Politician David Norris (Damon) stumbles into an encounter with men in suits and hats who are doing strange things to people he knows: they are “adjusting” his boss, nudging his thought processes so that his rational decision making will stick to “the Plan”. The Plan is the guidebook and blueprint, and these “adjusters” work for “the Chairman” (who humanity has “many names” for) to keep everything on track. They nudge here, alter an event there, so people do not stray too far from the path marked out for them. We glimpse the Plan now and then in the books the adjusters carry: it’s an intriguing image with moving dots and branching decision pathways, reminiscent of Harry Potter’s secret map, but unlike Potter’s map, it doesn’t just show where people are going, but where they are supposed to go.

Adjusters make sure that happens, even though we learn that at times the Chairman has rewritten the Plan, leaving odds and ends not necessarily reconciled – like the compulsion Norris has to be with dancer Elise (Emily Blunt), a vestige of earlier Plans where they were indeed meant to be together. Their burning attraction and continuing efforts to connect are not something the Bureau can control; when random chance intrudes to help Norris find the mystery woman he is so drawn to, it turns out that chance, also, is a factor the adjusters are powerless over. But this version of the Plan holds different futures for them, and the Adjusters are here to make sure they don’t step off the path.

Read the full review here.

Originally posted 2011-09-15 14:31:31.

Why is it, with my relatively advanced google-fu and a fair amount of tech savvy, that it should take me hours, even days, to discover how to add comments to static pages? or, how to limit the levels of categories displaying in a sidebar listing? I shudder to contemplate the learning curve for my next task, namely, displaying different sidebars on different pages.  It’s not that these things can’t be learned: it’s that locating the information in an up to date, valid, and useable form that’s on point is like some kind of bizarre zen exercise of self-mastery.  It’s like in a cold room someone is telling me I should learn how to master my body temperature so I can become superheated like those Tibetan monks who sit in bare silk robes in freezing weather and have the heat steaming off their bodies.

When all I want and need is a space heater to goose the room temp a quick 5 degrees.

I don’t know what the solution is.  We need better tools than google to locate information: it isn’t a question of finding keywords in a search heap, be it ever so logically arranged. It’s more like an AI exercise, in which conceptual parameters need to be factored in to the information requirement as well.  That kind of tool just doesn’t exist yet. I’ll be glad when it does.

Meanwhile, slogging through google-land, let me share the joy of my two recent scores:

The Very Simple fix for adding comments to pages is here, buried in plain sight in the WP support content in a fairly recent conversation. 

And the likewise Very Simple fix for limiting page listings is the addition of a meager 8 characters to a certain place in a file, neatly illustrated here, along with excellent description of surrounding program flow and logic for persons  undertaking page scripting of a more expansive nature than my simple needs required.

This is a great site, by the way.  WP Designer (who captions his picture “Small Potato” – I fnd that amusing) does not appear to have much activity posted here in the last year, but his tutorials are excellent examples of clear, orderly presentation of information, amply illustrated with screen shots and explanations of program logic.  This is vastly superior to the dominant school of “answers” to php and css coding questions, in the vein of “simply add x to where the php code calls y.”   If one does know how to formulate x or where to find y, (or for that matter, understand what a ‘call’ is, as many coding/scripting noobs do not), these kinds of answers don’t help.  WP Designer doesn’t assume any sophisticated knowledge.  In his explanations he does not talk down to the reader but is simply thorough and logical in his explanations. Kudos for a job well done, and I hope he will add some new material to his site this year.

Originally posted 2009-01-07 16:00:58.

You can see the Maps of Koristan page here. This is more than just maps: it also contains a narrative about the role-playing game genesis of this area, anecdotes about how some of my stories and books in this region came to be, and how my writing about one spot on this map got Marion Zimmer Bradley to lecture me about submission lengths. (See the page for more on that particular encounter.)

