Friday 13 May 2016

The last post

I've decided that today's post is going to be the last on this FEM-SF blog.  I've been posting here for around two years, and when I set up this blog I intended to keep it solely for posts about SF.  But over the years there's been a fair bit of bleed of subjects between this blog and my wendymetcalfe.blogspot.com blog, and I've decided that the time has come to post everything on that blog in future.

Several things have led up to this decision.  First, I want to free up the time I've spent in writing FEM-SF posts for writing new short stories. I still don't have enough good stories to send out on circulation, and I need to up the hit Rate.  And some of the stories that have been edited to within an inch of their lives and repeatedly submitted are running out of new markets to try.

So I must write some new stories.  I have no shortage of ideas for these.  I have a lever-arch file full of them, and two plastic wallets full of scribbled notes on pieces of paper.  I have no shortage of material, but I need to set aside time to write them.  I've set a goal of getting at least one short story accepted by a paying SF magazine this year.  So I have to up the story numbers being submitted.  I know full well that this is a numbers game.

Secondly, I want more time to experiment with short stories, try different writing styles, try to push the boundaries of my craft some more.  And thirdly, I have a file of already-written stories that just don't make the grade.  I have three in front of me now that bear the legend 'more setting' on the top.  This is one of my failings, an impatience with large chunks of description, but I am now training myself to enrich my settings by putting enough detail in.

This doesn't mean I'll stop commenting on SF subjects on the wendymetcalfe blog. If the Hugos turn out to be a disaster again this year, I'll no doubt rant about that again.  But I have my fingers crossed, hoping that won't happen.

The more I've written on both blogs, the more I've realised that the things that concern me - issues like the under-representation of women authors - are common to all parts of the publishing world.  Far from being a strange and rarefied genre, SF is afflicted by the same kinds of prejudices, politics, and issues as any other genre. The case for a dedicated SF blog isn't made.  So I'll say goodbye from this blog, and hope to see you over on http://wendymetcalfe.blogspot.com in future.

Thursday 5 May 2016

A change of location - good for filling the well

This week I've been out and about to some places I haven't visited for a while.  It's finally spring in England, and the last week has been a sunny and warm one.  The rise in temperature is welcome after a colder than average April.

I benefited from my change of scene by getting a flurry of new ideas.  Going to new places is good for "filling the well" as creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls it.  As I'm out and about I can observe things I want to change in the world, or things which I think need to change.  These provide the driving force for new stories.

And one of the things I notice a lot is aimless people, people without a purpose, or even a plan for the current day.  There are the retired men who buy the cheapest coffee in the cafe then hog the best window seat for three hours, staring out into pace.  But what if one of these aimless-looking men had knowledge that could save the world?  What if they were an adept at an ancient wisdom that was desperately needed to avoid global disaster?  Will our planet go to its doom because Western cultures generally don't respect and honour their senior citizens?

A change of scene has taken me to walking by the shore.  I see the many moods of the sea while walking beside it.  When it's out in the distance it leaves acres of mud flats.  What if someone buried a canister in the mud with top-secret data in it? 

What if this was a sea on another world, and the buried object contained the key to an ancient weapon?  And what if a bitter and twisted antagonist had heard about that burial, and was determined to find the key?  But maybe the ocean itself is the key's guardian?  Maybe it has some awareness that it uses to protect the key.  Or maybe the key itself has some awareness.  Perhaps the ocean and the key can communicate.  Perhaps the ocean knows that it will be harmed if the key is found and used to set off the weapon.  So many ideas from a change of scene and the application of the SF writer's magic question "what if".

A change of scene is a great way to "fill the well" of creative ideas.  Walking with our senses open, and alert to answers to the "what if?" question, we revitalise our ideas and or writing.  Anyone for octopus emperors?

Thursday 28 April 2016

Feeding the soul, or feeding the bank balance

Research the market... See what the magazines are accepting.  Write something you think they'll take... We've all been told that.  This is a topic I keep returning to In my exploration of who I am as a writer.  Because anyone who's studied any metaphysical texts will tell you that we create our own realities

So how does that translate into becoming a successful novelist or short story writer?  Well, one way is by the way our beliefs about our writing and our world show in our voice.  All agents and editors say they're looking for a distinctive voice in every submission they read.  But what exactly do they mean by that?  

