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.

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,

The passing of the old guard

I started writing this post early on Thursday morning, when Terry Pratchett was still alive.  I then went out for a long working lunch with my fellow Pentangle Press authors, and came home to the news that Terry had died.

It feels like the foundations on which I built my love of SF are crumbling.  Only last week we had Leonard Nimoy pass away.  Being an introverted, bookish type, I always identified with Spock rather than the over-excitable Kirk.  I sometimes feel like emulating Spock's raised eyebrow when I see some of the things around me today.

Then we heard of Terry's passing.  At 66, that's way too early.  Not only have we lost a uniquely talented writer, we've also lost someone who inspired other writers. I was lucky enough to hear him give the plenary address at the Winchester Writers' Conference back in 2010.  Although he managed to get through his talk, there were pauses where the Alzheimer's was already making itself felt.

Just as cherished are my memories of meeting Anne McCaffrey at Octocon some years ago.  Anne is one of my major influences, and in my wildest dreams I hope that someone some day might describe me as 'the new Anne McCaffrey'.  

There's a sense of the passing of the old guard.  One by one, the people who were so influential in instilling in me a love for SF, and the desire to write it myself, are disappearing.

Leonard's and Terry's deaths have left me with a feeling of melancholy, and have turned my thoughts back to my own work.  What legacy will I leave when I join them in the afterlife?  It's made me redouble  my efforts to have my own work recognized and accepted.

With the passing of the old guard I have the feeling that a moment of zeitgeist has gone.  The kinds of influence Leonard,Terry, and Anne had on our SF culture have sadly passed us by, with no obvious candidates to take their places.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Eco-SF books Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.

Returning to simplicity

I'm a big fan of simple storytelling.  But while I've been researching SF short story markets I've come across several magazines that want 'leading edge' and 'experimental' fiction, whatever they are.  Or 'stories that play with form and expectations', whatever that means.

The thing is, a story only is a story if it has a recogniseable structure.  Basically, it needs a boring old beginning, middle, and end.  That's very old-fashioned, I know, but plot is driven by event/action/result/new event/action/result.  The tests and challenges pile up and get steadily harder while we wonder how our heroine is going to overcome this latest impossible challenge.

The very simplicity of simple storytelling structure hides the power of effortless storytelling.  This is particularly so in young adult SF.  There you'll find fast-paced, logical stories, but you'll also find strong SF ideas being well worked out. Which is more than can be said for some of the adult SF stories I've read.  Some of these seem no more than a mish-mash of clever scenes cobbled together with no narrative thread, no obvious connection, and sometimes no obvious storytelling purpose.  They're the sort of thing beginner writers produce thirty years before they learn to write a story.

Perhaps that's why I love YA quest stories.  The little child inside me wants to go on a adventure, wants to face danger (but in a controlled way), wants to struggle alongside the hero/heroine (but not too much.). That's why I wrote my own YA novels The Code River, Geneship, and Auroradawn.  These characters are all people on a quest to find the truth.

To me, far too many adult SF novels are too complex.  They have several viewpoints, jumps in time, alternating first person viewpoints that don't identity the viewpoint character.  All this clutter gets in the way of telling a good story.  Maybe that's why Anne McCaffrey is one of my favourite authors.  Among young adult writers I like Scott Westerfeld, Teri Terri, Anthony Horowitz. All these books have fabulous and hard-hitting ideas, but great storytelling too.  Statistics tell us that more adults than young adults read YA books.  Maybe the simple storytelling is one reason why.

It's time we followed YA's lead in adult SF.  It's time to focus on good old fashioned storytelling, putting over our dazzling ideas without pretentious forms of writing.  And if we returned to simple storytelling maybe more adults would be drawn to SF stories.  Maybe, just maybe, the genre would go mainstream.

