Tag Archives: writing

Are multiple universes real? Some scientists say yes

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The good news – they believe they may be real. The bad news – we may never be able to access them, or even want to.

How cool would it be to visit an alternate version of yourself, say, a world where you married your college girlfriend instead of breaking up? Or visit the version of yourself who is the ninja badass you always imagined yourself to be?

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Scientists have long theorized that multiple universes exist, and now they may have proof.

I won’t delve into the science behind all this — it’s over my head. But I’ll get to the heart of it: a recent discovery on the inflation of the universe, as explained in this Scientific American article, supports a hypothesis that multiple universes exist in this humongous thing called space.

How would it work? Imagine a glass of soda. In the soda there are tons of bubbles. Each bubble would be its own universe. Simple enough.

But there’s a catch. Actually, a few.

First, it is theorized that these alternate universes would follow different physical laws. Scientists have no reason to believe that the basic properties of matter hold true. It just seems to be the way our universe is constructed, by nature, by God, take your pick. Let your mind go crazy with how these other universes might be constructed. The possibilities are infinite. But we would stand no chance of surviving.

Second, how would we access these alternate universes, even if we wanted to? We can’t even get very far across our own universe, which is too large for us to rationally fathom.

Third, and this gets to my problem with science, this is all basically theory. Science and religion love bashing each other, but what they don’t realize is that they’re more alike than they’d care to admit. Both are tightly constructed belief systems with high priests who disseminate knowledge. Science relies on the observable world, and religion tends toward philosophy, but both frequently get it wrong. (For the record, I’m a fan of aspects of both.)

So, in the end, I think we’re stuck with multiple universes existing solely in our imaginations, which is good. I loved when the TV show Fringe, a great underrated sci-fi series, used alternate universes to enhance the show’s mythology. The old TV show Sliders, where the cast of characters went from alternate world to alternate world, was great fun. Doctor Who used parallel universes briefly and effectively. And I’m writing a story now that is centered on parallel worlds – and alternate versions of the main character.

While the science is exciting, I’ll stick with the fictional side of multiple universes. For now.

Read this book: The Passage

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This literary/genre juggernaut is worth the hundreds of pages.

passageIf you picked up The Passage without knowing the plot, you would quickly know that dark times were ahead. It starts out with a deadly virus culled from South American bats, adapted and tweaked by government scientists to create super soldiers. Of course they test it out on twelve vicious killers on death row. And of course the outcome is worse than these scientists could ever have imagined.

So begins The Passage, Justin Cronin’s cinder block sized novel about vampires, the first of a trilogy. In other hands this setup might have been just another soon-to-be-forgotten pulp read. Cronin has the skills and literary background to create a lush, sprawling tale that spans genres and centuries.

The Passage, like the monsters it portrays, mutates and grows. It starts off as a technothriller that follows FBI Agent Brad Wolgast and one little girl named Amy. Amy is taken by these scientists and is given the same serum that turns twelve killers in to vampires. It doesn’t do that to her; instead it keeps her young. As the twelve proto-vampires escape and create their own tribes of powerful, evil vampires, Wolgast takes Amy and flees into a dying America.

Then we shift.

Courtesy of a report from a University set 1,000 years in the future (there’s hope for humanity!), we jump ahead nearly 100 years after the first vampires were created. Now we’re in a small California compound — a former FEMA camp — with a handful of survivors. Here we follow Alicia, one badass warrior woman, and Peter, along with other members of their community, as they struggle to survive. The technothriller is now a dystopic tale, reminiscent of the Mel Gibson flick The Road Warrior, though one deeply infested with horror that rivals Stephen King. Amy, the infected girl from the beginning, shows up and she becomes pivotal to the colony’s struggle against vampire hordes and horrific odds.

So what’s great about The Passage?

Start with the writing. I’m a fan of wordsmiths, and Cronin is definitely one. Though the book is huge, there isn’t much in terms of fat, and lyrically it is beautiful without being distracting.

