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I was reminded of this problem this week, as I have a short story due for an interstellar exploration anthology.

Now, you guys know though I’ve written for Analog, I’m very far from being a scientist. I mean, sure, I took all the fast track science and stuff, until 9th grade when, due a concatenation of personal, political and historical circumstances I landed my rebellious little (back then!) behind in the so called liberal arts.

As we all know, a lack of mathematics atrophies certain areas of the brain, an atrophy possibly encouraged by regular doses of Cliff’s Notes. (Look, I read Shakespeare and Jane Austen and can even take Goethe in small doses, but really, no. That modern Portuguese novel they made us read, where the whole point was nothing happened? Wagner’s librettos? The sheer suckiness of most of what calls itself magic realism? [I said most. Hint, friends of Castro can’t do magic realism for the Marx. Seriously.] All of this was digestible only in Cliff’s notes form. Because otherwise I’d have punched holes in my parents’ walls. And my parents’ walls are made of two-foot-thick stones, so you see the problem. (Though I’ll note the instance of big literature test where I’d happily managed to forget the book even existed and had failed to provide myself with cliff’s notes or the Portuguese equivalent. When I realized the test was happening, and I couldn’t contrive some emergency to post postpone it or close the school for the day [you TRULY don’t want to know] I read the prologue. From the prologue I guessed the rest of the book. My answer – essay – ran to ten pages, focused on the prologue and how it foreshadowed the entire book. I had an A. And that, children, is when I decided to be a fiction writer. Also, when I learned to despise that type of author with the withering disdain of those who do for those who pretend.)

What this comes down to is that when my two, intensely science track sons ask me a question, it only goes to further their opinion I’m mentally retarded. Or weird.

Oh, I read all sorts of popular science books, because I’m INTERESTED. And I can, given time and a pad of paper come up with reasonable extrapolations.

BUT – and this is a big but (yes, the one with two tt too. Office chair sprawl) – it’s been years since I did science fiction SHORT STORIES. Novels, yeah, but not a short story.

Somehow working on this story catapulted me back to my original view of what it took to write science fiction short stories – their being you know, smaller and therefore more concentrated than novels. (SF short stories, now with twice the science!)

And here’s what I believed when I started out:

1- Science fiction short stories have to hinge on a science puzzle or effect.

2- Since all of the easy puzzles or effects have been written, it takes years of research to write one science fiction short story.

3- You must spend at least three afternoons in calculations (which at this point requires me to spend a week learning the math again) to verify your premiss.

Despite the fact that this directly contravened the instructions the two editors gave me, by Friday night and more than halfway through the story, I’d worked myself into a “can’t breathe” panic, convinced what I was writing was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thank heavens one of the editors was more patient than he should be, even if he now probably thinks I’m insane. (I’m not revealing names till I sell the story!)

And now that my head has been reset on science fiction short stories, (again) perhaps I can send a story to Dr. Schmidt and stop hiding from him at conventions. (Besides, I think he’s onto the false nose and the moustache.)

Oh, yeah, and (#4 – You MUST use a slide rule. EVEN if you have three scientific calculators in the house. You MUST check your calculations with a slide rule.) I suppose I should get back to second-son’s room and return to him his “toy” slide rule that I absconded with. Right?

For those of you who read Darkship Thieves, the novel is the sequel to it, and then there’s the sister of the sequel. So, you see, it is a serious threat.

This used to happen all the time. My kids started noticing signs and would say “uh, oh, mom is coming down with a novel.” It was the little things that gave it away – like the fact that mom only rushed out of the office to use the bathroom, then rushed back again, muttering, forgot to eat, sometimes answered them with sentences that made no sense. Or perhaps stumbled around the house with a vacant look, walked into things and said stuff like “but that ending won’t work” in the tone of voice of one in pain. Usually things stopped short of watering the cat and giving cat food to the plants, but there was the time when I went to the store with a frozen chicken under my arm, leaving the purse safely stowed in the freezer.

It’s been a long time since a novel took me this way. Most of the time these days, I can work nine to nine, then read a bit and go to bed, but there’s time for eating and cooking and cleaning. The only thing approaching that white hot rush has been the last two/three chapters, before the book closes.