Making the impossible possible

The art of writing speculative fiction is the art of making the impossible possible.  Which is what I've been doing this week with my re-write of Jade.  The original story is over fifteen years old.  I wanted to create a sentient planet that communicates with my heroine.  Plenty of sentient planets exist in SF, one of my favourites being Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee.  But Anne doesn't try to explain how that planet became sentient.  She merely states that it must have been a side-effect of the terraforming process.

When I started my re-write of Jade I decided I wanted to try and explain the planet's sentience as far as possible in terms of known science.  And this is where the big difference lies from that original draft.  My knowledge of the science and procedures I needed to know was extremely sketchy fifteen years ago.  I didn't have easy Internet access then, it was before the era of broadband in the UK.  Researching the many and diverse topics I needed to know to make the planet work was near-impossible then.  And some of the science I've appropriated for the story, like crystal storage mediums for computers and DNA computing, didn't even exist back then.

Fifteen years ago it wasn't easy to research submarine diving procedures, how CDs were made, or how a planet's thermohaline circulation works.  Now all that information is readily available on-line.  Also in that period the depths to which such submarines can dive has extended enormously.  We've now explored the deepest places in our oceans.  We've discovered the communities of animals that congregate around the scalding water given off by black smokers.  And we used to think, before discovering the creatures who live down there, that all life needed sunlight to survive.

Being able to easily access all this knowledge has meant I've been able to deliver on the challenge I've set myself to make the impossibility of Jade possible.  I know how the planimal and ocean exchange data, and I know how the ocean writes that data into its Fire Crystal storage centres.  There are a few things that have defeated me, one of which is working out how the ocean retrieves its stored memories.  But it turns out that researchers don't really know how humans retrieve their stored memories either, so I'm not going to worry about that.

The other thing I can't explain is how heroine Kaath can communicate with the planimal and ocean telepathically.  Part of it is her unique genetics, but the other half is pure science fiction.  And I am writing fiction after all, so I feel well satisfied with what I have achieved in making the impossible possible.

The 'not good enough' demon

Reading reviews of Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire and Anne Leckie's Ancillary Sword, it struck me how far away from my own work these two books are.  I tussle constantly with whether I can make my name as an SF writer. I came into the genre in what seems like a much simpler age.  I read a lot of Anne McCaffrey, and Elizabeth Moon's feminist military SF.  These are writers who write a straightforward story, with a clear narrative style.  They may have multi-viewpoints, but it's always clear who's speaking and thinking.

The same can't be said about some of the more recent published SF.  Confusing, viewpoints jumping  everywhere, switching first person viewpoints without making the change clear, all seem to be in vogue.  I wonder if publishers are looking for clever structure and complexity - a "challenging read" - over simple storytelling.  

Ambiguity, and concepts so high they're stuck in the stratosphere, don't do it for me.  Despite my two Master's degrees, I'm still a five year old kid at heart. I want you to tell me a story, dammit.  Which leaves me wondering if my straightforward style is a disadvantage in the current market.  I'm having an attack of the 'not good enough' demons.

Every review I've read recently has focused on gender representations in the text.  Yes, there's an issue with female invisibility in the genre, but sometimes this smacks of point-scoring.  "My book has characters with three genders".  It almost seems mandatory to consider gender issues in texts.

But I don't want to focus on that.  Yes, most of my protagonists are "strong" female characters with lives and careers of their own.  They pay their own way.  Men and women are pretty evenly scattered throughout my stories, and often the women are in charge of the men.  But they don't spend their time thinking about that.  It's just how things are.

But I get the feeling that reviewers are "keeping score".  This politicisation of story almost makes me afraid to put pen to paper, for fear of judgement.  I'm not interested in exploring gender issues, it's  wildlife and the natural world that fascinates me.  Am I wasting my time writing about deforestation, overpopulation, and species extinction if all anyone's interested in are gender counts and the Bechdel Test?

I want to tell a simple story focusing on the politics and issues that interest me.  And if that's judged not good enough, then so be it.  That's who I am, and what I care about.

