by

Writing Rundown: Free-Writing Brainstorming for ‘Peering Into an Alien Mirror’

Last week in my Literature Spotlight, I discussed the idea of science-fiction as a reflection of the time period in which it was written. For this week’s Writing Rundown, let’s take a look at my brainstorming process.

As I mentioned in this blog post, there are many ways to brainstorm for a project. For this one, I decided to use a technique I hardly ever use myself: free-writing. Free-writing is a great tool for projects for which you have the beginnings of a lot of ideas bouncing around in your head, but none are quite fleshed out enough for you to contemplate their connections. It generally requires another form of prewriting such as a word cloud or outline to get it into a state that helps you write the essay, but it’s a great place to start.

So, as a brief recap: in freewriting, sometimes called “stream-of-consciousness” writing, you put your pen down on a blank piece of paper and just start writing – and you don’t stop writing for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Jot down everything that comes to mind, trying to stay on topic but not worrying if you stray. The important thing is that the pen should never stop moving – just write down everything that comes into your head. I’ve inserted the results of my freewriting below, transcribed for the web:

Sci-fi is popular because it is a reflection of the time period in which it was written. By reading sci-fi from previous eras we can see into what people of the era was thinking about. Sci-fi from the cold war era is preoccupied w/nuclear annihilation, or it deals with racial tensions like TOS Star Trek. The Expanse series has a female space marine, something that would never happen in sci-fi from the 50’s. Doc Smith in the 20’s wrote about the womenfolk making sandwiches in zero gravity. TOS had a black woman on the bridge and an alien FO. Also deals w/social issues and questions that are at front of people’s minds. Expanse talks about basic support/welfare and not everyone needing to work. Draco Tavern presents little nuggets of question and leaves them for reader to decide opinion about.

As you can see, it’s a bit of a jumbled mess – the tenses are all screwed up, most of the sentences are fragments, and it jumps topics all over the place. But if you look closely, all of the concepts from my essay last week are there. I used my ten minutes of free-writing to tease out all of my thoughts about the topic, as well as get an idea of which works from the genre I wanted to use. You’ll see a few things that didn’t make it into the essay, like the mention of nuclear annihilation – my brain connected that in the moment, but upon re-organizing into an outline, I realized that I was taking that idea mostly from japanese animation and didn’t have any specific works to cite as evidence. So I decided to leave it out.

Speaking of outlines, here’s what the outline I created from that prewriting looks like:

Now, this outline didn’t start this full; this is after a few minutes of adjusting and reorganizing. I realized in creating the outline that I specifically wanted to talk about social issues reflected through the use of aliens and spaceships, so I re-organized the flow of my essay from paragraphs centered around individual works of sci-fi to paragraphs centered around types of social issues represented. In particular, the free-writing helped me realize the connection between the utopian racial ideas within the human race in TOS Star Trek and the tension between the humans and the aliens, which in turn gave me the central idea of the essay – that using aliens to represent “the other” can help throw social issues into stark relief.

And as a little bonus, here’s a picture of my actual physical free-writing page. Check out how scribbly it is – that’s how you know I was writing fast!

by

Literature Spotlight: Peering Into an Alien Mirror

Prompt: Explain the popularity of Science Fiction. Use at least one work from this genre to explain its appeal.

Science fiction is one of my favorite genres. I love it (and I suspect many of its readers love it) because despite its trappings of the future, good science fiction is very much a reflection of the time period in which it is written. One of Sci-Fi’s major draws for me is that it can highlight and discuss social issues that might be touchy to talk about in the present day. Through the skillful use of spaceships, aliens, utopian planet colonies, and other ‘flight-of-fancy’ scenarios, a science fiction author can hold a mirror up to the way our current society deals with an issue by showing how their fictional society does. By reading sci-fi from previous eras, then, we can catch a glimpse of what people of that era were thinking about – and what was considered an acceptable ‘flight of fancy.’

The Skylark of Space, written by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith in the 1920’s, included an equal ratio of women to men on the spaceship – surprising for such an early entry into the genre. However, what is not so surprising is that the women involved are cast in incredibly traditionally ‘female’ roles – they are the wives of the scientists who invent the spaceship, and play a very motherly role on the ship. In particular, one comedic scene shows the women in the kitchen, trying in vain to make sandwiches in zero gravity. It plays out like a Jules Verne-esque slapstick routine, with the ham and cheese floating all over the room. Tellingly for the time it was written, the only thing the women seem to feel like they can take the initiative to do is fix lunch for the menfolk.

Contrast that with the Original Series of Star Trek, first aired in the 1960’s. Star Trek depicts a world where gender no longer matters – a black woman has an important bridge position as the Communications Officer, and even if her lines are mostly comprised of “Hailing frequencies open, sir,” still, nobody bats an eye at a woman doing more than just fixing lunch. Further contrast that with the Expanse series by James S. A. Corey, which began with the novel Leviathan Wakes in 2011. The second book in the series, Caliban’s War, contains not one but two female main characters, a Martian space marine and an Earth diplomat. Both are in positions where they are well-respected (though they receive pushback throughout the book, but it’s plot-related, not related to simply being female). Both radiate power in different ways and both are treated equally in terms of gender.

