Sweet Kate

Lately I've been mulling over collateral damage and aftermath in stories. For some reason, watching action movies often makes me wonder about the collateral damage. Does anyone care about all the cars that are smashed, the buildings that are blown up? Who fixes everything after the villain has been defeated? Is the insurance responsible if your car is destroyed due to a heroic act of saving the neighborhood? I've been pondering the implications for many different settings.


Fantasy
So many heroes go on a quest, defeat the Dark Lord, and the story ends (more or less happily). After the Dark Lord has been defeated, then what? Who builds the country again? Most of these Dark Lords also have Dark Armies. If it is some sort of nasty that is morally bad (e.g. Tolkien's orcs), who hunts them down and kills them? If the army is composed, instead, of humans or some free-willed creatures, who decides who is good and who is bad? Are there military tribunals? To what degree is the army responsible for the actions ordered by the Dark Lord or his lieutenants? If there were many people pressed into military service, which ones were they (men, women, young, middle-aged, some mixture) and what effect has this had on the culture? What happens when these people go back? Are some of the military roving bands of outlaws, now?

If there is a rightful ruler, is he or she accepted by the general population? Is there an old constitution or declaration of rights that can be accepted, or does it have to be thought up from scratch? Who is in charge of this? Are there any judges, lawyers or politicians who weren't corrupted by the Dark Lord who can help, and if so, how can you tell if they've been corrupted or not? Has the Dark Lord mostly left local politics in place, or has he or she put their own people in charge everywhere? If so, has he or she merely deposed the good people, or killed them? Are there any bands of outlaws that are actually good (like Robin Hood), and how does one distinguish them from the nasty sort of outlaws, and having distinguished them, how does one bring them back into society?

Was there any other country whose army helped depose the Dark Lord? Will they expect some sort of reparations or such? Whose authority will they accept regarding a peace treaty? Are they leaving any occupying forces?

Has the Dark Lord accumulated gold or supplies at their fortress? What happens to these things, particularly any money? Is it to be turned back to the rightful owner, and if so, how can you determine that? Is it to be used for helping the citizens rebuild the country, and if so, who determines which people receive aid? Is there an oversight committee?


Superheroes
Superhero movies seem to have a whole lot of destruction. Who fixes everything after the supervillain is defeated? Where do the funds come from? Insurance companies? State or federal governments? Who buys the new cars, fixes the roads, and rebuilds the buildings? Is counseling offered for those people held hostage by the supervillain? How does one deal with that sort of thing? Who fixes the security leaks? Can they be fixed?


Science Fiction
In my experience, this genre deals the best with questions about the aftermath of a bad government being toppled (see in particular Elizabeth Moon). There are pirates who either show up or grow stronger with less organized military resistance. Communication between planets becomes more of an issue. There tends to be a redistribution of power. There are people very unhappy about losing. Firefly explores this a bit from the other side.


Just a few thoughts. There may eventually be a story out of these thoughts, but right now I'm just mulling things over.

Being a story, of sorts.

The Ice Queen drove past Greta this morning (that is not her name, but what she is). The Ice Queen thought that she had the clear, blue eyes of Lucy, and that she was hoping that the school bus would take her to Narnia instead of the mundane classroom, with its whiteboards and faded posters and cracked ceiling tiles. The Ice Queen thought about stopping, to tell Lucy (as she thought she was) that no matter how many times you check the back of the wardrobe, it is never Narnia. That was a lie, like all fairy tales, and she would be a fool to believe it. But the Ice Queen did not have time, for she must buy and sell soulless things on the stock exchange today. If she had not been in a hurry, she would have stopped to break the illusion that Fairy can be found.

This morning, Greta found that the world had been washed clean as the sky fell to lie in little fractured bits, reflecting what it had been within itself. She did not know (for how could she?) that the imps had broken the sky, and these broken bits were too powerful for mortals, and yet she guessed. She had not run out into this rain, although she loved the rain, for she had somehow known its wrongness. She had tried to stop Hans (that is not his name, either, and yet it is who he is), but he had run out to stomp the puddle on the way to the bus stop, and a bit of sky had splashed up and lodged in his eye, and what is worse, in his heart. If that broken thing had landed in Greta's eye she would have seen Paradise, for such was the purity of her heart that she would have seen the world as it is. Hans also saw the world as it is, or so he thought, but the splinter magnified his faults and pushed them onto the world. He saw that the world was full of selfishness and hate, that nothing lasts, and that the only thing to do is to find power and hold it. He pushed Greta away and laughed at her naivete as she spoke simply of how clean and nice the world was today.

After school, Greta waited for the school bus, and she was not altogether surprised when it was a different bus, and empty, that she boarded. She is searching for Hans, who is now lost in a dark wood, listening to the siren song of the Ice Queen who offers him Turkish Delight. If anyone can bring Hans to himself and more than himself it is Greta, for in her clear, blue eyes, brighter blue than the sky after the rain has washed it clean, is Narnia or Paradise. But first she must find him, and that is no easy thing because he is so lost that he no longer remembers that he is lost.

