Jeno Marz

Write What You Know, Learn to Know More to Write

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Jeno Marz / 0 Comment

There are many ways of gathering necessary information about the topic you are going to write about. With Internet being flooded with crap it is getting harder and harder to do research, swimming in the Google ‘bubbles’, tailored just for you. Not. I don’t want some algorithm to suggest me loads of irrelevant information. I don’t have time and strength to process all that, digging to get the gold seeds of wisdom for my projects. The more specific information you need, the harder is to get it (and you might not even know where to look for it in the beginning – this paddling consumes even more time.)

Chances are the information you are looking for is not in your field of expertise, i.e. you have your diplomas and stuff in other fields. And maybe even on the other side of the knowledge spectrum.

What to do?

One good idea is to ask a person who works in the field of interest. If it is science, there are numerous “Ask a [insert scientist here]” services. They are not super fast, and you shouldn’t flood these people with tons of questions – so the best idea is to sum up all things you want to ask and send them in one e-mail. You will get a reply within a few weeks. Of course, you might be lucky having friends who work in those specific fields and can help.

If you have access to a good library, you might also dig for answers there. Reference books are expensive, and you would probably need a lot of those, so I wouldn’t recommend buying them just for one-time peek. Again, you might not even find an answer you are looking for.

The downside of the two options above is you don’t own that knowledge. You borrow it. If you need something similar, but a little bit different, you’ll be running around asking questions again, storming libraries and reading your ass off. This consumes time. It will devour your time each time you need to do your research. If you are consent to this – fine. Stop reading here.

There is another option. It also requires your time, but it does so only once. I’m talking, of course, about free online courses. Yes, they require you to work on them. They require your time. No, not your writing time. You can cut on TV and other small things for a few weeks. But this small sacrifice comes with benefits – the knowledge you’ll gain is all yours now. You will have a base to work with, to think and decide for yourself. You will have an idea where to look next time you need additional information. And you’ll be a lot faster in your research. And probably make less mistakes. You will be the one to answer your questions for your writing. If you are working in a specific genre like science fiction – no, even broader – speculative fiction, there are things you would need to research. Many, many things. And you can learn them before you would start your next project. So, consider being a student again for a while (if you are not one anymore.)

Free online courses are not hard to find via Google or any other search engine. For example, look at this: over 600 free online courses. There are more sophisticated ones, like Coursera. Then there’s Khan Academy, a library of over 4,000 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, with a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace. And here’s the Ultimate List of Free Online Video Courses.

I signed up for Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life on Coursera. Five weeks are going to be fun. And no specific background is required!

Try it. You might get to like the idea.

Writer's Blog

Falaha’s Journey: Descent (Book 1)

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Jeno Marz / 1 Comment

DESCENT is the first installment of Falaha’s Journey, a xenocentric science fiction series.

Falaha’s Journey first appeared as a blovel (blog novel or series) on my old blog. That was in January 2012. But before this happened, the now published series‘s main character, Falaha, had seen the light in winter 2011 in a flash story called The Answer.

This story came to my mind while I was browsing some chapters of the book titled Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials by Michael A.G. Michaud.

So, below is Falaha’s pilot episode, not in the book.

~~~

The Answer

“Ah, it stopped.” Falaha took off her rabhain when the signal of interest faded away. “But it sure is noisy out there.”

Her parents were still in the dining area but she, finishing the meal fast, rushed into their quarters to listen to space again. Mother once mentioned a place called Talghein. Transmissions never seemed to stop coming from that particular direction. They were so diverse and so beautiful and so weird. Falaha had no knowledge of the languages caught in the web of particle whistles and chirps, veiled in reverberant humming. Are they just afterwaves in space or would someone answer if she were to pin the source?

She thought of Talghein again, addressing her Node and the siSystem launched the visuals: a water world much like hers, the one she would never see again though, ever. A shiny grey crescent of a smaller orbiting body was visible as well. Their transport will be in the relative vicinity of this system for a while before reaching the DIVE-point. So there is a short possibility; this is as much as she can do for those who attract too much attention.

Falaha unfolded siSystem’s command pad and carefully started drawing. She drew oceans and continents, animals, trees and flowers under a pretty reddish-orange sun, and herself with the family, all copper-haired, waving hands at a hypothetical viewer, yet leaving the place in a spacecraft amidst multiple vessels doing the same. Giving it a second thought, she also diligently wrote her full name on the lower left corner of her masterpiece – Falaha Kierenen kennar Fargann, standard age five.

And so, the encoded message was sent, eventually reaching its destination.

Farewell to Earth. Credit: NASA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

~~~

Our radio transmissions have been slowly expanding into the deep reaches of space for about a century. Here’s a picture of the extent of human radio broadcasts, a bubble 200 light years in diameter. This is quite a ‘dot’, but it is still small compared to the size of the Milky Way.

