Human beings are wonderfully complex, so it’s interesting that sci-fi writers love to write about computers developing near-human characteristics (I’m guilty too—see The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan—FYI: this is a free download on Amazon starting tomorrow, June 28, through July 2; also, Odri’s starship in Sing a Samba Galactica is just another member of the crew).  But, let’s face it, it’s hard to imagine an AI computer program capable of modeling the emotional ingredients that influence human decision making.  (I suppose you could argue that you don’t want emotions influencing the computer’s thinking because they so often get humans in trouble, but that’s another issue.)

Last week I was struck by the stock market’s reaction to Bernanke’s announcement that the Fed was going to halt their stimulus policies and, in particular, let interest rates rise to a self-sustaining  and steady-state level.  The best way to describe it is that it was an “oh-my-God” reaction of Wall Street and the rest of the financial world to an abrupt change in the rules of the game.  Ignoring the fact that we can’t model these emotional responses (part of the problem), we still should wonder why.  Why is it that human beings have knee-jerk emotional reactions to outside stimuli that can send their world into a vortex of disaster?

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You win a few and lose a few in this life—and you just hope by the end the balance is positive.  I’ve always felt this wonder about life and the universe around me.  If you haven’t looked in the mirror in the morning and asked “Why am I here?” something is terribly wrong with you.  My “why?” was often projected outwards, a pitiful soliloquy to an unresponding Universe that seemed to pose great mysteries I must strive to solve, a scientific sleuth tracking down answers.  I did my small part and relished the successes of others.  I’ve never stopped wondering.

I was an avid reader from the time I discovered comic books at age four—or was it three?  I wanted to fill in my own balloons and make my own comics.  My mother helped me.  My love of reading was helped along by an older brother who joined a sci-fi book club.  Writing and wonder made for a heady mixed drink that addicted me to both science and the written word.  You might know me for the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” (my interest in mysteries and thrillers came later) or “The Clones and Mutants Series” (futuristic or techno-thrillers), but “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” my Foundation series, is more closely related to those early days spent reading books from my brother’s collection (Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun were my introduction to the mystery genre).  By the time I ended junior high, I had forsaken those comic books and perused all the sci-fi books in our public library…and decided I wanted to be a writer.

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(Stephen H. Banks, Chaos Theories, CreateSpace, 2013, ISBN: 978-1482023770)

This debut novel is a sci-fi thriller.  It employs intense and suspenseful action, tight plotting, interesting characters, and chaos theory to weave an Aladdin’s magical rug of a story that will leave you breathless once you hop on it.  It is my kind of novel—profound, yet entertaining.

The style, where interludes of quiet beauty are sprinkled with startling violence, reminds me of old Dean Koontz before he detoured into rewriting the Frankenstein myth.  In spite of the title, the mathematics of chaos theory is replaced by a more philosophical treatment.  The butterfly scene with Tali, a precocious two-year-old who intuitively understands how probability and stochastic processes continuously reshape our world, reminds me of the butterflies in Cien Años de Soledad.  In fact, Tali is the fountain of magical realism in this book, although she’s not the main character.

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Tuesday’s post was about the social singularity that appears in my books and is currently happening in the real world.  One aspect of this is fundamentalism in politics.  Whether human beings are by nature fundamentalist savages or not, it’s clear that fundamentalism across the world is bringing human rights and responsible government to their knees.  Let me elaborate.

The hope of the Arab Spring is being dashed against the rocks by the stormy waters of Muslim fundamentalism.  Mubarak might have been a psychotic sociopath (most dictators are), but he was secular and held the dark forces of Muslim extremism at bay.  The current Egyptian leader, clearly desiring the power of his predecessor, is the other extreme.  It’s obvious that he and his followers want another Muslim theocracy in Egypt.

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[Another guest post from thriller author Gina Fava.  Writers should especially pay attention.  I think she brings up some very important points on this one.  Thanks, Gina.]

Does that little voice inside your head ever use a language other than the one you speak everyday?  Ever consider dabbling in a foreign language to enhance the novel you’re writing, as in Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce?  Or creating a sense of mood with dialect, like Mark Twain did in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or just as Dennis Lehane did in Gone, Baby Gone?

How about making up a foreign tongue, like Vulcan, Romulan, or Klingon in the Star Trek series? Thought about using slang to add a touch of humor or the right amount of grit to a story, as in Dude, Where’s My Car? or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather?

Maybe you have an urge to go full throttle and write a whole work in a dead language (one that remains in use for specific contexts like science, law, or religion, such as Latin) or an extinct or endangered language (one lacking in speakers or users, such as Aramaic) or a combination of both, ala Mel Gibson’s screenplay for The Passion of the Christ.

Playing with language to flavor your characters and plot might just help your story exude an added level of texture and an authenticity that could distinguish it from other works in your genre.  Both of my novels, The Race, as well as The Sculptor, are based on American characters who reside in Italy.  Often, these characters interact with native Italians, so a fair amount of dialogue is sprinkled with Italian language.   I use it to evoke mood, setting, humor, and/or authenticity, depending on the scene.  Similarly, one of my chapters in The Race recreates the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986.  I enhanced character pathos and increased tension in the plot by peppering their dialogue with Russian slang.

In one of my earlier blog posts, A Thriller Audiobook That Hits You Like Bleach,  I recommend listening to the audiobook of Ken Follett’s historical thriller, Fall of Giants.   The lilt and cadence of every dialect and accent will practically transport you to Wales, Buffalo, Russia, England and Germany during the First World War.  Hurry, because the second installment in the trilogy, Winter of the World , is due out in September.

