Imagination and Knowledge

Maladapted Continues

2011-04-24T06:15:30Z

More adventures of Paul and Sid. The first three strips are here and the others are here. Or just look at all of them on Photobucket.

( Maladapted )

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The Saur in the Stone

2011-03-19T07:17:48Z

So wintercreek has been trying to write a large number of Merlin (BBC) fanfics, and I decided to help her out, despite the following facts:

1. As you probably have noticed, I don't generally write fan fiction.

2. I've only seen one episode of the show, and it was a couple of years ago.

Nevertheless, it seems that Mary Anning was beaten by a few centuries by another M. [and] A. Apologies to any actual fans of the show who could undoubtedly do a better job (629 words):

( The Saur in the Stone )

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More Maladapted

2011-01-11T06:57:33Z

So I drew a few more comic strips. See the first three here. Check them out:

( Maladapted )

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Maladapted

2011-01-03T06:18:50Z

Recently I've been interested in getting back into cartooning. This is something I did prolifically as a child, despite a lack of both artistic ability and wit. My talents have not progressed appreciably since then, but nevertheless I have started to draw a comic strip for some reason, tentatively titled "Maladapted." If you are familiar with my writing style the content shouldn't be too surprising (i.e. dorky biology stuff).
( Maladapted )

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Where the Creek Joins the River

2010-09-18T06:19:11Z

Inspired in part by recently reading Desert Solitaire, I have decided to write a little about the adventures I had several years ago doing field ecology research in South America. I won't use anyone's real name, but even so I suspect that certain individuals may be recognizable, so I'm going to friends-lock these posts. There will be close encounters with exotic wildlife, awkward cross-cultural interactions with the locals, and plenty of drama between scientists who can't escape each other. If this sounds interesting to you and you aren't my DW friend, just let me know and I'll add you.

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Final Polymer Monopoly

2010-09-16T07:24:28Z

I've finally consolidated the chapters of Polymer Monopoly and posted it to originalfiction . It's not really any different than it was before, but this is another great opportunity to read the story if you haven't already. I know it's long, but just read a chapter or two and see how you feel.

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An explanation of sorts for Polymer Monopoly

2010-05-13T07:53:36Z

Polymer Monopoly is a fantasy. The setting does not really exist, the characters are fictional, and according to basic physics it would actually be impossible for the miraculous technology that fills the story to work as described.

And yet, it all seems kind of familiar, especially if you've ever studied any molecular biology or spent time in Washington State. Sure, you could read and enjoy the story without any knowledge of these things, but if you're curious, here's some of the background behind the various plot elements (contains spoilers).

( Boing! )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 10

2010-05-10T06:04:24Z

Presenting the final chapter of Polymer Monopoly. Everything is wrapped up, various motivations and actions get explained (hopefully satisfactorily), and you get a taste of what will happen next in the characters' lives. I hope you enjoyed the story, or, if you haven't read it yet, that you will. Soon, I plan to write a follow-up post describing some of the science/history/geography behind the story. Also, at some point, I will consolidate all of the chapters into a single final post.

(Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

(2237 words)

( I can explain everything )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 9

2010-05-06T21:23:06Z

As you may have guessed based on the set-up from the last chapter, this chapter is very action-packed. Don't read if you have a problem with pH-based violence.

(Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

(2289 words)

( Sackwhiskers! )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 8

2010-05-02T05:58:43Z

What? What? Did you see that coming? I didn't see that coming. I literally did not see that coming. How are they going to deal with that? Does this plot even make sense any more? Who's writing this thing?

The molecules are restless, and we're in for a wild ride. By the way, if you thought that last chapter ended on a cliffhanger, you should check out this one.

(Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

(2443 words)

( What? )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 7

2010-04-29T05:22:07Z

How do you measure the success of an underground guerrilla movement against The Man? Is it better to work secret mischief in perpetuity, or is there value in a loud, disruptive, but potentially self-destructive act if it draws attention to your cause and the truth is set free? In other words, is it better to be a reactant or a catalyst? Does it matter if your recipe for social change is exothermic or endothermic? How does activation energy fit into this awkward metaphor?

