The Dance of Reason and Rhyme

By Christian Horst

Under the light of the stars and the moon
A girl named Rhyme danced and sang to a tune
She sang of the way that the world came to be
When the wind kissed a sunbeam and bore him a tree
Whose boughs held up oceans, mountains, and seas

Watching nearby stood a scholar named Reason
Shaking his head at her naive depiction
From such a delusion, no sense could he make
Out onto the meadow, a step he would take
To cut off Rhyme’s song and correct her mistake

Raising a finger and eyebrow to match
Candidly Reason contested her facts
He droned on of vacuum fluctuations
And baryon acoustic oscillations
With nary a flare nor exaggerations

Over the features of Rhyme spread a grin
Laughing, she offered a warm hand to him
Reason considered and slowly accepted
Following step, but the path, he directed
And soon felt at ease, his derision deflected

Twirling in tempo, hand in light hand
The two sang a true verse in poetry strand
Of galaxies swept out in web-like smattering
Seeded in splendor by symmetry shattering
Long ere the moment of last scattering

Born between stars in a cradle of fire
From water and dust rose complexity higher
A gravity seed drew a world from stone rain
And on it amines joined with acids in chain
Heralding eons of life-giving flame

Meanwhile a crowd had collected before them
Watching the two with intent and adored them
Their song in its glory rose up to the sky
And the mountains and stars joined the rhythm in time
To the glorious Dance of Reason and Rhyme

In Anticipation of Star Trek 2017

With the recent explosion of announcements of movies and TV shows, there are bound to be a few items that go largely unnoticed. One in particular has not made much of a commotion yet, but I look forward to it eagerly: the next Star Trek TV show, set to air next year.

Star Trek has always been different sort of speculative fiction, set apart from the mainstream sci-fi. Whereas most stories revolve around a few sets of characters battling and outwitting each other for victory, Star Trek is visionary, taking an optimistic view of the future of humanity, and considering the new problems and mysteries we will face after we have solved all of our own at home. It shows us a version of the future that is idealistic beyond what we think may be possible, to fill us with hope and a goal to strive for. With this in mind, here are some things I hope to see in the new Star Trek show.

Have a Middle Eastern crewmember.
It is tradition for Star Trek to promote cooperation by giving the Enterprise a diverse crew, paying particular attention to groups who are on uncomfortable footing with each other while the show is running. In past crews, we’ve seen members who are American, French, British, African, Russian, Chinese, and Native American, as well as artificial intelligence, alien, and half-alien. I am sure that the new crew will be just as diverse as those that came before it, and I cannot think of a more fitting place to represent now than the Middle East.

Continue to reference classic literature.
Though Star Trek is way out there in the far future, the depths of space, and a society that looks to us like paradise, it is strongly tied to the here and now by a common history. There is a blessed touch of familiarity when Data tries to solve mysteries with the methods of Sherlock Holmes, or Captain Picard wrestles with whether he is repeating the mistakes of Captain Ahab hunting Moby Dick. Their world is a vision of what our world could turn out to be, made all the more real when we see the classics will remain timeless even after we have left our planet behind.

Reference the modern scientific frontier.
Along with classic literature, why not go a step further? Star Trek is about the future, and one thing that is absolutely necessary to bridge the gap between our lonely rock in an infinite void and a galaxy teeming with life is scientific discovery. Let the characters reference the verification of the Higgs boson by the LHC and gravitational waves by LIGO. Mention Nobel laureates. Credit Miguel Alcubierre with the first theoretical model of a warp drive. Bringing these into the world would not only connect us to the show like classic literature does, but also encourage young people to go into science and help advance the real frontier of our time, moving us step by ever so small step towards the era of cooperation and exploration that Star Trek dangles in front of us.

Gravitational waves, simulated by Christopher E. Henze at NASA

Get the science right.
In the past, Star Trek has relegated science to a technobabble role, spouting meaningless jargon as "explanations" for technology and plot points. Admittedly, some made-up nonsense is necessary when speculating about the mysterious places where no one has gone before, but it would be nice if the writers made an effort to get the science that we already know correct. With science’s recent popularity spike, more and more of the audience is going to notice the absurdity of things like cleaning space lichen with concentrated neutrino beams or charging the deflector dish with antiprotons.

