Thoughts on serials and ebook pricing

18. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles, SW-V: Dreamweaver, SW-V: Reproach, SW-VI: Benefactor · Tags: , , , , , , ,

I’m going to do something potentially dangerous and discuss pricing strategies in a rather candid way.  I may risk turning off some of my potential readers, especially the ones who don’t like shorter works, but I want to be as open and transparent as I can, since I figure it’s only fair, especially to someone who’s just getting started with my books.

First of all, let me just say that if I could, I would make all my books free and write for love instead of money.  The trouble, though, is that I have to eat, and at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future I’m going to have to feed a wife and children as well.  If I made all my books free right now, I would have to spend all my time and energy doing something other than writing, and as a result there would be far fewer books for you to read.

In the last year, I’ve discovered that the best way to make money self-publishing is to write in series, preferably at a short enough length that you can release a new installment every other month.  A lot of other writers are discovering this, which is why there is such an explosion of series and serials.

I know a lot of readers don’t like this.  And when a writer takes a perfectly good novel and splits it arbitrarily into parts, each one without a solid arc or story structure to hold it together, I get a little bit ticked as well.  But the reality is that if you can tell a story in a series of short, self-contained novellas rather than a single novel, it will probably meet with better commercial success.

The price points for novellas are kind of tricky, though.  For anything priced below $2.99, Amazon takes 65%, whereas from $2.99 to $9.99, the self-publisher takes 70%.  To give that some perspective, you would have to sell 10x the number of copies at $.99 to earn as much on one sale of a book at $4.99, and 6x for a book at $2.99.

The trouble, of course, is that for a series where each installment is priced at $2.99, the readers may end up paying a lot more, depending on the lengths of the story arcs and the size of each installment.  Novellas are kind of in a gray area, where $.99 seems kind of cheap for that much story, but three or four installments at $2.99 really add up–especially with so many other ebooks priced at $5 or below.

Now, I’d like to believe that most readers judge the value of a story by its quality and not by its word count, or by how much they have to pay per word.  There are books like City of the Saints that I don’t mind buying in $2.99 increments at all.  At the same time, though, I think there’s something to be said about keeping prices fair.

This is all on my mind right now because I’m getting ready to release the first Star Wanderers omnibus and expand that series considerably over the next year.  It’s the series that sells best out of any of my books, and the one with the most potential to make it so that I can go full time.  Plus, I really love writing in this universe, and have a lot more stories in it to tell.

Right now, this is the pricing structure I’m following:

  1. Outworlder — free (15,000 words)
  2. Fidelity — $.99 (17,000 words)
  3. Sacrifice — $2.99 (19,000 words)
  4. Homeworld — $2.99 (20,000 words)
  5. Dreamweaver — $2.99 (19,000 words)

Parts I through IV make a complete story arc, though of course each individual novella is a self-contained story on its own.  With Part I at free and Part II at $.99, I figure readers have a good way to figure out if these are the kinds of stories that they’ll want to read.  But if I keep pricing the stories at $2.99, at some point this series is going to get really expensive.

So here’s what I plan to do to alleviate that:

1) Make new releases free to newsletter subscribers.

For every Star Wanderers story up to this point, I’ve made it free for the first two weeks on Smashwords and given that code out through my email newsletter.  I did that originally as an incentive to get people to sign up for my newsletter, but I think it’s a good series strategy as well.  This way, if someone discovers Star Wanderers now, they can buy all the previous installments at the higher $2.99 price point and look forward to receiving any future installments for free.

Some may question the business sense of giving away free books to readers who are willing to buy them, but the way I see it, the fans are the ones who are selling these books, not me.  I’m willing to put a free book in the hands of someone who already loves the series, and is more likely to write a glowing review or to share it with a friend.  And since sales of this series continue to grow, that strategy would seem to be paying off (or at the very least, it’s not biting me in the ass).

2) Try to put more story into each individual installment.