Voice is a collection of many things; our writing style, whether our way of telling a story is straightforward with short, functional, sentences, or told in longer, lyrical sentences in a more "literary" way.  It's our choice of words, and our choice of angle on the story.  The way we tell that story, what we focus on, is part of our voice too.

I usually write about 'strong female heroines'.  What a cliche that phrase is.  So how do my 'strong' women become individuals? By what they choose to focus on, and by what they do about the events in their lives.

My characters' voices are quiet and firm, like that of lyrr musher Anyu.  She resists the harassment of the alien Itea stoically, and when the time comes to get her revenge on them for the lyrr they killed, her part is to quietly transport a hit team through a blizzard.

My quiet characters explore my concerns.  They seek justice for the slain creatures of the natural world.  They seek to free women from sexual and reproductive slavery.  And they usually do so quietly.

These are the stories that feed my soul, that say things that I need to say.  They're not cashing in on some current craze. Many a time I will ignore human affairs in my stories.  They're just too petty for me. My focus is on the wider universe.  Only time will tell whether this feeding of my soul will resonate with others and feed my bank balance as well.

Thursday 21 April 2016

The price of being a bestseller?

On Wednesday night I listened to a talk from a successful women's magazine short story writer.  But the interesting thing was that when she talked about her real writing passion, it wasn't women's fiction.  It was crime.  Another writing friend who knows her work says that her crime is quite dark.

This raised the question of writing for the market just to earn money.  Our guest had decided that the women's magazine market offered her the best chance to earn a living.  I did toy with that idea myself a few years back, but my heart wasn't in that market.  My stories were about single women rejoicing about being out of constricting marriages, or women making great successes out of their careers.

But our speaker created a career for herself writing stories that aren't her real passion.  She is churning them out to pay the bills.  And that got me thinking about the price of success.

Publishers want novelists to establish their 'brand' right at the start of their careers.  They also love series with the same characters.  But I don't know if new authors think in terms of being trapped by their series when they get their first contract.  I'm sure that many are just so grateful to stop banging their heads against the publishing brick wall they accept the first contract offered.

But we need to have the vision to think about the long game of our career right from the start.  So our first published book or story needs to be in a genre and about a subject we're passionate about.  So if it's successful, we're happy to write many more using similar themes.  And if we have characters we love and want to develop through several books, so much the better.

If I applied that speaker's logic to writing novels, I should be writing crime or thrillers, or romance, for a shot at the bestseller lists.  But here's the thing: all these books are about humans doing things to other humans.  They're not my passion.  My passion is wildlife, and examining the way that humans use, misuse, and destroy it.

The price of havIng to write about humans murdering other humans would be too high for me.  My writing serves a higher purpose than mere entertainment, if murder can be called such a thing.  And SF  is the best route to explore the issues I'm interested in.  So I'll remain an SF writer, thank you, and take the longer and harder route to bestsellerdom.

Thursday 14 April 2016

I don't need any more courses

I subscribe to Writing Magazine, and I usually  buy Writers' Forum too each month.  And every time I read these magazines my eyes stray to glossy adverts for writing courses.

Over the thirty plus years I've been writing I must have attended hundreds of them.  Go back fifteen years and you would have found me, and most of my local writing friends, eagerly preparing for the annual Writers' Conference at the University of Winchester.  Some years I even booked for the Friday all-day workshop as well as the weekend.  My Friday would start at ten in the morning, and not finish until ten-thirty that night.

When I knew nothing about the publishing industry, or the business of writing for publication, I learned a great deal from course tutors and fellow writers. I did courses on creating powerful characters, pitching to agents, the state of the publishing industry, and self-publishing.  And I've lost count of the times I've walked out of a one-to-one session with an agent feeling dispirited.

On one occasion I cut short my fifteen-minute interview with an agent after she suggested that there should be a romance in the book between the male and female leads.  Considering that the female is a cat-shaped half-human and the male is full human, I thought it was the stupidest and weirdest comment I'd ever heard from an agent.  I think that has to count as one of the lowest points in my search for publication.

I've sought regular feedback on my manuscripts, read them to countless critiquing groups, and had my self-published books rigorously copy and line edited.  I've learned to think in terms of a commercial product.  Then in 2008 I had a book taken off the slushpile by a major publisher.  They read the whole thing, and liked it, but didn't offer me a contract.  But to have got that far from an unsolicited approach was a real boost, and they gave me lots of positive feedback on the novel .  More recently, an agent kindly critiqued my  cover letter for the novel I'm currently submitting, telling me she couldn't improve on it.

