Bringing in the big guns

"I write shoot-em-up space operas" a female author said recently on an SF panel of writers. She seemed to take delight in blowing things up, the bigger the explosion the better.

I baulk at this idea. I'm aware that, at base, everything in the universe is energy.  The energy of the universe is affected by everything that I think, say, and do. And the words that I write are also energy that I'm sending out into the universe.

In recent years dystopian stories, and ever more violent crime books, have filled up the booksellers' shelves.  I've read quite a lot of  young adult dystopian stories, and a few adult SF ones too.  But I refuse to buy, read, or endorse, books that have graphic violence front and centre in their plots and stories.  Yes, there is violence in the books I read, but it's never centre stage.  For the most part, the deaths are off the page.

An exception to this was a young adult book I read a couple of weeks ago.  I'd followed the spiky, not-quite-romance of the two central characters throughout the book.  It was the classic clash of opposites, the rich, privileged girl falling In love with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  So what did the author do?  She had the boy shot, on the page, in the last chapter of the book.  And he was shot in the back, unable to defend himself.  She then added an epilogue which said, in effect, that the relationship was never going to work.  The rich girl had a duty to marry the prince she didn't love, and she did.

At this point I wanted to throw the book across the room.  A more clumsy use of violence to twist a plot I've never seen, or a more unfair ending,  I felt cheated.  It was an unjust ending to the book to kill the boy.  And it was a convenient cop-out.  I could have looked forward to a sequel which addressed the challenges of this on-off relationship as the characters went on new adventures.  Instead I've marked the author down as one won't read again.

In YA books it's amazing how many sets of parents are killed while being watched by their children.  But it's just a story, isn't it?  But in two cases these books have been turned into films.  The big guns on the page have been turned into big guns on the silver screen.  People have been trying to convince us for years that violence in "make-believe" worlds doesn't affect people in real life.  I've never believed that.  Everything is energy, remember, and I think the violence in books and movies does affect us long-term.  The energy is being absorbed by us, incorporated somewhere into our consciousness.

That's a scary thought, and it's one reason why I don't have big guns in the centre of my writing,  it's a moral decision not to put that violent energy into the world.  Violence doesn't settle anything permanently,  it's only when the big guns fall silent that the talking starts.

Blurring the genre boundaries.

This week I've re-written another short story into a novella.  The original was fantasy, but the anthology I'm aiming it at doesn't take pure fantasy.  It needed to have some SF content added to stand a chance of acceptance.

That got me thinking about blurring the genre boundaries. There's long been a debate whether Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, with their telepathic, fire-breathing dragons, are fantasy or SF.  In the early books I would have said fantasy - until I read All The Weyrs of Pern.  

Pern has a feudal-type  society, and a low-tech setting in most of the books.  But in 'All The Weyrs of Pern' , McCaffrey introduces Aivas, a voice-address AI that's 2500 years old and came with the original settlers. Its discovery sets off a chain of events where the people re-discover all the scientific knowledge the original settlers had.  But they blend their new knowledge into their current society.  This story clearly blurs the boundaries of SF and fantasy.

Pern was uppermost in my mind when I started re-writing my novella.  It has huge Goldeagles instead of dragons, but I also added an internet, bioengineering, and drones.  Then I had to ask why, if there's an internet, anyone would pay a much slower courier service to carry things around the planet.  I came up with two answers.  First, hacking of the 'nets and data theft is so bad that many large corporations won't trust sensitive data to it any more.  And the second reason was that the rich and famous liked a discreet and exclusive service to deliver their holiday postcards.

I decided the Goldeagle Courier Service would cultivate that image of exclusivity, and the idea that it carried fripperies.  That way, most Goldeagles didn't get attacked.  But I invented smaller, faster black hawks that were also ridden.  They were used as military birds, had steel-tipped talons, and could outfly and menace the Goldeagles.

As in Anne McCaffrey's stories, I've blurred the boundaries of fantasy and SF.  The original settlers bioengineered the wild Goldeagles into the huge beasts that can be ridden today.  An SF purist would object that the planet's gravity and atmosphere probably wouldn't support such huge flying creatures.  But if I allowed the atmosphere to be dense enough to allow such creatures to fly it probably wouldn't be suitable for human-derivative settlers to breathe.  I blurred the genre boundaries.

I think Stephanie Salter's Gemsigns does the same. Her Gems are genetically modified humans.  But the big reveal at the end of the book shows a gem using an ability which it's questionable whether our atmosphere would support.  (I'm sounding cryptic because I don't want to spoil the book.  It's brilliant, go and read it.)

Even within books that are considered wholly SF we still have blurred boundaries.  The biggest one is the idea of travelling through space at FTL speeds.  We have no idea whether we'll ever be able to do that.  But everybody uses it, and I do too, because sending a ship through jump is just so damned convenient.  It opens up the galaxy to the writer.

In the end speculative fiction is about story, it's an entertainment.  I'm not writing a scientific paper documenting what is, I'm telling a tale of what might be.  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."  Now that's the ultimate blurring of SF and fantasy.

The quiet power of the word

There are some SF authors I follow on Twitter who are perpetually angry about anything and everything.  Several times I've been enticed by a good headline to check out a blog post, to see what that person has to say about a subject that interests me.  This week there were several that I started reading, but didn't get past the second paragraph before I stopped reading.  Why?  Because the page was littered with 'f' and other swear words.

