Interesting

I forgot to mention one of the space operas I've read more recently, which is Jack Campell's Geary series. (Oh God, what a terrible rhyme.) Someone over at james_nicoll accused it of being formulaic from book to book and, well, it is. I don't have the link (it was buried somewhere in comments to a post I don't remember what it was) but it was something like:

1. Geary comes up with brilliant plan.
2. Stupidheaded captains quarrel with brilliant plan.
3. Battle happens. Stupidheaded captains cause things to go wrong.
4. Stupidheaded captains (with encouragement of the few, reliable, smartheaded captains?) realize how wrong they were, use Geary's plan.
5. VICTORY HULK SMASH!!!

Uh, I'm paraphrasing lots.

So yeah, if you get tired of the formula, then you get tired of the formula.

What I found interesting was the reason behind the tired formula--I mean, not that it helps if you can't stand seeing the same basic thing every battle--is culture change. Geary was in some kind of hibernation due to...luck? (if you can call it that) and is from 100 years in the past, back when they knew how to do tactics and maneuvers and stuff. The war has been going on all this time with the enemy (the Syndics??) and the attrition has been so bad that doctrine has devolved to what looks awfully like a terrifyingly unthinking version of offensive à outrance.

Weirdly, I found this plausible because of math.

Specifically, I found this plausible because of math pedagogy, even more specifically because of high teacher turnover in USAn schools. When I taught high school math, I had three preps and one of them I had to design the curriculum from scratch (Discrete Math)--I mean, I was given a Discrete Math textbook but that course had been used for years as a dumping ground for the "bad math" students to do basic arithmetic worksheets for the hour as a holding pen. I wish I were making this up. The head of the math department was new that year and determined to turn that course into one that really actually taught Discrete Math. I was all for it, but, you know, first-year teacher so learning curve. I was forever doing things like thinking that something would take a full period and finding that the kids picked it up quickly, or finding that they would get hung up hard on something I took for granted. This is pretty natural; it happened to me when I was doing my practicum during teacher ed. Eventually with experience you get a knowledge base and a better feel for these things.

But the thing is, it's a little stupid to do this from scratch when you could, you know, have a knowledge base of this stuff. During teacher ed we read about Japanese school math departments where the teachers would get together and share this knowledge, and also keep files on lessons and what stumbling blocks students had and ways to address them. I'm not saying that all USAn schools don't do things like this, but I know I have taught at schools where they definitely don't do this--every time a teacher leaves (or quits teaching entirely, like I did), everything they knew goes with them, and the next person who comes in, especially if they're a first-year? Starts from scratch.

So yeah. I could depressingly see how you could end up with an entire space navy that is worn so ragged that it gets in this position--because even if someone figures out how to fight all over again, what's the odds that they live long enough to teach enough people who themselves live long enough...

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recent work
- I TURNED IN REVISIONS.

Also, I had to redo my hexarchate timeline because I accidentally set one figure wrong. It was a very easy fix, however. My arithmetic was otherwise fine.

(Embarrassing as hell, though, I admit, when you're dealing with a novel that presumably has characters for whom the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic is of dire importance.)

Also, I have written enough Yuletide that I feel justified in writing up a fandom_stocking stocking...

recent exchange
- Me: "Joe! You should write me a computer game for Christmas! In two weeks!"
Joe: "ROCKS FALL EVERYONE DIES: THE GAME."
Me: *swoon*

bookspoils
- Someone had the sequel to Storm Constantine's Sea Dragon Heir checked out so I'll try back another time. There was an omnibus of the Wraethhu (sp?) books but I wasn't sure it sounded like my thing. (Anyone?)

I made my saving throw against two sf books in the library discards pile--one I didn't feel deeply moved to reread (I'm blanking on the title but I'm pretty sure it's that Asimov story about the boy who gets called in to the shrink for going on walks in a future where everyone has a teleporter, something like that) and another by an author I admire but whose prose is dense hence too exhausting for me to deal with right now, and also I am very sure the book is easy to find, and I've read it before anyway.

recent quasireading
- It seems I now own two copies of The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.; the second is a library discard in terrible shape and I might take it as airplane reading to NY. I started rereading it at the library and still love it.

I actually do understand why people would find Lerris's "because it's boring" super-unsympathetic, or anyway rather trivial, as a heroic nonmotivation. It is, however, one of the things that I like about the book because I so completely sympathize with it. I get bored so easily. You think that I chase after Turkish, cross stitch, custom modded My Little Ponies, cryptology, military history, Latin, digital painting, etc. etc. because of a desire for self-improvement? Please. I do it because I get so bored.