But now Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men (don’t yell) have taken me that way. I’m having trouble even reading short stuff – like … offers – which I need to read. I’m spacing out in the middle of conversations with the family. Today, I officially ran out of clean underwear, so I’d better do some before tomorrow.

What is it? Is it that the kids are finally old enough that I can concentrate on work without fearing they’ll burn down the house? Or is it these particular books?

I don’t know. I know posting here will be erratic – oh, every day, but don’t be surprised if it’s sometimes at midnight and sometimes at ten AM – and might sound about as coherent as giving cat food to a plant. But know this – I’m being held hostage by a novel and I’m having a GLORIOUS time. It’s like an altered state of vivid dreaming, but the writing is much easier when I’m like this.

The first one should be done – latest – by end of month. Second, G-d willing, late April. If I’m not out by then, send dogs and perhaps native guides!

It’s funny how many fairytales and myths revolve around skin. Not just selkies, but also swan maidens. If you took their skins, you had them forever.

Recently I’ve been thinking of my writing as a process of removing my skin.

Before you go “ew” and try to claw out your eyes, let me explain.

All of us walk around in hard shells. We have to. Oh, maybe it was different at one time for each of us, I don’t know. When was the time you got stomped on and learned to put up a front, learned to put up a shield? When was the time you walked, puppy like, up to a group of other kids, expecting they would of course like you, and ended up pounded?

I remember the moment for my older son with almost painful clarity. No, he didn’t get pounded. If you knew you, you’d know that’s silly. He’s always been… well… built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse. But he was our first and we thought would be only child, born after six years of infertility. And he was a good baby. Slept through the night at four weeks. We delighted in him, and in his first year of life never even raised our voice to him, much less showed him impatience. He was healthy and we protected him, so he was never hurt.

And then we took him for vaccinations. They asked us to hold him, so he wouldn’t move, and they stabbed him quickly on each thigh with the syringes. The look of sheer betrayal in his face. It wasn’t the pain, I don’t think. It was the betrayal that we’d taken him here, allowed him to do this. And though of course, he doesn’t remember that, I swear he’s been more wary since.

Now, by the time most of us reach adulthood, we’ve had hundreds of such experiences, and we’ve learned to shelter ourselves from the… slings and arrows of capricious fortune. Part of it is the “I didn’t want it, anyway” and part of it is the “I’m too old to expect they’ll love me at first sight.” Etc.

This works okay in life. It would be very weird, frankly, to be an adult sauntering into a party with the eagerness of a two year old. And I think if you went around putting everything in your mouth – yes, yes, you, you know who you are – just to see how it tasted, someone would probably put you away. (Hey, my oldest used to eat dead bugs. From the windowsills. Until I caught him…)

So in life, we need our skin, our tough shell, our protection.

The problem is when you bring that protection into writing. It’s lovely in a way, isn’t it? You can write and keep it at a distance from yourself, from the parts of yourself that count.

This means different things to different people. Many people are afraid to write about sex, for instance, because it’s too close. Others will not write about emotion. Or pain. (You try reading a book that’s all joy joy, happy happy, then tell me it was any good. Even feel good books have dark moments. Some people flinch from the supernatural. Others from murder.

I confess to having had problems with all of those, at different times in my career. But there is more to it than that. Weirdly, I noticed something while listening to books. Listening somehow makes it more personal. I listen to books while walking, too, which I guess makes it more intimate – there’s no distraction of a physical book in front of you.

Anyway, I noticed that all the really good books, the ones that grab, have what can only be called “writer personal hang ups.” For instance, it’s clear that Heinlein liked cats. Or that Terry Pratchett nurtures a taste for the same sort of greasy spoon I love: the acid coffee, the burnt crunchy bits.

For me those are probably the hardest part. It’s the silly stuff you like or don’t like that’s really close to your heart. If you let it out there, people will be worried. Or shocked. Or bored. They won’t understand. They’ll make fun of your toys. You’re that little kid again, walking up to the group of older kids, and you just know they’re going to pound you.