Then there are the characters. The Passage includes several characters, and Cronin writes from their point of view. We get to know there people, and without exception they’re all three-dimensional.

And the plot. The Passage is thrilling end-of-the-world fare. We see America crumble. There’s a scene early on as a train full of people flees Philadelphia – the last train out before the city is overwhelmed. The train ride is harrowing, as the vampires pick off the train car-by-car. A few lucky ones only barely manage to survive. This scene has stayed with me.

This is just a glimpse into the world of The Passage. There are tons of twists and turns in this book, more than enough to get you hooked.

 

Book vs movie: World War Z

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It was nearly an impossible book to film, but they filmed it anyway.

There’s only one book that comes to mind as a successful movie adaptation (though I’m sure there are tons of others), and that’s The Hunger Games.

Zombie thriller World War Z by Max Brooks was a mega-successful book.

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World War Z the movie, produced by Brad Pitt, was a moderately successful movie.

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Both are vastly different beasts, and the adaptation didn’t quite make the Hunger Games standard.

To be fair, the book is nearly unfilmable as written. It’s told in the style of The Good War, an oral history of World War II by Studs Terkel. World War Z (book) is written after a global zombie pandemic/attack/war. It’s narrator is a UN rep who is compiling reports on the war from around the globe. In a neat literary trick, while the narrator appears in every chapter — he actually interviews the survivors — we never even know his name, or much else about him. This allows the focus to be on the individual stories throughout the book.

And the stories are gripping. We hear from normal folks who have to bury their pain to soldiers who relay harrowing tales of near death to higher-ups who reflect on the war from a matter-of-fact perspective. Max Brooks excelled at writing these micro-tales that not only have genuine human drama, but combine facts on worldwide culture and geopolitics. Brooks covers nearly every facet of the global war and its aftermath, including the new world order that results. It’s fascinating to see how Russia has become a theocracy, Cuba is a capitalist powerhouse, Israel and Palestine finally live in peace, and China is a democracy.

The movie version of World War Z. goes in a different direction. The hero (Hollywood loves its heroes) is Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt). He is a former UN investigator who gets caught up in the zombie outbreak in Philadelphia with his wife and daughters. After a close escape from a Newark rooftop, Lane and his family are flown to a ship, where Lane is called back to duty to help a CDC scientist search for a cure. This search takes Lane (and the viewer) to South Korea, Israel, and Wales.

The movie tried to stay true to the book in the sense that it was a global story. It was exciting to travel to those locations, even if the plot felt forced. For instance, I was unsure as to why Wales, in particular.

But while the book was one of my favorite reads, it did lack that central human character, and that’s the role that Gerry Lane served.

The movie also improved the book in its use of zombies. These were not the slow, ambling (though still menacing) zombies that we’re used to ,and which Brooks used. These zombies were lightning fast. The opening scene of Lane’s escape in the Philly streets was outstanding. The swarm happens in real time. It’s intense. There’s nothing like that in the book, though to be fair, it’s much easier to relay menace on film than in a book. And the scene with the zombie swarm scaling the wall in Jerusalem is a classic.

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Still, the movie couldn’t quite match the book in its scope. And as with most action movies, it stretched my belief nearly to the breaking point. A zombie outbreak on a plane results in a too-neat escape that could never happen in real life. Also, in the movie, the Israelis survived because they spotted the threat before any other country and walled themselves off. Yet they didn’t realize that noise would attract the zombies? The movie turned one of the most hopeful parts of the book — a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace — into a tragedy.

In short, there were too many harrowing escapes for Pitt, and the last act in Wales nearly put me to sleep.

My recommendation — read the book if nothing else. Then see the movie, at the very least for it’s amazing visual effects. I hear there are sequels to the movie planned. Hopefully they figure out how to add more of the book’s heart.

Crime and punishment – sci-fi to sci-fact?

