Today we cover odd facts that authors dig up when they’re researching stories. Here’s the question I posed to todays commentators:

What’s the oddest thing that you learned while researching a story?

I’m not a novelist so I can’t answer this question properly myself, but I’m going to fob one off on you regardless. I did do some research for a pair of Hong Kong action movie inspired games (one roleplaying the other collectable card) back in ‘95. Research for this consisted of watching countless hong kong action movies in a variety of subgenres. There was a point where I’d watch three of them a night, falling asleep on the couch lulled by melodramatic plots of wire fu. We (I designed these games along with Robin D. Laws) decided to use an aspect of Chinese geomancy as a central conciet in the game universe. Robin did do some research on Feng Shui but it was largely informed by its treatment in a low budget action flick titled Bury Me High. So our use of the Feng Shui concept was faithful to the source material but not really faithful to the bona fide, “real world” (if you can say that about magic) Feng Shui.

We named the card game Shadowfist (which was cool, it’s still in print with a publisher that has published some of my designs under his name) and we named the roleplaying game Feng Shui. The latter name seemed cool at the time, it had a nice sound to it, a nice obscure chinese name for a weird kung fu action roleplaying game. Unfortunately Feng Shui became all the rage a year later as a form of interior decorating with American yuppies. Not exactly an odd fact, more of an odd occurence really.

(You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not too chipper today. I’m quitting smoking. Grrr, piss off the lot of ya!)

Now over to our commentators:

Terry Bisson
I was asked by U of Nebraska Press to write an intro for E.R. Burroughs’s The Moon Maiden. While researching it, I was surprised (and I admit, alarmed) to learn that the Moon actually IS a hollow sphere inhabited by centaurs who lust after our Earth women. NASA has kept this super quiet.
Terry Bisson is a Hugo and Nebula award winning author

Naomi Kritzer
I don’t know if this exactly qualifies as “odd,” but it’s a fascinating bit of obscure historical information. A little bit of background information, first: a small percentage of babies each year are born “intersexed” — they have ambiguous genitalia that might be considered either girl parts, or boy parts. For much of the 20th century, babies born with ambiguous genitalia were assigned a sex and operated on surgically to make them look as much like the assigned sex as possible. This has become controversial in recent years. The fascinating obscure historical information: in the middle ages (when surgery, obviously, was not possible), a baby born ambiguous was presumed male. However, if the person grew up a bit and decided they were not male, they were allowed to switch over, and become female. But only once. They could never switch back.

I find that incredibly fascinating, but I haven’t (yet) written a story with this piece of information.

Naomi Krtizer is Fantasy author behind the Dead Rivers Trilogy

Steven Savile

Rather than ‘odd’ I tend to wander across disturbing facts/claims.

One of the most disturbing tidbits I ever came across was that as late as the 1960s the UK Government had scientists in its employ charged with looking into synaptic inhibitors as a way of preventing soldiers from feeling pain. These experiments went back to the old nature vs nurture arguments of the criminologists (including the likes of Lombroso) and the supurious idea that lesions on the brain could turn you into a criminal. Actually, that and the fact that the notations of the Dachau aviation experiments of scientist, Sigmund Rascher, who studied the effect of pressure on Jewish prisoners (exposing them to greater and greater pressures until they died so that he could discern the actual cause of death) were vital in the success of the American Space Program. It’s a dark not-so secret. I don’t know, this kind of stuff feels fundamentally flawed to me in terms of humanity. I understand the drive of science but it always makes me think of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s apes picking up the stick to use as a weapon. [Sigmund Rascher came to be known as the father of Space Medicine Ed]

The one fact that for some reason never registered in my brain prior to research and refused to leave once I had stumbled across it was that the same man who recorded all of those macabre fairy tales (Grimm) laid down the structure for Germanic grammar (Grimm’s Laws) and the German Dictionary. About an hour later I came across an old article on the microfiche talking about Hilter’s interest in grammar. Now come on… As soon as I read this a huge Da Vinci Codian conspiracy kicked off inside my brain claiming that in fact Grimm had locked the dark secrets of the fairy tale monsters inside the laws of grammar and the dictionary of seemingly random words like some out-in-plain sight Necronomicon, and that essence of evil had been decoded by one failed art student…

Steven Savile writes for Dr Who, and has written novels in Games Worskhop’s popular Warhammer series (Inheritance, Dominion & Retribution), and has a Celtic fantasy, Slaine: the Exile, due out this Christmas. He also co-edited Elemental: the Tsunami Relief Anthology
for Tor.

