The precious gift of words

As I'm writing this blog post on Christmas Day, my mind has turned to the subject of gifts.  And it's got me thinking about some of the stories and ideas which other writers have gifted me with.

There are some books which I read and re-read, and re-read.  Books that I get addicted to, like a drug  I can't crack and have to keep going back to for another fix.  When l stumble across a book like that, finishing it is a shock, a massive disappointment.  I don't want to leave that world - but more often, I don't want to leave the ideas that the story encompasses.

The books that really make an impression on me leave more than their surface stories on my mind.  They insinuate their ideas and themes into my awareness, and subtly change my world view.  I find myself going back and re-reading favourite sections of text, absorbing the ideas again.

One such book is Anne McCaffrey's Decision at Doona.  The scene that sticks in my mind is of a small Human boy and a small Hrruban cub, their bodies curled up around each other, fast asleep in the Human's bed.  It's the start of a friendship between the two that allows them to persuade the xenophobic elements of their peoples to let them live together on Doona. The boys grow up to be life-long friends, owning a ranch together.  The piece that sticks in my mind is the two fathers' simple decision not to wake the boy and cub up, to allow the friendship to blossom.

Another such book is Stephanie Saulter's Gemsigns.  Genetically engineered humans, and the terrifyingly hostile way some humans respond to them, will always stick in my mind.  A cautionary tale (as if we needed another one) about the misuse of religion for bigotry, discrimination, and hate.

My latest candidate for the title of gift is Karen Traviss's Halo - Kilo Five book Mortal Dictata. This story takes place after the war has ended, and the book is a superb exploration of human morality - or lack of it, in some cases.  Tough marines wrestle with the knowledge of ethically wrong medical augmentation programmes that snatched small kids for their subjects.  And when the father of one of those girls acquires a battle cruiser to force those on Earth to tell him what happened to his daughter, duty and morality collide.

It's the ideas, the concepts explored in these stories that stick in the mind.  They're a precious gift which prises my mind wide open and forces me to examine my own morality and values.

The golden age of SF - a woman's view

This week I read another article praising the so-called Golden Age of SF.  What's meant by this is a time when white males were writing hard SF, often including no women characters.  An age when the stories were tech-fests, with no regard for the impact of the tech on the civilisations using it.  And they often had no female characters - except the odd screaming female to be carried away by an alien.

My definition of the'Golden Age' of SF is very different.  My Golden Age is the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Newly married to a scientists who read SF, I was encouraged by him to start reading and writing in the genre.  At the time I was living in Hampshire, on the south coast of England, and commuting to work in London every day.  That meant a train journey of one and a half hours each way every day.  A perfect time to fill with a good book.

And boy, did I fill it.  I worked ten minutes' walk away from Lambeth Library, and I took six SF books a week out to read.  The library had a brilliant SF collection, and it was on its shelves that I discovered some of the books and female authors I still love today.  Books like Katherine Kerr's Polar Ciry Blues, set on a world orbiting a red giant where the population comes out at night. Books like CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  I still love the Hani tradeship captain Pyanfar Chanur.  Tough, wily, powerful, independent, experienced, skilled in interstellar politics, she's an inspiring role model for all women.

Books like Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen, with its themes of exploitation of a low-tech civilisation by a high-tech one, the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, and cloning.  Books like Mary Gentle's Golden  Witchbreed, with a human female ambassador struggling to survive on Orthe and make sense of a culture where friends might have you assassinated for the good of their people.

And, of course, Anne McCaffrey.  Decision on Doona and Treaty Planet are still two of my favourite books, despite them having few female characters with agency.  What I love about them is the picture Anne paints of humans and the cat-like Hrrubans making first contact and learning to get along together.  The chief catalyst for this is a human boy and Hrruban cub who grow up together. Their inseparable  bond reaches beyond all the false legal barriers the adults of both species try to put up in the way of their friendship.

These books are my Golden Age of SF, one based on people, not tech,

Keeping up with the real world

I've started an rewrite of my novel Snowbird recently.  The original text is over twenty years old, although it's been tinkered with several times since.  And as I was writing it struck me how much real world tech and scientific knowledge has changed in that time.

A large section of the novel takes place on a planet I call Angiris.  I modelled it on Mars, with some tweaks.  Twenty years ago I had no access to the Internet, and very little knowledge about the planet.  The only facts I could get at were in dusty old books about the solar system.  How different things are now!

Contrast that with 2015.  NASA has sent the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers to the planet, and there are three spacecraft orbiting the planet.  We've been mapping and measuring Mars from orbit for a solid decade now.  The spacecraft can see features on the surface as small as a desk, and have recently reported that liquid water may still be intermittently flowing on Mars's surface.  Twenty years ago I wrote about an imagined sunset on Angiris.  Today if I want to see what sunset on Mars looks like I can go to the Internet and download images taken from the surface of the planet.

There have also been massive changes in our knowledge of DNA and genetics, and forensics techniques.  The Hunan Genome Project has sequenced the human genome, and we've sequenced a fair few animal genomes too.  And gene editing is a science fiction idea come true.  Twenty years ago I couldn't even imagine how one could cut out parts of DNA and splice new sections in.

When I first wrote Snowbird I had a skull and bones show up in a power transfer conduit, and I fudged how the man was identified.  Now I've assumed DNA can be taken from the bones and used to sequence his genome. And I've assumed we'll all have our genomes on record, as an ID.  I have a cyborg character who got that way as a result of massive war trauma.  But now we have stem cell regrowth techniques, and I had to justify why his limbs weren't regrown that way.  It made the things he'd suffered even more immoral and horrific.

The other big chunk of the book is about the creation of a sentient AI.  We're still a long way off this, and it's still firmly SF.  It's nice to know that something I'm writing is still imagination, and that the world hasn't completely caught up with me yet.

Visualising my brave new worlds

I've just finished reading an SF book by a best selling author whose work I love.  And it confused the hell out of me.  This writer specialises in creating tangled political situations which are often interstellar and multi-species. And often I fail to grasp all the nuances of the situations she creates.

I've always thought that failure to understand everything that was going on was mine, but now I'm not so sure I am at fault.  Because in the book I've just finished she fails to physically describe her settings clearly enough too.

Part of the story is about spacers training in pod-simulators.  From her early descriptions of them I didn't get any clear idea of whether the pods were in zero-g, in vacuum, or whether they were free-floating or somehow tethered.  Later she talks of pods drifting up to the access, which seems to suggest they're floating in zero-g.  Later still she reveals that they're bolted to some kind of track.  And by this time I was really confused.

I'm a little naive in this respect.  I do want a new world sufficiently described to me.  After all, I can only see what the author tells me.  And if they don't describe something enough I get confused. And they run the risk that I get fed up with their book and abandon it.

I've recently realised that one of my faults is that I don't properly describe places.  I'd have such a clear picture of them in my head that I'd just write a passing reference to the scene and move on to the action.  But, of course, the reader has no idea what's in my head.  I need to put it on the page.

This week I've started rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird.  Half of the novel is set on an orbital shipyard.  I knew it had three rings, Central, Middle, and Deep Space, and that they were all fixed to a central cylinder.  I'd also made some lists of who and what occupied each ring.  But when I came to rewrite I found that wasn't enough.  Each ring has five levels, and I needed to know what was on each level.  So I made a plan for each level. And now I can describe the place properly.

For planet-bound stories I draw maps of the land.  And I colour in the different habitats with watercolour pencils.  That makes it easier to know if my characters are going north or south, along the base of the mountains, or are close to a river.  And my description has improved a great deal with these in front of me.  Now I'm off to draw diagrams of the starship Chilai herself.

Research - mixing it up

The job of a science fiction writer is to mix things up to show us a brave - or not so brave - new world. But if we're writing serious SF, that world must include and adhere to all of the scientific principles we've already discovered.

So how do we create something new from the old?   I find that one of the best ways of 'filling the well', as creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls it, is surfing the Internet.  Yes, dear old maligned Twitter comes in handy for many things.

