Author: Isaac Payne

Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Seanan McGuire

In the July 2021 issue of Galaxy’s Edge, Jean Marie Ward interviews Seanan McGuire. They discuss all manner of things, including writing, publishing, feminism, and much more!

Check out the full interview below, and if you like this content, consider subscribing to Galaxy’s Edge, where we bring you the best speculative fiction from writers new and old, as well as thoughtful interviews and book reviews.

About Jean Marie Ward

Jean Marie Ward writes fiction, nonfiction and everything in between. Her first novel, With Nine You get Vanyr (written with the late Teri Smith), finaled in both the science fiction/fantasy and humor categories of the 2008 Indie Awards. She has published stories in Asimov’s and many anthologies and provided an in-depth look into an award-wining artist, with her book Illumina: The Art of J.P. Targete. Her second nonfiction title, Fantasy Art Templates, marries the superb illustrations of artist Rafi Adrian Zulkarnain with pithy descriptions of over one hundred fifty creatures and characters from science fiction, fantasy, folklore and myth. A former assistant producer of the local access cable TV program Mystery Readers Corner, Ms. Ward edited the respected webzine Crescent Blues for eight years, and co-edited Unconventional Fantasy, a six-volume collection of fiction, non-fiction and art celebrating the fortieth anniversary of World Fantasy Con. She has also contributed interviews and articles for diverse publications before starting interviewing for Galaxy’s Edge magazine. Her website is JeanMarieWard.com.

FOLKLORE, PLAGUES, AND ANGLERFISH

What are award-winning, SFF writers made of? In the case of Seanan McGuire—author of the October Daye, InCryptid, Wayward Children series and more under her own name, as well as the science fiction horror novels of her alter ego Mira Grant and the children’s fantasy she writes as A. Deborah Baker—the answer encompasses music, art, anglerfish and 3 a.m. fanfiction attacks. Strange as the recipe may seem, you can’t argue with the results. To date, McGuire’s honors include the 2010 John W. Campbell Award (now the Astounding Award) for Best New Writer, the 2013 Nebula Award for Best Novella, five Hugo Awards, a record-breaking five Hugo nominations in a single year, and five consecutive Hugo nominations for Best Series—to say nothing of the seven Pegasus Awards she’s won for her filking. Eager to learn more, Galaxy’s Edge sat down with the California native a few days before the release of her latest novel, Angel of the Overpass, to talk about her earliest days as a writer, her fascination with microbial marvels, and expanding the notion of personhood on the page.

Galaxy’s Edge: When did you first realize you wanted to become a writer?

Seanan McGuire: When I found out it was an option. I was a very weird child. I was credulous in some ways that sound fake to me now, even though I remember the experience, and disbelieving in other odd ways. It made perfect sense to me that lunch boxes would grow on trees, which happens in The Wizard of Oz. And if there are lunchbox trees, why wouldn’t there be book trees? I had never met an author. I had never met anyone who said they were an author. I just figured that books happened. Being a storyteller felt like too much of a responsibility for any one person. It didn’t make sense, given the breadth of stories I could experience if I went looking, that anyone would do that.

At the time, one of my favorite shows was an anthology series on the USA Network called Ray Bradbury Presents. Every episode began with this white-haired dude sitting at a typewriter pounding away. Then there’d be a ding, and he would pull a sheet of paper out of the typewriter and throw it into the air. It fluttered down and formed part of the logo.

One day I asked my grandmother, “Who the heck is that? Why is this old dude taking up like a whole minute of what could be story?”

She said, “That’s Ray Bradbury. He wrote all these stories.”

That was my bolt of lightning moment. Wait, one person made all this up? This is all fake, and one person sat down and thought of it, and that was okay? That was allowed? I pretty much decided on the spot that that’s what I was going to do.

Galaxy’s Edge: How did you get from there to your first published stories?

Seanan McGuire: A lot of fan fiction. So much fan fiction. Shortly after the Ray Bradbury Presents incident, my mother brought me this gigantic manual typewriter from a yard sale. It cost five dollars, and it disrupted her sleep for years. It weighed more than I did. I would sit down, feed my paper in, and pound away for hours. I was seven. Seven-year-olds don’t sleep like humans They’re people, but they aren’t humans yet. The idea that 3 a.m. is not a good time to start working on a giant manual typewriter that sounds like gunfire does not occur to their tiny seven-year-old brains. And since the typewriter was so big compared to how big I was, I couldn’t just type, I had to assault the keyboard. I hunt and peck at approximately two hundred forty words per minute…

Because I was writing for hours at night, I would write stories about my cats or what I did that weekend or—and this is key—about having adventures with my friends, the My Little Ponies in Dream Valley. I had no idea that a self-insert was a bad thing. I was seven. I had no idea that saying I would be good at everything the ponies needed me to be good at was being a Mary Sue. Again, I was seven. I did this for years.

The thing about writing is the more you do it, the better you’ll get. You can get good at some really bad habits. But putting words in a line, forming sentences, building sentences into a paragraph, building enough paragraphs onto a page to have a page? That’s a muscle. That’s something that you learn by doing. I turned out reams and reams and reams of not goodness, but it taught me how to put together a page.

Then I got to high school and discovered real fanfic, where you write in a universe. [Fanfic] had these weird unspoken rules, like the Mary Sue Litmus Test, and what was and was not appropriate to do. One of the first pieces of advice I was given was never write a character who looks like you, even if they’re canonical, because everyone will assume that the blonde girl writing about Veronica Mars or Emma Frost is really writing about herself, and that’s not okay. At some point, every dude I know writes about himself having magical adventures in a magical D&D land and getting all the hot elf babes. But if a blonde woman writes a blonde character or a Black woman writes a Black character or anything superficially similar to their appearance, it doesn’t matter how integral that character is to the story, it’s proof they’re sticking themselves in the story, and that’s bad. I disagree with this, in case you can’t tell.

Galaxy’s Edge: What about the little blonde girl in the InCryptid series?

Seanan McGuire: I ultimately got around the problem by making everything fanfic. Verity is basically Chelsie Hightower from So You Think You Can Dance. The InCryptid series was a response to my PA saying, “Please, write something that gets us invited to go backstage on So You Think You Can Dance.”

But in the beginning I just wrote a lot of fanfic. The more fanfic I wrote, the better I got at things like plot and structure and actually writing a 20,000-word, a 50,000-word, a 100,000-word story that wouldn’t bore my readers. Eventually I started writing original fiction, which pretty much went nowhere. I would write it, I would be happy with it, and then I would revise it, because when no one’s publishing you, masturbatory revision takes 90 percent of your time.

One day, my friend Tara, who knew me from the fanfic community, said an agent friend of hers was branching out and starting her own boutique agency. And because [the agent] was from the fanfic community, she was looking for fanfic authors with an interest in their own original fiction. I sent her a copy of Rosemary and Rue. She sent me back a list of suggested revisions. I did one more revision, and she signed me. Then everything went nuts.

Galaxy’s Edge: Because you had something else in the pipe—something that became the Newsflesh series.

Seanan McGuire: The thing about writing very fast is I write very fast. When we took Rosemary and Rue to DAW, I had already finished [the] first three books in the October Daye series (Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation and An Artificial Night). I also had a rough and not-so-great draft of Book Four, Late Eclipses, but I had time to revise and beat it into a shape. I also had Feed, my biotechnical science-fiction thriller. We took Feed to Orbit.

With DAW, we were very fortunate in that a good friend of mine was also a DAW author and able to give me the nepotism referral to her editor. She wasn’t inappropriate about it. She just said, “This is my friend, Seanan. She wrote a really good book. I think you’ll like it. Let me introduce you.”

At Orbit, we went through a more normal submissions process. We wound up with DongWon Song, who’s now an agent but at the time was an Orbit editor. They were the perfect editor for that series. I miss working with them.

Galaxy’s Edge: You mentioned in another interview that you took the “dragon major” in college: a double major in folklore and herpetology. How did that play into your writing and your day job?

Seanan McGuire: I’ve never had a day job that used either parts of my degree. I think that anything we do or are interested in will play into our writing. We can’t help it. It’s part of why I get kind of angry on a personal level at authors who say that fanfic is bad and you can’t do fanfic ever. Well, okay, I’m gonna go over your work and find every element that you took from Shakespeare. How dare you write fanfic? I’m gonna find every element you took from Austen or from Poe. Or from fairy tales, from the Brothers Grimm, from Disney.

Humans are magpies. We do not thrive on original thought. That’s not how we’re constructed. If you have one truly original thought in your entire lifetime, you’re about average. You’re doing well. We want to think of ourselves as these incredible original innovators of everything, but that’s not how monomyths work. It’s not how human psychology works. Everything’s a remix.

Because I studied both the so-called soft science of folklore and the hard science of herpetology, I have, to a certain degree, the flexibility of thought arising from two very different disciplines. It doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else. It just means that I have been trained to look at things from those multiple angles. There are still ways of thought that are completely alien to me. I have no experience or background in any kind of physical handiwork. I don’t know how to fix a car. If you hand me a hammer and a nail, the odds are good that what I’ll hand you back is a trip to the ER, because I have just broken my hand. There are patterns and ways of thought that I can’t wrap my head around. But having that initial flexibility made it easier for me to switch gears as I got older.