And speaking of The Man, there is a particularly nefarious character who gets talked about a lot in this story, and you may have been wondering, "When are we going to meet this villain?" This chapter will not disappoint.

(Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

(2971 words)

( Curious jays hopped among the hemlock branches, inspecting the human invaders and our unusual vehicle. )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 6

2010-04-26T07:25:35Z

We left our protagonists in a bit of a tight spot at the end of chapter five. But recall that I gave away the ending in the first sentence of the story, so they must get out of it somehow. In fact, they're really making progress and figuring things out. Of course there are some setbacks, but you might be tempted to think that they could wrap this all up pretty soon in a rather straightforward plot.

However, a story is like a polypeptide zwitter chain. Technically linear, but then it folds back on itself and later parts connect to earlier parts. Then in bends again. After a few of these twists and contortions, it has become a complex globular maze. And if you get lost, if you tuck under a loop of chain when you should have tucked over, you end up with mad cow disease. And no one wants that.

(Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

(2487 words)

( I'll handle this )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 5

2010-04-22T19:38:55Z

Well, we have a posse. They have a target. There is a plan. But do these sorts of things ever go according to plan?

The end of this chapter (following these four: 1, 2, 3, 4) represent the halfway point of the story. The protagonists find themselves deep within the belly of the beast. Will they make it out again, or will they be digested? Or will they be digested and then make it out again in highly altered form via the beast's colon? And if so, will the process involve literal digestive enzymes as large as elephants, as ferocious as tigers, and as colorful as peacocks, this being the typical sort of thing that these characters keep encountering? Read on.

(2977 words)

( Mt. Thylacoma was a looming volcano towering two and a half miles into the sky, a mere twenty leagues southeast of Queen City's harbors. )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 4

2010-04-19T07:55:53Z

The official nickname of Seattle, Washington was "Queen City" for over one hundred years, before it was dropped in 1982 due to its homosexual connotations. In its early days, Seattle was relatively lawless and rife with gambling, liquor, prostitution, riots, and general exploitation of the poor (including many Chinese and Native Americans) by the wealthy. For some reason, it didn't occur to anyone that building a city on muddy tidal flats might be foolish. After putting up with with filth and floods for a while, they decided to raise the city up a story. At first, just the streets were elevated above the storefronts, but eventually the entire ground level was covered by downtown Seattle, under which it still lies abandoned to this day.

Anyway, enough history. Time for another chapter of Polymer Monopoly (previous chapters 1, 2, and 3), in which I introduce the most impressive globular machine yet.

(2356 words)

( What's the biggest machine you've ever seen? )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 3

2010-04-18T05:23:06Z

Presenting another exciting installment of Polymer Monopoly (previous chapters here and here). The globular machines go to the back burner while I introduce several new characters and focus on their conspiratorial dialogue in a seedy locale. Okay, well, there is a little rough-and-tumble action toward the end. I mean, they can't just talk the whole chapter, can they?

(2078 words)

( That evening, after a long nap and my required transformation, I followed Fred Bacon to the meeting place on foot. We crossed Saccharid Row through the drizzle. The Hypertonic Halibut was a cedar plankhouse built in the old style, with a vertical pole of totem zwitters displayed prominently. )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 2

2010-04-15T07:21:23Z

I know, I know, I finally posted an updated chapter months after posting the first draft, and the story still didn't progress any further. However, I now present chapter 2. There will be ten chapters in total, and I'm going to try to post one every few days now until it's all up.

Daunted non-scientists: Don't worry if you don't understand what things are "supposed" to be. You don't need to know any more than what is presented to follow the plot.

Pedantic scientists: I know that the science is wrong. It's supposed to be that way. It's a fantasy.

Curious non-scientists: Ignore that. A lot of the story is based on real science. I encourage you to learn more, it's cool stuff.