If $2.99 seems a lot for a short novella, then maybe I need to expand on them, with things like extra subplots and viewpoint characters.  Of course I don’t want the stories to feel like they’re padded, but if I can enrich the story in a way that really adds to it, then that’s certainly something that I should do.

For all of the Star Wanderers series so far, each novella is told from the point of view of just one character.  This sort of focus can be good, because it really gets me into the head of that character.  However, sometimes it’s also good to play things off of another character’s story, both to act as a foil and to provide contrast.

That’s what I’m doing with Reproach (Part VII) right now.  It’s not just from Mariya’s point of view, but Noemi’s as well, and that adds a lot to the tension as you see their competing motives and the way their views of the world really clash.  It’s delicious.  Benefactor (Part VI) is just from Jakob’s viewpoint, just because I wanted the story to really focus on his character, but most of the other stories kicking around in my head have room for at least another viewpoint character without taking away from the spirit of the series itself.

3) Price the omnibus editions less than the sum of their parts.

For someone who is just getting started with Star Wanderers, $2.99 might seem like a lot to pay to get caught up.  That’s only going to get more daunting as the series gets longer.  For that reason, I’m inclined to price the omnibus editions much lower–at least $4.95, which is the price of one of my novels.  At 70,000 words or so for Parts I-IV, that seems only fair.

I am a bit worried that sales of the individual novellas will drop off once I release the omnibus, but I figure if I’m constantly releasing new ones, those should cover the slack.  Since Dreamweaver (Part V) is already out, and Benefactor (Part VI) will be out in another month or so, new readers who come in through the omnibus will have more than enough to keep them coming back.

The other benefit of doing it this way is that it reduces the chance that readers will drop out midway through the story arc.  It seems that a few of them are doing that, or at least taking a while to get from Part II to Part III to Part IV, etc.  By having them all in one omnibus and encouraging readers to buy that instead of the individual parts, hopefully they’ll have more of a chance to get hooked, making it all the more likely that they’ll keep coming back.

So that’s my plan, at least for now.  When The Jeremiah Chronicles comes out next week, I’ll price it on parity with my other novels, even though that’s somewhat less than all the individual parts.  I’ll make all new Star Wanderers novellas free for my newsletter subscribers, and do what I can to enrich them with extra viewpoints and subplots (without just padding them, of course).  This way, I hope my readers won’t feel like I’m ripping them off, and I’ll still have a good shot of making a decent living at this.

With the way things have been going, I’m actually really excited.  The slow build approach is working, and if it keeps up then I think I may be making enough to go full-time by this time next year.  I’ll be sure to keep you posted as things come along.

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or comments, please don’t hesitate to share.  I’m still thinking this issue through, and there’s a lot I have left to learn.  In fact, I feel like I’m only just starting to figure it out, so any other perspectives on this topic would be much appreciated!

Update on STAR WANDERERS and a sneak peek at some cover art

17. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles · Tags: , , , , ,

So in case you didn’t know, I’ve been getting an omnibus edition ready for Star Wanderers.  It’s subtitled The Jeremiah Chronicles, and contains parts I-IV (Outworlder, Fidelity, Sacrifice, and Homeworld).  This covers the first major series arc, with all of the stories from Jeremiah’s point of view–hence the title.

I commissioned Ina Wong from Deviant Art for the cover, and this the result:

JV4 COMP

I must say, I’m rather pleased.  It’s got a very different feel from the current space photography covers, but I think this is a lot truer to the actual story.  I can’t commission art like this for the individual installments, of course, but for an omnibus edition, I figure it’s alright to go all out.

The only content in the omnibus that isn’t already in parts I-IV will be the author’s note, which I’ll either post here or include as a PDF to my newsletter subscribers.  In other words, don’t worry about missing out on anything if you’ve already read the individual installments.

I’m getting feedback from my alpha readers for Benefactor, the next part in the series, so I’ll probably release that one in the next six weeks.  In the meantime, I’ve picked up work on Reproach again (Part VII), and hope to finish the first draft before the end of the month.