This week I was reading an article about scientists sequencing the genome of tardigrades, otherwise known as water bears - and getting a big surprise.  These microscopic animals are virtually indestructible. They can survive freezing, drying out, radiation bombardment, and the vacuum of deep space.  And scientists have now found that 17.5% of their genome comes from plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses.  Apparently tardigrade DNA breaks into pieces when they dry out, and when they re-hydrate and return to life they drag in DNA from the organisms around them.

Hmm.  It doesn't take much leap of the SF writer's imagination to see someone using bioengineered tardigrades  as weapons.  Or as remedial organisms sent in to restore dead worlds. But if these things are virtually indestructible, and they reproduce, what happens when they mutate into a deadly form?

Or how about taking the idea of the 'wood-wide web' a little further.  The mycelium that links trees in forests extends for miles under the trees.  What if someone on an occupied world found some way to use the wood-wide web as a biological Internet?  Covert operations to overthrow the occupying force would be much easier that way.

I haven't thought of stories linked to these two ideas yet, but they're rattling around in my brain, fermenting.  And some day the perfect story vehicle will present itself.  And chances are that, when it does, it will arrive as a fully-formed story.  That's the way my subconscious works.

I never know how, or when, my constant research will pay off, but when it does it's often in surprising ways I would never have expected.

Environment plus culture equals a story world

This week I was reading a Sarah Galo article in The Guardian about Margaret Attwood.  She was reporting on Attwood's recent talk at the Book Riot Convention in New York.

Attwood said in that talk that her birth year had influenced her world view.  That sounds like an innocuous comment, until you learn that she was born in 1939.  So the first few years of her life took place against the backdrop of the Second World War.  It's no wonder that her birth year has influenced her world view.

As a science fiction writer, most of my work is a comment on various aspects of my current society and culture,  usually I'm pointing out the dangers of human overbreeding, or some aspect of how humans are affecting other creatures on the planet.  I'm very clear about my beliefs and values.  They've come into sharp relief in the last five years or so as I've examined the events of my life and begun to figure out how they all fit together.

But, of course, I'vs focused on my personal history to come to my view of the world.  And Attwood's comments reminded me that personal history isn't the full story.  As individuals, we are placed in the middle of a societal group, a culture, and we live in a specific geopolitical region.  And all those things influence how we see the world and what we focus on in it.

I was born after the Second World War, In England.  I've lived there all my life, and I've been fortunate not to have been forced to lived through a war that affected me.  England has been a peaceful country for all my life.  And my immediate family have no connection to the military and haven't been affected by the wars we've been caught up in in other lands.

And this peace has worked its way through into my literature world.  I'm often reluctant to read - and certainly don't want to write - military SF.  The world of the services isn't one I understand, not do I want to.  My background explains why my protagonists are never military, and why my heroines are usually civilians working away from areas where war is raging.

I'm one of the lucky ones who has never suffered in a war.  And that peace has engendered hope in me that humans will find a bigger peace as a species.  So, for me, no dystopian wandering in a ruined world.  My characters are out rebuilding that world, adding essential hope to the story.

Aimless dystopia - where's the story?

Twice in the last few months I've read dystopian stories that left me wondering why I'd bothered, and why  those writers had spent so long with that particular narrative and set of characters.

I understand the desire to write cautionary tales.  We use the medium of story to question and challenge aspects of our current cultural and political orientation.  Or we want to question the way our political institutions are leaning, or what we perceive as dangerous tendencies in big business to ignore the needs of the planet.  But the key thing is that we challenge those things in a story.

Both the dystopias I read failed the basic tests for what makes a story.  Both had ensemble casts, with the viewpoint switching so often it was hard to tell whose story it was meant to be. One took the form of distant third person narratives that were almost omniscient narrators. Which gave me a big problem.   I wanted to find a character to root for, to care about whether they succeeded or not, but this detachment made that impossible.

Both books also didn't have a real character arc for any of the viewpoint characters.  Things were hopeless and they were wandering around at the start of the books, things were hopeless and they were still wandering around at the end of it.  Both stories were about a bunch of characters' pointless wanderings.  

This might have got across the message of the book, but it didn't tell a satisfying story.  And if I buy a novel I expect to be told a story.  Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  And hopefully something changes within them.  In both these dystopias the only thing that had changed by the end of the book was that some minor characters had got killed.

If I'm to be engaged with a dystopia I need to see characters with hope and vision, characters striving to better the lot of the little band of survivors.  Even characters who ram home the environmental message, determined that this disaster will never happen again.

I want to see that some characters retain their hopes and dreams.  And that they believe it's worth striving for a better life, bettering their situation.  For when human hopes and dreams are totally wiped out as in these stories, then we will be too.

Exciting, violent, full of swearing - dystopian storytelling

One of the judges of a prestigious literary award was recently quoted as saying that one of the reasons the awards committee had chosen the winner was because it was "exciting, violent, and full of swearing."

It's at times like this that I despair of our society.  That is dystopian storytelling at its worst, bringing out the worst that humans can be.  We may not always think about it, but what we write about, and the way that we write it, involves making moral choices.  We choose whether to tell a light or dark story, we choose the amount of violence we put into it.  We can choose to write about murder, blood and gore, about wholesale slaughter with spectacular special effects.  Or we can choose to write on a less bloodstained slate, and focus on the devastation those deaths produce in the lives of those around them.  

I suspect that how we choose to write depends on how we see our writing.  If we see it as purely entertainment, we might feel the need to compete with Hollywood's blood and gore, to have the same level of sensationalism in the text.  But if instead we want to focus on the fallout from those deaths, we need to be more subtle.  To focus on the grief and loss, to examine what changes as a result of the death.  And that takes us to somewhere other than the world of shallow entertainment.

We might still have a whole planet full of people dying, but their deaths aren't gratuitous.  They're there to illustrate the evil in the story.   Having less violence and swearing in the narrative can be far more effective in getting a message across.  But that presumes that the text has a message.  Sometimes I worry that all there is in these bloodthirsty books is blood.

I need to believe that humans can be a civilised species, that we can make moral choices in extreme  situations.  Anne McCaffrey's Sassinak is a military officer.  She's forced to sit back and watch a whole colony of people die in order to follow the slavers instead.  She has to allow the smaller evil in order to stop the much larger one.  It's a choice that haunts the character ever after, but it was necessary.

Literature like this teaches us something in its stories.  It shows us that being military doesn't automatically mean being violent.  And it shows us that violence has a price.  We should remember that next time we praise a book for its violence and swearing.

Liberty and quiet power

Last week I was reading an SF book about a kick-ass female pilot out to save the universe.  At the same time I was reading blog posts about the quiet power of introverts in effective management, and at first the two ideas seemed to conflict.  Don't we need the kick-ass extrovert types to save the world?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes the tenacity of quiet power can achieve more.

To achieve the overthrow of a regime one needs intelligence, and to build a base of support for your alternative ideology.  If the regime is of the brutal type that tends to squash alternative modes of thought, this needs to be done very quietly and carefully.  And if you're planning on going behind enemy lines it helps if you don't draw attention to yourself.  The quiet power of the self-reliant introvert comes in very handy there,

I started thinking about instances of quiet power in the SF stories I love.  In Anne McCaffrey's All the Weyrs of Pern, the quiet  power is AIVAS, a rediscovered AI that teaches the descendants of the original colonists all the science they've forgotten since their ancestors landed on the planet 2,500 years ago.  With a combination of that knowledge, the use of the colonists' bioengineered dragons, and some handy left-over antimatter drives, they change their orbit of a planet.

I think also of the quiet power of CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  She's a tradeship captain who gets caught up in an interstellar, multi-species diplomatic incident.  It's her trading smarts and ability to quietly hide that help her to save her ship and defy a vicious race of aliens that threatens the destruction of her home world.

Even among military SF stories there are examples of quiet power.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series Grace Vatta is an older woman who wields great power.  She's the Rector of Defence for her planet, and gets to order its Spaceforce around.

A mind-wiped teenager in Teri Terry's Slated series of books keeps her reawakening memories of her past secret while she quietly uncovers the truth of a totalitarian government and its evil schemes.  She watches, waits, gathers information, and when the time is right she destroys the evil system.

