Science Fiction Books by John L. Lynch

Archives for November 2018

Women in New Persia

Readers of “Before the Storm,” have noticed the status of women changed at some point between the present and 3300 AD.
 
Women in New Persia, with some notable exceptions (whom we meet in the course of the story), have limited choices for how they live their lives. Marriage is expected of everyone, men and women, but is vital for women to maintain any standing at all. Women are expected to marry by the age of 20. After, they are expected to raise children.
 
This isn’t fair. I don’t advocate this kind of role for women, as it seems to me there is more to life than staying at home and raising children. I say this as someone who stayed at home and raised a small child. It was easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
 
The reason I wrote in the roles for women in New Persian society was to keep the setting consistent. This is not a result of the dominant religion in New Persia. To colonize a new planet, any society would have to grow its population. In order to have the large societies existing in 3300 AD, the population must have grown quickly. Without far-future technologies like cloning women would have to raise many children during their lifetime.
 
Beyond that, the nature of the environment requires many people to populate land cleared by Earth life. Without people, the native plants will move in and take over. Simply in order to survive the population must be sustained at a high level. The state of medicine in New Persia is roughly equivalent to the rest of the technology, so antibiotics exist. That helps, but there are many other ways to die, including the large wars which break out every generation or so.
 
And there are the seed storms. The fires kill many people, and the chaotic aftermath kills more. After the passing of a storm, huge areas of burned land lay fallow and must be re-colonized before the native life gains a permanent foothold.
 
All of these factors call for large families for a society to have not only successfully colonized New Persia but to have survived to 3300 AD. That requires a certain role for women which the present-day 21st-century world of Earth is leaving behind. I don’t advocate a return to the 1950s roles for men and women. The problem for me was the planet itself would wipe out any civilization which didn’t value a large number of children every generation, which requires marrying young.
 
A problem I’ve always had with many SF universes is that they are full of people, billions of them, but family sizes are too small to sustain the numbers or to have colonized planets in the first place. My ancestors who were pioneers in America routinely had 9 or 10 brothers and sisters. A frontier society cannot afford small families.
 
I intended the role of women in New Persia to be a tragic consequence of the environment.
 
The good news is technological advancement is on the cusp of changing everything in New Persia, if only it can survive the seed storm and the war with Azania.
 
Stay tuned.

Why Google AdSense sucks

Not the normal thing I’d post here, but I’d like to say a few things about book promotion. This is a necessary part of being an author, along with writing and publishing. Writers tend to go on about writing the most (because it’s more fun) but you can write a masterpiece and no one will read it if you can’t publish and promote it.

In today’s world, that means internet promotion. There are a few choices for that, and here’s my experience with two of them.

Facebook gets an A+ for ease of use and good service. They clearly want my money and provide promotional services with no hassle. I was impressed with how easy it was to use and the responsiveness of the ad team members.

Google gets an F-. They suspended my Ad Sense account with no explanation other than it had “suspicious payments.” I checked with my bank and my credit card was fine, and in fact, Google had not even tried to charge it. This is the same card that Facebook took with no complaints.

Keep it in mind if you are ever promoting your own work.

Sorry for the distraction, this is kind of inside-baseball, but I write about writing from time to time.

UPDATE 05/08/2021:

Last week I appealed my suspension again. To my surprise, Google not only answered my appeal but lifted the ban. Then my account was suspended for an unpaid balance (which I couldn’t pay while the account was suspended for suspicious payments). I paid the balance and appealed again and am waiting to see what happens.

I still have no idea what rule I broke or why it would be a reason to suspend my account in 2018 but not in 2021. My guess is that my second appeal simply reached a different person. I don’t think the terms & conditions changed. I think I triggered some algorithm the first time, probably because I had a short history on the internet as John L Lynch, and the human who handled my appeal didn’t want to override it (or just didn’t like me). I was irritated when I got banned, and my appeal reflected that. The moral of the story is to be polite when dealing with unaccountable corporate bureaucrats. 

UPDATE 06/15/2021:

I got a phone call from Google a week ago. They only seemed interested in verifying my phone number and Google Ads account. I gave them my Ads number and then verified my Google ID on my phone. I got a follow-up email that a decision on my appeal would be made within a week.

