Tag Archives: science fiction

622. My Place or Yours?

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If you didn’t read Monday’s post yet, go there first.

The most difficult problem I’ve had in getting under way with Dreamsinger is that I wouldn’t want to live as part of the culture of Home Station, the orbital habitat which most humans occupy. I need it as the flip side of the culture of the exiles on the surface, but I don’t like it.

Never fear, I’m a professional. I’ll get there, but there will be a lot of moaning, groaning, and cussing under my breath along the way.

One thing is in my favor — in world building, problems are answers. A perfect world might be pleasant to live in, but it would have no fodder for storytelling.

The situation in Cyan which led to the beltmen leaving Earth created a culture of enforced, extreme civility. That’s not natural for us hairless apes, so there has to be an enforcement arm with no sense of humor. That is the system of directed dreaming, explained Monday.

Directed dreaming is a system that needs overthrowing, and that will clearly be a major theme of the novel. But what else does it imply?

On Home Station, you don’t sleep. Therefore you don’t need a room. Your exercise/dreaming time is brief, so what do you do with yourself when you aren’t working? Where do you go? Once I had asked myself that question, I filled Home Station with lounges.

Also, if you don’t have a bed or a bedroom, where do you have sex? Let’s see what the rough draft says:

Antrim headed down to Heaviside Lounge for companionship and to purge his mind of the problems posed by Riff.

Beneath a flowering mimosa he saw a girl he knew. She had removed her shirt as a signal of readiness, but no one had yet joined her. Her name was — Broa. His mental hesitation triggered the Farleyfile which gave him a précis. Broa 14284. The number told him that she was one or two crèche releases older than he was. He had copped with her three times before, but he already remembered that. She was a tech working in hydroponics.

He stopped and smiled down at her. She said, “Want to cop?” and he said, “Sure.” He peeled off his shirt and she unfastened his pants. There was a snarl when they hit the floor and snagged on his shoes. Broa was already barefooted, and laughed at him as he extricated himself. He came down on her without bothering to remove her pants and met her mouth to mouth and tongue to tongue.

The pants came off soon after, and they put on a clinic of the four positions and the eight variations. Several of the other occupants of Heaviside Lounge wandered over to watch and admire.

Afterward, they talked for a while. Her eyes were on him, but her attention had wandered and so had his.

She levered herself up, pushed back her tangled hair, and said, “I have to shower before I go back to the hydros.” She kissed him again, lightly and briefly, picked up her clothes and walked away.

Antrim lay there admiring her back side. Nothing in the moment impelled him to run after her.

His mind was cleared, his body was spent, and the pleasure had been profound. But she was still, after four sexual meetings, so much a stranger that he had reflexively triggered the Farleyfile when he saw her. If he never saw her again, he would feel no loss.

It didn’t seem like enough.

Sex right out there in the open? Well, the future is supposed to be different and there are no secluded, grassy riverbanks on a space station. Actually, if you are living in society that controls your dreams, privacy is non-existent already. On Home Station, even the desire for privacy is considered a mental aberration.

In some ways, this culture is a bit of a feminist dream since everyone is completely equal and there is no power structure of dominance — except for the dream therapists, but that is a whole other level of this novel which we’ll get to eventually.

Everybody is comely. I don’t have space here to tell you where babies come from, but take my word for it, they all come out perfect. And it is considered impolite to refuse an offer to cop(ulate).

It sounds like a 14 year old boy’s idea of paradise, but it isn’t that either. Everybody on Home Station is so damned equal that nobody needs anybody. Want sex? Do it. Twenty minutes later you can each go your way without even exchanging names.

It’s very unromantic.

The culture of the exiles on Stormking, which we will see later, is based on survival. It is totally different, but also completely unromantic.

Antrim, our main character, has imbibed all kinds of romantic notions from reading the literature of Old Earth. He is seeking something neither culture stands ready to provide. He is going to have a rough time of it.

