Under Alien Skies

I've been doing some research recently, trying to get an idea of what a sky on an exoplanet suitable for humans would look like.  It's a frustrating search.  At present, all we can say about alien atmospheres is whether they contain certain elements.

A planet with an atmosphere like Earth's would contain at least water vapour, oxygen, ozone, carbon dioxide, and methane.  We could look for biosignatures on other worlds. Earth's are oxygen, produced by plants and photosynthetic bacteria, and ozone.  

But all that first principles stuff doesn't get me to what I want to know.  I want to stand on the surface of another world and see the sky.  Is is blue like Earth's?  If so, does it have a more greenish tinge?  What's the thickness of the atmosphere, and how would that affect me trying to breathe it?  What's the temperature range of the climate, and can I survive in it?

There are more complicated questions too.  What's the atmospheric circulation like? Does the planet spin on its axis the same way as Earth?  If ithe day length is shorter or longer than Earth's, how does this affect the weather? And what length are the seasons?

I want to stand on an alien world and watch the sunset.  What are the clouds like on that world?  Are they the familiar types we see on Earth, or are there new varieties?  How much dust is there in the atmosphere, and how does that affect the colours of the sunset?

It's estimated that there might be 30 billion planets in our galaxy that could be suitable for life.  But as yet, we're looking at them from afar through telescopes.  And until we find a way of travelling FTL and can send robot probes to some of these exoplanets our knowledge will remain distant.

So I have to make things up when I plonk characters on a new world.  But I can't be certain if my greenish sky actually exists out there, or whether humans would be able to breathe properly on a world where it does.  So I have to go with my dreams, and create the kind of alien skies I want to see.

No sex please, it's the future

One of the things that bugs me in SF stories is the assumption that recreational sex will continue on its same stupid way in the future.  SF is so good at zooming out from current issues, at examining them through the lens of story, and showing us different ways we could be.  But it rarely does that with sex.  Often the characters of the future are as sex-obsessed as our current society, sometimes more so.

I don't see why this should be so.  When my heroines are starship captains and powerful Traders they don't need to shore up their self-esteem with sex.  When they're dedicated to saving big cats and spend their days in the wilderness they have other things to think about.  They have a greater purpose to dedicate themselves to.

NASA has observed that the best people to take on long-term space missions would be those who don't use sex as a source of their self-esteem.  They recognise how divisive such relationships could be among small crews.  And yet every Hollywood SF movie set in space must have its misnamed 'love interest'.  It should really be called the sex interest, as that character is usually there to allow the movie to include some spurious sex scenes.

But what about the future where people are grown in artificial wombs?  When women have finally rid themselves of the danger and difficulty of being pregnant?  What would be the relevance of the sex act then?  If it was not connected to childbearing at all, I think there would be a radical reappraisal of its usefulness to our lives.

In the UK presently around 25% of people live alone.  And many of these will not be in a sexual relationship.  I have two mid-life friends who have been sex-free for over twenty years.  They own their own houses, have their own income, and live their own lives.   And they don't have a place for sex in those lives.  I want to see this growth reflected in the SF I read.  I want to see rulers or government officials who can't be bought with the promise of sex.  And please, no more prostitutes as main characters. The quickest way to put me off a book is to make the main character a prostitute.  I simply cant respect such a person.

SF is the literature of the future, and it should be the place to challenge our current sex obsession, not to prolong it.  Show me a future where women are truly equal and you'll be showing me one where we've ditched our current sexual obsessions.

Get with the seasons

One of my gripes with a lot of SF is that it centres on a city-based existence that is totally out of touch with the natural world.  An awful lot of writers think that humans will have totally tamed the natural world in a century or so's time, that it will be of no importance in the way humans live.

I don't think that's true.  James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis suggests that the planet has a self-regulating mechanism which keeps conditions on its surface optimum for life.  If he's right, then paving over Earth could well result in our destruction as a species.

What if you lived on a world where not keeping an eye on the seasons could result in your death? Perhaps there's a plague of insects that hatch every year that bring a disease deadly to humans.  Perhaps they're short-lived, like Mayflies, and in a few hours they've hatched, flown to mate, and died. It would be possible to co-exist with them, but you'd need to keep a close watch on the seasons, and keep out of the way when they hatched.  And what happens if your man on watch doesn't spot the signs, or deliberately doesn't warn people?

Or perhaps winter brings vicious ice-storms that  blow up frighteningly fast.  If you're caught out in the sub-zero blizzard winds you'll die.  You'd have to get out of the fields fast when they're approaching.  How would you feed yourself all winter?  And what happens if the stockpile of food isn't big enough for everyone?

I've always wondered how post-apocalyptic worlds set in temperate regions grow enough food for their people.  Few writers ever mention this.  But temperate climate gardeners know there's a "hungry gap" in late winter/early spring when stored crops have run out and the new spring crops haven't grown enough to harvest.  And if spring was late in a year when stored crops were low, you have the recipe for disaster.

There's lot of scope in SF to embrace the seasons.  I suspect that, however clever our tech, Gaia and nature herself will always be far more clever.  And perhaps if our SF showed more awareness of the natural world this might seep through into the present day and encourage more people to take better care of present-day Earth.

A straightforward new world

I've spent the last week getting new bookcases and organising my totally out of control book collection.  And now that my books are all sorted and proudly displayed, I'm reflecting on some of the discoveries I've made.

I hadn't realised I owned so many of Anne McCaffrey's works.  I don't have anything like all of her output, but a fair chunk of it.  And then there's the Elizabeth Moon Vatta's war and Serrano Legacy, all neatly arranged.  I've a chunk of CJ Cherryh's works, and a lot of Terry Pratchett. Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books take up one end of a shelf, next to Scott Westerfeld's' Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.

I began to wonder why I like those authors' works so much and  keep returning to them.   I've decided that one of the main reasons is that those stories are told in a straightforward writing style.

I have no problem reading about new tech or different social systems provided they're introduced in a straightforward way.  I want a novel new world, not a novel new way of writing about it.  The stranger the world is, the more straightforward I want the writing about it to be.

If we're dressing up our cultures in obscure rituals or writing in an overly-technical way about the tech of our world, chances are we don't know it enough.  We need to be clear about the theme of our book, and the way our plot supports that theme.  

