How The New Star Wars Should Work

I haven’t read anything about the new Star Wars, nor do I really intend to; I’m going to be getting enough spoilers incidentally without seeking them out.  But I have a sneaking suspicion of how Star Wars is going to handle the introduction of Luke, Leia, and Han – which is to say, given JJ Abrams’ fondness for ancient gravitas and some of the teaser images from the trailer, I suspect we’ll have them hauled out of carbonite.
Not literal carbonite, of course, but script-carbonite – which is to say that after all their adventures, Han, Luke and Leia will have done precisely bupkiss since the films ended.  Some spunky younglings will have to haul their inert asses out of the ancient desert – just like Luke found Obi-Wan – where they’ll have curled up in isolation for years and have to be brought back out for one great adventure. Kinda like Spock in the Star Trek films.
That’ll be deeply disappointing.
For me, I want active old geezers – the kind of spunky folks who are smart enough to recruit a new generation when they realize they need fresh blood to handle to this challenge.  I don’t want hoary old guys being noble – I want Luke, Leia and Han as the cool uncles and aunts we all secretly wanted to have as a kid, the kind of people who grab us by the arm and go, “You’re more awesome than you think! Come on, let’s save the damn world!”
You know, like a squadron of lightsaber-wielding Doctor Whos.
And what I really want is the implication that Luke, Leia, and Han continued to have really cool adventures after the films.  The greatness of Star Wars is its implied backstory – remember when nobody knew what the Clone Wars were, but really wanted to? – making a movie seem like a snippet of some grand history.
So I think there should be plenty of conversations like this:
HAN, LUKE, AND NEW KIDS FACE DOWN UNTHINKABLE DANGER
HAN: This is just like when we had to wrangle Gundarks back on Ceta Tau!
NEW KID: What?
HAN: Long story.
And then, later, facing some other crazy Star Wars action sequence:
LEIA: Doesn’t this remind you of the starwheels of Apocrypha Seven?
NEW KID: The what?
LEIA (waving her hand): Old history. Not relevant.
And that becomes a running gag throughout the film, that Han and Luke and Leia have seen it all before but still need these new kids because these new kids are awesome, culminating in a scene where, I dunno, they have to swing across a chasm:
LUKE: Whoa, this is just like when we had to swing across that chasm in the Death Star!
NEW KID: Death Star?  Who the heck would name something as bombastic as “The Death Star”? Now I know you’re just making stuff up.
LUKE: You got me.
(NOTE: Yes, I know there will be like twenty novels documenting the adventures of Luke and company between the end of ROTJ and these new films.  If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know the films never give a rat’s ass about the novelizations, so no, those aren’t going to be referenced unless Abrams has really upped his game.)
 

Wanna Hear Me Discuss Flex? Wanna Hear An Advance Preview Of The Flux?

So the most excellent podcaster Brent Bowen interviewed me for his podcast Adventures In Sci-Fi Publishing.  If you liked my novel Flex, we get into an awful lot of discussion on how (and why) that was created – and in discussing the magic system, we get into a new branch of ‘mancy that pops up in The Flux, Flex’s sequel (due out in October), which may be the craziest magic I’ve devised as of yet.  (It’s not super-spoiler territory as far as I’m concerned, but it is spoiler-ish.)
There is about fifteen minutes’ worth of talk prefacing my appearance, discussing the “Sad Puppies” slate of the Hugo Awards, which may or may not be of interest to a general audience.  But considering that he asks me my take on the Sad Puppies – and it’s an interesting story to my mind, of a bunch of right-wing authors attempting to change the composition of one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards – it’s almost certainly worth listening to.
Anyway, as usual, I crack jokes, I say things I regret, and I use the term “basically” way too much.  Check it out.

So What's With All The Boot Camps In Military Fiction?