Corollaries, implications, and unexpected consequences of the structure of directed dreaming are falling out onto the page every day, often surprising the hell out of me. Weird things are happening and I haven’t even gotten to the culture of the dissidents who have been exiled to Stormking. Their lives are really different.

621. Dream Culture

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For the last month or so I have been fleshing out one corner of a universe that I began writing about decades ago. My first SF novel was Jandrax, a lost colony story. Cyan came later, filling in the backstory of that same universe. Dreamsinger, which I am writing now, continues the process.

If you have read my novel Cyan, you will remember that when Keir visited the asteroid belt to view the B&A coreship, he discovered that the beltmen were secretly preparing an expedition of their own. They feared the impending destruction of Earth, but had no interest in colonizing a new planet. They had come to prefer life in space.

In the Cyan and Jandrax universe, the exploratory expedition to the Sirian system had found that the planet occupying the Goldilocks position — the distance from Sirius with the same level of radiation as Earth — was taken by a planet with a Uranian inclination. That is, it was tilted onto its back like a sad tortoise, with first one pole and then the other pointed toward it’s star as it moved through its orbit.

With no habitable planet, it was likely that Sirius would never again be visited by man. This made it an ideal destination for the beltmen who wanted to live in space without interference from planetbounds.

When the Procyon colonization expedition departed for Cyan, the beltmen were nearly ready to leave for Sirius. Keir’s last message was of farewell and good luck to them.

The beltmen had to build their craft in secret with minimal resources. It was a crowded, spinning torus which held 2000 refugees from impending disaster. Under-funded and under-powered, it would take an eighty-seven year journey to reach Sirius, and a generation would die in transit.

During that long, slow, crowded journey, civility became essential to survival. The refugees evolved a system called directed dreaming.

Once each day, each person entered into a dream like state during which her/his body (not under his/her conscious control) underwent rigorous exercise, followed by dreams tailored to keep them civil.

This is how it all sounds in the rough draft:

The dreamers were hanging, heads encased in sensory deprivation helmets, in ten rows of ten. They had already gone through their exercises, contortions that had stretched and strained every muscle and left them all soaked in sweat. Now they settled into a deep, quiescent, unmoving sleep

It looked like a grotesque mass hanging, but that was an illusion since their weight was just sufficient to keep them from bouncing off the ceiling. Being suspended by their necks at this level of gravity did not even cause discomfort.

Now, one by one, they began to move. An arm shot out here, fingers gripped nothing over there, arms crossed over chests to hold something in, legs shot out to kick some threat away. Each one was now in his own directed dream. Carefully tailored images were fed into their brains and they reacted. Uncivil inhibitions were destroyed; fears were dredged up and alleviated; prejudices were wallowed in until they seemed foolish. Angers were expressed in dreams, so they could be suppressed in waking life.

Dream therapy was every person’s right and obligation. Dream therapy was the key to civility. Dream therapy kept them all sane and happy.

It took less than an hour and a half, and afterward every person was ready to go back to his life. Each one was exercised, refreshed in mind and body, cleansed and cleared of all angers and resentment. There was no more need to waste a third of your life in sleep.

Sleep had never really knitted up the raveled sleeve of care anyway, but directed dreaming did.

You understand that I am setting this up as something that seems like a good idea, but isn’t.

Once the refugees arrived at Sirius, they immediately undertook the building of a larger station to be their new home. Directed dreaming continued to lubricate the wheels of progress, but not everyone agreed with this new way of life. Those who could not conform were exiled to Stormking, which was a place of Trenconian extremes, and a death sentence for most of those transported there.

I had already outlined all of this while I was still writing Cyan. For the last month or so, I have been fleshing it out. We’ll see some of the new thinking on Wednesday.

620. Wikipedia

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I love the Internet. I had access to it for a decade or so at work, but rarely used it. When I retired and returned to full time writing, that all changed.