Original series Star Trek also dealt with racial tensions. Lieutenant Uhura may have been a well-respected and equally-treated bridge crew member within the context of the show, but the show’s writers still received pushback from the network about her place in the story. In the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” there is a scene where Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) and Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner) share a kiss, widely cited as the first example of a scripted inter-racial kiss on US television. The network wanted them to film the scene both with and without the kiss, so that they could decide later whether to air it. The actors chose to intentionally flubb every take without the kiss so that the network would be forced to air it. The story of that episode serves as a reminder that Original series Star Trek, like most good science fiction, prodded at the boundaries of what was considered an acceptable social construct at the time.

While Star Trek‘s society treats all races and genders equally where Earth humans are concerned, it does still get a chance to display ideas of racial tensions and play with the theme of racial equality – through the clever use of aliens. Mister Spock is a great example of this – here is an alien as First Officer of an Earth Federation starship, who frequently gets mocked and insulted by the other crewmembers for his pointy ears, his green blood, and his unusual customs. Uhura may have been indicative of what race relations could be, but Spock depicted race relations as they were. Certain episodes also dealt more pointedly with the idea of race prejudice, most notably the episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” which dealt with the last two survivors of a war-torn planet still hell-bent on destroying each other. This is the famous episode with the ‘black-and-white’ aliens – their feud was based on which half of their body was black and which one white. While a bit heavy-handed, it does still speak volumes about the sometimes silly things that drive us to war and the dangers of prejudice.

Caliban’s War displays racial tensions as well, but in a different way – by highlighting the fact that they are all humans. When I mentioned the two female leads up there, you probably thought of them as different species – perhaps the Martian space marine was an ‘alien’ and the Earth diplomat was a ‘human.’ Well, in actuality, they are both human. In fact, the three-way war between the Outer Planets Alliance, Earth, and Mars is essentially an entirely human war – there are no aliens to speak of in the whole book (with one exception – no spoilers!). But the stark differences in lifestyle, outlook, and even physical appearance between someone born on Mars and someone born ‘down the well’ on Earth leads to them treating each other as aliens. You can easily see, through the diplomat’s eyes, how different humans can become in different circumstances, and how these differences could lead them to fail to understand each other on a primal level.

Race and gender are not the only social issues that can be depicted in science fiction. Plenty of other issues are presented, all depending on the time period in which the work is written and the aspect of society that the author wants to explore. Caliban’s War includes a scene that will stick with me for months, where the female space marine visits Earth for the first time and chats with a young barista. The barista talks about the Earth policy of having young people work for a few years after high school to make sure they like working before the government spends money sending them to college. The planet has become so over-populated that not everyone needs to work, so those who don’t like working can simply go on basic support and devote themselves to leisure. For the space marine, who grew up in a colony where everyone has a place and a job to do, this concept is foreign, almost incomprehensible. By contrasting these two personalities, Corey allows us to consider the ideas of single-payer systems like free university education and healthcare from multiple perspectives, and draw our own conclusions.

This is precisely why one of my favorite recent sci-fi works is Larry Niven’s The Draco Tavern. This collection of super-short stories centers around Rick Schumann, the bartender at an alien bar called the Draco Tavern. The stories are between 5 and 10 pages long on average, generally taking the form of a conversation Rick has with one or several of his alien patrons. The stories present little vignettes that bring up a question and then end, leaving the reader to think about their answer. The Draco Tavern‘s questions range from ‘What if you could choose when you died?’ to ‘If a human kills an alien, should he be subjected to the alien form of punishment?’ to ‘Should I feel weird knowing that this alien race took samples of my DNA and are using it to lab-grow meat for their own consumption?’ The beauty of The Draco Tavern is that it doesn’t attempt to answer any of these questions, just present them and leave the reader to chew on them for a bit.

Science fiction may seem fanciful, with all those aliens running around on starships firing photon torpedoes at each other. But in reality, a skilled science fiction author can often tell you more about your own beliefs and opinions by comparing them to those of his aliens than you might ever get from sharing them with a therapist. I’ve only scratched the surface here, but this deeply personal self-searching that arises from peering into an alien mirror is one of the many things that keeps me coming back to science fiction, time and time again.

by

Ellen’s Choice: What If You’re Not Supposed to Enjoy Reading It?

At a conference in town earlier this year, I presented several panel discussions centering around the difficulty of defining and quantifying art. Our discussions in these panels got me thinking about literature, and how one of my main points could apply equally easily to much of the literature that students read in high school. The point in question is this: one of the defining characteristics of art, in my view, is that it is something that creates an emotional response in the viewer. Experiencing it changes you in some way.