So I've decided I don't need any more courses.  I've learned my craft.  Now my quest to get published has shifted to finding the people who believe in my vision of the future, and don't try to turn my female characters into sexy airheads.  Courses can't help with that search.  It's down to numbers, self-belief, and perseverance - and a whole lot of luck.

Thursday 7 April 2016

Committing to my characters

I'm currently re-writing a novel which I originally wrote as a young adult tale.  Leaving aside my naive view that YA fiction was simpler and needed less depth than adult fiction, there are other reasons why the story didn't work.

I've mentioned in previous blog posts my tendency to pull my punches in describing characters' emotional reactions to events that affect them, but in this particular book I've committed a far worse sin.  I've failed to get into my character's skin.  I could see what she was seeing, but I didn't describe the differences between her vision and a human's.  But what I hadn't done - surprise, surprise - was describe her emotional reactions to the things that were happening to her.

And that was fatal for this particular manuscript.  For starters, she's just returned from a field trip to find the research station she departed from a few hours ago a smoking ruin.  But even more traumatic was her discovery of the burned remains of her parents there.

I've had the experience of my own parents dying, and I know the feeling of being suddenly cut adrift.  Two people who have been around for every day of your life are suddenly gone.  And this plunges us into a black hole of grief.  Each of us grieves in our own way, but if we cared at all about the person who's died, then we will grieve their loss.

But my character Chita was being too stiff-upper-lipped.  True, she is in constant danger of attack and has an ongoing threat to her own life, but I needed to show her grief.  I needed more of her emotions, a sense of that black hole that her dark thoughts are constantly falling into.

What I needed to do was get inside her skin.  She's a genetically engineered cat/human, and I think I've always had my internal censor sitting on my shoulder when I write about her.  "This will never work" it says.  "Do you have any idea how Impossible it would be to combine I'shara and human DNA to create a viable hybrid?"

This is when I need to silence that voice and commit to my character.  She does exist, a fully-functioning big cat with a human brain, language, and intelligence.  And my task now is to get fully inside her fur, live her life, and bring this glorious creation alive.  I have to commit to my character.

Thursday 31 March 2016

In at the deep end - what's going on?

Recently I've been trying to read several SF books by highly regarded authors which I couldn't get into the first time.  I know we've got to pitch our readers right into the middle of the action, but the reader also needs to know where they're being thrown to.  And especially in science fiction and fantasy getting the balance of action and world description right is crucial.

One of the books I struggled with started with an introduction (a prologue by any other name) which was 22 pages long.  That section is written in the first person, and is the record of an unknown therapist.  The client he/she is talking to is also not identified by name.  She's a female, but the introduction takes the form of the therapist's notes, and all the way through she's only called the client.

In short, this prologue is one massive info-dump of backstory, told by one unknown character to another.  And it's a very confusing and and complex backstory at that.  It involves two husbands, a lost brother, and half a dozen events that made no sense to me at all. 

And yet... the novel is published by one of the major UK SF imprints.  We're not talking about a thrown-together self-published book here.  We're talking about a book that has been accepted and edited by a mainstream publisher.

Having looked it up, I see that this is the fourth book in a series, so I think this marathon prologue info- dump is an attempt to tell the reader what happened in the first three books.   But it really doesn't work.  And even the back cover blurb mentions that the world is confusing, and that there are an awful lot of interweaving story strands,

You might say that I ought to seek out and read the first book before criticising this.  But readers often don't come to a series in the order the books were written.  And I've picked up middle books of other series before and had no trouble working out what was going on.  And wanted to read the rest of the series.

But not with this author.  And after struggling through a 22 page info-dump attempt to get up to speed, I've no desire to persevere with the book.

Yes, I do get impatient with long descriptive set-ups, but this long interview didn't pitch me into the middle of the action at all.  It pitched me in at the deep end, and I had no idea what was going on.

Friday 25 March 2016

I haven't failed, I've just found 100 editors and agents who don't believe in me

When i got four rejections on the same day recently I had a massive downer.  It was time for some swift self-esteem boosting measures.

And then I remembered the famous Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." And it occurred to me that this was just as relevant to trying to get published, albeit in a slightly altered form.  What an inspiration that quote is!  And it gave me a clue to a new way of dealing with faceless rejections.

Because, of course, every rejection that comes in is a failure.  It's a failure to convince another person of the brilliance of our prose, or the brilliance of our ideas.  And it hurts.

