Yesterday spelled the end of Aussiecon, the 68th annual world science fiction convention, held in Melbourne this year. Sunday night was the Hugo award ceremony, which actually had a tie for the main event - Miéville's The City & The City and Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl tied for Best Novel. The rest of the Hugo award winners are listed here.

AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Let there be light

So our world is ice, with heat and safe living areas forged from volcanic tubes and tunnels. Our people live mostly underground, venturing out only during the night when the sun's gamma rays are hidden.

Outside, they'll be able to see a little by the moonlight, most of the time. And they may even borrow a few tricks from the Egyptians, using mirrors to reflect moonlight down into the tunnels. That's not much light to see by, however.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

A short one today, because it's now that time of semester when my brain starts melting from answering student questions and resolving staff problems.

Heat

Our ice-world is volcanic, but it's still going to be uncomfortably cold to live on. While our inhabitants can huddle near volcanic vents and lava beds, heat is still going to be scarce - fire is difficult to create on an iceworld, and wood requires venturing up to the surface anyway, so our inhabitants are either going to have to have a technological adaptation to ward off the chill, or be physically adapted to deal with it.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment. It is, however, getting to the stage where it's rather silly to link posts individually, so I'm just going to link to the tag lookup result here.

Lay of the land

I don't know about you, but I'm rather sick of maths-y mathsness for the time being. So no more maths for the moment at least. We have an ice-cold world with a super-long year and three moons, and people are going to need to live somewhere.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

The sixty-fourth day of Fentebruary

 Our slightly-larger-than-earth ice planet rotates around its deadly start once every 120 years, while its three moons - a small dark, medium red and large white - loop around once every 426, 1150 and 5840 days respectively. We have four eclipses, occuring every 1380 days (dark-red), 7008 days (dark-white), 18396 days (red-white) and 22075 days (triple eclipse). That's earth-days, by the way - 24-hour rotations. We could change the day length (planetary rotation's more or less whatever you want it to be - it's dependant on how fast things were going when the planet was formed, and tidal locking stuff, so have at it. Anything up to about 96 hours is okay- after that, the temperature fluctutation between night and day gets too extreme. Also keep in mind the faster your rotation, the more volatile your weather.) but we've already got complicated things here, let's keep it simple.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Over the moon

Our bigger-and-heavier-than-Earth planet orbits around its deadly star every 120 years. That's a looong time to wait for Christmas - almost two generations. It'd be nice if they had something else to look at in the meantime.

Satellites are important to a planet's health and not just from a spiritual or aesthetic perspective of the inhabitants. Orbiting satellites help prevent tidal locking - a planet being stuck with the same side always facing its sun, the way the moon always faces the same side to earth. A planet that's tidally locked to a sun will fry on one side and freeze on the other, becoming rapidly uninhabitable. Satellites also help protect a planet from passing comets and asteroids, by influencing the gravitational pull or even providing a physical shield (if we're lucky).

With a solar year of 120 years, I'd like to add a couple of moons in there - it'll help break up that 120 years with varying kinds of eclipses and alignments. And besides, multiple moons is a great ingredient for inventing religions and cultures.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Planetary plans

So our planet is orbiting around our super-hot, super-short-lived, super-deadly blue star once ever 120 years, far enough out that it's largely made of ice. Or it would be, assuming there's water. There doesn't have to be. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

How big is this planet? What's the gravity like? Do we have huge creatures loping gracefully through a moon-like bound, or short, squalid inhabitants hugging the surface? Are there metals? How thick is the atmosphere?

Some of these are going to be decided for us by the fact that we're orbiting a blue star. Blue star radiation isn't just deadly to DNA, it also breaks molecular bonds in a process called photodissociation - blue stars steal your planet's free oxygen from its upper atmosphere. Without free oxygen, there's no life-as-we-know-it, no fire or civilised technology. So we're going to have to do something about that.

I'd like to try an experiment - building a world here, adding a new (hopefully interconnected) piece each week. I don't have a story in mind - that's sort of the point, seeing what emerges just from the creation of the world itself. At some point this is going to need a name, but that feels rather premature for the moment.

Starting with stars

I like blue stars, they're problematic. They're too hot, too big, too short-lived, and emit so much deadly-to-DNA UV radiation that they make the Australian hole in the ozone layer look like a giant lead umbrella. Problems are good - they force you to be creative with your solutions, give you opportunities for inventiveness and originality. Problems are the antidote to lazy worldbuilding.