While kick-ass heroes create sound and fury and blow things up, the chances are that it's quiet power that figured out who the real enemy and real threats were.

Rebels and low tech survivors in the SF universe

A lot of science fiction is heavily reliant on shiny tech.  Tech-based stories routinely involve cyborg enhancement of organic beings, consciousness downloads or transfers, or reliance on avatars or environmental tech to survive on otherwise hostile worlds.  These stories often don't consider the human factor on that tech.  Somehow the all-seeing emperor always knows what's happening in every area of her vast far-flung star empire, something I j just can't buy as an idea.

I've never been one for worshipping at the altar of SF tech. I don't feel the need to own every leading-edge device, and I have concerns about the immersiveness of gaming and virtual worlds. I question and challenge how good those things are for me, how good they are for the long-term development of a cohesive civilisation.  In my SF I'm always with the rebels who don't live in tightly-controlled cities.  

My heroes and heroines are likely to be living outside the control of the city's all-seeing AI.  They probably don't rely on tech to survive.  They use their skills and self-belief to get them through the harsh winters.  These are the people who will survive when our shiny tech breaks down.  And unless human nature changes in the future, it will break down.  The profit Imperative will still tempt companies to take short-cuts in rushing tech to market, and to skimp on vital maintainance procedures. 

Because I have an interest in wildlife conservation, much of my SF is set on unspoiled wild worlds.  It involves characters who love being in the wilderness.  This is partly my desire to write about the natural world and wildlife issues, to envisage a future where the natural world and its creatures can survive.   But some of that writing  explores what happens when humans arrive on new worlds and begin exploiting wildlife for human gain.  I'm writing cautionary tales, and, I hope, providing a sliver of hope for the future too.  Because the defenders of wildlife win in my books.

The future will contain rebels, people who can afford intrusive tech, but who refuse it.  People who wish to stay un-augmented, relying on their own wits.  I envisage many of them would leave Earth for less crowded planets, founding colonies in touch with the natural world of their homes.

When the shiny tech starts to fail it is these people who will survive, people who know how to light a fire and hunt for their dinner in the wilderness.  When the banking system has collapsed and no-one has access to their credits any more, we'll need their skills as hunter-gatherers to survive.

Robust tech - nuts and bolts in the SF universe

I always have a problem believing in SF worlds where all-seeing tech never breaks down.  There are books where rulers know everything that happens throughout their vast empires every minute.  There are powerful spymasters whose faultless tech always tracks down the rebels.  The problem is, I can't recognise them as human socieities.

I've always struggled with hard SF that focuses only on the tech, that doesn't consider who uses it, or  the impact of that tech on the lives of its users.  And some writers seem to be so in love with the shiny gizmo they've invented that they don't work out the consequences of using it fully.  All too often that tech goes on-line and it works flawlessly.  It always works, and sometimes without any visible signs of a maintenance schedule.  I just don't buy that, not if humans are involved in building it.

You only have to watch the news for a while to notice that humans are always taking short-cuts.  We don't store things safely and they explode, or we don't maintain our tech and it breaks down at a critical moment.  Things blow up regularly, or catch fire.  And very often at the end of the lengthy inquiry we find human error has been involved in causing the accident.  So, unless we can design systems that can prevent humans from taking short-cuts, I think our tech will always go wrong.

The other thing that isn't often featured in SF is basic tech like nuts and bolts.  It seems that many writers find them too boring for their brave new worlds.  But there's a good case for saying that nuts and bolts would be vital in some SF settings, like in the undeveloped wild world of Deon my characters in Genehunter inhabit.  

This week I've got to the point in the story where two of the guys are trying to repair Aris's airscooter after it ditched in the river.  I describe a scene where they take its innards apart to dry out the wiring and components, and try and work out what's shot and what's not.  They're working with nuts and bolts, and components that they can take apart and repair.  They're on a world with no repair shops, so they either fix the tech, or it doesn't go.

I think that's a more realistic portrayal of tech on a frontier world.  In such places it's the self-reliance of the settlers that's going to help them to survive, along with the type of tech they can fix when it goes wrong.  They're going to need to be able to take apart those nuts and bolts.

Introducing the SF world - getting the balance right

As an SF writer, I face a classic tension at the start of every story.  Because everything in my world is invented, I need to provide enough description of everything to show the reader where they are.  But on the other hand, I don't want to slow the action of the story down and bore my readers.

This balancing act is one that every science fiction and fantasy writer faces.  We have to sketch in enough of our setting to show the reader the city, space station, starship, or monarch's throne room.  And we have to establish our setting on the run.  Whilst the Iron Throne has an interesting design, it's the actions of the characters scheming against each other to gain it that readers want to see.

I've just finished rewriting Auroradawn, and that novel presented me with a particular challenge in chapter one. I had to get across the idea that my heroine Arrien is newly bereaved.  She is now the Captain  of a Great Family, one of several powerful wealthy landowners on Vedrana.  I had to explain that each Family had a bioengineered soulship.  The ships had intelligent biomechanical AIs, which have the capacity to reach full sentence through absorbing the memories of their dead Captains,  which is why Arrien is in the Transfer Loft at the start of the novel, transferring her just-dead mother's memories to a crystal to give to Auruoradawn, her soulship.

In 1600 words I've introduced the idea of soulships, memory crystals, and the Starrider Great Family.  Then Arrien's younger brother Baak appears, and he has to be introduced.  I have to explain that he ran away from home two years ago, and that he's now trying to steal the memory crystal.  

I thought all that information was essential for the reader to make sense of the scene I was showing them.  But there were a lot more things that I decided couldn't fit into chapter one. I have Arrien hoping the soulship will Awaken, but I don't explain what that process involves, or the changes it will make to the soulship.  At the top of the chapter I've labelled the location as Mithras, Starrider Great Family compound, Vedrana, but I haven't explained any of those names. 

Those are the sort of choices we have to make when setting the balance of action and description.  And this week I read the finished chapter to Havant and District Writers' Circle.  Most of them are not SF readers, and they didn't get confused by my start, so I guess I've got the balance right.

Evolving science fictional wildlife

This week I've reached the place in my edit of Auroradawn where Arrien is searching for an object in a desert market.  The place is about an hour's walk from where Auroradawn has landed, so I wanted to give my heroine some transport to the town and back.  

I needed a creature that was adapted to a hot, dry, desert environment.  Mindful of the principle of convergent evolution, I thought that the animal I came up with, a tobal, wouldn't be a lot different from Earth's camels.  For example, they would have evolved broad feet, to spread their weight more effectively when walking across loose sand. 

I also thought they'd have a water and fat storage system like camels.  I changed them by deciding they looked like leggy equines, and the humps that store their water and fat are in their necks, and under their bellies.  I think we can't ignore the knowledge we have of how evolution by natural selection works.  And that means that any changes I make from 'Earth-norm' have to be justified in evolutionary terms,

I did a similar piece of tweaking in Genehunter with the Ur-Vai.  I wanted talking big cats, and I had lions in mind for my base species.  But the Ur-Vai have also evolved hands and arms as well as their four legs.  This is not impossible.  It might have started out as a random mutation that conferred evolutionary advantage, and was thus passed on to later generations.

I wanted the Ur-Vai to have hands because that made them more feasible as tech users.  So what I've ended up with is a species that still hunts like lions for its food, but has radio, language, culture, and democracy.  They have mates and children, allies and enemies, and they worry like we do too.

In my novel Soulsinger I created alien dolphins who communicate telepathically with the natives.  The creatures bond with a native, and consent to being ridden by them.  We know that dolphins have complex language and social structures, so again I didn't think this stretch was impossible.

I enjoy the challenge of creating something a little bit different.  Yet I still think that creature needs to be one I can believe in.   I'm writing SF not fantasy, so I need a creature that doesn't cross that boundary from realistic into something that is only feasible in a fantasy world.

Riddles and objects - laying a trail of clues

I'm continuing with my rewrite of Auroradawn this week.  The book is structured around the main character, Arrien, being sent off around the planet to find the answers to seven riddles.

