Exoplanets, Protocolized Fiction, and Weirder Fantasy Maps

A shorter newsletter for this week as I’ve been mostly focused on getting as much writing done as possible. It’s why I haven’t really been reading or gaming. :)

📺 Watching - Severance, Anora

Slowly going through more of the Oscar films. Enjoyed Anora. Not what I expected at all. Unconventional, fresh, and the acting/directing felt so natural. Its story structure is quite different to what I’m used to (eg, Conclave followed a much more expected arc).

🏃‍♂️Running/Walking

Been snowy, so didn’t do as much running this week. But, I found this great article from

Liz Cook

on creating a BBQ gel for runners (ht Nathanael). The kind of novel experimentation we need more of!

I set out to improve on the model. It was not, I concluded, too much to ask that a food be both delicious and suited to my fast-paced modern lifestyle. This was the promise of Go-gurt.

Plus, running nutrition is simple. All you really need is sodium, some amino acids, and a lot of simple carbohydrates—ideally, in the form of highly processed and bioavailable sugars.

What you need is something like barbecue sauce.

✍️ Writing - Novel #2

If there’s something I’ve discovered about my current ability to write novels, is that I can’t really trust my ability to plot/outline well. It’s usually directionally correct, but when I actually write the scenes, I usually find either 1) issues with the plot and/or 2) that the characters are being forced into the outline far more than I imagined. So, I usually write a plot/outline, write the scenes, and then re-adjust: a constant process of zooming out and in. I kind of equate it to the experience of becoming a better programmer over the course of coding for 20+ years. Your intuition improves over time, enabling you to be able to judge your own assessments more easily. It’s being able to see how scope and scale interacts: from architecting a codebase to detailed technical programming. A plot point might feel right, much like one imagines an architectural choice might seem correct, only until you actually code or write it. With that said, I’ve finalised draft 2’s latter quarter in terms of plot and hoping to finish it soon. That is, if may assessment of the rewrite is how I intend it to end. ;)

💾 Links

Exoplanet Menagerie

I enjoyed

Karl Schroeder

’s exploration of how exoplanets can serve as rich playgrounds for stories.

This is just a hint of the exoplanet discoveries made in recent years. I encourage you to follow the Arxiv literature, because new findings come in daily. Climate modeling of these aliens worlds is particularly interesting; I’m reading about permanent storms and global heat transfers that can result in an unlivable sunlit side, and a balmy and comfortable dark one. New forms and alternatives to photosynthesis are being discussed, and the crustal dynamics of super-earths is a hot topic. All of these can drive spectacular worldbuilding for new science fiction that steps past the colonialist fantasies of 1900s space opera and imagines what life on real worlds might be like, and what settling them might involve.

I particularly enjoyed the riffing on tidally locked eyeball planets.

The weirdest characteristic of such planets (most of which will be super-earths, 1.3 to 2 Earth-radii in size and with 1.2 to 3 gees of gravity) is that they’re usually tidally locked, keeping one face eternally pointed at their sun, the way the moon faces the Earth. On such worlds, earthly plants’ strategy of sprouting leaves in all directions to catch light at different times of the day wouldn’t make sense. Instead, there would be competition to get in front of your neighbour and directly intercept light from a predictable, unchanging direction. Think solar panels, not leaves. This could result in bizarre forests where every possible chink of light from the sun has something covering it, and eternal darkness reigns on the forest floor.

and:

Sometimes the tidal lock breaks; every now and then, a planet could go from millions of years of stable orientation to a chaotic regime where the side facing the sun switches, maybe once a century for a while, then once in a thousand years, then twice in one year. The aliens in The Three-Body Problem evolve on such a planet. Chaotic flips like this don’t require a binary star, they can perfectly well occur for worlds orbiting a single sun.

How is a society like that structured? And what does a technologically advanced civilization do when the eyeball planet moves its temperate zones? Image the chaos that can create alongside an opportunity for societal upheaval in its wake?

Chiang’s Law and Protocolized Fiction

Check out Protocolized, a new newsletter/magazine from Summer of Protocols crowd, the purpose of which is:

To catalyze a whole global scene around protocols, with a particular focus on a brave new genre of protocol fiction that we think is just itching to emerge, with associated speculation, theorizing, research, and technical / cultural / social analyses. The stories, which we hope you’ll help us tell, are how we envision everything coming together.

Venkatesh Rao explains what it means and takes inspiration from Ted Chiang’s definition of how sci-fi differs from fantasy.

science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people.

I would actually put my own Hope Runners of Gridlock in the category of protocolized fiction because much of what drives not only characters and the city, is the protocolized traffic gridlock. :)

Weirder Fantasy Maps

Coming off last week’s spacetime maps, I enjoyed this take on how fantasy maps could functionally be weirder.

I enjoyed learning about the Peutinger map, a distorted map that showed the Roman road network.

🎶 Music

Luttrell - Day in the Park

Luttrell is one of my favourite house/electronic musicians. Beautiful music that one can casually listen to on a walk or get tipsy to over a beautiful sunset with friends. Enjoy!

With Valentine’s day being this past week, hope you received love in whatever form you prefer. Whether from a lover, from friends or family, from a dog, from nature, or from a beautiful melody.

See you all next week!

Simon