Big sky

Being at the Purbeck Literary Festival this week got me out to a beautiful venue on a beautiful sunny  spring day.  We were at Durlston Country Park, a stunning cliff-top setting where we were surrounded by sky and water.  The vast expanse of openness couldn't fail to lift the spirits.

The sky I was looking out on was standard Earth blue but it's got me wondering what variations we'll have in our SF stories.  I guess it depends on whether we want to people the planet with humans or not how wild we want our skies to get.  If we want the atmosphere to be one humans can breathe then that limits its chemical composition to one familiar to us.  But perhaps instead of being the familiar blue it might be more jade green, or have a reddish tint to the blue.

The night sky of our planet might be very different from Earth's.  Is the planet so far from the galactic centre that you can't see the misty veil of the Milky Way overhead?  Or are we in a different galaxy altogether where the stars are totally unfamiliar?  What about moons?  None, one, two, or multiple moons like our gas giant planets?  How many suns?  The planet might be in a binary system.  That would really confuse human diurnal rhythms.  And the shadows would be confusing and unsettling too.

What lives in our alien sky?  Birds?  Are they dangerous predators, even to humans?   Can we see alien flying machines out of our window?  Is there a purple-clouded storm on the horizon?  Or a plague of deadly insects?  Or do your aliens live in sky cities that float   permanently through the clouds?

I haven't even started on space stations, satellites, or surveillance systems.  Skies are big places, places for big dreams.

Ceremonial robes

I wonder, do all cultures have some sense or ceremonial dress?  We're so used to humans dressing up in their finery to denote their power, status, and wealth that it has become a shorthand for us, an instant way of assessing an individual's status in society.

It is hard to imagine a political or religious leader in a human society without seeing them wearing some kind of finery at important occasions.

All human cultures have always revered gold.  The metal that doesn't rust has stood for a metaphor for longevity, its scarcity has given it great value and it indicates great wealth.  Even our earliest ancestors were buried with gold jewellery.

Rank insignia, gold braid, sashes worked in gold thread, these are all ways humans have sought to indicate how important they are.  We have many ways to show our high status.

I wonder how we'd react  if we met aliens who didn't share our need for external markers of status.  Would we underestimate the power of the scruffy-looking meditating old male, only discovering how important he was when his mind-controlled armaments wiped out or settlement?

Or what if we encountered an alien society that was the complete reverse of ours?  The young were the ones who wore gaudy robes and finery.  Age - and wisdom - was marked by ever-plainer garb.  What if enlightenment and understanding of the complexity of the universe reduced the complexity of the presenting persona on the outside?

A reversal of the human cultural code of greed and worship of precious metals would really confuse a first contact team.

What if?

What if? is the great SF writers' question.  We take a current situation and ask what if this disaster or development happened?  What if a key scientific discovery turns out to be completely wrong, or we make a new scientific discovery that turns everything we know on its head.

We can take what if? into asking about cultures too.  What if an alien civilization had this kind of religion or beliefs?  How would they react to humans coming into their world and wanting to exploit their religious icons?

SF is founded on some classic what if? questions.  What if FTL travel was possible?  What if we could communicate instantaneously from anywhere in the galaxy?  What if it was possible to travel vast distances between stars in weeks not aeons?  What if we could clone ourselves a thousand times and some of those clones went to war with each other?

I've played what if in the Panthera books.  Death Spiral asks what will happen when we start splicing genes together to "improve" people.  Death Song is about developing natural surveillance techniques.  In Eyemind I asked what if people started using artworks to programme people using subliminal messages.

What if? is a key SF writer's tool.  It challenges us to examine the present and imagine how the future would be changed by a key scientific discovery or shift in culture.

Creative creatures

As SF writers, we may think we have a complete free hand to create new creatures, but it isn't so.  The laws of physics will work the same elsewhere in the universe, and they give us the framework for, and provide the restrictions on, what we can create.

Our imagined life forms are constrained by the type of planet they live on.  What is its atmosphere like, what is the gravity there?  If the planet is smaller than Earth it will have lighter gravity and the creatures there may be able to run and leap much further than on Earth.  But the atmosphere might be thinner than a human is used to, and might cause us some problems.

Or perhaps your aliens don't live on or in a planet, but in the midst of the as-yet undiscovered dark matter that we think makes up ninety per cent off the universe.  They would be radically different creatures than planet-dwellers.  Would they eat dark matter for energy? And how would they reproduce?  Would they be swarms of microscopic beings with a group-mind?

If we're planet-bound, we have to consider the effects of evolution by natural selection on our creatures, and the principles of convergent evolution.  And when we stick to those rules it's difficult to come up with a unique creature that doesn't exist in some form on Earth, or in its waters.

Bioluminescence, parthenogenesis, electrical sensing of the environment, echolocation with natural sonar, navigation with natural magnetic compasses, thermal imaging, the use of the skeleton.  All these features are utilised by creatures on our own planet.  Raiding them, we can create unique new combinations.

