Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "scifi"

Imagine if J.R.R. Tolkien had skipped writing The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, or Fellowship of the Ring entirely, and had fast-forwarded right to the Two Towers? And he had no idea what the One Ring even was or what the hobbits were doing with it? And then Eldarion travelled back in time to help them out and tell them of some important bits they could never have known without him at all? Also he already helped kick Gollum into Mt. Doom and he's on the way to give a hand to Bilbo on his way to the Lonely Mountain as well, and then maybe going all the way back to Túrin Turambar and Fëanor as well, except obviously Tolkien is yet to write any of these...

That's kind of like what I'm doing right now. Time travel stuff, involving going farther and farther back in time, except I started writing right from the middle - neither from the chronological beginning, nor from the time traveler's own future home. I think I have a pretty good idea on where the story is going from here, though.

Time travel stories tend to make the entire thing pretty complex: either you'll have to be careful about everything you do lest you accidentally change something really important and alter the lives and memories of everyone you ever knew, essentially making them entirely different people...



...or you're plain unable to change anything at all, the fate of the universe having already been sealed and everything you do failing by default. At best, you already changed the past, everything you do having been taken into account all along. At worst, trying to muck things up results in time paradoxes that can wipe out the universe or send creatures outside of time to fix it and kill you.



So all in all it seems like a pretty raw deal, where all you can do is observe - trying anything more than that will always bite you in the arse - but really I see it as far more simple and also somewhat optimistic, and it's the rule I'm following in the time travel story I write right now, as well as in any time travel story by me.

Here's the essential question: how do you ever know you changed anything, or to what extent? How can you tell what of the present-day situation is thanks to you, and what would've come to be anyway? How much can any of us even begin to comprehend of the tangled mess of time and causality, of events leading to others, and of blame and consequences?

And since we can't possibly know, what harm could we do in the end?

It follows the Already Changed The Past the closest, I suppose, except that you're nearly always allowed to freely choose what to do, since the future you know will not change either way. Unless you start to really, deliberately muck up with things you know didn't go this way, everything will be fine... and even if you do, there's good odds the universe will manage to fix its way somehow anyway.

Let's take an example: one of the very first things people tend to think about, when talking about changing the past for the better, is killing Adolf Hitler. This... almost assuredly wouldn't work, because we all know when and how he died. You can't kill him when he was a child, because that's not how it went and you know it.

But it doesn't mean you couldn't help. Nothing would stop you from infiltrating the Nazi-occupied Europe and helping with the resistance, saving lives, doing the little things you can. After all, it's almost certain that you didn't already know every resistance fighter and every little city skirmish and prison break! Once you return to your time (assuming you survive at all), you could finally read on the subject and see if you could find yourself in the annals of history!

Hmm... this could make for a pretty good historical fiction story, actually. A guy goes back in time to kill Hitler, realizes it doesn't work, but still finds ways to put his future technology and knowledge to a good use. Nazis and WWII really are overused, though, so maybe set it to another time and place, one tragically underused in fiction, and one of which far less material exists so that I wouldn't need to do so much research... see, it works for the convenience of the writer too! The less stuff there already is to be known, the more free I am to do whatever I want!

A proper time travel story needs a Constant: something that exists in every time - lasting and permanent - to remind the reader that they're still in the same place, just at different times. Great many things change in time travel, but not everything: some things need to stay the same too.

Otherwise it might as well be the same time but a different place: the whole notion of time travel starts to crumble.



I don't have a constant right now. This is a problem.

If I said that I listened to some type of music my every waking hour, it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Sure, sometimes I'm outside, or seeing my parents... or does it count as "waking hour" if I'm lying in bed and actively trying to sleep? I don't know. Even in those times I usually have music running in my head.

About a decade ago I got into D&D, and I sort of semi-accidentally ended up picking up a "soundtrack" for the first full campaign I was in. I listened to a bunch of music I had discovered at around the same time (mainly Sonata Arctica), always during games and only during games, or at least while thinking and talking about stuff related to it.