But, having got picked off the unsolicited slushpile once, I know I'm not deluding myself that I can write.  That was a major publisher, and the submission was made without an agent.   A tiny, tiny, proportion of scripts get followed up from this source.  I had the whole manuscript read, and received some fabulous feedback on my world-creation and characters.  A serious publisher thought my writing was good.

Since then I've had lots of this type of infuriating feedback on my short stories.  You know the sort of thing, "I love this character, she's really spunky... But we're not going to publish your story anyway."

And that brings me back to Edison's quote.  The most important thing in engaging with the brutal edifice of publishing is to make sure we keep our self-esteem intact.  And Edison's quote gives me the lead to doing that.  I haven't failed, I've just found a hundred editors and agents who don't believe in my writing.

Some will, some won't.  Next!  Their lack of belief in me is their problem.  It isn't going to destroy my self-belief.  Because the publishing process is all about belief.  It's about finding people who believe in me and in the world-visions set out in my novels.  And when I get downhearted I remind myself that even people like NASA fail.  Twenty of their first 28 attempts to send a rocket into space failed.

But now we have the International Space Station, and NASA is planning to go to Mars.  So persistence pays off, and i intend to follow that lead.  And one day, I will find the agent and editor who do believe in me and my work.  Watch out then, for I'll take off like one of NASA's rockets.
.

Thursday 17 March 2016

Short story competitions - falling between the cracks

As a science fiction writer, short story competitions have always been problematical for me.  If I enter  an SF competition, then the judges are looking for something 'radical', something that 'pushes the boundaries of the genre'.  They're looking for weird tech, or aliens.  But if you look at the winning stories you'll often find that marriage still exists in those worlds, and men still control women.  Hmm.  A strange kind of 'radical'

Now the thing is, the kind of 'radical' I write is rather different, and a good deal quieter than the those stories.  For a start, it's usually near-future, a hundred or two hundred years ahead, and human societies are not radically removed from today's.  

My 'radical' stories challenge current culture.  They imagine a society where people have grown beyond the use of recreational sex to bolster their self-esteem.  But that isn't a kind of 'radical' that competition judges want to see.  Neither, it seems, are stories where women have been totally freed from the burden of childbearing.  SF might speculate about the future, but this, it seems, is a step too far.

So perhaps I should try a general writing competition.  I've considered submitting short stories to two recently.  And I started by researching the judges.  Both were female, but that's not necessarily a good thing for me.  I discovered that one of them was an ex-editor of a romance imprint.nn I can't imagine such a judge, steeped in the world of cozy, unrealistic, romance, looking kindly at a story which contains zero romance.  In fact, it might even outlaw romance in that world.

So that was one competition ruled out.  What about the other one?  That judge was an author of contemporary women's books.  Books about relationships and cozy families.  So I can't see an  SF story which challenges the basis of her world doing well in that competition either.

This kind of falling between the cracks is common for me, and so damned annoying.  What I'm looking for are competitions that appreciate a conventionally-written story with a beginning, middle and end, a story that challenges the conventions of current western socieities.  And so far, I haven't found the entrance to that magic world between the cracks where I belong.

Friday 11 March 2016

Throwaway sexual comments = quickest way to lose my readership

I've recently started reading an SF book by a male author who is highly regarded.  This is part of my tug of war love/hate relationship with the genre.  It's the books by men that gain most of the plaudits, and the ones most likely to be included on lists of 'ten best SF authors' books you must read'.

I have a real problem with some of the books I've tried to read, mainly because they portray a future that is as hostile to women as the present patriarchal sexualised society is.  Let me give you an example.  One book I started reading had a section which I think was supposed to be a prologue, although it wasn't clear from the headings. And that section consisted of a male character reminiscing about the past.

Nothing wrong with that, you say. Except that at one point he's thinking about a woman.  And we get one line of her dialogue.  And that line is her saying that she really wants to come.  Oh, please!  I have no idea who this stray woman was in terms of the story.  I don't know if she's the other character's girlfriend, or some prostitute he had casual sex with.  

The cynical, weary side of me says that this piece of writing is there as a cheap device to lure in male readers with the promise of sex.  This woman appears on the first page, so you'll probably think that the narrative includes sex and buy the book.

This cheap titillation device lost me as a potential reader of that author's work.  If his level of respect for women is to put them as anonymous characters into his books with their only thoughts about sex then I don't want to read his work.  Because he isn't respecting women, and I expect respect.