Avatar's Na'vi are recognizeably humanoid, but they're ten feet tall and breathe an atmosphere slightly different from Earth's.  Anne McCaffrey's Hrrubans from the Doona books are walking big cats with language and high tech.  They characterise rank as being a "broad stripe", encompassing the wisdom of age.  The reference is to the broad stripe of contrasting colour running down the back of their fur.

In my Panthera books I've invented jagotheras, kingcats, and goldcats.  They're intended to be future versions of jaguars, cheetahs, and lions, but each has their own recogniseable habitat and markings that are based on what exists on Earth today.

It's easy for us to create exotic creatures, the skill lies in imagining the food webs, biospheres, and physical quirks of their homes that make them believable but different.

Future Crime

Tomorrow I'm off to the Purbeck Literary Fesrival to be a 'Dame for a Day'.  I'm joining a panel of cozy crime writers to talk about our books.  You might wonder what a science fiction writer is doing on a panel of crime writers, but just take a look at your favourite SF novels and see how many of them contain crime 

So what kinds of crime will we see in the future?  While we have some kind of money, we'll always have greed and theft.  Whether it's physical objects like gold bars, or noughts and ones in a computer, somebody will want to steal them. 

We'll always have people wanting revenge for something.  Messed-up childhoods aren't going to go away in the future. Family vendettas and feuds will also still exist.  They'll probably get bigger, and stretch across several star systems.

Future tech will also create future crime.  We're working on invisibility cloaks for real now, when we have them they'll be a burglar's, and an army's, dream come true.  Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song are based upon the exploitation of big cats for illegal medical research.  That's another theme which I see continuing.  Sadly, humans will continue exploiting the other creatures they share the universe with for their own gain.

Even our leisure time won't be immune from this.  In my novel Eyemind interactive artworks are programming people to self-harm through the use of illegal subliminal messages. The future equivalent of movies could contain subliminals too. If a revolutionary movement used the technology to programme people into joining its organisation a government would have a big problem on its hands.

I've even got a crime against a whole planet in my book Jade.  There is a symbiotic relationship between the planet's ocean and vegetation, which turns out to be an intelligent planimal.  They share information between them, and are truly sentient.  But of course humans want to move in and plunder the planet's natural resources for their own greedy ends.  In that book, it falls to a small and  enlightened group of humans to stop them.

As long as humans endure, so will crime.  And not only will we continue to commit them against our fellow humans, but when we meet alien species we'll probably rob them too.  Our crimes will get bigger.  Future crime will be a thriving activity for a long time to come.

The Characters of trees

Driving through the bare deciduous woodland forest yesterday got me thinking about the nature of trees and the roles they play in our stories.

If we want the planets we design to be suitable for humans to live on they have to have some mechanism for keeping the atmosphere as we need it.  On Earth trees fill this role magnificently, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. We wouldn't have an atmosphere we could breathe if it wasn't for the trees and other plants that maintain it.

Thinking about convergent evolution, any planet that has a suitable atmosphere for us is likely to have some form of trees.  But rather than seeing these familiar parts of the landscape as limiting our world design, we can embrace them as characters.

Tolkien famously did this in The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard the Ent, who takes the tree as character to its extreme as he can walk about and talk.  I did something rather different in my short story The Scent of Other Lives (one of the stories in my ebook collection Otherlives).  There the trees have branches they can move like limbs, and they communicate in some kind of telepathic way.

We can use them as characters who are conspicuous by their absence, as in Sarah Crossan's Breathe.  Her story is a cautionary ecological tale about what happens when we cut all the trees down.  There the few that exist are  hidden from view and tended in ways full of ritual.  

Avatar invented a new take on the idea of trees being the witnesses to our history.  The Tree of Souls was the keeper of the Na'vi's memories, the centre of their spirituality and history.  

In my book Panthera : Death Song the trees of the rainforest become characters.  Their denseness prevents my humans from doing things, and they provide home and sustenance for the jagothera big cats.  I've tried to capture the magic of the tropical sun rising and setting through the canopy, the dark foliage silhouetting a crimson and golden sky.

As well as being the essential lungs of an ecosystem, trees can be home.  Think of the massive Hometree in Avatar, a tree so huge it was a living cathedral.  Tall trees reaching into the sky give a planet a sense of continuity.  These guardians of the atmosphere have been here for many human generations, and will last for many more to come - if we don't cut them down.

The Great FEM-SF access debate

Yesterday I was in Chichester, West Sussex, a city on the south coast of England, checking out the SFF offering at a leading bookstore there.  I felt depressed about the lack of female representation yet again.

There's a perception that women don't read SF.  Certainly I've had a lot of women say that to me.  I think this is part of a vicious circle.  Analysing the covers of SFF books, the majority colour is black.   They're designed to appeal to what publishers think their male audience wants.

It's got me wondering if there's a case for FEM-SF, a separate genre of SFF fiction written by women, with feminist heroines as main characters, marketed to appeal to women.  SFF has such a bad rep with some part of the book buying public that they won't even look at it.  Which feeds the vicious circle, and the belief that it's a minority genre for men.