Non-pedantic scientists: There are not very many of you. Try not to go extinct.

(1817 words):

( I was temporarily at a loss about what to do. Should I tell someone what had happened? Return and try to retrieve my triph? Go home, drink a brandy, and crouch into a fetal position? )

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Polymer Monopoly chapter 1, take 2

2010-04-13T07:24:27Z

Polymer Monopoly, my biochemistry-based steampunk fantasy story, is coming together. I have rewritten the first chapter and fleshed out the rest of the plot. The setting, which wasn't clear in the original draft, is now the Pacific Northwest. Also, you learn a little more about the main character and his daily life before the action starts. It is a tale of a heist, of the little guy taking on the big guy through stealth, ingenuity, and courage. It is a tale of the innovative and optimistic spirit prevalent in the wild towns of the American frontier at the turn of the last century, when society strove to tame nature and nature fought back. Most of all, it is a tale of enormous protein molecules and the people who operate them. As I have done before, I think I will post it one or two chapters at a time every few days at first, then post a final draft later. As always, I welcome any comments or suggestions (rated PG-13 for violence).

( How's your triph supply? )

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a straight man's view on gay rights

2010-03-25T08:47:49Z

Writing little essays is kind of fun. Let's try another one.

The issue of marriage equality, and equal rights in general for people all sexual orientations, is very important to both wintercreek and myself. However, even though we arrive at the same conclusions, I think we approach the topic from slightly different places. Understanding why people hold the opinions they do may be helpful for changing the minds of dissenters, so I think this phenomenon is worth investigating. If I may, I will caricature our two positions for the purpose of rhetoric; in reality, of course, there are multiple subtle factors influencing what we believe.
( The importance of apathy )

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mature religion

2010-03-22T06:06:01Z

As I have been delinquent in my fiction writing for the past few months, I thought I would post a few opinion pieces.

This is a brief rant on the perceived cultural rift between science and religion. It is widely accepted by advocates of both sides that science and religion are at odds with each other. As an evolutionary biologist, I find the debate difficult to avoid; nearly any blog or forum about evolution inevitably generates commentary by self-described atheists dismissing religion altogether, and/or creationist trolls denying scientific theories because they feel threatened by them and think that a secular worldview will lead to immorality. Although there are legitimate differences of opinion in this conflict, I think the argument is usually poorly defined and misunderstood by many of the participants. If this topic is uninteresting or potentially offensive to you, please read no further.

( One under-appreciated truth is that religion is not primarily about God. )

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The Science of The Pioneer

2009-12-19T07:38:17Z

Apparently I have written a postscript describing the science behind all of my stories except The Pioneer (not counting Polymer Monopoly, which I am still turning into a full-length piece). So, here are some reflections on Shebbin's adventures. Does the plot in fact revolve around a biotechnological concept that could save the world? Read on.

( Mot? )

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The Science of Trail

2009-11-29T07:02:16Z

If you've had a chance to read Trail, here are some spoiler-heavy thoughts about the science and ideas behind it. If not, you could always go read it now (remember to read Sequence first).

( Rar! )

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Polymer Monopoly

2009-11-27T08:43:57Z

What follows is a rough potential first chapter for an unfinished plot. Before I write out the whole story, I am posting this because I want to make sure that the world I am building makes sense. Unlike my previous stories, this isn't technically science fiction (in the sense of "fiction that sounds like a scientist would say it's plausible"). Rather, it's more like biochemistry-themed steampunk fantasy. If you have taken advanced placement or college biology, you should be able to follow along quite easily. However, I want all readers to be able to understand what's going on, even without the background knowledge. After all, most fantasy stories introduce novel terms and concepts that are made up out of whole cloth, and the readers absorb them without difficulty. My goal is for this story to be the same way, except that many of the components actually come out of a science textbook. I guess what I want to know is, should I describe the technology in more detail or less? Should I use more jargon or less? To what extent should I call things by their proper names? And so on. Take a look (warning: contains lethal violence).

