The eyes of the beholder - the case for multi-viewpoints

Two-thirds of the way through my re-write of Snowbird I realised that the story still wasn't working.  The   manuscript still wouldn't be fit to submit for publication once I'd finished.

As the story is over twenty years old you might be forgiven for thinking that I was just tinkering with the story, afraid to say that I'd finished with it.  But you'd be wrong.

The first major problem is that the whole novel is in the viewpoint of one person, Jian Kabana, my starship Coder.  Certainly she's the major character, and most of the events in the book revolve around her, but there are many problems with telling the story only through her eyes,

One is that it made it hard to describe Jian's appearance - at least, without resorting to the old routine  of the character seeing herself in the mirror.  And in the early drafts I'd done just that.  But I felt that it was important to say that she had dusky skin.  Her mother was white-skinned and her father dark-skinned, so naturally Jian's skin tone is somewhere between them.  But if I didn't mention this up front, most readers would make the assumption that she was white.

The second problem with one viewpoint was that I couldn't get into the head of her friend and Scwanberger security guy Brett Dorado.  I wanted him to confirm that, despite her wild looks, Jian is an ace Coder.  And I wanted him to reveal that he is a cyborg, as a result of being a victim of an illegal military programme.  Only he knew some of that information, so he had to reveal it.

And the third reason I need multi-viewpoints is that I'm planning on writing a series of books based around the Darius orbital shipyard location.  In fact, I already have a very rough first draft of the second book, Darius.  That is a multi-viewpoint book, and although it needs re-writing, it already has more pace than the first book.  So by re-writing Snowbird in multi-viewpoints, I'll be setting the pattern for what I hope will be a long series of books.

My last reason for re-vamping the book was pace.  With one character only, she has to do a lot of thinking about or straight telling of what's happening to other characters.  And that slows the pace down and makes the book plodding.

I've re-written five chapters so far, in three viewpoints, and the book works much better.

Commit to the detail

I've been continuing with my rewrite of Snowbird this week, and finding out how shallow my previous edit made the book.  Then I realised the book had always been shallow in a lot of respects.

And one of my weaknesses is to focus on a story with tunnel vision.  Often I don't look to the side enough to take in the details and richness of the world I'm writing about.  For an SF writer this is a laziness that can't be ignored.  So much of the story is the world.

And especially so in Snowbird.  That world is totally artificial.  Most of the action takes place on Darius Orbital Shipyard, a huge structure in geostationary orbit around the planet Cathal.  And I had to create every aspect of that world, from scratch.  This novel is around twenty years old, and my first notes are just a list of which organisations were at the shipyard.  But there's nothing like sending a character for a walk through your world to show you how much you don't know about it.

And it's in the use of well-placed unique details that settings come alive.  So what was the name of that restaurant my heroine Jian dined at?  I hadn't given it a name.  What was the decor?  What type of food did it serve?  Again, I didn't know.  But these are key pieces of information for us to help us to decide whether we want to eat at that place, and Jian needed to know them too.

It's almost like my twenty-year-younger self was afraid to commit to the vision.  Her descriptions were so tentative.  And how long does it take for an Autoshuttle pod to travel from Central ring to Deep Space ring?  I had no idea.   And yet my character does that several times in the story,

I'd also failed to put in enough of Jian's emotional responses to things.  She's been dreaming of creating a sentient starship since the age of twelve.  Yet when it happens she takes it so calmly.  She  doesn't show her excitement at what she's created, or her concern over all the things she hasn't thought about.  She should be feeling joy, perhaps a little fear at this unknown quantity, and some worry about how the ship will fare in a world hostile to her sentience,

But there are many of those details I didn't commit to first time round.  They're things I'm tackling on this rewrite.  But now I have another problem.  The whole story is told from Jian's viewpoint at present, but she's just an observer for some scenes.  I need another rewrite to make the book multi-viewpoint before I feel that the details are  rich enough.  Will I ever finish it?

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.

Visualising my brave new worlds

I've just finished reading an SF book by a best selling author whose work I love.  And it confused the hell out of me.  This writer specialises in creating tangled political situations which are often interstellar and multi-species. And often I fail to grasp all the nuances of the situations she creates.

I've always thought that failure to understand everything that was going on was mine, but now I'm not so sure I am at fault.  Because in the book I've just finished she fails to physically describe her settings clearly enough too.

Part of the story is about spacers training in pod-simulators.  From her early descriptions of them I didn't get any clear idea of whether the pods were in zero-g, in vacuum, or whether they were free-floating or somehow tethered.  Later she talks of pods drifting up to the access, which seems to suggest they're floating in zero-g.  Later still she reveals that they're bolted to some kind of track.  And by this time I was really confused.

