Tag Archives: science fiction

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter X

 

 

 

is for Xenophobia

 

 

 

 

Xenophobia is a fear of strangers or of the unknown. It is frequently used as a device in literature, especially science fiction literature.

My theory is that, in times of war, the stranger is the enemy, be they German, Russian, or Mid-Eastern. During times of war there is an upswing in the number of books, movies and television shows where the stranger is the enemy. In World War I and II, most people had no idea what the typical German was like, except that s/he was different from typical Americans (or Canadians or Britains). Ditto Russians during the Cold War or people from the Mid-East since 9-11. It makes sense to cast the stranger with the unknown culture, the object of fear, in the position of the enemy in the media.

In times of so-called “peace”, there is an upswing in the number of popular culture projects in which the alien–as in from another planet–is the enemy. This is because with the advent of the Internet, the world has gotten smaller and we pretty much know about every culture there is. But a stranger from another planet? Now that is something to fear.

Most works simply assume aliens are out to annihilate the human race. Aliens speak a foreign language, they look different than us, and their culture–if it exists–would be different than ours as well. The truth is, most aliens would probably look more like Star Trek‘s Horta than its Klingons. Does a steaming mass of lava  or a shimmering plasma field have a culture? Can it/he/she/schlee have a culture?

I’m not sure what is more frightening to me, the likes of  Hannibal Lechter and Joe Carroll, or Lrrr and Ndnd from Omicron Persei 8. What’s scarier to you–an ordinary human psychopath or an alien from another planet? Would you fall prey to xenophobia and automatically assume the alien is your enemy? Post your opinions in the comments below.

 

 

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter S

 

 

 

is for Symbolism

 

 

 

Sometimes a red rose is just a pretty flower sitting in a vase on the shelf while others it is a symbol of love. Visual symbols, like the rose, are usually linked to imagery. Other symbols may be linked to theme. The bottom line is that if something recurs in a story and means something other than the obvious literal meaning, it’s probably a symbol and not just another pretty flower.

In The Revenant, Morgan is a symbol of good, his brother Malchus, a symbol of evil. The sum of their lives show that good and evil are more than simple black and white divisions. There is a little bit of evil thought and good intentions in the best of us, but in the case of Morgan and Malchus, their personalities ultimately polarize and repeated references to this polarization is what makes them symbols (and foils).

In I am, Was, Will be Alice, the ability of Alice to control her time traveling becomes a symbol of hope. If she can control when she travels, maybe she can save the lives of her teacher and student peers and ultimately, herself.

Likewise, in the short story “Hope Floats”, a butterfly found by a child in a dystopic world becomes a symbol of hope. Having settled underground, a child ventures to the surface and captures a butterfly to give to his mother to show her there is still hope for returning to the old way of life. But when the butterfly dies, he realizes there is no turning back the clock.

Symbols are all around us in everyday life and in popular culture. I prefer the puzzle of the subtler symbols, no rose = love in my writing! Do you think of symbols at all? Can you think of any you noticed recently? Share examples of the best ones in the comments below.

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter R

 

 

 

is for Repetition

 

 

 

Repetition occurs when a word or phrase is repeated for emphasis or effect.

In I Am, Was, Will Be Alice, when Tina learns Alice and Pete have not had sex yet, she tells Alice, “Maybe he’s just not that into you.” Through her adventure, Pete has been her faithful sidekick and the thought of losing him is horrifying. As Alice lies in bed that night, the phrase plays over and over like an ear-worm in Alice’s mind:

Maybe he’s just not that into you.

He tells me he loves me every time he sees me.

Maybe he’s just not that into you.

He took care of me that time at the ROM, got me out of a bad situation and took me to safety, clothed me, and fed me.

Maybe…

The point of this repetition of phrase is for the reader to identify with Alice’s stress in anticipation of another time leap.

Can you recall an effective use of repetition in something you’ve read? Why did you think it was so effective? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

 

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter M

 

 

 

is for Mood

 

 

 

Mood (often called “atmosphere“) is the feeling a piece of writing evokes in the reader. This is often done through narrative tone, description and setting.