When I wrote the book I first worked out the riddles, then decided what the objects the referred to were.  Then I wove the book's plot around them.  Arrien's mother had been studying a gold necklet inscribed with the 'master' riddle, and Arrien only finds about about them when her mother dies.

The necklet tells Arrien that she has to find seven objects, and hints that each of the seven objects is held by one of Vedrana's Great Families.  That gives enough information for her to start looking for the first clue, on a friendly neightbour's land.  But the clue doesn't tell her where on his large estate the object is hidden, nor does it reveal what form the object takes.

As the writer, I knew where and what each clue was, but I had to reveal them through Arrien's eyes, and think like she would.  I know that each clue will be found in the same type of location on each estate.  But I realised as I was working though the re-write that Arrien would have no reason to think that.

And here is where I had to balance the needs of keeping the story flowing against the complexities of the riddle quest.  If Arrien set off to search each Great Family's lands without any idea of where to look, it could take her years to find the riddle objects.  And the reader would have got bored reading about her aimless wandering a long time ago.

So I resorted to some editorial sleight-of-hand.  I had Arrien reasoning that, because she found the first object in a certain type of location, she should start off by looking in similar locations for the rest of the objects on the other Great Families' lands.

She makes an assumption that turns out to be true.  And that allows me to write about her solving the riddles and finding the objects solely by her own efforts.  That first unseen nudge by me has put her on the right track to complete the quest.

I'm happy that I've got the balance right between authorial direction and character freedom, and can now get on with unfolding the rest of the adventure.

 

Crimson, gold, and ice-blue - the power of detailed description

This week I'm continuing with my re-write/edit of Auroradawn.  One of my faults is a tendency to under-describe my worlds, and I'm trying to fix that in this rewrite.  But because I'm an SF author, I'm having to create and describe a whole world.  That gives me wonderful freedom, but I can't rely on the reader to know what's there.  If I want them to 'see' Vedrana, I have to describe the planet in enough detail to allow them to do that.

As in so many things, the devil is in the detail.  In my earlier draft, I had a description of summer alpine meadows dotted with red, blue, and yellow flowers.  But what shade of red or blue were they?  And is the yellow a weak pale lemon, or a deep strong gold?

It's that sort of thing I've been fixing in my re-write.  The flowers are now crimson, gold, and an ice-blue that reminds Arrien of a winter sky in the mountains.  I've described some of the paintings on the walls of the great house, works painted and drawn by Arrien's brother, Baak.  One of them is a graphite pencil study of Arrien and her mother.  As the mother has just died, this has special poignancy for Àrrien.

Describing the paintings also allows me to fill in more of Baak's history.  Two years earlier Baak ran away from home, after a long series of rows with his ex-military father, who didn't recognise his artistic talent.  It's a familiar scenario, a sensitive child having their talents ridiculed because they don't fit their parents' dreams for them.  Describing the brilliance of Baak's artworks allows me to tell the reader that Baak really is a talented artist, and that his father was wrong to rubbish his work.

And this detail also functions as a sneaky set-up for book two of the trilogy.  In book two the riddle quest switches to finding clues in symbols incorporated into paintings.  The reader doesn't know that at this stage, but in book two Arrien will be forced to find a series of paintings, and identify and decode clues wrapped up in symbolism in those works.  By then I've already established Baak's talent and knowledge of art, so it's natural that he would take the lead in searching for those clues.  Which allows Arrien to keep the matter within the family.

The challenge of detail in the second book is about inventing symbols, colour associations, and delving into the history of painting.  But that's a whole new story.

Familiar strangeness - the weird everyday in SF

I'm editing Auroradawn this week, and the early chapters talk about my heroine, Arrien, bonding with her soulship.  The novels brought me up against the problem of describing the strange in familiar ways.

What is a soulship?  It's a biomechanical creation, with an organic flesh hull that was specially grown.   It has a biological/mechanical mind.  It started out at as high-level AI on the verge of consciousness.  

So far, not so strange, but it's at this point that the narrative does turn odd.

One of my inspirations for Auroradawn was reading Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders book Ship of Magic.  I loved the way the heroine, Althea, felt connected with the Liveship Vivacia.  Robin describes it as Althea having a sense of connection with the liveship's 'near-life'.  The idea inspired me, and I wanted to write my own version of it.

Ship of Magic is very definitely fantasy.  Liveships come alive through the flowing of their dead captains' 'anma' into their timbers, and each death brings the ship closer to awakening.  Auroradawn is firmly SF.  I re-worked Robin's ideas in an SF context.  Instead of a hull made of wizardwood, Auroradawn has a bioengineered organic hull.  I have each dead Great Family Captain's memories being transferred to a crystal that is linked into a reader in the soulship's Memory Room.  The ship reads the memories it contains, and integrates them with the memories of each previous Captain.

At some stage, a critical point is reached where the memories tip the high-level AI over into full sentience.  The current Captain carries a command implant in her head, and the ship is able to talk telepathically with its Captain on Awakening.

But all this strangeness is familiar to my heroine Arrien.  She's grown up knowing it, and so my challenge was to write the scene through her eyes, yet provide enough explanation for the reader.  Arrien wouldn't stop to explain how the system worked, she's known it from birth.  But the reader can only learn about her world through Arrien's eyes and mind.  I had to find a way to get the information across in her narrative, in a way that didn't seem awkward or forced. 

I think I've got the balance right, but I'll see when I send the novel out on submission.

Submissions and the Imposter Syndrome

This week I've been coming across lots of references to the imposter syndrome.  One definition I found  defines it as "a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in the face of information that indicates the opposite is true."  It's associated with high-achieving people, who don't believe they're as good as they are, and especially with women.

I wish I'd researched this fully years ago.  I'm beginning to realise that the imposter syndrome has worked its way into my writing world.  I'm always berating myself for  not having enough richness of description in my work, or enough emotional depth to my characters.  Who am I to put myself up against all the published authors I admire?

I'm still struggling with imposter syndrome in relation to magazine short story submissions.  The  syndrome goes into full throttle when I read phrases like "fresh voices", "stories that push the boundaries", "intricate storytelling" in submissions guidelines.  I've already blogged about how meaningless these phrases are, but they still act to shut me out.  But it isn't the magazines who are stopping me, it's my imposter syndrome. 

I'm cutting off possible story markets because my imposter syndrome tells me there's no point in submitting to these magazines, as my story isn't fresh enough, intricate enough...  blah, blah, blah.  And it tells me that on absolutely no evidence.  Some of those magazInes I've never submitted to, so how can I know whether my story is what they want or not?  This makes me wonder if the imposter syndrome is partly to blame for the low level of submissions by women writers.  If it's causing others to self-select, not sending stories to some magazines, just like I am.  

I recall from my corporate days that men will apply for jobs they only have 80% of the skills for, women generally won't.  That's happened to me too.  The old imposter syndrome has always been part of my life, I just haven't realised until now how much it was shaping my writing actions.  But no more.  I'm now making it my mission to submit to those "leading-edge" "intricate" "fresh voices" magazines.  It's  time to kick out the imposter syndrome and get some real evidence in its place.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Huggeddon and beyond

The Hugo awards were announced last weekend at the Worldcon in Spokane, and I couldn't not comment on them.  The results were nothing less than extraordinary.  It was very strange to watch so  many awards being announced as 'no award'.

Every SF writer wants to win a Hugo. Stories are nominated by fans and readers, and they have a special place in everyone's hearts.  But this year's events threatened to derail the awards for ever.  Google 'sad puppies' and 'rabid puppies' and you'll get the whole sorry story.  I'm more interested in what the result means for SF, and for women, in the future.

I have the sense that this is a time of change for the SF genre.  Over a year ago I attended a Women in SF panel event at Blackwell's Bookshop in London where five female published SF authors described the struggles they had to be recognized and reviewed.  Since then, it feels like the pressure to recognise female and diverse voices in SF has risen steadily.  