Also, I know one person who actively likes the rather plain-sounding foods that Modesitt tends to feature and prefers them to the endless sumptuous banquet whatever school of fictional food. I'm, hmm, not precisely agnostic, but mostly I find long description of food really tedious (whether the food is sumptuous or plain or whatever), which goes along with me being adamantly not a foodie. Modesitt works for me because yeah food is mentioned a lot, but in a logistical sort of way, and he doesn't go on about it for paragraphs and if it tires me out it's easy to spot and skip.

recent listening
- Escape: "Ancient Sorceries" by Algernon Blackwood (podcast/audio story thing?, mp3 download from Archive.org). I was made aware of this by james_davis_nicoll and his description

An English traveller makes the mistake of disembarking at an innocent seeming small town, a town whose inhabitants seem to know him. He learns far more about himself than he'd have wanted to.

made this sound intriguing. It's the kind of (probably) horror/supernatural story I have a weakness for.

I can't say that I followed all of the story. Even sitting in the darkness trying to concentrate on nothing but the performance (which seemed to be well-done, with effects and bits of music and a couple voices along with the main narrator/protag), I kept having my usual problem with podcasts/audio lectures/audiobooks, which is that I either have difficulty parsing out the phonemes (this is also why I watch even English-language TV with subtitles whenever possible) or I space out and lose chunks of the audio stream. It's kind of frustrating, because it would be nice to be able to access stuff in audio format. From what I did understand of it, though, it seemed to fall into a particular form that I have seen in (written) supernatural stories, pretty much what you'd guess from James's description.

recent someone else's gaming
- I also probably shouldn't tell you about the comment I made when Joe was hunting elves (yesssss! sorry, I can't stand elves, it's an AD&D thing) and one of his targets ran away after he shot it and I asked him if he had to track it while it bled out like a deer and he said he didn't think the game mechanics worked that way. Although it would be funny if they did.

- Me, staring at gray-skinned elf on computer screen: "Joe, if I had ears like that, would you still love me?"
Lizard: "What's wrong with his ears? Those ears are totally awesome. I want pointy ears like that."
Joe: "Oh bleep." (He really says "bleep.")

(HATE ELVES HATE HATE HATE.)

for kate_nepveu

I have to admit that I feel too embarrassed to go to panels because I am not remotely current on the state of sf/f anymore and everyone's always talking about authors I've barely even heard about, or whom I've never read, etc. But!

The con panel topic I would kill to go to? How to write space opera battles. I would go! I would tape record! (Or use smartphone, whatever, although I rarely benefit from audio recordings for the same reason audiobooks and podcasts are hard for me and I have to use subtitles even on English-language telly.) I would take notes! Mainly, I want people who actually know what the heck they're doing to please tell me how to do this because I have no idea what I'm doing when I write space opera battles and that probably means I R DOIN IT RONG.

(I'm sorry, I used to have better English than this, but I woke up at 6 a.m. today because lizard.)

I mean, I do write space opera battles so I clearly have some idea of how I might go about doing this. I just feel like a total fraud when I do. My usual trick is to find a floaty metaphor and hang the space combat system off it, and to avoid getting pinned down with too many details. It's a degrees of freedom thing. I remember reading about how there was some ST:TNG ep where they had the night sky above Earth on some actual future date (you know what I mean) and some astronomy-minded Trekkies showed that it was the wrong night sky--I am undoubtedly hashing up the details, but something like that. I live in dread of being caught out. And of course, it's not like we HAVE spaceships. When I thought I was going to be a medievaloid fantasy writer, I could read up on Genoese crossbowmen and trebuchets and the Siege of Alesia and stuff. Star Wars-scale Big Space Battles? Not so much. To say nothing of the inconvenient problem of FTL. Since I usually take Actual Science out back and shoot it between the eyes, I do the traditional thing and have FTL without worrying about Actual Science.

More seriously (?), space battles way the hell out in space tend to look weirdly boring because, look, VAST STRETCHES OF EMPTY SPACE. I would probably have better tools for thinking about this if I knew anything about naval warfare (that's not the Imjin War), although I assume reefs and weather and stuff. (And sharks. The US Army's Survival Manual has the most hysterical survival chapter on sharks. Well. Hysterical if you plan on never, ever swimming. Me, I'm worried about the GATORS.) I would assume it's awfully hard to accidentally run into another space fleet because space is big and lack of terrain is just odd. (More anon.) OTOH if you set things near systems or stars or whatever, you start having to worry about Actual Astronomy and celestial mechanics. (Oh noes!) I don't know about you, but having to work out positions of things and slingshots and whatever in, I don't know, a five-body system or whateverthehell makes me break out in a cold sweat because, look, math major, I hate the thought of numerical methods or whatever you use to solve those equations, the only numbers I want in my life are 0, 1, π, and ∞.

I worry about this a lot because even when you come up with a neat/fun/whatever magitech space combat system, it is often not clear what optimal tactics are. (Or anyway, non-sheerly-wasteful-of-lives tactics.) Or, hell, who am I kidding, look at the ACW and the Great War. :-/ I'll take somewhat plausible tactics. It's hard! It's this whole thought exercise in, Given the particular military/social/cultural/technological/etc. institutions in this culture, what kind of warfare/training/etc. paradigms would emerge and how would they play out on the battlefield? And that's just one side, then you have to do the other side(s).