Just as Dreamweaver is a parallel novella to Outworlder (from Noemi’s POV), Benefactor is a parallel novella to Fidelity (from Jakob’s POV) and Reproach is a parallel novella to Sacrifice (from Noemi and Mariya’s POVs).  After that, I’ll do a parallel novella to Homeworld with Lucca and Mariya as the main POV characters, and then branch out into some other characters and storylines.

The fun part about writing this series is that each new story seeds at least two or three others.  I just wish I could keep up!

I haven’t abandoned Lifewalker, but I did reach a point where I figured it would be good to take a short break just to keep things fresh.  My creative process seems to work that way.  As much as I’d like to train myself to stay on project until it was finished, creativity can’t be trained so much as fostered.  I set myself a deadline to finish something by May 31st, so now it looks like that’s going to be Reproach.

As for The Jeremiah Chronicles, all I have left is to write the author’s note and book description.  It should be out on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords by this time next week.  In the meantime, I’ll keep working on Reproach so you guys can have plenty more stories to read!

Chance to win GENESIS EARTH and SW-II: FIDELITY

15. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Genesis Earth, Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles

In case you didn’t know, my fellow indie author and KBoards member Elle Casey has put together a book giveaway, and she was kind enough to include a couple of my books in it.  If you would like a chance to win a free ebook copy of Genesis Earth or Star Wanderers: Fidelity (Part II), head over to her blog and check it out.  I’m giving away 10 electronic copies of each title, but I’m only one author of many so if you sign up for my books there’s a very good chance you’ll win one.

The giveaway has a lot of different kinds of books, but they trend more toward YA and New Adult (a recently coined categorization that eludes me).  Out of all my books, Genesis Earth and Star Wanderers seemed like the titles that fit best, so those were the ones I chose.  But there are a lot of others to choose from, with no limit on how many you sign up for, so feel free to take your pick!

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the last day of the promotion, so be sure to act quick!

Post A to Z update

04. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Lifewalker, Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles · Tags: , , , ,

So, the A to Z challenge is over, and it’s back to things as usual.  I hope you guys enjoyed it–I’ll probably compile the posts at some point, update them to add some more examples and references, and put it out as a $2.99 ebook.  When I get around to it, that is.  If that’s something that interests any of you, let me know and I’ll get it up sooner.

As far as writing goes, I just went back to work on Lifewalker yesterday, and the story is coming along swimmingly.  This is the post-apocalyptic story about a guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn.  I checked with Peter and Brandon about that, and they said it’s okay.  In fact, they think it’s hilarious.  And it is, I suppose, though the book takes itself fairly seriously.

Just to give you an idea what I’m talking about, here’s an excerpt:

The first night, I stayed in a small village known as Sannakin. The people there were surprisingly friendly, though they assured me that they would have been more cautious if I had come from the south.

“What’s south of here?” I asked the village patriarch over dinner.

He shrugged. “Don’t know—never been that way. Get a lot of tinkers, though, and a merchant ever now and again. There’s people out there, that’s for sure—but it’s a wild and a dangerous country.”

I paid them for their hospitality by reading from Mistborn: The Final Empire. The story confused many of them, especially those who had never seen the ruins of a city. I explained to them that the forefathers used to live in great communes of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people. This sparked a vigorous discussion over how such a large community could possibly provide enough food for itself, and how it would handle the waste. Some people asked me if in the days before the Blight, ash covered the sky as it did in my book. I answered that it probably had, though doubtless the author had exaggerated it somewhat for the purposes of the story. This led to an even more vigorous discussion about the merits of fantasy stories in general, with most of the villagers forming a decidedly negative opinion of the genre. I strongly disagreed, of course, but held my tongue so as not to offend my hosts.

Today, I wrote a passage where the main character had to mediate an argument between two scholars over who was the primary god in the forefather’s pantheon: Batman or Superman.  In a few chapters, he’ll rescue a girl from a band of bloodthirsty cannibal slavers infesting in the ruins of Las Vegas.

