Weapons Fighting, and Battles in Science Fiction (VIDEO)

Here is the video from today's Google+ hangout about Weapons, Fighting, and Battles in science fiction. Our expert guest was Ken Burnside, game designer. I hope you enjoy it!

Armies in Worldbuilding with author Myke Cole - a Google+ hangout report

I would like to start by thanking Myke Cole for coming to the hangout and being such a fountain of good information! Thanks also to our other guests, Brian Dolton, Erin Peterson, Jaleh Dragich, Alex Von der Linden, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Janet Harriett. You can go here to see the video, or just read the report!

To open the hangout, I asked Myke to tell us briefly about his military experience. He explained that he had gotten into warfighting support after 9/11 as a PMC, or private military contractor. These people develop skills and experience at special boot camps and are paid by companies rather than the government, but Myke told us he felt bad doing the same work for ten times the pay, so he decided to go into the armed forces. He had his eye on the Navy and ended up getting into the Coast Guard, which is the smallest division of the armed services and most difficult to get into. After the Iraq war, he found the diversity of the Coast Guard's mission appealing.

When asked how his fantasy and military experience were linked, he explained that as a child he was "small," "skinny," and "maladjusted" and was concerned about his own inability to protect himself from bullying. Fantasy, and specifically Dungeons and Dragons, gave him the ability to imagine himself as a fighter and start working to become one. He feels the connection between the two is strong, and he remains dedicated to science fiction and fantasy.

I asked Myke what he thought about how different authors portray the military in science fiction and fantasy books. He feels that there's a "Baen school" of military fantasy dominated by John Ringo's kind of vision, but that there are other authors out there including John Hemry who treat things differently. Myke said that there's a tendency for people who aren't in uniform to "fetishize" soldiers as being powerful and mission-driven, as though they never had off days, or days when they were scared, or had trouble making decisions. Thus, in writing Control Point, he deliberately used a protagonist who faced impossible choices and often made bad decisions. Apparently he has received some backlash from this, but he wants to show the military as he sees it.

The institutional level of army organization is often nodded at but seldom explored. Everyone knows that the army involves bureaucracy, policy, acronyms, and paperwork, but they don't often mention how bureaucracy can hurt or kill people. Myke recognizes that when you're dealing with millions of people, all involved with the power of deadly force, the organization of those people is critical, and strong policy is a necessity. However, rigid policies can leave people in the cracks. His forthcoming third book gets more political, examining the repercussions of strict magic-based policies through a character who deals directly with magic policy in his fictional world.

Because we had discussed the importance of Logistics in our last discussion of fighting and battles, I asked Myke about it. He said that it's not only critically important for portraying an army scenario, but it's actually a key piece of his second book, Fortress Frontier. He has a character who is a "J1" at the dividion level, who works with paperwork, manpower and personnel.

I then asked Myke to comment on the idea of "military culture." He stopped in here for a blog post on the subject (here) when Control Point was first coming out, and had some interesting things to say about how the army brings together people from all different cultures. In our hangout discussion, he commented on how less than 1% of people in the armed forces are serving in uniform these days, whereas years ago, members of the armed forces used to wear their uniforms all the time, on any occasion when they might ordinarily wear a suit. Myke feels that this leads to a loss of connection between the armed forces and the general population, and that this is an unhealthy schism that can lead to serious problems. When you don't know something, ignorance breeds myths and misunderstanding. Myke believes strongly in the integration of the public and the armed forces, and a group of warfighters drawn from the general citizenry of the country.

At that point we turned to the question of language in the military. The armed forces of the United States have a very particular type of language that they use in order to operate, and being able to use it properly marks you as an insider. Myke compared it to the use of the word "sending" among rock climbers to describe reaching the top of a climb (apparently this was derived from the word "ascending"). We recognize military phrases like "Roger that," or "inbound," and the use of the different words like "Mike" "Yankee" or "Silo" to indicate single letters in spelling. Many of these phrases began to be used because it was so important to retain language clarity over the radio. Clarity is pretty important when mistakes can lead to such serious disasters! Of course, over time, many of these phrases have filtered into the vernacular, and movies have played a key role in making that happen. Some might be upset by the way that Hollywood writers portray the military, but movies do give the public access to military language, which helps military and non-military folk to understand each other in certain contexts.