Today, Google reactivated my ads account. Why? I don’t know. Nothing changed other than the passage of 2 1/2 years. I submitted another appeal this year because I’d gotten a promotional email from Google Ads and it reminded me I was banned. That always irritated me, so I appealed. This time, it worked. Other than having a feeling of vindication, I’m out of the unpaid balance which I couldn’t pay while I was banned. Maybe that makes me stupid for not letting it go, but it really bothered me when I was falsely accused of doing something wrong. Usually, when you hear a story like this it turns out the complainant is bullshitting or hiding something, but I really was on the up and up, and my account being reactivated after all this time seems to indicate Google agrees.

Why the hell didn’t they call me the first time I was suspended? Did the procedure change? What was the real reason for suspending my account in the first place? Why take over a month to reactivate my account after I paid the balance? So many questions.

The whole thing is bizarre. I’m not going to use Google Ads ever again if I have a choice.

Why Persia?

I get asked why I chose Persia to be the name of the nation where “Before the Storm” is set.  Even calling it “New Persia” causes some confusion with readers who either believe I am writing about the present-day Islamic Republic of Iran or have some political point to make with the book.  Neither is true.

New Persia is a book set in the far future.  The in-story date is around 3300 AD.  The setting is intentionally vague because I wanted a sense the world is something with little connection to our world.  What happens here in our everyday lives does not inform the story.  It’s so far in the future great changes have taken place.  People live on another world and have a long history there.  The connection with Earth is thin and almost lost.  Technology has decayed to the point where it is primitive by the standards of the 21st century.  I wanted a sense of an alien place without alienating the reader with technobabble.

So why call it Persia and not some made-up name?

While I made an imaginary world, I’ve always liked when authors leave a shadow of the past for the reader to infer a deep history behind the scenes.  In “The General” series by SM Stirling I loved the bastardized Sponglish language and the little hints about the origins of the colonists on the planet Bellevue.  It was never made explicit.  I also enjoyed the religious aspect of the book.  There was a new religion worshipping ancient technology alongside ancient faiths like Islam.

The touchpoint to the past made for a better setting than one completely without connection with the present.

Why choose Persia as a baseline for the nation of New Persia?

I wanted a far future setting.  Any civilization used as a starting point should be robust enough to be believable.  If I used a culture without ancient roots and had it survive a thousand years into the future on another planet, the reader would be forgiven if the suspension of disbelief could not be maintained.  I notice science fiction stories when the social norms of the present are assumed to continue indefinitely into the future.  I have a hard time not wondering how that is possible, given my experience of enormous political, social and religious change in my lifetime.

There aren’t many civilizations on our planet which have stood the test of time.  Western civilization is relatively young.  Rising from the ashes of the classical ancient world it can only be said to be about a millennium old.  Not long enough for my setting.

China and Egypt are the champs for longevity.  Egyptian civilization lasted a long time but isn’t around anymore.  China would be a good choice.  My primary reason for not using China as a starting point was a desire to use minority groups, particularly religious minorities, as the origin story for the different nations on my planet.  There are undoubtedly religious minorities in China, and perhaps I will write them in along the way.  But the mainstream of Chinese civilization is so old and so recognizable the reader would have a hard time if I took any liberties with the culture to reflect a thousand years of changes on a new world.

Between the two extremes, there are a few choices.  The Jews are a long-lived religious minority.  For my purposes they have the same problem as China, being too well-known to be usable without causing the present to intrude upon the story I want to tell.

Persian civilization is truly ancient, going back to at least 1000 BC.  That’s old enough.  Persia has been host to many religious minorities over time.  I chose one of the most recent, the Baha’i faith, as the religion of the New Persian empire.  The idea of a small and persecuted religious minority settling a far-off colony made sense to me.  The Persian substrate provides a rich history to mine for architecture, names, stories, and culture.

New Persia is not Islamic.  Religious minorities from Earth settled the planet orbiting the star 70 Ophiuchi A, and Islam is in no way a minority faith.  Neither is Catholic or Protestant Christianity.  There are far too many believers in either religion to qualify.  A decision about the setting of the book I made early on precluded most human faiths.

Far from having any agenda or commentary on the present, New Persia is a result of assumptions I made when I first started writing the book.  The decision to use an old civilization and a religious minority for a backdrop led to Persia and the Baha’i faith.

How well I succeeded in creating a believable world is up to the reader.