I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or games or most of that kind of thing, but I couldn’t live without e-mail. It saves me a lot on paper and ink, and even more in time. It used to take a week to get a paper manuscript ready to send by USPS, fifteen dollars at the window, a week for it to get to a publisher, and a year before they replied. Now I can send an e-mail manuscript in a few minutes, it arrives in an hour, and then I only have to wait a year for them to reply. Much better.

For this blog, I do a lot of research. That usually doesn’t including trying to find out things I don’t know about. It typically means finding out details I’ve forgotten about things I already know about.

For example, I would never do a review of Eragon because I haven’t read it, and I wouldn’t repeat someone else’s opinion of something I hadn’t read. I have read A Wizard of Earthsea, and I speak of it often, but it has been years and I might need to find out some things I don’t remember. Perhaps the name of the wizard who was Sparrowhawk’s friend (I actually do remember; it was Vetch), or perhaps the year it was published. I might need to find out how to spell some weird made-up name — or some weird name that isn’t made up. That is the thing I find the internet most helpful for, and when I run a search, the Wikipedia response is usually the most useful.

I have several other go-to spots on the internet, but I couldn’t live without Wikipedia.

Every once in a while, Wikipedia asks for a donation, and I always give them something. They sent me a nice letter a few days ago and I asked for permission to quote part of it. I forgot to ask if I could borrow their logo as an eye-catcher, but I think they’ll forgive me.

The essential story of Wikipedia is the story of individuals giving a little to keep the doors of discovery open.

You probably donated because Wikipedia is useful to you. That’s one of the main reasons people tell me when I ask them why they support Wikipedia. But what may surprise you is that one of the top reasons people don’t give is because they can’t afford to.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we believe that no one should have to pay to learn. We believe knowledge should always be free. We will never charge anyone to use Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is yours: yours to read, yours to edit, yours in which to get lost. We’re not the destination, we’re the beginning.

No one should have to pay to learn. Knowledge should always be free. Now that’s a notion I can get behind.

619. The Crash Heard Round the World

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Two days ago on the news, a Tesla driver was caught on camera asleep at the wheel on a freeway. We all got to see him snooze, then eventually got to see him jerk awake. Chit-chat ensued. One talking head said, “Someday sleeping at the wheel will probably be legal and safe.” Another replied, “Not in my car!”

When I was ten years old, everybody knew that men would never walk on the moon. In the subsequent decades, the public’s default position on what science plans to do has switched from can’t to can. The public isn’t any smarter; they’ve just changed their prejudices.

Driverless cars have been around for a long time in science fiction. Here is page 2, paragraph 1 of Methuselah’s Children by Heinlein, first published in 1941.

Mary had no intention of letting anyone know where she was going. Outside her friend’s apartment she dropped down a bounce tube to the basement, claimed her car from the robopark, guided it up the ramp and set the controls for North Shore. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then dived into the high-speed stream and hurried north. Mary settled back for a nap.

Good fun in ’41, but no one would have expected to see it happen this soon. Even science fiction aficionados might have said 2119, or maybe 2219, yet here we are, on the brink.

In 1941, the world was very different. Heinlein might imagine driverless cars, but he never imagined something else that is now part of our world — computer hacking.

Hang on, folks, I’m going to make a prediction.

At a near future date every car on the highway will be driverless. The old curmudgeons like me who wouldn’t even trust cruise control will all be dead, mostly from auto crashes with drivers who did trust cruise control. The text-and-drive crew will have won the battle of the public consciousness. Science will have proved that humans are inferior to computers in driving, and science will be right because it will be comparing computers to the text-while-driving generation. Human drivers will be outlawed as unsafe — which they will be.

Driverless cars will talk to each other and to central control, adding another layer of safety to the whole enterprise. Central control will be heavily protected against hacking, for obvious reasons. Science will prove that central control is impenetrable.

Science always proves something like that, just before the cataclysm. See Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

All that was just set-up for the prediction.  Here is the prediction.