You can see the dichotomy in the two sides of my work. When I write as Seanan, I tend to write very monomythical, very inspired by folklore, very poetic. One of my favorite copy editors says, when you copy edit my work for flow and for tone, you need to remain aware of the fact that I have never written a book in my life. What I write is 300-page poems. That’s not inaccurate. The way I build sentences, the way I phrase things and manage the rising action very much reflects the fact I was a folklore major who studied oral histories for a long time. Within a single book, there will usually be one or two phrases that I hit very often. It’s not because don’t I think my readers are clever; it’s how I assemble a narrative.

When I write as Mira Grant, [the stories] are very biological. I started out wanting her to be a horror author. It turns out she’s not, because I am so much less interested in the screaming than I am in the scalpel. I want my science to make sense, and I want my biology to make sense. That’s what makes me happy.

Galaxy’s Edge: Even when dealing with mermaids?

Seanan McGuire: Even when dealing with mermaids. The mermaids [of Into the Drowning Deep] were actually a direct attack on DongWon. When they were my editor, I would threaten to write them a book about anglerfish mermaids.

The way anglerfish reproduce is the male anglerfish will be attracted by the smell of the female anglerfish’s pheromones. He thinks she’s so sexy that, when he finally finds her, all he wants to do is eat her. So, he chomps onto her skin. This causes a chemical reaction which melts his skin and fuses him with the female. Her body will gradually absorb his until all that’s left is his scrotum.

The female now has a pair of testicles sticking out of her, and she can control when sperm is released. One female anglerfish can have hundreds of sets of testes stuck to her from men that she has effectively eaten. In terms of size, the male anglerfish is about one and a half to two inches long. The female anglerfish is the size of an alligator snapping turtle. It’s one of the biggest cases of sexual dimorphism in the vertebrate world…. The biology of my mermaids was preset by that horror.

Galaxy’s Edge: You didn’t work in herpetology, but I understand your former day job used a lot of your science background, which contributed to Feed and your all-too-plausible zombie apocalypse.

Seanan McGuire: Yep. I am a prophetic genius. The entirety of COVID-19 has been an exciting game of people telling me: “You were right about everything two years ago.” Yes, I was. Thank you. There you go.

Galaxy’s Edge: Are there more such prophecies in our future? Should we be shivering in our boots?

Seanan McGuire: Right now, I am not doing anything super pathological, in part because I lost a lot of optimism in the current pandemic.

People ask me all the time, “What do you feel like you got wrong? What would you do differently?” The answer is I had too much hope. Part of that is Feed was written and published before the real rise of Facebook, before the rise of microblogging, [at a time] when if you wanted a blog, you still had to set up a blog and usually wrote longer-form things. Readers could get an idea of who you were, your likes, your dislikes, your prejudices. You weren’t just delivering speedy sound bites of hatred and vitriol.

I like the flexibility and speed of Facebook and Twitter in terms of things like coordinating disaster response. But what we’ve seen is we’re not doing as much as we could, because we’ve all learned to hate each other in this time of super-fast microblogging, botnets and trolls.

There was a point, early in the current situation, where I posted a thread on Twitter (which is my primary habitat most of the time) about ways to protect yourself from con crud and the seasonal flu. There is a tweet in that thread which can be seen as equating coronavirus with airborne diseases.

At the time, the official position was that the disease we’re dealing with now was not in fact airborne, even though anyone who had ever worked with any coronavirus anywhere was saying, “No, it’s probably airborne. If you don’t think it’s airborne, you’re probably wrong.” The science said, “Probably airborne,” but the official public information said, “Not.”

So, I posted this tweet. It’s in the middle of a relatively innocuous thread. Hey, wash your hands, drink lots of water, sleep. I know that you don’t feel like those last two have anything to do with your health at a convention, but they genuinely do. The more well hydrated you are, the less likely you are to pick up most common crud. That sort of thing. For three days I got barraged by trolls screaming at me for being so irresponsible as to imply that this could be an airborne disease. They weren’t real people. None of them had existed on Twitter prior to a month previous. They weren’t there to engage in conversation. They were there to yell at me. That’s because it’s so easy to set up a word finder, something that triggers off a keyword and unleashes this tide of hating on people who say things you don’t like.

My pandemic response [in Feed] was founded on the idea that the news would lie to us (which we saw will happen), and that in the absence of the news, citizen scientists and citizen reporters would rise as a source of credible information. Instead, what we saw is people will rise to sell you miracle cures made from mercury and tell you that your children have COVID because they were given a vaccination twenty years ago, even though your children are eleven. It’s just bad.

I am not currently working on any diseases because part of what I enjoy about writing pandemic fiction, why it makes me happy to be Mira Grant, is that diseases fascinate me. I find them really interesting—the mechanisms by which they work, the things that we know they can do to us, the things that we’re still finding out they can do to us. They’re amazing. They’re so simple. They’re not living things. They’re basically malware. They’re just these little instruction bundles that plug into your body and go haywire.

It is easier for me not to be afraid of them if I understand them and am writing about them and having a good time. It feels a little mean to have a good time with diseases right now. The way I have always coped with the horrible diseases I created was by going, “No-no. Once enough people started dying, we would care. Once enough people were at risk, we would care.” But what I’ve seen is that far too many of the people in positions of power wouldn’t.

Galaxy’s Edge: There are those who say, if this world fails us, we should write the world we want to live in. What would that world look like for you?

Seanan McGuire: The way I would like the world to be is incredibly overly optimistic. I don’t think we’re going to get there in my lifetime. We have enough food that no one needs to be hungry. We have enough resources that no one needs to be homeless, no one needs to be sick. We have enough of everything that no one actually needs to feel like they don’t have enough. But there is a point at which anything stops being the thing itself and becomes counting coup. There are people with so much money, they could be spending money every minute of every single day of their lives and not come even remotely close to running out of money. And what do they do? Do they rent Disney World for a month? No. Do they set up a zoo full of tigers in their basement? No. They make more money because they have seen how much they are willing to exploit the world, and they want to make sure there’s no one in a position to exploit them.

I want a world where rich people pay their fair share, where everybody gets safe housing, food, clean water, medical care. Where the color of your skin is not treated as any kind of judgment on your personal character. Where the fact that people love who they’re gonna love is not treated as some kind of judgment on their character. It’s so idealistic. Every step forward is amazing, but we have the potential, as a species, to be so much better. Sometimes we aren’t because it would be inconvenient to be better right now. Sometimes it’s because we don’t want to, or it would be hard or “How can I feel like I am better than you if you have as much as me?”

Galaxy’s Edge: As opposed to seeing equality as a valid goal.

Seanan McGuire: We’ve been unequal for so incredibly long that equality really does feel like oppression to a lot of people who have been on the top of the inequality pyramid.

Galaxy’s Edge: Your fiction celebrates diversity and inclusivity. Is this your way of making the world you write shinier, or is it something that just happens?

Seanan McGuire: A little bit of both. But mostly it’s that anything that is 100 percent straight, white, and able-bodied is unrealistic unless you want to set up a bunch of oppressive structures I have no interest in writing.

The world is not a monoculture. Humanity has never been a monoculture. [A lot of stories] treat humanity like a monoculture where any setting you want to use is just pretty stage-dressing and any character you want to design needs a reason to be something other than what we jokingly refer to as the “Six-fecta”: straight, white, vaguely Christian (but not too Christian; you can’t be too religious) able-bodied, cisgender and male. So many books in our genre still hit all six of those attributes with every main character. The only exceptions are some secondary characters who are women because, otherwise, how do we reward the men for being awesome?

But that’s not the world I live in. I have been a queer, disabled, half-Roma woman for my entire life. I knew I liked girls from the time I was eight. Not in a sexual way but in a “If I’m gonna hold hands with somebody and kiss them” way, I would prefer it be a girl. So I can absolutely say that I was queer when I was eight. I’ve been half Roma since my daddy knocked up my mom in the back of a van, and I’ve been female since I popped out. I’ve done the gender interrogation you’re supposed to do as a cis ally and determined that “girl” is pretty much the label that works for me.

I never had a shot at that Six-fecta if I wanted it. Why would I, as someone who deviates from that “norm” on multiple levels, want to write that norm? I know people who fit it, I love people who fit it. I am not saying there’s anything wrong with them wanting to see characters who look like them. But sometimes I want to see a character who looks like me, and that means a character with multiple overlapping identities all of which inform her daily life.

Sometimes, people I know will tell me they want to see a character that looks like them, and they don’t get to do that very often. Then I will make a genuine effort to include a character that looks like them, because I want them to have that experience. We learn how to human from stories. Like I said before, humans are not built for constant original thought. We learn what a person looks like from the stories people tell us. Sometimes that is learning: “Wait, that’s me. I’m a person.” And sometimes it’s learning: “Wait, that’s Jean Marie. Maybe she’s a person too.”

Culturally, we have done ourselves a huge disservice by telling so many stories for such a long time where the only people who got to be at the center of the story were the ones who fit those six attributes, because only those people get fully acknowledged as people by the monomyth we’re living in. That’s not fair and not okay. The only time I tend to manipulate the diversity in a story is if I realize I need to kill somebody. If a group has little representation, you can kill a much larger percentage of that group by killing one character. If I kill a straight white man in science fiction, I have killed one of ninety million straight white men. If I kill a trans woman in science fiction, I’ve killed one of maybe twelve. That’s a very different statement, whether or not I intend to be making it.

So, if someone is in the line of fire and I cannot move them, I will stop, look at what I’m doing, and ask myself: How big a deal is this character to the group they represent? How big a deal would it be if I were reading this book and that character looked like me? Would I have seen me before? That’s not tokenism. I don’t give plot armor to these characters. They can still die. It’s a matter of am I taking away someone’s emotional support character?