( Though I am now known as the simple triphmonger who brought down the robber baron Ezekiel Montgomery, none of it would have happened if one of my globular moped's pseudopods hadn't gotten itself denatured. Without that pothole, you would still be choosing between triph and trout to this day. But I'm getting ahead of myself. )

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The Pioneer

2009-11-23T07:58:38Z

I have posted The Pioneer at originalfiction. Here are the details:

Title: The Pioneer
Genre: Original Science Fiction
Rating: PG for non-explicit references to reproductive biology, mild violence
Summary: A young hominid growing up on an alien world finds her peaceful life disrupted by shipwrecked space travelers.
Notes: The sequel to The Gardener. Contains spoilers for The Gardener, obviously. Approximately 9,000 words. Five chapters and an epilogue.

This is probably my most generic story yet, both in terms of the "hero's journey" plot structure and the "mysterious visitors from outer space" trope, but I think the creativity comes out in the speculative biology. See this post for random musings about the background to this story. I hope you like it.

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Teaser for The Pioneer

2009-11-19T10:13:45Z

If you enjoyed "The Gardener," you can look forward to the sequel I am writing, "The Pioneer." I'm still putting on the finishing touches, but here are some reflective thoughts about The Gardener and a hint of what is coming next (without any plot spoilers for either story, so read ahead without fear).

I'm not familiar with very many stories set in the far, far future like this one is. I'm not sure why that is the case, but I really enjoy how this setting provides almost limitless worldbuilding while still being grounded in the history and biological realities of life on Earth as we know it. Extraterrestrial life is a fascinating concept, but it's kind of overused in science fiction, and I'm a bit of an alien skeptic anyway (if they exist, and if they are at least as complex and intelligent as multicellular terrestrial life, and if they are close enough to us in the universe that we'd be able to interact with them, then that would be really cool, but the probabilities associated with each of those ifs might be pretty small). Terrestrial life after millions of years of evolution gives you many of the same imagination benefits as aliens, while remaining slightly more plausible. Plus you can assume that something different evolved in every solar system seeded by humans, which can be combined with diverse technological and cultural advances, leading to practically infinite storytelling options. Human differentiation raises other fascinating questions. What if racial variation were real and significant, not just skin deep?

The idea for "The Gardener" originated when I wondered what phenotypic plasticity taken to the extreme would look like. Would a totally plastic species have a high probability of survival? How would it interact with other members of its species that occupied distinct niches? In the story I don't go into details about how the fungus species evolved, but in my head I assume it included natural or directed horizontal gene transfer, so the fungus didn't have to reinvent from scratch many of the adaptations found in various species today. As a biologist, I'm tempted to include detailed physiological descriptions of some of these forms, but to keep the action moving I have mostly maintained brevity. Some of the adaptations can be (I hope) inferred by the reader; e.g. the vegetation is black because that pigment would absorb the full energy spectrum of sunlight, an improvement over green chlorophyll. One challenge in writing was to avoid taxonomic terms; there are no "birds" or "insects" in Yorel's world, because every organism is a fungus, not an animal, even if it looks and behaves like an animal. But the distinction between taxonomic words and ecological words can be blurry. For example, a "carnivore" is either (taxonomically) a member of a particular order of mammals, Carnivora, which includes cats, dogs, and weasels, or it is (ecologically) any meat-eater, such as a shark or a venus fly trap. Yorel's world includes carnivores of the latter sense but not the former. Another interesting challenge was to avoid the trappings of sexual reproduction, since the fungus reproduces with spores. There is no pollen in Yorel's world, for example. Although there are "fruits" and "flowers," I assume these have an asexual purpose, such as to attract mobile organisms to spread spore.

"The Pioneer" takes place twelve years after The Gardener ends, and it focuses on the new character that was introduced in the epilogue. It begins kind of like "Little House on the Planet," but then the young heroine's peaceful life is disrupted when strange visitors land and are not happy with the fact that they are not permitted to leave. I can't say more without any spoilers, so you'll have to check out the story when I get it posted.