During our earlier discussion of policy questions, the question of whether men could wear makeup came up by chance, and Myke said that he didn't know of any policy forbidding it.... so I promised that we'd return to the issue because of one of the interesting features of military culture it raised. Apparently there is an expression, "Anything not expressly forbidden is authorized." In an arena where there are so many rules for everything, people can become highly aware of loopholes. Myke told us that when he was trying to get back from his last tour of duty, the air boss had a way that he wanted Myke to fly out, but there was another flight going out that left earlier. Myke checked the rules and nothing said he couldn't be on the earlier flight, so he took it. People were surprised to see him arriving earlier by the different flight, but he explained his reasoning and it worked out. Obviously, the exploitation of loopholes often leads to the creation of more rules. People often ask "Where's the reg (regulation)?"

Myke urges authors to take on military topics. "Don't think that only people in the military can talk about the military." He thinks that empathetic people can understand another's experience and render it in writing. As an example of how this can be done well, he cited George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, in which every chapter has a different point of view - and these are people totally unlike the author himself - yet he manages to be totally convincing. He also mentioned John Kegan, one of the most respected military historians int he UK, who was never able to serve but wrote brilliantly about goings-on in the military.

Doing an army or military scenario well requires lots of research - even for Myke himself! In one of his books, much of the action takes place in a special ship called a buoy tender. A ship like that has its own culture, so he had to research buoy tenders because he's never worked on one.

Myke says, "A lot of writing is having the guts to give it a shot."

He told us an interesting story about his second tour as a private military contractor, when he was able to grow his hair and beard but was supplied with great gear (including weaponry etc.). He met some other soldiers who became convinced he was a member of the Delta group (something like the Navy seals), and though he protested, he was unable to convince them that he was not a Delta - because denying it was the kind of behavior they expected from a Delta.

Similarly, he finds it impossible to defeat the expectation that he's a kind of "superninja." He speaks quite eloquently and passionately about the use of force (please do see his longer article on the subject here). Essentially, he says that the government has paid a lot of money to train and arm him, and if he turns that against someone, it amounts to treason. If he's in danger of being killed, he would of course defend himself, but if it's just a matter of getting a black eye, he'll just endure it without fighting back.

Myke greatly admires the professionalism of the modern military. He cites Aristotle saying that law is "reason without passion" and sees the armed forces as trying to achieve something similar.

It's useful, when writing about a military, to ask the question, "What is a military?" Very often we think of the modern, ordered, Western-style military, but a military force can vary widely not just over time but across the world and across different cultures. War bands in Mogadishu, he says, are still a kind of military. When I noted that in fantasy we see a lot of medieval armies, but many fewer more modern armies, he said he doesn't know anyone else doing what he's doing, but that he can't imagine that nobody would do it but him. We don't see a lot of Renaissance military technology either, or early gunpowder scenarios. He cited Naomi Novik's Temeraire as a notable exception. She takes the Napoleonic period and gives it a special force of aviators mounted on sentient dragons.

Myke himself was inspired by the same question as Novik, "How does the reemergence of magic change the military?" In Novik's work, the dragons actually change world culture because in the era of Queen Victoria, longwing dragons only accept female riders, which changes the social order dramatically. He also mentioned Chris Evans' Iron Elves series, and Brian McClelland's Powder Mage series.

At that point we discussed the class distinction in military forces between officers and enlisted soldiers. This distinction has been around for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Myke described it as being a division based on socioeconomic status, because people who could afford to pay for college would end up on the officer's side of the divide. Officers can be portrayed in movies as cruel and demanding, but the US army as a concept of "servant leadership" where the officer's job is to take care of the soldiers under their command. Apparently if you throw your weight around you will tend to get "fed to the hog." Not such a good thing. The class distinction is starting to fade as more people receive college degrees, and as more disparate people encounter financial difficulty.

Apparently, some military forces don't maintain this divide, and people can get promoted from enlisted positions to officer positions. By contrast, there are also military groups where the divide is enormous. Myke encountered Iraqi officers who would stand their teams up as windbreaks for them, and he said Saudi officers are royalty. One Saudi officer was shocked when an enlisted American wouldn't carry his rucksack for him.

Our guest Alex described how his commanding officer's job was to make the job of all the enlisted guys easier. In one case, Alex and another soldier were interested in being sent to the airborne units (which is hard when you start out on a submarine) and the officer helped arrange for the other soldier to work hard enough and be transferred.