As you can tell, this book is a lot of fun. :)

As for the publishing side of things, I’m working with an illustrator to get the cover ready for the first Star Wanderers omnibus.  It’s going to be for Parts I through IV, but don’t worry–if you’ve already bought the parts individually, there won’t be any new content except the author’s note.  I’ll either publish that here or send my newspaper subscribers a link for where they can read it.

I’m not sure if anyone really reads the author’s notes at the ends of my books, but I enjoy telling the story behind the story, so I’ll keep doing them.  Besides, I figure some of you have read them, since you’re signing up for my email newsletter and sending me an occasional fan emails.  I really enjoy those, by the way, so thanks for sending them!

That’s just about it for things over here.  In unrelated news, I recently discovered an excellent sci-fi webcomic.  It’s called Freefall, and the archives stretch waaaaay back to 1998 (!!!).  So yeah, I’m going to be busy for a while.

But don’t worry, I’ll still find make time for writing.  I’m doing about 2k words per day right now, so at that rate, the first draft of Lifewalker should be finished before the end of May.

Aaand my roommate wants to sleep, so I’d better get off the computer now.  Later!

W is for Wagon Train to the Stars

26. April 2013 · 4 comments · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles, SW-V: Reproach, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

big_damn_heroes_moment_smallWhen Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek series back in the 60s, Westerns were all the rage.  Consequently, he pitched his show as a “wagon train to the stars,” where a bunch of quirky characters on an awesome starship travel from adventure town to interstellar adventure town, exploring and pioneering the final frontier.

Sound familiar?  Yeah, I thought so.  The concept proved so catchy that it’s been redone time and again, from Battlestar Galactica to Firefly to Doctor Who.  Even though Westerns aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be, many of its tropes are so well suited to Science Fiction that they drive the genre even today.

For example, adventure planets.  In a typical Western, the characters travel from town to town, with a different adventure in each one.  Well, in Science Fiction, the characters do the same thing, except that they’re traveling from planet to planet.  And really, if you’ve got the ability to travel to other worlds, how can you not have an adventure in each one?

A large reason for the Western / Science Fiction crossover is the whole concept of space as the final frontier, which we explored earlier in this series with I is for Interstellar.  There’s a very real sense of manifest destiny in the space exploration community, not because of humano-ethnocentrism (heck, we don’t even know we’re not alone in our local stellar neighborhood), but to ensure humanity’s long-term survival.  The parallels between that and the westward movement in 19th century America aren’t perfect, but they do exist.

Similarly, as we explored in R is for Rebel, the notion of space as the final frontier has a special resonance with the American audience.  The days of the old frontier may be over, but its spirit lives on in our culture, from guns to road trips to our glorification of the rugged, self-made individual.  Today’s Science Fiction, especially the space-focused SF of Space Opera, grew out of the adventure fiction of the pulps, which thrived on that frontier American ethos.

In fiction, the frontier can still be found in two major genres: the Western, which is historical and therefore more backward-looking, and Science fiction, which is futuristic and therefore more forward-looking.  Because Science Fiction isn’t burdened with all of the historical baggage of the traditional Western, it’s a much more flexible medium for story, readily adaptable to contemporary issues and concerns.

For example, where Star Trek echoes the large-scale nation to nation conflicts of the Cold War (Federation vs. Klingons and Romulans), the new Battlestar Galactica series echoes the much more asymmetrical conflicts of the post-9/11 world (Cylon agents who are indistinguishable from humans and may not even know that they are cylons).  At the same time, the wholesale co-opting of Western tropes enables a latent sense of nostalgia, evident in the look and feel of Firefly, or the famous opening lines from Star Wars: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

My first real experience with a wagon train to the stars type of story was probably Star Trek: Voyager, which I watched religiously with my dad every Wednesday night until maybe 9th or 10th grade.  The Western-borrowed tropes are somewhat more muted in that series, but they exist, especially the planetville / adventure towns stuff.  However, it wasn’t until Firefly and Serenity that I really experienced the awesomeness of a true Space Western.  There were a lot of things in Firefly that I really loved, especially the character interactions, the gun-toting action scenes, and especially the starship Serenity.  There were some things I didn’t like so much, like the fact that every planet is basically Wyoming, but overall I really enjoyed the show.

