Author: terribleminds (page 61 of 464)

It’s just one of those true things that for many, the DNA of Star Wars is in what we do — either because we’re fans or because it’s so pervasive, for good or ill. Here’s one author talking about that very thing — Django Wexler!

***

I wanted to tell the story of the inspiration for Ashes of the Sun, and that means talking about Star Wars.  So let me get this out the way up front: I love Star Wars.  It’s quite possible that no other single franchise has taken up so much of my fan energy over the decades.  I have a story in a new Star Wars anthology, and you have no idea how much fanboy-squee that makes me feel.

I say all this because this story involves a certain amount of nitpicking, and I want to make it clear that for a person like me (that is, a world-building obsessed turbo-nerd) this kind of fascinated close analysis is the highest form of affection, rather than trying to put down something I don’t like.  I can love The Empire Strikes Back with a fervent passion and also ask importunate questions like “How did they get from Hoth to Bespin if the hyperdrive was broken?”

Anyway, with that caveat understood, the story of Ashes begins with the Jedi, and specifically the way Jedi recruitment is pictured in the SW prequels and The Clone Wars TV show.  In the prequels, we see very young children (maybe five or six?) being trained by Yoda.  In The Clone Wars, we see younglings brought in for training who are maybe slightly older (starting in S5E6 “The Gathering”) and put through a bunch of harrowing tests in order to get their lightsaber crystals.  Watching this, I couldn’t help but start thinking — this is creepy as hell, right?

The thing is, the Jedi aren’t just a training society for force-sensitives, where you might send your kid to pick a few tricks like going to karate class at the mall.  They are a religious order of ascetic warrior monks, who swear an oath to uphold an extremely strict code of behavior.  This is, to put it mildly, not a thing which it is in a five-year-old’s power to understand or agree to.  (I find myself agreeing with the Harry Plinkett review when he says the whole “not permitted to love” thing means they must lose a lot of Jedi teenagers.)

It’s also not completely clear what happens if the parents aren’t on board with this.  We see some parents who are sad about it, but they’re all ultimately convinced.  If they weren’t, though, it’s not hard to image the kids would be brought along for their own good — the Jedi Order has some unspecified-but-vast legal authority in the Galactic Republic, and a strong interest in making sure Force-sensitives grow up to be Jedi.  Clone Wars’ narrator tells us that the younglings soon understand that the Order is their true family, which sounds extremely like a thing a cult leader would say.

(A related weirdness of Clone Wars is that the enormous authority of the Jedi within the Republic results in situations where fourteen-year-old girls are given command authority over literally thousands of soldiers, in addition to the law enforcement and other powers they already have.  Try to imagine a situation where your local teen, who was already an FBI Special Agent, was also commissioned a brigadier general on the spot.)

Okay, so, weird, right?  But in-universe, we have the Force, which makes it all work.  Younglings want to become Jedi, and their parents are okay with it, because presumably the Force wouldn’t allow things to be otherwise.  (And maybe making kids military commanders makes more sense when those kids have provably-correct magical insights, in addition to being combat gods.)  Again, this is not a critique of Star Wars, it’s just the kind of thing that gets me thinking as a world-builder and a writer.  And it got me asking the question — what if you didn’t have the Force to make things better?

More precisely, what if you had the magic-powers part of the Force, but not the semi-divine guidance part?  After all, in Star Wars, the Jedi are in charge because they’re wise and good, but also, it’s pretty clear, because nobody can stop them.  (The SW MMO The Old Republic storylines depicted this wonderfully on the Empire side — it was clear that nobody thought having a bunch of Sith religious lunatics running the government was a good idea, but since they were also a bunch of unstoppable killing machine … shrug emoji?)  And this, finally, brings us around to Ashes of the Sun.