I'm a little naive in this respect.  I do want a new world sufficiently described to me.  After all, I can only see what the author tells me.  And if they don't describe something enough I get confused. And they run the risk that I get fed up with their book and abandon it.

I've recently realised that one of my faults is that I don't properly describe places.  I'd have such a clear picture of them in my head that I'd just write a passing reference to the scene and move on to the action.  But, of course, the reader has no idea what's in my head.  I need to put it on the page.

This week I've started rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird.  Half of the novel is set on an orbital shipyard.  I knew it had three rings, Central, Middle, and Deep Space, and that they were all fixed to a central cylinder.  I'd also made some lists of who and what occupied each ring.  But when I came to rewrite I found that wasn't enough.  Each ring has five levels, and I needed to know what was on each level.  So I made a plan for each level. And now I can describe the place properly.

For planet-bound stories I draw maps of the land.  And I colour in the different habitats with watercolour pencils.  That makes it easier to know if my characters are going north or south, along the base of the mountains, or are close to a river.  And my description has improved a great deal with these in front of me.  Now I'm off to draw diagrams of the starship Chilai herself.

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 power of the older character

I'm starting to think about my panel at Loncon 3.  I'm talking about Exuberance and Experience, stereotypes and expectations of older and younger characters.

It's got me thinking about how many older characters I have in my books, and how I portray them.  The first thing I have to decide is what I mean by 'older'.   To someone in their teens it probably means some ancient person of fifty.  To me of rather more mature years, I think of older as seventy plus.  So it's a fluid definition that I can interpret in my individual way.

Taking a good, hard look at my books, I realise I have lots of "older" characters if you define older as forties and fifties, but very few if you define it as sixty plus.  One of the reasons for this is that most of my books have elements of adventure to them, and often my characters have to run about somewhere or avoid being shot.  There are limits to the degree of physical fitness of very old characters that tends to rule them out of many of the roles my characters play.

Having said that, in Snowbird and Darius I do have a very powerful older character.  Hyam D Scwanberger is the owner of the biggest shipline on Darius Orbital Station, and he has his fingers in dozens of pies.  I see him as a spider in the centre of his lair, pulling in data from everywhere.  In Jade my main characters are in their thirties and forties, but Kaath my main character does have an older aunt Bara.  She's a key source of support for Kaath when she discovers the truth about her origins.

Looking back at my books I see I don't have that many older characters in them.  Was that because I was in my twenties and thirties when I wrote them?  Possibly.  But I'm not anymore, I'm now of an age to know how powerful an older person can be, a person who knows their own mind and can spot falsehood, flattery, and bribery from a hundred paces away.

There's no reason why powerful older characters can't have a place in books.  Elizabeth Moon has several fabulous examples in hers.  I must try harder in future.

Seeing through other eyes

One of the major reasons why we write is to make sense of the human world.  But science fiction writers know that sometimes the best way to comment on human culture and behaviour is to see it through other eyes.

Choosing to narrate a story from a viewpoint other than human can shake us up and get us to question and challenge the way things are in our own world. In my youg adult novel Geneship I have a race of intelligent big cats with language, culture, and history.  They are clearly as intelligent as the human research team, yet their young have been exploited by humans in inhumane ways.  in that book one of the viewpoints is that of an alien leader, who gets to comment on human society.

In my Panthera books I returned to one of my favourite themes, artificial intelligence.  I combined it with my favourite animals, big cats, and have a sentient AI in cat form.  Pan is great for observing human culture. He notes that we put our best security where we have our stuff, and he wonders why we amass so much stuff when we all die and leave it behind.

In my short story The Scent of Other Lives (in my short story collection Otherlives) the trees are sentient planimals that can move their branches and communicate In a simple way with the humans who come to their world.  They save my human hero from a flood by flexing their branches and lifting his skimmer up into its branches until the waters recede.  

In my novel Snowbird I created Sponges.  They are organic pebble-like structures living on the surface of a dusty Mars-like planet.  They are a group-mind, linked together by threads.  And they've been there for many years.  But now humans have come along and want to terraform their world.

The increasingly intelligent AIs we are creating might end up doing more than just maintaining our tech,  they might end up running it, deciding what content goes on there and what doesn't.  Perhaps it will be AIs who eradicate pornography from the internet, guardian AIs who hunt it down and delete it.

Other eyes can be organic or manufactured.  They can be the eyes of animals or a house, or even the "eyes" of a black cloud.  Switching viewpoints away from humans can be a powerful device for challenging and examining our culture.

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.