It wasn’t until I started getting more acquainted with straight-up Westerns that I saw the real potential for crossover between the genres.  Stories about mountain men like Jeremiah Johnson really captured my imagination–what would this look like if it were set in space?  In that sense, I came to the Space Western more from the classic Science Fiction side first, rather than the pulp adventure stuff.  But once I discovered the crossover connection, it naturally found a way into my own work.

That’s basically how the story idea for Star Wanderers first came to me.  I was lying on my bed, daydreaming about having my own starship like the Serenity, when I wondered what it would be like for a starship pilot to get roped into an accidental marriage like in the movie Jeremiah Johnson?  The collision between the two ideas was like a supernova exploding in my brain.  I rolled out of bed and started writing, coming up with chapter one of Outworlder almost exactly like it’s written today.  And the more invested I became in those characters and that world, the more the story grew.  I’m writing Part VII right now (Reproach, from Noemi and Mariya’s POV), and so long as people read them I’ll keep writing more.

Genre mash-ups and crossovers are a great way to keep things fresh and come up with some really interesting stories.  Some genres aren’t very well suited for each other (Erotica and Middle Grade, for example), but others come together so well that they seem almost complementary.  That certainly seems to be the case with Westerns and Science Fiction, at least here in the United States where the spirit of the frontier still echoes through the popular culture.

More »

V is for Vast

25. April 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Genesis Earth, Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles · Tags: , , , , , ,

Pale_Blue_Dot

If you don’t know anything else about the universe, you should know this: it’s big.  Really, really, REALLY big.

How big, you ask?  Well, for starters, take a look at Earth in the picture above.  Can you see it?  It’s the pale blue dot in the beam of starlight on the right side of the picture.  As Carl Sagan so famously put it:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The picture was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft more than a decade ago.  At the time, the spacecraft was about 6,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth, or 5.56 light-hours.  A light-hour is the distance a particle of light can travel in one hour (assuming it’s traveling through a vacuum).  To give you some sense of scale, in one light-second, a particle of light can travel around the circumference of the Earth seven and a half times.

And lest you think that’s actually a distance of any cosmic significance, consider this: the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away.  That’s more than 6,500 times the distance in the photograph above–and that’s just the closest star!

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is between 100,000 to 120,000 light-years across.  If you were on the other side of the galaxy and had a telescope powerful enough to get a good view of Earth, you would see a gigantic ice sheet over both of the poles with no visible sign of humanity whatosever.  The light from all our cities, from our prehistoric ancestors’ campfires, has not yet traveled more than a fraction of the distance across this galactic island universe we call home.

Seriously, the universe is huge.  If you don’t believe me, download Celestia and take yourself for a spin.  In case you haven’t heard of it, Celestia is basically like Google Earth, except for the universe.  Everything is to scale, and there are all sorts of plugins and mods for exoplanets, nebulae, space probes, and other fascinating celestial objects.

I remember what it was like when I first tried out Celestia back in 2010.  I was at the Barlow Center for the BYU Washington Seminar program, in the little library just below the dorms.  I think it was twilight or something, and I hadn’t yet turned on the lights.  The building had a bit of that Northeast feel to it, like something old and rickety (though not as old as some of the buildings up here in New England).  I turned off the ambient light option to make it look more realistic, and began to zoom out.

Let me tell you, the chills I got as the Milky Way disappeared to blackness were like nothing I’ve felt ever since.  So much space, so much emptiness.  It’s insane.  The vastness between stars is just mind boggling–absolutely mind-boggling.

