So, I’ll start high.  In many fairly popular sci-fi stories, it takes an alien invasion for the world to set aside its bickering and unify as a single force.  Granted, there are still cultures and other issues within, but a single government entity emerges to confront the new alien terror.  Which, as I will say many times in this post, is a Them for our Us.  And honestly, I think that is about the short of it.  Sentient life seems to have such a hard time getting along that it comes down needing something bigger and scarier to pull us together.  Heck, John Locke noticed this, although he believed that it would take a Behemoth, a massive military force that was able to hold the world at gunpoint, to actually make it behave most of the time.  Which, funny enough, has been the case in some Sci-Fi too.

But, let’s even look back at the beginnings of government.  Nomad tribes learned to farm and settle, then when other nomads came to take the crops, the settlers banded together for protection.  Of course, the biggest, meanest settler became the king, and bingo, government, us, and them.  Pack behavior from the get-go has probably been survival based, with Nature being the Them, but don’t quote me on that.  I’m hardly an anthropologist; I just play one on TV (I wish).

So, cliques.  And an aside, I hate that word, cause I use it quite often in speech, but it took me a full five minutes of going DUR to remember how to spell it and have it mean what I wanted it to mean.  Anyway, cliques, and in particular, kids on a playground.  I don’t know how well anyone here remembers elementary school, but there were two givens. Thursday was spaghetti day, and there was a group of kids who hated with your group of friends with the boiling intensity of a thousand suns.  They might not have been able to do anything about it, especially if your group was way larger or more popular, but they still did.  And more than likely your group had an animosity with some other group (or, sadly, occasionally just a single outcast type kid).  Why? Well, it isn’t just that kids are mean, which they are.

No, it is because an enemy draws us closer.  Hatred is, sadly, a very strong and universal emotion, perhaps moreso than love.  A mutual love of something can create some bonds, but a mutual hatred is like the duct tape and super glue of young friendships.  Perhaps the nature of hate is a good reason.  After all, to quote (shudder) Billy Shakespear, “In time, we come to hate what we often fear.”  And, to quote many people (although Carmine Falcone from Batman Begins is stuck in my head saying it) “You always fear what you don’t understand.”  And what is more universally true of any human than a lack of understanding?

Oh, and an aside of historical proof, both the unification of modern Italy and the unification of the German State required a vilification of an outsider to make it stick.

So, hatred bonds people together, even when they have great differences.  Get enough people together, and there will be great differences.  So, perhaps, there will always have to a “Them.”  To my psychology-savvy friends, please, give me proof otherwise (or anyone for that matter). Cause, honestly, that is a kind of depressing thought.

Oh, and writing.  All I really take from this is that you need to think long and hard if a single-government without external threat really makes sense at all, whether in a future-earth or a fantasy universe.  I, personally, find them odd (which is funny since I do want to write about one in a novel.  Least I have more to think about.)

So, two parts, meta-writing, then some personal musing.  The natural disaster by itself is one of the great “villains” that isn’t really evil.  An entire sci-fi story can be told about the trials and pains of surviving a disaster, either immediately or even from that past that has just had lingering effects.  One does not even really need a sentient villain, although adding one in for spice never hurt.  Just be sure the villain has a reason for being, you know, villainous.  Depending on the disaster, this might be harder than it sounds.

I have noticed that writing about these kinds of things is becoming far more popular.  I don’t know if it’s the growing presence of climate change in the global discourse (holy crap, I got to use that phrase non-ironically!) or just a “vampire” phenomenon, but I’m not the only one to notice this.  Anthologist John Joseph Adams said in his collection of post-apocalyptic stories Wastelands that there seems to be a reemerging fascination with the end of the world.  In olden days, the Cold War was on everyone’s mind, and the prospect of nuclear holocaust.  The stories Mr. Adams selected for his anthology were actually quite different, from bio-terrorism to climate-change disasters, it showed plenty enough in the way of how a disaster can be responded to on both sides, the observing and the experiencing.

Which gets to my personal side.  See, I have observed a goodly number of disasters.  I am natively from the Midwest, where tornados are taken in an easier stride than Florida does hurricanes, but oddly enough, I have never been directly in one.  I’ve had some near misses, but never even a hit on my community.