Galaxy’s Edge: You have explored just about every subgenre in speculative fiction. Is there any particular kind of story or genre that you would really like to write but haven’t had the chance?

Seanan McGuire: I have an intense, bordering on the ridiculous, fondness for mid-Nineties chick lit, the sub-genre where The Princess Diaries, The Boy Next Door, and Bridget Jones’s Diary live. I’m waiting for the nostalgia wave to whip those back around. I’ve written several. I’m pretty good at it, but there’s no market for them right now. So they sit and occasionally get revised, when I have time, to make sure that they stay up to my current standards. And they go nowhere.

I would also very much like to write a series of cozy mysteries—The Dog Barks at Midnight sort of thing. I have a concept for a fun series of cozy mysteries. But unfortunately, I am told by both my agent and several authors I know who write cozy mysteries, there is no money there. There’s just none.

It’s not that I only write to chase the money, because no one becomes a writer to chase the money. That is the worst decision you could possibly make. Don’t do that, children. Or adults. Or unspeakable cosmic entities. Don’t become a writer because you want to get paid. You will not get paid. But there is a difference between writing something I am truly passionate about, cannot stop myself from writing, that I already know I’m good at, and not getting paid; and writing books in a genre I find charming but not completely compelling, kind-of-wanna-try-my-hand-at but will not get paid. One is a reasonable self-limiting decision. The other is just not bright.

I’d also like to write a truly horrific horror novel that has no science fiction elements. Just horror. I wanna do horror for the sake of horror. I wanna get my Clive Barker on. I wanna get my Kathe Koja on. I can’t. Every time I try, I get distracted by the possibility of science.

Galaxy’s Edge: That’s tragic. Science is death to horror.

Seanan McGuire: Yeah, I love horror so much, and I’m so bad at it.

Galaxy’s Edge: Any closing thoughts?

Seanan McGuire: We are recording this on April 29, 2021. I have a book coming out on May 4 called Angel of the Overpass. It’s the third book in my Ghost Roads series, which is InCryptid-adjacent, published by DAW Books. I won’t say it’s the last, but it is likely to be the final entry in Rose Marshall’s story for a while. So I’m very excited about that.

Over on my Twitter, I just finished a complete review of the October Daye books, because they are nominated for a Best Series Hugo this year. Having grown up in fandom, I tend to be very careful and a little aloof when talking about the Hugos. I remember being told by my foster mother when I was a teenager that it’s gauche to say you want to win. But I really want to win this year.

I feel that the Best Series category was created for urban fantasy. I know it wasn’t created just for urban fantasy, but urban fantasy plays best at series length. It is a story that needs that room to grow and breathe and really be considered as a whole, not just as the sum of its parts. I would desperately like for the first true urban fantasy—just urban fantasy, not urban science fiction, not urban horror, but urban fantasy—Hugo to go to a female or female-identifying author. It’s the only science fiction subgenre that is female-dominated and doesn’t have the word “romance” somewhere in the description. Romance is great. I love romance. I write romance. But female authors get shoved into romance so quickly, whether or not that’s what we want to be doing. Having a subgenre we currently control has always been very very important to me. It feels like a thing we have accomplished as ladies.

So, I would like the first Hugo Award given to a work of pure urban fantasy to be given to a female-identifying author. It doesn’t have to be me. You have many other choices. We are a big and diverse field. But if you’re looking at this year’s ballot, it does have to be me.

Galaxy’s Edge: We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope the best.

Seanan McGuire: Thank you.

Like our interviews? Read our conversation with qntm, author of There Is No Antimemetics Division!

Check out the interview with qntm!

Building a Dystopian Novel with a Train Station

A few weeks ago, I was at a Barnes & Noble, just looking through their speculative fiction section when I came across Yokohama Station SF by Yuba Isukari. It was a slight, green book with an intriguing cover, and I was surprised I’d never heard of it before.

Naturally, I bought it, and let me tell you, it’s only a bit longer than 200 pages, but it has more depth, tension, and mystery than some books three times its length.

It’s a lighthearted dystopian novel, if you can believe that, and it should definitely be on your 2021 reading list, and here’s why:

Yokohama Station SF is One of the Best Dystopian Novels I’ve Read

The premise for the novel is quite simple. A sentient train station takes advantage of human weakness after Japan is ravaged by the Winter War, and gradually grows to take over the islands of Japan. Life inside the station is regulated by the station’s ‘Internet’-equivalent, SuikaNet, and its robotic enforcers, the turnstiles.

The characters must find a way to stop the ever-growing station from destroying the rest of Japan.

It’s a neat idea, to be honest. The whole conflict is mostly internal for the characters, aside from the occasional row with the turnstiles.

 Yuba Isukari pairs a dry narrator voice with a semi-dire plot, and throws in some humor for good measure. All while inside a sprawling, replicating, self-healing, omniscient train station. It’s pretty cool.

However, the structure of the novel is a tad confusing. It jumps a bit back and forth between narratives for long stretches of time, leaving us wondering about the other characters. And the ending only resolves a few of our character’s dilemmas, again leaving us wondering about the other half of the characters, of which there are no mentions.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of translation, or perhaps the story’s meant to jump back and forth. Regardless, I didn’t find the transitions too jarring, and was able to power through a few confusing pages.

dystopian novel cover yokohama station sf

Top-Notch Characters

The main character, Hiroto, is quiet and laid back, resembling an observer more than an active participant in his own life sometimes.

A lot of the things that happen to him throughout the story aren’t of his own doing, and he merely perseveres through everything that’s thrown at him.

He does portray a keen sense of duty, however, which defines him as a character. He ventures into the station to find the leader of the Dodger Alliance, and in the end, to reach Exit 42 and find answers—answers to what, he’s not sure.

The notion that Hiroto just decides to go into the station on a mission he clearly doesn’t understand—or really care about, it seems—just speaks to the kind of character he is. He’s sociable, curious, and compassionate. He’s ‘go with the flow’ until he finds something that piques his interest, then he’s all in.

Hiroto contrasts with another of the main characters, Toshiru, who has an intense dislike for people. Toshiru is Hiroto’s shadow, but with a clearer purpose, and clearer desires. This isn’t to say that Toshiru is a bad person, quite the contrary, he’d just rather spend time with machines than with people.

Plus, there are a couple of quirky AI companions for both Hiroto and Toshiru along the way, and they act as foils for the two character’s most endearing qualities.

Dystopian Setting

The whole sentient train station vibe is pretty cool, and it creates an of air of danger and mystery while reading. Hiroto walks through the halls of the station, literally in the belly of the beast.

However, there are parts in the story where Yuba Isukari’s sparse prose does not lend itself well. I wish there had been more descriptions of the interior of the station, like what the halls looked like, the cities, the people, etc.

A lot of those details are left up to the reader’s imagination, which is fine, I guess, but I’d have liked the author to solidify the world in which we’re immersed.

For all we know, the inside of the station might be clean and white and sterile. Or, it could be dark, dingy, and really embody the dystopian tropes. But I’m not sure what it looks like exactly, aside from a very brief description at the end of the book where the walls are described as “white concrete”.

About the Dystopian Novel

So apparently, Yokohama Station SF was originally a manga published in Japan from 2016 to 2018, called Yokohama-eki Fable, or Yokohama Station Fable. I learned this after researching the book when I’d finished reading it.

The manga started as a popular web comic by the author, who was trying to wind down from work with a creative outlet.

The novel that I read was translated by Stephen Paul, published by Yen Press in March 2021, and marketed to English readers. The manga has yet to be translated into English.

Regardless of the history of the novel, it stands as a great addition to dystopian sci-fi. It’s short, quirky nature makes it stand out from the ranks of grim, brooding dystopian novels double its size.

If you’re looking for a short, fascinating read, I give Yokohama Station SF an 8/10.

Read More Book Reviews!

Sci-Fi Subgenres: Breaking Down the Punks

The practice of segmenting films, books, games, and stories into genres can get pretty tricky. Sometimes, a novel or film fits neatly into the conventions set down by a genre, other times the waters are a little muddier. But sci-fi subgenres have exploded in the past few years, and there a lot more categories with which to classify new (and old) work.

One of the large subsections of science fiction literature classification falls on the ‘punk’.  The idea of ‘punk’ literature focuses on the outcasts from society, the rebels, the vigilantes, those who go against the grain. The punks.

Genres like cyberpunk and steampunk sparked a flurry of smaller subsections that have distinct conventions, and often subvert the aesthetics of their parent genre.

In this blog post, we’ll break down some of the well-established ‘punk’ sci-fi subgenres and take a look at the rising stars.

Cyberpunk: Where It All Began

The term cyberpunk is now kind of a commonplace, kitchen-table word. It refers to science fiction literature (and by literature, I lump the written, visual, and interactive together) that takes place in a futuristic world filled with advanced tech, but riddled with socio-economic issues.

Characters in cyberpunk literature are often downtrodden, working-class loners rebelling against some kind of convention, whether that’s their corporate overlords or street gangs that control their neighborhood.

The term cyberpunk came from a short story of the same name by author Bruce Bethke in 1983, even though sci-fi writers had been exploring the themes of the genre years before there was a name to associate with them.

Authors like Roger Zelazny, Philip K. Dick, Gardner Dozois, and William Gibson pioneered the movement with their fiction and non-fiction alike.

Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson is one of the pinnacles of the cyperpunk genre, and helped bring more attention to the aesthetics of the genre as a whole. Films like Blade Runner, comics like Judge Dredd, and anthologies like Mirrorshades kept cyberpunk in the limelight.