Myke said that the personal concerns of the enlisted soldiers are included in the job of the commanding officer. This can mean getting people help in various ways. Sometimes the commanding officer is expected to intervene like a parent. This includes chasing down guys to get them to medical appointments! Myke says that being an officer is nice, but also lonely because you are always supporting and not usually being supported yourself. There are, of course, rules about privacy. Balancing protection and intervention can be tough, and as an officer you have to make sure you're following the policy manual, especially in cases of alcohol situations. If you go against policy, you can put your superiors at risk. Myke says the public puts trust in him, so when the policy says to do something, he does it unless he's convinced that irreparable harm will result. If he decides not to go with the policy he is careful not to do it secretly, but to share his reasoning with people around him.

Our last major topic was Secrecy. Myke explained that secrecy is bad when it comes to decision-making processes or disciplinary issues. It's good, however, when it means protecting people's privacy, such as giving light duty to a member of your unit who becomes pregnant, but not revealing that to others. Of course, there are also cases when it's vitally important to maintain secrecy, such as when you're dealing with operation security, troop movements, etc. In those cases, not maintaining secrecy can cost lives. There are also stranger borderline cases. Myke mentioned that if he sends an email on a classified system to arrange lunch with a friend, then strictly speaking, anyone who reveals that information could be punished with 10 years in prison. So clearly the "state secret" category can be overused. It's important to have an ongoing conversation about issues like what kinds of secrets are appropriate, and the Wikileaks revelations were interesting in that regard.

Wow, what a great talk it was! Extra thanks to everyone who attended, and especially to Myke Cole for sharing so much of his expertise.

TTYU Retro: Deep Worldbuilding and POV Preparation - an in-depth example

What happens when you discover that you have to write a scene in an environment you've never considered before? Here's a peek back in time to when I was starting to write Chapter 27 of For Love, For Power:

Yesterday I started to write a scene that occurs in a new environment. What I mean by this is that I have to write a scene in a hospital, and I've never thought about what a hospital would look like in Varin. So I figured, why not work my thoughts out here on the blog? That way I can really show the amount of preparation and thinking that I put into working out this sort of thing. I swear, this is why my writing process is so slow (ha)! In any case, I thought a vision of my process might give you ideas for some things to think through as you enter a new environment in your own world.

The first challenge as I enter this process is to bring up what I know about hospitals from this world, with all my gut reactions and all of the details that I fill in instinctively, and then take a step back and look at these things as foreign. When I start a scene like this I absolutely must keep my mind from slipping into "House" or "Law and Order" or "The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (or anything else for that matter). Varin has a level of technology very similar to ours, but that technology expresses itself very differently, because Varin's history is completely separate from that our world.

So I started my research by speaking with a fabulous writer friend of mine, Deborah J. Ross, who has (lucky for me) personal knowledge of what goes on in a cardiac ward. She told me about what kind of machines a patient would be hooked up to (heart monitor, IV, possibly nasal oxygen) and whether the patient would be likely to be able to speak (important for what I would like to have happen in the scene). Then I went through those details and asked whether Varin would have each one. I concluded that the answer was predominantly "yes." I actually wasn't too happy about this - if I'd been able to omit one, the scene would have appeared more different. Instead, I have to think about how to include everything familiar, but find one or two very salient details to alter in order to jar readers out of their normal perception.

It's actually not that hard to jar people off of their expected models - if you do it deliberately, first thing. I've done this already with one of my characters. He has obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in Varin, they don't call it OCD. Instead, he "suffers compulsive obsessions." You'd be amazed how just changing around the expected phrasing causes it stop bringing up all of the expected real-world associations.

At that point I realized I needed to get closer to the scene (i.e. start writing it) so I could work on the detail level rather than the general level of expectations and equipment. The other thing that writing the scene allowed me to do was bring in another huge tool for creating difference: deep point of view.

After all, I don't just need to know what this environment is like. I need to know how my servant-caste character, Aloran, experiences this environment. Immediately, more questions open up. How much medical experience does Aloran have? Answer: he has a lot of training, but essentially none of it with hospital doctors, who come from the knowledge-worker caste immediately below his. Instead he has learned his medical training from other servants who have undergone the same training. What about his own experience going to hospitals as a patient or friend of a patient? Answer: he has no doubt been to a hospital before, but it would have been one geared toward people of officer-caste and lower, not a hospital designed specifically for the nobility. Thus, the things he notices about the hospital will be 1. those things that make it unique to the knowledge-worker-caste doctors who are in charge there and 2. those things that make it a hospital for nobles, rather than a hospital for everyone else.