This is easy to see when the emotions are ones we generally see as ‘positive;’ if a play makes your heart swell with hope for the future, or a ballet duet makes you flush with the excitement of new love, or an epic novel makes your heart race with anxiety over the safety of the main characters, it’s easy to argue that those works are art and have changed you. But what if the emotions you experience are more negative – what if a novel bores you, frustrates you, or drives you nuts? For many high school students, it can be hard to recognize that even if your reaction to the work is boredom or frustration, the fact that you’re having a reaction that strong means that the book is affecting you deeply – and it’s probably intentional on the part of the author.

Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Waiting For Godot, by Samuel Beckett

Waiting For Godot is a play where nothing happens. Literally. The entire play concerns two characters, Estragon and Vladimir, who are waiting by a single scrawny tree for the arrival of someone they refer to as ‘Godot.’ They have various aimless conversations, run into a few odd characters, and at one point spend a good three pages of stage directions trading three hats between the two of them. Reading the play straight through is interminably boring, as you might expect. Many a high school drama student has been tortured with this play, as they groan and read through yet another pointless conversation about whether they were supposed to meet Godot here or somewhere else, today or yesterday.

The important thing to remember while reading (or watching) this play, though, is that this boredom is completely intentional. The play is an exploration of waiting, and the kind of non-events that suddenly become very important when nothing else is at stake. When you’re stuck in one place with nothing to do but wait, you can see how it might become immensely important to figure out who should wear which hat or exactly how far away you should stand from the others – anything to avoid dying of boredom.

In fact, I recall hearing a story once about a group of prison inmates who read this play and had it resonate so strongly with them that they self-produced it and performed it for the rest of the prisoners. Why? Well, it’s a story about waiting – while incarcerated, that’s pretty much all they were doing. It spoke to them on a much more personal level than it might speak to the average high school literature student. Beyond that, though, it can also be seen as a commentary on the non-committal nature and essential cowardice of mankind, particularly in the repetition at the end of each act:

ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]

After spending an entire act waffling non-committally about what they should do, Vivi and Gogo finally decide to leave – forget waiting for this man, he’s never going to come! And yet…they can’t do it. They can’t leave even after they’ve decided to go. How many of us have experienced this failure of will before in our lives? It’s universal. And how many of those prison inmates do you think spent their days dwelling on past decisions, cursing their own cowardice? Sure, it’s boring, but it’s a very human kind of boring.

That’s a lot to chew on for a play about nothing, eh?

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

I remember HATING this book when I read it in high school. Finishing each chapter of homework was a slog – it was one of the only times in my school career that I had to force myself to keep reading through my interminable boredom. And then – I recall one night, midway through our unit, I suddenly finished the whole thing, reading the entire second half of the book in one sitting. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but re-reading the novel a few years ago with one of my students, I suddenly realized what had happened: the boring slog of the first half was entirely intentional!

The Good Earth follows the life of a Chinese farmer, starting just before the revolution and beginning with the purchase of his wife from a wealthy merchant. His life for the first half of the book is boring and cyclical – it is entirely governed by the harvest seasons and his wife’s yearly pregnancies. It is justifiably dull, as the life of a farmer would be. Standout events in his life – a good harvest, a lean year, an upsettingly-ill-timed pregnancy – seem meager and uninteresting to our modern-day imaginations, but to him they are his whole world. And then, in the middle of the novel, the revolution happens. Things start to take off – he finds an abandoned store of wealth and becomes a wealthy merchant. Intrigue. Arranged marriages. Bigger houses. The cycle is broken. And in the final scene, we see a repeat of the opening scene, only this time, he is the wealthy merchant and another poor farmer has come to purchase a wife from him. The cycle begins again, but our protagonist has a new place in it. No wonder I read the entire second half in one sitting – that was the exciting part of the cycle! What better way to prime the reader for the breakneck pace of the second half of his life than by exposing them to the boring cyclical stuff first?

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I remember reading The Great Gatsby in high school and having misgivings about it. I wanted to like it, I really did, but I kept finding myself hating each and every character. I couldn’t get into their excitement, share their joys, because I found them so frustrating. Even the young ingenue Daisy, who I genuinely expected to like, turned out to be vapid and careless and thought little of the consequences of her actions. Looking back on it now I realize that once again, that was the intention! You’re not supposed to like any of the main characters – the idea is that they are completely undeserving of their wealth and prestige. It’s a commentary on the faultiness of the idea of the “American dream;” the people who supposedly are living the dream are thoroughly unlikeable and leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Looking back on my own high school literature classes, I find myself wishing my teachers had impressed upon us the idea that not all books are written to entertain you, and you can be bored, frustrated, or upset by something in a novel and still see the merits of the novel itself. Sometimes those negative emotions are what the author intended to bring out in you, and in the process of trying to articulate why you’re experiencing them you can learn something valuable about the work as a whole.

by

Mathematical Journeys: An Exercise in Averages

A few summers ago I wrote a blog post about finding math in unexpected places as a way to keep skills sharp through the summer break. One of the unexpected places I talked about was the world of tabletop Role-Playing Games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons. Such games are essentially communal storytelling exercises which use chance elements to help guide the story via a set of polyhedral dice.