Perhaps more women would be attracted to the genre if the books had bright colourful covers.  And an absence of big guns, or the fantasy equivalent, big swords.  I'm not attracted to the military look, and probably most women aren't either.

And then there's the matter of the blurbs on the back of the books.  Check out how many of them are about someone slaying whole civilizations.  Hmm.  Maybe to draw women into the genre we need less macho blurbs too.  Even Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series has as many civilian characters and storylines as it does military.  On second thoughts, it has more.  And that's the whole point of those books.  They're about defending civilian freedoms from pirates who want to remove them.  It's a distinctly different slant to the universe-wide slayer war.

But mainstream publishers won't change the look of their books until they're convinced that it won't lose them market share.  Maybe this is a case for indie publishers to test the water first.

So how about it, Amazon?  Add a FEM-SF category to your book listings.  Maybe we indie authors might consider categorising our work as FEM-SF, specifically targeting a female audience.  Just maybe, if we show women that we're writing about them, about issues that have relevance to them, issues that will impact on their personal futures, we might just get them into the genre in big numbers and change the future of SFF.

Famous SFF rejections

To keep my morale up, I've been delving into how often classic books and bestselling authors were rejected.

It's almost funny, reading the list of classic books that editors decided had no future.  It makes me wonder why they chose to publish SFF if they couldn't see the potential in these works.  What books am I talking about?  Here's a list of some:

H.G. Wells. - The War of the World

George Orwell - Animal Farm

Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451

And now for some stats on the number of rejections:

Frank Herbert - Dune  -                          Rejected by 23 publishers 

Stephen King. - Carrie -                         Rejected by 30 publishers

Madeline L'Engle -  A Wrinkle in Time -  Rejected 26 times

It seems to me that publishers have never been able to spot a classic story when they see one.  And that gives me hope.  If these giants of the genre could keep going through the long years of rejection, then so can I.

No more chain mail bikinis

There's been a massive row brewing among the ranks of the Science Fiction Writers of America recently.  It was triggered by the picture of a scantly-clad woman in a chain mail bikini on the cover of members' Bulletin issue 200.  Not surprisingly, the female members of the SFWA were mightily pissed off by this.  And when they complained they were met with the usual response not to make a fuss, dear.  Some female members even went as far as to leave the organisation. 

This is depressing and dispiriting for a genre that is supposed to see the future.  Speculative fiction is just that, it speculates on the way things will be different in the future.  But judging by that very offensive cover of Bulletin 200, the future will be just as sexist as today.

Maybe this gives me a clue as to why I can't sell any of my stories that challenge rape and sexism.  Maybe - shock horror - SF is just as rooted in today's discrimination as every other genre.

There's a reason why I chose to write SF.  It's because I want to explore notions of a better future, a future where women aren't exploited, where they're admired for their brains and professional accomplishments instead of their bodies.

It seems like we still have a long way to go towards that ideal.  But when the professional association that every SF writer aspires to join appears to be as prejudiced as the rest of the world, that's a cause for great concern.  If our professional associations don't support us, then who else will?

Note to whoever did the artwork for Bulletin 200 : women don't go around wearing chain mail bikinis in our society.  In fact, many of us have never worn a bikini.  And that includes me, even when I was a slender young woman.  Images of bikini clad amazons just don't belong in the SFWA in the 21st century.  That rubbish was for the so-called Golden Age.  Let's leave it there.

The ansible

It's hard to imagine SF without the ansible now. The concept has been around for many years since Ursula le Guin invented it. Curiously, the story in which she did wasn't about the effects of the technology, it was about culture clash when members of two very different societies meet.

But later writers have taken and shaped her invention to their own purposes.  I'm thinking specifically  of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books.  Much of the action there revolves around messages sent instantaneously by ansible, or around anisbles being destroyed and solar systems being out of contact.

I've adopted the technology myself, specifically in Starfire, where Ria Behar, my tradeship  captain, is jumping about the galaxy in search of her missing uncle.  Like FTL, I find it hard to imagine the SF genre without instant interstellar communications.

Part of our desire for the ansible is wish-fulfilment.  It would allow us to reach out to the stars in a far more immediate way than we can today, when a signal we send to a robot spacecraft takes minutes or hours to reach it.

But instantaneous communication would also greatly aid warfare, as Elizabeth Moon demonstrates in the Vatta's War books.  Pirates equipped with shipboard anisbles would have an advantage over other fleets, and the potential for destruction is huge.  As always, we need to be careful what we wish for.

Why I love YA SF

One of the reasons I haven't been drawn to adult SF for a while is because my local bookshop is stuffed full of traditional white male SF space opera.  The few female SF authors they deign to stock are writing about prostitutes or kick-ass heroines, neither of which I can empathise with.