DID YOU KNOW that nearly half of the world speaks a Top Ten Language:

1. Chinese*
2. Spanish
3. English
4. Arabic*
5. Hindi
6. Bengali
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German

*Includes all forms of the language

UNESCO ranks the world’s languages by degree of usage between generations.  One language dies nearly every 14 days.  Nearly 2,724 languages of the roughly 7,000 languages ever spoken on Earth are now endangered.  Here are just a few:

• the Aramaic dialects that linger primarily in the Middle East
• Tuvan, spoken by about 200,000 people in Russia
• Aka, limited to less than 2,000 people in India
• Seri, spoken by a mere 700-1000 Mexican natives

For more information on the planet’s endangered languages, check out the article “Vanishing Voices” by Russ Rhymer [http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text] in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic.

Recently, Google has initiated and funded a project to protect endangered languages.  So has Rosetta Stone, a language-learning software company.  Click on the Google or Rosetta Stone links above, and click The Endangered Languages Project link for more information on what you can do to protect global linguistic diversity.

What do you think of peppering your prose with another language?  Any suggestions or ideas?

[Note from Steve to writers and readers:  This is an important question.  If we apply the Goldilocks Principle, what is too much, too little, or just right?  This is especially important for dialog.  Comments are welcome!]

In libris libertas….

The death of Neil Armstrong at 82 from heart operation complications is a nail in the coffin we’ve been building for humanity’s adventures in space.  Some consider this only another example of public apathy or antagonism toward science and scientists.  I consider it a concerted effort to end a dream on the part of individuals who need to use their imagination more.

Another nail was the cancellation of the shuttle program.  But, even before that, the cancellation of the Apollo program was a bureaucratic castration—step 1, if you will, a pulling back from the great adventure.  The shuttle program’s cancellation was step 2, as the incompetent asses in government continued to opt for military expenditures over science in their clumsy and insane budget choices—the budget ax fell on the easy targets with special interests and lobbyists prevailing (call it the military industrial complex, with double meaning intended).

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There are many important issues in the never-ending battle between the 99% v. 1%.  One such issue is likely to affect the 1% just as much as the 99%–the environment human beings live in.  Worldwide, many of the 99% live in poverty, experiencing war, famine, and filth without shelter and clean water.  This could be the future of the 1% too—when Gaia suffers, we all suffer.  Gaia, Mother Earth, or whatever you call Her, is currently being violently gang-raped by the 1% for power and profit.  Her silent scream is what I see in the famous Edvard Munch painting.

The 1% and its power brokers, i.e. most conservatives, America’s GOP, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, are notorious Gaia rapists on America’s most wanted list of environmental criminals who are repeatedly indicted for their sociopathic abuse and lack of concern for Mother Earth.  To be fair, some born-agains, a large constituency of the GOP, have expressed concern about environmental issues.  Even some Republicans revolted against Romney’s leadership and voted for tax breaks for wind farms, a small victory probably aimed at vocally environmental constituents they need to appease in order to be re-elected to a second term.  Nevertheless, the political sycophants to the 1% generally turn a blind eye to Gaia’s rape.

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Trekkies know that there were two starship Enterprises, the first named after the aircraft carrier and the second after the first.  I claim there are three.  In a few days, the true first starship Enterprise will end its life as a museum on the decks of the old aircraft carrier Intrepid berthed in New York City’s harbor.

The demise of NASA’s shuttle program ranks as one of the most asinine decisions the government has ever made in its mismanagement of science funding.  Another, of course, was the cancellation of the SSC (short for “Superconducting Super Collider”).  The first killed America’s capability to put an astronaut in space, thus all but ending an all too brief era of space exploration.  The second ended U.S. dominance in experimental particle physics.  The Higgs particle, if it exists, won’t be discovered by American scientists, at least not by those working in this country.

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Scott, a frequent commenter to my blog posts, stated in one of his comments, the following:  “It almost seems like you have to be a scientist or almost one to write good SF today!”  At the risk of taking him out of context, this is the theme of today’s post.  To paraphrase Scott, how do we reconcile a scientist’s no-nonsense focused pursuit of good data and elegant theories with the creativity and imagination of a master storyteller?  Is there cause and effect here?  Or, do we just have the synergistic nexus of two different personality traits.

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Einstein’s special theory of relativity differs from ordinary Galilean relativity in that the scientist who ended up looking like a beat poet made the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames.  That and the key word “inertial” makes the theory “special,” as opposed to “general.”  (This is an over-simplification—the general theory is really a non-quantum theory of gravity, generalizing Newtonian gravity).  Back in September, physicists associated with the Italian Opera experiment shook the world in announcing that Einstein’s assumption was incorrect.  A sensor detected CERN-emitted neutrinos 453 miles away—the distance divided by the time lag gives a velocity.

Scientists hit the hooch, refusing to believe the results.  As an ex-scientist, I did too.  Over a century of experiments had confirmed Einstein’s assumption (it’s still true in the general theory, by the way).  I had a number of people ask me about the experiment.  Some even said, “Wow, Einstein was wrong!”  My response was, “Let’s wait and see.”  One experiment doesn’t overturn a theory—repeated experimental confirmation is required.  The lesson learned here is that, whether he was right or wrong, Eisnstein was just a very able theoretician.  Experiments determine the physics and the scientific method always prevails—theories have to be tested.  In this case, the disbelief spurred experimentalists to check the Opera results.

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