In a sense, "The Battle of Candle Arc" was comparatively easy because I had two goals. (Well. Three. #3 was "I need cash." Sorry, guys, I'm really boring.) #1 was to figure out how a particular Ninefox Gambit character had won a battle mentioned in his backstory. #2 was to CHEAT COMPLETELY by cribbing it off Admiral Yi Sun-Shin's Battle of Myeongnyang. Here's the diagram. To be brief, the tactics are not quite isomorphic, but they're as close as I could get while preserving the magitech system in the novel (the whole calendrical warfare thing features heavily). Admiral Yi used fishing boats in the distance to lure the Japanese, who presumably could only see a blur on the horizon and assumed that they had not managed to annihilate the Korean fleet at Chilcheonnyang after all, and decided that they had better make another go of destroying the Korean navy (given the drubbing that Yi had given them in the past they can be forgiven for being paranoid). I could not for the life of me figure out how to do fishing boats in space (I mean, it would have been hilarious, isn't there that one original Trek episode with the giant SPACE AMOEBA?) so I made up randomness (that would be the Rahal lenses). Things like that.

But basically, Myeongnyang relied heavily on a terrain feature. I picked it partly because the terrain feature that Yi exploited was something that I could induce by setting certain parameters, and also because the psychology of dealing with the opponent translated pretty straightforwardly. Plus, while it's possible there is other English-language sf that has TOTALLY CRIBBED off Myeongnyang, I am pretty sure it will not be as crashingly common as something in English-language sf/f like, I dunno, Cannae or Gettysburg or whatever.

For me there's also the whole I AM A FRAUD thing that makes writing battle sequences nerve-wracking. I do try to do my homework. I read a reasonable amount of military history and related stuff. I've only read a few army field manuals but the ones I have are super. But NO WAY NO HOW does that mean I understand anything substantive.

This means that I end up going elsewhere for any kind of insight into how systems translate into practices and paradigms, which is, uh...yeah. You guessed it. Computer games. Also I guess all the stupid arguments I got into on the FIDONET AD&D conference &c. and tabletop stuff. But look, given a weapons system embedded in a social matrix or whateverthehell, it does not strike me as a trivial problem to figure out how best to employ this stuff, not even getting into people having random weird self-serving agendas. So poking around on forums where people are arguing themselves blue in the face about whether character X is god tier or the tier just below, or whether mechanic X is broken, or the best tactics against whatever, or which attack does the most damage (I remember that tactics page for VO Raiden recommending side dash bazooka, my God, if I can tell that's wrongheaded and deeply suboptimal...see? I can do it too). Joe is extra-useful for this because he really gets into this stuff and if I prod him a little he will go into rhapsodies of analysis. Also, let's be real. I write handwavy space opera. A game is probably sufficient as a starting point, as long as the limitations of the model are taken into account. It's not like anyone reads my stories expecting them to sound real. But I want to hear about other approaches to this. Preferably including the ones that don't require you to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics. :-(

(Yes, I know I have an astrophysicist, but he runs away when I try to make him do work. I tell him that the fact that I don't write hard sf is his fault.)

(I think I make this too complicated for myself and next time I should just write about happy tentacle monster pirates. Joe wishes I would shut up about tentacles.)

Anyway, it's been too long since I read Vorkosigan to remember how Big Space Battles are handled, although I'm kind of remembering that most action is on a smaller tactical scale? Aral Vorkosigan is talked up for five-space something-or-other tactics and I am almost certain that this is handwaved and never described in any detail because I am also pretty sure that I watched the text like a hawk looking for details. (This is, BTW, not a complaint--I have no clue what five-space whatever looks like, it's better for everyone this way.) Honestly, I can't remember most of what Miles does other than terrify the hell out of me.

Is David Weber the one (one of the ones?) who got physicists to design his stardrive system and the basic tactics? Or something? I heard something about this, like, 15 years ago and don't remember details. Also it's been about that long since I read any Honor Harrington.

I have only read one of Iain Banks's Culture novels and that was The Player of Games, which I adored, but is not so much with the Big Space Battles.

There's Star Wars, but although I am not really familiar with the Extended Universe, I had a hard time taking the movies seriously because honestly, having a bunch of stormtroopers shoot at you en masse is a GREAT way to guarantee that you will not be hit. (In all fairness, I think I was more impressed with the original movies when I was six, although I apparently was terrified when Luke's hand got cut off.)

I don't think the Last Legionary books (YA) by Douglas Hill really do big space battles, although they're very pulpy space opera in a more individualist mode? There's a lot of hand-to-hand and infrangibility (oh man, I can't look at that word without wincing anymore).

I never finished watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes, whose politics I liked, but I frankly hated the space battle tactics as depicted so badly that I wrote an article for the anime club newsletter taking a flamethrower to them. (No, really. You do not have to get glowy-eyed at the words "oblique order" to look at the battles and go, WTF?)

No idea what Battlestar Galactica reboot qualifies as subgenre-wise but I wasn't tracking real hard. Also, carrier/fighter paradigms are hard for me to think about; I don't know anything about air warfare.

Uh. So who, given the topic, would you put on the panel?

(Oh God, this turned into a ramble...must stop procrastinating, back to work.)