The issues I want to read about are more likely to turn up in YA SF these days.  There are some things in the genre I can't identify with, like going to school, which is thankfully far in my last.  I also can't be doing with first love stories.  But beyond these issues YA SF stories present us with important issues and questions.

Scott Westerfeld's Uglies/Pretties/Specials books show us what might happen if we don't change our obsession with beauty and the perfect body.  Sarah Crossan's Breathe is a cautionary environmental tale about what happens when you kill off all the trees.

Teri Terry's Slated gives us a nightmare world of a totalitarian state and mind-wiped children,  Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting show us what happens when ruthless corporations are left alone to experiment on vulnerable children.

The worlds these authors create are genuinely chilling, all the more so because most of them are near future SF, rooted in developments that are going on in our present societies right now.  

But I think the real reason I loveYA SF so much is because the ideas and messages in the books are wrapped up within a damn good story with a beginning, middle, and end, and twists and turns that keep us gasping and guessing.

If adult SF wants to appeal to a wider audience it would do well to learn from YA SF.  Ordinary people are forced into becoming extraordinary, and there are lots of strong feminist heroines saving the world. It's time we saw more of that in adult SF.

"As you know, Professor..."

These are the words any science fiction reader dreads seeing in a story.  They signal that a massive  info-dump in dialogue is about to begin.  As SF writers, we have to be far more subtle than that about how we build our world.  We need to know all about its geography, ecosystems, and geopolitics, but. that doesn't mean our readers do.

Just as the tech of the future is familiar to the people who use it, so is the scenery to the people who live in it.  Which means they don't go around noticing its every detail all the time.  We have to be selective about what we tell our readers.  We need to choose the information we give them on the basis of its relevance to our story.

Long descriptive paragraphs telling the reader about your world are out.  I did that in early versions of Eyemind, justifying the details on the basis that Keri was new to Latoya and as an artist she'd notice those things.  But the leisurely description of the sunset was slowing down the story, so it had to go.

All the descriptions of the tall purpletrees, the blueshell paths, the crimson sunset and brightly-coloured birds had to go.  They weren't relevant to the story.  But the scene at the end of chapter one when Keri gets trapped inside a very nasty interactive artwork are very relevant, and I've added more details of that in each rewrite.  It's relevant to the story because it shows how dangerous the artworks are, and shows that the contract she's signed up might be dangerous.

The novel now starts with her half-way through a briefing where she's learning about the suspect interactive artworks.  That could have been a classic case of "as you know, Professor", but I got round that by making Keri new to Latoya and an outsider.  So the briefing that's telling her what's going on tells the reader too, within the action of the scene.  The professor isn't being lectured to.

Describing the world in an eyeblink

One of the challenges for SF writers is describing the alien worlds your characters land on.  Even if   the world is Earth-like and the atmosphere is one that humans can breathe unaided there will be subtle differences from our home world.

The trick is to get the amount of description right.  Your characters might well be overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of a new world, but you don't want the reader to be overwhelmed too. And that means being selective in the details.

When I first wrote about Latoya in Eyemind I had the story starting with my main character Keri Starseer land on-planet at sunset and looking around her at the landscape.  It read like a travel brochure in my early drafts, and had to go.  Now I've dispensed with that whole scene and the novel starts with her mid-way through a briefing with her new employer.

We have to describe our world in an eyeblink.  In Panthera : Death Spiral I focus on the golden light and the dust of a savannah dawn.  In Panthera : Death Plain the setting is rainforest, and I sketch out its size by having Ren look down on an unbroken forest of green below her as she's  flying into the reserves.

Being specific helps us to fix the scene in the reader's mind quickly.  Something is not red, but ruby, crimson, or claret.  In Eyemind I describe a palace as being large and built of soft pink sandstone.  That's all the description I need for this minor location.  And when Keri is captured she is put into a cold cave with no light where she hears things scuttling about that remind her of large deadly spiders. I don't need any more description here.

Often the scenery will be familiar to your characters.  As we don't take great notice of places we know well, neither will your characters.  The details will pass by in an eyeblink.

The four-dimensional agorab has dimensionally morphed

I can hear you thinking "what is she on about?"  And that's the point.  Even though we're writing science fiction we still have to make ourselves understood.  And that means we have to find ways of describing our worlds and their creatures in ways our readers can understand.

I'm thinking of one much-feted SF book that is up for several awards in 2014 that left me feeling totally cold.  Part of that was because I wasn't fully engaged with the world.  And part of that was because multiple first-person viewpoints were continually jumping about the galaxy.  I'd only just worked out who was speaking and where they were before the writer jerked me off to another location with another character.

I've long had a problem with this issue of form over function in SF short stories.  I read extracts from stories in magazines and wonder why they got published.  Quirky viewpoints and obscure descriptions seems to win out often over simple storytelling.

Which brings me back to the four-dimensional agorab.  I have no more idea of what it is than you have.  It probably describes a piece of future tech, maybe alien tech.  But the point is that if I, or you, as the writer don't have a good idea of what our tech does no amount of alien-sounding words will make it convincing,

Part of the appeal of Star Wars is its used universe look.  Yes, there are anti-gravity drives, force fields, and FTL interstellar travel, but all that is everyday to the characters who inhabit that universe.  It's the equivalent of us turning on our laptop or iPad today.