Recently, the genre has gained some attention from the release of CD Projekt Red’s triple-A video game, Cyperpunk 2077. While the game and its release were largely a disaster, it succeeded in introducing newcomers to the genre of cyberpunk.

And with all the attention the cyperpunk genre has received, writers began to deviate from the aesthetics of cyberpunk, sparking new genres like solarpunk and biopunk.

Biopunk Aesthetics

Biopunk as a genre is closely related to cyberpunk. Both are set in dystopian futures with rampant technological advancement.

However, the distinction between the two genres comes down to body modification. In cyberpunk, people often alter their bodies with cyberware and technological implants. Eye implants, enhanced limbs, etc. etc.

But biopunk takes that convention a step further, altering bodies using biotechnology like genetic engineering.

Biopunk still keeps the dark, grungy aesthetics of cyperpunk, dystopian futures; it just focuses more on the implications of governments or corporations using bioengineering as a tool to control people.

Popular books in this genre include:

  • The Leviathan Trilogy by Scott Westerfield
  • The Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler
  • Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
Post of Interest: Bigger Brains, More Intelligent? No Longer the Case

Solarpunk Aesthetics

Solarpunk is one of the relatively new sci-fi subgenres, really only established with a set of conventions and aesthetics in the late 2000s. Internet communities and literary icons alike were instrumental in bringing solarpunk into the public eye.

Where cyberpunk is rooted in dystopia and worlds wrought with misfortune, apocalyptic landscapes, and ever-encroaching environmental failure, solarpunk focuses on futures where we’ve overcome issues like climate change with sustainable practices and renewable energy. Hence the solar in solarpunk, in reference to solar energy.

Solarpunk literature often takes an upbeat tone, optimistic about the future and proud of overcoming the issues of the past. Works often have a heavy focus on nature as well as sustainable technology, which is what really sets the genre apart from cyberpunk, a genre that for the most part ignores nature.

Some notable solarpunk works include:

  • Walkaway by Cory Doctorow
  • Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland
  • Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

Modern Steampunk and Victorian Steampunk

When I hear the word steampunk, I think of elaborate Victorian-era costumes with neat techy-bits, airships, and tall, whimsical buildings.

The steampunk genre is often described as the point of deviation in our historical timeline where steam power overtakes other forms of power, like electricity. Writers in the steampunk genre explore historical events and settings with the “what if steam powered technology was the end-all-be-all” question in mind. Alternate history narratives, cosplay, and visual art mediums are also very popular in the steampunk genres. 

The term steampunk was coined by K.W. Jeter in the 1980s, but the term applied to work published before then, as far back as Jules Verne and Mary Shelley. Steampunk literature generally takes on a more optimistic tone than cyberpunk and dieselpunk (a steampunk derivative).

Settings for steampunk stories are a bit more fluid than cyberpunk’s megapolis dystopias. Steampunk can be set in alternate histories of the Victorian era, in the American Wild West, or even in post-apocalyptic settings.

Popular early voices in the genre, while they might not have considered themselves voices for the genre, include:

  • Michael Moorcock
  • Harry Harrison
  • Paul Di Filippo

Dieselpunk Aesthetics

Just like solarpunk contrasts with cyberpunk, dieselpunk contrasts with steampunk.

Where steampunk draws heavy inspiration from Victorian-era technology and fashion, dieselpunk is rooted in the period between WWI and WWII. Dieselpunk, as the term implies, idolizes diesel-powered machines, and takes on a grungy, darker outlook on the future.

But, just like steampunk, dieselpunk is filled with alternative histories, many of which build off the question “what if the Nazis won WWII?”.

Many of dieselpunk’s seminal works were published before the term was coined in 2001, including:

  • The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  • SS-GB by Len Deighton
  • Fatherland by Robert Harris

There Are a Lot More Punks to Speak of…

Exploring these sci-fi subgenres has merely scratched the surface of all the spin-off genres present in sci-fi literature.

Coalpunk and atompunk are derivatives of dieselpunk, lunarpunk is the polar opposite of solarpunk, etc. etc.

If there’s a certain genre you’re interested in learning more about, drop a comment and we’ll explore it in a future post!

Galaxy’s Edge Sci-Fi Book Review Roundup: July, 2021

July’s issue of Galaxy’s Edge showcases many great sci-fi stories, including work by Brian Trent, Bao Shu, Julie Frost, Harry Turtledove, and others.

In addition, Jean Marie Ward interviews Seanan McQuire, the prolific SFF writer of acclaimed series like Wayward Children.

Richard Chwedyk also puts his expansive sci-fi book knowledge to the test, reviewing three science fiction books.

  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  • Immunity Index by Sue Burke
  • Starborn & Godsons by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes

Here’s what Chwedyk has to say about this month’s sci-fi books!

Stand on Zanzibar

by John Brunner

Tor Essentials

March 2021

ISBN: 978-1-250-78122-2

It’s hard to find anything recently published that matches the ambitions of John Brunner’s 1968 novel, Stand on Zanzibar: exploring a culture—a whole world, really—from a multiplicity of levels while maintaining a central story that brings the vastness of this complex (and maybe crumbling) planet into stark focus. Parts of the novel are written in the straightforward, no-nonsense prose Brunner had been working to perfect for a decade or so beforehand. Other parts are written as news reports or anecdotal bits, illustrating aspects of the twenty-first century world in an almost documentary style. Other parts are written from the glib perspectives of canny social commentators. And all of this is interlaced to keep things moving along at a surprisingly brisk pace.

As was mentioned often at the time, the novel’s structure owes much to the trilogy by John Dos Passos, U.S.A. In this case, I dare to say it now, though I couldn’t have gotten away with saying it 53 years ago, Brunner actually improves upon the trilogy in many ways. He streamlined it, actually. His central dramatic story is more compelling, his worldview wider and, worth noting in the current literary environment, more diverse. This is not to knock Dos Passos’s sublime achievement with U.S.A., but Brunner took the baton and ran with it like a winner.

This adventurous structure itself is a thing to behold, like a Bauhaus-designed “modern” building after it’s been around for a century. In some ways, Brunner was re-thinking the way a novel could be written—as if that’s part of his future vision. If vehicles and buildings will be built differently a half century from this day, why shouldn’t novels look and work differently in that anticipated world? He applied his science-fictional imagination to the act of novel writing itself.

The sad thing is, perhaps, now that we’re living in the time Brunner wrote about in 1968, there is a greater sameness to the way our current novels are written. All our current writers, it seems (exceptions granted), have gone to writing schools that have taught them “best practices” that manage great efficiencies and great comforts. But like a row of townhouses in a residential urban neighborhood, they all have the same look and feel, omitting a few changes of color schemes and some superficial ornamentation.

Of course, in the era Brunner was writing this novel, he was considered a member of the “New Wave.” Brunner, in retrospect, wasn’t really part of that merry, contentious crew (like most literary movements, a great many of its members were draftees, not volunteers). Half of the anger and vitriol and brawling over the New Wave was the notion of “style over substance.” Brunner was all for innovations in style (whatever that is), but only so far as it helped to convey the substance (whatever that is) of the story in its most effective way.

And what about that substance? Much of the current reading of “classic” and/or “modern” science fiction these days seems to rest on picking over which parts authors did or didn’t “get right.” As far as the focal “issue” of the novel—i.e., exponential overpopulation—Brunner didn’t quite hit the nail on the head. The “population bomb” didn’t go off (though it may still be ticking). We don’t have any cell phones here, and all the computers are ginormous, house-sized structures with little public access.

Other aspects, like the growing frustration of individuals who become “berserkers” and strike out against innocent bystanders, the “corporatization” of governments, the excesses of popular culture, the addict-like hunger for media replacing “real” experience (like “Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere”), the blending of cultures across the globe—Brunner hits the nail hard and true.

Which makes reading the novel even now a revelation. You’ll turn to certain sections and find yourself whispering, or grunting, “How did he know? How did he do it?”

We’re fortunate that someone at Tor decided to bring back this novel at this time, to remind us what we can do when we of think of science fiction as something more than a tag on the binding of certain books relegated to certain shelves of the local bookstore. It can be dangerous, as this novel remains.

Immunity Index

by Sue Burke

Tor

May 2021

ISBN: 978-1-250-31787-2

Also from Tor, Sue Burke’s latest novel may not be the successor to Brunner’s brilliance, but she has managed the remarkable task of making her near-future world so plausible it nearly (but not quite) defeats its task of being a “what’s coming” story to a “what’s happening” story. She has placed her story in a world bowled over by a worldwide pandemic (who saw that coming?), and places it in a country and city (my all-too-familiar but beloved Chicago) where democracy is fast eroding, as are supplies of the basics. Remember the disappearance of toilet paper at the beginning of COVID-19? Burke will see you and raise you ten. Her degree of accuracy on that front is downright frightening. That’s the brief version of the world in which Burke has placed her novel.

The story deftly shifts between the tribulations of three women and one genetic scientist, the latter having “designed” the three formers, to purposes it will take the rest of this brief but challenging novel to reveal. Burke’s experience as a journalist and translator prove exceptionally helpful in keeping a complex plot coherent and intriguing.

So much recent science fiction has been set in the far future to presumably avoid becoming entangled in the messiness of our current circumstances. Burke, to her credit, takes on the messiness, and does so courageously. Remember that word that appears in many definitions of SF: “extrapolation”? Burke extrapolates with facility, intensity and vigor.