To this day I can't listen to any of Days of Grays without getting a really heavy hit of nostalgia. I've never been in a D&D game as fun as that first.



I began to realize just how much power music held, and how much it could influence the going of my (and probably everyone else's) mind. From there on I started to build myself soundtracks like that first: for every game of D&D (and later other systems), for every story I'd write, for some comics and books I like, even a few video games that don't have soundtracks of their own - I would find something to listen. I have a lot of songs and albums and entire bands, some of which I really liked, that I permanently welded together into one specific work or game, and that I only now listen if I want to feel nostalgic.

Sometimes I carefully pick up my music based on the sort of a thing I want to write, resulting in fairly consistent and well-managed stories that keep well in hand and don't go anywhere weird. Other times I just appropriate whatever I really like to listen at the time, which can easily shoot the whole thing into someplace bizarre and unexpected but not necessarily bad. I've done both successfully.

Often, how well this works out - how completely my brain associates the work and the music together, and how much I manage to listen to that same stuff while I work on it - directly correlates to how much I like the end result, be it something I'm writing or something I'm playing in or something I'm reading. If it goes poorly, it can lead to me throwing a story out altogether.

When I worked on The Straggler's Mask, for instance, I listened a lot of Blind Guardian, Twilight Force, a bit of Blackmore's Night and Blue Öyster Cult, and the soundtrack of a game I liked to play at the time, Risk of Rain. A lot of the sort I'd associate with adventure and exploration, but some of it was spontaneous and probably had a hand in the wilder bits of the story.

For The Vagrant's Wings, I picked up a bit heavier stuff like Bal-Sagoth, Celtic Frost, something more soft but foreboding such as Nox Arcana, and then just to spice things up, a bit more Blackmore's Night. It's one of the ones where I succeeded in picking a pretty fitting soundtrack - something for horror and romance alike - rather than just going with whatever, and I think the fairly grounded nature ended up for its benefit in the end.

One of the less successful drafts of mine - codenamed Shadowland - involved a lot of Manowar, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian again, and the Balance & Ruin remix album for Final Fantasy VI. I don't know exactly why the interest to this one just sort of petered out: how much of it was because I had listened to all these soundtracks before, and elsewhere, and couldn't pair together with this story effectively? How much was because I just got distracted by other things and ended up not feeling like it anymore? I wouldn't know. I'd guess a bit of both.

(Although listening to some of the soundtrack kind of puts me back on the mood of returning to that story... which is inconvenient because I'm kind of already juggling between a lot of things I might want to write.)

Chaos Star is sort of half-and-half: I had no idea what kind of music could fit for this, so in the end I defaulted to Iron Savior, Hyper Light Drifter soundtrack, and a little something nice I found on Youtube called Edge of the World. I'm sure the music can take some credit of it probably being the most out-there story draft I've managed to complete so far. It's been pretty hard to edit, though.

I haven't begun to really work on Ivar Stormling of Skar yet, but I already know it's going to involve a lot of Magic Sword and Gloryhammer. How well this works, remains to be seen.

The cyberpunk story, as I think I've said, is pretty tough to grasp and maintain interest on regardless of music - but it has one of the more duty-picked soundtracks, taking stuff from Blade Runner and Deus Ex, and interestingly, Command & Conquer series, especially Tiberian Sun. Lately, though, I also started to click stuff on Youtube at random, listening to a lot of synthwave and such while I wrote it... and I'm still doing this, even though my interest in the story itself has largely died away again.

So we come to the pirate story, currently tentatively named Pirates of The Demure Sea. I probably should look into Alestorm and such stuff, but because of the cyberpunk fallout I'm currently listening to things like this. Lemme tell you, it's helping me spawn out some pretty weird story notes and ideas.



But on the other hand, I had already decided that the Demure Sea is a weird place. So maybe it'll all work out in the end.

I spoke about narrators a few days back, in particular about how I had some trouble coming up with one for this story. I still have some trouble, sure, but I also mentioned that a lot of the story is also narrated by one of the characters, telling a tale of his own. I'd like to talk more about that today.

