New Testingstan

adr wrote:ok imagine the aliens are coming from another star in sleeper ships and something went wrong

the technology limitations means they can't expect help from their own ppl. they have no way to just leave. and they are colonists rather than conquerers so they don't have access to ALIEN BATTLECRUISER and NANOTUBE POWER AROMR

they are just improvising with what they have trying to make their way

and it didn't start otu violent but there's all kinds of fear of the unknown and the supply problem puts a time limit in place raising the stakes of failure


between the fear, the ticking clock, and difficulty of communication with a totally alien culture on both sides things go down hill

This sounds a bit like District 9, with the exception of the aliens having access to weapons that they built or brought with them.

Civil War Man wrote:

adr wrote:ok imagine the aliens are coming from another star in sleeper ships and something went wrong

the technology limitations means they can't expect help from their own ppl. they have no way to just leave. and they are colonists rather than conquerers so they don't have access to ALIEN BATTLECRUISER and NANOTUBE POWER AROMR

they are just improvising with what they have trying to make their way

and it didn't start otu violent but there's all kinds of fear of the unknown and the supply problem puts a time limit in place raising the stakes of failure


between the fear, the ticking clock, and difficulty of communication with a totally alien culture on both sides things go down hill

This sounds a bit like District 9.

Or Alien Nation.

i've found that there is no such thing as an original idea

Jung wrote:I even thought up a bit of local cultural color for the "good guys".

I was thinking about this and I wonder if it'd be able to stand up. It seems to me that if people actually stop and think about what they're doing, they won't be very enthusiastic about moving forward.

Now this is a good thing I say. But, if you're trying to push a war forward, do you want your soldiers to reflect on the horror they're inflicting? Do you want to risk them having second thoughts?



Perhaps if it is entrenched in the grassroots the generals and the rest of the war machine wouldn't be able to erase it. Any attempts might just get them shunned, preserving the culture. But I suspect it'd be at constant risk of being overwritten by a more traditional war attitude, even if it keeps some flavor to appease the ones who follow the other way, just cuz of the efficiency angle. There'd have to be an active effort to maintain the culture.

HPCA versions of classic stories, round two:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:

To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end. Around midnight, I came across the hag, making passes over the head of the Seer. I shot her three times, and the wig fell off to reveal that she was the charlatan Merlin in disguise. The Seer awoke, cured of his distemper by the passing of the vile, incompetent charlatan wizard Merlin, and Sandy "Bosoms" McGorgeous, his girlfriend, instantly rushed to his rotund side, running her hands through his fringe of hair. "To-day, we proclaim the rule of One Leader, who represents all the people. Away with chivalry, and feudalism, and that Greek madness of "democracy", for it is a liberal and probably German invention," he declared, and all cheered him.

Re: adr's last post

I think I'd probably go for the ancient tradition angle, though tbh I haven't really given much thought to how this culture would have come about.

I would guess war propaganda in such a culture would focus heavily on stuff like "yeah, it's bad, but it's for the greater good", "the ppl on the other side have been decieved by their evil leaders who are totally evil and their vision totally horrific you need to stop it from coming about", showing pictures of the not!Nazi concentration camps and Rape of not!Nanking and saying "this is going on right now" and "this could be your home town" etc. I wouldn't be surprised if this tended to get into some rather dark places though.

That might actually be a good thing drama-wise though. It'd prolly be a decent theme that war tends to twist this relatively benign culture toward something darker. Actually this seems like maybe kind of the opposite side of the coin of my "how would fascism react to actually ruling the world and thus not having an enemy" idea, like they could be two explorations of the idea that war tends to uglify culture with its influence while peace tends to make it less ugly.

sounds kewl

btw thinking moar about my INVASION WAR story

i'd tell it as kinda like a presentation of facts, but from two perspectives


in fact it might be the same story told twice back to back


so part 1 is told from the human perspective and it plays kinda like a regular big war blockbuster, told through a fog of war fear filter with a little bit of humanity fuck yeah obfuscation. all the events are presented, but you only see part of each one and are fed one particular interpretration

then part 2 is the same story from the alien perspective, where they are desperate from their problems, frustrated by their failure to communicate, and panicked by the combination of everything.




i wouldn't write it out in the book but the idea would be that the reader walks away from it, after reading part 2, and realize everybody could have won if things were just a little bit different, on either side. you see that each step might have made sense to each side but they still totally sucked and both lost.


and there's the obligatory anti-war message: the whole conflict was fucking pointless


edit: omg i'd have to borrow the term i heard so many times in full metal jacket

"he got wasted in blah blah"

wasted indeed

i love you guise

The idea of releasing two versions of the same movie each from a different perspective is a really interesting idea. Unsure if I would want to see them released simultaneously or some time apart.