I've just finished reading EJ Swift's Osiris.  It's told from two alternating viewpoints, with lots of tech and an original city setting.  But at the heart of the story is the clash of the rich and poor, the privileged and the underclass, and how each one is changed - or not - by coming into contact with the other.

Knowing our theme before we start to write helps to keep us on track, to make sure we make the points we want to.  It gives substance to our story.  If our theme is woven through our story, supporting our plot, then we find it easy to write in a straightforward style.  We know our world and its issues, and now all we have to do is get on with describing it.  Straightforwardly.

The wind on my face

One of the biggest challenges an SF writer faces is making the world we create and put on the page come alive for the reader.

We need to make the world seem real, and building up this picture in the reader's mind is best done in a straightforward way.  Have confidence in your story, and remember that the reader is willing to suspend belief while they read your tale. The reader is willing to believe anything we tell them, so long as that story world isn't just plain stupid or inconsistent.

How do we give the stamp of realness to our world?  By knowing about it in glorious colour.  We need to know its geography, its culture, its history, its languages.  The more we've worked out these, the more convincing our descriptions of the everyday of that world will be.  We need a sense of the history of the world, both geologically and culturally.  The reader might have been plonked down in the middle of the action, but that action, and that world, have been in existence for a long time before we came to them.  Or at least, the writer needs to give the impression that they have.

Keeping language simple is one way to get your world accepted.  Keep names simple and consistent. Anything that looks unpronounceable should go. In some of my early novels I fell into the common trap of creating aliens with names containing lots of apostrophes. Thankfully, I've abandoned that now.  In my young adult novel Geneship, the alien leader is called Yull.  Short and simple.  The same goes for  dialogue.  Yes, there'll be a few new slang words in your world, but a house is still a house, a city a city, a boat a boat.  There's no reason to call them anything else.

And see the world through the eyes of your viewpoint character.  If there's a storm brewing, get her to feel the freshening breeze and the drop in temperature, see the people around her scurrying about bringing livestock into barns for safety, putting up the shutters at the house windows.

The more you can get the reader to sense the wind on her face, the more real your story world will feel to them.

The texture of a story

Re-reading Christopher Evans' Writing Science Fictiin book, I came across his description of the texture of a story.  He says that texture consists of a mixture of description, dialogue, action, reflection, and exposition.  The combination of all these factors determines the texture of the work, how vividly, and with how much detail, the world is brought alive.

Description in SF can be problematic.  When we're describing totally new worlds nothing can be taken for granted.  Where we might talk about a Porsche or a cinema in our present-day world and everyone knows what we mean (at least, in the developed and moneyed west), the equivalents might not be so obvious in the world of the future.  We often have to describe what would be everyday items.  We might also want to use new jargon.  We know what an ansible is now, but nobody did when Ursula le Guin invented it.  

With dialogue, we have to avoid info-dumping ideas and backstory.  Language will have changed in the future and there will be new buzzwords, but we have to strike a balance between newness and readability.  Sometimes we will have to describe an everyday object casually mentioned by a character.  

In action scenes we have to strike a balance between moving the story forward and describing in enough detail what is going on.  But even in the future a boat will remain a boat, and we can describe familiar things in familiar ways.  

We have to be careful when characters are reflecting on something not to use the opportunity as an info-dump.  But if skilfully handled, having a character thinking about all the changes that have taken place since the Emperor seized power a year ago, can be an effective device for telling the reader necessary history.

Add all these ingredients to the story pot, give them a good stir with your own choice of vocabulary, sentence structure and syntax, and you've created the unique texture of your story.

Avoiding Star Trek lookalikes

As SF authors, we like to think that we're contributing something important to the genre.  We want to believe we're producing something more than a Star Trek lookalike with our work.  

Our aim as SF writers is to make the reader think.  We want to do more than just write an entertaining yarn.  We want to say something about our world.  Often the things we want to say are rooted in our own passions and beliefs, and that brings us to the subject of themes.

You have a viewpoint on the subject you're writing about, and that will help you to identify and refine the theme of your work. When you've identified it you then have to work out how it will play out in the story you have in mind.  Does your theme mean you need to have a certain kind of antagonist for your protagonist to put his views to, or work against?

The stronger the link your story has with the current world, the more likely you are to get the reader thinking about the consequences of your tale.  How will global warming affect the creatures that live on the Earth? Our centuries-old property-owning laws might have to be ditched.  We might have to become nomadic again, moving with the seasons to survive.

How would a nomadic culture preserve its tech? Would it be able to?  Sure, we have lightweight mobile devices today, but we also have massive server installations to power the networks we use them on.  What if we'd already gone a fair way along the path to becoming cyborgs, with inplants that connect our minds to the nets.  We already have concerns about the power of our social networks.  How much more traumatised would people be if that connection acted like a drug and it began to break down?

The questions we ask at the start of the novel to establish our theme help us to work out the consequences of the changes we make to the universe.  And establishing our theme, knowing what question we want to explore, helps us to keep on track and reveal our theme in ways that get readers to see our arguments without preaching to them.

Theme gives your work a backbone, and avoids your story sliding into a Star Trek lookalike.

Idea versus theme

Ideas are highly-prized in SF.  But there's a danger that a writer might run away with the shiny new tech and not work through the theme of the story. 

Re-reading the many how to write SF books I've found in my book reorganisation, I'm struck by how many writers make the point that originality is in short supply.  And how many are urging me to write what I care about.  I'm heartened by this emphasis to produce stories about things that matter to me.  And at this stage in my life I've worked out what matters to me.

SF is often about the effects of change on people, triggered by that magic phrase 'what if?'  What if we are all linked into our info systems with cyborg enhancements and someone destroys the network?  How will people respond?  Will there be mass suicides as people can't stand the withdrawal of their  information drug?  Will there be a resurgence of Luddite Originals, urging humans to reclaim their natural bodies?  And how could a totalitarian state keep control if its information lines were destroyed? There's material for at least half a dozen novels in those questions alone.

It's not the idea that's important.  Ultimately it's how the idea is worked out in the theme of the book.  And the best way to 'fill the well' with ideas for that is to take a look at what happens on Earth.  Natural history programmes will give you many ideas for using themes where the landscape dictates the action.  Science programmes will keep you up to date on new discoveries, and perhaps trigger an idea based on a radical combining of new theories.  And anthropology and cultural studies will also throw up information you can use or adapt to change your basic idea into a theme that will run.