Sometime in August of 2035, a kid named Morrisey, who isn’t even born today, will hack the un-hackable central control. No one will notice. He will place a delayed command, and head for a hill overlooking an LA freeway.

On August 26th, 2035, at peak rush hour, central control will send out an order and every automobile in America will speed to 100 mph, then simultaneously make a ninety degree left turn.

Registering 4.6 on the Richter scale, it will be the Crash Heard Round the World.

St. Peter will have to put on extra staff.

616. Anthropology

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If you took my advice and watched Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, you know now that the K. stands for Kroeber, after her father A. L. Kroeber, who was one of the important early anthropologists, and that her work was influenced by growing up in the atmosphere of Berkeley. My work has also been influenced by my study of anthropology, as I was ready to share in this post. I wrote it a few weeks before I saw the American Masters presentation. I moved my post down to shoehorn in my recommendation that you watch the TV show while it is still around. 

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I was seduced by novel writing in 1975 and that ended my five year study of anthropology, but there is more to it than that.

There were two things in anthropology that were driving me out before I wrote my first novel. One was cultural relativism, the philosophy that underlies the whole field. I didn’t buy it. I still don’t. You’ll hear more about that in a future post.

The other thing was field work. I did field work in archaeology for two summers, and that was fun, but my specialization was South Asian social anthropology. That meant sitting in some village in India for a year asking questions about local relationships, and there was no way to avoid it. It’s an absolutely required rite of passage and doing it once isn’t enough. You have to do it again and again. It is the way anthropologists do their research.

It offended my sense of privacy. If anyone were to ask me the kind of questions anthropologists ask their subjects, I would tell them to take a long walk off a short pier. Needless to say, being the person doing the asking wouldn’t make it feel any better.

There is also a deep triviality to field work. It resembles lab research in other sciences in that way. The end result of scientific research is not trivial, but the day to day weighing, titrating, or looking at slides from a telescope or an electron microscopes is exceedingly tedious.

That would also be true of asking questions about who is related to whom in the village, and making out kinship charts so you can tell who is a parallel-cousin and who is a cross-cousin. No, I’m not going to tell you what those two phrases mean; it’s better you don’t even have to think about it.

Encountering anthropology in college is like eating at a good German restaurant. It is laid out on your plate, already prepared, and delicious. It is still the same in grad school until the day you reach the field. Then you have to butcher the hog and make the sausage. It’s no fun any more.

I love ethnologies, treatises explaining in detail how other cultures work. The variety of ways in which mankind has organized his work, his time, and his beliefs is both staggering and fascinating. I would have enjoyed writing them, but the research needed to reach that stage would have been more than I could have borne.

I use what I learned in anthropology every time I write a novel. Sometimes it’s only a little; sometimes it forms the backbone of the whole enterprise.

I also wrote a long article on the subject called How to Build a Culture. I presented it at Westercon 34 in Sacramento, and later archived it on this website. It it’s present form, I have divided it into eleven virtual chapters to make navigation easier. The internal links to reach individual chapters are at the top of the file.

If you want to see it, click here. I think you’ll like it. It’s still anthropology, but you don’t have to do the fieldwork.

615. Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

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Last night (August 2nd) I watched American Masters: Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. I was not looking forward to it, since PBS screws up so many of its programs. The advertisements didn’t help. They emphasized that “before Hogwarts there was Earthsea”, as if her work didn’t mean anything until Harry Potter imitated it.

It turned out to be an excellent program, balanced, praising her for her excellence and her importance to other authors like China Miéville and Neil Gaiman, but not suggesting that she single handedly made science fiction and fantasy great again.

I was afraid they would take the path of overreach — PBS tends to do that — but the presentation was closer to flawless as any one of us has a right to expect.

During the first twenty years of Le Guin’s career, I read her novels as they appeared. By the second half of her career, I had moved on to other things. After this presentation, I clearly have some catching up to do.

If Ursula K. Le Guin is someone you have only heard of, or perhaps planned to read someday, you should not miss the opportunity to view this presentation before it disappears back into the PBS vaults.

