When the U.S. Constitution first addressed the issue of copyright, the world was just entering the mass-produced Industrial Age.  The clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 for those keeping score at home) sez:

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

Originally copyright was limited to 26 years, with an option for an extension of another 26 years if the creator so desired.

The 18^th century legislators who drafted the Constitution clearly felt few if any creators would live long enough to see their original work go out of copyright at the end of 52 years.

Well, times and circumstances change.  For one thing people began living a lot longer.  For another, corporate “personhood” allowed non-human entities to lay claim to work they had no direct input to creating.

Now, the concept of corporations — the original concept — was not bad:
A business entity that came together for a particular purpose for a limited period of time.

And once that purpose was achieved,
the corporation was disbanded,
its assets distributed among the shareholders.

But as the eminent philosopher C. Lauper once observed:  “Money changes everything.” Corporations bribed politicians to change the law so they could stay in business forever, and could in fact expand into businesses far beyond their initial prevue.

Marx wrote of workers’ alienation in modern industry, but that’s nothing compared to the alienation suffered by modern shareholders.  Shareholders, who often have invested blindly in mutual funds that chase down the best return for their dollar, have no first hand knowledge of the human beings working so hard to pay them their dividends.

Since they have no direct link to any of the businesses the mutual fund invests in, they don’t care how their money is made so long as their money gets made.

Corporations, hearing only the relentless drumbeat of “more-more-MORE” from the mutual fund managers, use business practices that would make Morgan the pirate blush.

This means, for creative types, that once a corporation sinks its fangs into an intellectual property, it’s never gonna turn it loose.

Copyright meant different things at different times in different cultures.

Japan was notoriously lax bordering on the whimsical when it came to copyright enforcement.  For a long time, any recording released in Japan had only a 20 year copyright, then it became public domain.

As a result, big non-Japanese acts were loathe to officially release records in Japan.  In a compromise move, they’d go to Japan and record a live album at a stage show, which would then be sold in Japan.[1]

When these live recordings went P.D.  in Japan, the original recordings, still officially unreleased  in there, remained safely under U.S. and / or European copyright.

Of course the Japanese — and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Koreans, and the Vietnamese, and the Thais, and the Filipinos, and the Malaysians (not to mention the entire Middle East) — pirated the ever-luvin’ s4!t outta everything, but those original copyrights remained sacrosanct.

Conversely the Europeans, in particular the French, took a much more respectful view of copyright re creators’ rights.  Creators might sell rights to their work, but that didn’t give the new owner carte blanche to do as they saw fit with it, nor could they profit off it without kicking something back to creators and / or heirs.

They also stuck an extremely lengthy term of protection on copyright:
The life of the creator/s plus 70 years before it becomes public domain.[2]

At first this seems like a fair idea, but it actually works against both the original creator and the culture at large.

At a certain point, ideas, characters, concepts, stories, and techniques need to be “released into the wild” to be used by the culture at large in such a way as to build off of them, to expand humanity’s cultural capital.

We do not forbid people the right to use vanishing points in their paintings simply because Filippo Brunelleschi pioneered the technique 700 years ago.

Likewise, a still living creator is not harmed if a work remains popular even after falling into P.D.

If anything, it’s continuing popularity only further promotes the creator’s work and career.

Irving Berlin lived long enough to see
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band” fall into public domain.
Some how I don’t think he missed any meals because of this.

But with soulless amoral corporations using their ungodly influence to guarantee more and more money for themselves, we now see ourselves in a media environment where there is no protection for the smaller creator.

If you don’t already have millions to prevail against an opponent in court, you won’t get any millions.

Q.E.D.

At the same time we can acknowledge that the corporations have spent a lot of time and capital promoting their characters, concepts, et al., to the public; it is neither unfair nor unreasonable for them to expect some return on their investment.

But when a corporation is the bogus “creator of record” for a work or character, when does said work enter the public domain?  When the corporation is sold off (if ever)?  But then the property is usually sold to another corporation, and the cycle begins anew.[3]

Copyright, as it exists today, is much too long.  It needs to be limited to a more reasonable period, say 50 years at which point it enters the public domain.

Corporations (viz. Burroughs and Disney and Lucas) frequently hold trademarks on specific character designs; unlike copyrights, trademarks are forever (or at least until abandoned).[4]

It would not be unfair to allow trademark holders the privilege of being able to advertise their product as the “official” version, while still allowing earlier versions to fall into the public domain & fair usage provided such works were noted as “unofficial”.