Show the Milky Way.
Outside of a planet’s atmosphere, space does not appear just a uniform smattering of stars across the sky, as each show so far has depicted it. For the most part, Star Trek takes place within the Milky Way galaxy. Because of the galaxy’s disk shape, we should see a band all around the sky, with a smoky wisp of space dust, and a bright bulge in the direction of the galactic core. Not only is this more accurate, it is also breathtaking.

Imagine seeing this in the background as stars zip by the Enterprise.

Keep the invention of the warp drive canonically in 2063.
In Star Trek lore, scientist and engineer Zefram Cochrane built and tested Earth’s first warp drive in the year 2063. As that year approaches, it might be tempting for the writers to change it and say it was actually 2163 or something like that. The reason I suggest not doing this—I mean, besides the angry mob of fans such a retcon would bring to their doors with pitchforks and torches—is if the date is pushed back, it creates the impression that the era of Star Trek is an unobtainable fantasy, always a hundred years away from us. Keeping the date as it is, false though it may inevitably turn out to be, will create a sense of growing excitement and imminent change as the year Earth makes contact with the Galactic Federation approaches.

So far, I have seen only The Original Series and half of The Next Generation, but that has been enough to see how the franchise had earned timelessness. With its passionately optimistic vision of the future, its brilliant social commentary, and its common history tying it back to home, I would not be surprised if Star Trek continues for centuries, even after the invention of the real warp drive, if such a thing is possible.

Is the End of Time inside a Black Hole? Chrono Trigger Video Game Theory

In Chrono Trigger, widely acclaimed as having one of the best stories in a video game, the characters travel between time periods, influencing the course of their fictional history on a quest to uncover a plot that has been in the making for mega-anna. Each time period has a label—600 A.D., 1000 A.D., 12,000 B.C., and so on. But when they crank the dial past the furthest date and off the scale, they find themselves at a place called the End of Time, where only a few pieces of land float in a dark void. The time stamp for this dreary, mysterious place is “infinity.”

At first glance, it doesn’t make sense for there to be an actual time called infinity. After all, infinity is always as far away as ever. Time can keep passing, on and on and on. The stars will burn out, the galaxies fizzle away, but infinity will never get any closer. Therefore, the End of Time must be simply a poetic device the game makers put in to make the game feel more mysterious.

Or must it? The ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea showed a curious puzzle about infinites, which is known as Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox. Zeno noticed that if someone were to run a race, he would first have to run half the race, then half the remaining distance, and then half the distance that still remained, and so on and so forth an infinite number of times. Though it is against our intuition that an infinite sequence of events can happen in a finite amount of time, runners do indeed finish races, so we must accept that it is possible.

From Wikipedia. The runner must travel half the distance,

then 1/4, then 1/8, etc.

If it is possible for an infinite number of events to happen in a finite amount of time, could it be possible for an infinite amount of time to pass between two events? The answer, believe it or not, is yes, according to the relativistic nature of time as discovered by Albert Einstein. A boundary that takes an infinite amount of time to cross is called an event horizon. There are several kinds of event horizons, but the most well-known type is what we think of as the surface of a black hole.

From the movie Interstellar

According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, time passes more slowly in a gravitational field. The stronger the field, the slower the passage of time. In fact, where there is strong enough gravity, time will completely stop. For a black hole, this happens at its event horizon.

If this is confusing, don’t sweat the details; we’ve just gotten to the important part. Remember, time passes differently in different reference frames. In the reference frame of someone falling into the black hole, they would pass right through the event horizon no problem, just as they would expect to from gravity. They don’t notice their own time slowing; to them it seems like the rest of the universe is speeding up. This person ends up inside the black hole, so we know that events inside black holes do happen. In the frame of an observer who stays far away from the black hole, however, the time around the event horizon slows to a crawl, and so the falling person takes an infinite amount of time to pass the event horizon. This is why it is called an event horizon; events on the other side are removed from the rest of space and time.

