked, would be a horribly effective one. But that isn’t the main danger of Asimov’s idea. The danger is in the fact that it doesn’t work, and in the fact that the nature of complex chaotic systems means it may never work, but it is still such an inherently seductive idea that otherwise brilliant people can delude themselves into thinking it does work.

Our economy has taken a nose-dive, and continues to do so, because of smart men who believed that if they controlled the right variable, tweaked the right interest rate, raised the right tax or passed the right regulation, that society would do as it was told. It rarely does, and the more centralized the decision making, the more perverse the eventual outcomes— and the worse the result, the more drastic the reactions by the people who thought they were in control.

Here’s hoping for that movie option. . .

RAD OMEN – “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.

From here.