Such unofficial versions would not dent a major corporation’s revenue stream.  For one thing, if a corporation thought they’d make a buck off something, they’d do it:  Convention sketches, fan films, slash fiction, etc., clearly aren’t worth their effort.[5]

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[1] This explains the huge number of “Live At Budokan” albums.

[2] For a specific recording of a specific performance, copyright only extends 50 years, even though the underlying source material may stay in copyright much, much longer.  One could not remake a European film from 1960, for instance, without paying the original writer and director though one could show the original film without reimbursing them.

[3] The irony, of course, is that rarely does a P.D. work bring the new packager any significant reward unless and until a new creative spin has been put on the material; viz. West Side Story / Romeo & Juliet.

[4] Burroughs has trademarked the image of a nearly-naked-clean-shaven-white-guy-in-a-loin-cloth as Tarzan, even though the original books are falling into public domain.  Try making a Tarzan movie based on a P.D. book, however, and you will find ERB Inc. lawyers swarming over your creative assets.  One wonders if a drastic redesign / re-imagining of Tarzan would escape such legal scrutiny, say a naked bearded version of the character, or one where he wears some modified form of jungle fatigues.  Likewise, many of the earliest Mickey Mouse comic strips are now public domain; what if one filmed them in live action with human actors?  Points to ponder…

[5] Paramount Pictures and Lucasfilm and Stephen King have long since learned the wisdom of letting fans make films based on their properties so long as they don’t make money off it.  Good or bad, the final product only promotes the Star Trek / Star Wars / Stephen King brand, so essentially it’s free advertising.

1.  Let’s start with the elephant in the room, or should we say, the everything in the universe?

There is no reason for anything to exist, or to have ever existed.

No physical matter.

No energy.

No time.

No space.

No abstract realms.

Nothing.

Zip.

Zilch.

Nada.

Honest cosmologists and mathematicians acknowledge this.

That anything exists…

That anything is perceived to exist…

That anything
anywhere ever existed
to perceive the existence of
That Which Can Not Logically Exist…

…is proof of…something…greater than the universe itself.

If the universe in its totality = nature, then by definition
anything greater than the universe = super-nature.

2.  There exists in mathematics a thing called Set Theory

[Sidebar to Creationists:
"Theory" does not mean
what you think it means;
the word you want is
"hypothesis".]

Set Theory exists and has been proven to everyone’s satisfaction.

It works in both the class room and the real world.

A key component of Set Theory is this:
Nothing in a set can describe the entire set.

Not even the sum total of all elements in that set.

Let’s start off with a basic example:
The Set Of All Whole Rational Positive Prime Integers From One To Seven
(1, 2, 3, 5, 7)

The number 1 can not describe the other numbers in the set, much less the set itself.  None of the other numbers can describe the set.  All the numbers grouped together can not describe the set.

To describe the set, we must have an even larger set of which The Set Of All Whole Etc. is but a subset.

A subset can only adequately be described by an even larger set.

Human beings are parts of The Universal Set.

We can not — and never will be able to — describe the rest of the universe, much less what exists beyond this universe even though we know that mathematics demonstrates there must be something greater that we can not describe.

This is not “there are things man was not meant to know” from bad horror movies.

That phrase implies a moral element, that it is somehow wrong to seek knowledge and truth and understanding.

Nothing could be further from the truth, further from reality.

We can and should actively and continually seek and study and find out and apply what we learn to improve our lives and the lives of others.

But there are somethings that will forever be beyond us.

A fern can not appreciate the musical intricacies of Beethoven’s 5th; it has no mechanism with which to perceive sound, much less music.

Mind you, Beethoven’s 5th may inspire a human listener to aspirations of beauty, and as a result of those aspirations the human may nurture the fern and so the fern will benefit from the music, but the fern will never “know” this because the fern is incapable of perceiving such knowledge.

To reinforce point #1 above, mathematics and The Set Theory demonstrate that not only must there be something beyond this universe, there can’t not be something beyond this universe.

And by definition, this something must be what we humans perceive of as God.

3.  Humans have a very limited, very rudimentary time sense.

We perceive it as happening one moment after another, like dominoes toppling over.

Take a look at this gif.  See how they go over one by one?

That’s only our perception, filtered through our instrument.

In reality this gif is a pattern of positive and negative electrons nestled in the physical circuitry of our computers.

What we perceive as a beginning, middle, and end of this action is actually an unchanging pattern.

It’s not that the gif doesn’t start / end when we choose to look at it…

The gif is always in a perpetual state of beginning / ending / happening simultaneously.

This is like God’s time sense.

God has a transcendent nature beyond time and space as we humans comprehend those terms.

God is the eternal cosmic Now of the Buddhists and Hindus.  To God everything is happening all at once simultaneously right now forever.