(As an aside, it’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by this kind of theme.  My middle-grade series, The Forbidden Library, came from the observation that Dumbledore sure does spend a lot of time allowing Harry and his friends to get into life-threatening danger in order to accomplish things that he, Dumbledore, could do easily and safely.  In the books, we trust Dumbledore because he’s both well-meaning and knows what’s best, but removing this element — what TVTropes calls the Omniscient Morality License — gives us what I described as the Sketchy Dumbledore Scenario, where an old guy tells you “Hey, you’re a wizard and the Chosen One!  Now fight these guys I don’t like for me.”)

In the world of Ashes, you can be born with the ability to access deiat, the power of creation.  Using special tools, deiat users called centarchs become almost unstoppable fighters.  The community of centarchs, the Twilight Order, see themselves as the last bastion of civilization, and this is not unreasonable: after a race of deiat-wielders called the Chosen went extinct and their great civilization collapsed, only the Order has access to the power to hold human society together and protect with from the monstrous plaguespawn on its borders.  Centarchs have unlimited authority, both legal and practical, because apart from another centarch, no one can stop them.  But they don’t have an all-powerful Force assuring them everything will come out for the best; deiat doesn’t provide guidance, it just blows things up.

Gyre is eight years old, and his sister Maya five, when a centarch comes to their home and declares that Maya has the gift and will be taken to join the Order.  Maya doesn’t want to go (what five-year-old would, right?) and Gyre tries to help her, and gets badly injured for his troubles.  The incident sets them on opposite paths: twelve years late, Maya is a loyal member of the Order and devoted to her mentor and friends, while Gyre has become a thief and a rebel, scouring the dark places of the world for forbidden power that will let him stand up to the centarchs.

There’s a lot more to Ashes then that, of course.  Like any good story, once I started working on it it took on a life of its own, and there’s a few other big threads and themes that got drawn in.  But the original idea, and the core argument between these two characters, comes back to my Star Wars thought experiment — if you have people who are born with the potential for great power, can you justify forcing them to use it for the common good?  And, if you do, is it fair to assign authority based on what is after all just the luck of the genetic draw?  The Order, in Ashes, would answer yes to both questions, and they could easily be right; survival is a struggle in a world full of monsters.  But ruling classes — centarch or Jedi — like to construct elegant justifications for their dominance, when in the end it just comes down to who has the magic swords.

***

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy.

Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.

Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

About the author: Django Wexler is the bestselling fantasy author of the Shadow Campaigns series and the Wells of Sorcery young adult series. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. 

Django Wexler: Website

Ashes of the Sun: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

So, there’s this pandemic, right? A real corker of a coronavirus — some people get li’l colds, some people get pneumonia, others have organs attacked, suffer strokes, or endure long-lasting neurological symptoms. And we’ve no idea if there are longer-term problems waiting in the wings. Like I said the other day, polio could wage additional damage decades after you had it.

In this pandemic, we shut the country down. Sorta. Partly. Some states went whole hog, others half-assed it, and now we’re all varying degrees of “reopened,” and cases are surging. All because we didn’t do shit, really, as a country. Some states did well. My state, PA, is doing… pretty okay? Better than a lot, not as good as some of our Northeast counterparts. But nationwide, as a whole, we took allllllll that time locked down to accomplish… eeeyyyyeaaaannnhhh, very, very little.

And now, in many places, it’s worse than it was in March. Worse than the conditions that triggered the lockdown in the first place.

We were on a train driving toward a broken track over the edge of the cliff, and we wisely said, “We’d better slow this beast down, lest we go off the edge,” so we slowed it down… but then… kinda did nothing? We didn’t build new tracks. We didn’t construct a bridge. We didn’t even cover the train in pillows and bounce-houses in the hopes it lessened our impact, if we had to go over the cliff.

We just bided our time and then started speeding up again.

The track is still broken.

The cliff is still ahead.

And the train is full of children.

What I’m saying is, how the hell are we supposed to open schools again?

Consider the following problem —

Soon, it’s going to be cold-and-flu season. That can start as early as September around these parts, and really gets its roots in by winter. Hell, autumn brings allergies, too.

