Liberty and quiet power

Last week I was reading an SF book about a kick-ass female pilot out to save the universe.  At the same time I was reading blog posts about the quiet power of introverts in effective management, and at first the two ideas seemed to conflict.  Don't we need the kick-ass extrovert types to save the world?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes the tenacity of quiet power can achieve more.

To achieve the overthrow of a regime one needs intelligence, and to build a base of support for your alternative ideology.  If the regime is of the brutal type that tends to squash alternative modes of thought, this needs to be done very quietly and carefully.  And if you're planning on going behind enemy lines it helps if you don't draw attention to yourself.  The quiet power of the self-reliant introvert comes in very handy there,

I started thinking about instances of quiet power in the SF stories I love.  In Anne McCaffrey's All the Weyrs of Pern, the quiet  power is AIVAS, a rediscovered AI that teaches the descendants of the original colonists all the science they've forgotten since their ancestors landed on the planet 2,500 years ago.  With a combination of that knowledge, the use of the colonists' bioengineered dragons, and some handy left-over antimatter drives, they change their orbit of a planet.

I think also of the quiet power of CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  She's a tradeship captain who gets caught up in an interstellar, multi-species diplomatic incident.  It's her trading smarts and ability to quietly hide that help her to save her ship and defy a vicious race of aliens that threatens the destruction of her home world.

Even among military SF stories there are examples of quiet power.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series Grace Vatta is an older woman who wields great power.  She's the Rector of Defence for her planet, and gets to order its Spaceforce around.

A mind-wiped teenager in Teri Terry's Slated series of books keeps her reawakening memories of her past secret while she quietly uncovers the truth of a totalitarian government and its evil schemes.  She watches, waits, gathers information, and when the time is right she destroys the evil system.

While kick-ass heroes create sound and fury and blow things up, the chances are that it's quiet power that figured out who the real enemy and real threats were.

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.

A real character

So we see the story world through the eyes of our characters,  but how do we make these recorders of the scene and the action real?  And for an SF writer there's an additional question to be answered.  How do we make our characters real and believable even though their beliefs and values, and the way they live and look, may be nothing like us and our lives.

But whether a character is alien or human, what defines them is what they do.  I'm thinking now of Pyanfar Chanur in CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  When a human fugitive runs onto her ship she chooses to keep him, and later to defend him against other species who want to use him as a political pawn. Her one choice comes to dictate the next several years of her life, and gets her ship shot at and her crew in danger.

Getting readers to really care about a character means more than making them into all-action heroines though.  If that was all there was to a character they might end up looking like a shallow thrill-seeker rather tan the authoritative figure we intended.  We have to get the reader to identify with our characters on a deeper level.

We want readers to feel empathy with our characters.  And we can empathise with any character, if we draw them properly.  Even our villains must have something we can empathise with.  We can understand their their passion for art or music, or their charismatic persona, even when we don't like their motives.  We want our reader to feel sympathy for our good characters.  We want readers to identify with them, to think that perhaps they too might find the courage to be so heroic if they were thrust into the same situation.

Which gives the SF writer who wants to write about aliens a bit of a problem.  If we make their beliefs and values so different from ours that we can't identify with them we will have a problem drawing the reader into our story.  What we are really responding to in characters is their underlying humanity.  And even if those characters are alien, they need to have their own version of humanity.  Underneath their strange cultural rituals we want to know that they have some recogniseable concepts of good and evil, the recognition that life is precious and is to be preserved.

Making characters real is about giving them the ring of truth, creating the feeling that yes, that is the only action they would have taken in that situation.  It's about making them feel authentic, about giving them the truth of the human heart - even when they're not.

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.

Being inspired by others'stories

I often struggle with the thought that my SF isn't original enough, that there isn't any dazzling new tech in it, that what I'm doing is really recycling other writers' ideas.

This is a particular affliction of writers in the genre.  We read a review of a new book that praises that dazzling tech, and we remind ourselves that SF is called the literature of ideas.  And we worry that our ideas aren't good enough.

So it was a great relief to re-read Lisa Tuttle's How to Write Fantasy and SF book.  "New concepts are highly prized in our culture, but hard to come by" she writes.  Then she goes on to talk about the stories she's written that were inspired by other writers' work.

What a relief.  Here was a concept of SF as a genre in conversation with itself, borrowing ideas from other writers all the time.  I suppose I've always known that at a subliminal level, but to see it out in the open, and acknowledged as the source of some of a best selling authors' stories, was reassuring,

I've borrowed a few ideas for my novels.  Starfire was inspired by Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I wanted my starship captain main character to stay a trader.  Eyemind was inspired by Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Searched, and her brainship became my Mind, controlling a powerful Supercruiser instead of a starship.

Starfire was also inspired by CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the strong character of the Hani captain Pyanfar Chanur.  In Starfire the Hani got recycled into my aliens, but they're friendly.  Ria Bihar, my Trader captain, eventually teams up with them to find something that has been stolen that affects the peace of both races.