There is no past / present / future to God.

Interestingly enough, not only is this concept found in ancient Hebrew, Hindu, and Buddhist texts, but later in the teachings of Christ, not to mention being proven as well with modern mathematical theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

If Hebrews, Hindus, Buddhists, Jesus,
Einstein, Hawkins, et al are agreed on this point,
I think we can safely take it to the bank.

God always has / always will have an infinite amount of time to focus an infinite amount of attention on the most infinitesimal of details.

To those who wonder how God can devote any attention to their lives:  That is what God does / must do by God’s very nature.  God can’t not devote an infinite amount of attention to you.

4.  By definition, time as perceived by human beings is meaningless to God.

If you believe God created the world in six 24 hour days approximately 6,000 years ago you are wrong.

Get over it.

The physical universe we perceive is billions of years old from a human time frame.

If you think that somehow diminishes God, you have created a false image of God in your mind.

In a very real sense, Creationism is a form of idol worship.

5.  There is no proof life originated on Earth.

No one, despite many attempts and numerous false proclamations, has demonstrated how life arose from inorganic material.

There are a lot of clever guesses, but no proof.

There is some evidence pointing to a terrestrial origin of life, but there’s also evidence that life came to this planet from space.

If life originated in space, there is no way we can determine where / when / how it originated.

It could have happened naturally by random chance, it could have been the deliberate manipulation of little green men.

As a result, it is intellectually dishonest to remove the possibility of Intelligent Design as a possible explanation for the origin of life.

One may discount it, consider it remote, but can not say it is impossible.

There is as much scientific evidence for this being the source of life…

…as this…

…or this.

6.  However life started, once it started evolution through natural selection guided its spread and development.

Human beings evolved from earlier non-human primates.

Creationists, you are wrong.

Get over it.

For those who believe God created human beings, yes, absolutely.  There is some point where the spiritual realm somehow infused / inspired the physical biological one.

There is an Adam and an Eve, not in the literal sense, but of the first real humans, the first beings to have some sense, some glimpse of what lies beyond this universe (even if they weren’t capable of adequately articulating that sense).

Don’t claim the Genesis account of creation is literally / factually true:  It isn’t and the Bible takes pains to explain it isn’t.  Do a plain text reading of the first 11 chapters:  The Bible clearly states that all this comes from the memories of a drunken farmer and his dysfunctional family.

A plain text reading tells us to be suspicious of the account of Noah and his family; they are notoriously unreliable narrators, full of self-justification and incapable of keeping their stories straight.  Further, in the very next chapter we are told that language — all language, any language — is unreliable and only sows confusion.

The Bible is tipping us off that nothing prior to the story of Abraham is in any way historical.
It is a metaphor for aspects of humanity’s relationship to God.
As such it’s “true” but not factual.

Embrace this reality:
Everything makes much more sense when you do.

7.  Anyone who denies the miraculous but accepts quantum physics doesn’t know jack about either.

8.  Nobody has all the answers.

If you are a believer, it is blasphemy to claim your intellect is on parity with God’s.

If you are a non-believer, you sound even more ridiculously small-minded than the most strident Creationist to claim your intellect has proven nothing can exist greater than what you feel comfortable imagining.

As I said, I wanted my story to be easily relatable to contemporary readers.

A girl in 1812 inhabited a vastly different world technically and, as a result, culturally from a girl in 2012:
No cars, no airplanes, no supermarkets, no electricity, no TV, no Internet,  no telephones, no flush toilets.

But a girl on 1912 lives in a far more familiar culture:
Cars and planes (albeit primitive), electricity in most homes (ditto plumbing).  TV is still just a gleam in Philo Farnsworth’s eyes, but there are movies.  Radio is just beginning, but newspapers are linked by wire services.  No computers, but adding machines and typewriters exist so number pads and keyboards are everywhere.

And there are telephones.

Split the difference — 1962 — and not that much changes.  TV and radio, to be sure, but no Internet yet.  Still, most of the changes are in style and degrees; the world of 1962 is easily understandable to a reader in 2012.

Problem: You can’t lose a bunch of school kids in 1962, either.

Split the difference again — 1937 — and suddenly the solution presents itself.  World War Two, at least the Pacific portion of it, started December 7th, 1941.

Now we have a logical reason why no one comes looking for the girls:
All hell is breaking loose, and the loss of a handful of girls is just one more tragic drop in a bucket brimming with tears.

Problem: Every island worth fighting over was fought over.

This is why Google was invented.  A quick search revealed that every island capable of hosting a permanent human settlement had a permanent human settlement.

But what exactly constitutes a “permanent” settlement?