Which is good, but we women have to do our part too.  I won't deny that Twitter scares me as much as I find it useful.  It can be fabulous for raising awareness of issues, but it can also be a very nasty place.  Like many women, I dislike direct conflict, and I will sometimes pull my punches in comments, mindful of the snark that will ensue if I speak my whole truth.

I have to stop doing this.  We all have to stop doing this, and the Hugos this year was a watershed.  It was a time when we said 'this misognyy is not acceptable', and voted accordingly. The awards were about much more than the individual nominees.  This year the result sent a message to the world about what we want SF to be in the future - inclusive.  

Some good people lost out on awards they deserved in the midst of the 'no awards' carnage, but we had to take a stand.  For after all, if speculative fiction cannot speculate on a future where women and diverse people are equal, then it has no right to call itself SF.  The Hugos were a necessary calling to account and course correction.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Sensing the alien

Following on from last week's blog post on aliens, this week I'm back to editing my novel Genehunter.  One of the main characters in that story is Yull, an Ur-Vai leader.  The Ur-Vai are zebra-sized big cats, with the solidity of a lion.  As well as their four legs, they also have two arms and hands.

This is a rewrite of the novel, and I'm trying to deepen Yull's character.  One of the things I realised early on is that I'd totally missed references to his sense of smell.  But Yull is a cat, and I realised his sense of smell would be much stronger than humans'.  He will be able to scent things the human characters can't smell at all.   And when he is introduced to human tech, that will have strange scents to him too.

So I'm now rewriting all of Yulł's chapters to add details about how the world around him smells.  I've decided he can scent each individual Ur-Vai emotion.  This is going to come in handy when he has to decide who is friend and foe later on in the novel.  And I've realised that the scents of the humans, and their technology, will be totally unknown to him.  He's put in the position of trying to build a friendship with humans without having all his usual scent clues to help him.  I'm writing in his sense of dislocation and disorientation this unfamiliar task brings to him.

I haven't mentioned the cats' sight in detail, but I've decided they see in full colour.  I'm cheating, because I've had them retain the tapetum lucidum, that reflective layer of cells cats have that help them to see better than us in the dark.  Cats can see up to eight times better than us with these cells, but the trade-off is that they don't see full colour,  I've been greedy.  I wanted the Ur-Vai to see in full colour as well.  I'm sure evolution can design an adaptation that will allow that.  I reasoned that the cats are tech builders and users, and they might need to see in full colour in order to use their tech safely.  

Because the cats have hands I've been able to work in a little of their sense of touch too.  At one point in the story Yull comforts Aris.  I've had him stroking her hair, and observing how different its texture is to Ur-Vai manes. By twisting around familiar senses, I've managed to make Yull unique.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

The evolution of the alien

Among the many delights I experienced at Nine Worlds Geekfest last week was a talk by Śtevyn Colgan on aliens.  His thesis was that our idea of the 'other' has reflected our own popular culture, and in film, also the limitations of the medium.

He mentioned that the aliens pictured on the covers of pulp SF magazines looked humanoid, they often had outsized heads, because we thought that more advanced people would have bigger brains.

And before the advent of computer generated imagery most aliens were 'men in rubber suits'.  They were the same shape as we are, with a few superficial tweaks.  But as technology expanded we became fascinated by the idea of robot aliens. 

Our scientific discoveries have always driven our ideas of the alien.  In the 1990s the rise of CGI imagery let us create aliens in the computer that had no analogue basis on earth.  More recently, with the discovery of many new planets, we've begun to realise that life might be able to exist in many different places.  There could be whole ecosystems swimming around in oceans under the frozen surfaces of planets.  There might  be creatures that can breathe methane atmospheres.

And when we got to exploring the deep ocean we saw many wonderful alien forms swimming around. We've found extremophiles that can live in sulphur, scalding hot temperatures, and impossibly cold temperatures.  We've found creatures that don't need to breathe oxygen.  And Oxford University scientists have recently created a flexible silicon gel that can swim.  The boundaries between life and not-life are much more fluid than we once thought.

But there are some universals.  Eyes will probably appear.  Fur is probably a constant too.  Flight may also be universal.  And sexual reproduction is also likely to be common.  And a last sobering thought comes from Kevin Warwick, who wonders if intelligence might be a disadvantage for long- term survival.  After all, these so- called intelligent humans are hard at work destroying their planet.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Tribal reinforcement - Nine Worlds Geekfest

Today I'm off to Heathrow for the start of the Nine Worlds Geekfest SF convention.  It's been a while since my last con, at Easter, and I'm feeling in need of a genre boost.  Writers always have a feeling of isolationist when we're writing alone in whatever personal garret we choose, but for me as an SF writer that aloneness runs much deeper.

I have lots of writer friends, but most of them are crime or romance writers, and one is a comedy writer too.  Only a few of them have ever read a science fiction book.  They're good for giving general feedback on writing, commenting on plots and character motivation, but they have no feel for the SF genre.  Sometimes that means they question silly things, and it means I can't use them as a check for whether a scientific idea sounds plausible.

This has been a perennial problem for me, as the lone SF writer surrounded by all sorts of other writers.  I've been part of Havant and District Writers' Circle off and on for thirty years, and I'm now its  Chairwoman.  I can remember back twenty years when I used to read SF pieces and get the reaction "that's nice dear", or "that's interesting" - translation: I haven't a clue what you're talking about and can't critique it. This lack of people around me with genre knowledge has become incredibly frustrating at times.

So I'm off to Geekfest to mix with people who read the same books that I do, that understand the concept of a jumpdrive. Some of them will be scientists, and will understand much more than me.  In the events I'll get to discuss SF tropes, political systems of the future, sexuality, and speculate on the scientific breakthroughs of the future.

The convention has a broad programme, and I'm sure it will spark off many ideas for me through listening to the discussions.  And there are industry editors and agents there, talking about publishing in the genre.  Their insight will be absolute gold dust.  So I'm looking forward to a packed weekend, and to learning lots of things that can take my writing career onwards to a higher level.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Everything comes around

I've been continuing my trawl through my new copy of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook this week. And I've had a pleasant surprise, for once.  The number of agents who now say they represent SF authors seems to have grown a great deal.  

I can remember back a decade ago, when I could find only five or six agents to submit to who had any affinity for SF.  'No SF' was a common part of the listing of an otherwise promising agent.  The five or six who did profess an affinity for SF got sent every novel I had - and rejected them all.  I hit a brick wall, with nowhere else to go, and that's when I took a step back from the genre for a few years.

It pained me.  I fell in love with SF in my twenties, and started writing it soon after.  My first attempts were derivative, and definitely not publishable.  But by the time I'd finished novel number twelve I'd learned my craft, found my voice, and knew what I wanted to say.  The trouble was that nobody was interested in what I had to say.

I call that my fallow period, the time when I went on writing, because that's who I am and what I do, but I didn't submit anything for years.  It was a dark time when I found it hard to believe that I'd ever get the chance to be published.

But the wheel has turned again, and SF is back in fashion, but, more excitingly, it's moved on.  Social media has given women SF writers a strong voice.  VIDA has started measuring the under-representation of women in reviews and as reviewers.  That has spurred some editors to come out of the woodwork to say that they value women's voices, but don't get enough submissions from us.

Last year we had the Women in Science Fiction panel in London, which again highlighted the challenges women SF writers face.  I now feel that it's not me, that I'm not alone in this struggle. I have  sisters who are challenging the status quo and calling out the inequality. I have the feeling that we're on  the verge of a step change in the genre, despite, or maybe because of, this year's hiccup in the Hugo nominations.  For the first time for a decade I now have hope that there might be a place for me in the genre, an agent who will be willing to take me on, a publisher willing to print my words.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

An end to second -guessing editors

This week I've invested in the 2015 issue of Writers' and Artist's Yearbook.  This weighty tome is essential for trawling through editor and agent listings and trying to find a home for my work.  But the book is also packed with articles offering advice on the world of publishing and the struggle to get published.