I want to read stories that give me some hope for the future.  And the biggest hope you could show me was a world where both men and women have grown up.  Where neither sex uses sex as a way to raise their self esteem.  They don't need to, because their self-esteem is high without that.

That's why books like Ancilary Justice caused such a stir in the SF world.  Because they turned everything our culture tells us about sex and gender on its head, breaks it apart and shows us how constructed, how false it is.

And that's why I have a love/hate relationship with male SF writers' books.  Because all too often I see no trace of a change, no shred of hope that the future can be better.  And my time and my money are limited, so why should I spend either with people who don't respect me?

Thursday 3 March 2016

The eyes of the beholder - the case for multi-viewpoints

Two-thirds of the way through my re-write of Snowbird I realised that the story still wasn't working.  The   manuscript still wouldn't be fit to submit for publication once I'd finished.

As the story is over twenty years old you might be forgiven for thinking that I was just tinkering with the story, afraid to say that I'd finished with it.  But you'd be wrong.

The first major problem is that the whole novel is in the viewpoint of one person, Jian Kabana, my starship Coder.  Certainly she's the major character, and most of the events in the book revolve around her, but there are many problems with telling the story only through her eyes,

One is that it made it hard to describe Jian's appearance - at least, without resorting to the old routine  of the character seeing herself in the mirror.  And in the early drafts I'd done just that.  But I felt that it was important to say that she had dusky skin.  Her mother was white-skinned and her father dark-skinned, so naturally Jian's skin tone is somewhere between them.  But if I didn't mention this up front, most readers would make the assumption that she was white.

The second problem with one viewpoint was that I couldn't get into the head of her friend and Scwanberger security guy Brett Dorado.  I wanted him to confirm that, despite her wild looks, Jian is an ace Coder.  And I wanted him to reveal that he is a cyborg, as a result of being a victim of an illegal military programme.  Only he knew some of that information, so he had to reveal it.

And the third reason I need multi-viewpoints is that I'm planning on writing a series of books based around the Darius orbital shipyard location.  In fact, I already have a very rough first draft of the second book, Darius.  That is a multi-viewpoint book, and although it needs re-writing, it already has more pace than the first book.  So by re-writing Snowbird in multi-viewpoints, I'll be setting the pattern for what I hope will be a long series of books.

My last reason for re-vamping the book was pace.  With one character only, she has to do a lot of thinking about or straight telling of what's happening to other characters.  And that slows the pace down and makes the book plodding.

I've re-written five chapters so far, in three viewpoints, and the book works much better.

Friday 26 February 2016

Diverse submissions - but are they diverse stories?

I've been trawling the submission requirements of some new science fiction magazines this week, and I've noticed an interesting development.  Quite a few carry diversity statements.  They're at pains to point out they welcome work from under-represented groups like .... well, all the usual suspects.

This is something I've seen gradually increasing during the last year, and it's a very welcome development.  But I'm wondering if it'll make any difference to my chances of success as an SF short story writer. Because encouraging submissions from people of diverse backgrounds is an easy win.  You can measure your progress and point to statistics to show the world how well you're doing.  You can make yourself look good on the VIDA count.  

But the thing is, diverse people also have diverse world views.  And if you're serious about attracting submissions from different groups of people, then you have to be serious about publishing diverse story content too.  But so far that doesn't appear to be happening.  I've read stories that support the patriarchal culture, marriage, and women relegated to the role of mother.  And work division on gender grounds.  None of these things describes my life, and these stories don't serve me or speak to me.

The thing is, as well as magazines honouring my physical diversity, I want them to honour my diversity of mind too.  For me, that means accepting stories which show the evil, exploitative side of sex, which question and challenge the religion of 'the family', and the notion that human breeding is a good thing. I want to see stories about reducing human population and increasing wildlife.  I want to see less about shiny tech and much more about the environmental consequences of making and using that shiny tech.
 
But I'm not seeing that.   A wandering multi-viewpoint story about UFOs outside a diner in the middle of nowhere America just doesn't do it for me.

Sorry, magazines,  must try harder.  Much, much harder.  You're supposed to be the place where we see brave new worlds.  But the future I see in your pages is more of the same, an extension of the culture we have today.  And the prospect of our current patriarchal, discriminatory, sex-obsessed culture extending into the future isn't one I find attractive.  And I certainly don't want to read about it in your magazine.