In summary, things inside of black holes happen after an infinite amount of time has passed. If any place could be called the End of Time, where the date is infinity, it would be the inside of a black hole. A time traveling space ship would have no trouble getting in or out though, so it would be an opportune place for Crono and his magical companions from throughout history to set up a base, out of reach of their eldritch abomination archenemy.

Choosing a Canvas: Video Games

The mark of a true artist is to be able to make people feel exactly how the artist wants them to feel. As civilizations advances and technology progresses, more and more tools appear for artists to use, expanding and pushing the limits of true art. For the storyteller, the most recent major leap forward has been the invention of the computer, which has led to an entirely new medium for storytelling: the video game.

Final Fantasy VII, widely acclaimed for its innovation and fantastic story.

The story of a video game is not entirely written by the developer. Instead, the developer lays a framework, and the player writes the details. Video games have the potential for much stronger immersion than any other medium of story, since the player usually controls—gets to be—one or more of the characters. In role-playing games (RPGs) like Final Fantasy, the player must invest time and energy in making the characters grow, drastically increasing the sense of accomplishment the player feels with the characters, and creating a sense of magnitude about the feats they perform.

This writing dynamic between developer and player opens doors to new kinds of stories, which would either not work well or be dull in book or movie form. In The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the character is forced Groundhog Day-style to relive the three days leading up to the moon crashing into the world. The different choices the player makes each time around lead to stories playing out in different ways. In the Metroid Prime series, the player explores the ruins of ancient alien civilizations, discovering their cultures, values, and causes of destruction.

There's history and culture to be found in this floating city in Metroid Prime 3.

Perhaps the most defining feature of video games is that the players are required to overcome a challenge in order for the story to progress. The classic science fiction shooter Halo is an archetype of balancing challenge with story, continually challenging the player to the maximum of their abilities, and then making the next challenge just a little more difficult. The challenge can be made even more exciting by adding music; when Halo’s Rock Anthem starts playing as the player enters a battle, it feels that much more like they are fighting to save the galaxy.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that, of all the storytelling media, video games bring the most variety to the table. From the mysterious ambiance of Myst to the Lovecraftian horror of The Last Door, from the courtroom drama of Phoenix Wright to the heroic adventures in The Legend of Zelda, from the tactics and adrenaline of Halo to the epic sagas of Final Fantasy, video games embody many artistic modes that can be mixed and mashed to create an untold variety of experiences and stories. Though they may one day be usurped by holodecks, I am glad to have been born in a time when video games are on the scene.

Choosing a Canvas:
Books
Video Games

A Fateful Quandary

The symbol for the Wheel of Time in the series of the same name by Robert Jordan.

One of the most important qualities of a good fiction writer is to be able to present a story that appears self-sustaining, as if it could happen without an author to speak it into being. In almost all cases, a story is so much better if it presents the illusion of being a transcription of events in an alternative world, not just a product of someone’s imagination. Stories that fail to do this feel shallow and lacking in dimensions, as the readers keep getting pulled out of their immersion by forced happenings or breaking of the fourth wall.

Fictional stories are usually created by a process of creating characters, places, and objects, deciding a set of key events and experiences to put the characters through, and then linking these events with details to make them coherent. In other words, a fiction writer creates everything in a story for a purpose. In this way, the story has an inextricable element of fate, its world being shaped to the will of the writer. Any aspiring fiction author must be wary of this, and take steps to hide it.

Though there may be no way to eliminate the connection between author and story, there are ways to create the illusion that it isn’t there. One of these is to write a mechanism for fate into the story. This could come in many forms, such as the Force, the Wheel of Time, the lion deity Aslan of Narnia, or even the ambiguous “greater forces at work” found in The Lord of the Rings. These powers serve as a buffer between the writer and story, allowing happenings which would otherwise come across as too convenient.

Another possibility is to forgo fate altogether and create the illusion of uncertainty, making the reader feel like anything could happen. This type of story feels more natural, as its events are seen to more realistically fall into place by chance and the will of the characters. Such a story style ups the stakes; if the characters don’t have some supernatural protection against the odds, and if there isn’t a higher power working behind the scenes to make events play out a certain way, then there is more tension and excitement to keep the readers engaged.

