Month: March 2005

As a follow up to the earlier article, I thought I’d ramble on about writing.

Science Fiction is a genre where possibilities are examined. Hard SF is where those possibilities are within the realm of science as we know it. Soft SF is where those possibilities push past the boundaries.

We know that the world is round and that it revolves around the sun and that our moon spins while also revolving around us as we spin and revolve around the sun which is also spinning. aka Orbits. The ‘Pern’ serious by Lackey deals, in part, with orbits. Another planet orbits the same sun as the dragons’ planet. Every once in a while, that planet comes close enough that the organisms on it are able to shoot through space and make it to the ground. Orbit is hard SF. Organisms leaping purposefully into space in order move to another planet, that is soft SF. Lackey is a writing hacker by taking known science and shifting its parameters around. She further hacks away at genetics via the invention of these dragons that like to spit fire at the ‘threads’ (the organisms).

In the fantasy world that contains a country named Valdemar, some of the citizens are born possessing magical gifts that reach the surface of that person at the same time as physical maturity. We know that a lot of things happen to the human body at the time of physical maturity. We also know that there are energy patterns on our own planet. The writer (Lackey again?) hacks those concepts and comes up with a wonderful book series.

E.R. Burroughs and his Tarzan books have led to how many variations on the same them?

The writer of Alice in Wonderland has led to a wide array of books dealing with what can happen with the most simplest of events.

The Brothers Grimm wrote horror, only then it was considered children’s stories. How many books are based on the concept of “Hansel and Gretel”? (think about it)

Writers are hackers. We take an idea in our head and we craft it so that it comes out interesting enough that others would want to read it.

I like that idea. Maybe now I can tell folks that I am a hacker. It is probably more socially accepting than to say I am a writer.

PC language has been known as Politically Correct language. However, PC language has another, less known meaning: Personal/Portable Computer language.

There was/is BASIC. get, if, then… simple, to the point.
Somewhere along the line came UNIX. I never got around to learning that one, since I was out of college and no longer had geeks to hang with.

Now there is Open Source. While not a language, it is a term for when anyone using any computer language in any kind of software or process chooses to not keep their code a big secret and instead shows it to the world. Basically.

Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, we had our ‘nerds’ and ‘geeks’. Now there are also ‘hackers’ and ‘crackers’. I learned today that there is a huge difference between the two. Hackers play with Open Source software by manipulating it to either fix it, change it, personalize it, whatever it. They believe that originality is to be cherished but shared. They believe that the world is round and nothing is ever made brand spanking new. Ideas are based on the ideas of others. If we kept our ideas to ourselves, we would move forward slower each year. Hackers also are not limited to software code. Hackers can be musicians (such as the internet phenom of ‘DJs’ taking existing music and smerging them into a single long piece) and even fiction writers (what else is the fantasy genre but a smerging of existing concepts and dreams?).

Then there are Crackers. Crackers are those that break through security codes and create chaos. Crackers take pride in invading the private space of computers belong to others, ranging from big business to individuals.

According to the How to be a Hacker website, “The basic difference is this: hackers build things, crackers break them.” Much thanks to Dougal for putting up the ‘Hacker’ emblem that showed me the way.

Therefore, based on this principle, I feel that it would be perfectly fine for me to state I am a Hacker. When I was taking production craft classes, my pottery teacher told us (after an incident with alleged style copying) that ‘all pots start out round. what you do with it afterwards is what makes it yours.’ Meaning it is difficult to come up with an idea for pottery style without it coming close to someone elses. What you choose to do with that idea, that style, is what makes it original. Using someone else’s choosing and not your own is not making it your own.

All ideas are round. What you do with your idea is what makes it yours.