You say crime, I say SF

The issue of genre 'pigeonholes' raised its head again for me this week.  With fellow Pentangle Press writers Carol Westron and Christine Hammacott, we were interviewed by a reporter from the Portsmouth News for an article on Pentangle Press's second birthday,

As part of our development we are about to set up a panel to speak at writing events, to market ourselves as writers.  Carol wants to call me a future crime writer for the purposes of this.  It makes sense, as we cover past, present, and future crime then, but it isn't really who I am.  

I spent a year going to crime conferences and reading in that genre, and it didn't take me long to realise that I don't belong there.  I hated the idea of my books being marketed by covers dripping with blood, and I just wasn't engaged by many of the stories.  Some of them even depressed me.  And one thriller writer (a massive best-seller) appalled me with the casual and totally unnecessary violence he put in his work.

And yet, at their heart, many of my books do contain crimes.  Eyemind has my main character Keri Starseer being hired to investigate dodgy interactive artworks.  She's an artist, not a law enforcer, but she's subjected to attempts to brainwash her and is kidnapped and beaten.  In my novel Jade the proposed crime is the rape of a sentient planet.  In my novel Snowbird, the crimes are fraud and illegal exploitation of a sentient species. In the second book of that series, Darius, it is the sabotage of the orbital shipyard, the murder of a starship, and attempted rape.

The crimes that occur in my books are many and varied, and yet, I'm still not a crime writer.  I don't feel comfortable with that label.  My heart belongs in the ideas around the crimes I write about, not in the investigation of the crimes themselves.  And I want starships and beautiful starfields on my covers, not blood.

This is one of the downsides of being pigeonholed into a genre.  I am sure there are a great many crime writers whose stories I would enjoy, if they were not packaged as crime.  And there are probably many crime readers who would enjoy my novels.  But the chances are that we won't discover each other's work.  This is the downside of being forced into a genre.  We can only be one thing there, when In fact we might be several.  We might be SF and crime, like me, or romance and crime, like several of Carol Westron's books, or SF and romance.  Life is richer than strict genre boundaries, and our stories should reflect this.

The Bechdel test and me

I've been reading a lot of stuff recently about the gender imbalance within the speculative fiction genre, and one of the things I keep coming across is the Bechdel test.  The test is named after Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist who set out the idea in her 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.  It's been taken up by the SFF community as a handy measure of how well we're doing - or not - in gender parity.

A work of fiction passes the Bechdel test if it contains more than one woman, and those women talk to each other about something other than a man.  It sounds like a great idea to me, but how many of my own works pass the test?

Snowbird - yes.  Top starship coder Jian Kabana talks to talented engineer Mai, about starships.

Darius - same characters talk again, this time trying to save an orbital shipyard from sabotage.

The Fall of Freyr - yes.  I have a whole female investigative team talking among themselves about their professional mission to survey the planet's culture.

Jade - yes.  Kaath, my xenobilogist, talks to Sarry about the strange fauna she's discovered.

Eyemind - yes.  Artist Keri Starseer talks to Ennis, Governor of Altius, about her mission and her Mind partner Bi.

Auroradawn - yes.  Arrien talks to other Great Family Captains about her riddle quest.

Starfire - yes.  My Trader captain Ria Bihar talks to a female stationmaster about piracy.

Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, Panthera : Death. Plain - yes .  Ren Hunter talks with the head off the Conservation Authority and with female security chiefs about her work.

So I'm doing pretty well in passing the Bechdel test.  I've always had strong female heroines in key positions in my stories, but now I stop and think about it more.  I actively think about switching some roles to women, to create a more even gender balance.  But here's the thing.  None of these books has yet been taken by a mainstream publisher.  Could the presence of strong female protagonists be one reason why?  I'd hate to think so, but I'm not so sure.

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.

Will it run, or fly?

Ideas are the life-blood of SF.  And we often get them by asking the magic question "what if?"  But every writer knows that ideas don't make a story.  They're only the first stage in the process of turning that creative spark into a fully-fashioned narrative,

It helps to know at an early stage whether our idea will run - or more likely, fly if it's an SF story.  And that means examining and questioning the idea in detail before we start writing.

Is the idea logical?  Something that totally reverses known science had better be well worked-out and justified before you start to write it.  If there's no evolution by natural selection on your world you have to show in detail what other mechanisms are at work there.  Of course, your book could be based around this new scientific discovery and how the knowledge changes science.