No, I'm not a prude.  I'm quite capable of telling someone who really annoys me to 'f' off in appropriate circumstances.  But that's usually an immediate response to an in-my-face interaction.  But writing a blog post is different.  It should be a reasoned argument for whatever view you're putting forward.  And to me, strong and controlled narratives have more persuasive power.  A text littered with angry rants and swear words dilutes the writer's message massively,

I have a similar problem with the thorny issue of representation of female characters in SF stories.  In the so-called "golden age" (aka as "dark age" for women), white male writers included female characters only as sexy bimbos, to be carried away by the aliens, screaming.  It meant the art department could produce a pornographic cover for the magazine with the woman's breasts exposed.  Real women with intelligence were pretty much absent,

Now at least real women are SFF protagonists, but I think some authors have pushed the boundaries too far the other way.  We have a clutch of books with "kick-ass heroines" (easily the term I most detest) , employed as assassins, mercenaries, and selling their wombs for money.  These books are a huge turn off for me.  I don't think you need to be in the reader's face, or angry, to make a powerful point.  I think the quiet power of gentle but persistent persuasion can often work better.  

Where a reader has been thoroughly entertained by a tale they're more likely to go back and re-read the story.  On a second or third reading the chances are that they'll notice the nuances of the book's theme, and the arguments the writer is making, far more than in the first, headlong, rush to discover the story.  When we know how the story ends but we don't want to let it go, we go back and re-immerse ourselves in the world of the story and its characters.

And, just as several viewings of a painting, or several listens to a piece of music, turn up new insights, so does several readings of a text.  I'm all in favour of the quiet power way of getting my point across.

I'd rather have my character Ren Hunter quietly despairing about why big cats are being exterminated than writing an angry rant about deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting and poaching.

Plenty of other people are using their energy to tackle those issues head-on, leaving space for me to address the things I care about sideways.  And, just as a casually overheard song can lodge itself in your mind, so can a casually absorbed idea from a favourite story have a lasting impact.  In the end, it might be the insidious insistence of the ideas planted by quiet power that really change the world.

The ten books meme

Facebook and Twitter are full of posts by people listing the ten books that have been most important to them.  I thought I'd join in for today's post and list the ten most Important books for me.

1.   All The Weyrs of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

In this book the Pern colonists discover their ancestors' AI 2500 years later.  I love the self-referential nature of the book, and the way McCaffrey has blended fantasy and SF elements in the story.  Guided by the AI's knowledge, the citizens of Pern do something impossible.  They move the Red Star into a new orbit.

2.  The Ship Who Searched - Anne McCaffrey

This is one of here 'brainship' books, this time with an archeology theme.  The relationship between Tia and Alex was one of the major influences for my own book Eyemind, where I have a similar relationship between Keri and Bi, but set against an art background.

3.  The Pride of Chanur - CJ Cherryh.

I love the portrayal of the Hani Pyanfur Chanur.  This alien is alive and real.  And the details of taking a ship through interstellar space are stunning.  It reads as if she's really been there.  And if you want a masterclass in handling dangerous interstellar politics, read this book.

4. Vatta's War - Elizabeth Moon

Ky Vatta is a disgraced Spaceforce cadet who ends up leading her own Space Defence Force and saving human space against ruthless pirates.  I'm not normally a fan of military SF, but this series is much more than that.  It is multi-viewpoint, and most of the viewpoints are civilians.  The books show us how ordinary people's lives can be threatened by one ruthless individual.

5.  Polar Ciry Blues - Katherine Kerr

This book shows us life on Hagar, a planet close to a red giant sun.  It's a murder mystery with interstellar ramifications, as an alien has been murdered.  It's a fabulous depiction of life on a planet where it's dangerous to be out in the daytime, and where interstellar politics are again finely drawn.

6.  Dragonsinger - Anne McCaffrey

A girl dreams of being a Harper.  But she's female, and girls can't be Harpers.  At least, according to her brutal father.  This is a feminist tale of Menolly running away from home and seeking her dream.  And eventually finding that her incredible talents are appreciated by others.

7.  Treaty Planet - Anne McCaffrey

This is the third of the Doona books, the first being Decision at Doona.  I love its portrayal of Hayuumans (humans) and Hrrubans (a walking big cat like species), and the way they live together in harmony on Doona.  Despite the meddling of their respective governments, the colony is a success.  There are some great descriptions of friendships across species.  These people don't just co-exist, they're workmates and best friends.

8. Slated - Teri Terry

This is a YA novel about a brutal repressive society where teenagers get brain-wiped to "correct" their behaviour.  Kyla somehow recovers her memories from before her Slating, and brings down the brutal totalitarian government.  A message that there is always hope in the darkness, if we look for it.

9.  Uglies/Pretties/Specials -  Scott Westerfeld 

Okay, I cheated.  This is three books, but you need to read all three to get the whole message.  It's a story about the dangers of pursuing extreme beauty treatments, and what their real cost might be.

10.  Freedom's Landing/Choice/Challenge - Anne McCaffrey 

Okay, so I cheated again with three books.  This is the story of how transported humans build a new life for themselves on Botany with only cups, knives, and blankets.  Human ingenuity triumphs, and this is also a tale about how they learn to accept a member of their oppressing species.