He's pretty unreliable.

Unreliable narrator can be a great thing to spice up the story, with a caveat that I'd like them to be established as such very early on, their lies and deceit brought out on the table right away rather than made into a twist at the end (the reasons for this might be worth another blog post later). It throws the whole story into question, forcing you to think about what is real and what isn't, scrutinize everything that happens, compare it to other things, and quite potentially come to great many different interpretations of truth that could make for a great subject for debate if you and some friends have read the same work.

But there's another appeal in them that really gets to me - one that may have much less potential for deep and meaningful storytelling, but that instead is just plain fun. Because they work both ways: they make you doubt everything you hear in the story, sure, but by the same token they also completely throw away all the worldly limitations, laws, and rules. After all, you can't trust that the guy isn't lying!

Now, anything goes. There are no limits, because it's easy to just brush it all away as the narrator lying, embellishing things for effect, misremembering, or just having gone crazy. This story-within-story has no need to adhere to any limitations or to any obligations of being taken seriously. Now you can dive deep into fairy tale and fantasy, to a far greater extent than your setting and story conventions would normally allow - and in my personal opinion, you should! Go for the whole hog! Bring forth the weird, and the wondrous, and the utterly unbelievable! The high magic and monsters in a low-fantasy world! The spaceships and robots in a realistic crime fiction! The friendly tigers and ocean lightshows in a castaway survival tale! (Really, Life of Pi has a lot going for it for other reasons too.)

And at the end of the day, the final question is also reversed. An unreliable narrator can make you ask "How much of this was real?"... but it can also get you to wonder "How much of this was a lie...?"

A very long time into the future - tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years - all the non-renewable resources of the world will have been exhausted. We'll run out of all the metals, and oil, and everything.

So what's left? Meat!



So we'll genetically engineer gigantic brainless creatures that can thrive in the void, then use them to travel the stars.

That's all.

A friend of mine was reading the draft of Pirates of the Demure Sea, and went on to ask me about photographs. I was going to answer him, but as I thought about the matter it ended up growing and mutating into a far more expansive subject, on technology in my books in general. So I put it in the blog instead.

The setting in which most of my books take place, a moon known as Shala, has some pretty varied levels of technology, sciences, and knowledge. I suppose this is the logical end result (if logic ever enters this kind of issues to begin with) in a world often thrown into the midpoint in a great cosmic conflict, like groups of children starting a fistfight on a field with an anthill in the middle. Scientists are often mistaken for wizards, and wizards are a jealous and misunderstood lot. Wars, occasionally interplanetary ones, can completely shuffle the deck in a heartbeat. Sixteen entirely different and perilous seasons wrack the sections of the world in varying ways, often cutting them off from each other for large periods of time. Parallel dimensions and other realms cross over in places known only to a few. Time travel is not an entirely unknown or impossible phenomenon. Things get weird.



Basically, if you're looking for a highly realistic and accurate examination to the technologies and livelihoods of people of some specific time period and place, this is unlikely to be the series for you.

The first (and currently the only published) book, The Straggler's Mask, sees the heroes crossing great many kingdoms and settlements across many biomes in two different continents, but despite all this variety the level of technological advancement tends to remain at roughly the level of our own 16th century. The Vagrant's Wings takes place several centuries later, in a fantasy equivalent to the Victorian Era, and on account of also taking place at the heart of Nexus - the least weird continent around - anachronisms are at a minimum. They have cars and, yes, photography. But in Pirates of the Demure Sea, which I'm currently working on, the story takes the reader on a faraway journey to an entirely different direction, where things get considerably more freaky.

In particular, two venerable superpowers vie for dominance in these seas, by means of diplomacy, subterfuge, and occasionally outright war: these kingdoms are Armaiti from above, and Aldarion from below.



Armaiti is a dogmatic, downright fascist Lawful empire, with an immortal Emperor and equally-indomitable law enforcement that are mentally linked to Him and more of a direct extension of His will than anything independent or sentient. They've had millennia to advance their technology in peace, but they do things extremely slowly and methodically and carefully, to never upset the order of things in any way. So they've stuck in the early-20th century steampunk/dieselpunk thing for several centuries now.