Blurring the genre boundaries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ten books meme

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

1.   All The Weyrs of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

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

2.  The Ship Who Searched - Anne McCaffrey

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

3.  The Pride of Chanur - CJ Cherryh.

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

4. Vatta's War - Elizabeth Moon

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

5.  Polar Ciry Blues - Katherine Kerr

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

6.  Dragonsinger - Anne McCaffrey

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

7.  Treaty Planet - Anne McCaffrey

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

8. Slated - Teri Terry

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

9.  Uglies/Pretties/Specials -  Scott Westerfeld 

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

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

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

Original combinations of ideas

Truly original ideas in SF are hard to find.  The genre has been around so long that most of the original themes have been well mined by now.  So how do we make a contribution to the genre?  How do we find something new to say?

Most of the time when we're casting our nets out for plots we're going to come up with ideas that have been used before.  What we're into is reshuffling old elements.  But when we do so, the resultant combination is salted and affected by our beliefs and values.  And our writers'unique voices will ensure that the way we tell the story of those ideas won't be like anything that has gone before.  Or it shouldn't be, if you've claimed your own voice and use it.

I confess to doing this combining of ideas often in my work,  in Eyemind I took Anne McCaffrey's brainships and applied the idea to a landbound Supercruiser.  Her brain became my Mind, her brawn my Mobile.  My favourite book of the brainship series is The Ship Who Searched, which has an archaeology background.  I changed that background to the world of art.  And I made my story a criminal investigation of suspect artworks.  Old ideas, but combined in a new way.

I'm a great fan of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I don't want to write about military characters.  So in my novel Starfire I turned Kylara Vatta into Ria Bihar.  Like Ky, Ria starts her trading life as an independent, but unlike Ky, Ria stays a Trader.  She does have military connections, though.  She's forced to team up with an alien military to recover a vital artefact.

I used to worry about the fact that I couldn't come up with leading-edge shiny tech.  It took me a while to realise that SF is as much about the cultures, politics, and social structures that tech facilitates and creates as it is about the hardware.  These days I'm more likely not to worry about inventing something brand shiny new.  I'm more likely to use someone else's invention and see where it takes me.

I've finally got comfortable with the idea of re-using old ideas.  If my characters are string enough and my voice my own, chances are my readers will still want to know about them.

The story of the land

Moving on from thinking about alien skies, I'm exploring the idea of using the rest of the landscape as part of our story today. 

Landscape can be far much more than just a passive setting into which the characters are dropped.  It can be the major driver of the story.  EJ Swift's Osiris shows us a world where global warming has melted the Antarttic ice and forced the remnant human population into cities built in the waters.  The city defines who people are in that world.  They are either privileged Citizens, or lowlife westerners. The haves and have-nots are physically divided by their city.  This is not a place where it is easy to be upwardly mobile.

In Frank Herbert's Dune the author created the desert environs of Arrakis.  The sand, and the Fremen  who live in it, powerfully shape the story.  Then there's Katherine Kerr's Polar City books.  There the planet is far too near to its sun for people to be out in the day.  Life takes place at night in Polar City.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe the landscape is the story.  People cluster in the city, the only place where there's enough oxygen to breathe.  It's a cautionary tale about what happens when we cut down all the trees.

In Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books cities take mobile form, trundling about the landscape.  And they've become predatory, eating up smaller cities.  And Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee is a world of cold, snow, and ice, its colonists drawn from Earth tribes who lived in such environments here,

In all these stories the landscape is a character in its own right, a powerful one that shapes and dictates what the human characters in the stories do.  Landscape can be so much more than pretty views.

A straightforward new world

I've spent the last week getting new bookcases and organising my totally out of control book collection.  And now that my books are all sorted and proudly displayed, I'm reflecting on some of the discoveries I've made.

I hadn't realised I owned so many of Anne McCaffrey's works.  I don't have anything like all of her output, but a fair chunk of it.  And then there's the Elizabeth Moon Vatta's war and Serrano Legacy, all neatly arranged.  I've a chunk of CJ Cherryh's works, and a lot of Terry Pratchett. Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books take up one end of a shelf, next to Scott Westerfeld's' Uglies, Pretties, and Specials.