So I started writing. Tagret and his mother Tamelera get the news that Tagret's father, Tamelera's husband and the Master of the house, has had a heart attack and gone to the Health Center. So Aloran escorts Tagret and Tamelera over there.

Difference #1 (behavior and layout): In this hospital, the patients are far, far more important than the doctors and nurses who serve them. Thus, they are received instantly by a doctor's assistant, the moment they walk in the door. Since none of them is a patient, this person escorts them to the patient's bedside. If they were patients, this person would ask questions and fill out paperwork for them. This entire first room is dedicated to instantly serving the people who come in: after the assistant's desk beside the door is a row of "triage chairs" on either side, where a nobleman or noblewoman can come in and have a seat anyplace that's open. The first-line nurses sit back against the walls behind these (well-spaced) chairs, each with a rolling cart of equipment he or she can bring forward to the chairs to do an initial evaluation.

Difference #2 (technology): You probably already noticed this one: the triage chairs. These are made of steel, and adjustable, so that a patient can be reclined and even wheeled (wheelchair-style or gurney-style) into the back treatment rooms as necessary. The triage chairs are a piece of technology that arose spontaneously when I tried to collapse the steps that we take entering a hospital: admission, initial evaluation, and being moved into a treatment area.

Difference #3 (technology saturation/judgment): One of the things that each receiving nurse has on his or her equipment cart is a device with a small computer screen. This is a testing device, but I make no mention of its use as they walk past. It's attached to a number of different measurement devices (blood pressure cuff, pulse counter, etc) that I don't need to go into. If someone from our world were to walk past this thing, if anything they might notice that the screen was awfully small. In Varin, the culture has a deeply ingrained religious bias against "capturing faces," and this has hampered the acceptability of photography and the development of live cinema, and also the development of screen technology. Aloran therefore notices the presence of the screens, because despite extensive medical training, he's only seen one or two of these comprehensive measurement devices in his life. The use of this device, with the screen attached to it, is seen as the province of the knowledge-worker-caste doctors almost exclusively. I think of this quote from Alexander Graham Bell, about his invention of the telephone: "The telephone is so important that, one day, every town will have one." Obviously the saturation of telephones went far beyond that, but the point is we can't always anticipate the level of saturation a particular technology will achieve. There are plenty of technologies whose use is restricted to particular limited contexts in our world; and this is one of those for Varin.

Difference #4 (manners): The assistant who escorts them to the Master's room calls Tagret sir, calls Tamelera Lady, and takes leave of Aloran with a set phrase: "May your honorable service earn its just reward, sir." These are social rules of the Variner caste system that show up in basic interactions between castes, so they show up here.

So here we are, the family hasn't even arrived in the hospital room, and already there are four major differences set before a reader to say unequivocally, "We aren't in Kansas any more." By this time, the fact that this place isn't like "House" should be so obvious that the similarities we do encounter will be significantly blunted. Add to this the fact that the Master is being treated in his own private room with stone walls and a steel door, and I suspect that the heart monitor, the IV, and the oxygen tube will have been largely stripped of their usual associations. I will leave them mostly as is, and probably change just a few tiny things about where they are placed/how they are supported, to make them more Varin-like.

Difference #5 (sound): The one thing that strikes me as so iconic to the real world that I have to change it at all costs is the peeping of the heart monitor. So my idea is to mix up my experiences just a bit, and have the heart monitor in fact relaying the rhythmic rushing sounds of the heart beating - a variation of what I experienced when I was allowed to listen to my unborn children's hearts beating.

And after thinking all of those things through, I feel much more confident about continuing into the scene. In fact, I'm pleased that there will be fewer differences from our own expectations when we hit the treatment room itself, because that will let me put more focus on the interactions of the characters, which after all are the really important part for driving the plot forward.

Now we zoom back to 2013... I hope this talk-through/think-through has given you some ideas about what you can do to create interesting worldbuilding effects in your own worlds.

Created Words in SF - guest post today chez Jamie Todd Rubin!

Just so you know, I have a guest post up today on the blog of fellow Analog author Jamie Todd Rubin, who asked me to help fill in while he's on an internet vacation. The post is called:

Created Words in Science Fiction - how do they work?

I'll be looking to add a post later today, but for now, hop over to Jamie's and check it out!