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Stellar Steller

2009-11-08T05:06:59Z

After recently reading "Steller's Island" by Dean Littlepage, I have become fascinated by the life of Georg Steller. He is a rather neglected historical figure, but what an badass scientist! He travels halfway around the world from Europe, across Siberia and the North Pacific, to Alaska on the exploratory voyage of Vitus Bering, becoming the first scientist to visit the west coast of North America and making the first European contact with Native Alaskans. Their vessel is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, the captain and many other sailors die, almost everyone gets scurvy, and the stranded survivors are forced to spend the sub-Arctic winter in hillside borrows. And what does Steller do in this situation? He founds the science of marine mammalogy and conducts some of the most rigorous and invaluable research of his day, including the only description of the now-extinct Steller's sea cow. He also helps the other castaways build a new boat from the remains of the old one and return to Asia. He wrote the first scientific descriptions of many species, several of which now bear his name. His insights included everything from the close relationship between the peoples of Alaska and Siberia to the importance of eating fresh green food to avoid scurvy. He also had a very intense, enthusiastic, and quick-tempered personality that was probably both entertaining and infuriating to witness.

Steller died while returning to Europe. However, if you imagine he did not, I think there is a lot of potential here for alternate-history, maybe steampunky Steller fan fiction. Consider the possibilities:

1. Steller as an environmental superhero of the Pacific Northwest. Steller stays in America, teams up with the locals who have superb seafaring kayak technology, and constructs, I don't know, some sort of giant kayak pulled by Steller sea lions or something, defended by harpoons and gunpowder. Although Steller loved to shoot animals, I can imagine him discovering the advanced ecological principle of "if you kill them all, there won't be any more left." He cruises around protecting the sea otters from the fur trade and presumably saving the sea cows from extinction. And doing science, of course. This is, after all, a man who once traveled hundreds of miles out of his way by dogsled just to get paper to press his plant samples (seriously).

2. Steller discovers the theory of evolution 100 years before Darwin (yes, his whole voyage took place in the mid-1700s, before the American Revolution, and certainly before Humbolt, Darwin, Wallace, or most of the other pioneering naturalists you may have heard of). The parallels between Steller and Darwin are rather remarkable: born almost exactly a century apart, both men visited unpopulated Pacific islands and studied the fauna in detail, including flightless cormorants which have evolved only in those two locations (the one Steller observed is now extinct, so we don't really know if it was truly flightless). Steller's writings contain hints of Darwinian ideas, but if he ever followed them through to their eventual conclusions, he never wrote about it. If he had only lived as long as Darwin, modern biology might have been jump-started a lot sooner.

3. In actual historical fact, Steller described a "sea ape" he observed from the boat. Most historians think this was a fur seal that he just didn't get a good look at, although he observed thousands of fur seals yet he apparently still considered the ape to be something different. What was the deal with this sea ape? Did it have affinities to sasquatch? Maybe Steller has more adventures tracking it down.

4. Steller changes the course of history through interactions with later-arriving explorers of the North Pacific sailing for Russia, Spain, or Britain (Grigory Shelikhov, Juan Bodega y Quadra, Captain Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, George Vancouver, etc.), famous Native Americans (e.g. Chief Seattle as a child), assorted pirates or other folks whose visits to the Pacific went unrecorded (Ben Franklin? Voltaire?) or even Lewis and Clark (who finally get there when Steller is very old and the action is long over).

5. Romance. Not much is known about Steller's sexuality, although he presumably didn't care for his wife very much, as he abandoned her in Europe and was in no hurry to get back to her, even after returning to civilization. But if you're into speculating about that kind of thing, you do have a bunch of men sharing close quarters in cold weather.

I have no immediate plans to write a story about Steller, since so far I can't find I way to keep the cheesiness down to an appropriate level, but who knows, maybe these ideas will come together. Mostly I just wanted to gush, and maybe spark some else's imagination.

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