We couldn't have imagined television three hundred years ago, and we can't even begin to imagine what tech we will have invented three hundred years into the future.  The pace of current tech development is so fast that, were we to see 300 years into the future, we wouldn't understand much about it.

But there is a way through this.  We have to remember that tech is invented for a purpose.  Find the need the tech is there to serve and you have the key to inventing something useful.  Remember the invention of the ansible?  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books relies heavily on that tech.  The stories wouldn't work without that technology.

And that's the key,  Make your tech serve some purpose and you'll already have gone a long way towards getting the reader to understand it,

It's the law

When we're world-building for SF we're not quite as free as it might first appear.  Our world has to be built according to laws of some kind, and then we have to stick to them.  As I'm writing SF rather than fantasy, my worlds have to conform to the known laws of science.  That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to have exotic aliens, it just means I have to work much harder to justify their existence. 

In the interests of story, we generally want our human characters to be able to move about freely when they're on-planet, and that usually means putting them on a planet that's not dissimilar to earth.  But if you think that limits you too much, think Avatar.  In many respects that world was familiar.  It had jungles, an atmosphere, oceans.  But within those parameters is scope to be exotic.  The bioluminescent forest at night was an extension of the bioluminescence some plants on Earth have, but scaled up and with every plant glowing it made for an alien world.  There were horses and birds on that world too, and flying dinosaurs.  Every creature has a similar counterpart on Earth, and yet they were truly unique.  

Pandora has trees too, but while they're recognizable as such, some are much more than mere trees. In the Tree of Souls I see the form of Earth's weeping willow in its arching branches, but everything else is different.  The tree has its own form of sentience, a role as memory-keeper, something no Earth tree can do.  The Na'vi too are recogniseable.  They're a standard humanoid body form, but they're ten feet tall and much thinner in the body than humans,

The rules we set up for building our world will influence the society and culture of the people who live there.  The Na'vi live in the forest, and respect and worship the natural world.  Species who live on the ocean where there are huge creatures would most likely build up legends, and probably some kind of religion, around the creatures.

If there are several different species populating your world, each will have their own culture and moral code.  If they are organised societies they will have some form of law.  What is forbidden for them?  Are they free to choose their friends?  Or is there a strict caste system that prevents free thought?  And what happens when an outsider comes in and shows that their rules don't make sense?

Consistent biology, creature design, and laws and cultures arising out of the environment and what its people do there, allow us to tell a convincing but alien story,

My favourite authors - Scott Westefeld

Scott Westerfeld is the author of, I think it's eighteen novels now.  His characters range from AIs to steampunk sentient flying creatures, and he's written both adult and young adult books.

My favourite books of his are the Uglies/Pretties/Specials series.  Convincingly written from the viewpoint of a teenage girl, it warns of the dangers of our beauty-obsessed society.

In the world of Uglies, everyone calls themselves Ugly until their bodies are re-shaped by extreme cosmetic surgery and body sculpting in their teenage years.  Every teenager can't wait to be old enough to be made Pretty.

Of course, this world of beautiful people isn't as benign as it looks.  There's a price to be paid for being Pretty. But they don't know what it is until Tally stumbles upon the truth.  Scott has set up a brilliant world where people are controlled by beauty in far more terrifying ways than even the present day.

Scott manages to show us the dangers of accepting a culture where we're encouraged to cut our bodies open, inject them with dangerous stuff, and think of it as success.  In Uglies and Pretties, the characters pay the ultimate price for their acceptance of beauty.  They lose their freedom to think for themselves.  But, crucially, Scott gets over his message without preaching to us, which makes the stories even more powerful.

What I love most about these books is that the story is a modern-day parable.  There are many women who are prepared to turn themselves into stick-thin airhead false blondes if they think it will make them more "popular".  Take a look at Uglies and Pretties, and don't do it.

The cross-genre queen

Sentient starships being attacked, illegal terraforming of planets, illegal construction facilities on a sentient planet, illegal dumping of toxic waste.  These are the topics I've dealt with in some of my SF novels, and at first it's hard to see what they have in common.

But they all contain crimes, in many of my books very big crimes.  Crimes against a planet, or attempted murder of other sentient species.  And yet until recently I've always seen my work as pure SF. 

Perhaps one of the reasons my books haven't been picked up by publishers in the past is because they lay in that no-woman's-land of cross-genre.  Yes, I was writing in the future, and yes, my books contained future tech, but they were also about people doing things they shouldn't, things that were morally wrong.

When I look back on some of my earlier works I see in Snowbird illegal terraforming, and the attempted murder of a sentient starship.  In my novel Jade the whole planet is sentient.  Humans want to come in and destroy its intelligence by mining the Fire Crystal that stores the planet's memories for starship drives.  In Eyemind, the crime is using illegal subliminals to cause people to self-harm.