Likewise, since moving to the east coast, I only have experienced one hurricane and one tropical storm, neither of which did much of anything to the area around me.  Honestly, my town spazzed out more over the threat of snow flurries than they did for either of those summer-storms.  So I have a very uninformed outlook on natural disasters.  Yeah, I can look at the pictures of flooded streets and crumbled buildings, of despairing citizens and brave rescue workers, but I am still just that, an observer.  Our society, while in the most recent incident seems to be doing well, tends to commercialize and go for rating and entertainment in even the most dire of situations.  And by entertainment, I do mean that “can’t look away from the train wreck” mentality we all have.  There are those admirable souls that would run up and pull the conductor out, but honestly, I think that most of us would just stand there and stare like deer in headlights.  Myself, I don’t know.  I’d like to think that I would not be a victim (mentality wise, not fact-of-life wise), but, as the song says “I’m not a coward, I’ve just never been tested.  I’d like to think that if I was I would pass.”

So, I hope the best of those who are caught in natural disaster.  I hope they are having the most uneventful, non-story worthy time of getting out of it they can, because stories are fun to read, not to live.  I know that probably isn’t the case, but when one is a starving artist, there is only so much one can do.  If you aren’t, though, please, give what you can to help.  Keep the stories in the fiction section as much as we can.

Wednesday, on the day before Christmas Eve, I attended a Festivus party (for the rest of us!).  For those unfamiliar with Festivus, it was an invention of the father of a writer for Seinfeld and made itself into an episode of the show.  The traditions are simple, with the entire explanation fitting on side of a piece of paper.  That aside, it was a fun excuse for a party.  Of course, a keg of beer and winter in general are good reasons for parties, but, well, yeah.

Other traditions have jumped off pages.  From the wonderful charity work of TarValon.net, with their Novices, Accepted, and Aes Sedai, to fictional swears and catechisms.  Heavens know that I say Gorram a lot since watching Firefly, and a goodly number of people use Frack of BSG fame.  There are people out there that will even have weddings themed on a book’s traditions.  Wowza!

But, what makes the tradition jump off the page like that?  Some of the great stories have very little off-page life, while some middling but still known stories have far more popularity.  Well, honestly, I have no clue cause I’m not a Humanities-type scientist, but I will say that I think it more has to do with the symbolism of the tradition or the ease of employing it.  For swearing, Gorram and Frack roll off the tongue easy.  For a Wheel of Time wedding, well, the costuming described is actually pretty awesome and the deeper meaning that was implied in the few marriage ceremonies we saw in the book were extremely heartfelt.

And to Festivus?  Well, it was simple, and the meaning was, while silly, strong.  It was a “secular holiday” (a wonderful oxymoron, in truth).  An acknowledgement that you don’t have to believe in invisible sky-people to still want to have some cheer in the dreary cold of winter, which, in my opinion, is what the midwinter celebrations are all about.  So, put up an aluminum pole and air some grievances!

And to the rest of you, a Merry holiday season.

Now, I’m all about the story simplification of only naming and establishing settings you are going to use, but the very fact that there could be numerous cities and countless towns and villages can do a lot for a setting.  And if there is a seemingly lack of it, make it important, please!  Like in the Wheel of Time, the massive tracks of land *snerk* that are uninhabited is actually a semi-important thing that has to do with the entire setting of the world.  But, in “Tower of Shadows”, the scant handful of towns (seriously, like an entire kingdom has less then ten solid municipalities across a hundreds if not thousands of miles kingdom.) does nothing except make it easier for the author to skip by the whole “let’s travel from one coast to the other” part of the story.  Oh wait, silly me, he through in a completely irrelevant dragon fight too.  Can’t forget that. (I swear, it was just a D&D campaign that somehow got past an editor).

Next up: what kind of civilization?  Is it a Roman-Greco republic or democracy?  Is it a constitutional monarchy.  Is it a military Punta?  And how does that make every single spear-bearer in the story act.  Trust me, people act completely different depending on the civilization they are in.  Do you have a good reason for this civilization to work?  Are you using a canned historical model or trying to make your own system.  Are you going to explain why the heck your own system works (Heinlein style), or are you just going to gloss over it?  If you gloss over it, you’d better at least take one or two more steps of design in your notes to know exactly how it works.  *shakes fist at authors who don’t*

And finally, where, really, does your protagonist (or group of protags) fit into this society, and how are they really going to react if they’re being shifted around in it.  Are you making them change their status?  If so, are they going to fall into with minimum discomfort (Like Mat from Wheel of Time), or are they going to kick and scream like an emo blacksmith that nobody likes?  Oh, sorry, Wheel of Time venting.  That’s what I get for reading The Path of Daggers right now.  Gah!

Anyway, Civilization, yeah.  I suck at ending my little expositions.  Maybe it’s cause I never liked the stupid “restate, recap, sting” thing they taught in high school.  Felt like a complete load of BS to me.  Basic Science, that is.  Dunno what you were thinking.  Yeah, I’m going to wonder off now.  Happy Pop-eye day (according to Google).