{"id":6663,"date":"2011-12-13T17:29:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T00:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=6663"},"modified":"2011-12-13T17:42:36","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T00:42:36","slug":"trope-tuesday-space-pirates-with-kindal-debenham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/trope-tuesday-space-pirates-with-kindal-debenham\/","title":{"rendered":"Trope Tuesday: Space pirates with Kindal Debenham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

For today’s Trope Tuesday post, I thought it would be fun to bring on my friend Kindal Debenham<\/a> to speak about one of the tropes in his new book, Wolfhound.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kindal and I were in the same writing group in college, and attended Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class together.\u00a0 I just picked up a copy of his book, and it’s pretty good–definitely the kind of science fiction that I love.\u00a0 You can currently find Wolfhound<\/strong> on Amazon<\/a>, as well as Kindal’s self-publishing site<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So anyhow, here’s Kindal’s discussion of space pirates<\/a> in Wolfhound<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

==============================<\/p>\n

Space pirates<\/a> are kind of a staple in science fiction. We\u2019ve seen them in all sorts of different forms since the genre came into being. As the trope states, though, there are basically two main classes. The first class is basically a bunch of violent criminals on a spaceship, kind of mirroring the behavior of modern day pirates in Somalia or Southeast Asia. The second are a corny recycled in space variant of the eighteenth century Caribbean pirate with robotic peg legs and a space parrot. Obviously one is a bit more realistic than the other. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

The version I went for leans a lot more heavily on the first class of space pirates rather than the second. I wanted a smaller scale conflict in order to introduce my main character, and pirates seemed to be a good opponent to use for that purpose. Since the ship that Jacob Hull is on was partially based on the USS Constitution<\/em><\/a>, I decided that I could use some of the pirates that ship fought during its history: the Barbary pirates.<\/p>\n

These pirates weren\u2019t your clich\u00e9d corsairs<\/a> with parrots and a desire for plunder. The Barbary pirates were a collection of raiders that operated out of northern Africa. Their motivation was to support their nations by taking ships and capturing crews, which they then added to their fleet and put to work as slaves. In addition to raiding ships, the Barbary pirates also went on slave raids throughout southern Europe. They would accept tribute to ignore the ships of certain countries (think \u2018protection money\u2019 for a mob equivalent). The US had to pay about a fifth of the early national budget in tribute to these pirates until the politicians decided that guns were cheaper to buy\u2014which led directly to the creation of the USS Constitution<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Building off of those ideas, I created the Telosian pirates. Vicious, more interested in valuable ransom for prisoners<\/a> and well armed ships<\/a> than simple cargo, and willing to do just about anything<\/a> to satisfy their greed. With an utter ruthlessness only matched by their subtle plots, they made quite a good enemy for Jacob Hull and the rest of Wolfhound<\/em>\u2019s crew, and they were a much more interesting enemy to fight than a stereotypical Pirate-with-an-Eyepatch would have been. In my opinion at least, though I\u2019m a little biased.<\/p>\n

So those are the bad guys of Wolfhound<\/em>\u2014at least, they\u2019re the majority of the bad guys\u2014and believe me, they live up to their reputation as nasty pieces of work. Hope you guys enojoyed the background, and I hope I didn\u2019t get too history nerd on you guys. See you around!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For today’s Trope Tuesday post, I thought it would be fun to bring on my friend Kindal Debenham to speak about one of the tropes in his new book, Wolfhound. Kindal and I were in the same writing group in college, and attended Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class together.\u00a0 I just picked up a copy… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Space pirates with Kindal Debenham<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[94,122,594,128,629,99,184,641,565,626,522],"class_list":["post-6663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-english-318","tag-friends","tag-guest-posts","tag-jakeson","tag-outer-space","tag-science-fiction","tag-space-opera","tag-trope-tuesday","tag-tropes-and-cliches","tag-tvtropes","tag-villains","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1Jt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6663"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6670,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions\/6670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}