I’m reading Brad Torgerson’s The Chaplain’s War right now, which is currently half of a helluva book.
The opening half had a start that dragged me right in – huge, mechano-mantis creatures had effortlessly destroyed our invading armada, and a handful of prisoners were trapped on an alien planet.  The chaplain’s assistant, who is not particularly religious but is the only man left to comfort these POWs after the chaplain was killed in battle, is approached by one of the mantis-overlords: they’ve decided to exterminate humanity, but first they want to try to understand this foolish concept humans have called “God.”
Problem is, the chaplain’s assistant isn’t quite sure he understands it.  But he does understand that teaching them something is the only hope humanity has.
Things don’t go quite where you expected from there.
The problem is that this narrative has serious drive – the stakes are great, there’s huge battles, there’s desperate moves from needy people on both sides.  I can’t wait to see what happens next…
…but unfortunately, at least thus far in the book (I’m about a quarter of the way through), every other chapter is a flashback to the chaplain at bootcamp.
There’s a lot of bootcamp narratives in military fiction.  And I feel, at this point, like I’ve seen most of them.  The recruit arrives at the boot camp as saggy sack of potatoes.  The upper echelons insult them gratuitously, give them impossible tasks and then punish them for not doing it.  Because we can’t demean the officers, there is of course a local villain – either a slacker who’s going to take other good soldiers out with him, or a nasty piece of work who has it in for Our Hero, or both.  And eventually, Our Hero learns more responsibility and camaraderie and becomes tougher than he’s ever been before.
It’s a lot like the Cop Narrative, in that I feel I’ve seen it too many times to get excited about it.  And I love it when there are twists – I think Ender’s Game did a great job in twisting it so that the boot camp created isolation and not brotherhood, I think Old Man’s War had the joy of seeing elderly people given new genetically engineered bodies lusting for a second life, and The Forever War had a boot camp in icy space that was almost more fatal than the war.
Yet I keep seeing that boot camp narrative show up in novels without much of a twist, and I wonder: what’s appealing about it?
I thought initially it was that soldiers love to relive that time period and will read anything that triggers that experience, and maybe it is, but I posted a status update yesterday and three ex-military friends of mine expressed the same bafflement.  I suspect I may be friended to outliers, but still.
And I myself am an outlier myself in that I don’t comfort-read.  I know there are people who read, say, romances merely because they’re predictable, taking comfort in hearing all the narrative tropes click into place, and I’m not one of them.  (People keep saying my novel Flex is wildly unpredictable, and that’s because if I got bored when I was writing it I tore up that chapter and wrote something weirder.)  So maybe it’s that military fiction readers like having variants on the same story, and they’d get itchy if the boot camp didn’t make its obligatory appearance.
And Brad’s a smart writer.  By alternating boot camp with ZOMG MANTIS WARS, he’s telling me implicitly that the audience he’s trying to court would find both halves equally compelling.  I don’t.  For me, it’s kind of like “These chapters are about an eight-year-old boy trying to fight off his murderous stepfather with a steak knife, and these alternating chapters are about his friend’s struggle to fix his ant farm.” I’m all like WTF MANTIS and find myself skimming the boot camp chapters like blazes to GET TO THE BUGS.
And maybe the boot camp pays off.  It may be a narrative choice to have something with the boot camp resound firmly down the pike – again, Brad’s smart, I wouldn’t put that off of him.  But I’ve seen so many fictional boot camps that don’t really pay off at this stage that I find myself wondering where the appeal of boot camp in general stems from.  There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just trying to figure it out.
Any ideas?

So What Universal Human Experiences Were You Missing Without Realizing It?

So Xuenay posted a really excellent comment the other day, linking me to this essay “What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?” Which, if you look to the comments, lists common human feelings that people didn’t realize they lacked.
The best example is from someone who had no sense of smell, yet because of social conditioning mocked her sister’s stinky feet and held her nose when she ate Brussels sprouts, just because she was supposed to.  It took this person years to realize that people actually smelled things.
Then there are other weirdies of “Wait, other people are not like me at all”:

• Realizing that some people actually like their jobs;
• Realizing that yes, some people actually get so physically stressed that it affects their emotions;
• Realizing that “not getting pumped up by being among big crowds of excited people” makes them an outlier;
• Realizing that some people really do care about the taste of food, and aren’t just ordering fancy meals to show off.

And I’m curious as to when y’all had that moment of realization of “Huh.  People really are that way, and I’m not.”
Here, I’ll share mine: I was in my mid-twenties when I realized that, bizarrely, putting the words “I feel” in front of sentences actually affected people’s reactions to an opinion.  Until then, it was super-obvious to me that everything I said was my opinion, it came out of my mouth, it’s created by a potentially-flawed brain, why should I have to put “I feel” in front of it to remind people that this opinion is an opinion?  To me, it’s like prefacing every sentence you speak with “I say that,” because shit, it’s that obvious.
But no.  Around my mid-twenties, I came to realize that merely shimming two words – “I feel” – in front of the exact same sentence radically changed how people reacted to my speech.  Which is something I still have issues with today, if you’ve seen my writings.  It’s something I struggle with, this idea that people feel that what they say is objectively correct until they specifically flip a switch otherwise.
So.  When did you have your moment of “Wait, I’m different from most people,” and what is the thing that sets you apart?
 

