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.