Now, let’s say a kid, or a teacher, starts to have symptoms of one or the other.

Sniffles, sneezes, runny noses, coughs. A temperature.

Is it COVID-19?

Well, you won’t know, so whaddya gonna do? Just casually remove them? The virus is catchier than a Rick-Roll, and often before you even show symptoms. You pretend it’s fine, you could make sure that everyone gets it, that it runs a race around everyone in school.

So, the likely answer is, you have to shut down the school, or at least that class, until the person is tested. And once again, testing is harder to get across the country. If you can get a test, then some people are receiving results in 7-14 days. For a while there it was faster, but remember SLOW DOWN THE TESTING, PLEASE, from our erstwhile shitberg of a president? Yeah. His wish was our command, and now testing is half-fucked again. So, if the person with the coughing-sniffles gets a test, it could be two weeks before results roll in.

Two weeks where people have to freak the fuck out that maybe their kids, or the teachers, or the parents, or whoever, caught the thing that may or may not be the virus that may or may not leave you with lasting long-time damage. That’s a very big Schroedinger’s Cat situation, isn’t it?

Then, then, assume that people are going to also get this thing. Not just cold. Not just flu. But people are going to get it. Statistically, that’s gonna happen, and I’m betting it happens in the first month of school. A kid, a teacher, an admin, a parent, or even someone secondarily connected to those people — a grandparent, a neighbor, whatever, someone where there has been exposure.

Now what?

Well, again, you probably gotta shut shit down.

So, best case scenario, you’ve got a rolling series of openings and shutdowns, blunting any educational momentum the kids and teachers gain. All while school is surely hamstrung anyway, because there’s no way you can run a school the way you did before in the midst of all this.

Given that even a single cough or elevated temperature could totally knee-cap your entire school for two weeks… how’s this supposed to work? What’s the point? Why even bother opening? It’s a futile gesture, like trying to thread a needle with a blowdart from across a crowded room. I guess it’s not impossible but oof. Of course, the Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head is that parents have to work and that means they have to send their kids to school and then there are kids who need school for meals and education (obviously) and social growth and maybe even an escape from abusive or problematic families. But federally, we have no response for this, no planning, no way forward — and a lot of states don’t have much of a clue, either. So onward the train goes, chug-chug-chug, choo-choo, and we know the tracks are busted, we know there’s no bridge, it’s only a cliff ahead and a damning drop to the hard ground below. But we keep going. The train keeps a rollin’.

HULLO HULLO. It is I, your bearded Charon guiding you down the rivers of the Underworld. Come, take a boat ride with me to the bubbliest, barmiest of blogtowns.

I’m reminded of polio. I know, starting off real exciting, right? Polio? JFC. I’m just saying, polio is one of those diseases where it infected a lot of people — but a bunch didn’t show symptoms, a bunch got the equivalent of a flu, and a smaller percentage ended up with muscle problems, paralysis, and death. Then, as if that weren’t sucky enough, some folks got a follow-up round of PPS (Post-Polio Syndrome) anywhere from 15-40 years later. And they don’t know why. Because viruses are weird.

What I’m trying to say is, take COVID very seriously. In particular, take warnings about neurological damage with considerable concern. Further, it’s worth realizing that survival — while good! — doesn’t mean a life free from symptoms or problems. We need to stop pretending like this is just the flu, like you get it and move on, like we understand the margins of this thing. We don’t. Even with a vaccine, its effects will be with us for a while. Wear a mask. Try to remain distant. Stop going to parties and bars, for shit’s sake.

In better news, Far Side is back. I mean, holy shit. The Far Side is back?!

