Fiction Vortex - May 2014

by Fiction Vortex

  ~~~~~

  "Unbelievable." Lina stared up at the display. "They're more complex than I imagined."

  "What do you mean?" Tuvad crowded close. Lina suppressed a shudder as one of his manipulation tentacles snaked around her neck, reminding herself that personal space was a cultural construct.

  "Look here." She pointed at a spinning helix. "That's its DNA. There are over ten discrete base pairs in this strand alone, and some of them are completely different from the other worms we've sequenced."

  "Isn't some genetic drift normal?"

  "Not like this." Lina tapped a few keys, unzipping the strand into its component parts. "The DNA of every race in the Coalition is composed of a set sequence of base pairs. For humans, it's Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine. Other races have a few more or less, or use different bases — Methylguanine and Xanthine for instance. They combine differently in individuals and species, but are pretty much the same throughout a biosphere. This worm here has base pairs that don't even appear in the others. It's mostly junk DNA, not really meant to be translated into characteristics, but technically this worm isn't even the same species as the last one we examined."

  "The genes are far too complex. We won't be able to reproduce a worm, not with this machine." Blue's word's echoed from the translator, which was sitting on a camp table nearby.

  "Wait, go back." Lina squinted at the screen. "That's human DNA."

  "Are you sure?" Tuvad's tentacle tightened uncomfortably around Lina's neck and shoulders. She shrugged it off, trying to appear nonchalant.

  "Up until now it's been mostly gibberish ... but these sequences are definitely human."

  Blue crawled around the corner and lifted itself up to view the screen. "How could a worm have human DNA?"

  "It's my father's." Lina stood, rubbing her forehead. The answer had been staring her in the face this whole time. "TAG CAT. It's part of a gene sequence. The worms aren't fighting, they're communicating."

  "I don't follow." Captain Tuvad's tendrils withdrew in confusion.

  "This isn't junk DNA, it's language. Think of each worm as a packet of information. They breed their sentences."

  Blue curled one arm to point at the specimen jars, its skin showing the red and yellow striations of distaste. "Their medium of communication is digestion?"

  Lina shrugged. "These are collective entities we're dealing with — individual worms are like skin cells to them."

  "Excellent." Tuvad moved closer, tentacles curling around Lina's waist in a show of trust. "We know how they speak, but do we know how to speak with them?"

  Lina did her best not to wince as Tuvad's cilia tickled her chin. Her father had always said intergalactic diplomacy required nerves of steel. "Well, we could have used the genome from every race in the Coalition to construct a mathematical primer on our language, but the samples went up with the ship. If they hadn't ... eaten my father, we'd have nothing."

  "How does that help us?"

  "Genes always form distinct pairs, adenine with thymine, guanine with cytosine. My father's DNA bonded with theirs, providing us with recognizable gene markers."

  "Again, how does that help us?"

  "Think of it this way. We've just been handed thousands of pages of alien text. We don't know their alphabet, syntax, morphology, anything. But, we can see how certain portions of the text are written in a way we understand. My father's sacrifice gave us the key to unlocking the worm's language — like a human Rosetta Stone."

  The Captain's communicator beeped.

  Tuvad drew it from his web belt. "A ship just skipped in-sector. I'll let them know where we are."

  "Don't answer it." Lina's mouth went dry.

  "Why not?" The Captain's voice was right next to her ear.

  "W-we don't have conclusive proof. We've got to talk with the worms."

  "Surely they will accept our work. What else can we accomplish before the ship arrives?"

  "A lot, like..." Lina swallowed. She was out of time.

  "I've pinged them back. The ship is still a few light years out. It'll arrive in a day, maybe less. Don't worry, we can keep working." Tuvad drew her closer.

  This time Lina's grimace was not a result of the Captain's touch.

  She had less than a day.