And then there’s letting my characters bleed. I mean, really bleed, really suffer. I don’t want to. It’s not even that I don’t want to hurt them. It’s that I don’t want people to see it. What? People might think I enjoy my characters’ suffering. And besides everyone is entitled to privacy in their distress, right? No, no they’re not. It turns out people who love your characters love them more if they see them bleed. Not cosmetic bleeding, but go for the jugular and follow it down, in detail, while they bleed and twitch.

Lately I’ve been writing with no skin on and it leaves you oddly sensitive, oddly raw to the world afterwards. You have to remember “I must put my skin on again. I must go out in the world and be normal again.”

In that sense, it is the opposite of the swan maidens. When you have your skin on, you’re just someone like everyone else. You have to take the skin off to be the magical being beneath.

And even if it hurts – a keyboard is a blunt implement to remove skin with – you dance so much freer on the page without it.

When I was just a reader – before being also a writer – there were many things I didn’t understand. I think this is fairly normal. For instance I had no idea the publisher could change your title. I had no clue most writers had no say on the cover. (Yes, yes, for those of you out there, I REALLY had no say on the cover of Draw One In The Dark, hard cover. Sorry. It just happens to be true.) I didn’t even understand that most elementary of ideas – that which books get published and which don’t and in what order is not under the control of the writer.

What this means is that, say, in 2012, I could have four books published which all revolve around intelligent cats. (I won’t, I swear. I haven’t written them.) The reader – or worse, the literature professor, which is kind of like a reader with a license to snoop – would then conclude “in this phase of her life, Sarah was preoccupied with intelligent cats. Which would make perfect sense, of course. Except, if you poked into the sales history, you might find out that one was a reprint of something I wrote ten years ago, another was a write-for-hire book because the publisher had the cover and hired me to write the story (this never happened to me, but it happened to someone I know. No, don’t ask), the other was written three years ago, but the publication was delayed and yet the other was something I wrote twenty years ago and was just now accepted/published. Thereby meaning that while I’d written a lot about intelligent cats, none of it was “in this year.”

This is how one of my friends became convinced I had written “legions of gay vampires.” To date I’ve sold exactly two gay vampire stories. This out of a total of five vampire stories ever written by me. However, he happened to come across those two stories in the same year. And, heck, at one time, out of ten stories published, I had four vampire stories. Mind you, I had fifty non-vamp stories Unpublished, but as far as the public was concerned I sat up in my little attic and wrote about undead people with a hemoglobin habit.

So, what’s all this b*tching in the name of? Actually it’s not. It’s just that I just realized what is probably the greatest disconnect between reader and writer. One that is almost impossible to breach from the other side, even when I TRY, even when I know what’s on the other side.

Series.

Series are experienced dramatically differently by writers and readers. As a reader, I’ll find a book I like and run out and buy all in the series. Or if I have to buy them one by one I will often, afterwards, re-experience them all as a unit. Just recently I went through all of the Tiffany Aching series on audio over a month of walks.

But unless you’re dealing with a writer who has only one series – a breed becoming increasingly rare – the writer didn’t experience it or work it that way. I.e. I’m now working on the Darkship series, again, but this was after detours through Sword and Blood and two refinishing mysteries. Getting back to Athena, realizing that FOR HER two years haven’t passed is the work I have to do so that the reader has that sense of continuity.

So, do you ever think about that – that the books you read in a row might have YEARS of life experience between them? Is it ever obvious? (My pet theory is that it’s obvious when the character gets “broken” – i.e. loses consistency.) And how do you read series? (I’m weird because I tend to tire around book ten.) Would it ruin it for you to know that there have been other series, books, between the books you love? Or do you imagine your characters waiting patiently to go on with their lives?

(crossposted at Mad Genius Club)

No. Don’t try to send me a baby gift. Human twins are far less work than this.

Through some process I can’t fully understand, some books refuse to be worked at unless they’re worked at together.

The ones that drive me totally insane are the ones that are in widely different universes/time frames/styles. For instance, I wrote at the same time – had to – Gentleman Takes A Chance and Soul of Fire. And if you’re sitting there going “at least they both got dragons” … yeah, you’re right. It is, however, where the resemblance stops. There have been others, too, though right now I can’t remember the pairings.