Some TV I’m enjoying? I started up both The Boys and Doom Patrol and… okay, listen, I wasn’t sure about The Boys. I kinda figured it was gonna be a bro-town meh-fest, but I should’ve have doubted. It’s great. I’m digging it. And Doom Patrol? Who knew? Both are squirrely, dark takes on the superhero thing, and I’m not super into the dark takes right now, but what can I say? What works, works. And these work. What shows or movies have you been digging?

I got a hammock. Its singular purpose was for reading — to disconnect from the world and to pick up a physical book and just read it. My pleasure reading has been erratic as hell since all this started, but lemme tell you, I started Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song yesterday, and in a blink, I was 100 pages deep. I haven’t read 100 pages of a book in one sitting since before the Quarantimes. Ironically, it’s a book about a virus — an upgraded rabies virus. It’s horrifying. Tremblay is a monster. A wonderful monster who is a helluva writer. What are you reading right now?

I saw a video that has made me laugh so hard I wept. It’s Akilah and Milana. Just watch it and improve your life one thousand percent.

A casual reminder that you can find me on Instagram. It’s @chuck_wendig over yonder.

Our garden doth grow. Been eating snap peas, which have been sweet. Our radish days are gone. Got kale that needs harvesting. Shishito peppers blooming. Peas starting. And something called “Dragon Beans” which are, no joke, growing taller than anything we have supporting them, so I’m pretty sure they’re some kind of mythological legume. We also used compost to help jump start our blueberries, but I guess the compost had squash seeds in them because now the blueberries have some squash buddies growing alongside them? I’m sure that’s fine.

Beer me, barkeep. I had something called Cocoa Cow from Sunriver and hot dang that was good. It’s like dessert, except it’s beer? I wanna put some vanilla ice cream in it. Because if you’re going to be unhealthy, you might as well press pedal and pitter-patter.

So it’s been a year, now. Happy birthday, Wanderers. The little big book has been out for a full year, and it’s done very well and I’m happy, but do you remember when it was fiction hahaha aaaaghhaaAAAAGHHHH yeah me too. Also holy shit, it’s at 989 reviews at Amazon — ?! That’s a helluva thing. I’m still very proud of the book. It was serendipitous in the writing and the reception, and equally so — if more troubling — in how it occasionally would come to mirror some of reality. I don’t think the book’s journey is over, and it continues (somehow?) to sell pretty well, and I’m just glad it’s out there and did okay. I remember taking a road trip to do research for it and — wow, remember road trips? Remember going places? Remember doing stuff outside your house. Of course, because we live in Two Americas, there are lots of people who remember those things well, because they just did them like, last week. Half our local cases are from people who thought, “Now’s a good time to go to Myrtle Beach, where I can rub my nose in some coronavirus with lime, baby.” Seriously, our cases in PA are coming from out of state. Because people just can’t be smart and keep it under control. IF I DON’T GO TO THE BEACH I’LL DIE, they say, before going to beach and catching a disease that could kill them. Cool cool cool, extremely cool.

I have all kinds of news I can’t yet share. One day I’ll share it. For now I’m sitting on a nest of eggs that only I know are there. HATCH, LITTLE NEWS GOSLINGS, HATCH.

ANYWAY that’s all she wrote, I think.

Wear a mask.

Here’s a flower.

I’m often wont to say that plot is Soylent Green — it’s made of people. Meaning, people make decisions, and that’s what forms an overarching plot or story, not some external hero’s myth, not some skeletal framework of A to B to C. And that’s in narrative, yes, but it also translates to the real world. Science and history are both driven by people — their decisions, their choices, their observations and recordings. And here, Andrea Phillips — with her new novel, America, Inc. out this week — talks a bit about the idea of the corporation, and how it relates to the individual:

***

My name is Andrea Phillips, I think corporations get a bad rap that they don’t entirely deserve. I even wrote a book called America Inc. that’s about a corporation running for president of the U.S. — and they’re the good guys. See, I think the corporation is just a tool, and like every tool, it can be used for good or for evil.