  ~~~~~

  The colony was even bigger up close. It hadn't looked so threatening across the plain, but now that Lina stood directly in its path she regretted her snap decision. Captain Tuvad wanted to approach more carefully, but he didn’t know they were working against a deadline. The Council frowned on rogue researchers initiating first contact with previously unknown races, not to mention promising unspecified bounties to freighter captains.

  Even with her father's DNA markers it had taken hours for the cloning apparatus to create, grow, and decant the most basic message--a series of mathematical patterns, shapes, and positional information linked to alphanumeric symbols. The meaning was simple: "If you understand this, move toward the sunset, then stop."

  She shifted one of the wet balls of flesh from hand to hand, hoping this colony was the one that ate her father. Lina had asked the Thrumm to take her to it, but wasn't exceptionally confident of the alien's perception, seeing how it couldn't even distinguish her from a seventy-year old man.

  She set the ball down, backing off a couple of paces. The worms had no sense other than touch, so she had to make sure it was right in the colony's path. It churned forward, bodies hissing against one another as they washed over the lump of flesh in a rising tide of quicksilver. Lina held her breath.

  The colony paused to digest her message, then shifted roughly three meters in the direction of the sunset, and paused. Lina clenched one hand in a gesture of victory. She pulled out the second ball and rolled it towards the colony. It contained basic directions to the lab. She hoped she wasn't making a mistake.

  The worms ate the second ball, then moved off. Lina frowned as she watched them go — the colony was heading the wrong way. Had she confused the directions?

  "That was promising." Tuvad reached a tentacle down to help her up onto the Thrumm. "Another few meetings like this and we may be able to open a dialogue."

  "We need to get back to camp." Lina clung to the Thrumm's carapace with grim resignation. She should be excited — the worms understood her — but there wasn't time for a few more meetings.

  Back at camp she recorded her observations — perhaps they might serve as a mitigating factor in her censure hearing — then spent the rest of the night helping Tuvad and Blue sequence the worm DNA and feed it into the translation matrix.

  Lina worked until her eyelids grew heavy, the stress and excitement of the last few days bleeding away in the face of sheer exhaustion. She propped her head on one hand and watched the translator search for patterns in another line of DNA. Soon, the lines of scrolling code filled her dreams.

  ~~~~~

  Lina awoke to the soft chime of Tuvad's communicator. There was a message inbound. She wiped a thin line of drool from the corner of her mouth. Someone had draped a blanket over her. The communicator chimed again. Lina wondered why the Captain didn't respond. She opened one sleep-crusted eye and lifted her head.

  Tuvad had his back to her. He was motionless, his cilia straight and rigid. There were worms everywhere.

  The camp was a single island in a slowly undulating sea of silver. Lina walked up to join Tuvad, noticing Blue-Green-Green-Red had propped itself up against one of the shelters, a handbeam held in a tangle of tube feet.

  A squirming cluster detached from the great mass, crawling towards the stunned group. As they drew closer, Lina saw that they weren't worms, but tiny humanoid figures, each an almost perfect replica of Gobind Prasad. Although she'd imagined thousands of conversations with her father, none of them prepared her for this.

  "Who are you?" They chorused, silvery bodies glinting as they climbed over and around one another.

  Lina gaped. She'd given the worms a primer, but even with human DNA ma
rkers, it was an enormous leap from basic math to simple sentences. She'd underestimated the worms' resourcefulness.

  They couldn't communicate, so they'd made someone who could.

  The Thrumm's voice shattered her shocked silence. "We have succeeded, Doctor Prasad. You will speak for me in front of the elders?"

  Lina nodded, unable to find words. Seeing her father reflected in a million tiny faces seemed to unwind something in her chest, a tightness she a hadn't even known was there. There was sadness, but joy as well. The tears came then, hot on her cheeks. She wiped them away and straightened, realizing why she'd been willing to risk everything to continue her father's research.

  Lina hadn't risked everything to surpass Gobind Prasad, but to understand him. She might not agree with his decisions, might not forgive him for abandoning her, but now, at least, she knew why.

  "Who are you?" The milling crowd called again.

  Tuvad's communicator crackled to life. It would be only minutes before the Coalition lander made planetfall.

  Lina approached the worms. Blue slipped aside, handbeam pointed at the ground. Captain Tuvad moved to join her, questing limbs already snaking around her torso. Lina didn't even flinch.

  It was good to have friends.

  "Who are you?"

  Lina drew in a deep breath. It didn't matter what happened now. She'd done it. No, they'd done it. She looked at her companions and grinned. N'ktheed, Fostern, Thrumm, and Human — not a poor diplomatic party by any means.

  "Who are you?"

  "Us?" Lina smiled down at the swarm of tiny anthropomorphic translators, feeling her chest swell with pride. "We're the next Gobind Prasad."