I began to wonder why I like those authors' works so much and  keep returning to them.   I've decided that one of the main reasons is that those stories are told in a straightforward writing style.

I have no problem reading about new tech or different social systems provided they're introduced in a straightforward way.  I want a novel new world, not a novel new way of writing about it.  The stranger the world is, the more straightforward I want the writing about it to be.

If we're dressing up our cultures in obscure rituals or writing in an overly-technical way about the tech of our world, chances are we don't know it enough.  We need to be clear about the theme of our book, and the way our plot supports that theme.  

I've just finished reading EJ Swift's Osiris.  It's told from two alternating viewpoints, with lots of tech and an original city setting.  But at the heart of the story is the clash of the rich and poor, the privileged and the underclass, and how each one is changed - or not - by coming into contact with the other.

Knowing our theme before we start to write helps to keep us on track, to make sure we make the points we want to.  It gives substance to our story.  If our theme is woven through our story, supporting our plot, then we find it easy to write in a straightforward style.  We know our world and its issues, and now all we have to do is get on with describing it.  Straightforwardly.

Making our stories believable

No matter how fantastic our world or the things we want to put in it, we need to make the story we tell believable.  To make readers believe our stories we have to give everything that happens in them a reason for occurring.  Events and tech must have a meaning, not just be thrown in to add local colour.

Writing SF doesn't absolve us from the duty to create realistic characters.  Working out their backstory, their culture, history, beliefs and attitudes helps a lot with this.  And we're faced with the extra challenge of creating believable aliens.  

We're writing fiction for humans, that illuminates the human condition, and that has to modify what we might dream up as an alien.  It's hard to relate to a sentient black cloud, although I have one story where Starspeakers speak directly to the consciousness of the universe.  Some writers think that creating humanoid types of aliens is cheating, but I'm not so sure.  The theory of convergent evolution tells us that the same challenges force the same evolutionary design solutions to arise, so if humanoid shapes are the most efficient form for an apex predator it could turn out that they're common.

Of course, they're likely to have different senses from us.  They might see in a different light range, our hear a different set of frequencies.  Anne McCaffrey did that with her alien Gringg, most of whose speech is experienced by humans as rumbling sub-sonics.

If you want humans and aliens to co-exist, they're going to have to do so on an planet or in a space environment that humans can live in.  And that affects the design of your aliens.  If they breathe the same type of atmosphere as us, that automatically limits them.  CJ Cherryh neatly gets around this problem in the Chanur books by dividing space stations into two halves, for oxy-breathers and methane-breathers.  The alien methane-breathers she created are truly alien.  

We have to ground the future of an SF story in something that we can believe today.  This is much easier in near-future SF, where we can extrapolate the consequences of global warming or food shortages.  What we're after is to show how humans are affected by the tech of the future and alien contact.  Our stories question our achievements, hold us to account for our tech and our actions, and ask who we are and who we're becoming.  And making our stories believable gives them more impact and might just leave your readers feeling they have to do something about the issues you've flagged up in your story.

The MICE quotient

I'm re-reading Orson Scott Card's excellent How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy book right now. It was published in 1990, but I'm struck by how universal his advice is, and how useful to today's writer the ideas still are.

Take the MICE quotient.  Card points out that all stories contain four elements, but that usually one of them is dominant in the story.  What are they?  The first is the milieu story.  Milieu stories are about the world, the planet, the society, the family, the weather.   

My novel Jade, about a sentient planet, is very definitely a milieu story.  In a milieu story the characters will go to a strange place that's different for ours, will see interesting things, and come back to what passes for normality a changed person.  Kaath in Jade certainly does that. She learns that her parents aren't who she thought they were, and they have a strong link with the spores that are an essential part of Jade's sentience.  

The second is the idea story.  It involves asking what happens when certain tech is invented, or why did complex alien civilisations disappear.  Idea stories ask a question, and then get the characters to answer it.  The plot of the story is about finding those answers.  In some respects, my novel Jade is an idea story too, as it's about the characters slowly uncovering the intertwined sentience of the planet.