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A near eternal hell on earth for felons? Maybe, if these scientists are to be believed.

Imagine a drug that, when given to a prisoner, would make him believe that a thousand years have passed in the matter of months. Imagine the hell of living for a thousand years in a jail cell, whether real or imagined.

We can argue over whether some crimes are so vicious that the perpetrators would deserve this treatment. But if scientists at Oxford University are right, this will soon be a reality.

And there’s more. The scientists quoted in this article also claim that life extension will allow a prisoner to be kept alive — and punished — for centuries. Or, criminals’ minds could be uploaded into a computer where they would serve hundreds of years in time.

Let’s take it for granted that this isn’t mere speculation but a possibility. Do we want to do this? Does this fall into the category of cruel and unusual punishment? And why would we want to invest so much money and time into keeping these criminals around indefinitely?

But what about another take on this? Even if these technologies never come to pass, imagine the possibilities in the sci-fi realm. Criminal minds uploaded that escape and roam free in the digital world. A killer kept alive for a millennium who escapes. A wrongly convicted man given a pill who lives a lifetime in a matter of days.

At least this kind of speculation is good fodder for fiction.

Can you really laugh while watching sci-fi/horror?

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Sometimes humor can cut the tension and seriousness, but it’s rarely done well.

I love most things horror and sci-fi related. But it can all get so heavy. Horror is basically about ghosts, witches, demons, vampires, etc. And as for sci-fi, well… science isn’t very funny. Scientists take what they do so damn seriously sometimes. Most times. Ok, 99% of the time.

In the fictional world there seems to be a stark divide. On one hand, there’s the hardcore, where pinhead2you never laugh, except maybe unintentionally. Take Hellraiser‘s Pinhead. There is nothing funny about him. Compare that with the comedies — Spaceballs, Scary Movie 1 to infinity. Those play it only for laughs.

But then along come those rare shows that can balance drama with comedy.

The first one that comes to mind is the iconic series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At its core it was a tragedy: a teenage girl is chosen (against her will) to become a vampire slayer. These girls rarely see their 18th birthday. Fun, right?

Well, head writer and creator Joss Whedon and Buffy herself — Sarah Michelle Gellar — made it fun. The writing was sharp and clever and the jokes would fly.

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But Buffy the Vampire Slayer never let you forget the tragedy at its core.

Another example is from the SyFy channel (or SciFi as it was called back then). Farscape was about John Chrichton (Ben Browder), an American astronaut who is shot through a wormhole to a thoroughly alien part of the universe. He accidentally kills the brother of a psychotic military captain, and winds up aligned with a band of escaped convicts. He spends the series on the run while trying to get back to Earth.

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Farscape could be heavy, and many times it was. But Chrichton was written as a loose cannon, confounding his adopted compatriots for better and for worse. He was often serious as hell. But he was also funny, sharp and crafty.

I think we need more of this in these genres. Take time travel. Most of the time travel movies are 100% serious (the Terminator franchise). The only non-serious time travel movie I can think of is Hot Tub Time Machine. But that’s straight up comedy.

But there could be alternatives. I came across this short clip below, courtesy of io9.com. It takes place in a world where time travel is common, and is used by drunken assholes. It’s clever, and it left me thinking… what if? What if someone could successfully inject humor into time travel, while keeping the drama?

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/70410780″>Timeholes</a&gt; from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/mallaby”>Ben Mallaby</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

I’m waiting, Hollywood.

On writing: race and the universal

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I write about outsiders, mainly — characters who, in one way or another, are cut off from humanity at large, often in ways that aren’t obvious.

Take Danny, for instance, in my supernatural story Always Mine. He’s 15, plays for his high school lacrosse team, and he fits in well enough at school. He’s a good looking white suburban kid. Nothing wrong with his life, right? No, except that his mother is physically abusive and depressive, and his father is deployed to Iraq during the height of the conflict. He is alienated in ways that are hidden, even to himself. That makes it easy for him to fall for Tina, the new girl next door, who uses her Ouija board for not-so-good purposes.