I've always been the cross-genre queen.  There's as much crime in my books as there is SF.  And in the past that's been a problem. Nobody wanted books that fit awkwardly between two genres.  

Thankfully, that's now changing, and cross-genre books are everywhere.  And I now have a label for what I write, thanks to Angry Robot.  I'm now a future crime writer.  The cross-genre queen by rules.

 

Consistent worlds

 One of the joys of being an SF writer is having the freedom to create my very own worlds for my stories.  But this can be a big challenge too.  If I'm creating a world where humans are to move about freely, it limits me in how wild that world can be.

The atmosphere must be the same as ours to be easily breathable, and the gravity needs to be in a range we can deal with.  We know that being in zero-g for any length of time results in muscle wastage.  Being on a low-g planet for years would make it very difficult for humans to go back to Earth's heavier gravity later.  If your world is smaller than Earth is it at risk of losing its atmosphere like Mars did? And where is the water on that world?  If humans are to live there easily in any numbers the world must have an abundant supply.

And then there's the question of what we would eat on other worlds.  Some native foods might not be good for our digestion.  And we all know the havoc introducing non-native plants has caused in different countries on Earth, it could be even more devastating on a planet with poorly-understood ecosystems. Japanese knotweed, anyone?

Our created worlds have to be consistent.  Evolution shapes plants and animals to deal with the challenges of their particular ecosystems.  It would work the same way on other planets.  If you invent a fabulous predator, you have to work out what it preys on.  And where do those prey species feed?

And I haven't even started thinking yet about the nature of the societies that live on that invented world.  But that's another story for another day.

What colour is your universe?

For years there was a fashion for every SF book cover to be black.  It had to be deep space with some  spaceship ploughing between the endless stars.  Which is fine for space opera, but not for all books.

My own books, Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, and the one I'm writing now, Panthera : Death Plain, are future crime involving the exploitation of wildlife and the natural world.  I wanted my books to reflect some of the beauty of the natural world, and in the first chapter of Death Plain I have my character Ren going out into the golden light of a savannah dawn.  In Death Song most of the action takes place in the rainforest wildlife reserves of Domovo.  That colour palette was very different: overwhelmingly green with the forest floor getting little light.  Sparkling dawns here can usually only be seen from clearings, the edge of the forest, or high up in its canopy.

Death Plain moves back to the great savannah wildlife reserves of what is by then New Africa.  Ren has been a major player in ensuring that the savannah still exists.  This time she's investigating the death of goldcats, the descendants of lions.

My favourite times of day are sunrise and sunset, especially on those clear days when the sky is full of colours.  And I want my universe to be full of colour too.  Goth blackness is not for me, I want the light and vibrancy of the natural world around me.

So let's start a campaign to get SF publishers to produce covers in a colour other than black.  And you never know, producing more colourful books might tempt more women to give the genre a try.

Tech fright

If I had a  pound for every time a woman had said to me "I don't read science fiction" I'd be fabulously wealthy by now.  What makes these women turn away from a genre that predicts the future of everyone?

In some cases I suspect it's tech fright.  Some of these women are ensconced in family backgrounds where they've never stretched their talents to the full. And many of them don't even know how to set up their own computers or use the software properly.

Women's unwillingness to get to grips with high tech worries me, frankly.  Because there's going to be an awful lot more of it in the future.  Yesterday I read a big newspaper article about inventor Sir James Dyson.  It was headed 'The Robots are Coming'.  He's setting up a new robotics research facility to design household robots.  His view is that they'll take over all routine household tasks in the future.  Google is busily buying up robotics and AI companies all over the place.  These visionaries know that high tech will be a key part of our lives in future.

Technology is already re-shaping our society. The Internet gives us an almost limitless research resource at our fingertips.  We can talk instantaneously with someone on the other side of the planet.  And there's been a lot of talk recently about security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic hacking into mobile 'phone calls and processing the data they collect from them.

If we don't want Big Brother to rule our lives we must engage with tech, and decide what we want and what we won't tolerate.  And we can't do that unless we're willing to understand the issues.  And reading SF is great preparation for that, stretching our minds to accept wild new ideas that make today's decisions on tech look easy in comparison.

Turbulence

Turbulence drives stories.  From the minor ripple of a family's youngest son going off to do their own thing in defiance of the family, to the start of an interstellar war, turbulence is at the heart of the action.

Tech can create massive turbulence in societies, something we humans haven't really recognized yet.  Just imagine how life and cultures will change when we can travel faster than light, or we invent the ansible for real.

Tech can allow people to create massive turbulence too.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series, pirate Gamis Turek steals ships and knocks out anisbles, creating turbulence in the lives of the systems he visits before striking against them.  In a short time the threat of piracy has solar systems locking out visiting ships and mistrusting people who have been long time friends,

In CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur a fugitive runs onto Pyanfur's Chanur's ship, beaten and starved.  She reluctantly takes the creature in, and triggers off massive unrest between three species and between the families of her own species.

