The Big Idea

There have been quite a few different systems of magic invented for fantasy stories. It's not the purpose of this post to examine these systems broadly. Instead, I'd like to talk about the implications of specific concept of magic. One of mine. I'm not the only person to do so, but I've hypothesized that one type of magic could simply be a form of energy unknown in our universe. A form that could be harnessed in a systematic way, which we do not know about either because it is too uncommon in our world or does not exist at all here. But which responds to concentrated thought or other acts directed from a person, such as speaking out loud, which would wind up resembling the magical spells of fantasy lore. This type of story would not utilize Wizard of Oz type magic, where the entire world had reasons for existence that don't make sense in scientific terms, where pretty much anything is allowed. No, saying that magic is an additional principle added on to what...

Superhero stories are becoming increasingly popular in American and yes, world culture. I'm not actually a huge fan of the superhero story, though. The most important reason why not is because to be interesting, a powerful hero needs to be opposed by powerful villains. Of course superhero stories feature supervillains, but as a general rule, supered-up bad guys tend to be silly and/or uninteresting for me. Silly because there is something compelling about someone who goes through an extraordinary set of circumstances to make him or her no longer an ordinary person for the cause of goodness. We all root for the superhero, wishing secretly we had a set of circumstances happen to us  to propelled us into that role. A superhero is, ironically, an everyman sort of figure, who most people are able to identify with. But the supervillain goes through a process to make him or her extraordinary as well--but then must adopt characteristics the audience will not identify with or like to be s...

Call it the lingering influence of 1973's The Secret Life of Plants  if you like. A story idea today popped into my mind today with an intelligent tree as the central character. The book I referenced above made many claims that plants observe what human beings and other animals do. That they are aware of other plants being destroyed and can recognize the particular human who destroyed another plant--so the book claimed. The book also legitimized things some people tended to do with plants anyway, such as talk to them or play Morzart to them. Because supposedly, the plants recognize this. The book was largely debunked not long after publication. There is no proof trees or other plants really do such things. But modern science does find that trees actually  do have a number of sensory perceptions. Roots know which way up and down are (like the human sense of balance). They also seek out water, including the sound of rushing water when experiments are performed that exclude...

A number of speculative fiction stories have played with the notion of changing subjective time for a person in one way or other. In  Inception , the changes in the perception of time between differing levels of the dream world is a significant element in the plot (even thought the idea of time passing at a different rate in a dream is not established in reality). Quite a number of stories have also played with the notion that a great deal of subjective time could pass in a short time in the real world and vice versa. For example, an episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine has Chief Miles O'Brien receiving a twenty-year prison sentence in subjective time from an alien culture, which takes only a few hours to serve in real time (episode title: Hard Time ). What's new about this story idea (as pointed out to me by Lisa Gefrides) is that current work is ongoing in 2014 neurobiology to change a human brain's perception of the passage of time. This actually should not come as b...

I'm participating in a science experiment of sorts--I'm sharing links to and from other blogs with the frank intent to see if that gets more people interested in my story ideas and my writing. :) ( Kat Heckenbach , a fine writer and friend, (www.katheckenbach.com) persuaded me to partake in this event--her site is worth a look.) The content of this link-sharing experiment is to discuss the process of my writing. What am I working on as a writer? How do I define myself? I have a huge backlog of story ideas I'd like to write, many but not all of which are discussed somewhere on this blog. I'm currently actively writing a fantasy novel called The Bond of the Sword , with the ambition of being to fantasy like what Starship Troopers or The Forever War are to military science fiction. The ideas behind the story draw on some of my personal observations about warfare from my own service in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I'm also writing a novella called "Mediev...

Reading a book on historical methodologies, I noticed the inherent problem with making history scientific lies in the fact that history is not truly repeatable. Certain patterns repeat of course, but historical events are by definition a one-time affair. Imagine a future historian with a time machine. Of course going back in a time machine to observe history has been the stuff of many stories, but imagine this future historian is more interested in the why behind past events. So he conducts changes in the timeline to see what happens as a result, making time in effect his experimental laboratory. So, for example, say this historian takes on the question, "Was the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire an inevitable consequence of a number events (such as increasing paralysis in the Roman senate)? Or was it because of the unique genius of Julius Caesar?" Historians of our day can read the evidence and make reasoned guesses, but this future historian can...

Imagine that the origin of psychological disorders is usually brain chemistry, as we are told. (Yes, this does involve at least a bit of imagination, since less is in fact known about the brain that most people realize.) Of course, plenty of people with such disorders went untreated in medieval or ancient times. Some would be seen as demon possessed or touched by the gods. Or simply very strange. But imagine a world of fantasy, where the laws of nature are altered so that performing magic is a genuine possibility, where wizards and sorcerers abound. Yet the human beings in this world are still human beings, with the same human weaknesses of humans we know. Some of them with brain chemistry imbalances, including schizophrenia. Imagine a wizard or other practitioner of magic who is schizophrenic. A snippet from Wikipedia defines some of the symptoms of schizophrenia as follows: Positive symptoms are those that most individuals do not normally experience but are present in people wi...