Avatar photoSteven Savage

A Bridge To The Quiet Planet: Avenoth

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Let’s get to know more about the setting of my upcoming novel, A Bridge To The Quiet Planet.

Avenoth
Avenoth is the star around which Telvaren and its sister worlds orbit. It’s a g-class star, analogous to our own sun, if slightly larger. It is orbited by the following planets, from closest to furthest from the sun:

  • Maladon – A rapidly spinning rocky world close to the sun. There was a failed attempt to visit it out of geologic curiosity, but the voidship was lost.
  • Gellitar – A semi-arid world first reached in 200 BR. Gellitar was arguably the site of the first Bridge, as primitive as it was. Initially a curiosity, it was colonized officially pre-war, forming the major city of The Barrow.
  • Telvaren – Homeworld of humanity and arguably the gods of Avenoth. Telvaren sports one major continent and one (previously two) minor continents. It is the most technically, magical, and theologically advanced of humanity’s worlds and the most populous of the worlds. It survived the great War, where power consolidated – and was wrestled away – by the Twelve Great Cities. It has one moon.
  • Godsrest – Godsrest has an orbit at a different angle than most of the worlds around Avenoth. it is the grave-world of the gods, where they go to die to avoid affecting the minds of their followers and the world. Godsrest was “theoformed” aeons ago.
  • Lindhaem – The second world reached by humanity. Lindhaem is a world known for its hospitable environment – nearly equal to Telvaren if slightly colder – but hostile life forms and diseases. It was rapidly colonized during the War, but this led to a variety of factions, minor nations, and political chaos. The planet’s government is in Dawn’s Approach, but it’s sister city of Corvallion wields considerable economic power. It has one moon, Roshnak, which appears to be a separate planet captured ages past.
  • Pandemonium – Formerly a world known as The Eye, it’s a world of extremes, with areas of cold, heat, and unusual geologic activities. Near the end of the War the majority of Demon Royalty and the Emperor were exiled here as an easier solution to mass battles against the poisonous creatures.
  • Iskomal – A gas giant with multiple moons, some of which are colonized. However no moon is habitable without technology, sorcery, or divine intervention.
  • Final Gleam – The last known planet in the solar system, it’s a frozen world of strange crystals.

There are various rumored other worlds, including lost planets, hidden ones, or even a complete parallel Telvaren on the other side of Avenoth.

– Steve

Steve’s Update 4/25/2018

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

OK this was not a good week as I got allergies.  Then I got sick.  So let me try to catch up here.

So what have I done the last week(s)?

  • Seventh Sanctum: I did get out the beta of the Strange God generator!  Come witness abstract powers and passions beyond human understanding – close yet distant.  It’s inspired by Cultist Simulator.  Also I’ve decided to regularly set aside time to work on The Nexus the next year to really stock it up – and I have a form to add your own ideas!
  • Epic Resume Go: Got published!
  • Agile Creativity: I got out the Agile Creativity posts for Principle #10 and Principle#11.

What am I going to do this week (er, next few days)?

This depends on how awful I feel, but . . .

  • Agile Creativity: The last post on Agile Principle #12.  Then maybe one more post on creativity, and I then start rewriting it into a book!
  • A Bridge To The Quiet Planet: I plan to start posting bits of continuity information on my setting to give you hints of what’s coming!
  • Seventh Sanctum: Add a bit more to the Nexus and polish the Strange God generator

 

– Steve

Despite All Her Rage She’s Still Just A Panda In A Cage: Aggretsuko

by

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Someone I knew had an awful day at work, and as part of the conversation they brought on Sanrio’s new series Aggretsuko.  If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a show based on one of their cutsey characters – who is an angry red fox in an awful job who takes out her rage with drinking and singing death metal.

So I had them watch it.  I also tuned in, because I’d not seen it and “rage-filled Sanrio character” is something I had to see.

It was kind of disturbing.  There’s a poison-blade edge beneath the cuteness, there’s things a bit too true, and if it had been done live action (or even with semi-realistic animated humans) it would have been even more painful and depressing.  My acquaintance, oddly, felt a bit better after the whole thing.

Now this is not a review, except I can say “damn that was better than expected and I will watch this.”  But it’s about impact, because I saw it affect someone.  And it was a show of cute animated characters (albeit in a bad situation).

There are some stories that just speak to us – not about what is good or great, but about what sucks.  These are important not as “misery porn” or anything else, but for us to reach out to, to relate to, and to laugh at.

And we have to laugh, because many of these things confront horrible issues that are hard to handle without humor.  If you were to take many of the truly relateable workplace dark comedies like “Clerks” or “Office Space” and do them realistically they’d at best be the equivalent of the moral black hole of “torture porn” horror.  They’d just be a parade of suffering.

However the comedy aspects, the irony, the dark laughter, is actually what makes things both tolerable but also relateable.  The humor lets us go from just the horror to truly see the ridiculousness of it all, while providing a buffer for us to internalize our lessons and maybe feel like we’re not just facing awful stuff on our own.  Humor both ads and buffers the empathy we need to feel to “get it.”

Some media and the like obviously would not work with humor – I think it’d be hard to do a funny Lovecraft/weird horror take.  Some of the dark things we explore are best explored without humor, with that immediate injection of empathy caused by being terrified or confronted.  We need that direct in-your-face connection.

But some forms of horror, only humor truly lets us process them.

– Steve