After Molly finds Stanley’s body in Phase Shift, she goes into shock:

At the foot of Stanley’s driveway. In the rain.  Police offer me hot drinks and dry blankets. Refuge from the drizzle in a cruiser. They think they’re helping. Won’t help take the chill off.

Three police cars. Two fire engines. One ambulance. Yellow police tape on the property line. Surreal. Like I’m on television. A TV crime show. Waiting on the coroner. Where’s Palmer? Time passes in waves. Folds in and around itself. Inconsistent.

In this passage, the use of short sentences and sentence fragments as well as confused observations help to demonstrate the shock Molly experiences.  Because the narrative has changed in this chapter, the goal is for the reader to experience Molly’s disorientation. In this case, the mood is set using narrative tone.

If the death of Stanley represents a sort of mini-climax in the story, the chapter that follows is a falling action of sorts. The chapter begins:

The rhythmic patter of the rain on the windshield has a calming effect. In spite of the fact we’re out of the weather, I can’t help but shiver. I can sense Palmer considering me, wet puppy, licking her wounds. Stanley’s dead, my mind repeats and repeats again, needle stuck in a groove. Stanley‘s dead and I killed him. Palmer wriggles out of his overcoat and then his suit jacket. He drapes the jacket over me and wriggles back into his overcoat, gifting me his woollen warmth and spicy scent.

In this chapter, a calmer, comforting mood is evoked in the patter of the rain, and the warm comfort of Palmer’s jacket. The reader should experience a respite from the tense shock of the previous scene and be lulled by a sense of security before thrown back into the fray as the climax of the novel nears.

What novels or short stories do you remember as most effective? “The Monkey’s Paw” by WW Jacobs comes to mind for me. Record your thoughts on mood and/or atmosphere in the comments below.

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter K

 

 

 

is for Katharsis

 

 

 

This is hard. Eleven days in to the challenge and I’ve already hit a brick wall. Outside of a few Japanese poetry styles, there are pretty much no literary devices beginning with the letter K. According to The Free Dictionary, the term “catharsis” is taken from the Greek “katharsis,” so today, K is for Katharsis.

Katharsis–better known as “catharsis”–means to achieve an emotional or spiritual cleansing or renewal.

In the Walking Dead episode entitled “Tempus Fugit”, both Beth and Daryl experience katharsis. In this episode, Beth decides to do something she’s never done before–get a drink. When her quest is realized, she has an emotional breakdown crying at the bar in the golf club with an unopened bottle of peach schnapps. Daryl shatters the bottle on the ground, symbolizing the end of Beth’s childhood. What follows is Beth’s spiritual and Daryl’s emotional renewal, for by the end of the episode, Beth sees herself as Daryl’s equal and Daryl is able to open up to Beth about his past. Neither character will be the same moving forward as a result of their katharses.

Kartharsis may be experienced by the audience as well. If a reader identifies with a character in a novel and feels an emotional release as a result, s/he has undergone katharsis.

Have your read or watched anything lately in which either you or the characters experienced katharsis? Share your examples of katharsis in the comments below.

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter I

 

 

 

is for Imagery

 

 

 

Imagery refers either to vivid, sensory description in writing or a recurring image linked to themes or symbols.

One example of the latter occurs in Macbeth when Shakespeare uses clothing imagery to show Macbeth is not up to the kingship he has stolen. When Macbeth learns he has earned the title thane of Cawdor he asks,

Why do you dress me in borrow’d robes? (I.ii)

because he has yet to learn of the former thane’s execution. Later in the play, Angus says of Macbeth,

Now does he feel his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief (V.ii)

to say Macbeth is not worthy of his title, alluding to his suspicion that he stole the title rather than come by it honestly.

New writers are often told to show and not tell, don’t tell your reader when a character has smiled–describe her face, the curl of her lips, the gleam of her eye, the wrinkles that form around her mouth and eyes.

In Chicken or Egg: A Love Story, Nigel learns of Paula’s death and rushes to the scene. He finds her zipped into a body bag and loaded into an ambulance. He’s told she’s in rough shape by one of the EMTs, but he’s so overcome with regret that he’d never told her of his feelings for her that he climbs into the ambulance and unzips the body bag.