I used to be concerned that my ideas were never original enough, but the one thing I've learned about reading and writing SF over thirty years is that very little is genuinely original.  It's a re-working of an old idea with a new theme.  And that's where the originality comes, in the storytelling, not the idea.

Familiar worlds - or not

What purpose do we want the setting to play in our SF story?  If you're writing hard SF the setting may be a major character.  The hardships and threats that a planet or space throws up might be the drivers of your tale.  Or, like me, you may want the setting to serve the doings of the characters and only incorporate as much of it as I need to serve their actions.

What we have to produce is useful background.  Our setting needs to be convincing enough for the reader to believe in it, but not so detailed that it becomes overpowering and jolts them out of the story.  Stories are about people doing things, whether those people are humans or aliens, and the setting should support the actions of the characters.

This means making every background detail work.  It means me cutting out my over-description of beautiful dawns and sunsets. And it also means that anything you take the time to lovingly describe in great detail had damned well better be important for your story,

The best SF  doesn't explain now future tech works, it just uses it. Unless, of course, the whole book is structured around the discovery of a new scientific theory that allows the new tech to be created.  But there I'd expect the story of the scientists who discovered the theory or made the prototype machine to be the focus.  These days, science is global and often collaborative between different countries.  Your story might have more tension if it deals with different nations or regions warring over ownership of the tech.  

Seasons must last a season, even if they are a different length from what we're used to.  And if you're labelling them spring, it makes sense for this to be the time when plants burst into new life and many mammals give birth.  

Unfamiliar worlds have to have a thread of internal consistency running through them.  And when you add in the laws of physics and of evolution the chances are that your unfamiliar world has many aspects we can find equivalents for on Earth.

The image of a world

One of the things SF writers have to do is fully describe their world.  It's different from the one we live in today,  so we have to get across how it differs from our own. And that means using imagery,

You can juxtapose images for effect.  Something fragile can be contrasted with something big and chunky, like the tiny flower growing at the foot of an enormous tree.  The tree shades it from the sun, but does it also garden the flowers for food?  Then maybe you have a planimals rather than a straight tree, and the way you show the tree tending the flowers should include imagery that suggests that.

Creating imagery doesn't mean peppering your stories with adjectives and adverbs.  It means choosing strong, descriptive words.  I have a weakness for writing sunset and sunrise scenes, and frequently on my first drafts I have a long list of words describing the colour of the sky.  Cutting it to a shorter, less flowery description forces me to look for more accurate words.  Instead of bright blue sky I might end up with a luminous azure dawn.  Instead of a red and orange sunset the sky will be streaked with crimson and tangerine.  

We have to remember also that the scene is being described through the eyes of our viewpoint character - or it should be.  How does that character respond to the scene?  Does it bring back sad or happy memories?  In the third Panthera book, Death Plain, I've explored a little of Ren's childhood.  Her mother was also a wildlife conservationist, and Ren learned her love of the open savannah from her.  But now she's forced to go back to the place where her mother was murdered and deal with the dark hole in her feelings about her mother's death.

But we need to weave imagery into the action of our story, so at the start of Panthera : Death Spiral I have Ren moving through the golden dawn of a savannah sunrise while taking a dead kingcat cub for examination.  The place and the subject of the story are woven together in that scene, but I hope I've also conveyed a little of the beauty of that vast wilderness.

Seeing the scene through a character's eyes, and having that character use all their senses, are powerful ways of making the imagery of a world immediate and real for the reader.

Extrapolation

A key part of world-building in SF is extrapolating from our present-day world.  We sit down and work out what would happen if things changed in a certain way.  It's conjecturing about the future from the standpoint of what we know today.

Extrapolation turns our story setting into more than just a future London or New York.  It has to be a key part of our story, as essential as working out our plot.  You may want to use a future London or New York in your story, but. If you're writing SF those future cities will look very different from today.

Extrapolation of science or cultures from what is known at the present day allows us to make our stories plausble.  We can't throw out the science we know, we can only modify and extend it with new theories or discoveries.  We have to convince our readers that our extrapolated world is realistic.

A good way to do this is to focus on a current trend.  What will be the consequences of the rampant over-population of Earth we are presently in?  Conflicts will break out over scarce land or scarce food or water.  Will we see horrible genocide as 'ethnic cleansing' reduces humans to some idealist master-race?  Will we run out of power, or will the crisis finally force us to put the money and resources needed into developing clean energy that helps to save the Earth?

You could start from the other end too.  Imagine a future situation where, for example, children are rare and the majority of the population is ageing fast beyond the reach of rejuv drugs.  What caused this?  Plague, war, starvation?  Or has the population's fertility declined so far that only a rare few are fertile?  Is this an effect of diet or lifestyle, genetics, or something more subtle, like Gaia limiting our numbers?

Taking the time to thoroughly work through your extrapolated change in the world of your story will pay dividends.  It allows you to write an authoritative portrait of the time with believable details.  And that always has to be the aim of an SF writer.

Making our stories believable

No matter how fantastic our world or the things we want to put in it, we need to make the story we tell believable.  To make readers believe our stories we have to give everything that happens in them a reason for occurring.  Events and tech must have a meaning, not just be thrown in to add local colour.

Writing SF doesn't absolve us from the duty to create realistic characters.  Working out their backstory, their culture, history, beliefs and attitudes helps a lot with this.  And we're faced with the extra challenge of creating believable aliens.  

We're writing fiction for humans, that illuminates the human condition, and that has to modify what we might dream up as an alien.  It's hard to relate to a sentient black cloud, although I have one story where Starspeakers speak directly to the consciousness of the universe.  Some writers think that creating humanoid types of aliens is cheating, but I'm not so sure.  The theory of convergent evolution tells us that the same challenges force the same evolutionary design solutions to arise, so if humanoid shapes are the most efficient form for an apex predator it could turn out that they're common.

Of course, they're likely to have different senses from us.  They might see in a different light range, our hear a different set of frequencies.  Anne McCaffrey did that with her alien Gringg, most of whose speech is experienced by humans as rumbling sub-sonics.