At least the current ones are in the same universe – one of them, Darkship Renegade starts the minute that Thena and Kit Sinistra land in Eden and then it doesn’t stop. (No, that’s pretty much it.) The other one begins on Earth a few hours before that with a character coming out of the prison that Thena attacked in order to free Kit. And then it turns Earth inside out and upside down. (No, that’s also pretty much it.)

I’m not sure, yet, whether the two interact at all. (They might not in these books.) But I’m sure I can’t write one without writing the other AT THE SAME TIME. Sometimes I hate the way my mind works.

In the last day, I noticed a lot of postings on Facebook about the shuttle. And this made me realize something about space, and what space means.

I haven’t been exactly paying attention. Whenever a novel is done – let alone a novel that was delayed due to my stupid body, once more, reminding me that these things come without warranty – there’s a lot of things I’ve been putting off that have to be dealt with. Particularly when I’m plunging straight into another couple of books that need to be finished, both of which are ready to enter ‘final phase’ (the phase when things are coming together and I work in a sort of white-hot haze.)

So, in the last couple of days I verified that my kitchen does, indeed, still have a floor by removing all the fur and grime that had accumulated over it; reduced the waiting Everest of laundry to a mere Pikes Peak; did grocery shopping; made sure the kids are still alive (you never know, and zombie children are such pains); cleaned the cats water fountain; removed approximately three Haveys from every surface in the house, including the floor (a Havey is a measurement of fuzziness. It equals about an inch of fuzz on everything.)

As has been obvious from this blog, I’ve logged on to the net maybe twice/three times a day, if that, and I haven’t exactly been thinking about the internet.

Even so, I couldn’t avoid postings on the shuttle.

. Perhaps it is a function of the type of friends I have, but for a day, posts on the shuttle seemed to overshadow even the endless political postings by people who should know better about what they put on their professional Facebook pages (Hint, if you feel free to put it up in a place where your potential bosses will read it, you’re not talking truth to power. You ARE the power.)

It reminded me a lot of the moon landing. For a moment, for a blessed few hours, we looked up from the ball of mud as all eyes turned to space and to what we all knew in our hearts was the next movement for our species. Remember, I wasn’t an American then, but I felt it too. And it wasn’t just me. Within a week our elementary school teacher, in this tiny one-room school house, started talking about how lucky we were to be living in a time when we might grow up and go to space. At various get togethers arranged for kids, the various, insanely-cheerful songs of the row your boat variety suddenly included references to the lunar age, to man of the space age. (Oh, I’m sure some Soviet scientists were furious that day. Bureaucrats even more so. But doubtless even they were in awe.)

The difference of course, is that the moon landing was a first and everyone pays attention to a first. So you might think it means nothing. It doesn’t explain the attention paid to the shuttle, because we’ve been expecting the end there – we know it’s an expensive program and it’s being shuttered.

And yet. And yet there’s something that calls us to space. In Space Engineers, Simak posited that we always longed for the stars, because we’d known we come from there. Of course if I wrote anything suggesting that, it would get buried under screams of outrage – even if I wrote it metaphorically, so I won’t. Beautiful and chest-expanding as that idea is, the explanation is much simpler.

As some of you know when I’m sick I read biology and anthropology manuals and sites. (Unless I’m REALLY sick, in which case I read about dinosaurs. It’s like comfort food.)

Our species – all species – have two modes: expand range or die. As my friend Dave Freer put it, we’re a species of colonists. It’s what we do. Every human race, every human culture longs to expand and most of them have, with varying degrees of success. Expansion is healthy both for the new culture and the one left at home. Innovations are bought back; inventions are sparked; restless young men are given productive outlets.

Are expansions within Earth and into someone else’s territory different? To an extent. It could be argued, though, that from the very long term perspective those expansions have, ultimately, been for the benefit of humanity in general. (Yes, I could expand on this, but not at six in the morning on a day when my to-do writing list is overflowing the page. Also, I suspect to explain it in detail would take a book. However, take the fact that as a whole humanity is now – at the end of expansionary movements and wars of conquest that started in the paleolithic – not only more numerous but more long-lived and healthier than ever. Then connect the dots.)