On a related note, in the future I plan to release some of these (and other) maps and regional information as sourcebooks. These docs will be of use in role-playing games or also just as fun reading for fans of my works or people interested in world building. Some will be free, and some I will charge for. If you want inside scoop about the development of this and related content projects, and possibly a chance to be a beta reader, please join my email list where you will get updates about this and other writerly things I’m doing.

Related Page:  Maps of Koristan

Originally posted 2011-11-04 22:38:38.

What do a 1956 science fiction classic movie and the 1960s retro hit Mad Men have in common? In my world, it’s Anne Francis, the sexy blonde who not only became famous for her role in the cult classic Forbidden Planet, but who also broke ground in the tv show Honey West, featuring a hot female private eye in 1965.

Growing up in the ’60s, I was very close to Sally Draper’s age as she is depicted in Mad Men.  In that show in 1965, we’ve seen the 10-year-old  caught masturbating to the provocative image of Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) in bondage, held captive by the bad guys. The awakening of her young sexuality parallels my own at the time, but I am wired a little differently than precocious Sally. I adored The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for its serious spy adventures – all the more compelling for its contrast with the farcical genre satire of Get Smart (which made me grit my teeth even then). How, then, could I not fall in love with Honey West, the gun-toting, karate-fighting, courageous crime-stopping private detective in the show of the same name? I had a crush on Anne Francis for years (although it took even more years to figure out why I had crushes like that in the first place.

Honey West was the bomb for a young girl looking for female heroes as role models. The hero thing I “got”, and there were plenty of them on the media landscape – but almost without exception, they were men. In 1965 I practiced swimming underwater in pools and holding my breath a long time so I could do underwater spy work on the off occasion like Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) did in Man From U.N.C.L.E.. The very next year I would be captivated by the dark-of-night adventures of the Green Hornet (with Bruce Lee as Kato); Adam West’s heroics would compel me to don a towel cape and dragoon my (younger) sister into playing Robin to my Batman. I would soon have fits if I missed an episode of Mission: Impossible (where Barbara Bain would become my woman to watch).

But except for Anne Francis, at the mid-point of the ’60s television offered a glaring dearth of women who were heroic and bold and adventuresome all on their own. I recall Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley as being matriarchal and commanding. And there was Miss Kitty (Amanda Blake), the saloon owner in Gunsmoke – she had an edge on her that was interesting. Action figures, though, these women were not. The memorable Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) of The Avengers would bump Honey West from the air a year later, but she was only half (and the junior half, at that) in a spy team, and the show came from England. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman was a decade in the future, and Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman (Lindsay Wagner), a year beyond that. By then I’d be in the Army having my own heroic adventures. So, what was a girl to do in 1965?

Swoon over Anne Francis, that’s what. She was the first female detective to be featured in a weekly tv series. Francis described Honey West as a “tongue-in-cheek, female James Bond,” complete with hot sports car and spy gadgets.  She had it going on, and looked damn good doing it, too.

Today, frankly, I don’t remember much about the episodes themselves. And while I’m being confessional, I must admit I’ve never seen Forbidden Planet either: one of Leslie Nielsen’s early claims to fame, and the thing that put Francis on the map as well (although the podcast of the radio version here seems an interesting way to catch the substance of it online.) But maybe those details aren’t important. What matters is that Ann Francis captivated my attention (for many reasons!) at an impressionable age, and showed me what so little other media did in 1965: a confident, capable woman, risking danger and taking care of business and the bad guys, and relying mainly on herself, not others, to do it.

Hm. Sounds like many of my female protagonists, now doesn’t it?  Thanks, lady, for the inspiration.

Anne Francis passed away in January 2011 from complications of cancer.  I’m sad to see her go.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting behind-the-scenes article about the authors of the Honey West books that spawned the tv show, Skip and Gloria Fickling of Laguna Beach, CA.

And how about you, readers? What heroines inspired you growing up, and why? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Originally posted 2011-06-22 05:34:48.

If you’re interested, or have a writer or world-building friend who might be, you can read more about it at the book page, here.