Darth Fanboy wrote:The idea of releasing two versions of the same movie each from a different perspective is a really interesting idea. Unsure if I would want to see them released simultaneously or some time apart.

Eastwood did something similar with Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.

Never saw them, any good?

Only Letters from Iwo Jima.

adr wrote:in fact it might be the same story told twice back to back


so part 1 is told from the human perspective and it plays kinda like a regular big war blockbuster, told through a fog of war fear filter with a little bit of humanity fuck yeah obfuscation. all the events are presented, but you only see part of each one and are fed one particular interpretration

then part 2 is the same story from the alien perspective, where they are desperate from their problems, frustrated by their failure to communicate, and panicked by the combination of everything.

I like this concept.

One possible idea: I kind of like the idea of having the alien invasion be like the rag tag fleet in BSG, a bunch of refugees running from the not!Cylons or whatever. It nicely explains why they need Earth so bad (they aren't a proper colonial expedition, their ships are falling apart, they don't have a sustainable high tech base, so a shirtsleeve environment is pretty much their only hope for survival), and it strikes me as a nice way to have them not making the best decisions because they're scared and angry, emotions are running high etc.. Plus I think it might be rather poignant to have the human narrative depicting the aliens as a faceless and terrifyingly powerful threat, seemingly invincible behind their lazors and pew pews and heat rays and ultra-tech machinery of destruction etc. then you find out that those monsters who seemed so terrifying and powerful and incomprehensible were basically a bunch of scared and traumatized refugees clutching the equivalent of rusty shotguns.

Another possibility: their civilization is doing fine, but they invaders are political exiles or something. Maybe you could play with a vague parallel to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Edit: another idea I like. Set up the book so there is no book 1 and book 2, the reader chooses which one to read first. Make the alien narrative so that you can't tell that the enemy they're fighting is humans, we're described entirely through the perspective of the aliens' perceptions and preconceptions and ignorance, so we look like some faceless hostile alien enemy or something (maybe give some subtle hints that the enemy in this part of the book is us, but nothing too obvious). It's only when the reader moves on to the human narrative (which, as you suggest, reads like a standard Hollywood style alien invasion story) that the reader can put things together and realize the enemy was us. Likewise, if you read the human narrative first, you see the aliens as War of the Worlds/Independence Day style faceless invaders, and only when you move on to the alien narrative do you see how things look from their PoV. So the reader starts out with sympathetic protagonists vs. faceless unsympathetic enemy either way, without having this part of the alien narrative influenced by knowing the enemy is humans (unless, of course, he read the human narrative first).

Hey, here's an idea if you really wanna go weird. Write both the invader narrative and the defender narrative as humans vs. aliens, just with the humans switching roles. Then in the intro put something like I remember the intro of Nightfall saying, where you say something like "look, I've humanized the aliens in this book, giving them human names and physical features and stuff, so you will be able to relate to them better and the narrative will not be cluttered up with unnecessary worldbuilding exposition about their tentacles and shit." The reader doesn't have any way of knowing which side is the aliens and which is the humans, and can pick for themselves, or maybe it's actually aliens vs. aliens.

edit: omg i'd have to borrow the term i heard so many times in full metal jacket

"he got wasted in blah blah"

wasted indeed

Indeed.

adr wrote:btw thinking moar about my INVASION WAR story

i'd tell it as kinda like a presentation of facts, but from two perspectives


in fact it might be the same story told twice back to back


so part 1 is told from the human perspective and it plays kinda like a regular big war blockbuster, told through a fog of war fear filter with a little bit of humanity fuck yeah obfuscation. all the events are presented, but you only see part of each one and are fed one particular interpretration

then part 2 is the same story from the alien perspective, where they are desperate from their problems, frustrated by their failure to communicate, and panicked by the combination of everything.

