NaBloPoMo - Day 5

Panthera : Death Spiral.    Chapter One - continued

  Cory strode over to her.  "The analyses will take an hour to do. Let's go and have coffee while we're waiting."

  Ren followed him to his office and let him fuss over her.  She drank the coffee he handed her without tasting it.  While they waited for the computer to process the samples she checked his husbandry records.  None of the other cats had been ill and the mother's pregnancy had been normal.  There was absolutely no reason for a whole litter of cubs to die.

  Cory got up and went to the lab, returning with the news that the sample analyses were done.  He sent the files to the console in front of her.  Ren propped her head on a hand while she read the DNA sequences.  They had the right number of genes, but she'd have to compare them with the Core World's Conservation Authority's reference genomes later to be sure.  It was always possible a mutation had occurred, but highly unlikely the same mutation would have been passed  on to all three cubs.  Instinctively she felt the answer to this puzzle didn't lie in that data.

  "Want the blood analyses?" Cory asked.

  "Yes, please."

  He brought up the new file and said "I'm wondering if they've fallen prey to Nereva."

  Nereva was the new, frighteningly virulent, strain of cat 'flu.  "It's possible," she said "but wouldn't the other cats be showing signs of it too?"

  "Good point.  Yes they would.  And they're not, thank the Gods."

Panthera : Death Spiral is available as an ebook and paperback from Amszon.

 

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.

What colour is your universe?

For years there was a fashion for every SF book cover to be black.  It had to be deep space with some  spaceship ploughing between the endless stars.  Which is fine for space opera, but not for all books.

My own books, Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, and the one I'm writing now, Panthera : Death Plain, are future crime involving the exploitation of wildlife and the natural world.  I wanted my books to reflect some of the beauty of the natural world, and in the first chapter of Death Plain I have my character Ren going out into the golden light of a savannah dawn.  In Death Song most of the action takes place in the rainforest wildlife reserves of Domovo.  That colour palette was very different: overwhelmingly green with the forest floor getting little light.  Sparkling dawns here can usually only be seen from clearings, the edge of the forest, or high up in its canopy.

Death Plain moves back to the great savannah wildlife reserves of what is by then New Africa.  Ren has been a major player in ensuring that the savannah still exists.  This time she's investigating the death of goldcats, the descendants of lions.

My favourite times of day are sunrise and sunset, especially on those clear days when the sky is full of colours.  And I want my universe to be full of colour too.  Goth blackness is not for me, I want the light and vibrancy of the natural world around me.

So let's start a campaign to get SF publishers to produce covers in a colour other than black.  And you never know, producing more colourful books might tempt more women to give the genre a try.

Turbulence

Turbulence drives stories.  From the minor ripple of a family's youngest son going off to do their own thing in defiance of the family, to the start of an interstellar war, turbulence is at the heart of the action.

Tech can create massive turbulence in societies, something we humans haven't really recognized yet.  Just imagine how life and cultures will change when we can travel faster than light, or we invent the ansible for real.

Tech can allow people to create massive turbulence too.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series, pirate Gamis Turek steals ships and knocks out anisbles, creating turbulence in the lives of the systems he visits before striking against them.  In a short time the threat of piracy has solar systems locking out visiting ships and mistrusting people who have been long time friends,

In CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur a fugitive runs onto Pyanfur's Chanur's ship, beaten and starved.  She reluctantly takes the creature in, and triggers off massive unrest between three species and between the families of her own species.

The turbulence a character creates by discovering the truth can be devastating.  In Scott Westerfeld's Uglies/Pretties/Specials series Tally discovers the terrible price that people pay for having  their bodies sculpted into beautiful shapes.  She and her friends subsequently leave the city, triggering a war that humans haven't seen for aeons.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe, the characters have grown up knowing that they can't survive outside the atmosphere of the Pod, but when they escape they discover the truth about the way they've been controlled and things change for ever.

In my own novel Panthera : Death Spiral the death of three kingcat cubs together triggers Ren Hunter's realisation that the cats have been murdered.  That turbulence takes her half way across human space trying to save the cats.

Stories need turbulence to drive our characters to act, and the stronger the turbulence the stronger the story.

Building a whole world

Yesterday I finally got back to writing Panthera : Death Plain after a week of distractions.  Although this book is set on Earth, the world I'm writing about has changed, and although I'm using familiar reference points things are different.

Earth is already overpopulated, and I've assumed that it will continue to be so even when humans  spread out over a vast amount of space.  Earth will always be the home world of humans, and there'll be many millions of us who won't leave home even when space travel is safe and relatively easy,

But I wanted to reflect some of the current environmental debates in my picture of the planet.  So I have a massive re-greening project going on at the southern edge of the desert.  These schemes are getting under way now, but I wanted to make this bigger than anything we're currently doing.

Because I have a passion for big cats I wanted to create a world in which they still have space to exist. So I have several reserves on the continent of New Africa.  But I also expected that the same issues will dog conservation as today - pressure on land for human development, poaching, ranchers killing cats who take cattle.

I've built my world in each of the three Panthera books around the story I wanted to tell.  I wanted the habitats on each world to show off the qualities of the big cats I was writing about.  But you might equally start from the other end, with a world hostile to human life and see how your characters deal with that.  World-building that way could take your characters mining gas giants, exploring ice worlds for incredibly rare and valuable metals or minerals, or terraforming a barren planet to suit their needs.  How you build your world will be shaped by the story you want to tell, but there's still scope for dazzling invention in the details.  Think Avatar and Pandora.