613. Cyan Remains

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Late in 2015, I began this blog in order to drum up readership for my upcoming novel Cyan. ‘Upcoming’ turned out to be a long time, so I had placed quite a few excerpts by the time it was finally released. It received good reviews, 4.3 stars on Amazon and 4.6 on Goodreads, but it never found its audience.

Cyan is set in the near future and covers the discovery, exploration and colonization of a planet around a nearby star, portrayed as accurately as possible. In an age of novels about galaxy spanning wars, it is possibly out of fashion, but still an exciting, human, realistic story.

Here is your chance to find out for yourself why it deserved better. The opening chapter crowds in quite a bit of background before the excitement starts, but it will give you  a picture of what is about to happen.

Blatant plug — available on Amazon. You might as well get on with reading it, because I’m not going to stop talking about it

Chapter One:  A New Planet
CYAN
Standard Year 600
Anno Domini 2092

Driving in from the eternal night of interstellar space, the Darwin stood on its tail, chasing the kilometers-long plasma fountain of the Lassiter drive. Stephan Andrax and Tasmeen Rao had been working for weeks, and lately for thirty-one unbroken hours, to plot the orbits of Procyon’s planets and choose a course that would let their residual inertia carry them rapidly toward a favorable orbit. Now the torch was stuttering as they slipped deeper into the stars’ gravity well. Softvoiced exchanges between Stephan and Tasmeen were echoed by equally quiet observations by the other eight explorers.

Keir and Gus were manning the spectroscope, trying already to determine if Procyon A III’s atmosphere contained the gasses which would indicate life. Tasmeen’s husband, Ramananda, and Petra Crowley were canvassing the asteroid cloud that twisted its Möbius strip around the two stars, searching for any that might be mined for ice — fuel for the journey back. Above them the main viewscreen flashed successive visual reconstructions, multidimensional projections of varying parameters, and flashing strings of calculations as one or another of the pairs briefly preempted its use. Viki, Debra, Uke, and Leia stayed out of the way, watching the screen.

With a final shudder, the Lassiter torch cut out and, for the first time in over a year, they were weightless. In that same moment the masking effect of the torch ended, and Keir yelled, “We’ve got life gasses.” Overhead, unmistakable spectral lines showing hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon flooded the screen.

Spontaneous cheering broke out in the cramped control room.

Stephan switched to a display of the Procyon system. Much was still unknown, but the planets, moons, and major asteroids had already been mapped.

Procyon A, blazing with six and a half time the ferocity of Sol, was surrounded by three planets of her own. A torus of asteroids lay where a fourth planet would have been. Procyon B simmered, cold and shrunken by stellar standards, with half of Sol’s mass, three percent of its diameter, and less than one percent of its light. Snuggled in close were four tiny planets, all useless rock. A second torus of asteroids surrounded Procyon B.

The asteroid belts interpenetrated like two gears meshing, which excited Stephan no end. The prospect of seeing asteroids in collision was not merely likely, it was inevitable. Beyond the asteroids were five gas giants, none as big as Saturn, circling the paired suns in the frozen outer reaches of this complex solar system.

For a minute they looked at the system that would be their home for a year. Then Stephan switched to a real-time display of Procyon A III. It was only a faint disk, pulsing slightly as the computer worked to keep it in focus, but its pale blue color was unmistakable. Tasmeen, who had been too wrapped up in navigating to watch the unfolding story, said, “Keir, give us a quick update.”

“It’s a little bigger than Earth; a little higher gravity. It stands straight up in its orbit — less than a degree of inclination. Day, 40 hours; year, 1242 days — if you want to call it a year. There won’t be any seasons, so the equator and the poles will be uninhabitable, but the area about 45 degrees latitude should have good climate.”

