Category: writing

One of the questions from J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings is: how did the bad guys build an army of orcs? Each of his primary bad guys, first Morgoth and then Sauron, built up an army, but then those armies diminished as soon as the bad guy was gone. I’ve got a theory, and it doesn’t even require dark magics. You could even do this at home, if you are an evil overlord. Here’s how.

Physical and Mental Characteristics

The story goes that orcs, as a species, started out as predominantly elves, with some later experiments with humans, who were corrupted by the bad guys. The orcs were humanoid and generally filled with hate for the other humanoids and anything not corrupted. They also were not prone to building things of their own, but had to steal from other cultures or be forced to build things by their masters. They hated their masters as well.

If you look at the orcs as a people with a select group of characteristics, it becomes obvious that a sufficiently powerful leader could create such a group today using real humans. The physical differences between the orcs and everyone else are just enough to make it easy to see who is who. The mental limitations are just enough to keep them from turning on their masters, but not enough to keep them from fighting or from being sneaky when needed. The anger issues seem inborn, as though they are predisposed to a lack of impulse control. You may have heard of specific humans in our world who have one or more of these characteristics.

I’ve met many people in my life, so I have an assortment from which to pick in this example. I’m picking neo-Nazis because many readers would have an idea who they are, though there are others I could use for this example. Whoever I pick, someone will be upset, so too bad.

Most of the neo-Nazis that I’ve encountered are not mentally complex. Human mental complexity spans quite a range, and these people have tended to be below average. Most of them are still functional and generally capable of holding a job or managing speech. Most of them will not be doing calculus. This is how they get snared into the Nazi rhetoric. They don’t have the intelligence to understand why they aren’t rich, famous, or powerful, but someone came along and said it’s because of some outside group such as the Jews or black people.

In news coverage of some recent white supremacist rallies, you can see the faces of those involved. In some instances, you can see the sign of conditions such as fetal alcohol syndrome or other mild developmental disabilities. One must assume that some of those individuals do not understand their condition or how it affects what they can do in life. However, the leaders can quickly prey on that lack of understanding to fill their numbers. They fill the followers with nonsense about superiority that can easily be overcome by “inferior” peoples.

How to Use This

Imagine that you have decided that you are going to be a Dark Lord and you have the financial means to engage in that activity. You have a kingdom of your own where you can do what you like. You’ve decided to build an army that will be a threat to others but are not clever enough to be a threat to you. After all, you know that you are the smartest and all-around best entity that ever existed and should be worshiped by everyone else.

You start by separating out the ones who are likely to follow you and you get them angry by telling them that the rest of the world is keeping them down. You, of course, are their only friend and, if they stick with you, they will eventually rise up to be in charge of all those inferior people who are oppressing them. Anyone who doesn’t go along with what you say is obviously collaborating with the inferior people and must be ended.

Selective Breeding

If you have enough time, you can start selective breeding. You encourage anger and mild stupidity. You want followers who will be brave in their group, but need the group, otherwise you risk an uprising. You don’t want any individualists.

You can also encourage distinct physical traits so you can easily tell who is a member of your army and who comes from elsewhere. This is an important thing in groups such as the white supremacists because a simple, visual cue about who is a “good guy” and who is a “bad guy” is a must. It’s like an easy way to tell who is on each team. Since your army will be made of simple minded creatures, anything more complex will be confusing. The appearance is also a quality that makes your people “superior”. Anyone without the correct physical characteristics would be culled.

A side effect of this selective breeding is that two characteristics would develop naturally. Most of the genetic material would come from the physically strong, aggressive members. These individuals would have the strength to breed whenever they wanted, and would produce most of the offspring. A second, smaller group of breeders would be made up of those who are sneaky. They would use stealth and cunning to breed without conflict with the strong ones. This would give your army two types of viciousness in a good proportion, preferably about 80/20 or 90/10.

Going to War

Once your army had sufficient size and the right characteristics, you could unleash it on your neighbors. This could gain you more ground, at least at first. Any damage caused to your soldiers was just more evidence of the other people keeping them down. With an aggressive breeding program and a general disregard for the safety of your army, you could stay at war for quite a while.