The third type of story is the character story.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books are character stories.  They follow Kylara Vatta from being kicked out of her home world's Spaceforce to commanding a multi-world Space Defense Force.  She's all that  all that stands between civilized worlds and a vicious pirate. Quite a change of fortune for the wronged Ky.

The fourth type of story is the event story.  It starts when something is wrong with the universe, the world is out of order.  The event could be the appearance of aliens in a planet's skies, as in Anne McCaffrey's Treaty Planet, or the reappearance of ancient evil thought to be dead, as in the rise of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings.

Most stories contain elements of all four types, but knowing which type is strongest in your story can help to keep you on track and checking that your story is doing what it should.

High-tech, low-tech

Browsing through the book reviews for recently-published SF novels, the thing that strikes me is how many involve characters who are human-cyborg mixes.  It seems we still haven't lost the dream of tech enhancing our world, making us puny humans bigger and better than we are.

SF has always been the predictor of future tech, and usually its authors are in love with their inventions.   We're shown how powerful the tech is, but very often in hard SF novels what's missing is any recognition of how the tech alters human culture,

I've always had a problem with scenarios where all-powerful rulers lord it over vast regions of space.  We know from our own experiences of empires on Earth that the bigger the empire gets, the harder it is to control.  Things start to unravel at the edges.  Conquered powers don't stay conquered.  They want their land and their freedom back, and sooner or later they challenge the supremacy of the empire.

The thing I really can't take is the all-powerful ruler who, through their faultless tech and systems, knows everything that's happening in their empire at all times.  No human being's brain can hold that amount of information all at once.  But the other thing that irks me is that their tech never breaks down.  We never hear about the attacks on the remote outposts of the empire that take out its tech and launch cyber attacks on its key systems,

I suspect the future in reality will be a good deal less shiny.  I think there will always be people like my Ren Hunter in the Panthera books who shun the virtiual world for the real one, people who fight for the physical world to retain its wildness and beauty.

There's even the possibility that we could see the rise of a New Pastoral movement.  Some out-of-the-way planets might revert to a near-agrarian existence.  Anne McCaffrey's Pern settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth, taking with them only the tech they needed.  Their airm was to establish a simpler way of life on Pern. McCaffrey hints that bad things had happened on Earth, but doesn't detail them.  But her original settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth for a simpler existence.

The future may become a divide between high-tech and low-tech civilizations not as a matter of lack of access to tech, but as a conscious choice not to use some of it.

Creative creatures

As SF writers, we may think we have a complete free hand to create new creatures, but it isn't so.  The laws of physics will work the same elsewhere in the universe, and they give us the framework for, and provide the restrictions on, what we can create.

Our imagined life forms are constrained by the type of planet they live on.  What is its atmosphere like, what is the gravity there?  If the planet is smaller than Earth it will have lighter gravity and the creatures there may be able to run and leap much further than on Earth.  But the atmosphere might be thinner than a human is used to, and might cause us some problems.

Or perhaps your aliens don't live on or in a planet, but in the midst of the as-yet undiscovered dark matter that we think makes up ninety per cent off the universe.  They would be radically different creatures than planet-dwellers.  Would they eat dark matter for energy? And how would they reproduce?  Would they be swarms of microscopic beings with a group-mind?

If we're planet-bound, we have to consider the effects of evolution by natural selection on our creatures, and the principles of convergent evolution.  And when we stick to those rules it's difficult to come up with a unique creature that doesn't exist in some form on Earth, or in its waters.

Bioluminescence, parthenogenesis, electrical sensing of the environment, echolocation with natural sonar, navigation with natural magnetic compasses, thermal imaging, the use of the skeleton.  All these features are utilised by creatures on our own planet.  Raiding them, we can create unique new combinations.