I’ve been running a D&D game for a group of friends for several months now, serving as “Game Master.” As Game Master I serve as lead storyteller for the group, while the others each create a character to experience the story firsthand. My job is to create the framework for the story. I devise and flesh out the world that the story takes place in, present challenges for the players to overcome, and rationalize the effect their actions have upon the world. Overall, my goal is to create circumstances that will allow the players to be heroes. Today I’d like to delve a little deeper into the math applications involved in a D&D game, through the use of an example from the game I’m currently running.

In the current story arc, my players recently made the acquaintance of a tribe of goblins led by a goblin chief by the name of Skizaan. Goblins are a very classic antagonist in the setting of D&D, and they are often seen as little more than cannon fodder – weak enemies who can be bowled over easily. However, these particular goblins are highly organized and skilled at group tactics, and as the brains behind their operation I wanted Skizaan to present more of a challenge to the group. In the rulebook for the game there are statistics for the average goblin, as well as a “Goblin Boss” – both of which were a bit too weak for my tastes. I decided to amp up Skizaan by altering some of his statistics to increase his ‘Challenge Rating’ (known as ‘CR’ – the system the game uses to help Game Masters determine which antagonists will present an appropriate challenge for a player group of a given power level).

As part of this alteration, I needed to increase the amount of damage Skizaan dealt with weapon attacks to bring it in line with my target CR. The rulebook contains a handy table listing the average values for various statistics at different CRs, so looking at the table entry for my target CR shows me that the average damage value per round should be about 33. Great – that’s my target. However, there’s a bit of a wrinkle – D&D uses dice rolls to determine damage dealt, so every enemy lists a number and type of dice to roll when an attack hits. This adds another element of chance, where combat can lead to drastically different outcomes depending on the luck of the dice – which is one of my favorite aspects of the game. The table only lists average damage output, though, not dice ranges, so I needed to figure out what combination of dice would result in an average damage of 33.

This is starting to sound like a word problem from a math test!

Now, there are several ways to do that, but here’s the system I worked out. To figure out the average result of a die roll, I just need to take the average of the lowest possible roll and the highest possible roll. Since I know my target average, reverse engineering the average formula is the quickest way to get there algebraically:

(lowest (l) + highest (h))/2 = average

(l + h)/2 = 33

l + h = 66

Now it’s time to think about the way dice rolls work for a moment. The lowest possible outcome would be all 1’s on the dice, the highest would be every die rolling its maximum. The game uses dice that have 4 sides, 6 sides, 8 sides, 10 sides, 12 sides, and 20 sides, so I have a few options. The thing that immediately hits me, though, is that 66 is 11 times 6. If I went with six dice, my lowest possible roll would be 6, regardless of what kind of dice I was using. That would leave me with 60 points left to divvy up between 6 dice, so they’d need to be 10-sided dice. In game terms, I’d write that as 6d10. So rather than the original 1d6 of the Goblin Boss, my new amped-up goblin chief could do 6d10.

So that’s one option, but there’s another aspect of the luck of the dice that I want to acknowledge: the spread of possible outcomes. The lowest and highest values of that 6d10 roll would be 6 and 60, which means that this attack could vary wildly in terms of how much damage it actually does. Sure, on average it’ll be around 33, but if my dice are having an off day when we actually play, Skizaan could do practically no damage and the players would steamroller him, which would be pretty anticlimactic. I’d like to find a way to make the rolls more consistent, with less variation. The way to do that is to change up the type of die rolled to decrease the spread – make the highest and lowest values closer together.

To do that, I’ll need to shift the composition of the roll to be more dice with fewer sides each. More dice increases the lowest value, and less sides each decreases the highest value. So let’s take our target of l + h = 66 again. We can split it into the same 6 and 10, but switch their placement – instead of six ten-sided dice, let’s use ten six-sided dice. That would make the lowest value 10 and the highest value 60. That would increase the average value a bit, from 33 to 35, but would condense the spread a bit in the process.

However, there might be an even better option – we do have four-sided dice at our disposal. Let’s say we used as many four-sided dice as possible to get the same average outcome. At this point, I use a slightly different logical process. Take a look at our previous two examples. With ten-sided dice, we ended up with six times eleven. With six-sided dice, we ended up with ten times seven. In each case, we end up with the number of dice rolled multiplied by one more than the number of sides on the dice. So if we have four-sided dice, we can figure out the number of dice to roll by dividing our target of 66 by one more than the number of sides on the dice – 66 divided by 5. Rounding down to avoid decimals, we end up with 13 four-sided dice. Plugging that back into our main formula to check our work, we get

(13 + 52)/2

32.5

So we’ve decreased the average just a tiny bit, but in exchange we’ve given ourselves a much more condensed spread on the dice. Minimum damage for Skizaan’s attacks is now 13, which is much better than 6, and his maximum damage potential is a still very threatening 52.