As with Danny, many of my protagonists have been white (and male), in part because that has been my experience, so it’s easy to climb into that skin. But I enjoy writing heroes who are neither of those. Take Randy Velazquez. He’s the star of my book The Last Conquistador. His Hispanic heritage is vital to the story, but for him, it’s just a mundane fact of his life. He doesn’t strongly identify with it, and he doesn’t have the time for it to be an issue, between trying to track down his pregnant runaway girlfriend and dodging a creepy demon.

And a story I’m working on now centers around a 14-year-old Chinese-American girl, Mina. Her ethnic background is secondary to the story. So how do I, as a white guy, approach writing Hispanic or Native American or Asian or African-American characters? Simple, actually. I write them as human beings. My philosophy in writing any character is to get to their common human essence first, and then go from there.

But there seems to be a lot of reluctance to do this, especially in the world of movies and television. Too often nonwhite actors play roles that can only be played by nonwhite actors. It’s rare that you get a Will Smith in I Am Legend. That’s a shame for all of us, because it limits all of our imaginations.

A fellow Jersey City writer, Madhuri Blaylock, wrote a great novel titled The Sanctum: Book One: The Girl. It’s a paranormal thriller that follows Dev, a half angel/half demon teenage girl who is kick-ass. Dev, in a matter-of-factly way, is African American. Blaylock scored a hit with Dev because she wrote her from a place of universal experience. There is no preaching or educating, just entertaining. In a lot of ways, Dev reminded me of Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games in that she was 100% relatable. You do not have to be female, black or a teenager to follow Dev as she fights the forces of the Sanctum. Plus, her love interest Wyatt is white; it’s about time we’re moving past the point of interracial relationships being any kind of issue. I highly recommend checking out this thrilling book.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe there’s a place–even a need–for stories unique to gender, culture, age, race, sexuality and religion. But there’s also a need for people who are any or all of the above to be universally relatable. None of those qualities should matter all that much in our day-to-day lives. As writers we can make it so, at least in our fictional worlds.

Helix spins a tantalizing, twisted tale

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The SyFy Channel’s latest original series Helix, which airs Friday nights in the US, is turning out to be a multilayered labyrinth of a show.

When SyFy first began promoting Helix, I was captivated by the (literally) mind-blowing poster.Since then, I tried toHelix- 1 unravel what exactly it was about. Zombies? Scientific procedural? Lost-style isolation tale?

Several episodes in, I’m still not sure exactly what this science-heavy show all about, and that’s half the fun.

To recap the set-up, a team of CDC scientists is flown in to a Helix - Season 1remote Arctic lab to contain a mysterious viral outbreak. Once there, they are trapped. Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell) is the lead scientist, and his brother Peter is one of the Arctic lab’s scientists, who also happens to be infected. Alan Farragut’s team includes his ex-wife Julia Walker, who had an affair with Peter. Soapy and confusing. Luckily this aspect of the story has taken a backburner as the plot churns on.

The series is getting a lot right.

–We know the outbreak was engineered by lab head Hiroshi Hatake (Hiroyuke Sanada, a Lost alum), but we’re not sure what exactly it is, or why it was created.

–The writers on Helix aren’t afraid to play rough with the characters. No one is safe. Farragut and Hatake isolated scores of researchers they suspected were infected, giving them essentially a death sentence.

–Major characters are also at risk. I was shocked what happened to Doreen Boyle, a member of Farragut’s team. Likewise, big bad Constance Sutton (played by Star Trek: Voyager‘s Teri Ryan) proved less threatening in the end than she seemed. (And I loved the scene of her filing her own teeth down. Why??).

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–Julia Walker, Farragut’s ex-wife, could have been an annoying distraction. Instead she’s become fascinating. Infected by the virus, then mysteriously “cured” by Hatake, Helix eyesshe’s revealed depth and determination. Adding to the mystery – is she really Hatake’s daughter? And what exactly has she become?