I've realised there's nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from others' stories.  I'm currently working on planning a young adult series which will recycle ideas from Sarah Crossan's Breathe with my own focus on wildlife conservation.  I've also got EJ Swift's Osiris sitting there to read, and I suspect that her tale of the divided city will furnish more ideas for me to adapt.  

I'm thinking that perhaps I don't do enough borrowing sometimes.  I think I have to sit in my garret and come up with dazzling new ideas all on my own. But of course I don't.  Everything I write is built on the shoulders of those who came before me, and rather than fighting against this and trying to produce something 'original' I'd be far better off using others' stories as a launch pad for my own ideas.  I need to absorb the richness of those others visions and let them feed and inform my own,

Wide-angle lens, or close-up?

What kind of focus on your world - or the universe - does your story demand?  If we look at it in photography terms, is you story wide angle or close-up?

Which focus you choose will depend on the type of story you're telling.  If you want action on a big scale then you most likely want your characters to travel around the universe.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War sprawls across dozens of solar systems, following the actions of half a dozen characters who are spread out all across human space.  My copy of CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur has a star map of human space in the front of the book.  I adapted her notation system for my own books Starfire and Panthera : Death Spiral.

Other books are set on one planet, and sometimes in one country.  Teri Terry sets her Slated books in a near-future England that is under totalitarian rule.  The small space of the country matches the confines of the oppressive government, heightening the sense of fear.  People who live there never know when they'll be the next victim of the Lorders.

My book Eyemind is set on one continent of one planet.  Panthera : Death Spiral sprawls the action across half of human space, while Panthera : Death Song and Panthera : Death Plain again have the action taking place mainly on one continent.  Sarah Crossan's Breathe has a lot of the action taking place within one city.

Whether you choose wide angle or close up will depend on the focus of your story.  A tight zoomed-in portrait of an oppressive government can be just as exciting as watching a starship come out of jump in far-off space.

The ordinary hero

My writing friend Charlie Cochrane was recently blogging about the ordinary hero.  I thought it was such an interesting idea that I'm thinking about ordinary heroes and  heroines myself is morning.

In the SF world, most of the books I admire have ordinary heroes/heroines. C J Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur has a tradeship captain totally upending interstellar politics when she picks up a fugitive character.  What I like about Pyanfar is that's he's often scared stiff, she knows defying the alien Juf might get her and all her species killed, but still she defies them.

In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta' war series, Kylara Vatta is a disgraced Spaceforce cadet forced to become a civilian ship captain.  Out of necessity, she creates a space defence force against dangerous pirates, and rises to command the Spaceforce that kicked her out.

In YA SF, ordinary heroes and heroines are commonplace.  In Kathy Reichs' viral series ordinary teenagers foil illegal  viral experimentation, stop bombers, save the research institute that is their home.

In Teri Terry's Slated books the heroine is a girl who thinks she is ordinary who has been made extraordinary by government forces.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe it is teenagers who uncover the secrets of their world and change things.

I especially like these YA heroes and heroines because they aren't traditionally powerful.  They're young people thrust into the midst of often intolerable situations who know they must act.

In my own books, my own ordinary heroines include Jian Kabana, the main character in Snowbird, who uncovers illegal terraforming and corruption on a large scale.  In Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song it is up to wildlife conservationist Ren Hunter to save the natural world from major abuse.  In my novel Jade, the sentient planet is defended from exploitation by Kaath, a civilian survey crew member.  All of these characters are ordinary people thrust out of their everyday lives by extraordinary circumstances.

Ordinary characters are people I can connect with.  There's an element of "there but for the grace of God go I" about them.  And I often winder if I would have their strength of character and their sheer determination to see things through if I was thrust into a similar situation.

Favourite authors. C J Cherryh

Another of my favourite authors is CJ Cherryh.  She's written a huge number of books,  and I must admit up front that I've only read a fraction of them.

I'm a big fan of the Chanur novels.  Payanfar Chanur is a Hani, an alien who looks a bit like a walking lion.  But Cherry's genius is in making her and the other Hani characters so individual.

The writing is close third person, and we go inside Pyanfur's head a lot.  She's captain of a trading starship, an experienced and wily character who travels the galaxy.  She has to negotiate trade contracts, and negotiate the choppy waters of multi-species diplomacy while she's being chased across the universe by the ruthless and dangerous Kif.

The way Cherryh describes the everyday life and operation of a starship is stunning.  She is so detailed about who does what, the ship's operating procedures, and the mechanics of travelling through jump.  One of the things I particularly like is the way she shows how physically exhausting constantly going through jump is for the crew.

And then there's the role reversal, which I can really identify with.   The women are the starship captains, travelling the universe, with power to make trading contracts that bind their long-established and noble houses.  There is also a very real sense of the cutthroat competition that exists between different Hani families.

Hani males stay at home and keep house - when they're not fighting their neighbours to take over their lands too.  Cherryh makes the Hani really come alive.  They're very definitely alien, but the mirrors she holds up to humanity make us think hard about our own gender divisions and competitiveness.