Whether our expansion is a good thing for anyone else, frankly, is a matter of total lack of concern to me. I know it’s chauvinistic and irredeemable of me, but when it comes to choosing between my own species and hypothetical blue aliens with linked in pony tails, I’m going to choose my own species. And no, I don’t care how ecologically sound these hypothetical aliens are, or how loving-kind or how perfect. Heck, I wouldn’t care even if they stopped being hypothetical.

Yes, I know, you’re looking at me in horror. But there are things that are so basic, so simple, so fundamentally gut-right that it takes years and years of education and an exquisite attention to moral formation to make people ignore them or think otherwise. Arguably our system does just that to people, just now.

And that’s insane, because even herbivores fight for their herd. You never see cornered antelope go “Oh, look, it’s much better for our herd if we let the lions eat the weak and the old. I mean, it’s not like they can live forever. And what right do we antelopes have to take over the area? Everyone knows we overgraze and destroy bio diversity.” The reason antelopes don’t do this is that they haven’t spent twelve plus years listening to how the species they belong to is harmful and useless and should go extinct for the sake of higher values of a nebulous kind. Lucky antelopes.

I did spend sixteen plus years listening to what horrible creatures humans are. I’ve also read countless books to the effect. But, aw, shucks, as my parents found out from the moment I could move around and say “no” I’ve never taken suggestion well. Also, I’m a mother, (no, not in the sense you guys call me that) and I’m selfish. I’d like to see my line of descendence stretch all the way into the future and if possible to the stars.

Those posts yesterday proved that despite schooling, despite instruction, despite the fact that the rest of you aren’t as tri-plated irascible, stubborn b*tches as I am, (which is a good thing. A world full of me would be terrifying, not to mention boring) most people at a gut level feel the same yearning to push our species past the ball of mud and on to new and bright frontiers.

Oh, we know it won’t all be blanket trees and candy fields. If anything we know the dangers far too well. We know in this wave of expansion as in many others, men and women will die, and we’ll lose some of our true best and brightest. Doesn’t matter. In reaching beyond one simple planet, they will bring a better life to the vast majority of us. A life so rich, so free, so full of security and abundance that we can’t imagine it, and our ancestors would have called it heaven.

And that is why I’m talking about it in the future, despite the last decade or so of our being assured this expansion would never happen; despite the last two decades of our being hectored on how this was a pipe dream and we had to learn to be good stewards of this one, tiny corner of the galaxy.

Look my friends, here is wax. Block your ears against the siren song of the nay sayers, the guilt-trippers and the scared sisters who always, always prefer their fireside to the discovery of new lands. Their ilk has always existed and always will. Someday our descendants will come back from their distant space colonies, conquer their descendants and bring them the innovations we discovered meanwhile. And then some of their descendants will join in the expansion to another galaxy and – if it’s possible we’ll find a way – another universe.

Oh, things look nasty right now, but the way we’ve been doing space is expensive and not very efficient. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in recent decades (since we went to the moon) is that not only isn’t big government necessary for big projects, big government is usually an hindrance to big projects, (it tends to be staffed by all those fireside sisters.)

So, government is broke and won’t be doing much for us. That’s fine. Not a problem. Le us do for ourselves. Let us try many ways to get into space. the best will succeed, and after that we’ll continue trying.

Look up into the skies at night see all those stars? Your descendants (direct or collateral) and mine will walk in planets circling them. They’ll be born and die, war and marry in worlds we can only imagine. They’ll change, they’ll grow, they’ll understand more than we can know.

And they’ll dream of bigger things.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

I know you’ll find this riveting, but today it’s all I’m up to post.   Turned out I wasn’t as recovered as I thought.  I found I simply wasn’t up to cleaning the house, so after the book was sent I slept a bit and then we went out to dinner.  Stayed up late talking and for some reason I had a case of middle-of-the-night wide-awakes.

I’m just up now and grabbing coffee, medicating the cats (you don’t want to know!) and then going to lie down and read.  If I feel better later, I’ll vaccum and maybe iron a bit. 

If you’re all very good and eat all your green beans, I might post a blue plate plate special short story later.