Burke’s vision of our near future is in many respects bleak, but not without its hopes and a few lighter notes. Its wit is dry but satisfying. Another thing that I found enjoyable about this novel is that it is written at the tight length of those paperback originals we geezers grew up on in the middle of the previous century. It’s a good length to get a story across without overweighing the vehicle with added-on subplots. Would that more novels follow in that path.

Post of Interest: Interview with qntm, Author of There Is No Antimemetics Division

Starborn & Godsons

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes

Baen

April 2020

978-1-9821-2448-9

I received a letter—a real letter—a while back from GE reader and subscriber John Hertz, who remembers me from the days when I moderated writing workshops at a few Worldcons. He wrote in general complaint that some of his favorite recent books have received scant attention from the award-giving bodies in the field, such as the Hugos, Nebulas, Locus Awards, etc. Indirectly, I think, I was being taken to task for not having reviewed them in these pages. I’ll take only partial blame, as Baen’s promo folks have not been at the top of their game in getting advance copies to me. Nevertheless, Mr. Hertz gave me a list of books he considered worthy but overlooked, and this is one I managed to catch up with.

Starborn and Godsons is/was a long-awaited sequel (and conclusion?) to the Legacy of Heorot series. It finds us on the planet Avalon, which after several generations and much conflict has been colonized by humans. The original colonists have mostly passed on, and the planet’s humans are called “Starborn.” They have no direct memory of Earth and have had no contact with the planet in ages. Earlier volumes in the series concerned themselves with the struggles of surviving a harsh environment, conflicts with competing lifeforms called “grendels,” which attracted me to the earlier volume, Beowulf’s Children. You can understand why. At a visceral level, these stories tie together with the world depicted in Old English epic poetry in ways that seem more than an extended metaphor. The old world of bardic sagas and the tales of humans establishing footholds on new planets re-envisions both traditions in new and surprising ways.

At the heart of this novel, which puts us into contact, or in some cases reacquaints us with, some other alien lifeforms, are the starborns facing encounters with “godsons”—other humans who set out spacefaring after the original colonists of Avalon. They also have no direct contact with Earth, and have developed in their own way, different from the earth-born humans and the starborn alike. In a way, it’s a “first contact” tale between humans and humans, which is something you don’t see too often, and implicitly questions our expectations when we think or talk about one of the big questions in our science fiction (and our literature in general): what makes us human?

Any attempt at plot summary on my part at this juncture would be insufficient. The novel is super-jam packed with action, characters and ideas. The question for readers (and since many of you have already read this novel and have already answered the question to your own satisfaction, bear with me) is whether it all holds together into an enjoyable and rewarding experience. As many of you can already guess, my reviewing it here and now indicates my answer is yes.

What added to my enjoyment and appreciation of it has to do with my interest in writers and writing and how we manage to do the crazy things we sometimes manage to do. Like having three authors work in collaboration. How do they manage not to get in each other’s way? It’s hard enough for two authors to collaborate on an extended narrative (except when they do, and has been done famously in this field), how do three authors manage it? I’m familiar with the works of each author here individually as well as in collaboration. And each author, individually, does not write like the other two collaborators, but when they come together they seem to create a distinct, new voice which is unlike any of the previous ones. It is a tribute to their skill and their professionalism, to which I’ll add, since the passing of Mr. Pournelle, we’ll not see its like again.

Another reason to squeeze in this review now was to note that unfortunate passing (I wanted to get to this in the previous issue, but space and time prohibited my doing so). This was Mr. Pournelle’s last book, I believe. And regardless of his behavior or opinion outside the pages of his fiction, as a novelist and as a science fiction thinker, he was a formidable and significant presence in our field whose work—in collaboration or individually—was always skillful, intelligent and witty.

Be sure to check out the rest of Galaxy’s Edge July 2021 issue!

Galaxy’s Edge July 2021 Issue

NFT Digital Art Is a Currency Right Out of Science Fiction

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and NFT digital art; they’ve kind of taken the world by storm.

As someone who is mildly up-to-date in the cryptocurrency scene, the popularity of NFTs came as a bit of a surprise. And it sparked my imagination, too. Watching pieces of digital art being sold at exorbitant prices for clout made me think about the future of our currencies, physical and digital.

Before money, barter and trade was the primary means for getting the goods you needed to survive. A bushel of apples for a flank of meat. It was simple, and a system soon appeared, where certain items would be valued higher than others, based on abundance, time and labor investment, etc.

I originally thought that NFTs might be a futuristic barter and trade system years from now, if we ever came to a global currency fallout. But I soon realized that possibility wasn’t feasible for NFTs in their current state, and I’ll explain why.

But first, let’s break down how NFTs and NFT digital art works.

How Do NFTs Work?

An NFT is a digital asset that operates on blockchain technology, the same infrastructure used for cryptocurrencies.

Many creators create digital art and sell them as NFTs. There are all kinds of NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea: graphic design art, music, trading cards, video game skins, etc.

As I mentioned, NFTs are non-fungible tokens, which essentially means that one NFT is not equal to another.

A fungible currency is where a single amount is exactly the same as another amount. Like a $1 bill. It’s $1, and no matter how many times you trade that $1 bill for other $1 bills, you’ll always have $1.

Cryptocurrencies are fungible tokens. A single Bitcoin is the same price as any other single Bitcoin.

NFTs are different because they cannot be exchanged for other NFTs. Each NFT has a unique digital signature, making it a one-of-a-kind asset.

Is There Money in NFT Digital Art?

The idea of the NFT baffled me when I first learned about it, and to be honest, it still does. Why would people pay exorbitant amounts of cryptocurrency to buy a piece of art, like a song or a collage, when they could view that art online for free?

Well, the blockchain NFTs are built on provides a traceable ID and transaction history, which essentially means when you buy an NFT, you obtain ownership of it. As opposed to paying a streaming service like Spotify, which you a license to listen to music, buying music as an NFT solidifies you as the owner of it.

Like if you were to buy a famous painting at an auction, but gone digital.

Initially, this practice seemed like nothing more than a flex, a show of wealth. After all, NFTs aren’t tradeable, meaning you either own it for life, or have to find someone willing to pay you for it, sometimes less than what you got it for.

So how is it the NFT market is so big, and yet, seemingly have no clear purpose? Apparently, NFT trading is quickly becoming a popular means of making money, and creators are benefiting.

NFTs, the New, Dystopian Currency?

The concept of NFTs has been around since about 2014, but it experienced a large uptick in popularity in 2021. People are trading NFTs—buying highly sought-after pieces and reselling them at a premium.

The problem with NFT digital art trading, though, is that it’s not driven by any economic principles. It’s purely market-dependent. So, if you spent $2.9 million on an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, you better hope someone out there wants it more than you do, or you’re down $3 mil.

But creators are reaping the benefits of NFT trading.

Every time an NFT they created is sold, they receive a kickback from that sale. So if a gif they made as an NFT gets traded around multiple times, they’ll make a percentage of that on top of however much they sold it for in the first place.

No one knows how long NFT trading will be around – the demand for them might die out in a few months, or they could become the future of traceable, authenticated currency.

When I think of a dystopian, cyberpunk worlds, I usually think of cityscapes ruled by tech moguls. The industrialists that sell the tech the world is built on, getting filthy rich at everyone’s expense.

But with a few modifications to the NFT idea, it could become the barter and trade currency of the future. And the richest people of all would be the artists.

Post of Interest: Oxygen Movie Review

How to Make NFTs a Viable Currency

For NFTs to be a viable currency of the future, they’d have to be able to be traded for other NFTs. Smaller NFT tokens could be used for goods or services, and then could be traded on a digital marketplace for more expensive NFTs.

A good example of this concept in action is the Counterstrike: Global Offensive marketplace on Steam. CS:GO is a first person shooter, originating back in the 1990s and early 2000s. In-game weapon skins have a real-life value, a dollar amount.

You can buy skins online directly from the Steam marketplace, and they often retain their value or increase in price as they become more desirable. You can trade skins with other players, increase the value of your skins by adding expensive in-game stickers, trade lesser-grade skins for more high-quality ones, etc. etc.

If NFTs operated like the existing CS:GO marketplace, then they would become much more viable as a currency. Just like the bushel of apples for a flank of steak example, a handful of smaller NFT tokens for a more valuable, larger token. You could trade a small gif NFT for apples, and a Snoop Dogg album NFT for a flank of meat.

It’s a really weird concept, that art could essentially become the lifeblood of a society. Because people always say, ‘oh, the art and culture are what makes a society great’ but in this case, art is literally the means of survival.

Problems with NFTs

One of the primary problems with using NFT digital art as currency in the cyperpunk future is the environmental impact.

Most NFTs run on the Ethereum or Bitcoin blockchain, and those cryptocurrencies use a lot of power. So much so that cryptocurrencies are causing a serious problem for the environment.

A recent report from CNBC found that Bitcoin mining creates 35.95 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. More than half of the world’s cryptocurrency mining takes place in China, a country that still largely uses coal as a source of electricity.

Bitcoin uses about 707 kWh of electricity, whereas Ethereum uses about 62 kWh. And the output of emissions from Ethereum mining should decrease with the implementation of Ethereum 2.0, which will decrease power consumption to about 1/10,000th of the current rate.

The widespread use of NFTs or crypto on a societal level would be catastrophic for the environment. Without significant improvements to the blockchain and hardware technology, digital currencies could bring about a dystopian future. And not the cool kind, either (pun intended).

For now, NFTs stand as a neat method for digital art, and if you’re lucky, some profit too. But there needs to be significant change for it to become a popular, futuristic barter and trade.