If you want humans and aliens to co-exist, they're going to have to do so on an planet or in a space environment that humans can live in.  And that affects the design of your aliens.  If they breathe the same type of atmosphere as us, that automatically limits them.  CJ Cherryh neatly gets around this problem in the Chanur books by dividing space stations into two halves, for oxy-breathers and methane-breathers.  The alien methane-breathers she created are truly alien.  

We have to ground the future of an SF story in something that we can believe today.  This is much easier in near-future SF, where we can extrapolate the consequences of global warming or food shortages.  What we're after is to show how humans are affected by the tech of the future and alien contact.  Our stories question our achievements, hold us to account for our tech and our actions, and ask who we are and who we're becoming.  And making our stories believable gives them more impact and might just leave your readers feeling they have to do something about the issues you've flagged up in your story.

How much science do you need?

People who don't read SF often have the idea that the genre is full of scientific theories that are hard to understand.  In reality that often isn't the case.

Hard SF built around the invention of some new tech is the sort of story outsiders to the genre think of, but a great deal of SF is soft, focusing on cultures, alternate histories, and social structures of societies.

In our own lives most of us don't know how our car's engine management system or our computers work, we just use the tech.  This will be so in the future too.  And that gets us off the hook as writers. We need only describe what future tech does without knowing how to design it in detail.

For Panthera : Death Spiral, I needed to know about DNA and epigenetics, and about the workings of the thymus gland.  I learned enough to know how many genes a human body has, and how genes are controlled by the epigenome, but I won't be doing any gene splicing any day soon.

The trick is to know enough to be able to work out a plausible plot for your story.  In Panthera : Death Spiral the plot revolves around discovering who is stealing kingcat thymus cells, and why they need them.  And that took me into examining DNA.  But I couldn't give you a detailed breakdown of what gene does what.  I don't need that level of detail.

Popular science books usually give me enough knowledge of the topic, so do TV programmes.  In England we have excellent wildlife filmmaking, courtesy of the BBC.  And programmes like Horizon tackle serious science topics in an accessible way, providing a valuable overview of complex cosmology or biological theories, or the state of AI research.

Even popular science summaries can be enough to throw up story ideas, or confirm that the one I'm writing has plausible science or tech in it.  And that's all I need as a soft SF writer.

Being inspired by others'stories

I often struggle with the thought that my SF isn't original enough, that there isn't any dazzling new tech in it, that what I'm doing is really recycling other writers' ideas.

This is a particular affliction of writers in the genre.  We read a review of a new book that praises that dazzling tech, and we remind ourselves that SF is called the literature of ideas.  And we worry that our ideas aren't good enough.

So it was a great relief to re-read Lisa Tuttle's How to Write Fantasy and SF book.  "New concepts are highly prized in our culture, but hard to come by" she writes.  Then she goes on to talk about the stories she's written that were inspired by other writers' work.

What a relief.  Here was a concept of SF as a genre in conversation with itself, borrowing ideas from other writers all the time.  I suppose I've always known that at a subliminal level, but to see it out in the open, and acknowledged as the source of some of a best selling authors' stories, was reassuring,

I've borrowed a few ideas for my novels.  Starfire was inspired by Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I wanted my starship captain main character to stay a trader.  Eyemind was inspired by Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Searched, and her brainship became my Mind, controlling a powerful Supercruiser instead of a starship.

Starfire was also inspired by CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the strong character of the Hani captain Pyanfar Chanur.  In Starfire the Hani got recycled into my aliens, but they're friendly.  Ria Bihar, my Trader captain, eventually teams up with them to find something that has been stolen that affects the peace of both races.

I've realised there's nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from others' stories.  I'm currently working on planning a young adult series which will recycle ideas from Sarah Crossan's Breathe with my own focus on wildlife conservation.  I've also got EJ Swift's Osiris sitting there to read, and I suspect that her tale of the divided city will furnish more ideas for me to adapt.  

I'm thinking that perhaps I don't do enough borrowing sometimes.  I think I have to sit in my garret and come up with dazzling new ideas all on my own. But of course I don't.  Everything I write is built on the shoulders of those who came before me, and rather than fighting against this and trying to produce something 'original' I'd be far better off using others' stories as a launch pad for my own ideas.  I need to absorb the richness of those others visions and let them feed and inform my own,

Getting into the story

SF stories are about strange worlds and strange people, and that means the reader can't just jump in and expect everything to be the same as it is today on good old Earth.

We as writers of SF have to handle the tricky problem of describing our world and its people, and showing our readers how it works.  It's a delicate balancing act.  We don't want to overwhelm readers with descriptions of strange places and cultural rituals, but we do need to tell them enough up front to get a handle on what's going on in that place.  We have to introduce the rules of our universe early on in a story, but not in a massive info-dump.

Naming key people, objects, and concepts helps.  Naming our viewpoint character gives us a way into that world, and we need to tell the reader the bare bones of who he or she is. What species, what their role is, what they're doing in that place at that time all have to be imparted to the reader quickly.

But part of the joy of SF stories is that they don't over-describe.  We get just enough information at the start to drag us into the story.  If the reader doesn't know what a piece of tech does straight away they trust the writer to reveal the information when it's needed.  Perhaps that's what makes reading SF difficult for people new to the genre.  Certainly I've had many critiques from non-SF readers wanting to know more detail up front, detail an accomplished SF reader either assumes, or is willing to wait to find out.

But our readers will expect our descriptions to be literal, not metaphors.  We're in a strange world, we have to describe it in a straightforward way.  We're willing to wait for some information, but the information must be straightforward when we get it.  It means we have to be careful to describe things in a straightforward way until we've got the world of the story established.

We need to weave descriptions of places, cultures, and people into the action.  Establishing the story is more a case of dropping a sentence or two of detail into ongoing action than it is stopping to describe the view.  Getting into an SF story is a tricky balance between too much strangeness and not enough, intriguing the reader, and baffling them.  But that challenge is one of the things that makes SF such a joy to write.

The MICE quotient

I'm re-reading Orson Scott Card's excellent How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy book right now. It was published in 1990, but I'm struck by how universal his advice is, and how useful to today's writer the ideas still are.