Lexx did something like that in season 2 with the two episodes 'The Net' and 'The Web'. Not exactly with a war, but dealing with the same events from two perspectives, alien and mostly human.

In the first, the Lexx runs into an alien entity, things go weird and everyone wakes up in a dead, unresponsive ship. Things are deeply confused and unsettling for the longest time, 790 accuses Stan of treachery constantly, but finally they discover the Lexx is still caught in some sort of alien spiderweb and manage to blast their way out.

In the second we see it from the perspective of the alien spiderweb. We find out it did actually take over Stan, was trying to use the entire crew through him to spread its young further thoughout the galaxy and that 790's paranoid demands for his execution were actually valid for once.

Let's all watch rashomon and talk about multiple perspectives and shit

adr that sounds like a great idea, but I think it would be better if you just intertwined the two stories, say alternating chapters or something

that way people would get the 'oh gods these guys should just sit down and talk' during the story, rather than afterwards on reflection; but you'd have to avoid the urge to make them sit down and talk. Maybe the aliens get a beachhead set up, and there's attacks from the humans; and then one of the aliens tries to go out and talk - like, putting down its gun in a symbolic way - only to get shot by the panicky soldiers. This would make one of the soldiers start thinking, and maybe they'd try to do the same later on, to try and make peace; but by then the aliens have hardened their hearts and they'd shoot him

but then I tend to think that rashomon-style multiple perspectives stuff is more about showing off how clever you are, though of course it has its advantages

Rashomon was pretty fun, and I don't think it was all about Kurosawa showing off. There was a lot of stuff about honesty and dishonesty and how different people's nature makes them pitch a story differently, to fit different goals.


I think I agree with soup about the interleaving thing. If you just write two standalone stories, everyone reads one first and a lot of people will be all "wtf you are about-facing on me you flip-flopper!"

Mix it up, and people get a little bit of everything and aren't so confused.

The two standalone thing would work great if the author got a chance to talk to every reader while they were reading it. But that only happens in fanfiction so it's not a good model.

Doing it serially worked for Rashomon because each version of what happened was, I don't know, like 15-20 minutes long tops? The longer you make each version, the harder it's going to be for people to forget what they think they know from the first story so they can follow the second.

"I, Mon Mothma Mekratrig of the Alliance to Restore the Republic, declare the Galactic Empire illegal usurpers of galactic government!"

"Balls!" yelled Lt. Mike Wong, leader of Alpha Squadron as his group of twelve TIE Advanced strove fiercely into the heart of the battle with the Rebels. Armed with the finest in advanced concussion missiles, shield technology, and a hyperdrive that would make women swoon (cut six paragraphs of tech specifications) he lined his next target in sight.

Meanwhile, Emperor-President Palpatine watched on the holoviewer. "I guess I will have to eliminate all infighting and really unify everyone together but we can do that." Tarkin agreed and so did everyone. "Good thing we purged the Jedi to the last man or our freedoms would be in trouble."

"Sir, what of the reports that there are more hidden secret unknown Jedi in hiding today than there were active Jedi before the Rise of the New Order?"

Palpatine used Force lightning to execute the traitor who hated freedom that would say that, "Mark down his cause of death as 'Jedi Spy' when you fill out the official report."


---


Planet Bakgraundfluf had not been in operation since the Clone Wars and was running out of jobs and the planetary governor was watching the dust collect on his deck when eighty million transmissions from all of the top weapons manufacturers in the Empire came in at once.

(cut 92 pages of that)

All in all it was an Example of American Imperial elbow grease bringing together lots of bombs and meanwhile they were also refitting the old assault fighters from the days of the Clone Wars and....

(cut 92 more pages)

It is very hard work to win a war.


----


end the first half of chapter one

i need a nap after reading that

Darth Fanboy wrote:"I, Mon Mothma Mekratrig of the Alliance to Restore the Republic, declare the Galactic Empire illegal usurpers of galactic government!"

"Balls!" yelled Lt. Mike Wong, leader of Alpha Squadron as his group of twelve TIE Advanced strove fiercely into the heart of the battle with the Rebels. Armed with the finest in advanced concussion missiles, shield technology, and a hyperdrive that would make women swoon (cut six paragraphs of tech specifications) he lined his next target in sight.