Coming up with original ideas is also a challenge.  At this stage in the development of SF, many ideas are re-workings of concepts that are well accepted into a different form.  But that doesn't mean you can't produce something stunning.  Witness the ancillaries in Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice.  It's about adapting or modifying what's gone before.

I did exactly that with my novel Eyemind.  I love Anne McCaffrey's brainship books, and I wanted to do my own take on them.  So I created Bi, a paraplegic housed in a Supercruiser who works for Intel.  The basic idea is shamelessly copied from Anne McCaffrey, but I've put my own stamp on it.  Bi controls a land vehicle not a starship or space station, and he's basically working as a PI.

If you're writing a novel you've got to be sure that your idea will sustain a long narrative.  That means you'd be wise to work out its details and some idea of the plot before you start writing.  Working out the science, culture, and politics surrounding your idea will give weight to it, and you confidence that you can pull the story off.

One of the criticisms I have of so-called Golden Age SF stories is that they're all idea, they're all shiny tech.  Often that tech was worked out in detail and lovingly described, but what wasn't described was its effect on the societies that used it.  How do instant ansible communications change societies?  How do people feel emotionally about the tech?  Will it prompt New Luddites out into the city's streets to destroy this evil creation?

Deciding whether an idea will fly is about knowing how it drives the action of the story, and how it affects the motivations of the main characters.  You've got to get these things in place or your idea won't fly.

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.

What if?

What if? is the great SF writers' question.  We take a current situation and ask what if this disaster or development happened?  What if a key scientific discovery turns out to be completely wrong, or we make a new scientific discovery that turns everything we know on its head.

We can take what if? into asking about cultures too.  What if an alien civilization had this kind of religion or beliefs?  How would they react to humans coming into their world and wanting to exploit their religious icons?

SF is founded on some classic what if? questions.  What if FTL travel was possible?  What if we could communicate instantaneously from anywhere in the galaxy?  What if it was possible to travel vast distances between stars in weeks not aeons?  What if we could clone ourselves a thousand times and some of those clones went to war with each other?

I've played what if in the Panthera books.  Death Spiral asks what will happen when we start splicing genes together to "improve" people.  Death Song is about developing natural surveillance techniques.  In Eyemind I asked what if people started using artworks to programme people using subliminal messages.

What if? is a key SF writer's tool.  It challenges us to examine the present and imagine how the future would be changed by a key scientific discovery or shift in culture.

Future Crime

Tomorrow I'm off to the Purbeck Literary Fesrival to be a 'Dame for a Day'.  I'm joining a panel of cozy crime writers to talk about our books.  You might wonder what a science fiction writer is doing on a panel of crime writers, but just take a look at your favourite SF novels and see how many of them contain crime 

So what kinds of crime will we see in the future?  While we have some kind of money, we'll always have greed and theft.  Whether it's physical objects like gold bars, or noughts and ones in a computer, somebody will want to steal them. 

We'll always have people wanting revenge for something.  Messed-up childhoods aren't going to go away in the future. Family vendettas and feuds will also still exist.  They'll probably get bigger, and stretch across several star systems.

Future tech will also create future crime.  We're working on invisibility cloaks for real now, when we have them they'll be a burglar's, and an army's, dream come true.  Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song are based upon the exploitation of big cats for illegal medical research.  That's another theme which I see continuing.  Sadly, humans will continue exploiting the other creatures they share the universe with for their own gain.

Even our leisure time won't be immune from this.  In my novel Eyemind interactive artworks are programming people to self-harm through the use of illegal subliminal messages. The future equivalent of movies could contain subliminals too. If a revolutionary movement used the technology to programme people into joining its organisation a government would have a big problem on its hands.

I've even got a crime against a whole planet in my book Jade.  There is a symbiotic relationship between the planet's ocean and vegetation, which turns out to be an intelligent planimal.  They share information between them, and are truly sentient.  But of course humans want to move in and plunder the planet's natural resources for their own greedy ends.  In that book, it falls to a small and  enlightened group of humans to stop them.

As long as humans endure, so will crime.  And not only will we continue to commit them against our fellow humans, but when we meet alien species we'll probably rob them too.  Our crimes will get bigger.  Future crime will be a thriving activity for a long time to come.

