It's about the people, stupid

One of the things that sets modern SF apart from a lot of the so-called Golden Age writing is its focus on people instead of pure ideas, or on one piece of shiny new tech.  Sure, there may still be grand ideas at the bottom of a story, but today that story is far more likely to explore the way that tech affects the people who come into contact with it.  And show those effects through their eyes,

This is far more my kind of SF.  It means I can use tech in a story without having to be a scientist, and without knowing every last detail of how that tech works,  I can just use it in my story to carry out social experiments.  I can use it to poke and prod at human civilisation and culture, and work out how people react to other beings and ways of being,

I stumbled across Karen Traviss's Halo: Kilo-Five books recently.  On the face of it, they're pure military SF.  The main characters are a black-ops unit operating after a multi-species, intergalactic war.  But it's what Karen has done with this bunch of characters that's so magical.  Tough shock troops who'd never turn a hair about killing dozens of the enemy are torn up about the injustice of what happened to young children who were kidnapped and turned into enhanced  super-soldiers.  It's an exploration of the fall-out from tech big time.  Another of Karen's characters is BB, an artificial intelligence.  He tries to claim that he's not becoming human, but he's more human than some of the human characters, right  down to the ability to love others.  And she can even make us empathise with a terrorist.

Naomi Foyle's Astra books are an exploration of ecological issues,  but they're seen through the eyes of a girl who doesn't fit in to their strict regime.  Her story becomes a very personal quest to find her exiled father.  What drives her is that most basic need to know herself and where she came from.

I've taken lessons from these books in my own Genehunter.  My main character Aris is on a journey to find out why a bioship has been sent covertly to Deon.  But there's a personal connection to her quest.  Her father was piloting the ship, and she doesn't know if he's still alive.  Her story becomes a very personal one of going to find her father.

And in the end it's the people who populate our worlds, the people who use the shiny tech, who give our story it's substance and heart.  And if we're really lucky, we might have challenged a reader and persuaded them to change their views on an issue.  We might have got them to see things our way.  Now that's the real power of story-telling.  In the end it's about the people.

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.

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.

Sensing the alien

Following on from last week's blog post on aliens, this week I'm back to editing my novel Genehunter.  One of the main characters in that story is Yull, an Ur-Vai leader.  The Ur-Vai are zebra-sized big cats, with the solidity of a lion.  As well as their four legs, they also have two arms and hands.

This is a rewrite of the novel, and I'm trying to deepen Yull's character.  One of the things I realised early on is that I'd totally missed references to his sense of smell.  But Yull is a cat, and I realised his sense of smell would be much stronger than humans'.  He will be able to scent things the human characters can't smell at all.   And when he is introduced to human tech, that will have strange scents to him too.

So I'm now rewriting all of Yulł's chapters to add details about how the world around him smells.  I've decided he can scent each individual Ur-Vai emotion.  This is going to come in handy when he has to decide who is friend and foe later on in the novel.  And I've realised that the scents of the humans, and their technology, will be totally unknown to him.  He's put in the position of trying to build a friendship with humans without having all his usual scent clues to help him.  I'm writing in his sense of dislocation and disorientation this unfamiliar task brings to him.

I haven't mentioned the cats' sight in detail, but I've decided they see in full colour.  I'm cheating, because I've had them retain the tapetum lucidum, that reflective layer of cells cats have that help them to see better than us in the dark.  Cats can see up to eight times better than us with these cells, but the trade-off is that they don't see full colour,  I've been greedy.  I wanted the Ur-Vai to see in full colour as well.  I'm sure evolution can design an adaptation that will allow that.  I reasoned that the cats are tech builders and users, and they might need to see in full colour in order to use their tech safely.  

Because the cats have hands I've been able to work in a little of their sense of touch too.  At one point in the story Yull comforts Aris.  I've had him stroking her hair, and observing how different its texture is to Ur-Vai manes. By twisting around familiar senses, I've managed to make Yull unique.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Making first contact - the cheat's way

This week I'm re-writing Genehunter.  In it I have a human crew making first contact with an indigenous species of big cats, the U-Vai.This raised the question of how to keep the story moving when the two species know nothing about each other and can't speak each other's languages.

I've resorted to a couple of tricks to get around this problem.  First, I have a viewpoint in the head of one of the aliens, Yull.  Getting into his head means I can tell the reader about the cats' society, culture, and concerns without having to worry about the language barrier.  The big cats do have a language, and they speak proper words.  (I'm not sure whether that modification to their vocal chords would mean the couldn't roar, but I want them to roar, so they do that too.)  being in Yull's head allows me to tell the reader relevant history long before my human characters discover it.

