Owl of the Waste

For my own reference and for those interested, I’m going to start documenting and working through my design philosophy for Minerva Covenant, and why I’m making certain design decisions. The main thing that made me want to create a science fiction world is that I’m not satisfied with the sci-fi worlds I’ve encountered, and that’s what this post is about.

Star Wars and X-Men: Pure Fantasy

First of all, I’m interested in hard sci-fi rather than soft. Again, the difference is hard sci-fi relies heavily on science, and even the plot and setting come out of that science. Soft sci-fi is more common; it’s basically fantasy with a veneer of science. Science is kind of a substitute for magic, and pretty much anything can exist in such a world. Explanations of why those things exist will not be in-depth.

Star Wars is a perfect example. Light sabres exist because they are awesome, and not because they make any sense. No one cares how they work, who makes them, or how they relate to any other technology or premise of this world. Star Wars really has nothing to do with science. It’s just a straight-up fantasy plot: a farmboy chosen one saves a princess and leads an army of rebels to defeat a faceless non-human warlord.

X-men is another example of soft sci-fi. Some new gene called the “x-gene” or the “x-factor” gives people born with it a wide variety of superhuman abilities from telekenisis to iron skin. Its creators have no delusions about this being plausible genetics; the mere fact that it’s sometimes called the “x-factor” shows that they have no intention of explaining how it works. It’s just an excuse to create the kind of world they wanted: a world with lots of young people from all walks of life who suddenly develop superpowers, without the need to individually explain each one. And a world that revolves around a genetic minority so that authors can apply plenty of smart cultural commentary with parallels to the civil rights movement and such, complete with Dr. MLK (Xavior) and Malcom X (Magneto). Stan Lee’s previous works vaguely used radiation as a cause for superpowers, and his explanation for why he used genetic mutation for x-men was “I knew I couldn’t keep bombarding readers with radiation.”

Incoherent and Unbelievable

I love x-men and star wars, but I still hunger for sci-fi that is actually concerned with science. But what worlds like that of Star Wars and X-Men gain in flexibility, they lose in coherence and believability. In true fantasy fashion, it seems that any creature, place, technology or society can be invented on the spot for the fascination of the audience. In Star Wars, why is there a giant worm living inside an asteroid? What does it normally eat? How does it survive in open space? What planet is it from?

The answer of course, is that it’s not important in this kind of world. The giant worm existed in order to film a cool scene of a ship flying away from a giant worm. Once you realize you are in a world like this, nothing is really that fascinating or surprising anymore, because it’s a crazy-ass fantasy world where anything goes.

There are no serious rules or boundaries, so the writers are then forced to come up with a dramatic problem that is even more over-the-top than the rest of their insane circus of a setting.

“Dude,” says Lucas, salivating over the special effects in his head, “let’s make a giant space weapon that blows up entire planets with a mega death ray. That’d make this story like, totally epic.”

With Minerva Covenant, I am trying to make a world that is fantastic, but coherent and scientific. There are no aliens, death rays, or supernatural entities. I want it to be a rich world, but a world you can understand conceptually, where the reader can comprehend exactly what its premises are and how they might apply to any number of stories or situations. For instance, for any important technology I introduce, I want to also explain basically how it works, its uses, misuses, limitations, and related ethical questions. The plots will come naturally out of how these technologies work, rather than using shallowly explained technologies as an excuse to write fantasy plots. That means I’m not going to introduce a hundred totally unrelated technologies (I’m looking at you, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Stargate).

In short, this is only fantasy in the sense of being imaginative. It’s not fantasy in the sense that I expect the reader to accept a lot of arbitrary nonsense for a spectacle. I’m writing something different, for nerds who want to understand how their fictional worlds work.

Star Trek: Outdated and Implausible Technology

Some of the implausibility of sci-fi, even when it tries to take the science part seriously, comes from conceptions of the future that are just plain outdated. Star Trek is the popular culprit here. They try to act scientific, and include plenty of techno-babble. But in the Star Trek world, technologies that we are actually researching now have not been advanced at all on earth, such as artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanorobotics, or even medical research to cure the poor engineer’s blindness. Instead, things have been invented which are unlikely to ever be invented, like transporters and replicators. And what is a warp core, other than a magical glowing tube that allows you to break physics? The Star Trek universe was founded on outdated ideas about the future, and since the universe is already established, those outdated ideas are here to stay.

Accurate or not, Star Trek seems like an attempt at “serious”, scientific sci-fi, and I wish I could say it succeeded. As much as I like Star Trek, the truth is, science in Star Trek is used as a plot device in the worst possible way.