Friday 12 February 2016

I'll pass on 'pushing the boundaries', thanks

"This magazine is looking for stories that push the boundaries in form and voice."  So a new SF magazine announced this week.  There goes another gimmicky market it's not worth me submitting to.

This isn't a question of lack of self belief, or of belief in my writing. It's a declaration of self-knowledge and strength.  I've read the starts of a lot of these "pushing the boundaries" stories recently.  And I've rarely got past the second or third paragraph before I'm bored silly.

Often the ideas in these stories are totally impractical.  Tech migh be able to do wonderful things very quickly, but I simply refuse to believe that the human body will be able to change its skin colour every day any time in the near future.  Biology  needs more time to evolve, but why would it evolve to do that?  What evolutionary advantage would it give us?

And that's my problem with a lot of these "pushing the boundaries" stories.  They haven't just pushed the boundaries, they've destroyed them.  So many of them have no points of reference with the science we know today,  and yes, I know we can't predict how radically tech will change our lives in the future.  But while the tech may change at lightning speed, human biology won't.  At least, not naturally.  Genetic modification might make some radical changes, but I suspect we'd find out what we  don't know about the process pretty quick.  And most likely in negative ways like terminal illnesses.

Others of these "boundary" stories have left me thinking "is that it?" when I've reached the end.  So  you've had one off-the-wall idea and spewed it onto the page.  But that's just an idea, not a story,  and ideas are a dime a dozen.

This is where I usually part company with the "pushing the boundaries" stories.  The envelope becomes so pushed that it's totally unrecognisable as an envelope.  Stories start somewhere, they progress somewhere, and they end somewhere.  Beginning, middle, end.  Not always presented in that order, but always there somewhere.  Without them there is no story.

Without them what's left is no more tnan a character or idea sketch showing off the shiny new idea. And I have a hard time caring about those.  So I'll pass on pushing the boundaries, thanks.

Thursday 4 February 2016

The moral in the military

For years I resisted reading any military SF.  The idea of reading about massive space fleets killing each other just wasn't for me.  I come from a family with no real connection to the military, and I had this misplaced idea that military SF would glamourise and glorify war.

I still haven't read much military SF, but what I have read was written by women: Elizabeth Moon and Karen Traviss. Both these authors do have connections with the military.  Elizabeth Moon was a 1st Leuitenant in the US Marine Corps the 1960s.  Karen Traviss is a former defence correspondent and journalist.

I started reading both writers' works unsure if I would like what I found there.  My objection to reading military SF was the same as to reading violent crime.  I don't want to read about blood and gore.  I don't want to read graphic descriptions of people being killed, whether it's by a murderer or the latest military hardware.

I'm sure such graphic books are out there.  But the books I've read by Elisabeth and Karen aren't among them.  Both authors' books are multi-viewpoint, and what surprised me was that some of these viewpoints were civilian.  Far from being a glorification of war, both authors' books explore the consequences of war and the fall-out from military engagement.

In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War books we're told that an ansible platform is under attack,  and that 4,000 people live on it.  It has to be defended to save those lives,

In Karen Traviss's Halo: Kilo-Five books the whole of the third book is in effect a moral examination of terrorism and the legality of government action.  We're told that the supposed good guys, the UNSC, abducted small children and bioengineered them into super-soldiers.  We're shown how devastated one of the fathers who lost his child is.  So when he becomes a terrorist to find out the truth about his daughter's disappearance, where does the moral high ground lie?

Both authors have used the military format to explore moral issues, and to examine why we must protect civilian freedoms.  And that's my kind of military SF.  One that has its moral heart firmly in place.

Thursday 28 January 2016

The future doesn't have enough rebels and whistleblowers

Having spent time recently reading some books about dystopian totalitarian states, I'm left with one burning question.  Where are the rebels and whistleblowers?

The books I read have created what I'd describe as a perfect evil state.  It's faceless.  Nobody even knows who wields all this power.  It's all powerful.  Nobody can challenge it,  citizen democracy has disappeared completely.  It never has its actions exposed, and it has no cracks in its armour.

And I have real difficulty in believing in that kind of world.  We're writing about humans, and humans are a troublesome lot.  We don't ever all see the world the same way.  And I can't see that trait changing in the future.  Yes, charismatic leaders do arise who sweep people along with them for a while. Perhaps initially they have a grand vision for the future, one many people buy into. But when the oppression of others begins those supporters start to get uneasy, and start to question things.