This is just one example of the many ways in which serving as Game Master for a game of D&D involves quite a bit of math and logic. Running this game has been a great experience for me in problem solving with algebra, and I thought you might enjoy hearing about it.

by

Ellen’s Choice: When The Story Affects The Book

I’m a huge fan of the novel structure known as epistolary, where the story is told through primary sources such as diaries, newspaper articles, or letters back and forth between characters. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of my favorite examples of epistolary, as the mystery is heightened by Stoker’s clever choices of whose diary to show at which point in the story. Epistolary form allows the author to strengthen the reader’s immersion in the story by allowing the story itself to influence the final form the novel takes. Leave off a character’s diary in a tense situation where he’s about to go do something dangerous and stupid, with the cry “Goodbye all!” and then cut to someone else’s diary for the next hundred pages, and you leave the reader begging to know what happened back there – did he make it out? Why are we not reading more of his diary? Is he okay? Tell me please!

I recently finished another epistolary novel that has quickly made it onto my list of great examples of the craft of writing – one I think everyone should read. It also takes the prize for longest title of any book I’ve read. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party is a young adult novel written by M.T. Anderson. The Pox Party tells the story of a young boy growing up in a scientist-philosopher’s commune in revolutionary-war-era Boston. The first half of the novel is all from the boy’s perspective, and feels like a relatively standard first-person narrative with the exception of the fact that it begins with the statement “Drawn Primarily from the Manuscript Testimony of the Boy Octavian”. Already the epistolary format is working its magic, albeit subtly. Manuscript Testimony, eh? Why is Octavian writing this testimony – what happened that he needs to testify about? Is he testifying for the defense or the prosecution? He alludes several times to some kind of looming tragedy that he didn’t expect at the time, reinforcing the reminder that he’s producing this story as a testimony. The wheels are turning in the reader’s head, trying to piece the puzzle together ahead of the narrative and worrying over the possible outcomes they’ve imagined.

And then, in the middle – everything changes. I don’t want to go too much into it, because it blindsided me completely and was extremely effective that way and I don’t want to spoil it, but something happens that renders Octavian unable to continue to write. This plot point causes real changes to not just the story, but the book itself. The story so far has been told through Octavian’s manuscript, after all, so what happens now that he cannot continue his writing? The resolution of that question makes the second half of the novel a completely different reading experience and drastically heightens the dramatic tension. I’m sorry to be so vague here, but the surprise was part of the effect for me and I don’t want to spoil it. Suffice it to say that the story affected the book in a very real way, and I’m still thinking about it a week later. I highly recommend it.

by

Mathematical Journeys: The Three Types of Symbols

We’re going back to basics today with a Math Journey covering the three broad categories of symbols. I’ve found this concept very handy when introducing Algebra to middle school students. So let’s go!

Math is a language, and I find it often helps to think of it as such right from the beginning. Just as there are different parts of speech in a language, so there are different ‘parts of speech’ in math. Where a spoken language includes parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, math has three major types of symbols: constants, operators, and variables. Let’s go over each one in detail.

Constants
These would be the equivalent of your nouns. A Constant is a number – it has a single, discrete place on the number line. Even if the number itself is ugly – a non-terminating decimal, for example – it still does exist in a specific spot somewhere on the number line. In addition to the obvious constants, math frequently uses what I refer to as ‘special constants’ or ‘named constants’ – ugly numbers that are important enough for some reason or other that mathematicians have given them special names and symbols. Pi is a good example of this; mathematicians figured out that performing a specific calculation on a circle always yields the same number, regardless of which circle is used, and figured that that number was special enough to warrant a name. In much the same way, other constants such as e and i have been given names and special symbols to represent them due to their importance for certain calculations. But the important thing to remember here is that all of these named constants do have specific spots on the number line – they don’t change value depending on the situation. Pi will always be approximately 3.14159, no matter what you do to the rest of the problem.

But that’s not always the case.

Variables
Variables also represent constants, however in this case the actual value of the constant is unknown. The variable does have a specific spot on the number line, but we don’t know where it is. Its location on the number line can vary from problem to problem, but within a single problem it is always consistent. We generally refer to variables using lowercase letters, traditionally starting with x, y, and z, and then moving to others if necessary. In practice, a variable behaves just like a constant, since it does actually represent a constant. It can be manipulated the same way you would a constant, except of course you don’t know the value so you’ll have to leave some calculations unfinished until you get to a point where you can identify the mystery number. Funnily enough, many elementary math programs use the concept of variables, but they don’t define them as such. If you’ve ever seen a basic math worksheet with a question mark in a problem, you’ve seen a variable. All algebra does is change over from using a question mark to a series of lowercase letters.

3 + ? = 7
3 + x = 7

Operators
All the constants and variables in the world won’t help us without an operator. Remember how your grammar teacher was always going on about how every sentence needs a verb? Well, every mathematical sentence or phrase needs an operator. An operator is a symbol that performs an action on a constant or set of constants. Plus signs, minus signs, multiplication and division symbols are all operators, but so are square root bars and fraction bars. In fact, as you may have read in one of my earlier Math Journeys, a fraction is just an indication of the top constant being divided by the bottom constant. The equals sign is also an operator of sorts, though it doesn’t perform an action on the constants so much as declare a relationship between them. The greek letter Sigma is an operator as well, used to represent taking the sum of a series.