In the beginning, corporate personhood was a great idea. The whole point was to legally separate a business from its owners. That way they wouldn’t be ruined if something went wrong and the business went under — say a ship was lost at sea, or the shop burned down.

Recognizing the business as a separate legal entity created a shield that meant the people the business owed money to couldn’t come after the owner’s house, couldn’t take all of their life savings, couldn’t take the lollipops from the mouths of their children. That doesn’t seem so bad, right?

So why do people hate corporations today? That tool fell into the wrong hands. They’ve taken the legal and financial shield and applied it to other areas of responsibility. It’s become a moral shield, too.

When Deepwater Horizon spilled hundreds of millions of gallons into the Gulf of Mexico, we blamed BP. When researchers discovered diesel cars cheating their way through emissions testing, we blamed Volkswagen. When the 737 Max turned out to have gone into service with fatal flaws, we blamed Boeing.

But each one of those incidents is the result of decisions and actions taken by individual people — and not just one or two, but a cascade of people all choosing to do the wrong thing.

This also applies to business practices. It’s easy shorthand to talk about Amazon’s monopoly power or Wal-Mart’s decision to underpay their workers. But Amazon didn’t decide anything. Wal-Mart didn’t, either. In a very concrete way, neither Amazon nor Wal-Mart even exist. You can’t touch them, and you certainly can’t throw them in a jail cell. Every one of those actions is a choice that some asshole made — some asshole who took on the mantle of the corporation to shield him from the consequences.

The corporation isn’t the problem. The problem is a cultural and legal structure that absolves individuals of moral and criminal culpability for the choices they’ve made. The problem is letting those assholes run things without consequences.

It doesn’t have to be like that.

OK, fine. Sometimes, in the most egregious of cases, we’ll throw a few assholes in jail. Sometimes, though, the people who wind up in hot water aren’t the ones who made the original decision; they’re just water-carriers following orders for the people who sign their checks.

We could be doing a lot more. We could be exercising punishments for corporate malfeasance with more bite than skimming off a fraction of a percent of profits in fines. We could and should create a criminal framework that punishes both businesses and decision makers for their antisocial, anti-environmental, anticompetitive choices.

Creating sweeping change like that is hard and slow. In the meantime, all of us have to operate within this corrupt system. There’s no escaping it. But that doesn’t mean we have to be corrupt ourselves.

Individuals have much more power than they realize. Every day, we make choices, and our little choices can add up ripple by ripple to become a great wave of change. We’ve seen it in #MeToo, where each person calling out the instigator of their harassment emboldens others to share their experiences and enforce a new cultural acceptance that that kind of shit isn’t okay. We’re seeing it right now with Black Lives Matter, where years of tremendous work of Black activists has finally stirred even apathetic white people to protest and to support massive changes in police use of force, disciplinary processes, and funding.

I’m not saying that little by little we can change the complicated international financial-legal system on our own. But in your own workplace, you can be a sticky cog, finding ways to prevent evil and ways to do good. Every business that sent out an email supporting Black Lives Matter did that because an individual at that company made a choice — a moral choice. We can all find ways to try to make our workplaces less racist, or less exploitative, even if it’s just by example.

Me, I’m just a reclusive author. I can’t press my employer to, say, make Juneteenth a paid holiday because I don’t have one. So for my part, I’m donating 15% of net profits from sales of America Inc. to Common Cause, a nonprofit that works to protect voting writes in the United States.

Be the change. It’s got to start somewhere. And once you start, you just might discover you’re not as alone as you thought.

***

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning immersive experience designer and author. Her short fiction includes the critically acclaimed novelette The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike. America, Inc. is its novel-length sequel. Her other books include Revision, The Daring Adventures of Lucy Smokeheart, and A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. She also created the Serial Box LitRPG project Alternis, and co-authored Bookburners and ReMade. You can find her on Twitter at @andrhia. I mean, if you like that sort of thing.

Andrea Phillips: Website | Twitter

America, Inc.: Buy Now