[ARCHIVES] Guest blog: Chaz Brenchley Steampunks Mars (With Added Hockey Sticks)

Chaz Brenchley is an amazing writer -- I've been an unabashed fan ever since I read Bridge of Dreams, which led me to write to him, begging for a story for my editorial debut, Lace and Blade. (That story, "In the Night Street Baths," was reprinted in Wild Stories 2009.) Now, many literary adventures later, Chaz sets his sights on Mars, complete with steampunk and a girl's boarding school placed in a failed hotel that was once a Norman castle. Read on for the delicious details...

One of the joys of living in the heart of Silicon Valley is that NASA Ames is just over there, and SETI HQ is even closer. We live among the cool kids - and the cool kids like to share. I went to NASA for the recent transit of Venus; and ever since I moved here, I’ve been going to SETI’s weekly colloquium where planetary scientists and cosmologists talk about the latest discoveries, or the specific projects they have on a new mission, or the latest weird theory that’s almost a guaranteed Nobel prize if it should ever prove true (“but right now there are only two people who believe it, and they’re both in this room”), and like that.

So there I was with planetary scientists at my fingers’ ends for the asking, and lots of Mars talk going on around the time of Curiosity’s landing, so it’s really no wonder that I started thinking about Mars fiction. Real Mars, not so much, for it is dry and inhospitable and I have written my desert books already - but old Mars, Mars with canals and an atmosphere and aliens? Oh, yes. Very much yes.

And very much within that spirit, I wanted to steampunk it up a bit; and there was a lot of talk at that time in my social media about how steampunk tended to assume British Empire overtones, as though that were the only choice, and how it so very much was not. So I thought somewhat about that - but I did keep coming back to the British Empire, because I am far from home and the more time I spend in California the more inveterately Brit I become, and because I am the son of an Empire brat (Grandad was a major in the Scots Guards; Mum was born in Rangoon and grew up in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, speaking Malay more readily than English), and because above all I was really curious. If Mars were a province of the British Empire, how would that actually work? How could it happen, and what would it mean - to the Empire, and to European and world history? And to Mars, and to the presumptive Martians? How do you impose colonial rule on a race that has no concept of empire, or statehood, or governance? And does it make a difference if you’re there by their courtesy, via their aetherships, for reasons you still don’t understand? And how do you negotiate even the broadest heads of agreement where you can barely communicate at all? 

The Tajji Diaries: A Story of Her Own

This blog was first posed in 2015. Tajji has since gone over the Rainbow Bridge, but her spirit remains with us. I read an excerpt from this story, "Four Paws To Light My Way" at FogCon this year.

Tajji, our elderly German Shepherd Dog, came to live with us a little over a year ago when she retired from seeing eye guide dog work. She learned new behaviors in the process of “being just a dog.” Her behavior also showed us some of the many things dogs who help the blind must learn. Some of these are responses to commands. Tajji knows “Go Right,” “Go Left,” “Easy (slow down),” and “Back,” for instance. She was also able to enter a mall (a chaotic place for a dog) with her blind person and, never having been in this place before, guide him to an elevator, escalator, or rest room.

We also noticed other behaviors from her training. She would remain lying down in the same place after we had stepped over her, touching her. Not moving would allow a blind person to remember where she is (and not trip over her, at least, not twice.) She uses a gentle nose touch as a greeting (as do most dogs; it’s polite) but also to let us know when she has come to sit beside us. She asks for attention by touching an arm, sometimes neatly inserting her nose underneath a hand. In fact, she initiates physical contact so much we suspect she was not only trained to do so, but bred for the predisposition.

All of this got my writer’s imagination started thinking about different ways dogs can be partners with humans. Years ago, I loved watching movies about Zato-ichi, a blind swordsman in Japan. He had preternatural hearing, and his ears would twitch when he heard an enemy approach, undoubtedly a theatrical device to point out to the audience what was happening internally. Since I was preparing to write a story for Sword and Sorceress 30, the idea came to me of a blind swordswoman – and putting Tajji in the story. How would they interact? What could the dog tell my character and how? 