Video: Armies in Worldbuilding with author Myke Cole

We just finished having a terrific hangout discussion of how armies and military forces work with Myke Cole, author of the awesome military fantasy novels Control Point and Fortress Frontier. Here's the video, in case you weren't able to attend:

Also, here are two blog posts referenced in the video:

Myke Cole's guest post at TalkToYoUniverse, on "Military Culture"
Myke Cole "On use-of-force"

Next week, March 28th at 11am PDT on Google+ we'll be discussing Weapons, Fighting, and Battles in Science Fiction and Ken Burnside will again be joining us. I hope to see you there!

Weapons, Fighting, and Battles in Worldbuilding (1): A Google+ Hangout Report

I was joined for this discussion by Erin Peterson, Brian Dolton, Glenda Pfeiffer, and Ken Burnside.

This is an interesting topic for me, because I feel our cultural environment is so pervaded by the concepts of weapons, fighting, and battles that I'm always trying to de-emphasize them! But in part because of their pervasiveness, and in part because they are so common in fantasy and science fiction, it's very important to think through and discuss these topics, and how to treat them in a created world.

We started out talking about weapons. There are laser weapons, energy bolt weapons, etc. - and in the familiar stories we know, they don't always seem to have the effects we'd expect. Wouldn't a bolt of energy tend to burn you instead of cut you, as seems to be the case in Star Wars? And even if it could cut you, as the light saber does, would it really cauterize the wound so completely that there would be no blood? What about the phaser from Star Trek - what does "stun" mean? How can a beam go from knocking you out to vaporizing you? Sure, you can get away with doing it, but it might be good to think through what exactly is going on here.

Brian mentioned that we see a lot of swords, but in fact there were many more weapons used in medieval times, such as spears, axes, and crossbows. Erin noted that crossbows are underrepresented, and guessed that maybe this is because they are illegal in some states, and we have more familiarity with longbows.

Familiarity is one of the primary reasons that certain weapons are picked over others. We constantly see gun-facsimiles and sword-facsimiles, and even bow-facsimiles. Each choice you make sets an expectation for the type of action that will follow, since tactics depend on weapons. This is one of the reasons why familiarity can be such a help. If you've got your fighter carrying a war flail (that thing the king of the Nazgul had, which is often mistakenly called a mace), what exactly can she do with it? How dangerous is she, and where does she need to be in order to use it most effectively?

We discussed spears for quite some time. Erin suggested they would be useful for societies that didn't have as much metal. Brian noted that you never borrow a spear, since it tends to be thrown and never return to the warrior... or be broken in its use. Spears are far easier to make than swords, which require a lot of metal, and a lot of time and craftsmanship. You will find characters naming their swords, but not naming their spears, because chances are they won't see the spears again (intact).

Maintenance is one of the questions it's good to consider. How does a warrior maintain a weapons collection? How much work does it take? How much money or trade did it take for him/her to get the collection in the first place?

Often enough, you'll see a character equipped with only a single weapon. Or, conversely, you'll see them equipped with ALL THE WEAPONS (heavy!). Neither one of these is particularly realistic. Brian noted that swords were for personal defense, but weren't the go-to weapons for battle. Those were more likely to be crossbows or spears. Pikemen would break up the formations of the opposing force, and then go in with swords. Pikemen were also great against horses, but not against defensive squares. Overall, you'd find a balance of different types of weaponry because some weapons were good for one thing, and not for another - you probably wouldn't find any pikemen trying to run fleeing people down.

At this point in the discussion was when Ken Burnside joined us to comment on an earlier mention of the Roman pilum, which was a spear consisting of a staff with a 12-18 inch metal point pinned to the end. They were heavy and meant to be thrown like javelins. The lead pin used to hold the head on the staff was designed to make it easy to change a broken staff section, but would sometimes break when the pilum hit, causing the head to stay embedded in a shield (which would make the shield awfully heavy). We were very lucky to have Ken stay in the discussion too!

From there Ken talked about the gladius, which was designed not to penetrate a shield but to stab the person to your right. When you're thinking about how weapons translate into fighting style, remember that a weapon held in the hand will be to one side, not straight ahead - so handedness should affect your strategy and descriptions. Apparently spear formations were trained specially so they didn't follow their own tendency to turn to the left (which had to do with how shields were held).

