WRITING

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FICTION

Part art, part science, we can always use either help or inspiration in building the worlds of our stories, whether the mundane with a little twist, or the totally new.

• Aliens and Alien Societies
  Stanley Schmidt and Ben Bova, Writer's Digest Books, 1996. List price $17.99 or less.
  

  While designed for science fiction writers using science fiction examples, your strange races in fantasy will be more convincing if you absorb this valuable treatise on the analysis of where non-human creatures may go if they develop intelligence and culture. Also covers the technology for space flight and provides "A Xenologist's Bookshelf" of reference for further study. Bova is one of the Names of SF, and Schmidt edits 'Analog' so he knows what he is tired of seeing.

• Atmosphere, Climate, and Change
  Thomas E. Graedel and Paul J. Crutzen. List price: $19.95 and less.
  

  Highly recommended to explain how atmosphere and climate change over time, so that you can put your deserts and rainforests in the proper place, rather than putting the forest in the rainshadow. Thoughtless plunking down of ecological zones starts to make your world as believable as Oz, which most of us wish to surpass in acceptability. Especially important to master now that weather and ecology has become a subject of great popular interest.

• Climate and the Affairs of Men
  Nels Winkles and Iben Browning. List price: $17.00
  

  A book that can stay in print for twenty years that makes lots of predictions is a good one: most of theirs about the effects of climatic change on human society have proved out. Valuable in that it tells you what sort of behaviors you can't have without the society looking out of place or like it's going to die of its refusal to change with the climate. The last can make the plot pivot of a lot of moving stories.

• The Coattails of God: The Ultimate Spaceflight -- the Trip to the Stars
  Robert M. Powers, Warner Books, 1981.
  

  A nonfiction book, covering many suggested means of starflight, both slower than light (STL) and faster than light (FTL), and latching onto a most probable program for getting us out there, instead of sitting here talking about it. Includes a chapter on suggested destinations, too.

• Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today
  Margot Adler, Penguin, USA, 1989. List price $16.95 or less.
  

  An authentic journey through the beliefs, practices and personalities of the pagans of America and England. Some Witches find it over-emphasizes feminist Wicca, but most pagans recommend it. "Witch" is not an alternate term for someone who has magical powers. It is time we started remembering that "witches" like Jews and Moslems are members of a persectured minority religion, not the inhuman monsters of propaganda. The decision to make Druids or Witches vile and reprehensible should be a conscious one, not just a convenient stereotype. Jews were once treated in almost the same way by 19th century writers: let's move beyond the bigotry. They may also provide you with the feel of non-centralized religions of the future or otherwhere: religion does not always require a bureacracy or a single ruler like a Pope.

• Earth Shock : Climate Complexity and the Force of Nature
  Andrew Robinson. List price $22.50 and less.
  

  Despite the name, this is not an earthquake book: it covers earthquakes, volcanos, hurricanes, floods, glaciers, deserts, and drought, how they come about, and how people and societies react to them.

• How to Build a Flying Saucer and Other Proposals in Speculative Engineering
  T. B. Pawlicki; Prentice Hall, 1981.
  

  These six essays dive into a lot of fringe science. The first, "Megalithic Engineering" details how to build Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid with bronze age technology, which may surprise the snorg out of your time travellers who went back there looking for ETs; "How to Build a Flying Saucer" puts the ones reported by the UFOlogists in your hands in scientific terms; and most valuable, "Time Travel: How to Navigate the Streams of Time Through Hyperspace" solves a lot of little knots of causation. The other three are a trifle less impressive, though if you want to go into standing waves as energy sources and for transmuting elements, or back up Velikovsky's planetary intruder theories, they are excellent.

• Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy
  Lin Carter; Ballantine Books, 1973
  

  A review of the classics of the other-world fantasy, which is a heck of a reading list, followed by excellent chapters on how to build worlds, from naming people and places to placing places, and deciding how magic works.

• Law and Public Order in Space
  Myres S. McDougal, Harold D. Lasswell, and Ivan A Vlasic, Yale University Press, 1963.
  

  A monstrous (1147 pages!) book by lawyers for lawyers on how present day laws will have to be extended as the precedent for law in space, from access to orbits to dealing with alien life. Too comprehensive for most of us, but the latest version may be just right for a story about a space lawyer, or how a new pleading saves your protagonist's colony.

• Life in the Cold : An Introduction to Winter Ecology
  Peter J. Marchand, Libby Walker (Illustrator). List price $22.00.
  

  By learning about some of the amazing tricks nature already uses to preserve plants, animals, and insects in the extreme cold, you should be able to build workable winter-planets or cold zones. Very readable.

• Mapping
  David Greenhood. List price: $19.95 and less.
  

  Many people are not map literate: they do not know how to read them, and do not know how to draw them. This superb, readable text will take you all the way from "Huh?" to fairly polished amateur cartographer. Especially valuable is the one chapter on conventional symbols, so you know how to indicate marshes, deserts, and such. As you are mapping imagined worlds (usually!), the sections on how to map on a walk and such are not so useful, but you should be thinking, "How do my characters get their geographic information, and how good is it for places more than a couple of day's walk away?"