If you’d like a review copy, let me know and I’ll set you up. Review copies are going only to people with established track records of reviewing books at Amazon, or who routinely post book reviews at their blogs and have a following at that blog. If that’s you, please do drop me a note. Teramis (at) deborahchristian (dot) com.

What the Dickens have I been missing out on?

So, here’s something I’m thinking of doing. I read a lot of classic literature when I was a kid and a teenager, and although a lot of it was in the original, complete edition (like The Brothers Karamozov  when I was 15), others that I read were (now, I would say unfortunately) in *abridged* editions. Namely, this happened because my parents subscribed to the Reader’s Digest series of Great Books (or whatever it’s title was) that issued a monthly classic (or was it 4 classic titles under one cover?) …in abridged form. And since this reading was on the shelf there, quite handy, naturally I read it.

PFC Janelle Zalkovsky in Irag 2006

I’m a woman and a U. S. Army veteran. That puts me in a small class of authors who, like Elizabeth Moon and Sandra McDonald, have military experience and also write military science fiction.

I have long loved military science fiction. Even had I not been inclined to play soldier, volunteer for Civil Air Patrol, or long for an ROTC program that did not exist in my high school, I would still have gravitated towards this sub-genre. It distills so much that is heroic and gritty into inherently conflict-oriented stories where ethics and survival factors often play interesting roles. Naturally, I’m a big fan of Gordon Dickson (what a feast the Dorsai! series was when I discovered it as a teen); John Scalzi; David Drake, and others. But it is always wonderous to me to see a woman’s name on a book of military science fiction.

The evidence of our past and present wars notwithstanding, as a culture we don’t usually associate women with the military, or going to war, or being responsible leaders in potential combat environments. Even I, who have this personal experience behind me, always feel a bit of cognitive dissonance, a mental double-take moment, when I learn of a female author who writes military sf. I am doubly interested if I discover that she also has military experience, because then I am curious if and how that experience comes through in her writing.

I can’t help but wonder, with our increased number of women in the military these days, and the higher awareness they have in the public consciousness (think Lorie Piestewa for good reasons; Lynndie England for bad ones), if military science fiction by women, featuring women, is not finally coming into its own. We have our own real-life female heroes and occasional villains in the U.S. military; perhaps a genre resonant with that fact will find a larger marketplace in the book-buying public than in the past.

This marketplace is giving a warm reception to former Navy officer McDonald for her recent book  The Outback Stars.  It is receiving excellent reviews (see Danger Gal[2] and Spacefreighters’ Lounge[3]) for being a compelling love story intertwined with a mystery and military duty aboard ship. The detailed military environment, which lends so much depth to the setting and plot, is  frequently given kudos by reviewers.  Elizabeth Moon has been a force to be reckoned with since her Paksennarion cycle, infused as it was with military sensibilities.  Her more recent Serrano Legacy books which feature protagonist Esmay Suiza, such as Once a Hero, are a gripping exploration of a space-faring military career and adventures against the backdrop of dynastic family and planetary politics, which are of course further enriched by her experience as an officer in the Marine Corps.

(I suspect there are other female science fiction authors who also write in this sub-genre and who are military vets,  but I don’t know their names or works off-hand.  If you, Gentle Reader, know of some others of this sort, please do mention them in the comments. I’d like to know who to add to my reading list.)

I’m eager to read works by these women, but this puts me in a bind at the moment. I must be very careful what I absorb in this sub-genre, or if I even read it at all, when I am engrossed in my own science fiction writing projects.  I don’t want other writers’ stories to color mine, because I have a military science fiction book of my own on the back burner.  Like my other science fiction novels, it is set in the Sa’adani Empire, and centers on the mother of the protagonist of  Splintegrate.  She is a career officer in the Imperial Navy. Why she abandoned her daughter as an infant and what she is doing elsewhere is a story that wants to be told.[1]  However, I need to do explore that story without other authors’ visions vying for head-space in my imagination. This means I have a long list of McDonald’s and Moon’s books to catch up on after I’m done with my Sa’adani navy book.  Once I’ve established the tropes and the tone in that book, then I will be less concerned about the ability of other works to insidiously affect my own.

