LATEST COSMOS PROVIDES ESCAPE, HEROES

In this grim time a little escape and new heroes to admire are certainly welcome, and this week’s recommendation for where to get them cites a familiar source. Neil deGrasse Tyson, everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, is back on the Fox Network with his second re-imagining of the popular Cosmos television show first created by Carl Sagan and wife Ann Druyan in 1980.

This time the show is titled Cosmos: Possible Worlds, and uses the fictional trick of the “ship of imagination” to take us both back in time to view our Earth’s creation and our human species’ rise, and out into space to explore other possible life-nurturing planets in the galaxy. The ever-optimistic Tyson is our host for these journeys, explaining everything in a way that’s scientifically based, graphically displayed and easy to understand. Ann Druyan serves as lead writer on the series. She’s also an executive producer, along with comic Seth McFarlane, well known as a space geek.

I hope you have a decent television set at home to watch this show, because the visuals are stunning. Whether you are in a location here on Earth, or looking at the stars, everything is awe-inspiring, which I imagine is the point.

I do have one criticism of this latest iteration of the Cosmos franchise. The various historical segments are done in a kind of weird stop-action-looking CGI animation rather than using real actors. This, combined with Tyson’s tendency to lecture in maddeningly simple terms, made me think I was watching a science special aimed at fourth-graders at times, rather than the Carl Sagan show of old, which always pitched the material way over my head. 

Unfortunately, I think there’s a reason for that. We no longer respect, value or bother to learn science (or history) in this country. A show like Cosmos: Possible Worlds has to dole out its information in small, easily digestible bits or risk losing the audience. That doesn’t exactly explain why real actors couldn’t have been used instead of CGI for the historical parts, but I can understand that the producers might have wanted to reserve a limited budget for more WOW-factor location shots and onscreen recreations of exploding stars.

Nikolai Vavilov

A recent episode provided an example of the show’s underlying philosophy, and its ultimately uplifting inspiration, even though the production aspects were frustrating. Episode Four, titled “Vavilov,” told the story of an unsung hero of science, Russian agronomist, botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. In the years before World War II, Vavilov traveled the world collecting seeds and roots in a search for the earliest, purest genetic forms of common food crops. He believed knowledge of these base forms would provide a starting point for improving the seeds used for agriculture. 

Vavilov wanted to build on the theories of Gregor Mandel and Charles Darwin to solve the age-old problem of crop failure and famine in Russia. To that end he established the world’s first global seed bank in Leningrad and began work in genetics that became recognized throughout the world. But in the poisonous political atmosphere following the death of the revolutionary Lenin and the rise of the authoritarian Stalin in the USSR, a young man Vavilov had taken under his wing turned on him.

Trofim Lysenko began to denounce Vavilov’s theories and put forward his own, nonscientific ideas. The politically astute Lysenko found easy favor with Stalin, a man with no patience for learning or science. But Lysenko’s simplistic theories only encouraged Stalin’s foolish political ideas with regards to state agriculture. The result was mass famine on a scale seldom seen even in Russia. Millions died in 1932-33 in an event the Ukrainians named the Holodomor (death inflicted by starvation).
 

Vavilov, by contrast, lost favor with Stalin. By 1939, the famous scientist had lost the right to travel abroad, and in August of 1940 he was arrested. A year later he was condemned to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, but in reality, Vavilov was forced to slowly starve to death. He died in prison in January, 1943 at the age of 56.

During the two-and-a-half year siege of Leningrad by Nazi forces, during which approximately 1.5 million citizens of the city starved to death, a handful of Vavilov’s colleagues lived in the basement at the Leningrad seed bank and guarded the a cross-section of the precious genetic material Vavilov had collected with their lives. Nine of the scientists themselves starved to death, but none of the staff touched the seed compilation, though it contained rice, wheat and other edible food grains. (Today’s Global Seed Vault, the modern embodiment of Vavilov’s idea, exists in Svalbard, Norway within the Arctic Circle.)

The Global Seed Vault in Norway

I knew about the siege of Leningrad, Stalin’s famines and the Global Seed Vault, but I had never heard the name of Nikolai Vavilov before this episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. And I had certainly never known of the heroism of Vavilov’s fellow scientists in Leningrad. It was worth putting up with the irritating CGI production on the episode to gain this useful knowledge and a historical reminder that a refusal to accept the facts of science in the pursuit of a political agenda can lead to death and destruction.

  

There was another upside to this episode. Viggo Mortensen provided the voice acting for Vavilov’s character. If you’ve seen the excellent movie EASTERN PROMISES, you know he can do a terrific Russian accent. (The man speaks five languages, after all!) That makes it even more disappointing, though, that we didn’t get to see Viggo act the character. 