News From the Edge: Resnick Award, Book Sale

Galaxy’s Edge magazine and Dragon Con have the pleasure of announcing the 2021 finalists for THE MIKE RESNICK MEMORIAL AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION for Best Unpublished Science Fiction Short Story by a New Author (in no particular order):

  • Lucas Carroll-Garrett: “Hive at the Dead Star”
  • Shirley Song: “Times, Needles, and Gravity”
  • Z. T. Bright: “The Measure of a Mother’s Love”
  • Christopher Henckel: “Echoes of Gelise”
  • Torion Oey: “Feel”


Congratulations to all of our finalists and thank you to all the talented authors who submitted entries for award consideration! Mike Resnick would have so loved to have been here to witness this achievement!

If you are one of the finalists listed above, and you have not received prior notification that you are a finalist via email, please check your spam folder of the email account you used to submit your story entry or contact us at admin@ArcManor.com.

If you’re interested in submitting a story for the 2022 Mike Resnick Award, please visit our website to read the submission details.

Publishers Pick Book Sale

For a limited time, Publishers Pick is offering discounted prices on many great science fiction books.

There are books by:

  • Robert Heinlein
  • Harry Turtledove
  • N.K. Jemisin
  • Sarah J. Maas
  • And many more authors!

At the time of this sale, all sale prices are better than other popular book retailer prices, including Amazon! Don’t wait, pick up a great summer read today!

Post of Interest: Interview with qntm, Author of There Is No Antimemetics Division

A Post-Impressionist Look at Popular Sci-Fi Films

In our ever-advancing modern age, art takes on new life. Sometimes, the forms of that art were previously impossible. Like the combination of historic paintings and popular sci-fi films.

Combining historic art forms with modern methods isn’t unpopular. Quite the opposite.

The 2017 film Loving Vincent uses the visual aspects of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings to craft a wonderfully vibrant story.

But what about re-imagining live-action films in the styles of long-dead painters? Does the combination of modern film and 100-year-old paintings give the film a new meaning?

Let’s explore Post-Impressionism and modern sci-fi films in their weird, yet accurate marriage.

Understanding Realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism

To truly understand the Post-Impressionism movement, we first have to take a glimpse at what came before it.

Impressionism started in France in the late 1800s, and broke away from the previous line of artists, the Realists. While the Realists, as one can ascertain, were focused on creating the most realistic, lifelike art physically possible, Impressionists emphasized painting as an art form, not just a mode for creating hyper-accurate renderings of real life.

Impressionism was all about the paint, the environment, the effect of light on the subject. Instead of trying to capture the subject exactly—which were often scenes of nature or landscapes—they took the liberty of experimenting with the scale, depth, and texture of their paintings.

Artists that dominated this era included:

  • Claude Monet
  • Camille Pissaro
  • August Renoir
  • Mary Cassatt

What is Post-Impressionism?

So, Post-Impressionist art turns the values of Impressionism on their heads. The Impressionists placed a lot of importance on how light is portrayed in scenic, often pastoral, paintings.

Well, that didn’t jive with the Post-Impressionists, and neither did the intense focus on color. The Post-Impressionist largely placed an “emphasis on more symbolic content, formal order and structure…believing color could be independent from form and composition as an emotional and aesthetic bearer of meaning.”

Post-Impressionist art is marked by the idea that the meaning of the piece is more important than the piece itself. Art is created for a plethora of reasons, and evokes a plethora of feelings, which take precedence in Post-Impressionism.

Well-known artists from the era included:

  • Vincent Van Gogh
  • Paul Gauguin
  • Henry Rousseau

A Tasteful Pairing: Post-Impressionism and Popular Sci-Fi Films

When you think about popular science fiction films, like Blade Runner, for instance, does your mind jump to famous Post-Impressionist works of art?

Probably not. But for Bhautik Joshi, it was.

A few years ago, Joshi, who is an avid photographer and artist, reproduced scenes from the 1982 Blade Runner film in the style of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Plus, keeping with the theme of sci-fi classics, he reproduced parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the style of Pablo Picasso. While Picasso was often referred to as a Cubist, Cubism was a sub-section of Post-Impressionism.

Starry Night/Blade Runner

2001: A Space Odyssey/Picasso Cubism

Sci-Fi Films and Post-Impressionism Characteristics

What struck me about Joshi’s decision to pair classic sci-fi films with post-impressionist art was, well, that pairing.

On the surface, such a combination might seem innocuous. It even looks good! The delicate swirls and deep color of Starry Night matches almost seamlessly with Blade Runner’s already-compelling aesthetic.

However, if we think about post-impressionism’s meaning – the aestheticism of color, the symbolism of the content, a focus on structure and order—pairing it with popular sci-fi films was a genius move.

Blade Runner is a cyberpunk classic, often noted as one of the first cyberpunk films. The cyberpunk genre is known for portraying societies in various stages of social, economic, and technological collapse. It’s grungy, dark, and unforgivingly violent.

Post-Impressionism was a breakdown of Impressionist beliefs—a movement that placed more value on the meaning and symbolism of art than the piece of art itself.

Cyberpunk as a genre—specifically Blade Runner—can be seen as largely symbolic. The use of neon colors contrasted with dark, rainy alleyways portrays the artificiality of modern societies. Nature in cyberpunk worlds borders on nonexistent, replaced instead with the ‘formal order’ of vast cityscapes and power grids.

Blade Runner evokes both feelings of awe and despair. Awe at a world with flying cars, advanced technology, and an extreme melting pot of ideas, people, and lifestyles. But also despair at the inevitable breakdown of societal righteousness, the disregard for human, animal, or plant life, and the commonplace corruption of technological icons.

Joshi’s take on the popular 1982 film, while only a few seconds, puts into broad prospective the connection between artistic themes. Post-Impressionism and the cyberpunk genre fit together hauntingly well.

Opening a World of Possibilities

Joshi accomplished his snippets with deep neural networks, feeding them pieces of art to pair with popular sci-fi films. That was in 2016.

Now, artificial intelligence is so advanced it can create realistic human likenesses by combining characteristics from thousands of photographs of real people. These non-people are called deep fakes, and to any casual observer, they are near indistinguishable from actual photographs or videos of real people.

AI and neural networks are great tools for creating art. We can create entirely new actors, giving them a face and a voice and viewers might not even know the difference.

If we wanted to, we could make a film with every character played by Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson. Not a great idea, but it’s a possibility.

But at what stage does the use of AI for art cease to be an artistic endeavor? When does it become a crux for creation, a necessity rather than a convenience?

Years before Joshi released his Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey projects another artist was experimenting with classic art forms and modern film.

Anders Ramsell released Blade Runner – The Aquarelle Edition in 2013. He hand-painted over 12,000 watercolor paintings and combined them into a 35-minute rendition of the Blade Runner film. His labor of love took 2 years to create.

Ramsell’s project shows us that amazing art is possible without the help of artificial intelligence. He had full control over every painting and every scene because he made them with his own two hands.

Anyways, I’ve rambled on for long enough. Hope you found this interesting!

INTERVIEW With qntm, Author of There Is No Antimemetics Division

I recently had the pleasure of reading There Is No Antimemetics Division, a paranormal sci-fi novel. I stumbled across it while browsing the Kindle store and I was immediately hooked from the premise.

The story focuses on the members of the Foundation as they fight to save Earth from the titular antimemes, which are elusive, memory-altering entities intent on destroying humanity.

When I finished reading the book, I did a bit of digging online and learned about the wide genre of SCP fiction (Special Containment Procedures), of which There Is No Antimemetics Division is a part of. After my sleuthing, I found qntm’s website and reached out for a chat.

So, I’m excited to share with you all the conversation I had with qntm!

Author Bio:

The author known as qntm was born in the UK and still lives there. He is educated in mathematics and now develops software for a living. He’s been writing science fiction in his spare time since he was in secondary school. For an incredible amount of time, it was just a hobby, but he’s now at the point where it’s a full-on side gig. He is the author of Ra, Fine Structure, Ed, and most recently, There Is No Antimemetics Division.

So, qntm, you have a few books in the broader sci-fi genre, how did you get into writing, and who the biggest influences to your writing?

“I have been writing science fiction for a long time, mostly putting that writing out online for free, on my own website and as part of various online writing communities. I spent a massive chunk of my life contributing both fiction and factual work to Everything2, which is where I found my earliest real audience, and where my first few books originally appeared (serially, over the course of years). E2’s popularity waned in the early 2010s, but around that time my own website was beginning to gain traction/readers. More recently, I spent several years contributing to the SCP wiki. That’s where There Is No Antimemetics Division originates. It’s only relatively recently that I’ve actually started publishing my serials in ebook and paper formats.

My earliest influences were Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. For a long time I wrote in an Asimovian style where essentially I would have largely personality-free talking heads produce a new science fiction concept, and then do something clever with it, and then end the story immediately. It was David X. Cohen and Matt Groening’s Futurama that taught me that science fiction could, and should, be much more than that: smart, colourful, funny, relevant, opinionated, story-driven, character-driven. Like a lot of people of my generation, I was also massively influenced by The Matrix. And I’ve drawn massive stylistic inspiration from Grant Morrison’s late 1990s run on JLA — those comic books are the main reason why I write in the present tense, just to begin with. More recently, I’ve loved the Culture novels of the late, great Iain M. Banks.

