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.

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.