Blue stars only live a few billion years - no where near enough time to get an intelligent life form off the ground. Consider that our planet's about four billion years old, and homo sapiens only started appearing, at the earliest, four hundred thousand years ago, it means anything smart enough to think about the sun in their sky isn't going to have the chance to do so for long. Even your longest-lived blue star will be threatening to go nova when your native species have just begun metaphorically crawling. Which means either we'll have a native species with a really big problem, or a some settlers for whom such a star was either ideal, or the best they could get. All three of those sound promising as starting points.

It's often been quoted that the main difference between us and [insert monstrous invader of your choice] is that we bury our dead. It is, for some reason, something that we identify as a key factor of being human - that we have a ritual to honour and mark the passage of our friends and kin.

Animals don't bury their dead - with the exception perhaps of elephants, few animals die in such a peaceful fashion as to allow it. Usually, nature takes care of the basic process, and the dead are someone else's lunch. If you're being hunted by lions as a matter of course, it makes little sense to risk your whole herd in order to perform a ritual for a member who's no longer there. 

It's a recognised luxury, however - whenever the dead start to outnumber those who are left to bury them, rituals tend to go out the window. Consider the mass graves during the plagues (and that was at a time when the law decreed the dead had to be dealt with for the survival of everyone else). Any horror movie or video game will show you - dead left where they lay signifies total social panic - a regression back into our animal values - survivalist rather than social. 

What your society does with its dead speaks volumes. Their mythology and religion is laid bare by the basic rituals (or lack thereof) that mark important life moments - birth, death, marriage or mating, entering adulthood.

Religion is always a delicate topic. It's unfortunate that in most novels, it's treated with a very heavy-handed approach. Religion in speculative fiction seems to fall into one of: thinly-disguised Christianity, flat-out corrupt and evil, Gaia-worship, or non-existent.

Which is a shame - because religion will tell you so many things about a society's values and the context of a character. It's an area rich with potential for developing interesting philosophies and concepts. And creating a religion isn't that difficult (hello, Hubbard.) - it's just a matter of looking at how things interconnect.

It's no secret that an overwhelming majority of western fantasy is Euro-centric, stealing creatures, worlds and plots wholesale from old Celtic lore, with the occasional dash of Greek or Roman for flavour. Leaving aside for the moment the rampant borrowing of feudal systems and monarchies, why do so few authors bother to go beyond simple cut-and-paste when it comes to their mythology - especially when said mythology is set within an entirely difference world? There seems to be some kind of romance with Celtic mythology, especially. But it leaves your reader in an odd position: you're linking their world experience (the Celtic fey, of which almost everyone has some experience - Banshees, tricksy fairies and the like) with the otherwise-entirely-unrelated world of your novel. The reader is unsure how much of that experience can be relied upon - often, they'll just dump their whole hazy recollection of the myths into your world, and read on with that mirky not-quite-imagined feeling permeating the whole mythos.

Or, if you luck out on a particularly educated or mythology-enthusiast, they'll sit there picking apart all the places where you deviate from the standard mythology as examples of you failing to do your research. Honestly, why not just create your own?

When building a solar system, or even just a planet, the star(s) it revolves around is one of the most crucial aspects. The star affects the planet's atmosphere and life-supporting capabilities, temperature, year length, climate, life expectancy, mineral composition, evolutionary trends, and a host of other, smaller aspects. 

I'm not going to give you numbers and maths - it would take far too long to explain, and it's usually not strictly necessary. If you want the maths, I recommend World Building by Stephen L Gillet. At some point I'll dig out and share the tiny program I made to calculate these things for me, so I didn't have to. The important thing to remember when creating stars (and indeed any aspect of worldbuilding) is: everything is interlinked. Changing one thing will ripple changes through the whole design. This is clearly demonstrated by star-building:

Three of the books I read (or, in one case, tried to read and gave up on) last year were what's usually termed 'slow writing'. It's writing that doesn't provide continuous story development. We're never sure if what we're reading is actually progressing the main plot, or just an aside or a character moment. In extreme cases, we're not even sure what the plot is. Not, at least, until we're most of the way through the book, by which point a lot of readers have probably picked up something more immediately compelling.