Short Book Reviews: Alien Abduction Falls Short

Glow : Book I, Potency, by Aubrey Hadley (Ruby & Topaz Publishing)

This book began auspiciously with a homeschooled teenager who loves soccer and rebels against her mother’s demands for a curfew as a mysterious “sleeping syndrome” reaches epidemic scale. Not only that, but she starts seeing mysterious glowing creatures, invisible to everyone else. Before we can catch our collective breath, she’s kidnapped by an alien race bent of cleansing the Earth of human evil. What a great set-up!

Unfortunately, that’s where the story began to sag. The suspense dissipated into long, long, long stretches of characters explaining the obvious to one another. Action submerged under the weight of description and dialog that didn’t advance the plot, reveal character, or heighten conflict. Even when something important was happening, it felt distant and flat, without emotional engagement.

On a prose level, the many scientific impossibilities or rather extreme implausibilities are dismissed with “unknown reason,” or “somehow this happens.” I was able to ignore most of the medical errors, until “Unless he’s bipolar and can change his mind without a trace of his old emotions” just threw me out of the story, since my husband has bipolar disorder and that’s not how it works. Awkward prose includes bits like, “My ears comb the silence,” and “The seconds of silence that followed lingered in the air like a pungent smell.”

I want to say something about first person, present tense, when handled by an inexperienced writer. Both choices give the illusion of dramatic intensity and emotional immediacy but are actually hurdles to achieving them. Just because action happens inside the protagonist’s head and “in the now” does not automatically engage the reader more deeply. First person is commonly used in Young Adult fiction today (although this was not always true and might fall into disfavor in the future) because the focus is so often the personal growth of the central character. This creates difficulties in conveying information that’s necessary for the reader to understand but that the narrator herself does not know or that there is no logical reason for her to think about. You end up with dialog whose only purpose is the edification of the reader, or in which two characters tell each other what they already know, or ask idiotic questions at inappropriate times, which happens entirely too frequently in this book. Present tense in particular requires skill in order to not be flat and passive. You end up with passages of verbal flab like:

We go through the net, the garden, and then come to the base of the structure. There is no visible divide between the inside and outside. We enter the building by walking through an invisible force field. We enter a massive lobby with towering white walls that elegantly slope down from the ceiling and rise up from the floor like white sand dunes. We go to the wall straight ahead.

If you’re in need for a cure for insomnia, look no further. (Snarky aside: three out of four sentences begin with “we,” and two of those “we enter” — what editor let this slip through?)

I think in the end the length and tedious pace bothered me so much because I didn’t connect with the central character. She kept asking annoying rhetorical questions, and the choice of present tense conferred an unfortunate emotional flatness. Another reader might love the book. For me, though, the fact that this is only the first book in a series made it ¾ of a book too long. The story is imaginative and should have been compelling. I don’t know whether the author or the editor bears the greater share of blame for the result.

BayCon 2019 Schedule

Here's my schedule for BayCon 2019

Besides these events, I'll be around on Saturday the 25th, so please say hello!

How To Write A Heroine

26 May 2019, Sunday 14:30 - 16:00, Connect 5 (San Mateo Marriott)
Tips for writing strong female protagonists in sci fi/fantasy (or YA sci fi/fantasy).
Marjory Kaptanoglu (M), Ms. Jennifer L. Carson (Freelance), Deborah J. Ross

Urban Legends in Science

27 May 2019, Monday 11:30 - 13:00, Connect 3 (San Mateo Marriott)
Salt causes high blood pressure. We only use 10% of our brains. Vaccines cause autism. Where does this stuff come from, and why do these fallacies persist? Scientists and science-knowledgeable fans dissect some of the crazy things we hear.
J.L. Doty (M), Deborah J. Ross, Kathleen Bartholomew (Self-employed)

By Any Other Name

27 May 2019, Monday 13:00 - 14:30, Synergy 5 (San Mateo Marriott)
Are character and place names important to a reader's response to your story? What about titles?
Ms. Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff (Book View Cafe) (M), Heather Rose Jones, Deborah J. Ross

Today's Moment of Art

Still life with a squirrel by Edouard Vandenbosch, 1874