And then there’s the special operator known as ‘a function.’ We’ve talked about functions multiple times before in my blog, and I usually introduce it as a machine that turns one number into another by applying a set rule. That sounds like an operator to me! The key here is that a function is kind of a general operator, one that you can define within a given problem any way you want or need it to be. Want to indicate a specific sequence of operations performed on a number repeatedly over the course of a single problem? Use a function and define it appropriately!

Breaking down the world of math symbols in this way helps to clear up some of the confusion that often results from the particulars of traditional naming conventions. Consider, for instance, the following six symbols:

e ∏
x Ѳ
f() ∑

All three in the first column are lowercase letters, and all three in the second column are greek symbols. However, their usage in math is better represented by the horizontal rows. The first row are constants, the second variables, and the third operators. And the way they behave differs accordingly. So the next time you’re confused, take a look at which type of symbol you’re working with!

by

Writing Rundown: Word Cloud Brainstorming for A Clockwork Orange

Last week in my Literature Spotlight, I explored the connections between humanity, free will and morality in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. For this week’s Writing Rundown, I thought I’d share with you my brainstorming process.

As I mentioned in this blog post, there are many different ways to brainstorm for a project. For this one, I chose to use a Word Cloud. I chose the Word Cloud because it’s a much more flexible and organic method than going straight for an outline, and I was anticipating this particular topic being tricky to organize. All of the ideas bouncing around in my head were interconnected, and I felt a Word Cloud would help me sort them out and figure out the best way to structure my essay.

Take a look at my finished Word Cloud:

In the center of the page, I began with the phrase “Loss of Free Will.” I knew that was the central key to my current thought process – that the loss of free will was what actually affected the main character’s humanity, far more than any other event in the book.

From there, I began to work outward with a second set of large ideas. My second ring contained four phrases: “Title: Clockwork Orange,” “Loss of Humanity,” “Link between humanity, free will, and morality,” and “Becomes tool of the state.” I knew these were all things I wanted to touch on in my essay, but couldn’t quite figure out yet how to distribute them. All four of these phrases were connected to the main point in the center.

Next came the outlying phrases, where I began looking for supporting evidence for my various big thoughts and jotting down anything that seemed important. Spiraling outward from those four big ideas were a sequence of phrases indicating both concepts I wanted to explore and specific quotations I knew I wanted to use, along with their page numbers for easy reference later. Each of these spirals connected back to its main idea, but for the most part there wasn’t any cross-connection between them at this stage. I went back through and began adding extra connections between some of the ideas to show which things belonged in the same train of thought, and which things shared a causal relationship that I wanted to make sure I touched on. I was beginning to see my paragraphs forming.

But something wasn’t quite right.

I inspected my word cloud further. The title connected to the loss of humanity, which connected to the link between the three ideas. I found I had a little triangle surrounding the idea of that link between humanity, morality, and free will. Even though that phrase was not the original center of my cloud, it had emerged as the glue that held all these thoughts together. If I removed that piece, large parts of the rest of my cloud wouldn’t connect up anymore. That told me that the concept of that link was actually my thesis, more than simply the loss of free will. That phrase became the new center of my cloud, and I re-adjusted my visual conception of the rest of the cloud to surround that point.

I then added in some dividing lines to visually separate the cloud into the points that would become each of my three paragraphs. One involved the title and its connection to the idea of a loss of humanity, a second dealt with Alex becoming a tool of the state after the loss of his free will, and the third involved a discussion of the final chapter and the commentary on morality presented within it.

I now had a pretty clear idea of how to structure my essay. I translated this cloud into a more traditional five-paragraph outline and wrote from there. Of course, all pre-writing should stay flexible throughout the writing process. As I went into my drafting phase, I found myself organizing and re-organizing multiple times, and I referenced my word cloud several times to keep myself on track as the shifts happened. Word Clouds are really handy for topics that are intricately interconnected, or that you think might run the risk of getting tangled up in themselves as you write. I don’t always use one, but this essay really needed it.

by

Literature Spotlight: Humanity, Free Will, and Morality in A Clockwork Orange

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.”
~(Author’s Introduction to A Clockwork Orange, P. xiii)

The protagonist of A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is a depraved young teen named Alex who has a love for ‘ultra-violence.’ For the first third of the book, Alex gleefully commits felony after felony, robbing, raping, and beating up random innocents just for the fun of it. At first glance, anyone witnessing his nighttime escapades would probably call him inhuman, a monster. And he is certainly degenerate and warped – but is he really inhuman? After all, humanity has sunk to some pretty low depths in history, and the human race is capable of acts of incredible violence and devastation. What do we really mean when we call someone inhuman? Are there some qualities absent in Alex that we feel should be present in all humans? A sense of morality, perhaps? A Clockwork Orange explores the link between morality, free will, and humanity, and shows that despite his outward appearance Alex is more human than we might like to admit.

