What legacy will I leave?

As part of my personal development work I've been working through the deeper purpose for my writing this week.  Thirty years ago I just wrote what came into my head, what excited me in the moment.  I wasn't thinking about what genre it fitted into or if I could sell it. But now, 26 novels and 200 stories later, it's time to take stock and see what my writing reveals about me.

My writings divide into two broad explorations.  One is the championing of the natural world, and covers everything from challenging homocentric cultures to showing the beauty of wildlife.  The other broad strand is writing about alternative ways of relating to each other through AI and non-human friends.  It's about challenging the sexualised and objectified way we see people today.

My heroines aren't in sex-based relationships.  This is the future, and I want to show mature cultures that don't do recreational sex, objectification of women, or excess breeding.  My 'relationship' (what a sexualised and abused word that is!) stories explore real love - the unconditional, uncontrolling acceptance of another.  I often use friendships between intelligent big cats and humans for this,but I have used high-intelligence birds too.  My YA novel The Code River charts the non-sexual friendship between a human boy and a half-human, half-big cat girl, and the Panthera novels explore the relationships between the Hunters and sentient AI Panthera.

So what legacy do I want to leave?  I'm aiming to get readers to think about how they live, to question and challenge the sexualisation and objectification of our society.  And if I persuade one woman to breed one less child I will be well pleased.  But I hope my readers will also admire my competent, professional heroines and want to emulate them.  They too might choose to follow their passion, not be derailed by sex, and become world-class experts in whatever fields they choose.

Do I sound deluded when I say my aim is to change the world?  Then so be it.  Every person we now consider a great thinker or leader was reviled and called mad at some stage of their lives.  But the prize we play for is saving Gaia and all her creatures, and if I have to be labelled crazy to achieve that, I'll live with it.

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

2014 - the science fictional year

2014 was the year when I finally came home.  After dabbling with the idea of being a crime writer for a year, I finally realised that I could be nothing other than an SF writer.

January found me doing a lot of soul-searching about this issue.  I couldn't deny my true calling any longer.  Despite the best efforts of my crime writer friends to get me to join them, I just didn't feel like I belonged in crime.  Yes. There is often a crime at the heart of my stories, but my heart sings when I'm exploring something in an SF setting.  So armed with my new resolve i bought a membership to the World Science Fiction Convention Loncon 3.

Next I completed the manuscript of my second indie-pubbed book Panthera : Death Song.  The books went live on the Amazon site the week before Loncon 3.  Then I left for Loncon 3, five days of brilliance in London in August.  I attended an SF writers' workshop, heard some of the major editors in the genre speak, and spoke on a panel myself. There was also the satisfaction of sitting in the Hugo awards ceremony and seeing Best Novel go to a woman, Anne Leckie.  And Aidan Moher, one of the bloggers I appeared on my panel with, also won a Hugo.

I went home and wrote two 20,000 word novellas in two months, a phenomenal output of words.  Then I decided to re-write Jade, my 15 year old novel about the discovery of a sentient planet.  Half way through that re-write the Conville and Walsh Word of  Mouth Prize was announced, and I found myself scrambling to do the edit of the first 30,000 words to submit to the competition.

As the year closes I've finished the final edit of Jade, and have just completed reading the book aloud. I've moved on to the final edit of Panthera : Death Plain, which will be my third indie-pubbed book, which I want out before Easter.

Looking back on this year, I see how hard I have worked, and how hard I played at Loncon 3.  I have a sense of having come home, and have recovered my passion for writing in the genre.  But writing is only the first step in the journey.  My goal for this year is to be able to come back at the end of next year having persuaded somebody to pay for my writing.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of science fiction Eco-crime novels Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song,

Is there enough danger?

As an introvert who writes "quiet" adventure books, I'm not much into big guns, wholesale slaughter, and the sound and fury that goes with genres like space opera.

More often my heroines are geeks, quietly working away finding out why something is or isn't happening.  Often there's a crime involved, and my characters appear in the role of unofficial private investigator.  The reality of the world is that thousands of people engageed in quiet research are behind every new discovery, but this doesn't make good TV news, or thrilling fiction.

I think there's a need for "quieter" books to satisfy the reading needs of the fifty per cent of the population who are introverts. I'm thinking of one if those mega best-selling fantasy series which has a reputation for the wholesale slaughter of its characters. That's not the sort of book I want to read, or write. But that raises a tension between "quiet" storytelling and creating enough conflict to keep the reader engaged.  And to get the main character involved In the story the stakes have to be high enough to motivate them to take action.

I had this problem with the end of Panthera : Death Song.  Towards the end of the book a crucial court hearing takes place.  It's vitally important for Panthera's future, but having trained as a Solicitor (Attorney), and having sat in courtrooms listening to hearings, I know how boring they can be.  I needed to spice up the story around the trial.  I needed more danger.  Cue handy riots outside the courthouse, and an attempted kidnap.

I have almost the same problem at the end of Jade, the novel I'm editing now.  I've got my heroine giving evidence to a hearing that's vitally important for protecting my sentient planet.  Even so, I can't make that boring for the reader.  Cue a breakdown in the communications link, and an attempt to murder my heroine.

I've had to add a whole new section to the end of the novel to create this extra tension and danger.  When I first wrote the book fifteen years ago I didn't even know there was a problem with it. But exposure to books like Robert McKee's Story and Christopher Vogler's  The Writer's Journey have shown me why the novel didn't work originally. It's often the case that I need to add more danger to my stories.

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.

