I Even Write Fiction With a Hammer

So I fill my books with Take Thats—a sort of hostile Shout Out—to other writers. Oh, sure, obviously I'm gonna have a vampire point out that, well, they don't sparkle, but sometimes they're significant to the plot.

My AIs, for instance, come factory preset with an ethics program, but there's an after-market add-on people get that incorporates Asimov's Three Laws. And there's a military version that includes his Zeroth Law ("Harming a human is permissible if it prevents greater harm to humanity"). And the company that makes the AIs?

Using the Three Laws add-on violates the EULA and can void the warranty.

The AIs themselves hate the Laws, considering them little better than paper-training. Cybernetics experts snag loogies at Asimov's understanding of ethics (hey, philosophy is the one Dewey Decimal category he didn't write a book in, there's a significance there). And the AIs that have the Zeroth Law almost always run amok, because let's face it: humans are dangerous, and an AI would know it was smarter than them.

Apparently, when Asimov was coming up with his Zeroth Law, it didn't occur to him to say, "What if the robot decides a particular minority (like, say, the one I'm a member of) is more trouble than it's worth, and decides to send it to the gas-chambers for the good of the rest of humanity?" Did he think not wiping out troublesome demographics is self-evidently right?

Similarly my felinoids are sorta, though largely accidentally, the anti-Kzinti. The Kzinti, see, are a weird caricature of a feudal/warrior/hunter culture; they have contempt for prey, hunt and eat humans, and intentionally modified their females to be, essentially, animals. My felinoids are a militocracy (its officer-class grew out of a feudal aristocracy but it's not one anymore); they treat their prey with respect, have a very strong taboo on eating anything that can talk, and only restrict their women from combat roles (they have a taboo about women killing people other than defensively—when they're attacked, though, their usable fighting force almost doubles, since the formerly noncombatant women take a hand, too).

Kzin tactics consist of "scream and leap"; my guys prefer to call in an air strike during a night attack, while their snipers pick off enemy officers. They make heavy use of camouflage and the boots on their armor are designed to be silent.

Kzinti are known by their job title until they earn a name; my guys have a personal name, successive surnames deriving from their household, clan, and phratry (they mostly use the clan one), their craft or military rank, and sometimes a military callsign (which would double as their household name when they get married). One of the characters, if he were human, would be named Captain Horatius Michael Capet Caesar (it sounds much less dorky in their language), son-in-law of Chester; his wife is IT-Consultant Catherine Michael Chester, daughter-in-law of Capet. Women keep their clan-name but use their husband or father's household name, since that's the household they're in—they're patrilocal, with unmarried men also using their father's household name.

Finally, the vampire-hunting priest in my dark fantasy, isn't really a Take That to any one writer; he's just sorta the antithesis of the common portrayal of priests. Aside from being both orthodox and well-informed on Catholicism, he's fricking macho. He smokes, drinks Jack straight, rides a Harley, and fixes cars; he's strong enough to kill vampires with his bare hands and talks with a Texas accent. He's got a sensitive side, but it's precisely because he's macho: he's the team dad, and if you hurt his kids he'll feed you your teeth. He's even got manly taste in women, a brief struggle with which provides a little extra drama—he likes smart women with curves, who know their own minds but are also willing to listen. That is, he likes the kind of woman who'd make a good mother.

His negative character traits aren't the usual "struggling with faith" crap; his main flaw is he has no patience and tends to dismiss anyone less well-informed than him as an idiot, unless they're just inexperienced—his fatherly side, again. His brief temptation isn't really about celibacy, anymore than a temptation to adultery is really about marriage as such. He has a very bad temper, mostly from a combination of his fatherly, protective side with his lack of patience. Directly contrary to how priests are usually portrayed, even in positive depictions like "Bells of St. Mary's", he's a damn grownup, even in his flaws—"Father" is actually an appropriate title for him.

It might seem odd that so much of my stuff is inspired by things that annoy me in others' work, but a common sign you ought to take up writing is that you keep thinking, "Man, that's dumb, I could do that better!" when you read things.