The broadcasts travelling through space are weakened as they approach the Shannon limit, at which the energy of the signals is so low that they are no longer transmitting data and are almost indistinguishable from the background radiation.

Also note that our transmitters are designed to broadcast horizontally to planet’s surface, not into space. Before going into space, our strong signals are first traveling horizontally through our atmosphere, constantly changing direction, and are distributed irregularly around the world. Sensitive equipment several light years away would pick up an irregular stream of changing signals, the broadcasts and languages frequently changing and often going silent.

Civilizations/Culture and History/Languages

A Dan: Phonetics and Writing System (1)

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Jeno Marz / 3 Comments

I’ve been working on A Dan language for nearly three years now, though I haven’t finished it yet. I have a basic idea of how it sounds like, with now complete phonetics, and general rules for things I’m using in my novels and stories, like nouns, place and personal names.

Though I speak several languages (programming languages included), linguistics is way outside of the spectrum of my expertise. Being an engineer, this is what I’m trying to do here: to engineer a language. It is a major work in progress, and I still have to understand a lot about linguistics.

A Dan: Phonetics and Writing System, Part One

Type of writing system: alphabet.

In A Dan glyphs are written in squares called boxes. Text can be written horizontally from left to right, right to left, and vertically from top to bottom. Handwritten text usually has right to left alignment, because most of the Danna are left-handed.

Word glyphs are clustered together and glyph clusters (words; also called populations) have spacing between them. Punctuation signs are included into the last box of the word, after which they follow.

Boxes for glyphs.

A Glyph consists of a frame and a core.

Vowel Glyph

Vowel Diacritics

While a Dan has only five vowel glyphs, it has fifteen phonemes. Each glyph has three grades. Glyphs of the first grade are called free and have no markings. Grade Two (Romanized with the inverted breve) has a single stroke marking in the glyph’s core; grade Three (Romanized with the macron) has two strokes in the core.

Consonant Diacritics

Not all consonant phonemes are represented with glyphs. There are two, /h/ and /j/, which don’t have their own letters. They are shown with diacritical markings instead.

In the middle of the word these are put on the glyph frame, followed by the /h/ or /j/ phoneme:

If a word starts with /h/ or /j/ phoneme, the marks are reversed and put on the glyph frame that follows /h/ or /j/:

Punctuation marks

Consonants

A Dan has 13 consonant phonemes, but only 11 glyphs for those.

Phonemes-conso — A Dan Consonant Phonemes and Glyphs

Comments on Romanization of consonants for orthography

/j/ might be represented as letter j or y. With vowels it is as y (when word starts with /j/ which is followed by vowel, or /j/ is between two vowels); with consonants it is j (between consonant & vowel, or between two consonants). E.g. Eyuran, Rjg, tjrnenagh.

Labiodental approximant [ʋ] might be represented as letter w or v, not b; e.g. Orewen

/k/ might be represented as letter q (before /ue/); e.g. Quennah

Vowels

A Dan has fifteen vowel phonemes, and only five glyphs for those. This is where things get complicated.

Vowel-phoneme-grid-complete — A Dan Vowel Phonemes Grid and Glyphs

The diacritical marking for /h/ can be omitted between two identical vowels, as they will always have /h/ between them (e.g. Falaha). A Dan does not have geminated vowels.

There are no diphthongs, but there are clusters of vowels without syllable break. These are treated as long vowels.

In A Dan different phoneme can change a meaning of a word, or be an allophone. Though they only have five letters for vowels, diacritical marks help distinguish between the sounds in similar-written words. Moreover, sounds can have different length and it is not marked in any way; it is simply an accent on different worlds. Foreigners have to learn the pronunciation from the native speakers. Natives can tell where you are from just by hearing you talk. Here the classic A Dan is presented, as it is spoken by the Danna.

Stress

Stress is quite predictable. Usually the first or the last syllable. The combination of two or more vowels is treated as a single syllable, but any of the vowels can be accented in such vowel cluster (e.g Diona – ‘dio’ is a syllable, and ‘o’ is accented; Kieren – ‘Kie’ is a syllable, and ‘i’ is accented.)