I got my first introduction to science fiction when I saw Star Wars IV: A New Hope as a seven year old boy.  In the next few years, I think I checked out every single Star Wars novel in our local library’s collection.  It wasn’t enough.  Whenever I was on an errand with my mom, I tried to pick up a new one.  I think they even left some copies of the Young Jedi Knight series under my pillow when I lost my last few baby teeth.

One of those summers, we drove down to Texas for a family vacation.  I picked up the second Star Wars book in the Corellian trilogy, written by Roger Allen McBride.  It was completely unlike any of the other Star Wars books I’d ever read.  In it, Han Solo’s brother leads a terrorist organization in the heart of their home system of Corellia.  They hijack an ancient alien artifact and use it to set up a force field that makes it impossible for anyone to enter hyperspace within a couple of light hours from the system sun.  The part that blew my mind was that without FTL tech, it would take the good guys years to get to the station with the terrorists.

All of a sudden, the Star Wars universe didn’t seem so small anymore.  And it only got crazier.  Roger Allen McBride did an excellent job getting across the true vastness of space.  At one point, Admiral Ackbar mused on just how puny their wars must seem to the stars, which measure their lifespans in the billions of years. For the ten year old me, it was truly mind boggling.

That was my first taste of science fiction that went one step beyond the typical melodrama of most space opera.  And once I had that taste, I couldn’t really stop.  As much as I love a good space adventure, real-life astronomy offers just as much of a sense of wonder.  When a good author combines the classic tropes of science fiction in a space-based setting that captures the true vastness of this universe we live in, it’s as delicious as chocolate cake–more so, even.

I try to capture a bit of that in my own fiction, though I’m not always sure how much I succeed.  In Star Wanderers, the vastness of space is especially significant for the characters because their FTL tech is so rudimentary that it still takes months to travel between stars.  All of that time out in the void can really make you feel lonely–or, if you have someone to share it with, it can bring you closer together than almost anything else.  It’s the same in Genesis Earth, which is also about a boy and a girl who venture into the vastness alone.  The Gaia Nova books lean closer to the action/adventure side of space opera, but the same sensibility is still there.

The best science fiction, in my opinion, both deepens and broadens our relationship with this marvelous place we call the universe.  It’s not just a fantastic setting for the sake of a fantastic setting–it’s the universe that we actually live in, or at least a plausible version of it set in a parallel or future reality.  The universe is an amazing, beautiful place, and my appreciation for it only grows the more science fiction I read.  If I can get that across in my own books, then I know that I’ve done something right.

More »

U is for Universal Translator

24. April 2013 · 7 comments · Categories: Bringing Stella Home, Novellas & Novelettes, Novels, Sholpan, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles, Uncategorized · Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In science fiction, whenever two characters from different planets or different alien races have to interact with each other, they almost always speak the same language or have some sort of universal translator that magically makes them able to communicate with minimal misunderstandings.  This is especially common in Star Trek, though it happens in just about every franchise involving a far-future space opera setting of some kind.

I’ve got to be honest, I think this is a cheap plot device that almost always weakens the story.  As a writer, it’s tempting to have something like this so you don’t have to deal with any pesky language barriers, but when you do this, you remove a major potential source of conflict, thus violating the rule of drama.  Also, you make your fictional universe feel a little less grand, your aliens a little less alien.  After all, if everyone can perfectly understand each other, then there must not be a huge difference between Earth and the far side of the galaxy.

There are some times when having a universal translator allows you to broaden the story and focus on other conflicts.  For example, if some sort of interstellar legislation is under review in the grand galactic council, you can’t spend all your time focusing on basic communication difficulties.

However, if this is the case, then you can usually overcome the language barrier through other means–a galactic lingua franca, for example, or translation tools that may or may not misfire on occasion (much like Google Translate).  Of course, if you’re writing a comedy like Galaxy Quest (or parts of Star Control II), then falling back on a universal translator is forgivable.  But if you’re going for believability and a sense of wonder, this trope isn’t going to do you any favors.

