Writing Colonies XXXV: The Culture of Tauron

Caprica itself is, basically, modern-ish America but with hats.  Sagittaron, we know from Galactica, is largely made up of religious types who eschew medicine.  But, thanks to Caprica, Tauron is the world with the richest depictions among the Twelve Colonies.  

Of course, as I'm writing, I'm including all sorts of aspects of the culture we've seen, and I have to fill in some blanks, too.  This means I also have to tackle the origins of some of this stuff.  Not to worry; I won't be giving Taurans tattoos, mourning gloves, the "dirt eater" epithet, and ancient Greek as a language in one fell swoop like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did (wherein Indy got his whip, his chin scar, his hat, and his fear of snakes in one day).

Let's hit a few of the big points and I'll give you a peek at how it's handled in Colonies of Kobol - Book Twelve: Tauron.  After the JUMP.

Writing 'Colonies' Part XXIII: Have I gone mad?

Yeah, so ... I'm still working on Canceron, that hasn't changed.  Remember how I said I had an idea about how to build up the first part that I didn't like?  How that part was too slight?  Well, I had an idea about how to add some content and context, so I started writing the other day.

I may have gone mad.

Once you read what I've written (this is the first of the planned four such parts of new material), you'll understand my question.  You might even recognize its inspiration.  Read it after the JUMP.

Book Five: History and Theology

(For the record, the "History and Theology" I'm referring to is "real world" stuff; not BSG universe stuff.  That'll come in a later post.)

If you've read Book Five and don't mind having the curtain pulled back a bit and the magic spoiled, read on ...

Everything's VERY SPOILERY so it'll all come after the JUMP.

Book Five: Glossary

Most of these will be items from the Tiberian Empire, since a great deal of focus was on that side of the world.

See the full list of terms and titles after the JUMP.

Writing, Again: Part XIII - Myth and "-Machy"

When it comes to writing Lords of Kobol, some of my favorite stuff comes from mythology.  I'm talking about the Greek mythology; not the show's mythology.  I love reading up on these ancient tales and then trying to figure out a way for Cylons to enter the mix.

So it's fun.  It's a good storytelling exercise.  Like making Hades the lord of the underworld.  Or punishing Prometheus for revealing forbidden knowledge to mankind.  Sometimes I like to take the mythology and turn it completely around.  Honestly, the only example of that I can think of would be Hephaestus' loving marriage to Aphrodite.  (In mythology, their marriage was rather loveless and she slept with everyone but Heph.)

With Of Gods and Titans, there were many, many more myths to explore.  This gave me a skeleton of narrative ideas and also fertile ground for creative integration solutions.

Sorry.  I seemed to have gone corporate for a second there.

Basically, there are shloads of good myths about the gods and the Titans and that gave me shloads of opportunities to make cool stuff up.

For most people, they might not notice the connections to real myths.  If you're a Greek scholar or a fan of this stuff, you might even get more enjoyment from it all.  But for the masses, there's really only one Titan story we all remember:

Francisco de Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son"

Admittedly, it's pretty damned hard to forget that Cronus (Saturn) ate his kids.  Maybe you forgot that Rhea (Cronus' wife) hid baby Zeus and tricked Cronus into eating a stone instead, which later caused him to puke up his other children.  Still, that's the part about the Titans everyone knows.

I won't spoil it, but I will say that I'm particularly proud of how I made this story fit into the Lords of Kobol universe.

But there's a lot more myths to be had.

The war between the Olympians and the Titans is called, in Greek, "Titanomachy."  "-machy" is a suffix meaning "war" or "conflict."  Again, I won't spoil anything, but there are other "machies" involving the Titans and the Olympians.  They are the "Gigantomachy" and the "Typhonomachy."  If you want, feel free to Google or Wiki those, but maybe you'd like it better if you studied up on that biz after you read Book Five.

Still, for my purposes, it's intriguing to think that most people only know the story of Cronus eating his children.  But how did Zeus overthrow the Titans?  It's in the book.

I know I said this is a post about myth, but I won't be getting into the mythology of BSG here, or the whole One True God and its Messengers thing.  I'll save that for a later post about the theology of Book Five.

Mapping Kobol, Part III

Usually I post the maps for each book after the book itself is out, but, hey.  I'm trying to pass the time before the first week of October.  The book includes the maps, but they're small and in grayscale.  The first two books only had one map each, but I made three for Book Three.

(In case you're wondering how I devised the maps of Kobol in the first place, check out this older post.)

The first one is one you've seen before.  It's the City of the Gods (aka Theonpolis) taken from a screencap of BSG when Roslin's tripping balls on chamalla:

(As always, you can see bigger versions by clicking on them.)

The next one is of the suburbs of the City of the Gods.  Well, not really.  It's the surrounding area, including the mountains (such as Mt. Olympus and the Gates of Hera) and the Tomb of Athena:

Lastly, here's the now-familiar map of the whole world, but with Book Three points of interest:

Hmm.  Lots of military bases.  I wonder what that implies?  Did you notice that the symbol for Cylon facilities is a pentagon?

QUIZ: who can tell me the one place name, other than City of the Gods, that does not come from ancient Greece or other ancient places, languages, etc.?  Tell me the place name and whence it came and I'll give you a copy of Book Three before anybody else.  (Leave your answer in the comments below, along with your Twitter or email address.)

Lords of Kobol - Book Three: The Final Exodus will be available for download in the first week of October.

Visual Inspiration

Before I got too far into writing LoK (Lords of Kobol, just in case you didn't pick up on that), I fell into a mild slump and had trouble visualizing many of the elements I had in mind.  

I wanted a distinctive Greek flavor, given that the gods I had in mind were very Greek.  Sure, there are plenty of pics of temples online for me to see, but that wasn't doing it.  And I couldn't picture every single character in the book wearing a toga.  (They don't.)  I needed a Greek element blended with something from the Galactica-verse.  I took it upon myself to whip something up.

Now, I'm not saying that's what I have in mind for all my Cylons to look like, or even just the warriors.  It's just a Greek helmet with a red eye scanning about (and speaker vents behind the mouth area).  There are other Greek helmets out there that I liked the look of better, but this was the easiest for my Photoshop-novice self to do up.

At any rate, this simple digital doodle was enough inspiration for me to start typing again.