Take the MICE quotient.  Card points out that all stories contain four elements, but that usually one of them is dominant in the story.  What are they?  The first is the milieu story.  Milieu stories are about the world, the planet, the society, the family, the weather.   

My novel Jade, about a sentient planet, is very definitely a milieu story.  In a milieu story the characters will go to a strange place that's different for ours, will see interesting things, and come back to what passes for normality a changed person.  Kaath in Jade certainly does that. She learns that her parents aren't who she thought they were, and they have a strong link with the spores that are an essential part of Jade's sentience.  

The second is the idea story.  It involves asking what happens when certain tech is invented, or why did complex alien civilisations disappear.  Idea stories ask a question, and then get the characters to answer it.  The plot of the story is about finding those answers.  In some respects, my novel Jade is an idea story too, as it's about the characters slowly uncovering the intertwined sentience of the planet.

The third type of story is the character story.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books are character stories.  They follow Kylara Vatta from being kicked out of her home world's Spaceforce to commanding a multi-world Space Defense Force.  She's all that  all that stands between civilized worlds and a vicious pirate. Quite a change of fortune for the wronged Ky.

The fourth type of story is the event story.  It starts when something is wrong with the universe, the world is out of order.  The event could be the appearance of aliens in a planet's skies, as in Anne McCaffrey's Treaty Planet, or the reappearance of ancient evil thought to be dead, as in the rise of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings.

Most stories contain elements of all four types, but knowing which type is strongest in your story can help to keep you on track and checking that your story is doing what it should.

Inventing the past

Societies don't just spring up fully-formed from nowhere, so when we're writing SF we need to invent the past of the society we're dealing with.

Even if we're talking about humans on Earth in the future we need to know their "past".  I tend to write near-future SF that flows out of today's issues, but I still need to link the characters' present to our present day.  In Panthera : Death Plain that's as simple as imagining Africa having enhanced information systems throughout the continent, however remote the people are.  And I invented a New Africa Connectivity Authority to be in charge of them.

But if we're talking about genuine aliens we have to invent their past. Did they become a group mind in order to develop the ability to store memories?  I've done something like this in my novel Jade, where the planet has developed crystal memory storage.

What's the history of your world and it's people?  Who did your powerful leaders trample on on their way up to power?  Those people are likely to be the source of future conflict.  Who wants revenge on the leader of a powerful empire?  Given the mechanism of evolution, with its competition for scarce resources, It's likely that war exists in some form in your society too.  It would be nice to see a society where it didn't, but I suspect the very nature of evolution precludes this.

The language of your people will be shaped by their history and the things that are of most importance to them.  This could involve elaborate caste or class systems with their own vocabularies, or religious organisations with their own metaphysical way of seeing the universe.  Language will also define the 'untouchables' of your society.

There's a lot of inventing of the past to be done before we move on to writing the future, but knowing this back history makes for a richer story, and might just provide you with ideas for several other books.

Will it run, or fly?

Ideas are the life-blood of SF.  And we often get them by asking the magic question "what if?"  But every writer knows that ideas don't make a story.  They're only the first stage in the process of turning that creative spark into a fully-fashioned narrative,

It helps to know at an early stage whether our idea will run - or more likely, fly if it's an SF story.  And that means examining and questioning the idea in detail before we start writing.

Is the idea logical?  Something that totally reverses known science had better be well worked-out and justified before you start to write it.  If there's no evolution by natural selection on your world you have to show in detail what other mechanisms are at work there.  Of course, your book could be based around this new scientific discovery and how the knowledge changes science.

Coming up with original ideas is also a challenge.  At this stage in the development of SF, many ideas are re-workings of concepts that are well accepted into a different form.  But that doesn't mean you can't produce something stunning.  Witness the ancillaries in Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.  It's about adapting or modifying what's gone before.

I did exactly that with my novel Eyemind.  I love Anne McCaffrey's brainship books, and I wanted to do my own take on them.  So I created Bi, a paraplegic housed in a Supercruiser who works for Intel.  The basic idea is shamelessly copied from Anne McCaffrey, but I've put my own stamp on it.  Bi controls a land vehicle not a starship or space station, and he's basically working as a PI.

If you're writing a novel you've got to be sure that your idea will sustain a long narrative.  That means you'd be wise to work out its details and some idea of the plot before you start writing.  Working out the science, culture, and politics surrounding your idea will give weight to it, and you confidence that you can pull the story off.

One of the criticisms I have of so-called Golden Age SF stories is that they're all idea, they're all shiny tech.  Often that tech was worked out in detail and lovingly described, but what wasn't described was its effect on the societies that used it.  How do instant ansible communications change societies?  How do people feel emotionally about the tech?  Will it prompt New Luddites out into the city's streets to destroy this evil creation?

Deciding whether an idea will fly is about knowing how it drives the action of the story, and how it affects the motivations of the main characters.  You've got to get these things in place or your idea won't fly.

Utopian dystopia

I've been reading a lot of near-future dystopian stories recently.  They drew me in and made me believe the world the writer had created.  They tackled important issues, and are totally believable, but there's always a part of my heart that rebels against these extreme portraits of the future.

Usually the regimes who keep these dismal worlds in order are brutal and totalitarian.  They have grabbed authority to control not only the characters' lives but also they way they believe and the thoughts they think. They're a beaten, cowed, people.and I have to confess that this total destruction of the human spirit depresses me.  I want to rail against the injustices of those worlds.

That's part of the writer's purpose in showing us such a place.  We're meant to object to it, but sometimes I feel that their characters don't do so enough.  I want l know where the Resistance is.  If we want to see the things the human spirit is capable of, look at the stories of the wartime Resistance, or the fortitude of Viktor Frankl and other Jews who survived the concentration camps. Frankl is the very embodiment of the best of the human heart.

I would have to have someone like him in a dystopian novel if I wrote one.  Someone who still believed that there was a better way to be in the world, and who quietly worked towards making it happen.  But I think I'd also have to have revolutionaries, people who took direct action to bring down the totalitarian rulers.   

I'd have to write utopian dystopia.  I can't spend time in a place that is totally devoid of all hope.  It depresses me too much.  I question and challenge every statement on a news programme, asking who said that, and what their agenda is.  And I believe this is the essential nature of humans.  We agree to disagree, and somehow manage to get along.  