Second, I've cheated by letting the two species have universal translators.  They both have tech, so I've figured that they might be able to find a way to exchange binary files.  It's unlikely that they'd receive the complete databases I've miraculously had my characters doing, but this is fiction, and I have to do what's needed to keep the story moving.

In reality, even if the two species had such help, making a first contact would be a cautious, long drawn out process. But I want to send the two species on a journey together, to figure out what's happening at the other end of the continent.  So  I need them to be able to communicate and agree to travel together on this adventure,

I've made Yull a young leader, but wise in ways some of the older members of his tribe are not.  That means he's more open-minded, a dreamer, more able to cope with the culture shock of meeting people who came to his world through the 'deep black'.  And his son Villjo has a youngster's lack of fear, and makes friends with Aris, my human heroine, easily.

I've tried not to make the contact too unrealistic. It does involve Aris spending long hours with the language teaching programme actually learning the language.  But in the end the demands of the story must prevail.  And now they're ready to set out on their big adventure,

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Plain and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Getting inside the alien mind

This week I've made a start on re-writing Geneship.  The first book is now Genehunter, and covers the first half of the events that the original book did.  

My alien viewpoint, Yull, was always an interesting character.  Because I had to invent him from scratch, he always had more detail than my human lead, Aris.  He's the leader of a tribe of Ur-Vai, and I knew they had as much tech as humans.  Yet they're big cats, and Aris sees them hunting like lions  early on in the story.  So they retain their predators' instincts even in a high-tech culture.  I knew they lived in caves, and they inserted bioware into a species of birds to make them into a natural type of drone for surveillance.  

In the original book I hadn't worked out the aliens'spirituality.  Now I've decided that each tribe has its own God or Goddess to protect their tribe.  I want Yull's long journey with the humans to question his sense of belief in the tribe's Goddess.

I also had to decide how and where they live.  The planet has two long mountain chains that bisect it north-south and east-west.  I've decided that Yull's species, the Ur-Vai, live in caves dotted along the mountain chains.  That allows me to give them distinct territories with hunting rights.  

In the first chapter Yull makes first contact with the human characters.  When he returns home he has to face a challenge from a hostile deposed leader, giving me a chance to detail their politics (a form of democracy). 

But Yull knows about a mysterious Artefact lying at the far end of the continent, which he suspects is human.  Finding out what it is, and what connection it has to these humans, forms the basis of the story, and drives him to question and challenge everything he thought he knew about the universe.

There's lots more detailing to do, but now I feel much happier about getting into my alien's mind effectively.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Her website is: www.wendymetcalfe.com

Re-using old myths, legends, and fairytales

Writers have always re-told myths, legends and fairytales.  Sheri Tepper had great fun with her retelling  of Sleeping Beauty.  Her Beauty is a sassy, time-travelling character who compares and contrasts the best and worst things of each time period she travels through.

Yesterday I finished reading Julie Kagawa's young adult book Talon.  The book has been much hyped, and I've read many enthusiastic reviews of it.  I was curious to see if the book lived up to them. The story is a contemporary retelling of the George and the Dragon myth, set in Southern California, and including a teen romance.  But the book is also a deeper examination of duty versus love, and shows us the evils of indoctrination.  And it's a damned good read.

Rick Riordhan has had great success with his books turning the gods of Olympus into contemporary children's stories.  And Kathy Reichs has re-worked the werewolf trope in her Virals series.  There the teenagers aren't bitten, but are infected with a virus that gives them their superpowers.

This set me thinking about using myths and legends in my own work.  I'm currently re-writing a stand-alone book that was originally a young adult adventure into the first two books of a new adult series.  My heroine Aris is human, but the creatures she spends most of her time with in the book are the alien Ur-Vai.  The Ur-Vai indulge my fantasies of what big cats would look like if they'd become the highest intelligence dominant species on a planet.

I've already decided they need a spirituality.  But what to use?  Gods, goddesses, and religions arise out of the environmental and cultural situation of the people of that faith, so their gods and goddesses should be cat-related.  I think I should delve into Egyptian cat beliefs for a start. So far, I've decided that Yull's Ussin tribe worship the Dark Huntress, a powerful dark big cat goddess.  I'm not sure what the legends concerning her are, so will need to work these out.  And as the Ur-Vai are fiercely tribal, and each tribe has their own god/goddess, I'll need to invent a few more individuals for them to worship.  

Myths, legends, and fairytales endure because they deal with universal themes and truths, and I think they'll continue to be a source of inspiration for writers for a long time to come.

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