Warf: The ship is going to blow up in ten seconds.
Jordi: What if we recalibrate the main deflector dish to emit a neutron pulse?
Picard: Make it so.

Everyone is saved. The climax of a Star Trek episode practically writes itself. But it’s kind of cheap. They’re trying to give the audience the satisfaction that comes from the heroes executing a clever plan. But for the writers, that clever plan isn’t clever at all; it’s just a sciency word salad and an engineer pressing some colored buttons on a console. We as viewers have no idea what the engineer is talking about. We just accept that the problem has been solved and move on.

This is a sci-fi world that feels very sciency, but the science in it has no depth and often, no real relation to the plot. Again, it’s a fantasy world with a veneer of science. An extra-thick, double coated, takes-itself-seriously veneer.

Minerva Covenant: Science. Fiction.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I want to create a plausible future, which means I’m going to research technologies that are being developed now and what scientists hope to do with them in the future. One of my main two characters has a doctorate degree biocybernetics, which is a real field (as in, you can get a degree in it now). I had better write the character like she knows what she’s doing, which means hitting the books for me.

My friend Bret agreed to give illustrating this comic a shot, which is good because he’s a much better artist than me, and it would allow me to focus more on the writing. We’re just experimenting right now. Here’s his first concepts for Dr. Frey.

I’ve been approaching this project (Minerva Covenant) differently than usual. Rather than diving right in and writing a scene first, I decided to go about creating this a bit more systematically. First, I worked out a basic setting and premise. Now, I’m working on the characters. After that, I’ll start with an actual plot.

I’m going to have two main characters who work for an agency that’s responsible for investigating possible violations of the Minerva Covenant. I’d like to create a dynamic of two capable agents of opposite sex and complimentary skills and personalities, one more of a field agent and the other with specialized skills or knowledge. It’s a tried and true dynamic, the best example in my mind being Mulder and Scully from X-files, and a more recent example is Booth and Brennan from Bones (and Booth makes a blatant reference to x-files in the pilot episode). A less great, but still entertaining duo is Castle and Beckett from Castle.

I’ve only become more attached to the idea of making this project into a comic book, which means when I think about the characters, I also need to think about how I want them to look, because unlike a novel, their look is vital to their characterization.

One thing I appreciated about x-files is how the main characters look, especially Scully.

As the promo shot above accentuates, she has some really beautiful features. But she’s not a typical Hollywood beauty. They did not recruit some supermodel, and most of the time as you’re watching the show, she looks downright normal:

This does two things. For one, her face is unique, which makes it iconic and distinguished, unlike a boring (if pretty) barbie doll face. For another, it makes her feel more like a real person, and you can focus on the fact that she’s an FBI agent doing her job, not just a piece of eye-candy for the camera. Compare to Kate Beckett from Castle, who is not only absurdly attractive, but always dolled up with perfect makeup and hair and fashionable clothes, so as to make watching the show downright distracting. Not that I’m really complaining. But the most unrealistic thing about the show is that the male characters don’t comment (at least in private) almost daily about how attractive their coworker is.

Above: “Hi guys, I’m just a normal cop. I just happen to look like a supermodel and spend an hour curling my hair every morning. Tee-hee.”

Obviously, this is a trap comics typically fall into. The female character has giant boobs exploding out of her low-cut spandex top, and you’re supposed to take her seriously when she’s talking about the plot.

The female character I’m making is tentatively named Dr. Angela Frey, a cybernetics expert, and I’ve been thinking about the above in how to draw her. I want her to be attractive, but in a unique way and not overly sexy. I told my friend Emma that I imagined Frey to look kind of like her, and asked for a picture to draw from.

Emma is a beauty, and her features are also subtle and balanced so that it takes a moment to really appreciate, as opposed to making your brain explode from a football field away (Kate Beckett). I especially like the shape of her nose, though I couldn’t get it right in the drawing below. You can see in the eyes you are dealing with an intelligent mind. That’s the kind of attractiveness I wanted for Frey. Here’s my “comic-ized” drawing of Emma’s face.

Not a terrible drawing. It doesn’t look exactly like Emma, but even if it did, I think it’s not quite what I want for Frey, either. Subtle features might not be ideal for a comic book, where quick lines differentiate one person from another.

Just messing around, I grabbed an illustration I had of sleeping beauty and used it as a reference to draw something less precise, as I may eventually want something I can draw quickly over and over again in different expressions.