We also talked about how weapons were developed over time. Ken argued that weapons are designed in reaction to armor, and clearly armor also responds to weapons to some extent. The Iron Age didn't arrive all at once, but began in Thrace and took a thousand years to spread. Keep in mind when you're working with a new technology that not everyone will have the required resources and infrastructure to emulate the technology right away. Even in the 12th and 13th centuries, there were still lances that used stone tips rather than iron ones. Ken put it this way: imagine you want to renovate your house, but every nail costs $50 and the maker has a 6-month waiting list! When that is the case, stone lance tips don't seem so bad, and as Erin remarked, they do keep their edge pretty well. Crucible steel was apparently invented three separate times during the Middle ages (in Cordova, Persia, and the Norse lands), and then the technology was lost again until the 18th century.

Returning to the idea of armor as a driver for weapons design, Brian remarked that this is the case with buildings and castles as well as people. Better wall technology leads to the development of siege engines. Look at the difference between Japanese castle design and European castle design: in Europe you get moats, walls, slits for archers, portcullises etc. etc. while in Japan you get a sort of snail-shell design like this (from Wikipedia):

It may not be super-clear from the picture, but there is only one entrance from any one public area to the next, and in each case, there are access points from the inner layer of the spiral through which the defending archers can attack the incoming invaders, even while they retreat further toward the center. This castle is not designed for invaders who are planning to climb walls or knock them down.

You might imagine that steel plate armor is the pinnacle of what armor can achieve, but the result is that when the weapons become good enough to penetrate it, the armor starts going away. Its strength is suddenly less useful, and its weight is a serious drawback because your best approach is not to stand under the assault, but to run away. Ken mentioned that the conquistadors would wear breastplates but not leg armor because they needed to be able to move quickly.

Brian noted that leather armor is string enough to stop a chopping sword. (I have also heard of paper armor being used - it just depends on what you're defending against.) Longer and thinner weapons become more useful when you're going up against armor, since chopping becomes less effective than piercing.

At that point we moved on to discuss what one discussant called "the dead hand of logistics." The effectiveness of your attack and the strength of your force depends enormously on the costs of travel, the terrain, the supply chains, and the lines of communication. Roman legionnaires put a lot of work into roads, and into food supply, giving two horses with food for each soldier. This allowed their armies to move faster because they did not need to forage. There was also the possible solution of taking all of your opponent's food and supplies as you went, which was used in many conflicts, but notably by General Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War.

Brian is working with a story in which he'll be introducing the advent of gunpowder. In this scenario, the gunpowder is expensive but the ammunition is cheap, and requires less training than some other weapons.

Ken described the crossbow as the first ever "gun," inasmuch as it could be held ready to fire (unlike a longbow, which would wear you out if you tried to keep it at half-draw). History suggests it began to be the chosen weapon across Europe with the exception of England, and the battle of Agincourt may have influenced this result. Apparently there were Papal bans against crossbows. (Here's a Wikipedia article in case you'd like to read more about crossbows).

We then returned to the question of supplies. Ken told us that the "Laws of Warfare" were due to a gentleman's agreement not to raise troop levees during harvest season, because all those men were needed to make sure there were enough supplies that armies could keep operating. Ken says he has a lot of respect for George R. R. Martin's handling of this issue in A Song of Ice and Fire. Apparently the ratio needed was 12 on farms for every 1 person in the city, except near the coast where it was 8 to 1 because of fishing resources. This held true until the 1830's when cast steel parts and horse-drawn reapers decreased the number of people required to bring in the harvests to 1/4 what it had been. Erin asked whether this was in part a function of European climate, and whether this might have been different in Mesoamerica, for example. Ken said he thought there was less potential for crop failure, but that farming was still so labor intensive that some people felt war was less work for better pay. I thought that was fascinating because it certainly reflects on some of the mindset of the people, in terms of their willingness to go to war.

In pre-modern times it was very difficult to move people. Think about this if you're writing in a pre-modern setting. If you have ox carts, you need to feed the oxen. If you have horses, they need to be fed, and typically grass foraging is not sufficient (so have somebody bring some grain!). Weather is a huge factor, and delays in supplies can cause you to lose a war. In more modern times, logistics and supplies are also critical. In World War II, the D-Day invasion relied on a port that was not on the shore, but built to float. This was an incredible feat of engineering, and allowed ships to be unloaded at high speed. There was also the PLUTO underwater pipeline to provide petrol.