"As you know, Professor..."

These are the words any science fiction reader dreads seeing in a story.  They signal that a massive  info-dump in dialogue is about to begin.  As SF writers, we have to be far more subtle than that about how we build our world.  We need to know all about its geography, ecosystems, and geopolitics, but. that doesn't mean our readers do.

Just as the tech of the future is familiar to the people who use it, so is the scenery to the people who live in it.  Which means they don't go around noticing its every detail all the time.  We have to be selective about what we tell our readers.  We need to choose the information we give them on the basis of its relevance to our story.

Long descriptive paragraphs telling the reader about your world are out.  I did that in early versions of Eyemind, justifying the details on the basis that Keri was new to Latoya and as an artist she'd notice those things.  But the leisurely description of the sunset was slowing down the story, so it had to go.

All the descriptions of the tall purpletrees, the blueshell paths, the crimson sunset and brightly-coloured birds had to go.  They weren't relevant to the story.  But the scene at the end of chapter one when Keri gets trapped inside a very nasty interactive artwork are very relevant, and I've added more details of that in each rewrite.  It's relevant to the story because it shows how dangerous the artworks are, and shows that the contract she's signed up might be dangerous.

The novel now starts with her half-way through a briefing where she's learning about the suspect interactive artworks.  That could have been a classic case of "as you know, Professor", but I got round that by making Keri new to Latoya and an outsider.  So the briefing that's telling her what's going on tells the reader too, within the action of the scene.  The professor isn't being lectured to.

Describing the world in an eyeblink

One of the challenges for SF writers is describing the alien worlds your characters land on.  Even if   the world is Earth-like and the atmosphere is one that humans can breathe unaided there will be subtle differences from our home world.

The trick is to get the amount of description right.  Your characters might well be overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of a new world, but you don't want the reader to be overwhelmed too. And that means being selective in the details.

When I first wrote about Latoya in Eyemind I had the story starting with my main character Keri Starseer land on-planet at sunset and looking around her at the landscape.  It read like a travel brochure in my early drafts, and had to go.  Now I've dispensed with that whole scene and the novel starts with her mid-way through a briefing with her new employer.

We have to describe our world in an eyeblink.  In Panthera : Death Spiral I focus on the golden light and the dust of a savannah dawn.  In Panthera : Death Plain the setting is rainforest, and I sketch out its size by having Ren look down on an unbroken forest of green below her as she's  flying into the reserves.

Being specific helps us to fix the scene in the reader's mind quickly.  Something is not red, but ruby, crimson, or claret.  In Eyemind I describe a palace as being large and built of soft pink sandstone.  That's all the description I need for this minor location.  And when Keri is captured she is put into a cold cave with no light where she hears things scuttling about that remind her of large deadly spiders. I don't need any more description here.

Often the scenery will be familiar to your characters.  As we don't take great notice of places we know well, neither will your characters.  The details will pass by in an eyeblink.

The cross-genre queen

Sentient starships being attacked, illegal terraforming of planets, illegal construction facilities on a sentient planet, illegal dumping of toxic waste.  These are the topics I've dealt with in some of my SF novels, and at first it's hard to see what they have in common.

But they all contain crimes, in many of my books very big crimes.  Crimes against a planet, or attempted murder of other sentient species.  And yet until recently I've always seen my work as pure SF. 

Perhaps one of the reasons my books haven't been picked up by publishers in the past is because they lay in that no-woman's-land of cross-genre.  Yes, I was writing in the future, and yes, my books contained future tech, but they were also about people doing things they shouldn't, things that were morally wrong.

When I look back on some of my earlier works I see in Snowbird illegal terraforming, and the attempted murder of a sentient starship.  In my novel Jade the whole planet is sentient.  Humans want to come in and destroy its intelligence by mining the Fire Crystal that stores the planet's memories for starship drives.  In Eyemind, the crime is using illegal subliminals to cause people to self-harm.

I've always been the cross-genre queen.  There's as much crime in my books as there is SF.  And in the past that's been a problem. Nobody wanted books that fit awkwardly between two genres.  

Thankfully, that's now changing, and cross-genre books are everywhere.  And I now have a label for what I write, thanks to Angry Robot.  I'm now a future crime writer.  The cross-genre queen by rules.