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.

Introducing the SF world - getting the balance right

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving science fictional wildlife

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riddles and objects - laying a trail of clues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Familiar strangeness - the weird everyday in SF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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