And I think in the future we will continue agreeing to disagree.  So I think our dystopian futures are move likely to have idealists in them fighting to change things, people who aren't taken in by the majority view, a Resistance against the evil.  

It's a sort of utopian dystopia that draws me, the imperfect societies with a kernel of pure good morality at their heart that I can identify with best.  Utopian dystopia lives.

Wide-angle lens, or close-up?

What kind of focus on your world - or the universe - does your story demand?  If we look at it in photography terms, is you story wide angle or close-up?

Which focus you choose will depend on the type of story you're telling.  If you want action on a big scale then you most likely want your characters to travel around the universe.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War sprawls across dozens of solar systems, following the actions of half a dozen characters who are spread out all across human space.  My copy of CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur has a star map of human space in the front of the book.  I adapted her notation system for my own books Starfire and Panthera : Death Spiral.

Other books are set on one planet, and sometimes in one country.  Teri Terry sets her Slated books in a near-future England that is under totalitarian rule.  The small space of the country matches the confines of the oppressive government, heightening the sense of fear.  People who live there never know when they'll be the next victim of the Lorders.

My book Eyemind is set on one continent of one planet.  Panthera : Death Spiral sprawls the action across half of human space, while Panthera : Death Song and Panthera : Death Plain again have the action taking place mainly on one continent.  Sarah Crossan's Breathe has a lot of the action taking place within one city.

Whether you choose wide angle or close up will depend on the focus of your story.  A tight zoomed-in portrait of an oppressive government can be just as exciting as watching a starship come out of jump in far-off space.

Everyday details

One of the things we expect to see in an SF story is details of the world and the tech that is used by that society.  We need to show how the world of our story is different from the one we live in.

This can give us some tricky problems in deciding how much detail of the tech and society to put into our story.  To be convincing, we have to describe future tech sufficiently that the reader believes it, but not so much that we're info-dumping details for the benefit of our readers.

Imagine that you lived 200 years ago and somehow you'd just seen a TV programme.  The tech there would seem magic to you.  How could a box capture likenesses of people?  And how could it make those pictures move?  To that person of the past, TV would seem like magic.  They'd probably spend hours watching the images, marvelling at them and wondering how they were made.

But to us, TV is an everyday bit of tech.  We watch the programmes on it, not thinking about the technology that brings them to us.  It's an ordinary object in our lives.

This is the sort of impression we have to convey in SF that deals with future periods.  Tech we use every day is utterly familiar to us, and the tech of the future will be completely familiar to the people of the future too.

So how much detail do we put into our stories about future tech?  If it is something totally unfamiliar to us today we will have to add some description of how it works and what it does for the benefit of our readers.  But unless we're writing about a radical new invention, the tech will be utterly familiar to the people of that time and they won't go around describing it in detail.

We need enough detail to tell the reader what the stuff does, while making it seem totally familiar to the people of its time.  Put in too much detail, and we risk throwing the reader out of the narrative.  Put in too little description, and we risk confusing or annoying our reader.  It's a tricky balance to get right, but it's one we must tackle every time we write about future tech.

Action adventure - or SF?

Sometimes the labels publishers put on our books aren't helpful.  For adults, SF has to have a recogniseable SF cover, and there's something about an adult book that seems to need it laden with tech.

That's why I love YA SF so much. The writing style is unpretentious. Kids won't stick around to fathom out who's talking if they're confused.  So there's none of that getting half-way through a book with two first person viewpoints and still not knowing who's talking that I've encountered in adult books.  Putting it bluntly, adult SF is often up itself.  It tries too hard. YA doesn't label itself as SF.  It just puts the stories out there, often dressed up as action-adventure,

Perhaps this is the burden of the genre label, which drives publishers to be sure they're putting out 'worthy' books with lots of shiny toys in them.  But story is driven by people, and what we remember is the people, not the dozens of bits of tech, which are often incidental anyway.

YA books tell the story in a straightforward way.  Here is the situation, here's what the characters do about it.  Straightforward doesn't mean simple, nor does it mean lacking emotional depth.  One of the things I've been most surprised by in some of the recent books I've read is the amount of emotional processing and receiving of insights the young adult characters are doing.

This rarely happens in adult books.  We don't explore the consequences of being ripped away from our parents at an early age.  Nor do we explore our characters' reactions to finding out their parents aren't who they thought they were.  We expect our adult SF characters to go through their world as if emotions and their back history weren't relevant to their lives.  I think some SF writers are afraid to put  this emotional involvement into their books.  It's not what adult SF writers do.

Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy thinking about the morals of mind-wiping people, the commercialisation of the air supply, and the control one has over people through making a beauty standard absolute, as seen through the eyes of YA characters.

Believability

HHowever alien our characters are, our story has to be believable.  Most of the time, although we're writing science fiction which might involve aliens, we're writing to enlighten ourselves.  We write to make sense of humans, our culture and beliefs, and the best books are the ones that get us thinking about who we are, what our values are, and what our cultures are doing.  The best SF allows us to understand ourselves better.  And if our story is not believable its lessons will most likely be lost.

Believability in a story comes from many things.  If your action is set on-planet, it comes from a richly drawn world.  The flora and fauna is properly thought out, and obeys the laws of physics and evolution.  If there's more than one sun in the sky the shadows will be complex, and would confuse a human newly on-planet.  The sky might be a different shade of blue. The differences might be subtle, but they'll be there.  

The political and cultural systems of the world need to be logical within the premise of the story, fit together, and be consistent.  Which can often be a challenge when that culture and its politics are radically different from ours and something we're struggling to understand.

If we're setting our story on a starship, we need to make the operating procedures and the way the ship travels believable.  One of my favourite books for this is C J Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  Cherryh has managed to portray the everyday ordinariness of a trading captain who is constantly travelling in and out of jump.  She shows the physical toll this constant travel has on the crew in little touches, like Pyanfar shedding too much hair (pelt, not head hair) when she showers.  She's worked out the ship's operating procedures and the way the crew works together in dazzling detail.  Even now I still marvel at its complexity when I go back and re-read it.

If we're going to mind-wipe citizens we have to set up a culture that will allow that monstrous act.  The chances are we'll be dealing with a brutal totalitarian regime that rules by fear.  If we're going to control and sell the air, or water, of our world, we'll have to set up some disaster that makes these resources scarce, and put someone into a position of power where they can control them.