  ~~~~~

  ~~~~~

  By day, Evan Dicken fights economic entropy for the US Department of Commerce, and studies old Japanese maps at the Ohio University. By night, he does neither of these things. His work has most recently appeared in: Daily Science Fiction and Escape Pod, and he has stories forthcoming from publishers such as: Andromeda Spaceways In-Flight Magazine, and Stupefying Stories. Feel free to drop by at: evandicken.com.

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  Narcissism or Negligence: Mary Sue and Your Characters

  by Mike Cluff; published May 22, 2014

  Creating and developing characters in your fiction can be a challenging process. Even though authors are more capable of developing multiple unique entities (look up ‘theory of mind’, it’s fascinating), there is a certain crutch that authors can lean on too heavily if they aren’t careful.

  The Mary Sue.

  The Mary Sue is a form of author self-insertion or personal wish fulfillment that manifests in fiction. Wikipedia gives a good explanation of why it is called the ‘Mary Sue’, so if you are curious go look it up. Personally, I prefer the term because I can say ‘Mary Sue’ without my inner, dorky, adolescent self giggling like it does when I use the term ‘self-insertion.’

  There are two reasons why an author might find themselves Mary Sue-ing in their writing. Narcissism or negligence.

  Some authors, like Clive Cussler, use the Mary Sue intentionally. A good example in film is how Stan Lee briefly appears in all of the Marvel movies. Even if narcissistic, it adds another facet to the experience. The technique, when used by established and popular authors, works well to quickly create characters and, like most Easter Eggs, can be fun for readers. Luckily, lesser or unknown authors usually know better than to purposefully Mary Sue.

  However, it is the unintentional use or abuse of the Mary Sue that can leave your story, specifically your characters, flat. Bottom line: blatant Mary Sue-ing is often a sign of an amateur and negligent author. The negligence is made manifest in the inevitable line-up of under-developed characters. We write what we know, but if we stop at the first example for characters that we have, ourselves, then we aren’t dedicating enough effort to create rounded, three dimensional personalities that form strong connections with our readers. And readers, even if they don’t recognize the Mary Sue for what it is, will recognize flat and transparent characters.

  Of course I am not going to present a problem without bringing solutions. Here are a few that I have found to be effective.

  1. Free write. Writing can be a cathartic experience, a source of release. But your issues with your mother-in-law probably don’t have a place in your space opera. So before you start into your main project, do some finger warm ups and let loose on some of those life problems with a few hundred words of free writing.

  Hopefully this will provide a stress release and keep you from throwing too much of your personal life into your writing. Plus, many people use this technique and call it blogging.

  2. Develop, Develop, Develop. When I said at the beginning of this article that developing characters can be a challenging process, I should have said ‘it needs to be a challenging process.’ From the least important to the main, each character deserves to have some effort put into their development. Of course, time spent in developing a character should have direct correlation to how big of a role they play in your stories or book.

  Personally, I like to interview my characters, really grill them, get the dirty secrets, find out their hopes and fears, find out what makes them do what they do. And if I find that they are too much like me, I take them back to that dark room, shine that 100 watt bulb in their face and tell them to cut the crap. Or in other words, it’s back to the drawing board.

  So find out if your character thinks facial hair is unattractive, or if they prefer coffee to tea. The little details will open up greater questions of ‘why are they the person they are?’ and you will have characters that you know intimately. Characters that aren’t a Mary Sue.

  3. Voice. Unique characters have unique voices. Whether it is the one character that never uses contractions or the hillbilly whose dialogue is riddled with apostrophes or the street ruffian that expresses his inflections by throwing in a curse every other word, each personality has their own voice.