They have with them trains, zeppelins, helicopters, advanced weaponry (up to and including nukes), near-modern medicine, nigh-unkillable clockwork robot soldiers, and, yes, photography. They also bargained the secret of submarines and underwater construction from Aldarion, later mixing it up with their own tech. They complement all this with sorcery, which is where all the weird fantastic stuff (divine beings, carving Chaos out of humans like it were cancer, etc.) come to play. Magic, technology, and divinity - the last one stemming from their Emperor - all mix together in ways that an outsider can find impossible to understand let alone replicate, and they're jealous and protective of their secrets and slow to let the world outside to know them - it might all very well lead to chaos and disorder, after all.

The empire's borders are in fact completely shut. Only the city of Haurvatāt permits foreign entry, even then after intense customs and vetting, and no non-native is allowed to leave to the empire beyond. Likewise, no imperial native can ever leave abroad without permission, and some specific mission - and for that matter, very few would even want to leave, thank you very much, it's all so weird and scary out there.



Millennia ago when the majority of the old continent sank into the sea, the many warring kingdoms and republics of that time found themselves forced to band together just to survive the entirely new enviroment. Their dome cities, bunkers, magical fortifications, or just really fortuitiously well-constructed architecture, were enough to let them not be instantly killed as the water swept in, but only the kingdom of Zenmua - set around a great inner sea - had submarines and so they were the ones that got to travel around to rescue the less fortunate and unite them all into a new underwater federation that came to be known as Aldarion.

Their technology is a mixed bag, combining whatever high tech they managed to salvage from the old kingdoms, with sorcery and demonology. They have submarines, of course, and also salvage sunken ships and by arcane means turn them into underseaworthy vessels. Some cities have the original domes still standing, while others are cramped little bunker places (the town of Otachame, where the book takes place, follows this style) or bizarre wizard towers. They're technically a monarchy, but their king has fairly little political power: most things are run by a conglomerate of sorcerers and mad scientists from the many provinces and municipalities, most of which are the same as the old nations from back when they still lived above ground.

Aldarion is a far more open and accepting place than Armaiti is, and has a thriving tourism industry, but they're still fairly jealous about their magic and technology, fearing that letting these secrets spill would endanger their livelihood. Armaiti still managed to learn about submarines, though, as mentioned above - their sale on open market is allowed nowadays, but just because you own one, and know how to pilot it, doesn't mean you'd know how it actually works. It's even rumoured that such ships have hidden defenses that trigger if they're ever to be used against Aldarion itself, something even Armaiti would be unaware of.



Little of any of this has reached too far beyond Demure Sea, so far, and especially not to the naive and primitive continent of Nexus. Something of such might have come to place eventually, but then the Skar War happened, and in its aftermath no one contested high king Ivar Stormling's decree to ban all technology that they haven't yet managed to come up with on their own. After that, barring a couple hiccups, it could develop into a spacefaring empire on its own time.

Both of my books so far have been pretty long, but I've gotten around to writing a few short stories as well, as I think I may have mentioned. Here's one.



Last Gasp tells the tale of the last and the only planet in the universe, wherein some people make a startling discovery and begin to see a way to escape the terrible cold end of their dying sun.

It should be available for free from tomorrow on. Maybe you can give it a read then. It's quite a bit shorter.

I've seen a lot of discourse about fantasy racism these past couple days, especially with the context of orcs. This got me thinking about such racial matters in general. I thought I'd throw in my own two cents.