Pulling off such a trick is a skillful art. We think of the things that need to happen—This person needs to join the main characters, that person needs to be diverted, these characters need to go on a mission even though someone else is much more qualified—and it is tempting to simply give the characters a little help, to use our pens to nudge events in the right direction. We must keep in mind, however, that smart readers are going to notice, and it will cheapen their immersion in our world. We don’t have to give up on our unlikely heroes though—anything can happen in fiction, and with enough imagination, it can be made to look natural.

Star Wars Main Event: The Force Awakens

This discussion, of course, contains spoilers. It is highly recommended to have seen the movie before reading further.

At long last, the moment we have been waiting for all this time is here! Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens has hit the theaters, blowing the minds of generations. There are many reasons for its dramatic success: the on-location shooting, the return of the great characters from the original saga, the role the Force played, and that the stormtroopers were shown to be people, not just faceless cannon fodder. It’s hard to nail down any one thing that made the movie great, but to me the feature that outshone all the others was the new characters.

As always, John Williams has come up with some amazing new music. The most notable debut this time is “Rey’s Theme.”

There's also this guy, who became a fan favorite just by existing. He's
kind of like Boba Fett in that regard.                                                           

The first time I saw the movie, I made a huge mistake. I watched it with the intent to critique the director by the standard of the original trilogy, not to experience the continuation of the story of a fantasy world. Because of this I came away disappointed—angry, even—with the large list of things that I would have done differently if I had been in charge. But I recognized this mistake immediately after the screening finished, and two days later when I saw it again and watched it properly, I was utterly swept up in it and all my dark side feelings toward the film melted away.

The new hero, Rey, is awesome. When she is introduced, she has been living secluded from the goings-on of the galaxy, making everything feel new, like it did as we followed Luke in A New Hope. But even though war forces itself upon her she is able to keep her head on her shoulders and come up with a plan of action. Rey seems to be fascinated with the Force, but also to have a strange aversion to it, which can be seen in her encounter with the Skywalker family lightsaber. Both sides of this coin are shown as Rey climbs the stone steps to Luke, where she is clearly afraid of whatever is about to come, but at the same time is driven forward by the need to know and experience it.

The new villain, Kylo Ren, is also awesome. Far from the hardened, controlled instruments of destruction that we saw in the Sith, Ren struggles to keep some some grasp on his emotions, often losing control of them completely. He feels the Light Side pulling on him, which calls into question the Jedi view that the Dark Side is a black hole that swallows and devours anyone who steps too close, a view which all of the previous films have implicitly taught us to believe. Most importantly, though, Kylo Ren doesn’t follow the Dark Side out of a desire for power or revenge, but because he believes it is right. His struggle comes fully to the surface in the fateful scene where he must decide, and act on that decision, to kill his own father, Han Solo.

They all have to have a black cloak, distorted voice, and red lightsaber.
No, I wasn't complaining, I enthusiastically agree!                                     

The Force Awakens is a promising beginning to a new era of Star Wars. Whatever the future will bring, I have no doubts that it will be great. From the revelation that when Luke went missing, he was searching for the first Jedi temple, I suspect the next two episodes will involve the origins of the Jedi and Sith. I don’t know how similar the new history will be to the Legends timeline, but I hope to hear “Duel of the Fates” in episode 8 or 9, perhaps revolving around some unknown embodiment of the Dark Side in some forgotten region of the galaxy. But right now, I am delighted to have been given such a satisfying, adventurous return to the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Star Wars Countdown:

The Phantom Menace

Attack of the Clones

Revenge of the Sith

A New Hope

The Empire Strikes Back

Return of the Jedi

The Force Awakens

Length of a Written Work

Sometimes, when you sit down to write something, you worry about how long it should be. You wonder what length you should have in your head as a goal. But is this really a significant question? Whether you’re writing a novel, an academic thesis, or a blog post, the rules or recommendations for your word count are really just a guide for how specific and detailed you should be. In the end, what matters is that you achieve your goal with enough detail, but no extra fluff. The best length for anything you write is as long as it needs to be for you to properly express what you are trying to say.