Culture, politics, flora and fauna.  All these have to work together, and be worked out in detail, if we're to make our stories believable.

High-tech, low-tech

Browsing through the book reviews for recently-published SF novels, the thing that strikes me is how many involve characters who are human-cyborg mixes.  It seems we still haven't lost the dream of tech enhancing our world, making us puny humans bigger and better than we are.

SF has always been the predictor of future tech, and usually its authors are in love with their inventions.   We're shown how powerful the tech is, but very often in hard SF novels what's missing is any recognition of how the tech alters human culture,

I've always had a problem with scenarios where all-powerful rulers lord it over vast regions of space.  We know from our own experiences of empires on Earth that the bigger the empire gets, the harder it is to control.  Things start to unravel at the edges.  Conquered powers don't stay conquered.  They want their land and their freedom back, and sooner or later they challenge the supremacy of the empire.

The thing I really can't take is the all-powerful ruler who, through their faultless tech and systems, knows everything that's happening in their empire at all times.  No human being's brain can hold that amount of information all at once.  But the other thing that irks me is that their tech never breaks down.  We never hear about the attacks on the remote outposts of the empire that take out its tech and launch cyber attacks on its key systems,

I suspect the future in reality will be a good deal less shiny.  I think there will always be people like my Ren Hunter in the Panthera books who shun the virtiual world for the real one, people who fight for the physical world to retain its wildness and beauty.

There's even the possibility that we could see the rise of a New Pastoral movement.  Some out-of-the-way planets might revert to a near-agrarian existence.  Anne McCaffrey's Pern settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth, taking with them only the tech they needed.  Their airm was to establish a simpler way of life on Pern. McCaffrey hints that bad things had happened on Earth, but doesn't detail them.  But her original settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth for a simpler existence.

The future may become a divide between high-tech and low-tech civilizations not as a matter of lack of access to tech, but as a conscious choice not to use some of it.

Seeing through other eyes

One of the major reasons why we write is to make sense of the human world.  But science fiction writers know that sometimes the best way to comment on human culture and behaviour is to see it through other eyes.

Choosing to narrate a story from a viewpoint other than human can shake us up and get us to question and challenge the way things are in our own world. In my youg adult novel Geneship I have a race of intelligent big cats with language, culture, and history.  They are clearly as intelligent as the human research team, yet their young have been exploited by humans in inhumane ways.  in that book one of the viewpoints is that of an alien leader, who gets to comment on human society.

In my Panthera books I returned to one of my favourite themes, artificial intelligence.  I combined it with my favourite animals, big cats, and have a sentient AI in cat form.  Pan is great for observing human culture. He notes that we put our best security where we have our stuff, and he wonders why we amass so much stuff when we all die and leave it behind.

In my short story The Scent of Other Lives (in my short story collection Otherlives) the trees are sentient planimals that can move their branches and communicate In a simple way with the humans who come to their world.  They save my human hero from a flood by flexing their branches and lifting his skimmer up into its branches until the waters recede.  

In my novel Snowbird I created Sponges.  They are organic pebble-like structures living on the surface of a dusty Mars-like planet.  They are a group-mind, linked together by threads.  And they've been there for many years.  But now humans have come along and want to terraform their world.

The increasingly intelligent AIs we are creating might end up doing more than just maintaining our tech,  they might end up running it, deciding what content goes on there and what doesn't.  Perhaps it will be AIs who eradicate pornography from the internet, guardian AIs who hunt it down and delete it.

Other eyes can be organic or manufactured.  They can be the eyes of animals or a house, or even the "eyes" of a black cloud.  Switching viewpoints away from humans can be a powerful device for challenging and examining our culture.

The ordinary hero

My writing friend Charlie Cochrane was recently blogging about the ordinary hero.  I thought it was such an interesting idea that I'm thinking about ordinary heroes and  heroines myself is morning.

In the SF world, most of the books I admire have ordinary heroes/heroines. C J Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur has a tradeship captain totally upending interstellar politics when she picks up a fugitive character.  What I like about Pyanfar is that's he's often scared stiff, she knows defying the alien Juf might get her and all her species killed, but still she defies them.

In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta' war series, Kylara Vatta is a disgraced Spaceforce cadet forced to become a civilian ship captain.  Out of necessity, she creates a space defence force against dangerous pirates, and rises to command the Spaceforce that kicked her out.

In YA SF, ordinary heroes and heroines are commonplace.  In Kathy Reichs' viral series ordinary teenagers foil illegal  viral experimentation, stop bombers, save the research institute that is their home.

In Teri Terry's Slated books the heroine is a girl who thinks she is ordinary who has been made extraordinary by government forces.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe it is teenagers who uncover the secrets of their world and change things.

I especially like these YA heroes and heroines because they aren't traditionally powerful.  They're young people thrust into the midst of often intolerable situations who know they must act.

In my own books, my own ordinary heroines include Jian Kabana, the main character in Snowbird, who uncovers illegal terraforming and corruption on a large scale.  In Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song it is up to wildlife conservationist Ren Hunter to save the natural world from major abuse.  In my novel Jade, the sentient planet is defended from exploitation by Kaath, a civilian survey crew member.  All of these characters are ordinary people thrust out of their everyday lives by extraordinary circumstances.

Ordinary characters are people I can connect with.  There's an element of "there but for the grace of God go I" about them.  And I often winder if I would have their strength of character and their sheer determination to see things through if I was thrust into a similar situation.

It's never enough

Watching the news, the underlying theme of a lot of the reports is that there's never enough of something.  On any day there are dozens of pressure groups all saying that not enough money is being given to this or that cause.  Or not enough action is being taken to tackle some problem. There's not enough change in a situation, or it's not happening fast enough.

Watching the news shows what a cantankerous, dissatisfied species humans are.  We fight wars because we don't have enough land, or enough of some precious resource that the other guy owns.  We never have enough money, or enough stuff.