Meanwhile, Emperor-President Palpatine watched on the holoviewer. "I guess I will have to eliminate all infighting and really unify everyone together but we can do that." Tarkin agreed and so did everyone. "Good thing we purged the Jedi to the last man or our freedoms would be in trouble."

"Sir, what of the reports that there are more hidden secret unknown Jedi in hiding today than there were active Jedi before the Rise of the New Order?"

Palpatine used Force lightning to execute the traitor who hated freedom that would say that, "Mark down his cause of death as 'Jedi Spy' when you fill out the official report."


---


Planet Bakgraundfluf had not been in operation since the Clone Wars and was running out of jobs and the planetary governor was watching the dust collect on his deck when eighty million transmissions from all of the top weapons manufacturers in the Empire came in at once.

(cut 92 pages of that)

All in all it was an Example of American Imperial elbow grease bringing together lots of bombs and meanwhile they were also refitting the old assault fighters from the days of the Clone Wars and....

(cut 92 more pages)

It is very hard work to win a war.


----


end the first half of chapter one

way to edit out all the good stuff

what i was thinking with the serial thing is i want the reader to get fully inundated in one side

like if we had an alien invasion in real life, we'd only see our part of the story and after the shooting starts it'd probably cloud things even more

i worry that by doing a back and forth, the reader won't get fully stuck in the us vs them mindset which might weaken the reflective part. like at the end they remember how they were celebrating the victory at the end of part 1, but now know the whole story and look back and say "i was wrong"

with the back and forth they might immediately see "they were wrong" but not necessarily make the same personal connection

idk

***

now on rashomon, i've never actually seen it but i saw a tng episode compared to it once so i can use that to relate

a key diff there is the story being told changed with each narrator because they were not just filtering, but also massaging facts to glorify themselves; not all the perspectives can be true since the stories contradict each other in ways

whereas what i'd want to say is that both sides are equally and simultaneously true. the individual characters might be wrong, but the facts presented by the narrator are not

adr wrote:what i was thinking with the serial thing is i want the reader to get fully inundated in one side

like if we had an alien invasion in real life, we'd only see our part of the story and after the shooting starts it'd probably cloud things even more

i worry that by doing a back and forth, the reader won't get fully stuck in the us vs them mindset which might weaken the reflective part. like at the end they remember how they were celebrating the victory at the end of part 1, but now know the whole story and look back and say "i was wrong"

with the back and forth they might immediately see "they were wrong" but not necessarily make the same personal connection

idk

The personal connection is the part where you'd really only manage it if you could talk to every reader- have a real conversation and say something like "yeah, so you remember how this felt..."

I don't think you can structure a story such that you're sure it'll make people think certain things. People aren't sheep, you can't just totally mindwipe them and write on your own message. So the themes you want to get across have to be something that the reader will keep in his mind constantly. If you try to set it up so that the reader feels more and more like X, but then has a sudden epiphany at the end and feels Y instead, and there's a discontinuity, that's bad. It's not going to work well, because you'll lose people at the junction between X and Y.

whereas what i'd want to say is that both sides are equally and simultaneously true. the individual characters might be wrong, but the facts presented by the narrator are not

That actually makes it trickier. One of your best tools in a story like that is deliberately shifting the tone of the narrative and picking out people on each side that your readers want to root for. The facts, the literal what-happened, that you could keep uniformly true. But narrative doesn't break down neatly into "just the facts" and "just the character's opinion." At least, not with third-person over-the-shoulder narration, which is what we usually see in stories these days.

are you envisioning this as a physical book or an ebook or some kind of hypertext fiction thing?

It's an interesting idea. I once saw a book about IIRC the american civil war. QAbout two brothers, one on each side, or something; but it was actually two books in one, upside-down relative to each other. Blargh, I don't know if I'm making any sense; but do you mean something like that?

Or more like: part 1 - human perspective; part 2 - alien perspective; all in one volume. Hmm. The more I think about it, the more it appeals to me.

yeah, one volume.

as to the specifics of format, well, idk, it isn't something i'll probably ever actually do anyway. it's just one of the ideas that kicks around my brain for a while