I know I’m not the only author who compartmentalizes reading in this manner, but I’ve become pretty aware of it since I write in multiple genres. When I write science fiction, for instance, I don’t read anyone else’s science fiction. And when I write fantasies, I can’t read any other fantasies. Instead, I look elsewhere for my reading fix. For instance, while working on Splintegrate, I’ve had a great time reading about the 18t0s and ’60s in London, for a cycle of historicals I am planning to start in a couple years. It’s entertaining, it’s grist for the mill, and it is safely distant from science fiction. And yet…

The fact is, I miss reading military science fiction. I’ve read everything I can get my mitts on on by most authors who write in this field. No wonder I must write more of my own: I’ve exhausted the ready reading supply that’s available publicly. Meanwhile, it’s great to know that new stuff continues to appear in this sub-genre. And you know what? You probably aren’t under the same reading constraints that I am right now. If you haven’t dipped into military science fiction, I encourge you to give it a try. McDonald will satisfy readers who like a tight story that includes a compelling love interest; Moon will appeal to readers who like complex, large-scale concerns along with up-close and personal adventure and memorable characters. Both will satisfy the yenning for high drama aboard space ships.

And that’s just quintessential science fiction in my book.

~~~

1. If you want to keep posted on my military science fiction work-in-progress, the working title is Task Force 104 , and I’ll be giving exclusive updates on it now and then in my newsletter, Warped Space. New subscribers get a free short story as a welcome for joining. Check it out.

2.  Danger Gal is aka Lisa Paitz Spindler. She is the proverbial voracious reader who spits out entertaining and insightful reviews with scarey regularity, and is also doing reviews now for SF Signal (a great fan-based review source on the web).  You can catch Lisa’s blog here.

3.  Spacefreighters’ Lounge is hosted by Laurie Green, who has a particular interest in science fiction romance. The site is an eclectic retreat featuring book reviews and various oddments both informational and entertaining to the science fiction afficiando.  It’s a nice place to chill and browse around for a while.

Originally posted 2009-01-12 17:46:19.

But elsewhere, hidden away on her one (and only) hit album, was a song sung all in Welsh. “Y Blodyn Gwyn,” was the title. Total Greek to me.  But ambrosia to my ears.

You can hear it here.

After falling in love with this song, I looked at programs to study Gaelic with Irish families (you lived with them for 6 months – part of a “living language” program that existed at the time, early-mid ’70s). But ultimately I joined the Army and took my admittedly large language aptitude off to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, CA, where I became fluent in German…

But.

A large part of me remains celtic-ly inclined. Y Blodyn Gwyn, indeed. (Also musically inclined. I still aspire to learn lap-harp, to the tune of the anent song. Have already taught myself jigs on a violin, or should I call it fiddle, idionsyncratically tuned, but that’s a post for later…)

I still have no idea what the lyrics mean, lo these many years later.   If any reader would care to share a translation of those beautiful lyrics, I’d be most grateful. And maybe, when I have a long summer free, I will still find my way to do a language-in-residence program in Wales or Ireland (of course I know they’re different flavors of Celtic – but it’s the Celtic aspects that matters to me, and I have affinity for both areas, so I’d be happy where-ever…)

So many languages, so little time…

And here’s to Mary Hopkin, long may she wave.

Update: in an earlier version of this post I mis-spoke Gaelic when I should have said Celtic. Others discuss the difference in the comments, which is something I knew but did not have in the forefront of my brain when i wrote this late-night post.  This has been edited to correct that factoid.

Originally posted 2009-05-02 04:09:30.

This remarkable girl is documented in this ABC news story and video. The reporter puts her finger on the flashpoint of this issue in the first few seconds of her introduction: Brooke is “a little girl who could give the world the key to eternal youth.”

The Fountain of Youth by Lucas Cranach the Elder

The facts of her case are baffling. Doctors say that parts of her are maturing at different speeds:  she still has her baby teeth, for instance, while her bones have the density – but not the size – you’d expect to see in a 10 year old.   In terms of mental development, she remains at the stage of a 1 year old, and does not speak. She has not been diagnosed with any genetic abnormalities that would stunt growth. Her case seems to be unique in the world, and her parents appreciate this fact. They have already followed it through to the next step.