This link between humanity, morality, and free will is hinted at right from the start, in Burgess’s choice of the title and its connotations. The term “clockwork orange” comes from Cockney slang, implying something that is strange to the point of being unrecognizable. Burgess uses the term as a representation of “the application of a mechanistic morality to a living organism.” (P. xv) This idea of “mechanistic morality” is an important one that warrants additional discussion. By describing morality as “mechanistic” in this context, Burgess hints at the idea that morality may be a far more subjective construct than we think. Morality is usually defined as conformity to the rules concerning the distinction between right and wrong. But consider – who is writing those rules?

Orange depicts a governing State with very clear ideas about right and wrong, but also depicts a terrified and ineffective police force, a thriving underworld, and a general lack of efficient enforcement of those rules. Without enforcement of the official morality Alex and his peers have essentially written their own code of ethics, their own distinction between right and wrong. When Alex and his gang run into a rival gang on the street in Chapter 2, Alex explains in depth to the reader the appropriate size for a gang and the attention that should be given to the proper way to get into a fight with them. Their interactions with Billy’s gang are formal, cordial. Under a subjective view of morality, the argument can be made that Alex and his peers are still moral individuals, they just have different morals than the rest of society. They know the right and wrong ways to interact with others, and they follow those morals to a fault. Skewed though those morals are, by following them consistently Alex in part 1 is shown to still be unquestionably human. He has opinions and priorities, and acts based on his sense of what is appropriate for the circumstance. His morality is unpleasant to us, for sure, but he certainly does have one. He makes choices knowing that he has to live with the consequences of those choices – there is nothing more human than that.

In Alex’s case, the consequences of those choices turn out to be the forcible removal of his free will. Through the conditioning of Dr. Brodsky, he is made to associate acts of violence with nausea and intense revulsion. Importantly, though, this conditioning does not remove the desire, just the ability to act upon it. Burgess makes this perfectly clear near the end of Part 2, when Alex is shown off as a success at the end of his ‘rehabilitation’. As proof, Brodsky presents a young woman in a neglige, and Alex’s reaction is immediate and visceral:

“the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I would like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out real savage, but skorry as a shot came the sickness…and now the von of lovely perfume that came off her made me want to think of starting to like heave in my keeshkas, so I knew I had to think of some new like way of thinking about her before all the pain and thirstiness and horrible sickness come over me real horrorshow and proper.” (P. 142)

Clearly, Alex still desperately wants to commit the act, but is made so physically nauseous by the thought of it that he cannot. He’s been ‘reformed’ to fit into Society, ‘cured’ of his deranged behavior, but in the process they’ve removed what makes him human. Not only can he not commit violence if he wants to, but he is incapable of even defending himself from attacks of any type. Brodsky demonstrates this when he allows a man to beat Alex up viciously and Alex is powerless to even raise a hand to protect himself.

This helplessness is displayed piteously in the early chapters of Part 3, when Alex finds himself being repeatedly used and abused by everyone from his previous life, unable to stand up for himself in any way. He has been converted into a tool, a mechanical puppet who can be easily used by anyone who understands how the clockwork fits together. The State uses him; he is front-page news as a grand ‘success’ story of rehabilitation and the mercy of the State. A group of rebels desiring the overthrow of the State get hold of him, and upon hearing his story they figure out how to use him to their own ends. Taking advantage of his conditioning they create a situation that encourages him to attempt suicide, intending to hold him up as a martyr and sway public opinion with propaganda. The suicide attempt failed, the State gets hold of him again in the hospital and ‘re-cures’ him. They remove his conditioning and restore his free will (and thus his humanity), causing Alex to praise them as his saviors.

The final chapter of Orange displays one last twist of thought on this topic. It begins in much the same way as the very first; Alex has found a new group of gang-mates to replace his old group and goes back to his earlier revelry. As an older teen, though, Alex grows to realize he finds no pleasure in the old ‘ultra-violence’ he used to revel in. Thirsting for something more, he runs into an old gang-mate who is now married. Through a conversation with this friend, he realizes what he’s been missing. His humanity returned, his morality now begins to shift – he wants what his friend has. In the final pages, Alex walks off alone into the night, ready to begin the next phase of his life. This chapter shows that while we might have initially thought Alex to be an inhuman monster, really he was as human then as he is now. The shift is one of morality rather than humanity – the only shift in humanity throughout the novel is the one forced upon him by the State’s conditioning.

A Clockwork Orange challenges our conception of what it means to be “human” by pointing out that while we might find Alex’s ‘ultra-violence’ in part 1 to be monstrous, we realize through his suffering in part 3 that part 1 Alex was still human. It is far more inhuman to be an automated robot, usable by anyone who understands your programming. Alex’s journey in the novel is from flawed but human, to perfect but mechanical, and then back to flawed but human again. By taking a depraved and monstrous character and forcibly removing his free will, Orange shows us that the really inhuman thing is to be unable to make your own choices.

by

Ellen’s Choice: The ‘Best’ Book?