Standing soldier-straight in its orbit, Procyon A III was a planet of small continents scattered across a huge, world-spanning ocean. The equator was chastely girdled with thick masses of steamy clouds, churning up continuous storms that would make a Terrestrial hurricane look like calm day. From ten to thirty degrees north and south, every island and continent was part of a world-spanning zone of desert, separated by hot, dead seas.

Uke asked, “What names did we draw?”

Ever since Neil Armstrong blew his lines, NASA had kept close tabs on what its explorers could bequeath to posterity. The computer contained several hundred “suitable” names for the planets they might find, but it would only give them ones matched to what they actually encountered. No one at NASA wanted a charred lump of rock to be named Eden, or for two planets to get the same name, and nobody wanted a planet named New Earth. Tasmeen keyed in a request, and fourteen names appeared on the viewscreen beneath the planet.

“What the…!” Debra began, then shut her mouth.

Gus chuckled. Petra said, “Someone certainly didn’t think much of our chances of finding an Earth-type planet.”

They were all the names of colors.

“Madder, umber, vermillion…” Keir read out in disgust. Then he stopped short, glanced up at the winking blue disk on the viewscreen, and said, “Cyan.”

“It’s the best of a bad lot.” Uke said.

“No,” Keir said, “it’s perfect.”

612. Zelazny Squared

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Isle of the Dead, painting by Arnold Böcklin

Two of Roger Zelazny’s novels have been floating around in my interior conversations recently, Doorways in the Sand and Isle of the Dead.

A month or so ago I re-read Doorways in the Sand. It isn’t my favorite, ranking about half way down the thirty or so of Zelazny’s that I have read, but that still puts it into the top five percent of lifetime reads.

I was struck by how absolutely goofy its structure was. Every chapter starts in medias res, and then backtracks to fill it what the reader has missed. It is a common way of starting a fast moving novel, but in this case every chapter began with some kind of peril, then backtracked to fill in, extracted our hero from his trouble, and ended with things moving smoothly.

Weird — and I have to confess to a failure of imagination on my part. It took me forever to realize the trick Zelazny is playing.

He is taking us through the novel with serial style cliffhangers, but he is putting them at the beginning of each chapter instead of the end. It’s normally a technique to make a reader keep going so the writer doesn’t lose him, but Zelazny is forcing us to come to a full stop and start over (in terms of momentum) with each chapter.

It’s all inside out. And by the way, the machine that is central to the plot turns things inside out as well.

Zelazny likes to play games with us, and he isn’t afraid to skirt the edge of absurdity, assuming his readers will stay with him. The aliens who follow Doorways’s main character around are extremely not humanoid; to avoid being recognized, they wear disguises — a kangaroo, a wombat and a donkey, to name a few.

There aren’t very many writers who could get away with that without having me slam the book shut and move on.

Isle of the Dead came up when JM Williams asked for a book recommendation reciprocal to having cued me in to Small Gods. That lead me to re-read Isle for what would be the third or fourth time. What strikes me this time through, in view of discussions in recent posts, is Zelazny’s use of conversation.

Long before I was a writer, I read an advice-to-writers article titled “Multiply by Two,” which suggested that most fiction should start with two characters, because conversation is the easiest and reader-friendliest way of introducing a situation. I consistently ignore that advice — it doesn’t fit my personality — but I understand it.

You might think Zelazny is also ignoring that advice since Isle of the Dead opens with a long, philosophical monolog about Tokyo Bay. No, not really. This “monolog”, because of its loose, informal structure, is actually more of a conversation between author and reader. As in the following excerpt.

Of course everything in parentheses is an imagined reader’s response, which I have added to unfairly push my side of the argument about first person’s ability to snag the reader.

Life is a thing — if you’ll excuse a quick dab of philosophy (sure, go ahead) . . . that reminds me quite a bit of the beaches around Tokyo Bay . . . like Time . . . Tokyo Bay, on any given day, is likely to wash anything ashore . . . a bottle, with or without a note which you may or not be able to read, a human foetus, a piece of very smooth wood with a nail hole in it — maybe a piece of the True Cross (good, good) . . . it also used to be lousy with condoms (what?), limp, almost transparent testimonies to the instinct to continue the species (where are you going with this?) but not tonight (okay, now I get it) . . .