Cheers, Donna

THE GUY ON THE COVER--WHO IS HE ANYWAY?

Pippa’s fascinating post about the evolution of her new cover for Bones of the Sea had me fantasizing about the day when I would have to talk to artists about a cover for my own novel(s).  

For months, sometimes for years, we authors are constrained to put our concepts into words, describing vast galaxies, gleaming starships, slavering aliens (or maybe mouth-watering aliens) and exotic landscapes with nothing but lively verbs and bright adjectives.  How exciting to have an artist put those concepts into actual pictures on the page (or better yet, images on a screen—squeeee!).

For all authors, the choice of a cover is fraught with angst and seems a matter of commercial life and death.  Does it convey the right points about the plot and characters?  Does it project just the right emotional tone?  Will it attract the audience we want?  Will it stand out from others on a shelf—either actual or virtual?

But for science fiction romance authors, the choice of a cover is even more difficult.  Do we opt more heavily for planets and spaceships, hoping to scoop up the SF crowd?  Or do we boldly go for the romance audience, with a couple on the cover?  Should the woman be in front, or the man?  Should they be fully clothed or partially undressed, naked torsos or filmy ecstatic expressions?  Stars or weapons?  Landscapes or closeups?  So many decisions—and so much that could go wrong!

But, okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that this is my book we're talking about and I and my publisher/editor/cover artist/second cousin twice removed and his best friend all decide that I want to attract a primarily romance audience and secondarily an SF audience for UNCHAINED MEMORY.  We agree, after much discussion, that a couple should appear on the cover.  (That’s as far as I’m willing to speculate right now, folks.  I have another point to make.)

Great!  Now, what do Asia and Ethan, the heroine and hero of my novel, look like?  Here, I think, is where it all breaks down.  I can describe my people in the book with passages like this:

“Ethan Roberts was the deluxe edition—his dark blond hair a little too long to be fashionable, his deep-set gray-blue eyes examining me with what seemed like X-ray vision, his strong jaw skimmed by the barest shading of beard, highlighting the cleft in his chin.”

Or:

“He looked up to see a woman charge into the waiting room, her high cheekbones flaming with color, her amber eyes snapping with fire.  She was so furious she seemed on the verge of tears.  She was so beautiful he forgot to breathe.”

I can even say I wrote the characters with certain physical models in mind.  In Ethan’s case, it was Viggo Mortensen.  For Asia, I wavered back and forth between Shania Twain and Ashley Judd.  I started with those models, but eventually, as I wrote, the characters became themselves, someone unique and never before seen in the world.

The problem is, everyone who reads the book will visualize those characters differently.  So when the cover artist gives me her version of Ethan and Asia, based on what I’ve told her, or maybe even on what she’s read, it can’t possibly be what I’ve envisioned.  Her Ethan and Asia may be better; they may be worse.  But they will most certainly be different.

I don’t mind.  I find the envisioning of characters a fascinating process.  The “rule” in romance writing has traditionally been that your hero and heroine must be clearly described—eye color, hair color, height, weight, etc.  Some contest judges get a little OCD about this.  They want to know what these people look like.  But beyond a few particulars, I can’t tell you that.  You will come up with that picture on your own, no matter what I say.  I can tell you that Ethan has broad shoulders and narrow hips, but if you like guys big and beefy, and I’ve written him as a sexy character, you’ll fit him into your mold, and so will your girlfriend, who likes ’em lean and long.

Each writer has her own process for discovering the attributes of their characters.  Some are very visual and plaster photos of their physical models around their desks while they work.  Some work up complete background files on each character, with bios and backstories.  Some have music or other things associated with them.  I just sketch out a backstory (which I can change or add to as I go along) before I start the book, and I usually look for a physical model.

In my current WIP, Sam, the pirate captain who becomes a faithful agent of Rescue, friend of tracker Gabriel (from Trouble in Mind) and lover of Rayna/Dozen from the first two books, is based on David Boreanaz, of BONES and ANGEL fame.  Rayna herself is based on an African-American woman I saw in a picture once on a wall in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service training center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.  She was a rock climber—young, vibrant, tiny and very beautiful.  I have no idea who she is, but I can still see her smile.  I took one look at the picture and knew it was Dozen.  

But then, I’m the writer, and I created Dozen.  Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many romance covers feature headless torsos or couples turned so you can’t really see their faces.  Those leave room for the reader to impose her own vision of the characters on the story as she reads.  Let's just call them “interactive” covers—and not feel so bad about them.

Cheers, Donna