The turbulence a character creates by discovering the truth can be devastating.  In Scott Westerfeld's Uglies/Pretties/Specials series Tally discovers the terrible price that people pay for having  their bodies sculpted into beautiful shapes.  She and her friends subsequently leave the city, triggering a war that humans haven't seen for aeons.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe, the characters have grown up knowing that they can't survive outside the atmosphere of the Pod, but when they escape they discover the truth about the way they've been controlled and things change for ever.

In my own novel Panthera : Death Spiral the death of three kingcat cubs together triggers Ren Hunter's realisation that the cats have been murdered.  That turbulence takes her half way across human space trying to save the cats.

Stories need turbulence to drive our characters to act, and the stronger the turbulence the stronger the story.

Building a whole world

Yesterday I finally got back to writing Panthera : Death Plain after a week of distractions.  Although this book is set on Earth, the world I'm writing about has changed, and although I'm using familiar reference points things are different.

Earth is already overpopulated, and I've assumed that it will continue to be so even when humans  spread out over a vast amount of space.  Earth will always be the home world of humans, and there'll be many millions of us who won't leave home even when space travel is safe and relatively easy,

But I wanted to reflect some of the current environmental debates in my picture of the planet.  So I have a massive re-greening project going on at the southern edge of the desert.  These schemes are getting under way now, but I wanted to make this bigger than anything we're currently doing.

Because I have a passion for big cats I wanted to create a world in which they still have space to exist. So I have several reserves on the continent of New Africa.  But I also expected that the same issues will dog conservation as today - pressure on land for human development, poaching, ranchers killing cats who take cattle.

I've built my world in each of the three Panthera books around the story I wanted to tell.  I wanted the habitats on each world to show off the qualities of the big cats I was writing about.  But you might equally start from the other end, with a world hostile to human life and see how your characters deal with that.  World-building that way could take your characters mining gas giants, exploring ice worlds for incredibly rare and valuable metals or minerals, or terraforming a barren planet to suit their needs.  How you build your world will be shaped by the story you want to tell, but there's still scope for dazzling invention in the details.  Think Avatar and Pandora.

How big is your universe?

Deciding on the world of our story is one of the first decisions we have to make.  How big is your universe going to be ?

Although SF gives us the universe to play in, we need to reduce it to a scale that humans can relate to.  This might mean a series of scenes on different Earth-like rocky planets.  Or if we're in a hostile environment like the atmosphere of a gas giant, we're going to need a place of safety with familiar tech around us.

If we choose to travel across the universe, most of us choose to send our characters in some kind of physical spaceship.  We create a home away from home for them out in the icy, inky depths of interstellar space.  One of my favourite series is C J Cherryh's Chanur series, where most of the action is set in and around the interstellar trading ship The Pride of Chanur.  One of my favourite moments is where a starship of a rival Hani family comes into the system with its drive destroyed and can't stop.  Cherryh describes how crews of other ships, even when they're of different species, immediately go to rescue the crew.  Cherryh's description of how devastating the loss of the ship is to the crew has stuck with me for years.  "Home and life to the Faha crew".  Such a short phrase, but so full of meaning.

Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war series takes us jumping all over the universe, but we see each scene through the eyes of the viewpoint character.  Her canvas is the universe, but made manageable through the human viewpoints.  People are scattered on many planets, but they still need to eat, trade, sleep.  The broad canvas is anchored through the familiar actions of human everyday living.

Near or far, settings can be as big as we like - or as small.  How big your universe is is shaped by your story, and by what the characters do in it.

Finding the alien at home

If you're designing alien creatures for your stories there's no better place to start than on good old planet Earth.

If you're going to set your action on a planet that humans can exist on that means it's going to contain creatures facing similar challenges to Earth's species.  And if we employ the principle of convergent evolution - i.e. the same challenges force the same sets of solutions to the challenge - we end up with creatures we might recognize on Earth.

Does that mean our aliens don't look alien?  Not at all.  Take a look at any film of deep sea creatures. In that place of perpetual darkness beyond the reach of the sun there are myriad strange and glo wing  forms.  There are creatures with translucent bodies and bioluminescence, pulsing with waves of green and blue colour as they swim.  There are fish with bioluminescent fishing rods on their heads to lure in prey.

We used to think nothing could exist without sunlight to power its body, but then we discovered black smokers on the ocean floor and their colonies of creatures.  Tube worms, shrimps, and a host of other creatures get along just fine at atmospheric pressures that would crush us, getting energy from the heat and minerals ejected by the smokers from the Earth's core.

Take a look at individual animals' senses.  There are animals who can sense the  temperature of the earth so accurately they can keep the temperature of a nest constant.  Snakes can effectively 'see' with heat sensors that can detect infra-red emissions.  Plants and animals can predict the weather.

Green tree frogs croak when rain is approaching.  Some plants only open their flowers in fine weather, and some track the sun across the sky. Infrasound and ultrasound extend hearing way beyond the human range.

