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Laying Pipe

Time was, you had to have some kind of hard science degree to actually write “science fiction”. You at least had to be plausible. We had a nice, happy little ghetto. Then the “New Wave” hit. The characters were more real, they were having (gasp!) sex, and there was the occasional unhappy ending. They gave the readers what they wanted, and book sales surged. We were mainstreamed with books that people could hardly comprehend (always a problem with Science Fiction), and we arrived. Almost.

Fast forward (heh) to “Today”. We’ve moved into the Brave New World of publishing: franchise fiction. The section that contains the spin offs from popular TV shows and movies is equally as large as the original fiction on the shelves.

I think I know why that is. It has to do with a process known as “laying pipe”.

When you introduce a world to someone, it is, of necessity, strange. You have to introduce new sights, new sounds, new concepts to them. You can do this in one or two pages, and bore the reader out of their skulls, or you can do this over many chapters (sometimes the whole book, if a new concept was a plot point).

You “waste time” laying out your world before getting to the “good parts”. This is where franchise fiction comes it. You already know what the Star XXX universe looks like. You already know that Buffy is a Slayer and Harry is a Wizard as well as a Potter (although I’m not sure he throws pots as a hobby). All that back story, all that infrastructure, all that pipe is already laid for the writer. Which makes it easy to write, and easy to read.

Pardon me for being a snob, that seems terribly lazy to me.

So. My world (and welcome to it). Sure, it’s derivative. Post apocalypse has been done. Robots taking over the world has been done. To death. It’s the idea of robots taking over the world, and nobody noticing? That’s fresh, I think. Do it for laughs (and in These Frightened Times, don’t we all need a laugh?), and By Jove I think I have something.

More on this later.

Self Expression

It’s been about six months since I finally admitted to myself I was an atheist. Sam Haris’ The End of Faith was instrumental in that decision, although I had been languishing as a “comotose Catholic” for some thirty years.1

I immersed myself in The Literature: Dennet, Harris, Hitchens. You know. The Masters. I found myself haveing several “yeah, right, this makes sense” moments while reading all of them. They all lacked one, vital thing. The thing that Religion automatically provides.

I’m talking about cursing, people. And in 21st century America, the best curses involve blasphemy.

Think about it

You’re in your basement. You’re trying to fix your toaster 2. And you have the sucker plugged in. You get shocked. What do you say? “God damn it”? Who are you talking to? Or this: “Jeezus F. Christ”? Hello, anybody home? Even the relatively mild “Damn it” loses it’s sting if, well, there’s no damnation to go to.

We are up the Rubicon without a paddle, people

We could always fall back on the old tried and true: biological processes. But let’s face it, the F-Bomb is just way overused, and poop and pee based epithets stopped being satisfying in High School.

So what the Hell (if you’ll pardon the expression) do we do?

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1
For you Non-Roman-Catholics, a “lapsed Catholic” was an erstwhile member of the flock who had not seen the inside of a church for, oh, a great long while. As a comotose Catholic, not only had I not been inside a church for a while, I had no desire to go in.

2
Unless you own one of those Sharper Image jobs that more resemble an high tech Final Solution for bread than than something to warm up a few Pop Tarts.