Tolkien - the father of modern fantasy - spawned his nonhuman races out of the old human mythology, fairy tales, and shared consciousness. Elves were like humans except far more magical and spiritually connected to the world; orcs were then the result of basically Lucifer himself getting his grubby hands on some elves; dwarves were the creation of a different god, dwellers under the earth, resilient as stone and greedy for gold and other shining metals; finally, the hobbits just sort of showed up, pudgy little folk with a love for idyllic life and peace, the closest to regular human. Some of them had in common with real-life nationalities and cultures - according to Tolkien himself, dwarves have more than a touch of Jewish in them, orcs Mongolian, and hobbits of course are basically British countryside dwellers - but these had a fairly minor role in their creation, helped by the man himself disliking allegory. All of them were also quite insular and had little to do with the businesses of other races: the Council of Elrond, the races coming together to address a grave issue, was an anomaly that was noted in-universe. On the whole they had strongly mythical roots, and drip with magical and fantastic flavour. All was well.

Then Dungeons & Dragons poached them into its great big fantasy patchwork. Now any player could roll up an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbi halfling; and every DM liked to use orcs as their basic mooks. Half-elves were codified into a race of their own, and soon after, so were the half-orcs... with fairly disturbing implications for the latter, at first. Gnomes were brought along from elsewhere, the enemy ranks swelled with kobolds and gnolls and others, and soon the world teemed with all manner of fantasy races great and small - and they quickly grew a familiar, even a mundane, sight in any fantasy setting.



And once you grow familiar with something, the next step is to explore and expand - to stretch its definitions, to ponder its identity, and to deconstruct what it all means. It didn't take long before the players wanted to be the orc rather than kill it, be it in a game of flipped perspectives where the whole party took up the role of the bad guys, or as a singular heroic individual who's fled home and wants to do good things, or a half-orc whose parents actually loved one another, or an orc wizard, or really just about anything else. At this stage, your imagination is the limit.

By now it seems like D&D's become the new standard bearer of fantasy - the introduction of the concept for most people, the originator of new ideas, and the wellspring of new fantasy and literature. It's next to impossible to write a fantasy story without it having been influenced by D&D in some way or the other - either by embracing it, or by consciously rejecting it. In it, magic and fantasy are a pretty standard fare, all over the place and accessible to everyone. The new races it added later on - genasi, tiefling, and dragonborn among others - followed this trend, each having their cultures and their nations and each blending in with humans just fine. It all tends towards the melting-pot feel, very much a modern concept... and indeed tied to modern sensibilities and attitudes in many other ways as well, the interpretations of morality and good and evil, the ideas of equality and inclusiveness.

All of this finally culminates to the topic of the present - racism. The big question on everyone's lips is, are orcs racist? Do they have to be racist? How to fix it?

But I reject these, and instead bring forth a whole other issue: What difference is there between these races, and plain old humans? How are they not just humans with tusks or pointed ears and other meaningless window-dressing?



The metamorphosis - the mundanization - is now complete. Through the twists and branches of a hundred-year-old evolutionary tree, the roots of mythology are now forgotten. Through intense familiarization and numerous deconstructions and parodies, the magic and fantasy is lost. "Fantasy" is no longer a description, but a genre, with medieval technology and various squat bearded and pointy-eared and green tusked people. The "orc" is no longer a strange mythical horror, he's your neighbour. The cultural counterparts and allegories, once a minor footnote, have grown to the forefront of their identity - because at this point, what else is there?

This is the great underlying issue for me - the dragon that gnaws at the tree of fantasy. I solve it by taking several big steps back. I grab all the nonhuman races and hide them back into the corners of the earth. You have to go looking for them, and therefore they remain fantastic and weird.



But where Tolkien tapped into mythology for his inspiration, I tend to look outward, into the realm of science fiction. My races tend to be substantially more different from humans, with many physical and mental traits that we might find utterly alien, just as they would never understand many facets of humanity.

Peal is not human, and I emphasize this inhumanity whenever it would be relevant. His size, his senses, his natural habitat, the faiths and superstitions drummed into him as a youth, all serve to separate him from humanity even after he's spent many years living among us. He still considers us weird or disgusting in many ways, while we in turn often find his way of thinking difficult to understand. It is a constant theme in the stories starring him - how humans might be viewed from an outsider's perspective.

I still have elves and orcs around, but you're not going to see them any more than you're going to see bugbears, which is very little indeed. I hope that I can maintain their fantastic elements forevermore.