(to be continued)

SAVAGE ANGELS — Update #1

Another longish rant,
but this one on writing.

Ideally every story should be about the single most important event in the life of the protagonist.

Series stories need to be about the most important event in some character’s life.

TV shows are frequently franchise shows:
Comedies and cop shows (i.e., their mission is to set things right, be they cops, cowboys, doctors, lawyers, or starship captains)

Comedies are simultaneously the hardest and easiest type of story to write, their audiences simultaneously the most unforgiving yet forgiving.

All that matters in a comedy is
“Did they laugh?”
All other rules of writing,
drama, art, and literature fall to this.

All comedies are franchises as well:
How will these particular characters make me laugh?
Good comedies invariably follow the laughs,
bad comedies try to force them.

Back to the core idea of story:
Each tale is about the single most important event in the protagonist’s life.

An epic story requires an extensive background full of character and incident to fully explain the importance of the story in the character’s life (viz. Dune; try boiling that down to a satisfactory 2,000 word short story).

Conversely, a short story like “The Gift Of The Magi” tells us everything we possibly need to know about the newlyweds; anything more would be superfluous and dilute the impact.

The problem with telling the most important thing in character’s life is this:

Whaddya gonna do for an encore?

By nature, most stories are designed to be poor source material for sequels.

Which is not to say good sequels are impossible, just that they have to start with the assumption that the previous story was the most important thing in that character’s life up to that point.

And it can work:

Bride Of Frankenstein builds beautifully
on the original Frankenstein

Aliens follows Alien to a logical conclusion

But usually they are disappointments, or else faux sequels that turn a good original into a generic genre series (viz. Die Hards 2-4, Lethal Weapons 2-4, etc.).

Nothing wrong with series films, but they aren’t the same as a sequel.

As a rough rule of thumb,
if you can enjoy a story without
having to have experienced
the previous story to understand it,
it’s a series story, not a sequel.

There are exceptions.  Huckleberry Finn is a sequel of sorts to Tom Sawyer; it transcends its source novel and becomes one of the greatest works in American literature (the other Tom Sawyer sequels are tedious).  Individual films or stories in a series can rise above their roots (though I’m unable to think of one that rises to Huck‘s level of brilliance); they tend to be remembered as really good examples of the series as opposed to stand alone works of merit (Goldfinger, f’r instance).

There are also epic stories that the creator/s divvy up into smaller bite-sized bits for release:
C.S. Lewis’ Narnia or J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, for example.[1]

The single most difficult kind of story to write is a prequel.[2]

Because by definition, a prequel consists of the stuff that wasn’t good enough for the original.

Now again, there are exceptions.

J.R.R. Tolkien had plotted out The Lord Of The Rings but decided to do The Hobbit as a shakedown cruise before starting on his epic.  It really isn’t a genuine prequel since it was released well in advance of his epic trilogy.

Sometimes an original story gets adapted to another media, and when it does part of it has to be jettisoned for time / budget / aesthetic reasons.  A prequel that incorporates such material usually is still superfluous.

The only exceptions I can think of are Nevada Smith and The Godfather II.

Nevada Smith is a prequel to a gawdawful movie called The Carpetbaggers (based very loosely on Howard Hughes’ Hollywood career) which is based on an equally gawdawful Harold Robbins novel of the same name.  In both versions there’s a cowboy actor named Nevada Smith (based very loosely on real life cowboy / soldier of fortune-cum-actor Tom Mix).

To pad his already turgid tome, Robbins threw in a novella-sized flashback to Smith’s pre-Hollywood life, filled with copious Wild West violence.  Joseph E. Levine, The Carpetbaggers’ producer, was savvy to recognize this material would make a serviceable Western & cast Steve McQueen in the role (Alan Ladd played him in the original film).

Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather has numerous flashbacks and references to Don Vito Corleone’s boyhood, his fleeing Sicily for America, his early introduction to crime, and his skills as a gang leader is bringing together several independent criminals to form the core of his “family”.

Francis Ford Coppola’s film of The Godfather keep the story rooted in the late 1940s, eliminating the flashback / background material.  When that film’s success demanded a sequel, Coppola & Puzo turned The Godfather II into that rarest of films, a prequel / sequel by using Don Vito’s story as a counterpoint to Michael Corleone’s consolidation of power.

All of this is a really roundabout way of saying I’m really looking forward to
Ridley Scott’s Prometheus since he’s finally going to reveal who / what  the Space Jockey
was and why he / she / it was tootlin’ ‘round the galaxy with a starship fulla Alien eggs.