To be fair to Zelazny, the original, without all the ellipses and all my parenthetical comments, is much better. If you ever find the book and don’t have time to read it all, read the first three pages anyway.

This kind internal, self-referential conversation is storytelling within the storytelling. Zelazny excels at it. So does Louis L’amour, and Heinlein couldn’t write any other way.

Zelazny inhabits (I almost said owns) the shadowland between science fiction and fantasy. Trying to shoehorn his novels into either genre is futile. In Isle of the Dead, the protagonist and his opponent are a human and an alien, in purely SF fashion. However Sandow, the main character, is also a world shaper. In becoming one, he allied himself with one of the Named Gods of the Pei’an religion.

Gringrin, his enemy, is a Pei’an who didn’t quite make the cut as a world shaper. Why he didn’t is told two ways, one early and one late. Figuring out which reason is true it part of the mystery of the enemy’s motivation, and part of Zelazny’s skillful storytelling.

Are these Gods real, or psychological constructs that allow Pei’an worldshaping? Making a choice on that question would push Isle into SF or fantasy. Zelazny leaves it open, taking one side, then the other, leaving the question unanswered at the end. Meanwhile, the other 95% of the novel reads like pure SF. This is Zelazny’s basic MO.

Stripped to essentials, Isle of the Dead is the story of an enemy kidnapping loved ones, and the hero going to their rescue. Of course there is a twist at the end; Zelazny would never make it quite that simple. Nevertheless, the structure of Isle is extremely primitive. The novel’s charm lies in the telling. Given a choice between plot and style, I’ll choose style every time, which accounts for this being my favorite Zelazny stand-alone despite its somewhat disappointing ending.

610.1 Time Out!

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When I wrote yesterday’s post, I thought it was probably more than most of my readers cared about. But what the hell, it was a continuation of a conversation, so why not.

Now I have more. Sorry about that, but I’m continuing to write Dreamsinger, and I keep running into ways in which out old time system just won’t let go.

Today I wrote a family reunion where Antrim and his sibs turned out for a party to celebrate one of their own graduating from flight school.

Family isn’t a word the Sirians use. They are turned out, eight at a time, from a DNA vat and raised in a creche by two professional parents, on alternating shifts. Sibs have a strong bond. Almost no one else does. If you were reading Dreamsinger, you wouldn’t know all that yet, since I am unfolding their culture slowly.

In a family reunion, you have to talk about age, and have people thinking back to childhood. You need the concept ‘year’, even if it just refers to human age, with no astronomical reference. I explained yesterday why YAR finds no favor, but I still need a big term.

There are 31,557,600 seconds in a terrestrial year (of 365.25 days) so let’s do what people do with grams when they need to measure something that weighs (sorry, masses) more — add a prefix, so that 1000 grams becomes one kilogram. That brings us to a kilo-det, which is about three years. Here is the small poster over in the corner of my screen, as it now stands.

SEC — 1 second — This is the same basic unit scientists have used for decades.

DEC — 10 seconds

DIN — 100 seconds — This is used as Earth dwellers would have used a minute.

DUR — 1000 seconds — This is about fifteen Earth minutes.

DEL — 10,000 seconds — This is just under three  Earth hours.

DAE — 100,000 seconds — A dae is 17% longer than a terrestrial day, which is close enough for human circadian rhythms to accommodate.

DET — 1,000,000 seconds — Used where Earth dwellers would have used week or fortnight.

KILO-DET — 1,000,000,000 seconds — About three  years.

As a writer, I would have been better off doing none of this, but I can’t help it. If my brain didn’t do odd things, I wouldn’t be writing science fiction.

I’ll leave this up for about a week and the append its contents to yesterday’s post. I don’t need three posts on one subject cluttering up the archives.