Roger Allen McBride – One Thousand And One Parsecs

2019-10-24 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the October 24th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

There’s this guy I follow on YouTube named Tom Luongo who has a very interesting take on Star Wars: The Last Jedi. According to him, it’s one of the best Star Wars films ever made. I recently got into an online conversation with him about it, so I thought it would be interesting to bring up some of that in this newsletter.

Tom is a radical anarcho-capitalist libertarian who lives on a farm in Florida that he and his wife built. I listen to his political commentary mainly for the contrast. He’s a natural contrarian who tends to fall into the trap of wishcasting, which has really blackpilled him in the last few years. I disagree with him almost all of the time, but he’s got a fascinating take on things, and I think his central thesis is basically correct.

You really should read or listen to Tom’s take on The Last Jedi. His argument goes something like this: the Skywalker-Solo family was always bound to come to a tragic end because the original series never resolved any of their underlying flaws, so in order for anything good to come of the family’s fall, everything built up by the previous generation first needs to come crashing down. Unfortunately, The Last Jedi falls in the midpoint of that arc, when the characters hit their lowest point, which is why so many fans were disappointed with it—just like so many fans of A New Hope were disappointed by The Empire Strikes Back the first time they watched it.

If nothing else, his argument has convinced me to watch The Rise of Skywalker, which I wasn’t planning to do. In fact, after The Last Jedi, I had pretty much checked out of the Star Wars fandom forever.

I discovered Star Wars when I was seven years old and saw A New Hope for the first time. Completely blew me away. My parents made me wait a year and a half to watch Empire Strikes Back, and for the last couple of months I was counting down the days. When I first saw Empire, I was lukewarm on it, but I really liked the Battle of Hoth and Luke’s duel with Vader (strangely, I don’t remember being surprised to learn that Vader was Luke’s father). In later rewatchings, it grew to be not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but my favorite movie of all time. I also loved Return of the Jedi, and felt that it really sticked the landing for the trilogy.

I read all the Star Wars books from the library that I could get my hands on. Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson—but it was Roger Allen McBride’s Corellia Trilogy that really opened my eyes to a different kind of science fiction. Instead of all the flashy lasers and adventurous antics, he used the limitations of physics to depict a universe far more vast and far more ancient than my young, boyish mind had ever dared imagine. I began to branch out to other works of science fiction, and over the next few years I discovered Card, Le Guin, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Burroughs, and all the other greats.

When Phantom Menace came out, it was a huge disappointment. Midichloriens? Jar Jar Binx… ugh. Darth Maul was pretty okay, but the rest of the movie was garbage. But I held out hope that Clone Wars would be better… and it wasn’t. Too much CGI, too little story. The romance was icky, the plot was too slow, and the fight scene with Yoda was a farcical caricature. I was disgusted, but I still saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters, because surely they had to get Vader right… and once again, they failed. Massive disappointment. It was like Lukas had taken a massive dump on my childhood, and was trying to sell it back to me as merchandise.

I cooled off to Star Wars for the next few years. It was never a religion to me. I dabbled a bit with the video games and expanded universe novels, but at this point in my life, I was more of a casual fan. I turned to other works of science fiction and fantasy, and began to pursue my own writing more seriously.

Ever since 4th grade, I always knew I would be a writer. All through high school I had some novel project or another I was working on, but it wasn’t until college that I finished any of them. In 2008, I took Brandon Sanderson’s writing class at BYU and finished my first novel. Incidentally, my wife was in the same class, though it would be another ten years before we met each other.

When The Force Awakens came out, my expectations were low. I didn’t want to get shafted like I had by the prequels. It was probably because of those low expectations that I enjoyed it. Han Solo’s character was utterly ruined, and the plot was little more than a rip-off of A New Hope, but hey, at least it didn’t totally suck! Then Rogue One came out, and it was excellent. On par with the original trilogy. Star Wars was back.

And then, The Last Jedi… green alien breastmilk… Leia Poppins… Admiral Gender Studies… Space Vegas…

Ironically, I think I would have hated it less if Rogue One hadn’t been so good. By the time TLJ came out, I felt like I was on a rollercoaster that was giving me a really bad case of whiplash, and I just wanted it to end. The low points felt so low because the high points were so high, and with TLJ it felt like it was all crashing down again.