While linguists and technologists have been working on translation programs for some time (and admittedly making some significant breakthroughs), I’m extremely skeptical that we will ever develop a perfect universal translator in real life.  If we do, I expect we will have to develop a sentient AI as a prerequisite, since the nuances of language are so inseparable from the things that make us human.

Here’s how translation services like Google Translate work:

  1. They amass an enormous database of language material by scanning websites, newspapers, and other documents.
  2. They analyze this database to look at word combinations and frequencies, observing the likelihood that any one word will appear in combination with any others.
  3. They compare these combinations and frequencies with those in other language databases to match words and phrases.

This data crunch method of translation works fairly well for simple words and phrases, but it falls apart in the more complex grammatical structures.  I see this any time I try to use Google Translate with an Arabic source.  Arabic is an extremely eloquent language, with all sorts of structures that simply don’t work in English.  One mistranslated word can completely change the meaning of the entire text, and even when it works, the technically correct English translation sounds as if it’s full of errors.

The methodology also falls apart for languages that are too small to have much of an electronic database.  The Georgian language is a good example of this.  It’s spoken by only about 4.5 million people worldwide, most of them in the country of Georgia, which is predominantly rural.  Internet access for most of the population is very limited, and most Georgians who do communicate online tend to use the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets more often than their own.  As a result, Google Translate for Georgian is utterly useless–seriously, you’re better off just sounding out the letters and guessing at the meaning.  There are some other sites like translate.ge that try to fill the gap, but they seem to rely on actual lexicons, not databases and algorithms.

All of this is between entirely human languages that developed in parallel on the same planet–indeed, languages between human cultures that have traded and shared linguistic influences for thousands of years.  What happens when we encounter an alien race whose biology makes it impossible for them to make human-sounding noises?  Or an alien race that communicates through smell or electromagnetic impulses instead of sound?  What happens when humanity is spread out across hundreds of star systems, each of which periodically becomes isolated from the others for hundreds or even thousands of years?  When our definition of human is stretched so thin that we would not even recognize our far-future descendents as anything but alien?

There is so much wasted potential whenever a science fiction story falls back on a universal translator.  Case in point, compare Halo I, II, and III with Halo: Reach.  In the first three games, the Master Chief’s universal translator enables him to hear exactly what the enemy Covenant troops are saying.  This is great fun when you’re chasing down panicked grunts, but it tends to get old after a while.  In Halo: Reach, however, the human forces haven’t yet developed a universal translator, so everything the Covenant say is in their original language.  All of a sudden, the game went from a hilarious joyride to a serious war against aliens that felt truly alien.  That one little change did wonders to the tone and feel of the entire game.

Needless to say, you won’t find a universal translator in any of my books.  In Star Wanderers, the language barrier is the heart and soul of the story–it’s a science fiction romance between two characters from radically different worlds who don’t speak the same language, and yet overcome that to develop a strong and healthy relationship.  In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, Stella knows a language that is fairly similar to the one spoken by the Hameji, but there are still words and phrases that elude her.  This detail is critical because it impedes her ability to understand and adapt to the Hameji culture, leading to some major conflicts later in the book.

As someone who’s lived for significant periods of time in Europe and Asia and learned languages very different from English, I can say that the language barrier is not something that we as writers should avoid, but something that we should embrace.  There are so many interesting stories that can be told when two characters don’t speak the same language.  Please, don’t be lazy and write that out of the story through a cheap plot device!  Let your aliens be truly alien, and your worlds and cultures so fantastic that we can’t help but feel hopelessly lost in them. More »

T is for Terraforming

23. April 2013 · 5 comments · Categories: Novellas & Novelettes, SW I-IV: The Jeremiah Chronicles · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

[NOTE: this post is a reprint of an earlier post from the Trope Tuesday series, which you can find here.]

The fantasy isn’t that Mars could actually look like this, but that NASA might actually get the funding.