• Of Stars and Men: Human Response to an Expanding Universe
  Harlow Shapley, Greenwood Publishing, 1984 (1958). List price $49.75
  

  Still a very relevant exploration of the likelihood of extraterrestrial life and its requirements, especially for the neophyte who gets lost in too much jargon and math. Shapley, a noted astronomer, manages a popular introduction without it being either a demanding textbook or only kid stuff that doesn't give you the ideas or vocabulary to dig deeper.

• People's Names: A Cross-Cultural Reference Guide to the Proper Use of over 40,000 Personal and Familial Names in over 100 Cultures
  Holly Ingraham; McFarland, 1997. List price $65, and still selling so well it hasn't been discounted.
  

  Goes back to Sumerian in history, and all around the world, covering all ethnic groups with about twice as many family names as individual ones per chapter. Title vastly understates the number of them. Covers meanings mainly in languages or periods where people really know and care about them, unlike ours. Borrow your fantasy names from little-known languages like Albanian or Provencal. SPECIAL FOR F&SF: the last section is on how to build "shadow languages" for totally original cultures, complete with tables of possible sounds and meanings most likely to cover. No one else has that!

• The Possibility of Intelligent Life Elsewhere in the Universe Report prepared for the committee on Science and Technology, US House of Representatives, 95th Congress, first Session
  US Library of Congress, Science Policy Research Division; 1977
  

  This is the classic, written by Marcia S. Smith. Short (126 pgs with bibliogrqphy), written clearly enough for legislators to understand, with the original Carl Sagan formula on the likelihood of intelligent life. Also an excerpt from the excellent Smithsonian magazine article (Oct. 74) on animals in alien biospheres. Some of you may have seen these on exhibit at the Air and Space Museum in DC.

• Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic
  P. E. I. Bonewits, Samuel Weiser, 1989.
  

  A highly readable and original systemization of real world magic by a scholarly interpreter (he has degrees in Magic from the University of California, not some $25-mail-order "degree") and practitioner. He approaches the matter with the scientific method, and breaks it down into "natural laws" leaving Deities and morals out of it. As he says, magic is an energy, and no more inherently moral than electricity: it is the user who has morals. He covers most known systems of belief from around the world.

• Restless Earth
  Carolinda E. Hill (Editor), John G. Agnone (Editor), Bonnie S. Lawrence, Stephen L. Harris (Contributor). List price $35.00 and less.
  

  An NGS production, this covers clearly enough, with loads of maps, photos, and illustrations, covering the more violent aspects of plate tectonics (earthquakes, volcanoes) and climate (hurricanes, tornadoes). Good to help you set up your own danger zones.

• The Role of the Sun in Climate Change
  Douglas V. Hoyt, Kenneth H. Shatten (Contributor). List price $29.95
  

  This is a little heavy-going, but if you may want to get a better grasp of this before you start juggling the levels of stellar radiation your invented world gets, which happens as soon as you change the sort of star it orbits.

• Space Travel
  Ben Bova, Anthony R. Lewis, and Tony Lewis; Writer's Digest Books, 1997. List price 16.99 or less.
  

  An excellent introduction to astronomy and travel for the rank beginner. It does become technical, but you are not supposed to drop into the middle of this for a fast crib, but start at the beginning and learn. Discusses the uses of space travel in society, which may give you a story line.

• Strategic Relocation
  Joel Skousen. List price: $45.00
  

  If you want to destroy North American civilization as we know it, and run your characters through either the breakdown or the ruins, Skousen has collected the data on what is most likely to happen and which areas will be most affected. Disasters range from flood and earthquake to NBC terrorism and urban collapase. This book is designed for the survivalist who wants to relocate to one of the safer places, not for writers, and you may find the tone repellent, pitiable, admirable, or hilarious depending on your own attitude. Include wind patterns for the carrying of air-borne diseases or nuclear fallout, so it helps you set up your world.

• Time Travel: A Writer's Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel
  Paul J. Nahin, Writer's Digest Books, 1997. List $16.99 or less.
  

  All the plausible theory to convince your reader they are not dealing with arbitrary "fairy godmothers" in your story. Sometimes the tech gets a little thick, but start at the beginning and consider this your home study course (with no tests or homework) in the physics of time.

• Water, Rivers and Creeks
  Luna Bergere Leopold. List price $30.00.
  

  An excellent book on how running water works, since most planets have it somewhere. This is hydrology and water resources for the intelligent layperson, a non-technical primer following water from rain through the ground into free flow, not ignoring the effects of dams and irrigation on groundwater.

• World-Building
  Stephen L. Gillett and Ben Bova, Writer's Digest Books, 1996. List price $16.99 or less.
  

  Once again, fantasy writers building their own worlds should pay attention, too. Gillett is a geologist as well as a novelist, and will make the science behind star systems, planets, weather, and such clear to anyone intelligent enough to write. For hard-science SFers, he covers gravity, non-Terrene atmospheres and all the other astrophysics you need.

• The Writer's Guide to Creating a Science Fiction Universe
  George Ochoa and Jeffrey Osier, Writer's Digest Books, 1993. List price $18.95 and less.