But most recently of all, a lot of my inspiration is simply modern technology news. The world is moving unbelievably fast right now, and the gap between what a science fiction writer can imagine and what a real human can just do in reality has never been narrower. It’s difficult to stay out in front of that.”

One of the most interesting things about There Is No Antimemetics Division is of course antimemes; can you explain what an antimeme is for our readers, and can you talk a bit about your inspiration for such a concept?

“So, “meme” has multiple conflicting definitions, but for our purposes I define a meme to be a contagious idea. It’s an idea with some kind of intrinsic property which causes people to spread it to other people. The mechanism for that spreading can take a lot of different forms. An idea can spread because it’s useful, but it can also spread because it’s just catchy, or it rhymes, or because someone’s paying people to spread it, or because it’s forbidden to spread it (reverse psychology)… A meme can be a catchphrase, or a scientific theory, or a design for a tool, or a memorable tune which is easy to chant, or a symbol which is easy to scribble, or an urban legend, or a massive, complicated economic philosophy, or a whole religion. A meme doesn’t have to be the truth. A meme can be a lie.

My observation was that the contagiousness of an idea varies greatly. Some ideas are clearly less contagious than others. So, what’s at the bottom end of that scale? What ideas, truths or lies, are the most difficult to share? What ideas intrinsically resist being shared? There are plenty of examples. Things like dirty secrets, taboos, passwords, dreams, politically inconvenient historical facts, complex equations, boring tax code, injunctions and super-injunctions. I call these difficult-to-share ideas “antimemes”. Both memes and antimemes are real, by the way.

The study of memes is memetics. Exactly whether memetics is a real scientific field is, I believe, disputed and questionable. Personally, I think it seems rather elusive and pseudoscientific. Luckily, I’m not a scientist, I’m a science fiction writer, and exactly what memetics can be in fiction is something we are free to play around with, and redefine. I called the study of antimemes “antimemetics”, obviously. Antimemetics is just as questionable as memetics, as a field of study, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep going.

Now, what happens if you take a step from there into fiction? A fictional, “supernatural” meme might be an idea which spreads faster than should be physically possible – it spreads from person to person seemingly telepathically, maybe across great distances, and maybe has some physical power to it. Meanwhile, a supernatural antimeme might be an idea which should be memorable but somehow isn’t. An item locked in a vault which anybody can go in and look at… but nobody who leaves the vault can remember what they saw, or what happened to them. Photos come out blurry. An antimemetic entity trips you up — you don’t remember why you fell, and after getting up, you may not even remember falling.

I wrote SCP-055, which is the first chapter of what came to be There Is No Antimemetics Division, in 2008. SCP-055 is little more than an antimemetic entity in a box — there’s not a lot to it other than this thought-provoking premise, in the Asimovian sense I mentioned above. But years later I decided that there was a lot more unexplored narrative potential here.

Antimemes make for a really interesting science fiction adversary — how do you fight something you can’t remember? What else is there in this ecosystem of competing ideas? What kind of organisation can deal with that kind of problem, and what kind of person works there? These questions turned out to have really interesting answers. That’s how the book starts.”

One of the things that struck me about There Is No Antimemetics Division is the structure. It jumps back and forth between characters at different parts in the timeline, and in the beginning, it incorporates case files for SCPs as part of the narrative. How did you land on that structure, and is there something about it you feel lends itself to the story?

“There Is No Antimemetics Division was originally written in serial form on the SCP Foundation wiki, as a series of SCPs and Tales, over the course of years. All of my SCPs are intended to be comprehensible if read standalone by an idly browsing reader. About half of my individual Tales are too, especially the earlier ones.

So, the structure of Antimemetics is less of a continuous narrative than it is a series of discrete events.  Think like a series of movies, rather than a television show.  Chapters appeared individually, with months separating them. With this in mind, I was trying to make it so that each chapter was, to a certain extent, a complete short story, providing value to a reader, providing progress and narrative satisfaction in itself.

And I really like the effect this had. First of all, I think it just keeps things interesting. It keeps the reader guessing, keeps them on their toes, changes the scenery, changes the pace. A strictly linear story would have been much less interesting, and, in this case, it would have given away quite a lot of crucial information far too early.

 Secondly, a major theme of this specific story is that the characters themselves are kind of acting without context. They are arriving at confusing and frightening situations, with no memory of the years of prior events which led up to those situations, and then they are making the best decisions they can based on limited information.

When I withhold that backstory from the reader, the reader has to deal with the same situation, and decide for themselves whether the characters made good decisions. The flashbacks make it a complete story in retrospect, but they mean you aren’t second-guessing the characters. It’s the best alternative I have to actually erasing the readers’ memories.”

You’ve mentioned the SCP Foundation Wiki, can you explain a bit more about that?

“At its heart, it’s a collaborative work of science fiction/fantasy/horror, using the format of a database of “Special Containment Procedures” (SCPs) for thousands of diverse “anomalies”. The anomalies are all contained by the same ambiguously moral organisation, the Foundation.

The Foundation is a huge, nebulous, bureaucratic secret agency, the kind you’ve seen in many other places in fiction. It has a lot in common with The X-Files, Hellboy’s Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, Warehouse 13, Men In Black… the key differentiator here is the collaborative wiki aspect.

Anybody can sign up, invent a new SCP, and contribute it to the wiki. When you do, other people will vote your contribution up or down. If people like what you wrote, they might even build on it. As a result, a sort of consensus lore gradually emerges, a background for other people to build on…. The wiki isn’t something I invented, by the way. I’m just one of thousands of contributors to this show.

A Special Containment Procedures database entry (“SCP”) has to use a specific, fairly rigid structure, and a clinical tone. And normally it should stand completely alone, being comprehensible if read in isolation. It can be really challenging to tell a compelling story in this format — that’s part of the fun. I actually consider it a form of constrained writing, like a sonnet or a palindrome. But the wiki also allows for “Tales”, where contributors can break from that format and present a conventional narrative.”

I know a lot of the literature in the same universe as There Is No Antimemetics Division consists of different short fiction pieces, how did you decide it had to be a novel?

“It was a coin toss whether it would even turn out to be a novel. There Is No Antimemetics Division was written primarily as a web serial, to entertain the readers of the SCP wiki. That was the top priority for me. In fact, some aspects of the original web content had to be sacrificed in order to assemble the ebook, and then more still to turn it into a printable format for the paperback and hardcover editions.

For example, the original web version of “SCP-3125” shows only the first half of the database entry, and an interactive keypad. The reader has to figure out the right code to enter before they’re even allowed to read the rest. In the book, naturally, there’s no keypad, you just turn the page and there’s the rest.

Of course, the adaptation could have been a lot harder. Some SCP wiki content uses moving images, complex full colour text and backgrounds, advanced interactive controls… all very difficult things to adapt to a non-web format.

Some SCP wiki content is hyperfiction with no single intended linear reading order. Some of it is highly collaborative, with multiple contributors. And some of it relies heavily on contextual knowledge from other SCPs.

As for me, I wrote a relatively linear, self-contained, closed, plain text story. There’s some screwy text formatting, but relative to a lot of wiki content, There Is No Antimemetics Division is positively pedestrian. I guess that makes me old-fashioned. But it meant the end result was fairly novel-like.

If you’re asking how I decided that the serial should be adapted as an ebook, and then a paperback, and then a hardcover? People asked for it!”

Along the same vein as the last question, I realized there are a lot of things in the novel that aren’t really explained, the man who confronts Adam Wheeler outside of Site 41 near the end of the novel, for instance. I haven’t read all the short fiction in the same universe, but are many of these things explained there? Or is the lack of explanation a part of the paranormal horror?

“I consider this to be a very self-contained story. There are some mysteries which I left open because I wanted the reader not to know the answer. You won’t find the answers to those elsewhere in the wiki. In particular, you know everything about that man, Red, that I want you to know.

Having said that, if you don’t get cracking into the rest of the wiki, you are missing the heck out. The main thing to check out is What the Dead Know, a side story by sirpudding set in the Antimemetics continuity and written around the same time. This side story introduces Mobile Task Force ω-0, and eventually crosses over into Antimemetics. It’s not necessary for understanding Antimemetics — if it were, I would have found a way to incorporate it into the published novel — but it provides valuable background detail and is well worth a read in its own right. I also highly recommend SCP-1425, an early SCP by Silberescher which was massively influential on Antimemetics and is obliquely referenced in the story.”

From what I understand, there’s no official canon in the SCP universe. A lot of other authors might shy away from letting readers actively participate in the ‘canon’ (I’m using the term loosely here), how do you balance your own writing versus reading what other people have written in the world you’ve created? I personally really love the idea that the SCP universe is a collaborative effort, and I think more authors should start opening up their worlds to readers like you have. There is of course, fanfiction, but to actually be considered part of the universe’s ‘canon’, must be very exciting as a reader.

“Contributions to the Antimemetics Division corner of the SCP wiki have been relatively limited since I wrapped the story up in 2020. I think that’s because the story is fairly complete and self-contained — it was kind of designed to be that way, after all. I suspect a lot of potential contributors get to the end and think, “How do I follow THAT?” and instead head over to another corner of the wiki and develop something without those creative constraints!

As for the fiction content of the greater wiki… like I say, it’s not something I have control over, or would even want to control. I wish I could read more than a fraction of it. But I think contributing to a huge shared universe, even one with “no canon”, is one of the great attractions of the SCP wiki. There being “no canon” is another way of saying that when you write your contribution, you have great creative freedom in which facts you take to be canonical or not — and others have the same choice when it comes to your work. There’s a chance to contribute something which really resonates with a lot of people.”