What kind of sensawunda do you want?

I was reading the latest copy of the BSFA's  Focus magazine this week.  The major articles focus on world-building this issue, and something Gaie Sebold said stuck with me.  She talked about being attacked by the "shiny".  What she meant was that the technology ran away with her storytelling, hijacking it and sometimes backing her writing into corners where she didn't want it to go.

I'm not attacked by the "shiny" in that way.  Although I, or my characters, would use a cool new piece of tech, I'm not likely to build a story around that gadget.  I'm far more likely to build a story around misuse of the tech, which is what I've done with the Panthera books.

That doesn't mean I don't have any interest in cutting-edge science.  To write the Panthera books I had to delve into DNA and epigenetics.  And delving into that world, finding out how creatures are created, is magical.  There are around twenty-three thousand genes in every human, and every one of those genes is in every cell in our bodies.  We have fifty trillion or so cells in our bodies, and each one of them is packed with DNA.  How can so much data be packed into such a tiny space?  To me that evokes a sense of wonder.

Look at how a fly dodges you swatting it.  How can it have a brain at such a tiny size?  And yet it does, one that controls flight dynamics, and drives reproduction and feeding behaviour.  Recent research into the brain has shown striking similarities between fly and human brains.  Just how can so much be crammed into the space of a pinhead?

This is the nano world that humans are only just starting to explore themselves.  But nature has been creating nano-structure architectures for centuries.  But how much SF explores the wonder of the natural world?  And yet it could be a rich vein for stories.  Time and again, when scientists set out to find the most efficient way to deal with a problem, it turns out that nature had it licked aeons ago.

We have learned to look at nature's structures for clues to how to tackle problems, but I still don't think we celebrate her enough.  That's what I've tried to do in the Panthera books, and no doubt will do in books yet unwritten in the future.  My sensawunda lies in the natural world.

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.

High-tech, low-tech

Browsing through the book reviews for recently-published SF novels, the thing that strikes me is how many involve characters who are human-cyborg mixes.  It seems we still haven't lost the dream of tech enhancing our world, making us puny humans bigger and better than we are.

SF has always been the predictor of future tech, and usually its authors are in love with their inventions.   We're shown how powerful the tech is, but very often in hard SF novels what's missing is any recognition of how the tech alters human culture,

I've always had a problem with scenarios where all-powerful rulers lord it over vast regions of space.  We know from our own experiences of empires on Earth that the bigger the empire gets, the harder it is to control.  Things start to unravel at the edges.  Conquered powers don't stay conquered.  They want their land and their freedom back, and sooner or later they challenge the supremacy of the empire.

The thing I really can't take is the all-powerful ruler who, through their faultless tech and systems, knows everything that's happening in their empire at all times.  No human being's brain can hold that amount of information all at once.  But the other thing that irks me is that their tech never breaks down.  We never hear about the attacks on the remote outposts of the empire that take out its tech and launch cyber attacks on its key systems,

I suspect the future in reality will be a good deal less shiny.  I think there will always be people like my Ren Hunter in the Panthera books who shun the virtiual world for the real one, people who fight for the physical world to retain its wildness and beauty.

There's even the possibility that we could see the rise of a New Pastoral movement.  Some out-of-the-way planets might revert to a near-agrarian existence.  Anne McCaffrey's Pern settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth, taking with them only the tech they needed.  Their airm was to establish a simpler way of life on Pern. McCaffrey hints that bad things had happened on Earth, but doesn't detail them.  But her original settlers were fleeing the high-tech world of Earth for a simpler existence.

The future may become a divide between high-tech and low-tech civilizations not as a matter of lack of access to tech, but as a conscious choice not to use some of it.

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.

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.

The Characters of trees

Driving through the bare deciduous woodland forest yesterday got me thinking about the nature of trees and the roles they play in our stories.

If we want the planets we design to be suitable for humans to live on they have to have some mechanism for keeping the atmosphere as we need it.  On Earth trees fill this role magnificently, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. We wouldn't have an atmosphere we could breathe if it wasn't for the trees and other plants that maintain it.

Thinking about convergent evolution, any planet that has a suitable atmosphere for us is likely to have some form of trees.  But rather than seeing these familiar parts of the landscape as limiting our world design, we can embrace them as characters.

Tolkien famously did this in The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard the Ent, who takes the tree as character to its extreme as he can walk about and talk.  I did something rather different in my short story The Scent of Other Lives (one of the stories in my ebook collection Otherlives).  There the trees have branches they can move like limbs, and they communicate in some kind of telepathic way.

We can use them as characters who are conspicuous by their absence, as in Sarah Crossan's Breathe.  Her story is a cautionary ecological tale about what happens when we cut all the trees down.  There the few that exist are  hidden from view and tended in ways full of ritual.  

Avatar invented a new take on the idea of trees being the witnesses to our history.  The Tree of Souls was the keeper of the Na'vi's memories, the centre of their spirituality and history.  

In my book Panthera : Death Song the trees of the rainforest become characters.  Their denseness prevents my humans from doing things, and they provide home and sustenance for the jagothera big cats.  I've tried to capture the magic of the tropical sun rising and setting through the canopy, the dark foliage silhouetting a crimson and golden sky.

As well as being the essential lungs of an ecosystem, trees can be home.  Think of the massive Hometree in Avatar, a tree so huge it was a living cathedral.  Tall trees reaching into the sky give a planet a sense of continuity.  These guardians of the atmosphere have been here for many human generations, and will last for many more to come - if we don't cut them down.

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.