I want to know where the resistance to these totalitarian states is.  Those people will likely be hidden, and in great danger, but that didn't stop the French Resistance.  And it won't stop similar organisations operating in the future.

My objection to some of these dystopian tales is that the evil is seamless.  There don't seem to be any cracks in the edifice.  Those with power all seem to think the same way.  But short of being brainwashed or programmed in some way, there will always be dissenters, people who question the 'experimental' programmes and want them stopped.  And in the age of the internet I can't see them being kept quiet.  People will leak things onto the 'nets.  

For a dystopian story to work for me, I need to see more of these fracture lines appearing.  Not only must the 'evil' leaders be working hard to keep people oppressed, but they must also be working hard to quell dissent and leaks.

I need more rebels and whistleblowers in these worlds.  More people to question and challenge what's  going on, and to challenge the morals of such leaders.  Without that, the stories are ultimately shallow, cardboard cut-out set pieces that leave me feeling dissatisfied.  And wondering why I invested so much time in reading them.  Bring back the rebels and whistleblowers.

Thursday 21 January 2016

Commit to the detail

I've been continuing with my rewrite of Snowbird this week, and finding out how shallow my previous edit made the book.  Then I realised the book had always been shallow in a lot of respects.

And one of my weaknesses is to focus on a story with tunnel vision.  Often I don't look to the side enough to take in the details and richness of the world I'm writing about.  For an SF writer this is a laziness that can't be ignored.  So much of the story is the world.

And especially so in Snowbird.  That world is totally artificial.  Most of the action takes place on Darius Orbital Shipyard, a huge structure in geostationary orbit around the planet Cathal.  And I had to create every aspect of that world, from scratch.  This novel is around twenty years old, and my first notes are just a list of which organisations were at the shipyard.  But there's nothing like sending a character for a walk through your world to show you how much you don't know about it.

And it's in the use of well-placed unique details that settings come alive.  So what was the name of that restaurant my heroine Jian dined at?  I hadn't given it a name.  What was the decor?  What type of food did it serve?  Again, I didn't know.  But these are key pieces of information for us to help us to decide whether we want to eat at that place, and Jian needed to know them too.

It's almost like my twenty-year-younger self was afraid to commit to the vision.  Her descriptions were so tentative.  And how long does it take for an Autoshuttle pod to travel from Central ring to Deep Space ring?  I had no idea.   And yet my character does that several times in the story,

I'd also failed to put in enough of Jian's emotional responses to things.  She's been dreaming of creating a sentient starship since the age of twelve.  Yet when it happens she takes it so calmly.  She  doesn't show her excitement at what she's created, or her concern over all the things she hasn't thought about.  She should be feeling joy, perhaps a little fear at this unknown quantity, and some worry about how the ship will fare in a world hostile to her sentience,

But there are many of those details I didn't commit to first time round.  They're things I'm tackling on this rewrite.  But now I have another problem.  The whole story is told from Jian's viewpoint at present, but she's just an observer for some scenes.  I need another rewrite to make the book multi-viewpoint before I feel that the details are  rich enough.  Will I ever finish it?

Thursday 14 January 2016

An end to hopeless dystopia?

It's said that literature reflects the age it's written in, and even SF isn't immune to that kind of influence.  But recently I've read a couple of 'end of days' dystopias that have left me with no hope at all.  And found them deeply dissatisfying,

Personally, I'm a 'the glass can be refilled' kind of person.  Despite all the horror and danger that is in the world, there is always much that is good and hopeful taking place every day.  And I'd rather read about inspiring people, even if they are fighting for their lives in the direst of circumstances.  But one of the stories I read was nothing more than an aimless wandering through a ruined land.  None of the characters seemed to have any dreams or hopes, no plans or desires to make the future better.

If I was stuck in a ruined world I'd set to work improving it.  One of my favourite books which does this is Anne McCaffrey's Catteni series, beginning with Freedom's Landing.  There the dystopia is back on Earth, which has been invaded and destroyed by the Cattini.  But that's not what the book is about.  The book follows the struggles of humans transported to a brand new world to survive and rebuild their civilisation.  This is my kind of dystopia, one that shows people struggling to better things, one that allows the characters to dream of a better life, and work to make it happen.

Stephanie Saulter's Evolution series does just that.  Gemsigns has terrifying god gangs murdering gems, genetically modified humans being used as slaves.  The book has a lot of the sense of disorder and violence that many dystopias do.  But there is also hope in the midst of the violence.  One of the gems, the winged Aryel Morningstar, is a charismatic and wise leader.  You sense she can lead the gems to greatness.  There is much darkness in the book, but it's tempered by seeing events through the eyes of characters who are actively working towards their dream of equality and freedom from indentured servitude.