In addition to the senses we use there are creatures who can sense the Earth's magnetic field, plants that can tell the time, creatures that use the sun as a compass.  All animals can sense the seasons, vital if they're to breed at the right time of year.

The amount of variation in Earth species is stunning and staggering, and anyone wanting to create an alien species would have enough examples to last several lifetimes.

Age in SF stories

I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention.  My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?"  Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.

It's got me thinking about age in SF stories.  One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain.  She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species.  She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story.  She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet.  She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.

Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it.  Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.

These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth.  Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.

Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about.  Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict?  Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.

Favourite authors. C J Cherryh

Another of my favourite authors is CJ Cherryh.  She's written a huge number of books,  and I must admit up front that I've only read a fraction of them.

I'm a big fan of the Chanur novels.  Payanfar Chanur is a Hani, an alien who looks a bit like a walking lion.  But Cherry's genius is in making her and the other Hani characters so individual.

The writing is close third person, and we go inside Pyanfur's head a lot.  She's captain of a trading starship, an experienced and wily character who travels the galaxy.  She has to negotiate trade contracts, and negotiate the choppy waters of multi-species diplomacy while she's being chased across the universe by the ruthless and dangerous Kif.

The way Cherryh describes the everyday life and operation of a starship is stunning.  She is so detailed about who does what, the ship's operating procedures, and the mechanics of travelling through jump.  One of the things I particularly like is the way she shows how physically exhausting constantly going through jump is for the crew.

And then there's the role reversal, which I can really identify with.   The women are the starship captains, travelling the universe, with power to make trading contracts that bind their long-established and noble houses.  There is also a very real sense of the cutthroat competition that exists between different Hani families.

Hani males stay at home and keep house - when they're not fighting their neighbours to take over their lands too.  Cherryh makes the Hani really come alive.  They're very definitely alien, but the mirrors she holds up to humanity make us think hard about our own gender divisions and competitiveness.

My favourite authors - Anne Mccaffrey

One of my favourite authors is Anne McCaffrey.  I haven't read every book she wrote, but a fair number of then from different series.  Her books have been a constant presence in my life for many years.

I own a lot of the Pern books.  The debate has raged for years whether these are SF or fantasy.  I think it depends which books in the series you read.  If you read the books dealing with the colonists landing on Pern, you find technology a-plenty.  The dragons are bio-engineered from the fire lizards, and the colonists carry Aivas with them, a high-level AI.  All the Weyrs of Pern rediscovers Aivas 2500 years later, and successfully blends the fantasy elements of the series with hard science.

One of my favourite series is the Doona books.  Here, colonists settle on Doona and gradually come to realise they're not alone.  I love the way McCaffrey paints the Hrrubans as fully-rounded aliens, and I also love the way the two species have the wisdom to learn to live together.  There are xenophobes in both species, but friendship prevails.

I love the way she's created a sentient planet in the Petaybee books.  They give us a vision of powerful companies with their own militaries who own planets and are far too powerful for the good of the people.  She also has telepathic clouded leopards who help the humans. I wish.

Then there's the Freedom books, the Catteni stories.  I like the way humans are shown to be inventive and quickly rebuild a civilization when dumped on an empty planet with just a cup, a knife, and a blanket for technology.  

Another of my favourite books is from the 'brainship' series of books.  The Ship Who Searched has a brainship and her archaeologist brawn searching for alien ancient remains. The book partly inspired my book Eyemind. 

I met Anne McCaffrey at Octocon in Ireland a few years before she died, and I'm glad I managed to meet and talk with my heroine.  She's been lighting up my life for many years with her ideas and her simple storytelling.  

The world behind the tech

One of my bugbears with some hard science books is that the technology is all. The writer is so in love with their vision of a shiny new world that they fail to work out what effect that technology is having on their world.

But think about the way we use tech in our real lives today.  We use smartphones, tablets, the Internet as additions to our lives.  We're doing things with them.  We use our tech to connect with other humans, and that's what some of these books forget.  We pour millions into researching something because we believe it will enhance human life.  Or in the case of a psychopath he/she may pour millions into destroying people.

A few years ago I read an SF book by a well-published female author that left me feeling completely short-changed.  The book's title and early chapters led me to believe it would be about a sentient starship, but it wasn't.  The book got lots of praise for its shiny tech, but it left me feeling totally unsatisfied.

It felt like the tech was in search of a story, as if the author had invented all these new things and then shoved in the random wandering of a bunch of characters to justify its creation. The trouble for me was that they didn't.  There was no central question or problem in the book, no main issue that was driving the narrative forward. Instead it felt like a series of vignettes of different characters and the way they used this new tech.

Writers might have been able to get away with this in the Golden Age, but today we've seen what nuclear and chemical weapons can do.  We're still living with the fall out of some of that tech.

So when I read an SF story I want to see the world beyond the tech.  How the people use it, and how it's shaped the way they live.  Only that way lies fully-rounded and satisfying AF.