There Is No Antimemetics Division was your latest book; what projects are you working on next?

“Next up is a book of short stories. This will include my short stories “Lena”, “The Difference” and “I Don’t Know, Timmy, Being God Is A Big Responsibility”, at minimum… and a fistful of others, some old, maybe some new, I haven’t decided yet. No working title, no planned date.

After that, there’s an outside chance that I might do something I’ve never done before, and write a book and self-publish it, without first releasing it for free on the web. It’ll take a lot of willpower, because I love that immediate feedback.”

Can you describe what your writing process looks like?

“I’d love to have a reliable, consistent process. That sounds great.

When developing a story, my general approach is to start from some kind of compelling science fiction “What if?” and then run with it. What if information was a substance you could almost shovel around like snow? What if magic was, starting from the 1970s, just another field of engineering? What if you were at war with your own failing memory? Then I explore the logical consequences as far as I can, finding out how the universe changes if this concept is introduced, and how the universe has to change retroactively in order for this to become possible in the first place. Usually, once I get far enough, some kind of story emerges — if it doesn’t, it’s time to start over from some other premise.

Ideas, however, are cheap. Execution is expensive. I write pretty slowly by most people’s standards, and that’s when I can muster the time to write at all. Maybe a hundred words a day. It’s hard going.

If I’m writing a serial, it then becomes about planning ahead as far as humanly possible, while also understanding that the plan can’t be perfect in every detail, because a plan perfect in every detail would just be the completed serial. I usually have a basic end goal in mind and some cool set pieces or lines of dialogue which I want to engineer somewhere along the line — and commonly half of them turn out to be mutually exclusive with the others, so they have to be ditched.

The rest is just time. And experience.”

You can find qntm’s novels for sale on Amazon or Google Play!

Check Out qntm on Amazon
Check Out qntm on Google Books

And if you liked this interview, let us know! Is there another author you’d like us to interview?

Latest Science News: Larger Brains, More Intelligent? Not the Case

One of the most prevalent conventions of human thought is “Bigger is Better”, whether that’s referring to buildings, cars, bank accounts, etc.

And the same concept applied to brains, too. For a long time it was thought, the bigger the brain, the more intelligent the creature.

But, new studies show that the correlation between brain size and intelligence isn’t really much of a correlation at all, and the age-old idea that increased size = increased [insert variable here] has been blown out of the water.

A team of 22 international experts in human and animal biology have studied approximately 1,400 brains of extinct mammals. The idea was to compare information about their brain masses with the rest of the body in each sample.

Latest Science News Says: Big Brains Aren’t Big Enough

All this biology news looks like science fiction, but it is not. The study, published in April 2021 in Science Advances, is the result of years of research on brain size and intelligence.

The species known to be the smartest on our planet have very different proportions:

  • Elephants amaze us with their size, but their brain development is much greater
  • Dolphins tend to shrink their body size over the years and mutations across the species, but the brain grows larger with each generation
  • Monkeys have a wide range of sizes and seem to follow a pattern when it comes to body and brain
  • Humanity follows a trend similar to dolphins, where we become smaller and with greater intellect.

Kamran Safi, a lead researcher from Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, said that “Using relative brain size as a proxy for cognitive capacity must be set against an animal’s evolutionary history and the nuances in the way the brain and body have changed over the tree of life.”

Studying the Past

The researchers discovered that the biggest evolutionary changes to brain size occurred after cataclysmic events in the earth’s history. Think events like meteor strikes and massive climate shifts.

The first point analyzed was the mass extinction 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretatian era. During this period, dramatic changes were found in rodents, bats, carnivores, and some animals recognized as direct survivors of dinosaurs.

Likewise, between 23 to 33 million years ago, at the end of the Paleonege era, profound changes in the structure of seals, bears, whales, and other primates were also found due to a brutal change in the planet’s climate.

Based on this information, who’s to say that other events in the future won’t spark evolutionary changes too? Like the eruption of a supervolcano or widespread nuclear fallout.

Humans Cognition and Their Developed Brains

Talking about evolution concerning our own species in this aspect needs the support that the research from the University of Vienna carried out in 2015.

After more than 8,000 individuals were studied nearly 90 times, the result says that it is not the size but the structure of our brain that gives us greater intelligence.

Although the result is not 100% compatible because they have tested IQs, it is accepted that what makes someone more or less intelligent than others is their ability to rationally understand the world around them, their memory, resolutions, and logical capacity.

Another project, published in the Royal Society Open Science in 2016, supports the thesis that brain stucture, not size, is indicative of intelligence.

An experiment used to test brain function has subjects collect food in a container that has two entrances. Once the specimen learns both entrances, a transparent block is added, and if it remembers the alternate path to the food and does so, it is considered to be more intelligent than another species that insists on the shortest path.

Many of the test subjects (which varied in size and species) demonstrated the same performance, which again shows subjects with different brain sizes are capable of reaching the same end goal. It’s all about structure.

All of this research leads to the question: have humans evolved to unlock the full potential of our brains? Or will cataclysmic events in the future lead to evolutionary changes in the human brain?

It also raises the question: what does this new science mean for non-earth species?

Alien Science Meets Earth Science

A common stereotype about aliens is that their hyper-intelligence comes from their massive brains, which is reflected in the oblong-shaped heads.

But, if alien biology follows the new developments in Earth biology, it’d be more likely that aliens have slighter frames and smaller heads. It’s all about brain structure, not size, so the massive heads common in depictions of the green men don’t seem as realistic.

What do you think? Have cataclysmic events altered evolutionary patterns for non-Earth lifeforms, just like they have influenced human and animal brain size/structure? And what’s next for the human evolutionary pattern? Let us know in the comments!

Lightning is the Coolest Way to Decrease Greenhouse Gas

We have seen many different ways to prevent and reduce greenhouse gas, such as recycling, using sustainable energy, switching to electric cars and even changing our diets.

And although we have our sustainable ways, somehow, nature always has its own ways of beating us to the point, in almost every aspect.

Maybe you’ve already heard about its capacity to regenerate the ozone layer, which is a cool enough fact, but in this article, we’re going to talk about how lightning bolts can decrease greenhouse gas.

The Nature of Lightning

Lightning bolts have sparked (pun intended) a lot of myths and legends over the years. Thor, Zeus, the thunderbird, etc. Overall, lightning bolts are usually associated with ethereal beings, and were a thing of mystery.

But, as science progressed, we made progress decoding what lightning actually is. For starters, Ben Franklin flew his kite with a pointed wire attached to the apex near a thunderstorm. Although it was a very dangerous experiment, it helped us discover electricity and how it can be conducted.

Fast forward to present day, William H. Brune, a meteorology professor at Penn State University, attached an instrument to a plane flying from Colorado to Oklahoma during a thunderstorm to study lightning. What did it prove? Well, it showed that lightning is beneficial to the health of the atmosphere.

Initially, Brune thought something was wrong with the instrument, since it was receiving a massive amount of signals found in the clouds. So he removed the signals from the dataset and shelved them for over 5 years, planning to study them later.

A few years ago, he took out the data and with the help of an undergraduate intern and a research associate, they realized that the signals received were actually chemical radicals such as hydroxyl (OH) and hydroperoxyl (OH2), and then linked these signals to lightning measurements made from the ground.

And that’s where it gets weird.

Cleaning with Lightning

Lightning occurs when the heavy mix of warm clouds and cold clouds meet. Water droplets in warm clouds collide and “rub” against frozen particles present in cold clouds, forming an electric discharge. This linear discharge can descend to the earth, as lightning, or remain in the clouds, often called heat lightning.

That was basically the information we had until now. Today, we know that this electric discharge is responsible for producing nitric oxide (NO) due to its rapid ‘hot n’ cold’ activity.

When combined with the oxygen of the atmosphere, it creates nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which later on decomposes into hydroxyl radicals (HO2) and ozone (O3) in sunlight. A strange, yet unique form of cleaning out air pollution.

So to sum up this chemical dilemma, each lightning bolt concentrates a heavy amount of air pollutants in their electric discharges, so that they can be released and later on transformed into air oxidizers.

Lightning, Greenhouse Gas, and Climate Change

Okay, maybe lightning itself isn’t the pancrea for global warming, but it’s definitely working against it.

Most greenhouses gasses are created naturally and have been around since the beginning of time. However, fluorinated gasses are what we should worry about, which are all gasses that are synthetic, byproducts of humanity. These gasses create a layer of heat in the atmosphere called the greenhouse effect. This greenhouse effect is what leads to global warming. Here are some of the greenhouse gas components:

  • Carbon dioxide
  • Methane
  • Water vapor
  • Nitrous oxide

Some studies point out that climate change directly affects the frequency and rate of lightning bolts. Global warming has shown to increase the activity of thunderstorms, producing more potent and more frequent lightning.

Is nature somehow trying to “alleviate” itself or even defend itself from a massive atmospheric breakdown?

Hydroxyl radicals and ozone are primary oxidation components that help clean the atmosphere and eliminate greenhouse gases. And as we now know, lightning creates these radicals.

While lightning won’t solve all of our global warming problems, perhaps this discovery will lend itself to other ways to decrease greenhouse gasses.

Lightning factories like in Legend of Korra? Creating raw electricity with renewable energy? Imagine finding a way to shoot bolts of lightning into the atmosphere, powered by wind and solar power.

How else could the lightning discovery help us combat global warming? Let us know in the comments!

Interested in other interesting science news? Check out our blogs about intestinal breathing apparatuses and atomic bomb testing sites!