At that point, I noped out. No more Star Wars. I was out. The fact that so much of my childhood—and not only that, but my chosen career—was so tied up in the franchise only made it that much more painful.

And then I heard Tom Luongo’s take on The Last Jedi, which has made me rethink some things. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s a great film, but perhaps it’s not as flawed as I thought it was. It really does come down to The Rise of Skywalker. Will it bring the roller-coaster ride to a satisfying conclusion, or will it fling us off the rails the way the prequels did? (“nooooooooooooo!”) I guess we’ll find out in December.

Y is for Yesteryear

They say that the golden age of science fiction is about twelve years old. That’s definitely true for me.

My first exposure to the genre was Star Wars: A New Hope. I saw it when I was seven, right around the height of my dinosaur phase. Everything about the movie completely blew me away, from the Jawas and Sand People of Tatooine to the stormtrooper gunfights and lightsaber duels. After watching Luke blow up the Death Star, I spent the next few hours running around the yard pretending to fly my own starfighter.

In a lot of ways, I’ve never really stopped.

My parents made me wait until I was nine to watch The Empire Strikes back, because it was rated PG. Without any exaggeration, I can say that those were the longest two years of my life. I was literally counting down days by the end, and to pass the time without going crazy, I read up on all the books about space that I could possibly find.

My father bought the original X-wing flight simulator game somewhere around then, and I soon became totally engrossed in it. Since the 386 was our only entertainment system (no Super Nintendo–I had to visit a friend’s house for that), X-wing became the defining game of my childhood. I spent hours and hours on that game, to the point where I knew exactly which simulated missions the characters from the books were flying and how to complete them faster and easier.

I thought The Empire Strikes Back was a little slow the first time I saw it, but it’s since grown on me, to the point where now it’s my favorite film in the whole series. Thankfully, my parents let me watch Return of the Jedi the next day, and for the next few months my life felt utterly complete.

Around this time I discovered the Star Wars novels and soon immersed myself in them. The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton soon became one of my favorites, as well as the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the X-wing series by Michael A. Stackpole.

But it was Roger Allen McBride who first introduced me to a different flavor of science fiction with his Corellia trilogy. As I mentioned in V is for Vast, those books had just enough of a touch of hard science to intrigue me about the other possibilities of the genre. That was the last Star Wars series that I read before branching out into other works of science fiction.

The Tripod trilogy by John Christopher was my first introduction to the dystopian / post-apocalyptic genre, depicting an enslaved humanity after an alien invasion. Those books really captured my imagination for a while. The Giver was also quite interesting and thought provoking, though since it didn’t involve spaceships or aliens it wasn’t nearly as compelling.

I read a lot of fantasy in my early high school years, including Tracy Hickman, Lloyd Alexander, and (of course) J.R.R. Tolkien. While I enjoyed those books and immersed myself in them for a while, my true love was still science fiction. For almost a year, I watched Star Trek: Voyager religiously with my dad. And every now and again, I’d pick out a science fiction book from the local town library and give it a try. That’s how I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In eleventh grade, my English teacher had us choose an author and focus our term papers solely on their books for the entire year. She suggested I choose Orson Scott Card, but I chose Cormac McCarthy instead. I’m not sure if that was the worst decision of my high school career, or the best decision, since assigned high school reading tends to make any book feel like it sucks. I discovered Ender’s Game the following summer, and finished it in a delirious rush at 3am the morning after checking it out from the local library.

More than any other book, Ender’s Game cemented my love for the genre, and showed me just how powerful and moving the genre could be. It opened so many insights into the world and human nature, reading that book made me feel like I’d opened a pair of eyes that I didn’t even know I’d had. Looking back, that was probably the moment when I knew I would be a science fiction writer. I’d known I was going to be a writer ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight, but to be a science fiction writer specifically, that goal was probably cemented by reading Orson Scott Card.

After high school, I served a two year mission for my church, during which I didn’t read any novels or watch any TV or movies. When I came back, though, Orson Scott Card and Madeline L’Engle helped me to ease through the awkwardness of adjusting back to normal civilian life. When I left for college, I expanded my horizons even further, starting with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Princess of Mars.

When I discovered Pioneer Books in downtown Provo, I knew I’d found my favorite bookstore in Utah Valley. I have so many fond memories sitting cross-legged on the floor in the science fiction section, browsing through the musty used books for hours at a time. That’s where I discovered C.J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and numerous other authors who are among my favorites today.