The ambulance’s interior smelled of disinfectant and alcohol, an odour that began to turn Nigel’s stomach before long,..He brushed away a blood-soaked lock of hair from her forehead. It left behind a copper trail. Her skin was pale, her lips and cheeks inordinately red where her makeup had clung in spite of the blood that had left her.

In this example, the reader can recall the medicinal smell of a doctor’s office or hospital emergency room, imagine Paula lying on the stretcher, pale and bloody, hair taking on a reddish hue as the result of a fatal head wound. Nigel’s feelings for Paula are exposed when he ignores the blood caked in her hair to perform one last tender gesture.

What images do you remember reading that stuck out in your mind as a brilliant, sensory-filled description? Have you written any passages containing imagery of which you are particularly proud? Share your thoughts and comments below!

A to Z Blog Challenge – Brought to you by the letter H

 

 

 

is for Hyperbole

 

 

 

A hyperbole is an exaggeration used to emphasize a point.

In the tentatively titled,  I Am, Have Been, and Will Be Alice, Alice is depressed and has taken to her bed for comfort when her mother comes into the room:

She digs my head out from under the blankets, brushes my hair from my forehead and brings her cool lips to them. “You’re cool as a cucumber,” she says for about the millionth time in my lifetime.

The hyperbole in this excerpt is Alice insisting her mother has used this phrase about a million times over the past 14 or so years. While it’s theoretically possible for someone to achieve this goal, it’s not very likely, which is what makes it a hyperbole.

When Suzanne leans over Palmer during a sarcophagus examination in The Mummy Wore Combat Boots, he says,

As she spoke I was enveloped in a haze of her perfume. Her scent was sweet and distantly floral.  It brought back a slew of memories—not all of them disagreeable—in a dizzying flood.

While Palmer’s memories make him neither physically dizzy, and his memories would not carry the same force as a flooding tsunami, I’m sure it would feel as if they did to poor Palmer who can’t escape Suzanne’s unwanted advances in such close quarters.

Do you use hyperbole in either speech or writing? Which ones do you use most often? Which ones have you written that you’re most proud of? Whatever they are, share them in the comments below.

Literary Devices from A to Z – Brought to you by the letter G

 

 

 

is for Genre

 

 

 

Genre is used to describe types of literature. Some examples are science fiction, young adult, supernatural, thriller, adventure, and police procedural.

In the genre of science fiction, authors take current social mores and technology and project how that might change in the future. One example of this is “Star Trek” and communicators. In “Trek”, Gene Roddenberry imagined how people might communicate in the future and came up with the small, handheld devices. It’s no coincidence that when real life engineers were designing handhelds they used the communicator as a model and came up with the flip phone. Incidentally, modern smart phones appear modelled after another “Trek” device, the PADD (personal access display device).

In Phase Shift, museums on Gaia meld high and low tech in their dioramas. A description follows:

…the display was lifeless, a series of plaster casts of various skeletal remains sitting dully on a number of podiums, arranged in chronological order according to the era of each animal’s evolution.  Now, one by one, each piece of bone is animated in turn.  I watch as the first skull grows holographic muscle and skin and then rotates a full three hundred and sixty degrees on its podium.  Following that, the hologram grows a body, a three-dimensional representation of what Gaians believe the animal to have looked like when alive.  The three-D body comes away from the skull on the podium and it, too, rotates full circle.  Lastly, for its magnum opus, the hominid looks me square in the eye and takes a series of steps toward me, leaving the diorama behind.  Once more it rotates a full three hundred and sixty degrees before vanishing into thin air.  It takes almost a full five minutes for each specimen on the Gaian human evolutionary line to cycle through its trip down the runway.

When the last specimen has finished, the gallery is once more still.

Here, holographic technology is melded with a low-tech plaster diorama to create an interactive museum display. Given the state of holographic technology today, it’s not such a long stretch to assume one day the two might be joined to make history come to life for museum patrons.

The key to writing science fiction is to make it plausible. Readers should be able to imagine a future in which the technology and social structures might exist.

How many genres of literature can you think of? Write them below and I’ll compile a master list and share it in a future blog post.