If you're designing what is going to happen, remember how often it has been the case that the fighting lags behind the technology. People who have just discovered gunpowder are not going to use it in guns until they first figure out that it can be used as a kind of bomb to blow up a wall during a siege. Then come grenades, and then use for firearms. During World War I, tanks were a new technology and had all sorts of problems. For example, it was very hard to see where you were going while driving one, and soldiers learned the deadly way that they shouldn't try to run in front of one, but must always run on the side. People and generals feel their way into military tactics. There is always accident and difficulty.

At the end of the discussion we decided to revisit the question of weapons and battles for science fiction. That topic is the one we'll be taking up on March 28th. Tomorrow, March 21, we'll be taking on the topic of Armies because we have a very special guest. Author Myke Cole, whose military fantasy books Control Point and Fortress Frontier feature the modern military with magical powers, will be joining us to talk about his writing and his army experience. I hope you can join us!

TTYU Retro: Dealing with Chronological Breaks in Your Story

Do time-breaks in your story ever drive you mad?

They do me. My recently completed novel was on a very strict schedule - this event has to happen on one day, then this other event has to happen at a three-day delay, and then the next one at the same three-day interval, etc. etc. I got to a certain point and I realized, "I'm on the wrong day. More time has to pass than this. How can I get more time to pass?"

If I were using a more external narrator, this might be easier. I might just say, "The next day..." or "Three hours later..." and there we go. Well, okay, it wouldn't be that simple. The real problem with chronological breaks is that you have to maintain the story drive in spite of them, which means you have to create a sort of bridging effect across them.

So what kind of continuity links can make this work? There's quite a range. You can make an explicit reference to the amount of time passing, but this works more easily with a distant narrator; with a deep point of view, there would have to be a specific reason why the character was aware that this much time was passing. Besides which, I don't prefer to make direct reference to the amount of time if I can help it. I much prefer to use a topic link, or a psychological link.

A topic link means that you leave a cue in the last piece before your time break that you can then pick up again on the other side. I had a case where I was struggling with a break that looked something like this: Nekantor and Tagret were talking about their plans to contact the Sixth Family, and Nekantor said effectively, "No problem, we'll contact them; it'll be great to do this while father's busy talking to his friend Doret." Whereupon Tagret said, "Why is he talking to Doret?" I tried to move on from there to the meeting with the Sixth Family and it felt really awkward because I was feeling as if I had to show them getting a message off, getting a message back, sleeping on it (ugh!) etc. I thought to myself, "What did I do? Why am I feeling obliged to fill all this space with events?" And then I realized that I hadn't bridged properly. None of the message-sending stuff, or what happens in between, is actually relevant to their goals. It shouldn't be in the story. Where I turned off-course was in having Nekantor specifically refer to what they would do to contact the Sixth Family and when they would do it. That automatically sets up an expectation that we will see it as it happens, find out about Doret, etc. Not even explaining the amount of time passed would feel quite right.

So I went back and cut everything out that I had written, so that I stopped with Nekantor saying, "No problem; we'll contact the Sixth Family." The only expectation I set up there is that their next order of business is contacting the Sixth Family - and that allows me to hop straight across the time gap.  I can open the next section with "The Sixth Family took nearly a full day to reply, specifying an evening meeting..." and give Nekantor and Tagret's reactions to their slowness, thus orienting readers to the fact that time has passed and making it personally relevant to the characters and their state of mind. Because of the bridge, it doesn't feel like anything is missing.

The other kind of link that I like to use is a psychological link. Basically this means that instead of focusing on the flow of external events, which might make me feel obligated to include them all, I turn inward to the state of mind that my character is in when the time break is happening. I have a break of several hours that I made a bridge for, between a morning event where Nekantor encounters a setback, and an evening event where he is put under significant pressure. I set up that he's got to wait until evening for the event; I didn't want to have him wandering around all day doing irrelevant stuff. My focus was therefore on how he felt about the setback he'd just been dealt, and what he felt he had to do about it. The presence of the later event meant that whatever confusion he was experiencing, he had to get through it before he was "put on trial"; I could therefore focus on him trying to find a way forward mentally, and refer to his various attempts to break his state of mental confusion without having to ground them in actual external time. He could then make the decision to take action just at the time when the chronological flow of outer events had to resume, which allowed me to move back into the outer events at that point.

I'm sure there are more ways to do this, so feel free to share if you have any special tips. I just thought I'd mention these methods because they are particularly useful when I'm dealing with a time break in deep point of view.

It's something to think about.