That's my kind of dystopia.  And in the third book, the now freed gillungs are busy building their own society, one where their ability to breathe underwater as well as in air allows them to develop revolutionary new technologies.  Of course, the old order still opposes and threatens them, but in the end this story is hopeful.  And a dystopia without any hope is not one I want to read, thank you.

Friday 8 January 2016

It's about the people, stupid

One of the things that sets modern SF apart from a lot of the so-called Golden Age writing is its focus on people instead of pure ideas, or on one piece of shiny new tech.  Sure, there may still be grand ideas at the bottom of a story, but today that story is far more likely to explore the way that tech affects the people who come into contact with it.  And show those effects through their eyes,

This is far more my kind of SF.  It means I can use tech in a story without having to be a scientist, and without knowing every last detail of how that tech works,  I can just use it in my story to carry out social experiments.  I can use it to poke and prod at human civilisation and culture, and work out how people react to other beings and ways of being,

I stumbled across Karen Traviss's Halo: Kilo-Five books recently.  On the face of it, they're pure military SF.  The main characters are a black-ops unit operating after a multi-species, intergalactic war.  But it's what Karen has done with this bunch of characters that's so magical.  Tough shock troops who'd never turn a hair about killing dozens of the enemy are torn up about the injustice of what happened to young children who were kidnapped and turned into enhanced  super-soldiers.  It's an exploration of the fall-out from tech big time.  Another of Karen's characters is BB, an artificial intelligence.  He tries to claim that he's not becoming human, but he's more human than some of the human characters, right  down to the ability to love others.  And she can even make us empathise with a terrorist.

Naomi Foyle's Astra books are an exploration of ecological issues,  but they're seen through the eyes of a girl who doesn't fit in to their strict regime.  Her story becomes a very personal quest to find her exiled father.  What drives her is that most basic need to know herself and where she came from.

I've taken lessons from these books in my own Genehunter.  My main character Aris is on a journey to find out why a bioship has been sent covertly to Deon.  But there's a personal connection to her quest.  Her father was piloting the ship, and she doesn't know if he's still alive.  Her story becomes a very personal one of going to find her father.

And in the end it's the people who populate our worlds, the people who use the shiny tech, who give our story it's substance and heart.  And if we're really lucky, we might have challenged a reader and persuaded them to change their views on an issue.  We might have got them to see things our way.  Now that's the real power of story-telling.  In the end it's about the people.


Friday 1 January 2016

Living the world - where's the restaurant?

I'm rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird this week, and finding that I don't know my way about my world anything like well enough.  I'm beginning to wonder how I ever wrote the novel in the first place.

Two-thirds of the action is set on an orbital shipyard. I knew that it was in geostationary orbit above the planet Cathal, and I knew that it had three, differently-sized rings, attached to a central cylinder.  And that it looked like an outsized, multi-levelled snowflake.  But that was almost all. Not much to go on.

Looking back now, I wonder how my characters ever found their way around the shipyard.  All I had as an aide-memoire was a list of functions, organisations, and companies who occupied the spaces.  When I came to re-write the novel I realised that it suffered from my usual problem.  There wasn't enough description, not enough detail of the setting.  And I've realised that one reason why I didn't describe things was because I didn't know what my characters were seeing.

I've got better though.  In my novel Genehunter the characters are travelling from east to west across the continent.  They pass through tropical and temperate biomes, and I needed to know when one ended and the next began.  That allowed me to add touches like Aris waking up cold and needing her heavier jacket because she was out of the tropical biome.

Now when I invent a planet I work out the details of its surface before I begin to write.  But with another old novel, Auroradawn, that plan was only an ink outline of the land masses.  The trouble with that is that I don't know when alpine meadows segue into temperate grassland, and where the snow line is on cold Berenger continent.  So now I've made a more detailed, coloured-in map.  I colour in the various types of vegetation in different shades of green and golds.  I show mountains as dark brown masses. Blue rivers snake through the forests and savannahs, dictating where the settlements should go.

I now make my maps with watercolour pencils, the colours wetted to blend together in a watercolour portrait of my world's surface.  And now I know exactly where the boundaries between biomes are, and I have no excuse for under-describing my setting.