Quantum Storytelling

With titles like The Road nabbing the Pulitzer, World War Z being a popular title, and remake of The Omega Man, myself and others have been noticing that interest in post-apoc seems to be growing, at least from a creative standpoint.

Why has there been a recent surge?

According to Wil Wheaton over on Suicide Girls:

“…a lot of the same fears and geopolitical conflicts that dominated the post-WWII era when apocalyptic fiction really got started are alive and well today. We don’t have the Cold War, but we have terrorism, global warming, and a government that does everything it can to keep us in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. When we feel like this, one way we cope is by creating worlds where the worst of our fear have been realized, worlds where we can walk away if it gets too scary, and maybe it prepares us to deal with that world, should we create it for real.”

Smart guy. I think he’s right. The themes of my post-apoc universe are synthesized out of many of my personal fears, and looking at issues of the day and thinking, “What’s the worst that could happen?” More importantly, “How would we deal with it?”

It’s the essential what-if of all good sci-fi, post-apoc, and dystopian stories.

Thanks to our buddies over at SF Signal for the heads up on that one.

When I began writing I swore that I would not infodump in an excessive manner. So how do you impart background world information? You inclue it;

“Incluing is a technique of world building, in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set.”

OR:

“The process of scattering information seamlessly through the text, as opposed to stopping the story to impart the information.”

As a gamer, I’ve always had a natural appreciation for incluing. There are a multitude of examples in my favorite games, such as Half-Life, Fallout, and Oblivion. Because games are an interactive medium, they naturally inclue information to the player by distributing it throughout the world.

Fiction writers don’t have it so easy. The world is not revealed in an interactive manner, and so it is harder to inclue items about the world in a subtle fashion.

I have an odd solution to this, given I’m creating a metaseries media franchise.

Read more

As I’ve been studying Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, I’ve been paying attention to how the episodes use story threads. It happens in one of two ways; The writers either create a new thread, or pick up where an old thread left off. Executive Producer Brad Wright in a GateWorld interview;

“That’s what Atlantis did well in that we created a universe wherein multiple storylines could be born and take place and spread and grow. Those are the lessons we learned building SG-1 in the first place. While it started with mythology at its root, very early on, by mid-way through Season Three and [the] beginning of Season Four, we had created enough of our own mythology that wasn’t rooted in the culture of “X.”"

One of the strengths of the series is its ability to remain fresh after so many seasons, and the best I can determine is that their ability to do this relies heavily upon those open threads. You can resolve a thread with a villain being killed… or so it appears. But maybe they are revived, cloned, take a new body, or found a way to escape at the last second that the hero didn’t know about. While this is standard fare, the more interesting type of open thread is when an episode features a new discovery: New technology, ancient artifact, riddles constructed out of alien languages. The characters never truly know the full story. A pillar inscribed with text may lead to certain discoveries in one episode, but the interpretation of that finding may change or evolve in drastic new ways in a later episode.

It is safe to say that the SG-1 writers did not have entire story arcs across multiple seasons planned out in advance. So then how did they make it seem like they did plan it? They left themselves enough open threads, and had confidence in their own abilities to deliver on those open threads when the time came. Making yourself seem like a master story arc planner is just a matter of leaving yourself enough opportunities to create that illusion through future stories.