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[1]  It may come as a shock to some that I’ve never seen any of the Potter films & only read one book in the series (#3 or #4, IIRC).  The book was well written, I can easily understand why so many people love the series, but it just didn’t connect with me.  As someone once observed re Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, “If you don’t discover him by age thirteen, you’ll never discover him.”  My knowledge of the books is based on what I’ve gleaned through cultural osmosis & from what friends whose opinions I trust have related to me.

[2]  This guy is wrong-wrong-wrong-wrong!

“When I first heard that the libretto of Philip Glass’s 1979 opera Satyagraha was written in Sanskrit (by him and Constance de Jong), I giggled inwardly at what I deemed its pretentiousness and, delightedly reverting to my snotty adolescence, made many a witty remark at its expense.  Then I saw it.  Not only was I mesmerized for most of it, I was brought up short by the realization that Sanskrit was the best possible language for an opera libretto.

“It has the two necessary qualities: it utilizes predominantly open vowel sounds (listen to the title), and it doesn’t invite you to try to understand the language, which is something you automatically do at the opera if you know a smattering of German or Italian or French.  With Sanskrit, you are relieved of every bit of concentration except where it counts: on the music and the singing – and, if you’re interested in the story, on the surtitles.  Even librettos in English need surtitles, since distended vowels, vocal counterpoint and the over-trained diction of many performers make it difficult to understand.  Every librettist should have a smattering of Sanskrit. It will save them, and their audiences, a huge amount of work.”

– from Look, I Made A Hat by Stephen Sondheim

We were told each team should come up with a name for itself & an identifying “look” (an outfit, shirt, hat, badge, whatever). I suggested my team hie itself hence over to the Golden Apple on Melrose and buy a buncha Batman T-shirts.

We would call ourselves The Bat Shirts.

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They were not amused.

Step one was determining who my characters were, which also meant determining when they lived.

I wanted them to be readily identifiable to my target audience (i.e., North American readers).  I have no problems re historical fiction, but I wanted my readers to feel familiar with my characters’ background so I could focus more tightly on the challenge of survival.

Problem:
It’s awfully hard to lose a bunch of school kids in the 21st century.

They will be missed, somebody will come looking for them.

In Lord Of The Flies, William Golding handled the issue by integrating it into the core of his story:  Though never stated explicitly, the world his boys inhabit is engulfed in a great apocalyptic war.  The insane evil of nuclear brinksmanship was reflected in the deterioration of his characters’ civilized behavior.

Exploring the morality of nuclear war was not my intent; I wanted a story focused on survival, not conflict.

(Besides, it’s one thing to crib
the idea of kids shipwrecked on an island;
lots of books, movies, and comics have done that.
Using those kids as a metaphor for the collapse of
modern civilization is exclusively Golding’s idea.)

I briefly toyed with the idea of a great natural or astronomical disaster but quickly passed on that; I couldn’t see how the story could not be about the disaster instead of the desert island fantasy.

I use “fantasy” advisedly.  There’s no magic in Savage Angels, everything is within the realm of the possible.  But the idea of the desert island as a new Eden, as a place to begin again, to somehow Get It Right This Time holds a fascinating allure to writers and readers.

Then I wondered, what am I thinking about when I say “contemporary”?

(to be continued)

I could backtrack a long ways to get to “the” origin of SAVAGE ANGELS, but let’s set our marker down here:

SERENITY started life as a monthly magazine concept; each issue would have a 45-page Serenity story, a couple of short stand alone stories, and an ongoing serial.

HITS & MISSES was supposed to be the first of those serials, Savage Angels was to be a follow-up.

Well, things changed.  Magazine publishing plunged into the toilet just as I started looking for partners so, finding no takers for a monthly mag, I went the original gn route.

…but that’s another story for another time.

Savage Angels came about during a long idea generating period where I was trying to come up with as many ideas as I could for the tween-to-teen / YA market (Angels is just the tip of the iceberg; wait till you see what we have on deck!).

I’ve always enjoyed shipwrecked-on-a-desert-island stories.  As a child, my grandmother and aunt gave me a wonderful slipcover edition of Swiss Family Robinson; I still have that book even though I almost read it to shreds while growing up.

And of course there’s the great-granddaddy of them all, Robinson Crusoe.

And Island Of The Blue Dolphins.

And even Gilligan’s Island.

And, probably most importantly re the origin of Savage Angels, Lord Of The Flies.

William Golding’s book is a harrowing tale of young boys stranded on an island descending into naked feral savagery.  It’s a kill-or-be-killed tale, and it does not offer a comforting view of humanity.

So I wondered, would the story have been any different if it was a group of girls, not boys?

…and the gears started turning.

(to be continued)