“What if Brooke holds the secret of aging?” her father asks. “We’d like to find out. We’d like to help people. When people ask you – everybody’s here for a reason. Maybe this is why Brooke is here.”

These news stories do not get into details about what doctors are doing to analyze her “fountain of youth” attributes. One assumes testing is being done, given parents open to exploring this question, and the great scientific anomaly that Brooke’s lack of aging presents to the medical community.  And here is where this human interest tale diverges from anomalous curiosity, and into the realm of science fiction and social issues.

What if We Could Stop Aging?

There is instant fascination with the concept of staying young forever, or at least a good span longer than we ordinarily have.  As the old addage has it, “Youth is wasted on the young.”   What would it be like if you could arrest your aging process at any point you like – say, your early or mid-20s? Then, though you continue to age emotionally and experientially, your body remains youthful along with the health and fitness that generally accompanies youth. A glowing future stretches ahead: you have much more time to do what you please, without having your physical resources and capacity being slowly diminished by the aging process. Better health, more time to be productive in work and play, more time for life.

Who would say no to this golden opportunity? This is the stuff of legend. The Fountain of Youth was mentioned by Herodotus, and the quest for it drove Juan Ponce de Leon to explore Florida in 1513.  Belief in it has faded with time, but interest in the notion has not. Eternal youth – or at least, a substantially increased life span – would be of compelling interest to  elites who aspire to power, influence, and/or financial empires: such things take time to grow to maturity.  Its siren call will also be heard by anyone who hates growing old. Add to this all those caught up in the vanities of western youth culture, and a goodly number of women whose security and love relationships depend upon their being a fertile and ideally nubile lover, and one can hear the clamoring masses already.

Pandora’s Box

But if we could stop or seriously slow the aging process – would we want to? In the personal lifetime, this means decades, conceivably even centuries, of time. If you’ve ever gotten bored with a long vacation or retirement, how bored will you become when you’ve seen it all, done it all, and feel stuck in a rut that stretches endlessly ahead of you? Or, if you do not have that kind of personality and mental outlook, you would still be faced with the challenge of creating meaning in a lifespan that far exceeds anything we have ever been taught to cope with. We have rites of passage, cultural touchstones that mark the progress of the years. We have expectations, habits and institutions subtlely and not so subtlely tied to the process of aging in our various cultures.  Old folks become respected for their wisdom, or are shunted aside as too burdensome for the young to deal with. Increasingly, as the Boomer generation ages, the once-young become caretakers to the elderly. What if such things were suddenly non-issues? The portion of the population that ceases to age – at whatever point in their development this should occur – will be playing a whole new ball game.

The dark shadow of this, of course, is the specter of over-population. Already the globe is burdened with billions difficult to feed and water. What happens when a part of that population, large or small, stops aging entirely?  Say we do not attain  ”eternal youth” per se, but only a substantially extended lifespan.  Still, this pseudo-immortality threatens change on two fronts.

On one, it alters the balance of power among elites, for those who live extended lives are automatically at advantage in the gamesmanship of power.

On the other, people who do not age and die in the normal allotment of time continue to use resources even while breeding and producing offspring over a longer period than the “short”-lived would. Longer span of fertility means population increase. A lowered rate of mortality means population increase. Take those separately or together: in either case, a world with the exceptionally long-lived in it will force fundamental shifts and new challenges in the world we live in.

The Eternal Youth Race

These pitfalls notwithstanding, its a sure bet that someone’s eyes light up at the prospect of not dying. This prospect is of course a greater temptation and imperative to older people facing their own mortality. They are also the people with more resources, who could afford to develop such a treatment and afford to buy it. Fortunes stand to be made, and will be, should the puzzle of Brooke Greenberg’s unaging self be solved.