One theme leapt out at me from several of the articles.  Rachel Joyce advises 'Take yourself seriously,'. Nathan Filer says 'Take responsibility for your novel. Your opinion counts.'  Neil Gaman says 'write the books you want to write'. Their words have given me a much-needed reminder that I must write what I want to write, what I believe in, and then find an editor who also believes in my vision and wants to publish it.

I've been running up against the rejection barrier again recently, and I seem to be going backwards.  I thought that maybe my feminist stories were turning off male editors, so for my last submission to one of them I switched tack.  I sent him a humorous contemporary faerie/SF mash-up.  And got back a rejection almost by return.

Considering that all the other rejections from him had some words of praise for the story in them, and  this one didn't, I'd guess my idea to stay 'safe' and not to submit controversial stories backfired rather badly.

So I've decided I've had it with second guessing editors.  I've had it with reading published stories that don't have beginnings, middles, and ends, or any narrative drive.  I've had it with studying the market and finding stories where nothing happens.

From now on, I'm writing what I care about.  There'll be no compromises.  And I'll keep throwing my stories at enough editors until I wear one down enough to publish me.  Or I find one on my wavelength who can't wait to take the work of an unknown, feminist, writer.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Unicorns and lions - recycling old tropes

I've been writing a short story about unicorns this week.  I know they're an old trope, but I hope I'm recycling it in a different way.  For starters, they're miniature horses, about the size of a Labrador dog.  And they have language.  And, most conveniently for my story, they're telepaths.  And even more handily, so is the reporter who befriended them.  

He needs to report on a trade convocation, but his paper's been barred from the proceedings. Cue the attack of the miniature unicorn.  The President is hosting this convocation, and she keeps unicorns as pets.  She never seems to notice how many of them are wandering around the palace, so it's an easy matter for my reporter to get his special friend smuggled in.   Where he will listen to all the conversations and stream them telepathically to my barred reporter.  Problem solved.

Another trope I've recycled in Genehunter is the lion-predator.  My alien Yull is certainly big, powerful, and predatory, but that's not all he is.  His people live in prides like lions, although there are many males in a tribe.  And they elect their leader in a democratic process, not by fighting.  They have written and oral language, and a fair degree of tech too.  And they have two arms and hands in addition to their four legs.  Yull is a complex, intelligent being, with his own problems and challenges.  

And I think that's the key to successfully recycling old tropes.  We usually think of unicorns as fantasy creatures, but my story is firmly SF.  We're on a different world, and the unicorns are natives there.  With Yull, I've retained the lion's pack-hunting way of life on the savannah. I researched lion hunts, and found that they too have their favourite positions.  They have their flankers and the individual who goes in to make the kill.  That was something I could easily adapt for the Ur-Vai.

So although unicorns and talking lions might be old ideas, there are still new ways of using them within a story.  And now I just hope that Villjo survives his fight with the upstart Ur-Vai Ahri.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Choreography, darling - the trouble with fight scenes

This week I've been writing, re-writing, and re-writing a fight scene. I always find them problematical, but I thought this was just me, with my aversion to violence.  But then I stumbled over a blog post from Writeonsisters, and realised fight scenes are a problem for many writers.

Phew, what a relief!  Often when I'm reading other authors' fights I'll consider them over-detailed and far too long.  Part of this is my childlike mind.  Despite having two Masters' degrees and being a qualified Solicitor (lawyer), I still read a bit like a wide-eyed child.  And I very quickly get bored with too much detail and description of a scene.  Which poses a problem for writing fight scenes.  It means I have to force myself to slow down, to choreograph each character's moves, to put in the detail that I normally skip over when reading.

This week's fight scene was also challenging because of the number of characters involved.  I had four baddies, who were holding my heroine hostage.  Then I had three rescuers.  That's eight people to keep track of.  And I didn't want any of my baddies killed.  I wanted them to escape so they could cause trouble in book two.  And I needed to tip the odds in favour of my outnumbered rescuers.

So I had some shots exchanged while the rescuers dive for cover.  When they fire back, two of the renegades run for the exit.  I think I can justify that because they've already been portrayed as losers, and one as a whinger too.  So now I had two renegades, a hostage, and three rescuers.  Better odds.

My alien Yull charges at the hostage-taker and frees Aris, but gets stunned in the process.  The move sends the remaining two renegades running for the exit, leaving Aris on the point of fainting after being throttled, and Yull in a coma induced by the energy blast be took.  That gives me a tense scene where nobody knows if Yull will wake up.

I'm not the only writer to tie myself up in knots about fights.  My friend Eileen Robertson had seven characters in the confrontation scene at the end of her first book.  She worked on it for months, sorting  out problem after problem with the choreography.  Oh, what we writers put ourselves through!

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera :Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Plain and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Making my characters suffer

This week I've been continuing with my rewrite of Genehunter.  I've been leading up to the Supreme Ordeal, where Aris is kidnapped and asked to do something she can't.  In my original version she didn't really come to any harm, and the danger was muted.  She wasn't subject to any violence, and she was rescued too easily.  It was a cop-out, and it was totally devoid of dramatic tension. What was happening to her wasn't even being seen through her eyes.  

This time, I've put the scene into her viewpoint and she is subject to violence, but only a small amount.  They don't hurt her badly, and that's another decision I've made about the scene.  For me, toughening up the story and letting my characters suffer is a balancing act.  I don't do dark and violent.  I'm responsible for the energy I put out into the world, and I don't fill the universe with such things.  The trick is deciding how little violence I can get away with while writing such scenes.

I've read several young adult books recently which have described violence in great detail, violence meted out to the main character on the page.  I've been surprised, and sometimes shocked, by the level of darkness in these books.  I've also read a YA book recently which described the teenage heroine being forced to kill for the first time.  The author has included a lengthy section of the character's reactions to her action, but this still makes the book uncomfortably dark.

The trick is to provide enough danger and challenge to the main character to make what happens to them matter while not alienating the reader.  The stakes need to be high, yes, but I don't need a detailed description of the gruesome death that will await my character if she gets caught by the villain.

I freely admit that I err on the side of being too soft with my characters.  Often I let the violence happen off the page.  My challenge is toughening up enough to make the scene feel realistic versus becoming so dark that it loses my readers.  And I think that getting this balance right is crucial. There is one bestselling YA series I refused to read beyond book one because of the excessive violence at the end of that book.  The right degree of toughness matters.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Solitude and isolation - driving the plot with silence and nothing

I'm away on a writing retreat this week, in a converted Wesleyan chapel in the middle of the Somerset countryside.  We're down a dead-end road that leads only to a bridleway for horses, and fields.  The nearest village is a mile away.  It's ideal for three writers wanting to get a lot of work done, and it got me thinking about solitude and isolation in storytelling.

I'm the one who always wakes early, and I'm typing this blog post alone while my two friends are still asleep.  The house is quiet around me, and so is the land.  It's around 6.30 in the morning, and the sun is rising on a peaceful new day.

Solitude and isiolation are great devices to put into a story when we need a character to reflect and question his or her life, or when they have to choose between two impossible options. I've just finished reading Julie Kagawa's Rogue, the second in her Talon series of young adult books.  It's all about Ember, a young dragon who doesn't fit in.  There's a character who feels alone and isolated even when she's with others.  

Solitude is perfect for torturing a character who's been ignoring the voice of his or her conscience for years. Put that character in a place where they're alone and can't sleep.  Get them to be tortured by the whisper of that little voice in their mind at 3 a.m.  Have it tell them how bad they've been, or urge them to do something they're afraid to do, and you set them up for challenge and change.

Fiction is about characters who make choices, who change by the end of the story.  In order for the reader to believe in these changes, the writer has to show how the character was induced to change.  We need to see the events and reasoning that have shaped his or her decision to act.  A short reflective scene of a character in solitude can achieve that, and let the reader into the character's thoughts and motivations.

As I finish this blog post its gone 7 a.m. and my friends have come down to join me. My brief period of solitude and isolation is over.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

The dangers of research

One of the pieces of advice all writers get is that, if we want to be published, we have to study the market.  The thing is, when I do that, I come away from the exercise thoroughly depressed.