At BYOBook Club last month, we were discussing possible topics for the final meeting of the year. Someone suggested “The best book you’ve read all year,” which seemed to be well-received in the moment as an option. Since I’m participating in the Reading Challenge this year, I set myself the goal in January to read 50 books over the course of the year. (Right now I’m on book 45, so I’m right on track.) So I started thinking about it, talking with friends about how to choose a ‘best’ book, and I’ve realized that’s a trickier question than I expected.

For one thing, how do you define the ‘best’ book? The one you enjoyed the most? The one you’re most likely to re-read? The one with the most well-crafted story? The one with the most interesting setting? The one you’re most likely to recommend to a friend, regardless of genre or other interests? The best nonfiction vs. best fiction? What about the one you’re most glad you read?

This is a tricky question, to say the least, and with 44 contenders for the title of ‘best’ book read this year there’s no way I can narrow it down to just one. So here, in my own sort of mini-Academy Awards for books, are my picks for best books I’ve read this year – for varying definitions of ‘best’:

Most Enjoyed – TIE: The Lotus War Series by Jay Kristoff, and The Gentlemen Bastard Series by Scott Lynch

I really have to apply this one to these two series as wholes – by far the most fun I had reading this year was while reading the first two entries in each of these series. I love Scott Lynch’s writing style and his characters, and I love Jay Kristoff’s setting and the smart way he handles the teenage protagonist’s insufferable crush on a boy she just met. Both of these series are just really enjoyable reads, the kind where you can’t put the book down because it’s just so GOOD!

Most Likely to Re-Read – “The Lies of Locke Lamora,” by Scott Lynch

While we’re on the subject of the Gentlemen Bastards, the first entry in the series needs to take this category as well. I feel like this is a book I could just dive into over and over and enjoy over and over. Fortunately, the series has around 8 installments, so I can read new ones for a while, but once it’s over, I will definitely be back for multiple re-reads. I love the premise, I love the setting, and I love the characters. The story is absolutely perfect given those three, and always keeps you guessing. It reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows, Leverage, but with young priests of the god of thieves. In fact, one of my favorite quirks of the story is the spirituality of the main character, since whatever else he may be, he is still a priest with a code of ethics that shapes his life.

Most Well-Crafted Story – “Before I Fall,” by Lauren Oliver

While I’m not generally a fan of mostly-realist YA set in high school, I really loved ‘Before I Fall’. The basic premise is similar to the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’ but with a popular girl in high school. She dies in a car crash at the beginning of the novel, and then has to repeat her final day over and over until she figures out how it was supposed to go down and orchestrates it to happen that way. She still ends up dead at the end, of course, but she is able to change the day’s occurrences to fix a lot of other problems in an incredibly selfless act that finishes her character arc out beautifully.

Most Interesting Setting – TIE: “Kinslayer,” by Jay Kristoff, and “A Darker Shade of Magic,” by V.E. Schwab

This one has to be a tie again – two different fantasy books blew me away in terms of setting. Jay Kristoff’s steampunk-dystopian-feudal Japan with insectoid clockwork atmosphere-suits and chainsaw-katanas is cool enough, but in the second book he shows us more of the world than we’ve seen yet and introduces such crazily inventive things as lightning-collecting towers and cultist zombies that flay off your skin and tattoo their histories on it. Meanwhile, Schwab’s worlds are intricate and distinct, from the coat that can be turned inside out multiple times to the thick, tangible nature of the magic and the way the characters can sense the presence of other magic-users nearby.

Most Likely to Recommend to a Friend, Regardless of Genre – “The Book Thief,” by Markus Zusak

This is just a beautiful book, one that everyone should read. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think you like YA, or if you aren’t a fan of historical fiction – read this book now. Yes, it’s a bit of a downer, but it’s a beautiful downer. I honestly don’t want to give away too much more about this one – just read it for yourself.

Best Nonfiction – “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation,” by Bill Nye

How can you go wrong with Bill Nye? Seriously, though, I really appreciated the effort Nye puts into getting across the expansive nature of evolution as a theory. It’s about much more than just the origin of life, and this book really brings that point home. It’s careful not to disparage anyone’s viewpoints, it just brings up all the non-creation-related reasons why evolution has proven itself to work as an organizational theory. Nye’s writing style is informal and approachable, and full of quirky humor that fans of his show from the 90’s will have no trouble recognizing.

Most Glad To Have Read – “The Long Earth,” by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

I was devastated to hear about Terry Pratchett’s death this year; he’s always been one of my favorite authors. I was overjoyed to find a book of his I hadn’t read yet, and I loved getting to see what he did with a setting that wasn’t Discworld. It’s a bit quieter and more serious than the zany pogo-stick that is Discworld, and I really enjoyed getting to see that side of him.