Part of this drive for more is an intellectualised form of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" idea.  If we have that bright shiny spaceship, that planet full of resources, then maybe we'll be shown as the fittest and she'll choose us.  Like bower birds, males amass the interstellar equivalent of bright plumage and a dazzling home with beautiful flowers in it, in the hope of attracting a female,

I wonder how we'd react if we ever found a species that had a concept of "enough".  Perhaps their laws would limit the amount of money or credit they could own.  Perhaps anything they earn over a set level gets automatically redirected to help the less wealthy.  How would that affect their culture?  Would their companies be admired for the most ecologically sound manufacturing techniques instead of the size of their bottom lines? 

The retail sector would be vastly different without the drive for constant conspicuous consumption.  And what about the way they choose their mates?  If the equivalent of having a shiny red sports car doesn't draw in the females, then what does?  Kindness?  Wisdom?  Mental strength?  

A species that had enough would have very different drives from humans.  My only worry is what would happen if humans discovered them.  It could well prove that their life of enough wouldn't be enough to keep humans at bay.

The plague

 This week it's been announced that scientists have brought back to life a 30,000 year old virus thawed out from the Arctic permafrost.  Their goal was to see what could happen if the Arctic ice melts and all the other dormant viruses there were returned to life.

We only think of viruses when we have a bad cold, but delving back into the role of viruses in the history of the Earth and humans brings some interesting insights. We already have a problem combating ever-mutating 'flu strains.  It's not too big a stretch to imagine a newly-awaked Arctic virus that infects the birds that migrate there.  When those birds go south on their winter migration, they take the virus with them to a completely new set of animals.  Perhaps our domestic herd beasts contract the virus, and then it's passed on to their human herders...

For those of us who believe in the Gaia hypothesis, this kind of mechanism would be an ideal way for the beleaguered Earth to thin out the numbers of the human pest that is overrunning its surface.  Perhaps the next apocalypse will come before we run out of food or water, but be carried by tiny biting insects.

Our gathering together closely in cities makes it much easier for viruses to spread from host to host.  But we could get the opposite effect too.  If the citizens of a large continent evolved an immunity to a major disease, anyone moving in to conquer them from elsewhere would be likely to be attacked by the disease and the invasion would probably fail.

That happened to Napoleon's army in 1802 when it invaded Haiti.  His troops were decimated by yellow fever, a disease that mosquitoes transmit.

Assault team commanders might think twice before sending teams down to alien worlds.  The mightiest army is capable of being killed by the tiniest creature.

The lessons of history

If we want to write about an advanced, intelligent species the only role model we have at present is our own.  Human beings are a deeply flawed species with a turbulent and violent past, and digging into our history provides us with the basis of many stories.

Most writers think of mining our social history and culture for stores, but I think that looking at how we've changed and affected the natural world, and how it in turn has changed our history, is a rich source of ideas.

The genetic modification of wild wheat and rice has provided the food supplies that have allowed our population to boom.  An unscrupulous scientist adding chemicals to a staple food like this might well have the basis for a form of mind control. 

The co-evolution of species with us has given us domesticated dogs, horses, cattle, and sheep.  Domesticated cattle and sheep allowed us to become sedentary farmers.  We lost our nomadic roots and became settled in one place.  And eventually gathered together in vast cities across the globe.

But when we domesticated wheat and rice we narrowed down the hundreds of wild species into a few super-producing strains.  The problem with monocultures is that, if they become susceptible to disease, you have a lot of people starving very quickly.  Perhaps the heroine of an SF story might be the keeper of the Millenium Seed Bank, defending the precious seeds from raiders and culturing new species that save the planet from starvation.

Or if you want to control a species, how about getting it addicted to sugar?  Consuming high levels of sugar decreases dopamine in the brain.  And dopamine is linked to the ability to learn.  Dumb them down with sugar, then conquer them.

Or you might also write about what happens when the billions of cattle we have today contribute so much to greenhouse gases that we have to slaughter them all.

This just scratches the surface of ideas from human history.  Looking at cultural and social history alongside corresponding ecological changes can provide us with an endless stream of situations for stories.

Primal Earth

If we're looking for exotic flora and fauna to people our SFF worlds with, the best place to start looking is on Earth.

During our planet's development it has had very different atmospheres to the one we breathe today, thicker, and containing elements we would find toxic.  And there were all sorts of exotic creatures and plants that don't exist today that we could use as models for alien worlds.

How about twelve metre high fungi forests?  Earth had these around 350 million years ago.  When they were ready to reproduce other creatures would have to keep well out of the way of these huge fruiting bodies as they exploded into the air.

Or how about trees that have retained the earliest mechanism for photosynthesising, scales all up their stems?  A forest with scale-laden trees would look very different from the dense canopy of photosynthesising green leaves that we know today.

Or perhaps your world is dominated by giant ferns that suck up all the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. You'd better plan for the onset of the next ice age then.  Or maybe the inhabitants of a world threatened with a runaway greenhouse effect would grow giant ferns to stop that disaster.

At many periods during its development our Earth has looked radically different from the way it does today.  Maybe the dinosaurs didn't die out on another world.  I wonder what kind of civilisation they would have produced.

Reproduction

I've been reading a book about the evolution of key species that changed the world, and one of the things that struck me was the variety of methods for producing offspring.

It's a salutary lesson for sex-obsessed humans to reflect that this isn't the only way to reproduce the species.  There is the phenomenon of parthenogenesis.  Some species are self-fertile and don't need a male to reproduce at all.  Now there's a feminist motif if ever I saw one.

Some species lay eggs, and some of those are soft and laid in water.  Some land species worked out a way to keep the essential fluids the embryo needs when they made their move onto land.  They lay eggs with hard shells that protect the growing young from the weather and desiccation.  Eggs contain their own food supply, and are a brilliant invention.

There are birds that hatch eggs at different intervals, and some where the younger siblings are eaten by the older, stronger ones.  And then there's oophagy.  The live young hatch inside their mother and the biggest eat the smallest.

Looking at the animal kingdom is a great way to challenge human sex-centred culture.  How will we deal with an alien species where infanticide is common and accepted?  Where children aren't worshipped as they are in our current society.  Is this the ultimate expression of Darwin's "survival of the fittest"?  Perhaps this produces a more robust species than humans, one that would out-compete us.

There's nothing like looking to the animal kingdom to challenge the human-centric way we see the world.  Maybe the aliens we meet might be parthenogenic females practising oophagy.  That would give the lie to the idea of the weaker sex.