In Tolkien’s works, the orc armies were only strong when being guided. Whenever the most recent dark lord was deposed, the size of the armies diminished. Small pockets of orcs withdrew to isolated areas where they rarely encountered other people. This makes sense for a species that was bred to be less capable of doing anything but fight. They simply cannot take care of themselves, so it takes an external leader to organize them and keep them healthy long enough to grow.

This means that you must make sure that you are around to keep motivating them. If you are dead or otherwise not viable, you army will fall. Small pockets of them will survive, but it will probably not be the strongest of them unless a smarter one appears to lead. It’s also possible that the skeeky ones will last longer just because they know how to avoid danger.

If there is a chance that you will not survive, make sure that there is at least one person that you would choose as a successor. That person must understand how to manage your army of monsters and your overall goals. However, you must take steps to make sure this person is not a threat to you.

You must also make it understood to your army that if you are gone it is because you had to return to your heavenly plane to fight enemies there. That means the army should be worshipping you. If things go poorly for them it is because they are not doing enough to defeat their earthly foes. They should try harder to get back into your good graces.

The Threat from the Enemy

Your enemy will be made up of individuals who are healthier and smarter than your individuals. The enemy will have a big weakness: they don’t want to go to war. That gives you a big advantage and the enemy scrambles to change from their peacetime lifestyle.

The specific threat posed by your enemy is that they will kill large quantities of your soldiers. The enemy will also attempt to invade your lands and kill you too. In today’s world, that means a drone strike on your headquarters. You may want to dig deep.

The longer term threat comes in the form do-gooders among the enemy. They will want to capture and rehabilitate your forces. With good healthcare and nutrition, proper education, and breeding taking place in a violence-resistant environment, your hard work will be wiped out in a few generations. That’s all it takes to turn your army of freaks into a slave class living peacefully among your enemies.

The best bet is to try to shorten the time to maturity for your monsters and make sure they are breeding like rabbits. You want them to consider the enemy to be a food source. Understanding that there will be a high mortality rate, send out as many of these things as you can as fast as possible.

Conclusion

This all seems highly unlikely to happen. There aren’t really any tyrants with the money and land to do this, we keep telling ourselves. The main issues are that those same tyrants don’t understand how this would work nor do they have the patience. Note that the conversion from humans to fiends takes generations, and no single tyrant has time for that. This is something that would have to be worked on by a dynasty, or at least a secret government research branch. Can you really imagine a government doing something like that?

The Fall semester has finally ended. Maybe now I can get back to some writing… maybe. Already, my mind has been a blur of things to write. It’s almost overwhelming, but some of it has already squeaked out.

I’ve had a few short poems show up. They have been the silly, dark poems that my mind tends to favor. One of them has already made it to this site (read it here). These kinds of things often show up in my head, but I rarely have time to write them down during class, so they drift away into the universe, like so much dandelion fluff.

With the end of the semester, I’ve already had one instance where an idea woke me and demanded to be written. It was just the general idea, so it has a way to go before completion. The idea was for a better follow up to the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, this one involving the great grandson of Fraser’s character. I should look a little bit into writing for movies; I’ve got a partially written follow up to Hogan’s Heroes just sitting in my pile of things to write.

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my novel. I’m not sure what genre it really fits, and that has hampered my attempts to find an agent. I’ve gotten really positive feedback from the agents who’ve seen it, but it wasn’t what they were looking for. One possibility would be to serialize the novel on this site just to try to get publicity. The goal of doing that would be to get enough attention that I could sell my other novels. It’s an idea.

Another thing I would like to do is to finish illustrating a couple of my poems. There are some that just need illustrations to finish them off. If I do that, I may put “dramatic readings” of them on YouTube or something similar. Again, this would to help generate name recognition and overall exposure for the writing.

Naturally, I won’t accomplish all everything in the break between semesters. At least the Spring semester schedule is a more normal schedule with only one night class. My energy levels should be better and I should be able to accomplish more outside of work. That’s the goal anyway.