I know you’re thinking that today is the second day I’ve taken off to eat bonbons and read trashy books…

Actually the bonbon eating – as it were – hasn’t started yet. I finally finished A Fatal Stain yesterday a little past noon, and now I’m engaged in the great typo hunt. Particularly when dealing with this sort of book, which had at least two versions of the ending, assorted tweaks in the middle and parts and references that were replaced, typo hunt is a nightmare, because it also catches fragments of the past versions.

Unfortunately I know me, and if I try to do too exact a typo hunt, I’ll end up adding more typos than I remove. (Like, I lose the original meaning of a sentence and try to fix it, thereby muddying it beyond repair.)

Anyway, that should be done sometime this morning, and I have a short story that is due next week, as well as two space operas to finish. (Maybe three, if I can decide if one of them – almost done – is dead or not. There are times when a novel dies in mid writing. I never know why or how to bring it back.)

Because I have other things due, and because frankly I hardly know what to do with myself when not working, there’s a great temptation to sit here and write. Or to indulge in two or three days of reading – the trashy novel thing, though there’s a lot of non-fic I need to catch up on, as well.

What I feel though is that right now I can’t take words. Written words and writing words. It’s like my brain is tired of all the pushing and wants to recover.

So, once this thing is de-typoed and underway to its proper destination, I’m going to go do a bazzillion (technical term) loads of laundry, do a quick dust and vacuum (both the boys have tests this coming week, so I’m not bothering them with it) and then, if I’m very lucky, vegging in front of Pride and Prejudice mini-series.

This is one of those blogs where I explain I’m not blogging.  Yeah, I hate to do these, and I suspect you hate to read them.  However today is the first day in a long time that I woke up completely clear headed and I’d like to push through and finish the mystery, so I can finish the (2) space operas, before my editors kill me; so I can finish Shifters before Evmick kills me.  My chest is still congested and my friends have threatened me with seven kinds of death if I exercise today — so instead I’ll just write.  Particularly because I only know five kinds of death and I don’t want to get educated in that.

A quick explanation of how I got so awfully sick — and, having talked to other people, I really think this is the illness that started in October which has been going slightly better then much worse in a steady spiral.  You see, being 48 I’m menopause-hypochondriac   As long as the symptoms aren’t OBVIOUSLY some illness, when I start dragging and feeling irritable (which I DO feel when I’m dragging and I’m trying nonetheless to work normally) I assume “Oh, it must be starting.  About time I had some symptoms.”  And because until the last week it wasn’t PATENTLY obvious I had chest congestion, I dismissed the episodes of sore throat and stuffed nose, etc, as “oh, allergies on top of going menopausal.”  Which is why I haven’t gone and got meds before.  And why I kept trying to power through the almost-finished book and getting annoyed at myself I couldn’t.

You know, bodies should come with idiot lights.  That way when my “upper respiratory infection” light came on I wouldn’t start imagining “I’ve entered da changez”.  Truly, a flawed design, the lack of those.

Now I have meds, and I’m improving, but it will probably take a couple of weeks to normal, and I suppose till then I have to sort of baby myself, at least on the exercise and physical work front.

BUT today I finish the book, because tomorrow I’ve pencilled in for sleeping and reading trashy novels.  So there.

*Sorry to be absent on Tuesday. I woke up feeling VERY ill and went to the doctor. Those of you who know me personally know what it takes for me to admit I need a doctor. Anyway, I’m now medicated which will hopefully put an end to the creeping crud that has been extending in one form or another since before Christmas. The following post is being echoed at Mad Genius Club.*

When I’m sick – yeah, let’s just say that my respiratory system is a walking liability – I can’t read fiction. This is part of the reason I’ve fallen so far behind on my fiction reading. It doesn’t seem to be a rare affliction. When you’re sick you can’t handle emotion and, of course, all good fiction is emotion.

However, I can’t stop reading. Reading is what gets me through the stupid stuff that must happen in life, like washing dishes, cooking, cleaning. I have yet to figure out how to read in the shower. Someone must make a better, water-proof ereader.