I got into SF in the 1980s.  I fell in love with the stories of Anne McCaffrey, Mary Gentle, Joan D.Vinge, CJ Cherryh.  I loved Anne McCaffrey's straightforward storytelling style, the richness of her invention of Pern and its people.  I adored Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen.  I turned green-eyed with envy over the incredibly detailed descriptions of life on board CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the hyper-real portrayal of the ship's operating procedures,

Recently I decided to tackle the short story market, and came up against the present-day magazine world.  And here's where I started to despair.  Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end.  And I want something to change between the start and end of the story.   I've lost track of the number of published pieces I've read recently that don't follow those basic rules, that aren't really stories.  The beginning never seems to change into a middle, and in some cases there wasn't even an end.  I was left thinking "is that it?" when the story ended.  They're character studies, or little vignettes, the sort of thing a novelist might write while discovering their story or getting to know their characters.  They certainly aren't story in their own right.

So now I have a dilemma.  Should I try to write like this just to get published?  I don't really want to. I like my stories to have a strong narrative drive, and for something to change in them. For me, it's not enough to show a weird planet or weird culture and say "look at this!"  I want to know why you want me to look at it.  What message does that scene contain?

For me, writing has to do something.  It has to make a point, or explore a theme.  So I won't be writing  vignettes any time soon.  And I know that some of my themes are intriguing magazine editors, because they're telling me so in their feedback.  So I'll continue to write stories with a beginning, middle and end, exploring ideas I feel passionately about.  Because that's who I am as a writer, and I'm not prepared to change that.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

A world beyond the labels

As an SF writer, my task is to imagine the future.  So I get a little bemused when so many SF authors use their work as a political polemic for current-day gender politics.  I confess that much of this debate turns me off.  Call me naive, but when I raised the issue of multiple genders with a friend, her response was "but humans only come in two types, males and females."  I do feel rather like that myself.

I've watched the proliferation of gender labels with bemusement, and I confess that when I spot a new one I often have to look up its meaning.  And it seems that some SF writers go out of their way to invent more exotic variations on gender.  The trouble is, I'm a practically-minded person, and I wonder why we need this overlay of gender on our physical sex type.

I think some of it is an attempt to escape the shackles of our current sexualised culture, and that I support wholeheartedly.  We have to challenge the 'sexy girlie' stereotype, but I'm not convinced that inventing multiple genders is the best way to do that.  What's needed is a full frontal attack on sexism and mysogyny, what's required is to demand true equality for all people.

That's why I don't focus on gender in my books,  I write about worlds where people don't define themselves by such labels, a world where people are accepted for who they are.  I envisage worlds where anyone can train for and do their dream job or profession, and not be barred from that career because of sex-based prejudices.  Gender is absent in my books because it's not relevant to them.   I have female project leaders and Presidents working alongside male chairmen of powerful organisations.  I have teams of male and female people working happily together, bound by their respect for each others' professional expertise.  

I see my characters as individuals living in a world beyond ugly sexualised culture, where equality is an expectation of everyone.  That makes them free to be true individuals, without the need to identify with some label or group.  To me, that is true speculation, as it's so far from the world in which we live  today.  But SF has always been a torch-bearer for change, and if what I write can encourage people to see people free from sexual stereotyping and expectations, then it will have served its purpose.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Rape and birth control aren't SF? That's news to me

This week I had a Facebook discussion with a group of women SF writers.  I was commenting on an article about a magazine's submission policy that failed to pin down what type of story they liked. I find the blanket statement "we don't know what we want until we see it" totally unhelpful, and I wondered if anyone out there had any opinions or experience that could help.

The first response to my query was from a man, who said that rape and birth control didn't sound like subjects for SF stories.  I immediately replied, demanding to know why they weren't SF when they were issues that affected over half of the human race, and would continue to do so in the future.

The deafening silence from the women members of a so-called feminist SF organisation bothered me. This group's aims include "celebrating women as writers... In SF, fantasy... And the speculative genres."  And yet the majority of its members didn't consider this an important enough subject to comment on.

My comment was a response to an article by a magazine editor who stated "editors select what they think are the best stories for the publication."  Best is a subjective personal opinion of one person, and in this case of a man.  And this particular magazine makes no statements in its submission guidelines about committing to diverse stories and authors, as many others do.

At least other magazines state in their submission guidelines that they welcome work from under-represented groups.  But that doesn't go far enough.  Those guidelines don't address diversity of subject matter.  Do we have equality of submission, but not equality of story subjects likely to be bought?  Are certain issues being labelled as "women's issues" and ignored by the magazines?  I have to suspect so, given the response I got from the man on Facebook.

When I start seeing published stories that question and challenge current cultural assumptions I might start to believe in those magazines' equality  statements, but until then I remain to be convinced.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Sexual apocalypse - no thanks

Last week I finished reading a book, the second in a series, that I came to because of the promise of the environmental SF of the first book.  That promise was badly betrayed in the second book, which seemed to have abandoned the environmentalist principles that made the first one so interesting.  In this book, the focus was on poverty, politics, and war.

The overall tone of the book was depressingly gloomy, as is the cover.  But what really annoyed me was the amount of gratiuitous sexual content and references to sex, some of it alluding to violent sex, some verging on the erotic.  Sorry, but I don't read SF to learn about a squad of elite berserkers who have violent sex with each other every night, an activity encouraged by their leaders.

What really bugs me is that this book was written by a woman, and edited by a woman, both of whom  have been involved in decrying the lack of representation for women in the SF genre.  Sorry, but if your solution to that problem is to write and publish books about sexual apocalypse, count me out.  I'm more likely to write about an apocalypse that occurs because a woman can't be corrupted that way.  

I'm kicking around several ideas for stories where women rulers simply can't be affected by the promise of sex, where "fluff-head" women turn out to be totally immune to any kind of sexual flattery.  But the thing is, if this kind of sexual apocalypse is what the market thinks it wants, do I stand a hope in hell's chance of ever getting those stories published?  Sometimes I despair when I ask that question, as I suspect the answer is 'no'.

But there is one thing I can do. I can refuse to nominate this book, or any other with a sexual apocalypse in its pages, for any awards.  And I can refuse to buy or read any more books by this author.  I can refuse to send my energy her way, and focus on finding and supporting storytellers with more positive messages.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Competing to shock - loss of the moral compass

I was appalled to read on Twitter last week that a bestselling thriller writer was boasting that his next book would be his most violent ever. I have only read one of this author's books, and the amount of graphic and unnecessary violence in it ensured I'd never read any more.  I have met women, some of them in their sixties with grandchildren they dote on, who've said that the more violence there is in a book, the more they like it.  This bothers me.

It seems that many crime writers, and some SF ones too, are competing for the award of Most  Shocking Narrative of The Year.  Yes, literature must  reflect the zeitgeist of its age.  Yes, it should comment on and challenge the tenets of the prevailing culture and societal values.  

But at this point the writer's moral compass comes into play.  Both metaphysics and quantum physics tell us that, at a fundamental level, everything is pure energy.  And they also tell us that we affect that energy with the thoughts and words we put into it.  That gives us a moral duty to think very carefully about the amount of death and violence we put into our work, and about how graphically we describe those things.

There is a very successful fantasy series of books, and now its associated TV series, that have gained notoriety for the number of people killed in its stories.  But to me, there's something obscene about boasting that the body count for series five will be even higher than series four.  This is a series of books I've refused to read.

Sometimes I feel like King Canute, trying to hold back the relentless tide.  But then I remember that everything is energy.  And if I can send my energy out into the universe untainted by such violence then that is one clear voice slicing its way through the darkness, showing a different way,  By refusing to add to the sum of graphic violence, by refusing to read about it and watch it, I am making a difference.  I'm throwing a small pebble into the pond from which great ripples arise, ripples of awareness that spread out and help others to say no, and to change things.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Every title tells a story

This week I've been sorting our four years' worth of back issues of Writers' Forum magazine.  I cut out the articles I want to keep and file them in alphabetical order in lever arch files. They provide a rich resource for designing workshops.