Phonological constraints

Syllabification

All syllables have at last one vowel or semivowel [j] as a nucleus. Some syllables can contain 2 or 3 vowels, or combinations of one or two vowels with semivowel. A Dan has no consonant clusters bigger than three phonemes.

(to be continued.)

Cartography/Geodynamics/Geography/Geology/Planets/Software

The Four Elements: It’s all in the Record (continued)

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Jeno Marz / 0 Comment

Plate tectonics is thought to be necessary for maintaining a stable climate capable of supporting life. Some more modeling suggests that both size and surface conditions of the planet are important, with plate tectonics being favored for larger, cooler planets. This implies that plate tectonics on other worlds should correlate with size, incident solar radiation, and atmospheric composition.

So far, so good.

Planet mass and radius set a constraint for terrestrial planet models and, via models, a planet’s bulk composition can be enterpreted. There is a reference describing the fundamental equations for calculating the interior structure of terrestrial planets (including silicate-rich, iron-rich, and water-rich planets). So even if you are not into modeling, but want to know your conworld better, it’s a good read anyway.

In this article, however, I want to focus on geophysical software. And yes, maps.

Computational thermodynamics and planet interiors

There are numerous software packages (e.g. MELTS, pMELTS, etc.), created by OFM Research. Some of them are available online in the form of Java applets; all software can be downloaded from the official site. This software provides a computing environment in computational thermodynamics for petrology and geochemistry, which includes complex calculations of the thermodynamic properties of materials, the generation of phase diagrams and pseudo-sections, and the modeling of the chemical evolution of a system along geologically important irreversible reaction paths.

pMELTS was used in the research of geodynamics and rate of volcanism on massive earth-like planets by Kite et al. 2009, see the previous post.

Plate tectonics software

There are some freely available programs for continent reconstruction and plate movement animation, etc. However, keep in mind they they don’t create continents for you, so if you want to model and alien planet, you’ll have to input data from scratch and do some serious work with Cartesian coordinates and what have you.

The simplest one is GLG-Plates.

This screen grab shows the 96Ma stage of the break-up of Gondwana.

GLG-Plates is used by undergraduate students to reconstruct ancient continents. Plate models containing pole data extracted from the published literature are provided. The plate models may be animated. In addition, there are tools for the creation of new plates and additional plate models.

GPlates is more sophisticated desktop software for the interactive visualisation of plate tectonics. It offers a combination of interactive plate tectonic reconstructions, geographic information system (GIS) functionality and raster data visualization. GPlates runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

A plate tectonic reconstruction is the calculation of positions and orientations of tectonic plates at an instant in the history of the planet. The visualization of reconstructions is a valuable tool for understanding the evolution of the systems and processes of the planet’s surface and near subsurface.

World topography bathymetry reconstructed in Map View

GPlates extends the graphical editing capability of GIS (Geographic Information System) software. Operations such as tweaking geometry shapes and manually fine-tuning reconstructed plate positions are interactive graphical operations and can be manipulated directly.

Update: Aug 24, 2013 — Astrographer’s blog has a good tutorial for GPlates.

Maps

I’m sure many of you heard about PALEOMAP Project.

The goal of the PALEOMAP Project is to illustrate the plate tectonic development of the ocean basins and continents, as well as the changing distribution of land and sea during the past 1100 million years in Earth’s history. And, of course, future maps.

It is a really fascinating idea and I believe it is the best illustration available how a planet behaves. Unfortunately, the software involved in PALEOMAP development is not a free stuff.

If all above made you cringe, there is a way to avoid complicated things. It is called Fractal Terrains. It is not a free way, though, but it is not expensive.

I got myself an official copy of FT some time ago and I have to admit, it is a very good world generator. If you want to try it out, there is a demo version available.

A part of the early Dannan map for my sci-fi novel made in Fractal Terrains 3

Of course, there is still an alternative to everything, a good old pen & paper alternative. Which one you like is up to you. And if you are fluent in Photoshop and/or AI, more power to you.

Update: Feb 2013

The World Building School has a very neat tool to create stunning maps.

It’s called The Map Generator for Photoshop. It’s not free, but it might be what you’re looking for to create high quality maps for your story and put it in your book.

# Have fun! If I find something else to play with, I will add it here.

## If you happen to know some other software that can be used for fictional maps, please share with me.