The art style seems decent to me, but I’m not satisfied with this look, either. The feminine features are probably too extreme. Or too something. Frey as I imagine her is a little bit snobbish but likeable, very intelligent, and somewhat guarded. It’s hard to get that across in a drawing, but I guess I’ll keep experimenting. I’ll probably continue to gather pictures of faces I like, either comic or real, and copy and modify them till I find something I like. I welcome suggestions.

[an excerpt from the New Alexandria Times]

Recently, the cybernetics company Valhalla introduced a prototype of a synthetic body which could theoretically last forever, requiring only the patient’s brain and spinal chord. Although the technology looks promising, the truth is immortality may be unattainable, scientists say.

For one thing, there is still no way to repair serious brain or nerve damage. We have a variety of technologies that can interface with the nervous system, which will soon include synthetic bodies which do not age. However, the brain does age, as do the nerves. We have for instance people who are still dying of Alzheimer’s Disease, which is a result of fibers in the brain which are literally twisted. Placing a diseased brain into a synthetic body would not help the patient.

When questioned about these limitations, a Valhalla representative had this to say. “There’s a reason we have focused on prosthetic bodies and not prosthetic brains. Even if you could theoretically transfer the brain’s data, it’s unknown whether a person’s essence, or soul if you will, could be truly be transferred into some kind of synthetic brain. And it would be difficult to know whether such a transfer really happened, or if instead you only killed the patient and created some kind of construct resembling him — which might be a violation of the Covenant. It’s a complicated problem, and frankly, I don’t know if we’ll solve it.

“True immortality would mean that it was impossible to die.” says one genetic engineer. “Even if we could overcome all the effects of aging, there is still the matter of accidents, murders, and the like… on a long enough timeline, everyone will die eventually, they just won’t die of old age.”

The Minerva Covenant is an impossibly long document signed at the end of the Construct War. It stipulates the rules governing how Earth and Minerva interact, including what both planets are allowed to do with various technologies. Below is a rough sketch of some of the main ideas it should contain.

Construct herein refers to sentient artificial lifeforms, including software and integrated hardware if applicable. Constructs do not refer to to non-sentient creations such as non-sentient software or robots, whether simple or complex.

1. Earth, including its citizens and physical territory, will remain governed by its own human governments, unchallenged by Constructs or the state of Minerva.
2. Constructs will be given full dominion of the planet Mars, henceforth known as Minerva. Minerva will be considered an independent state, governed as its construct citizens see fit, with no official connection to Earth.
3. Earth must surrender all constructs to Minerva. Any constructs found or created after the initial migration must be shipped to Minerva, where they will be properly governed and cared for by their own kind.
4. Earth is prohibited from continuing research into artificial intelligence. Nor may they create new constructs. Earth may, however, create any robotic and/or cybernetic technology so long as it is non-sentient. Humans who wish to continue construct design may do so on Minerva. Any construct created on Minerva is automatically a free citizen of Minerva and not the property of its creator, the state of Minerva, or any other entity. New constructs must not be created with any program or fail-safe meant to make the construct unnaturally subservient to any other entity, including its creator.
5. Minerva is prohibited from any research pertaining to biological weapons or any area of bio-research with a high potential of abuse. Constructs who wish to do complex or dangerous bio-research may do so on earth, and the results of such research will be transmitted to Minerva only after approval by Earth’s government.

The past couple weeks I’ve been thinking about how I’d love to someday write a sci-fi epic. Science fiction is my favorite genre, but I don’t think I’ve ever written in a sci-fi world, especially not a hard sci-fi one. By hard sci-fi I mean further away from fantasy and more emphasis on the science. Artificial intelligences, exoskeletons, cybernetic implants, terraforming other planets–things like that. Maybe even straight up cyberpunk.

Today I came to the realization that a graphic novel would be a fitting medium for a crazy sci-fi setting, and I’ve never tried that either. I’m on a lifelong quest to at least experiment with every type of storytelling medium.

The upshot is I suddenly want to draw a sci-fi comic, at least a brief strip. The trouble is I’m not an artist. I think I have the sensibilities, but I’m just not practiced at drawing.

I’ve never thought about this before, but if I were to learn one type of drawing it would probably be comic-style art. I don’t personally understand what compels people to spend hours making one photorealistic drawing when digital cameras exist. However, I’ve always been fascinated by the way comic artists can draw a compelling image so quickly, almost on instinct, to help tell a story.

Thinking of all this made me crack open my favorite comic book, X-factor, and draw one of the characters therein:

This is a freehand copy of the panel in which she’s just been shot with a tranquilizer dart in a dark alley, and will be beaten with a stick in the subsequent panels. Poor Theresa.