One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought). In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere close (Mars) is a radiation-blasted desert with only the barest hint of an atmosphere and a surface temperature colder than Antarctica. To get around this problem, you can do one of two things: build an artificial enclosed environment to house the colony, or change the world itself to make it more Earthlike–in other words, terraform it.

The actual science of terraforming is way over my head far too complex to do it justice in this post. Instead, I’ll just point you to the Terraforming Wikipedia page as a starting point and focus on how the concept is used as a story trope.

According to tvtropes and Wikipedia, the term came from a 1942 novella by Jack Williamson titled “Collision Orbit.” The concept of changing the environment of an entire planet actually goes back much further, with H.G. Wells subverting the trope in War of the Worlds (instead of humans terraforming other worlds, the hostile Martians try to xenoform Earth to make it habitable for them). Before the U.S. and U.S.S.R. put probes on the surface of Mars and Venus, it was fairly common for writers to speculate that those planets were able to support human life, at least on a basic, rudimentary level. Once the science showed that that isn’t actually the case, terraforming as a story trope really began to take off.

Today, this trope occurs commonly across all ranges of the Mohs scale. Soft sci-fi stories (such as Firefly) use it as an excuse to have planets that look and feel like Earth. Hard sci-fi stories (such as Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) use it as a fundamental premise, or to pose questions like “what is the ultimate destiny of human evolution?” or “how important is it to our species’ survival that we spread out beyond Earth?” Although it’s not something that we as a species have (yet) done, our present science seems to place it well within the range of the plausible, and that means that makes it fair game for any kind of science fiction.

In order to be believable, however, any significant terraforming project requires two things: resources and time. LOTS of time. We’re talking on the order of centuries and millenia here. Because of that, stories that use this trope generally fall into the following categories:

  • The terraforming happened a long time ago and is part of the world’s ancient (or near ancient) history.
  • The terraforming is on-going and directly impacts almost every element of the world’s culture and setting.
  • The terraforming has failed in some way, which may (or may not) make it a key element in the story conflict.

As with generation ships, the scope of this trope spans more than just the interests of a single character–it deals with the ultimate destiny of entire cultures and civilizations. In hard sci-fi stories, the planet that’s being terraformed may actually become more of a character in itself than the individual people who are terraforming it. Unless they have some form of immortality, they have little hope of ever seeing the ultimate end of it.

Of course, that almost makes the project more of a religion to the colonists than a science, with all sorts of interesting philosophical and story implications.

Why is this trope so widespread in science fiction? I can think of a few potential reasons. First, it hits on some of the key issues that lie at the very heart of the genre, such as the ultimate destiny of humanity and the ethical issues surrounding our ability to play God through the wonders of science. Also, it captures the imagination in a way that few other tropes can equal. Because the scope of any terraforming project is so vast, the implications touch on almost every key element of the story, including setting, character, and conflict.

But on an even more fundamental level, it hits on one of the key elements of any fantasy magic system: limitations. We can’t live on an alien world because the conditions are too hostile, but we can’t just wave our hands to make it Earth-like either. We have to undergo a painstaking, laborious process that could unravel at any point and throw everything we’ve worked for into chaos. We have to dedicate our whole lives to the project for dozens of generations before it will ever pay off. There are no shortcuts–none that won’t strain our readers’ suspension of disbelief, anyway. But if it all works out, then we will have created a new Earth–and how is that not magic?

Needless to say, I’m a big fan of this trope. I’ve used it in just about every science fiction story I’ve written, though I probably play with it the most in Star Wanderers. The main character of that story comes from a world where a terraformation project failed, having severe religious implications that drive the whole series. Sacrifice is largely set in orbit around a world that is midway through the terraforming process. Elswhere in the Gaia Nova universe, people build domes just as often to keep humanity from screwing over a terraformed world as they do to provide room to live on one that isn’t. After all this, though, I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this trope. You can definitely expect to see it in my work in the future.

More »

« Older articles