At the same time as I was sorting through them I was trying to work out - yet again - why I'm not getting any short story acceptances.  I've rewritten the first pages and sections of many of them to make them tighter, and I was looking for any other ways to improve them.  That was when my eyes lighted on an old article about turning rejected stories into accepted ones.  I'd tried most of the remedies suggested in it, but the one I hadn't tried was changing the titles of stories.

Then I came across another article by prolific short story writer Della Galton, talking about rejection.  She too said she'd changed story titles and subsequently had the stories accepted.  She said that sometimes a good title could sway an editor to accept a story.

Hmm. Clearly I've been missing a trick here.  I'm a very solid practical person, and I tend to think of solid, practiical titles for my stories. They tend to be down-to-Earth titles that describe the story, often in one word. Maybe they weren't exciting enough?

Then I went on-line and started reading some more recently-published SF short stories.  And found that many of them have lengthy, often quirky, and sometimes obscure, titles.  When I read the stories, the titles seemed only loosely connected with the narrative they headed up, but they were getting sold.

So my next experiment is to change the titles of stories I believe in and am happy that I've edited to within an inch of their lives.  I've found two good titles already, and am about to submit them in their new guises.  My only problem then will be keeping track of the old and new titles, and where I've sent the story as each.  But if an obscure title really will tempt an editor to buy the story, what have I got to lose?

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Committing to submitting

I've been keeping up my submission commitment this week, with five new submissions.  I'm not sure whether it's good to get rejections swiftly, or after a month's wait.  I've had some of both types this week.  At least the quick ones allow you to move on fast and get the story turned around and sent out again.  Those that take a month to return somehow seem like I've wasted time getting the answer.

It helps to keep an eye on social media when you're submitting stories.  Following publishers can alert you to their open reading periods, and I came across one of these this week.  Tor.com closed submissions some months ago, and have just re-opened.  But when I was following up their submission requirements for short stories I happened to notice they were open for submissions of novellas again.  For a whole month.  But I just happen to have a novella looking for a home, so I submitted that too.

I've been spending some time recently looking at the openings of stories that have been published.  Even for subscription magazines, you can usually read the first three or four paragraphs of published stories for free.  As these are the very paragraphs that persuade an editor whether or not to buy the story, that's handy research.  

I've also been trying to take a long, hard look at my stories to work out why they don't sell.  Ànd I've detected a tendency in me to start the story too slowly, or just a shade too early.  I'm still writing myself into the tale.  Once I've got to page two or three the story's rattling along, but it needs to do that on page one as well.  So the novella, and the stories that got submitted this week, got a page one re-write to eliminate the excess story establishment before they went off. 

I'm committed to submitting my work now, and to selling it.  So if I need to keep on changing my stories I'll do it.  But it's knowing what to change that matters too, and I sense I've reached a higher level of awareness on that in the last few weeks.  I'm learning to pull back far enough to look at my stories as a stranger, to develop the lack of investment in my work that allows me to see it as an outsider who knows nothing about me, or the story.  Time will tell if it pays off.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Making first contact - the cheat's way

This week I'm re-writing Genehunter.  In it I have a human crew making first contact with an indigenous species of big cats, the U-Vai.This raised the question of how to keep the story moving when the two species know nothing about each other and can't speak each other's languages.

I've resorted to a couple of tricks to get around this problem.  First, I have a viewpoint in the head of one of the aliens, Yull.  Getting into his head means I can tell the reader about the cats' society, culture, and concerns without having to worry about the language barrier.  The big cats do have a language, and they speak proper words.  (I'm not sure whether that modification to their vocal chords would mean the couldn't roar, but I want them to roar, so they do that too.)  being in Yull's head allows me to tell the reader relevant history long before my human characters discover it.

Second, I've cheated by letting the two species have universal translators.  They both have tech, so I've figured that they might be able to find a way to exchange binary files.  It's unlikely that they'd receive the complete databases I've miraculously had my characters doing, but this is fiction, and I have to do what's needed to keep the story moving.

In reality, even if the two species had such help, making a first contact would be a cautious, long drawn out process. But I want to send the two species on a journey together, to figure out what's happening at the other end of the continent.  So  I need them to be able to communicate and agree to travel together on this adventure,

I've made Yull a young leader, but wise in ways some of the older members of his tribe are not.  That means he's more open-minded, a dreamer, more able to cope with the culture shock of meeting people who came to his world through the 'deep black'.  And his son Villjo has a youngster's lack of fear, and makes friends with Aris, my human heroine, easily.

I've tried not to make the contact too unrealistic. It does involve Aris spending long hours with the language teaching programme actually learning the language.  But in the end the demands of the story must prevail.  And now they're ready to set out on their big adventure,

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Plain and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Talking cats - ignoring an editor's advice

When I was gathering together submission guidelines for science fiction magazines earlier this year I came across one editor's list of what he didn't want to see in stories.  Apart from showing that person's jaded and cynical view of the stories he received, it also contained the line: no stories about talking cats.

I have no idea why this should be a no-no.  True, if you're going to replace talking fluffy bunnies with fluffy cute kittens it's likely your story won't have the edge it needs.  But what about if those cats are pony-sized lion-cats with arms and hands as well as four legs?  What if they have language, culture, religion, their own technology?  Ŵhat if they're a fully-rounded, intelligent, alien species that just happens to have evolved from a big cat species rather than an ape one?  I think that's a wholly different story.

This is what I am doing with Genehunter.  The point of creating the alien Ur-Vai was to give me a chance to comment on humans and their beliefs and culture.  For example, do we ever wonder about the feat of balance we perform every day just walking down the street?  From the viewpoint of a four-legged cat, bipedal locomotion should be hard.  After all, humans have no tails to help them balance.

My talking cats are real people.  Their pelt and mane colours differ, as do the shades of their eyes.  They're individuals,  Yull, my viewpoint cat, has eyes of different colours.  The Ur-Vai show the complexity and diversity of form that evolution would produce. And they have different political and personal opinions, as any highly-intelligent race would.  There are cats friendly to my human characters, cats hostile to them, and there are traitors to their own people.

So I'll leave that jaded and cynical editor's advice about no talking cats behind me.  Every trope can be done successfully if we find a fresh angle on it, tell a great story, and give our talking cats real problems and challenges.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Putting my head above the parapet

Over the last couple of weeks I've received several savage reviews of stories of mine, stories I love and really believe in.  This is the downside of putting our heads above the parapet and showing our work to the world. VWhen someone tells you that they cannot believe in the premise of your novel at all, this is a grievous wound.  It goes straight to the heart.  And sometimes we get do shot by critiquers.  Badly shot.  And the words wound us and go straight to the heart.

But sometimes there's more than just a comment on our work going on in these critiques.  In one of those savage reviews, I sensed jealousy, and perhaps even a sense of competition from the critiquer.  This was another writer who had not had her novel published yet.  It's coming out later this year, published by a small press I've never heard of.  And that makes me wonder how good she is as a writer.  I didn't get to critique her work in return, so I can't judge.  But I wonder.

If I were a beginner writer that level of savage criticism might well stop me writing for ever.  But I'm not,  I've been writing for forty years, and spent almost as long putting my head above the parapet.  I've taught creative writing for over a decade, and I'm now Chairwoman of Havant and District Writers' Circle.  And in all my workshops and in the Circle I set rules for feedback.  I ask people to say what they like about a piece first, then move on to what they didn't like about it.

There is always something good about a piece of writing.  I've never yet come across writing without one spark of something good to it.  And yet that was the critique I received.  Nothing was good, she didn't believe in my premise, my characters were stupid...  The critique was the most disrespectful I've ever received, and I can't help thinking of this critiquer as a jaded, cynical 'I've seen it all before' woman.  How joyless her life must be if she criticises everything in that manner.

There's only one way to heal from such a wound.  Remind yourself that this is one person's opinion, and that not everybody will agree with that view.  If we want to grow and learn as writers we have to put our heads above the parapet, but we also have to gain the wisdom to sort the wheat from the chaff.  I'll heal from my current wounds, continue putting my head above the parapet, and keep on learning and risking new wounds.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera: Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more about her on www.wendymetcalfe.com