Disclaimer: I actually think that time travel is theoretically impossible, as is faster than light travel (which is closely related to time travel; if you can travel faster than light or travel in time, you can theoretically do both). That's the problem with majoring in physics and liking sci-fi; everything becomes a lot less probable. So, having said that, here's a bit of a story I wrote today.


I invented a time machine yesterday. It wasn't hard, once you think about time the right way. You're used to thinking about time as a separate dimension, but it isn't. Or at least, it isn't a dimension in the way that height and breadth and depth are dimensions. Cats, now cats understand dimensions as well as time. That's how they can be in another place nearly instantaneously. They also have an intuitive understanding of paradoxes. A cat almost travels instantaneously, but never quite, because that might result in the cat existing in two places at once, which is dangerous. But I'm not going to give you a lesson in theory, because I don't want you to get any ideas, and besides, this is about what happened after I'd invented my time travel machine.

I was sitting at my computer playing with the device, which I'd made as a sort of puzzle ring, where the interlocking layers controlled time. I wasn't sure what to do with my new gadget, because I wanted to test it, but not on myself. I've read enough sci-fi to be aware of the potential logical paradoxes, or at least I thought so. But there's no point to inventing time travel unless you use it. So I decided to send something small back in time, something that wouldn't make a difference, or at least, not much, and see what happened. I had a letter sitting on my desk that I'd been meaning to send, but hadn't gotten around to so far, and so I took that letter and put it in the mailbox, but then I sent that letter back a few days in time. Or at least, I was pretty sure I'd sent it back in time, because it wasn't in the mailbox anymore. I went back to my computer and found a text message that my friend had sent as a reply to my letter. I was incredibly happy. It had worked, and I was brilliant, and I thought that perhaps the next step was to send myself backwards, or forwards, in time, but just a few minutes, to see what would happen. But then Robin Hood showed up.

I knew it was Robin Hood at once. He was tall, and thin, dressed in faded Lincoln green that was mottled and patched, and he carried a longbow that he was leaning on as a staff, and the quiver at his side was full of arrows, fletched white and grey. "Just what do you think you're doing?" he said.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. When I was younger, I'd used to imagine meeting Robin Hood. I never pictured it like this.

"You're messing around with time," he said.

"Just a little," I said, "I sent a letter back a few days. That can't be why you're here, it's not like I stepped on a prehistoric butterfly."

"You don't know what you're doing," he said, looking a little relieved. "You have no idea."

"I just sent a letter back in time a few days," I said, "you make it sound like it's the end of the world."

"You could have caused the end of the world," he said. "No action is isolated, especially when you start moving things around in time. Changing the proper time of that letter caused reverberations and consequences that acted both backwards and forwards."

"Nothing can have consequences backwards," I said.

"Look," he said, "if you're thinking like this, it is extremely dangerous for you to start doing things outside of your proper time."

"You're here," I said stubbornly. "This is outside your proper time."

"Indeed, but I know what I'm doing," he said, "I'm aware of the possible consequences. But I'm not staying here, out of my proper time, nor am I moving anything outside its proper time, most of all you. And I want that device."

"But then you'll be moving it out of its proper time," I said, "won't that contradict what you just said?"

"I'm going to put it past the end of the world," he said, "so it won't, properly speaking, be part of your time. And I want you to promise not to send anything to any other time until you understand how that will cause reverberations backwards and forwards."

"What if I don't?" I asked.

"There's a very good chance you could cause the end of the world," he said.

"This time travel device won't destroy the world," I said. I wasn't entirely sure, but I thought I knew enough of the theory to be confident.

"I mean you'll start the apocalypse," he said, "and if you do that, you won't be able to stop it, and I can't interfere."

"Alright," I said, and handed over the ring.

"Remember," he said, "don't make any more devices, and don't take things out of their proper time until you understand what you're doing." And then Robin Hood was gone.

Today I'm considering the possibilities of teleportation. I don't see how anyone can have a problem with that. But then again, I didn't expect to have trouble with time traveling. Maybe I'll work out the theory a bit more before I build anything.

Amazingly, the story I started last week is coming along nicely. I think it is rather influenced by Pushing Daisies; all the beautiful colors. There is much food, and flowers, and dresses. And vampires. Honestly, I don't know why vampires keep ending up in my stories.

I just finished the story I have been working on for months, which I rather like. It is a modern retelling of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, which is one of my favorite fairy tales. *does a happy dance around her room*

(Note: this is all backstory. To skip directly to the sort of story, please click on the lj cut) I was going to take a nap this afternoon. I laid down with every intention of taking a nap. But then the phone rang. I got up to answer it, and found that it was an hour later. I had the unsettling feeling that I really had been asleep, because I had wisps of dreams that faded away even as I tried to grasp them. I had been skimming the surface of sleep without realizing it. Being the sort of person I am, I sketched the idea with words.

( A Sketch in Words )