Mary had a little stalker
Who couldn’t understand, “No”
And everywhere that Mary went
The Stalker would surely go
The cops said that their hands were tied
So Mary bought a gun
And when the stalker went too far
His stalking days were done.

I looked at my last posting to see that it was in September 2017. Today is the third of December, and almost the end of that. That tells me only one thing: it has been a really long and busy semester.

This particular semester has been busier than the previous ones. The schedule has been a mix of long days, irregular hours, and far too much to do. Just a week before classes started, the office cancelled one of my classes due to low enrollment. They replaced it with another class, one I had never taught before. New book in hand, I dug into the material so I could serve my students well. Fortunately, I had used the material in “real” work before, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch, but it still took a lot of time.

Then there were my doctors. I have three primary medical people: the internist, the diabetes specialist, and the cardiologist. Two of them have lectured me about not keeping to a proper schedule for diet, exercise, taking my pills, etc. The cardiologist would probably join in, but I only get a checkup there once a year and won’t see them till spring. The disruption to the pills, eating, and so forth probably contribute to my exhaustion. I’ll have to look into it.

I have written a couple of things, though. It’s mostly just notes for other pieces. For example, I figured out how to create an army of horrible fiends such as the Orcs of Tolkien’s stories. No, it doesn’t involve overworking some cranky, old teacher; that’s how you get supervillains who create armies of horrible fiends. I hope to have that little essay written and posted before too long.

My classes for this semester end this week, followed by a week of final exams. Once that is done, I have a few contracted work days for wrapping up this term and preparing for the next. This means that grading drops off appreciably, so I have more free time. Since my school is actually closed from Christmas to New Year (no one allowed for liability reasons), I should have a bit of time to do even more writing. I’m looking forward to it.

With all that free time, who knows how much I can post. I might even get enough to keep me over until May when my next break comes at the end of spring classes.

I’m not sure about my novel writing skill; still collection rejections from agents. However, my complex data and abstract modeling talents have always served me well. Since my teen years, I’ve been slowly building a fictional world along with all its peoples and histories. That leads to the issue of keeping track.

At first, I just wrote general notes in my notebooks. Occasionally, I wrote a short story, or part of one, to illustrate an event or notable personage. This was good for a start, but it is easy to get overwhelmed. My boxes and shelves are stacked with old notebooks, some from as far back as the 1980s.

Fortunately, I like to read history. The history folks are fairly good at organizing events and people. Tools such as timelines really help. Concurrent and convergent timelines start to get complex, but clearly illustrate how events happen at different place but the same time, sometimes coming together. Short biographies help too.

If you read more heavily into Tolkien’s Hobbit books, and I assume you do, you see occasional references to books of information that only exist inside his fictional world. These tomes are written inside the story by the denizens there. This is a good example of something that I started doing.

While writing some historical notes about my world, it was sometimes easier to do it from the perspective of a person from that world. Many of the characters are of a group called Lovelos (IPA ,loʊ.vɛl’.oʊ). As I wrote their historical notes, I would make reference to their other interesting volumes. At first, this was just to amuse myself, such as referencing Royal Lovelo Intelligence Manual on Self Defense, Volume 7 Assassination. Making these asides also kept me from branching off into another set of notes at the time. Eventually, it became a way to keep the world notes themselves.

Since the Lovelos figure so prominently in my stories, they were good candidates for historians. As a result, I now slowly transfer the old notes, and write all the new ones from the histories of the Royal Lovelo Intelligence Service. By keeping the index in a spreadsheet, I can organize them. I assume that I will have the whole thing organized and complete-ish shortly after my three-hundredth birthday.

There are times when I need to note something that the Lovelos would not know. That is easy to handle for two reasons. First, most of the other peoples have at least some literate persons capable of chronicling the happenings of the day. Second, the Royal Lovelo Intelligence Service is not above copying or stealing the documents of other peoples. Their preferred way to handle this is to steal the document, copy it, and return it without the other people noticing.

Between timelines, short stories, and an official in-story chronicling agency, I can organize my notes and make them easier to review as I write more. If you have a world of your own, it may be worthwhile to do this yourself. Of course, if you are building your own world, it will take up quite a bit of time you should be spending in the real one.