Avatar's Na'vi are recognizeably humanoid, but they're ten feet tall and breathe an atmosphere slightly different from Earth's.  Anne McCaffrey's Hrrubans from the Doona books are walking big cats with language and high tech.  They characterise rank as being a "broad stripe", encompassing the wisdom of age.  The reference is to the broad stripe of contrasting colour running down the back of their fur.

In my Panthera books I've invented jagotheras, kingcats, and goldcats.  They're intended to be future versions of jaguars, cheetahs, and lions, but each has their own recogniseable habitat and markings that are based on what exists on Earth today.

It's easy for us to create exotic creatures, the skill lies in imagining the food webs, biospheres, and physical quirks of their homes that make them believable but different.

Age in SF stories

I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention.  My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?"  Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.

It's got me thinking about age in SF stories.  One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain.  She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species.  She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story.  She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet.  She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.

Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it.  Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.

These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth.  Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.

Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about.  Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict?  Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.

My favourite authors - Anne Mccaffrey

One of my favourite authors is Anne McCaffrey.  I haven't read every book she wrote, but a fair number of then from different series.  Her books have been a constant presence in my life for many years.

I own a lot of the Pern books.  The debate has raged for years whether these are SF or fantasy.  I think it depends which books in the series you read.  If you read the books dealing with the colonists landing on Pern, you find technology a-plenty.  The dragons are bio-engineered from the fire lizards, and the colonists carry Aivas with them, a high-level AI.  All the Weyrs of Pern rediscovers Aivas 2500 years later, and successfully blends the fantasy elements of the series with hard science.

One of my favourite series is the Doona books.  Here, colonists settle on Doona and gradually come to realise they're not alone.  I love the way McCaffrey paints the Hrrubans as fully-rounded aliens, and I also love the way the two species have the wisdom to learn to live together.  There are xenophobes in both species, but friendship prevails.

I love the way she's created a sentient planet in the Petaybee books.  They give us a vision of powerful companies with their own militaries who own planets and are far too powerful for the good of the people.  She also has telepathic clouded leopards who help the humans. I wish.

Then there's the Freedom books, the Catteni stories.  I like the way humans are shown to be inventive and quickly rebuild a civilization when dumped on an empty planet with just a cup, a knife, and a blanket for technology.  

Another of my favourite books is from the 'brainship' series of books.  The Ship Who Searched has a brainship and her archaeologist brawn searching for alien ancient remains. The book partly inspired my book Eyemind. 

I met Anne McCaffrey at Octocon in Ireland a few years before she died, and I'm glad I managed to meet and talk with my heroine.  She's been lighting up my life for many years with her ideas and her simple storytelling.  

FEM-SF AUTHOR'S RANT

Welcome to my blog, where I’ll be periodically ranting about the state of FEM-SF – or more likely the lack of it.

I got into reading the SF genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and for me this is the Golden Age of SF.  I was hooked by fabulous books like C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur Saga, Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed, Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen, Katherine Kerr’s Polar City Blues.   Real SF with real heroines.

So what happened?  Many of those authors have switched their allegiance to writing fantasy instead of true SF, and some of the others have switched to writing mainstream books.  Certainly when I go down to my local bookshop I see very little that I like on the SF shelves, and almost nothing by those authors that is contemporary SF.

It seems to me that SF publishers, both magazine and book, are still seduced by shiny technology at the expense of cultural exploration of how that technology impacts on the lives of humans.  And even more depressingly, the number of heroines in powerful roles seems to have shrunk.  What that means is the FEM-SF viewpoint is virtually non-existent.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the genre in the last decade or so.  I was brought up on Anne McCaffrey: brainships, telepathy, starship designers, colonists, all with strong female characters.  More recently I’ve got into Eizabeth Moon’s military SF.  But for several years now I haven’t seen anything that makes my heart sing written by female authors.

I want to see SF that challenges traditional family structures, that doesn’t reinforce the stereotype that all women want to breed, and that shows that some women don’t do sex either.  In other words, I want SF to reflect the variety of women’s experience in the real world today.

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