Alma Alexander
The oddest…? I’m not entirely sure - I’ve had serendipity happening, with stuff I needed falling into my lap just as I needed it - when I was writing “The Secrets of Jin Shei” and needed alchemy as a plot device I went searching for some information on what *I* knew as alchemy - the Western philsopher’s-stone kind of alchemy - expecting to have to tailor it to the “chinese” background of my story, and I was utterly astonished to find that an entire Chinese school of alchemy already existed and was just waiting there for me to plug it into the plot without any modfiications whatsoever. Finding out about things like the Beggars Guild in Chinese cities, too - I needed something like that but I could not begin to INVENT the complex world that I discovered as already existing out there…

The most surprising…? It shouldn’t have surprised me that much, not really, I’ve lived long enough to have seen the existence of this - but I never cease to be astonished at the depths to which some arbitrary member of the human race can sink in order to torture, humiliate , and creatively annihilate some other member of the same human race. Some of the things I read as fact you could not INVENT in fiction and have the character perpetrating such things remain believable in the context of your story. And yet, it happens every day, under all our noses, somewhere. Suffering is a disease that’s endemic to us as a race, as a species; it’s part of being human, it seems. It is saddening to learn - by reading true accounts of real events - that there will always be people who cannot seem to be content unless someone else is being made unhappy.
Alma Alexander is the author of The Secrets of Jin-Shei and Changer of Days.

Christopher Rowe

It’s something that just came up recently, actually, though I’m not sure whether the info itself is as odd as the tone in which it was conveyed to me. I was on the phone to a science museum curator in Philadelphia, asking for information about snails. The character I’m contributing to the next round of George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards books is, for want of a better term, a snail-centaur.

He asked “You’re researching this because you want to know what characteristics a snail man would have?”

I told him that was more or less it and he replied, with no hesitation at all, “Snail man would be a _tremendous_ lover.”
Christopher Rowe is a writer of Speculative Fiction who blogs at UnCommonwealth

Mike Allen

My stories and poems tend to be more about internal landscapes than historical events or scientific facts, so I can’t cite any strikingly bizarre trivia to you off the top of my head. (If you were asking about my newspaper stories, I could rattle off dozens of things, but that’s a different matter.) I’ve certainly mined some strange things from my own mind, though. Memory is a tricky place. My story “Humpty” stems from a nightmare I had as a kid — at least I assume it was a nightmare — in which a Humpty Dumpty doll I owned came to life and tried to strangle me in my crib. I don’t remember falling asleep before the attack or waking up afterward, I simply recall the fight with the doll as if it were any other childhood memory, like getting slapped for acting up in kindergarden or my futile attempts to climb the coconut tree in our yard when my family lived on Guam.
Mike Allen is a a poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher and journalist who blogs at The Plasteel Spider Factory

Catherine H Schaffer
Something odd and also fascinating that I learned is that the historical period known as the Dark Ages was kicked off by a mysterious global catastrophe that triggered several extremely cold “years without summer” in 535 AD, triggering worldwide plague and famine whose effects lasted hundreds of years. Further, it seems that all of human history has been punctuated by these catastrophic events, which seem likely to have been caused by impacts of asteroids. I based my article “If a Tree Falls…or the Secret History of Global Environmental Catastrophe” on this information, and the article subsequently won the Analog annual readers poll for best fact article, so I think the idea really struck a chord with a lot of people.
Catherine H Shaffer is a Science Fiction and Fantasy author

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