So, instead of fiction I read non-fiction. The more tired/sick I am, the dryer my reading material. Years ago, when pneumonia put me in the hospital (ICU for eleven days) I read a collection of nineteenth century biology manuals. No, you probably don’t want to ask.

And I know I’m at least becoming somewhat more human because I either start having story ideas, or I start figuring out how what I’m reading applies to some aspect of writing.

This last month and a half, as I’ve been spiraling deeper and deeper into illness (And no, I don’t even know if it’s the same illness or a succession of respiratory bugs) I’ve been reading about the pursuit of the Indo-European language and culture.

Yes, this morning I finally decided enough was enough and this afternoon I dragged self to doctor and I’m now medicated. While I’m still not substantially better – except the fever must be down because my head is clearer – in the “up” points of this er… bug sequence I’ve been able to realize what I’m reading is both a wonderful seed for stories, possibly a setting for a series of novels which has deviled me (my last run at it was … fifteen years ago, when I was definitely not ready) and, more importantly, a world building tool.

What I’ve been reading, particularly, which attempts the reconstruction of an ancient culture that might have been homogenetic, but was almost certainly heterogenetic (same or different genetic heritage), might have been located over a region or another, and might have worked out one way or another, has made me realize how things are connected, things we don’t tend to think about.

No, I don’t know how much their guesses are true, but I do know that there are certain “rules” that tend to apply and that these archeologists use them to reconstruct a culture just like a paleontologist reconstructs a dead animal from a loose tooth. Will they sometimes be wrong? Oh, yeah, heck, yeah. Remember the dinosaurs that have changed name or shape as more has been found out about them? But still, there are certain things that apply. If you find a certain shape of tooth, you know you’re dealing with an herbivore, for instance. And if you find human craniums with largely cavity-free teeth, you know you’re dealing with a culture whose diet was low on carbohydrates. Oh, there might be some genetic freak that keeps them from getting cavities, but, more than likely, you’re dealing with a diet based on protein.

The same goes for population replacement, for instance. One population disappears, another comes in. Was it war? Maybe. Sometimes you do find a population where the graves show women of the previous population and men of the new one. You could be dealing with a Rape of The Sabines situation. Alternately, you could be dealing with some elaborate treaty and bride price, and perhaps the men of the tribe moved elsewhere to marry women from the other tribe. Yeah, that wouldn’t be total, but these graves never represent everyone, just the powerful families.

And then there’s that too – what was powerful at the time? What was “wealthy”. A man is buried in a grave that would require immense labor with only a few shards of pottery and a dagger. Was it because the culture was terribly poor, or were the gifts symbolic. You only know by comparing to smaller graves of the same culture.

I’m not going to go into details, but it is important, not just for historical fiction but for science fiction and even for fantasy to think through these details. “What does my culture use for transport?” for instance, limits how far your character can travel. That much is obvious. But it will also limit the ideas of the world; how far her parents’ married; how many languages there are in the immediate vicinity; what they eat and possibly how they pray. “What do they eat?” again limits or shapes what the culture is like. If they are mostly agriculturalists, their culture will be different from if they are pastoralists. And if they are pastoralists with frequent cattle raiding (which also correlates to weapons) the culture is yet different. (And if they eat mostly stew, you’re caught in The Tough Guide To Fantasyland.)

I confess that even with as much as I know about history and how cultures evolve, and how economics influences daily life, I’ve caught at least a couple of mistakes I’ve made in one of my cultures – where they could not possibly be settled agriculturalists with those habits.

We live in a time where the world is our backyard, where food of all seasons and all continents is available to us and transport is cheaper and easier than it’s ever been. This divorces source from event in our minds, so that we have trouble creating even complex, future cultures.

Of course, the classic work with everything integrated is Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness. I’m not saying I don’t have problems with some of her extrapolations. I do. She and I come from widely different philosophical traditions and that always shows. Also, though I liked it originally, the presentation itself now seems incredibly dated to me. BUT at least she tried to show a culture integrated in all facets of myth and daily living and its natural environment. And managed to hint at a full fledged society, which of course never fits in a book.

What is your favorite such example? Do you have one? What would you like to see? How do you think archeology can help us learn world building?