–One of my favorite characters on Helix is Major Sergio Ballaseros (Mark Ghanime). He’s duplicitous, murderous, and maybe even a touch remorseful. It’s a great portrayal of a mostly bad, complex character.Helix - Season 1

–Likewise, Hatake isn’t quite the villain he seemed. He reminds me of Lost‘s Ben Linus – a flawed man for whom the ends justify the means. His motivation is still unknown. It’s compelling to watch.

Another interesting aspect of the show is technical: the editing and the music. The scenes often seem a little off. They cut away too early, or they come in and out of focus, which keeps you slightly disoriented. It’s hard to understand without watching it;  this article at TV.com explains it better than I can. And the music choices, well, just watch the opening credits, with the 1960s bossa nova soundtrack.

I’ve referenced Lost a few times. That’s because Helix is similar to Lost in key ways. The mysteries unfold gradually, and the layers are onion-like. Character motivation is always in question, and the isolation heightens the drama. While it doesn’t have the emotional impact that Lost had, Helix is proving to be a fun addition to the sci-fi universe.

Fictional faces brought to “life”

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One artist is translating writers’ descriptions of their fictional characters. The results are jarring.

For me, half the fun in reading a book is imagining it in my mind’s eye. Sometimes I get a clear image of the characters; other times the image is hazy as the action takes control. Either way, I’m engaged in creating this world in my own imagination with the blueprint that the writer provided.

Brian Joseph Davis has taken some of the best known — beloved and infamous — literary characters and created sketches of them using law-enforcement composite sketch software. He’s compiled the sketches, and the original descriptions, on his website The Composites.

Take Mr. Wednesday, one of the major characters in Neil Gaiman’s classic novel American Gods.

As described by Gaiman:

“Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him…He grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all…His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes…The man’s craggy smile did not change…There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other…humorless grin…Wednesday’s glass eye… He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man.”

And as visualized by Davis?

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That’s not how I pictured Mr. Wednesday in my head. To me he was older, craggier, beefier.

There’s more on Davis’ website. Here’s Marla Singer, from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, as Palahniuk describes her:

“My power animal is Marla…Black hair and pillowy French lips. Faker. Italian dark leather sofa lips…Marla stares up at me. Her eyes are brown. Her earlobes pucker around earring holes, no earrings…She actually felt alive. Her skin was clearing up…Marla never has any fat of her own, and her mom figures that familial collagen would be better than Marla ever having to use the cheap cow kind…Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of dark roses…Her black hair whipping my face…The color of Marla’s brown eyes is like an animal that’s been heated in a furnace and dropped into cold water. They call that vulcanized or galvanized or tempered.”

And here’s Davis’ image.

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My favorite of Davis’ images is the one that captures a different view of a classic character. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley describes the monster as:

“Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing… but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

And here he is:

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With all the Hollywood depictions of the Monster as monstrous, it’s easy to forget that he was not created to be hideous.

As a reader and a writer, I’m not a fan of over-description. In my book The Last Conquistador, I tried to be sparse but concise in my descriptions of the characters. For instance, the protagonist Randy describes his wayward girlfriend Lise as “solid and shapely, like the kid sister of a truck stop waitress.” I wanted to seed a broad image in the reader’s mind.

In Always Mine, Danny, the young hero, meets the stepfather of Tina, the mysterious girl next door that he has a crush on. How do I describe Bob? Using just a few key images:

“He shook Danny’s hand rough and hard. He was meaty with a walrus mustache, and he glared as if Danny harbored bad intentions for his daughter.”

While I prefer the less is more approach, after browsing through Davis’ website and comparing the writers’ words with the sketches produced, I have a greater appreciation for those writers who are meticulous in crafting their characters. It’s fascinating to see how writers shape the worlds we create in our minds.