 

Is the world ready for self-driving cars?

auto-car

 

“As Reyes speaks to me, the car lurches into action.  He uses the rudder control to join the traffic stream, and then flips a toggle switch on the dash. The car moves forward, speed ebbing and flowing with the pool of traffic. I get the idea the vehicle uses auto-pilot to arrive at its destination.  Once he has flipped the switch, he keeps his eyes on me instead of the road. Not once does Reyes busy himself with the drudgeries of defensive driving.”

—Phase Shift

Google uses them; “Toyota Priuses equipped with self-driving technology“. Once the stuff of science fiction, self-driving cars may be a reality within four years. Already we have cruise control and anti-lock breaks (which always take me by surprise and do nothing but make me brace for uncontrolled impact), proximity cameras and cars that parallel park themselves, is it such a stretch to think they could do so much more in the very near future? The argument is that cars on auto-pilot could drive closer together, alleviating traffic. They could eliminate the need to stop at intersections if the coast is clear. They would take out the human error factor that causes so many deaths on the road. To extrapolate, if there is no danger of collision, there is no need for heavy, internal structure and safety features, so cars could be made of lighter-weight materials making them more fuel efficient. Seems win-win, no?

If there’s one thing the invention of autonomous cars reinforces, it’s the extent of human ingenuity. History tells us that if one person invents it, another will invent a hack for it. Case in point, Will Smith’s I Robot, Live Free or Die Hard, and Revolution or worse, Terminator, all cautionary tales in which technology either malfunctions or is derailed (on purpose in Die Hard and accidentally in Revolution) to the detriment of society. What if the system malfunctions or is hacked? In the event the Internet is turned off, would the cars still work?

Imagine the President of the United States in an entourage of light-weight self-driving cars, free of safety features. How easy would it be to commandeer the vehicle from a distance? Tired of paying alimony? Hack into your ex’s auto-pilot and drive him/her into a wall. If you use anonymous servers and encryption codes, what are the chances they could track the destruction code patch back to you? Why go through the trouble of training and placing pilots in major US airlines to fly planes into buildings when you can cause a multi-vehicle pile-up on a highway by turning off proximity detectors or throwing a bug or two into the software without leaving your country of origin?

Sounds like a premise to the next great science fiction disaster epic to me. Guess what? We’re all cast as the main characters. Coming soon to a parking lot near you.

Dexter Meets Nancy Drew

Dexter Meets Nancy Drew

Harper Curtis squats in a house, the owner dead and rotting in the hallway. In his pocket he finds a key. When he uses the key in the front door, he is taken to whatever time he imagines. He returns later to bludgeon the owner, thus coming full circle in the timeline. Harper travels through time looking for his “shining girls”, girls that emit an aura-like light that he alone can see. He finds them as children, making contact with them when he does, promising to return again, sometime in the future. When he finds them as adults, he brutally slays them, leaving with them a souvenir from a previous kill. The book opens with Harper gifting Kirby a small, plastic horse, years before the date left behind by the mould on the bottom off the horse’s foot. He returns later to murder Kirby, but unbeknownst to Harper, she survives and devotes most of her adult life to bringing Harper to justice. Harper’s hubris in leaving behind these anachronistic souvenirs is what eventually helps Kirby orchestrate his undoing.

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is part Dexter’s evil twin, part grown-up Nancy Drew in the perfect combination. It’s been a while since I’ve read a page-turner, and The Shining Girls is a mesmerizing one at that. Beukes’ prose is literary and compelling. Her tone is gritty and dark, whether from Harper, the murderer’s, Kirby, the victim’s, or Dan, the reporter’s points of view. Whether depression, disco, or near-twenty-first century, Buekes’ story makes the era come to life. I love time travel as a plot device, but it must be done right. I need to know about the technology that transports the characters from one time to the next. Beukes chooses to make the device a psychic key, of sorts. Beyond the question of how the original owner obtains it (which is told in the final chapter), the reader is too caught up in the lives of the characters to question it’s true origin (i.e., from where or whom it originated in all time and how it got its power), which is a credit to the author, as I thought this would hang me up and sour me on the novel altogether; it didn’t.

Like The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Shining Girls is one of those novels I can see myself returning to in the future (no pun intended) to read and re-read before I am able to grasp all of the subtle nuances of the manuscript. And I will do this with gusto.

Graphic from http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16131077-the-shining-girls

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!