One can imagine a future where eternal youth is a closely guarded trade secret, available to – and affordable by – only the elite. With this as a tool, the infrastructure of power on the global stage changes. Unless the secret is smuggled out of the lab and made available to the masses, the elite will be able to maintain tighter (and inevitably corrupt) control of the mechanisms of government, finance and power by virtue of their entrenched positions (enabled by their extended lifespans). For just one example: if the average extended lifespan is, say, 200 years, then why should a president in the US (or any elected representative) be limited to 2 terms – merely 8 years – of governance? Would governance not benefit from wisdom and a view to the long haul? Therefore a long-lived official in office for a decade or 20 years – a meager fraction of his own lifespan – makes a perverse kind of political sense.

The variations on this theme are myriad.

If the secret is smuggled out of the lab, and becomes available to the public at large, then the equivalent of drug wars will ensue as an incredibly valuable commodity makes it way into the social network. Eventually, if enough people are affected by the Immortality Drug, the nature of the world’s population, fertility and mortality changes shape, bringing on a whole host of other, very mortal, problems to contend with.

Dark scenarios? Perhaps. But I think it naive to believe that if scientific curiosity unravels the long-sought-after Secret of Eternal Youth, that things will stop in a laboratory’s record books. Where will they head instead?

Well, that might be the stuff of science fiction.

Originally posted 2009-07-10 11:42:54.

I dove into this book because I’d read a passing mention of it as being a good treatment of early 19th century Britain. That’s it. I didn’t know that it had been a Philip K. Dick award winner, or caused a stir when it was released in 1984. Indeed, neither this book nor the author have been on my radar. That is an oversight I’m glad I finally remedied.

For the first time in a long time, I read some fiction here that kept me awake at night because I had to know what happened next. Yay, Tim, for ruining my sleep cycle! I only recently got a Kindle, and this is the book that popped my “falling asleep and Kindle bashes you in the face as it falls out of your hands” cherry. (Tell me I’m not the only one that happens to?) Anyway, as to the story itself:

He sets up his time travel premise neatly and it effectively accounts for the to-and-fro’ing that happens. It’s s not a theory I would personally “believe” in outside the context of this book, but Powers does that good-author thing and ~within the context of the story~ it is logical, his world follows these rules, and it makes sense in the fictional world. So, I was able to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride.

His protagonist grapples with a weird bit of knowing the past, and being caught living out some things he has foreknowledge of, and yet it does not feel like a trite predestination slog. Powers keeps the element of suspense going through to the end, where even the protagonist is surprised at the turn in his own fate. So again, well done on that point.

The London of the early 19th century is well represented on the page. You get a good feel for the place and time (and some other times and places that are visited as well). It’s intriguing to meet the historical figures who pass through these pages and see them from the everyman viewpoint of the protagonist. But the great strength of Powers’ storytelling is the world building and characterizations that surround the antagonists, their magical and time-travel shenanigans, and the beggar and criminal underworld that comes to play a role. If you have ever hated clowns on general principles, Tim’s Harrabin character will convince you that you are right to feel that way. I’m especially interested in the story of Harrabin’s experiments-gone-wrong, who we meet fleetingly and who appear only at a few critical plot points. I would like a whole other book about them.

Finally, Tim envisions magic to work a certain way and again, and plays with the strengths and weaknesses of this rule set to craft a winding plot that surprises with some of its turns. The book reads like a prelude to another; although it stands alone, there are also lots of events and people this reader still wants to know more about by the end of the tale. Now I’m going to have to go investigate Tim Powers’ writing and see what else I’ve missed. I was a long time coming to this party, but glad I finally arrived.

This book gets 4 Lizard Stomps of Approval.