When I discovered Spin, Robert Charles Wilson soon became one of my favorites. I picked up that novel as a free PDF from Tor, and read it over the summer while studying abroad in Jordan. Once again, that same hard sf sensibility I’d gotten from Roger Allen McBride touched me in an unforgettable way. But it was the human element of that book that really moved me–in fact, it’s always been about the human element. The world building in Downbelow Station was great and all, but the romance of Merchanter’s Luck had a much more lasting impact. Starship Troopers had some good ideas, but it was Mandella’s personal journey in The Forever War that moved me almost to tears. The intrigue of the Ender’s Shadow series was quite entertaining, but it was Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that really taught me what it means to be human.

I finished my first novel, Genesis Earth, shortly after returning from that study abroad, and tried to capture the same sensibility from Spin as well as the intimately human element. Since then, I’ve written several more sci-fi novels, some of them tragic, some triumphant, but in all of them I’ve tried to get as close as I can to the personal lives of the characters. I don’t know if I’ll ever write a character portrait so intimate as Shevek’s in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I certainly hope to someday.

For me, science fiction started out as a wonderfully exciting entertainment and turned into something much more meaningful. If there’s anything the genre has taught me, though, it’s that the two aren’t mutually exclusive–that you can have your adventure and learn what it means to be human as well. Indeed, the more imaginative the adventure, the greater the truths I’ve taken from it.

Because of that, even though I’m almost in my thirties now, I can’t possibly foresee a time when science fiction isn’t a major part of my life. It’s a love affair that’s grown just as much as I have, and continues to grow with each new author I discover and each new book I write. When I’m old and grizzled and pushing eighty, I’m sure there will still be a part of that twelve year old boy in me, still running around the yard flying his starship.

V is for Vast

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.

Story Notebook #3 (part 1)

I’m not sure whether this notebook is #3 or #2. There’s a lot of notes from English 318, which would put it in the winter, but I don’t know if it’s from ’08 or ’09.

Not that that matters; ideas are ideas. And here they are!

An empty parking garage with no exit.

Covered this already in a previous post. Strangely, it’s one of the most popular posts on this blog. I constantly get search engine traffic from people googling “empty parking garage” and other such stuff. Who googles “parking garage”? Weird.

Telepathy through instant messaging between microchips interfaced with the brain.

Also covered in the same post.

And they all lived evily ever after.

Bwahahah! I’ve got Jakeson to thank for this line–specifically, from a conversation at LTUE. Good times!

A TV show where the viewers vote between ads what should happen next.

I’m pretty sure I got this idea from an Escape Pod story–one of the Hugo short story nominations from ’06 or ’07, IIRC.

What if the human mind, which we think is so great, is ridiculously broken?

After all, isn’t it true that we only use a tiny fraction of our brain’s capacity during our lifetime? What if the true potential of the human mind far outstrips anything we could possibly imagine?

What if the human brain was manifested as some sort of library / processing building, with short term, easy access, and archival memory sections manifested as bookshelves and long rooms? And there were flies or insects or parasites of some sort that fed on the archives, causing forgetfulness? And you were trapped in there?

I’m pretty sure I was tripping out on the Brain Science podcast at this time, combined with an old Roger Allen McBride novel about time travel and terraforming. Good times.

What would it be like to be God’s intern?

FREAKING HARD.

If perfect, instantaneous communication is possible, doesn’t this blur the individual identities of those speaking, so that they become simply voices in one mind? If so, does this mean that our individuality is based on the ways we misunderstand each other?

At its core, this idea is a take on the whole perfection vs. personality debate: the question of whether our individual personalities disappear as we approach Godlike perfection. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not the case, but that’s a discussion for my other blog (which I have not updated in a ridiculously long time, dangit).

A middle aged mom at a children’s book fair in Utah who has a tattoo partially showing from under her sleeve

I saw this in the Wilk one day, and started wondering about this woman. Who is she? Where did she get the tattoo? Why is she at a Utah Children’s Book Fair, which is about as far removed from tattoos and tattooed society as you can get?

A robot that was made to suffer, as part of an experiment.

It makes you wonder what ‘suffering’ actually is. Do inanimate objects suffer? Do the rocks and clouds and sky and stars suffer? Do they weep for us?

On that trippy note, I’ll cut this short and finish reviewing the notebook in a later post. Until then, stay awesome.