  Yet dialects, diction, and dialogue play only a part. The form in which a person perceives their world will determine their voice. As an author, you must step out of your usual perceptions and allow your characters their own.

  While difficult to master, distinction in voice is probably the easiest way to ensure that Mary Sue stays away.

  4. Revision. As much as we would like to think ourselves impervious, we all have chinks in our armor, a Mary Sue or two in our works is inevitable. So in those final steps of perfecting your fiction find those infiltrating self-insertions (queue the giggle) and squash them.

  Turn to your alpha-readers for help, they should know you and be able to recognize you in your writing better than you can yourself. In fact, they will probably be eager to point out your virtues and your failures made manifest in your writing. What else are friends for?

  Still, no matter what you do, including yourself to some degree in your work will happen. Consider this quote from author Anne Lamott:

  “You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.”

  As stated before, writers write what they know, and, whether we like it or not, we know ourselves best. So don’t alienate yourself from your writing, just make sure that your presence in your writing is far from overbearing. Unless you are a narcissist, then by all means, have fun with yourself, probably by yourself (queue giggles.)

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  Book Review: Riyria Revelations, by Michael J. Sullivan

  review by Ernie Shell; published May 15, 2014

  Is it possible for a self-published book to sell a hundred thousand copies, be picked up by a major publishing house, and continue to sell so well that it launches the career of the author? Michael Sullivan with his series the Riyria Revelations answers this with a resounding YES!

  Michael Sullivan has given several interviews and is quoted in many articles about how this came t
o pass, but a quick summary of his journey to writing this story can be summed up in just a few sentences: He gave up on writing as a career, and wrote the series primarily as something that he wanted to read. It was originally only going to be made available to his family and a few friends, but everybody who read it wanted it. So he published a few copies, then a few hundred, then a few thousand. And the then things really started to happen.

  This is a review of the entire series, originally published as six books: 'The Crown Conspiracy', 'Avempartha', 'Nyphron Rising', 'The Emerald Storm', 'Wintertide' and 'Percepliquis'. Now republished in three volumes as: 'Theft of Swords', 'Rise of Empire' and 'Heir of Novron'.

  The Riyria series can be looked at as a traditional fantasy, with Sullivan’s take on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouse paradigm front and center. If you are looking for a unique fantasy with a complex magical system, new races and monsters, and something more than a pseudo-magical setting, then don’t look here! On the surface, the Riyria Revelations could be plopped into any number of other worlds and work just fine. That serves a great reminder to all those aspiring authors out there; it’s about the story! And the story is what Sullivan does very well.

  It’s filled with action and adventure, and the pacing is outstanding. The characters take on greater and greater depth with each book, especially Royce and Hadrian, the heroes of the story. Royce is a complex and fascinating character, full of faults and mystery. Hadrian is much simpler, but filled with kindness and a genuine concern for people. They are both very likable, and the joking between the two of them is one of the highlights of the books. Often in fantasy stories there is a challenge that only one character can defeat while the rest are watching. Hadrian and Royce generally work together, and find success in imaginative ways.

  The characters become caught up with events that quickly spiral out of control, and for much of the story they seem to be rushing about just trying to stay alive. For all that, they are not on some mystical quest to find (or destroy) an ancient artifact and save mankind. They are two friends who have inadvertently become caught up in events that they spend a great deal of time trying to get out of. As the stories progress, the plots become far deeper and more complicated than could have been imagined at the beginning.