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.