You Might Cure Depression, But You Can't Cure Stupidity

I know people mean to be helpful with their advice. They do.  But if humanity has one sin nestled at its heart, it’s this:
People can’t truly imagine that someone else is different than they are.
So what you see, over and over again, is this strange process where someone who has a horrifically fucked-up life finally finds a way out.  It doesn’t matter how their life was fucked up – maybe they’re a depressive who found a therapy that worked.  Maybe they’re a drug-abuser who found a good way to get clean.  Maybe they had food allergies, and found a better way to cook meals.  Maybe they felt lost, and they found religion.  Maybe they felt tense all the time, and they found BDSM.
Doesn’t matter.  What matters is that for them, we have sadness + cure = happiness.
And that’s good!  As annoying as the people with these micro-savior complexes are, let us take this moment to celebrate the fact that they found something that worked for them – even if it’s a transient cure!  Happiness is mighty thin on the ground, my friends, and if you find a flickering source of pure-D joy, then you curl up beside that thrill for as long as you can.
Yet what then so often happens next is wretched: they see other people with problems like theirs.  Or, at least, from their perspective, sort of like theirs, because as mentioned most people don’t actually see other people.  They look out across this great country and they see not a million unique specimens of humanity, but a million vague clones of them.
Oh, they recognize that “people are different,” but that’s a sort of muddy background wash that fades away when they start making decisions.  They know, in their heart of hearts, that everyone feels the same emotions that they do.  That’s why anyone of the opposite political stripe is so often portrayed as evil – hey, those other guys know deep down just all of the harm they’re doing, and they’re choosing to do it anyway, so they must be actively wanting to fuck people over.  What monsters!  They can’t possibly be acting in good faith!
Likewise, anyone of an alternative sexuality is doing something that’s purposely creepy, because they can’t possibly have genuine feelings for something that repels you as much as it does.  Unless, of course, you’re comfortable with alternative sexualities, in which case anyone who feels the slightest bit uncomfortable must be a raging bigot because God, look how easy it is for me to be okay with all of these concepts I’ve dealt with for years, the fact that you can’t instantly come to acceptance means you’re a monster.
Nobody’s an individual, sadly.  They’re all just warped reflections of you.  And if they have any differences, it must be because they know better and yet have chosen to do the wrong thing, not that they actually have entirely different experiences and conclusions.  (Perhaps wrong and harmful conclusions, true, but it’s possible to come to a wrong conclusion through the best of intentions.)
Which means that when one person finds something that brings them happiness, they are convinced they’ve found the cure for everyone.  And when they see someone who has problems superficially similar to the issues they had, they automatically go “Well, that looks like my problem, so it is my problem,” and set about barraging people with This Cure They Found!  It works!
And here’s the thing: the cure does work, for some people.   Because the world is large; cast your net wide enough, and you will find a few people similar to you.  So they get just enough evidence to see that this is a fine cure, a beautiful cure.
Then they become accidental dicks.
Because this isn’t a possible cure – it’s the cure, and if you’re not happy after trying it, well, you didn’t do the cure properly.  Hey, you were depressed and medications didn’t work for you?  You just didn’t find the right medications.  You were sad and religion didn’t cheer you up?  You just didn’t have enough faith.  You felt sick all the time and this new diet didn’t work for you?  You must have cheated on this diet.
And slowly, the cure becomes a weapon.
And slowly, people start to feel even worse because they have so-called friends who are hammering on them with cures, and these cures aren’t working, and that means there’s something wrong with them.
And no.
There’s nothing wrong with you if a cure doesn’t work.  The world is big, and problems are complicated, and even problems that seem similar can have wildly different root causes.  The whole point of life is to try as many damn things as you can, because solutions come from odd areas, and the more you can explore the better a chance you’ll have of finding the fix that gets you the serenity you deserve.
But there is no one cure.  There’s a million specific cures, each targeted at the millions of people who are legitimately different, and while there are people who genuinely don’t view other folks as extensions of themselves, most do.  Which means that they’ll be very firm about fixing you in the same way they’d fix themselves, and they’ll be aghast and skeptical when the cure that brought them to happiness doesn’t work on you.  They’ll think you didn’t clap hard enough to save Tinkerbelle.  They’ll think you did something wrong.
And maybe you did do something wrong.  That’s a possibility.  But it’s also a possibility that you are not them, and your cure for depression or sickness or panic is something different entirely.
I hope you find it.
And I hope when you find it, you remember that not everyone’s like you.