My fictional role models

One of the reasons readers get into SF Is because it allows us to dream of futures we'll never have.  It allows us to travel the universe, make the next big breakthrough scientific discovery, and discover the pleasures of exotic worlds.  But for me one of the biggest reasons why I go back to my favourite books is because they provide strong fictional role models I can identify with.  These women inspire me on my down days.

If I need to be reminded how tough women can be when thrown into unexpected and dangerous situations I need look no further than C. J. Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  A wily old tradeship captain, she  gets more challenges than she bargained for when she decides not to hand over a stowaway on her ship to the murderous Kif.  In the world of the Hani it is the women who pilot starships while the men stay at home and fight each other.  I've always loved that role reversal.

Then there's Kylara Vatta, who single-handedly forms the Space Defence Force and bests a fleet of pirates three times the size of her own.  And in Anne McCaffrey's world of Pern, harper Menolly shows what you can achieve when you're determined not to let men's prejudices stop you from having your dream career.  And in most of my favoure books, the characters pass the Bechdel test too,

These favourite books have greatly influenced my own writing and the way I dream on the page.  I like to think that what I write can change the world, through the influence of my story on each individual reader.  

And if part of my influence is to show women that they can be as successful as Admiral Vida Serrano or Pyanfar Chanur I'll have provided some great inspiration and role models for women,

I see it as changing the world by stealth, one fictional role model at a time.

Being inspired by others'stories

I often struggle with the thought that my SF isn't original enough, that there isn't any dazzling new tech in it, that what I'm doing is really recycling other writers' ideas.

This is a particular affliction of writers in the genre.  We read a review of a new book that praises that dazzling tech, and we remind ourselves that SF is called the literature of ideas.  And we worry that our ideas aren't good enough.

So it was a great relief to re-read Lisa Tuttle's How to Write Fantasy and SF book.  "New concepts are highly prized in our culture, but hard to come by" she writes.  Then she goes on to talk about the stories she's written that were inspired by other writers' work.

What a relief.  Here was a concept of SF as a genre in conversation with itself, borrowing ideas from other writers all the time.  I suppose I've always known that at a subliminal level, but to see it out in the open, and acknowledged as the source of some of a best selling authors' stories, was reassuring,

I've borrowed a few ideas for my novels.  Starfire was inspired by Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I wanted my starship captain main character to stay a trader.  Eyemind was inspired by Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Searched, and her brainship became my Mind, controlling a powerful Supercruiser instead of a starship.

Starfire was also inspired by CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the strong character of the Hani captain Pyanfar Chanur.  In Starfire the Hani got recycled into my aliens, but they're friendly.  Ria Bihar, my Trader captain, eventually teams up with them to find something that has been stolen that affects the peace of both races.

I've realised there's nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from others' stories.  I'm currently working on planning a young adult series which will recycle ideas from Sarah Crossan's Breathe with my own focus on wildlife conservation.  I've also got EJ Swift's Osiris sitting there to read, and I suspect that her tale of the divided city will furnish more ideas for me to adapt.  

I'm thinking that perhaps I don't do enough borrowing sometimes.  I think I have to sit in my garret and come up with dazzling new ideas all on my own. But of course I don't.  Everything I write is built on the shoulders of those who came before me, and rather than fighting against this and trying to produce something 'original' I'd be far better off using others' stories as a launch pad for my own ideas.  I need to absorb the richness of those others visions and let them feed and inform my own,

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 ansible

It's hard to imagine SF without the ansible now. The concept has been around for many years since Ursula le Guin invented it. Curiously, the story in which she did wasn't about the effects of the technology, it was about culture clash when members of two very different societies meet.

But later writers have taken and shaped her invention to their own purposes.  I'm thinking specifically  of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books.  Much of the action there revolves around messages sent instantaneously by ansible, or around anisbles being destroyed and solar systems being out of contact.

I've adopted the technology myself, specifically in Starfire, where Ria Behar, my tradeship  captain, is jumping about the galaxy in search of her missing uncle.  Like FTL, I find it hard to imagine the SF genre without instant interstellar communications.

Part of our desire for the ansible is wish-fulfilment.  It would allow us to reach out to the stars in a far more immediate way than we can today, when a signal we send to a robot spacecraft takes minutes or hours to reach it.

But instantaneous communication would also greatly aid warfare, as Elizabeth Moon demonstrates in the Vatta's War books.  Pirates equipped with shipboard anisbles would have an advantage over other fleets, and the potential for destruction is huge.  As always, we need to be careful what we wish for.

The four-dimensional agorab has dimensionally morphed

I can hear you thinking "what is she on about?"  And that's the point.  Even though we're writing science fiction we still have to make ourselves understood.  And that means we have to find ways of describing our worlds and their creatures in ways our readers can understand.

I'm thinking of one much-feted SF book that is up for several awards in 2014 that left me feeling totally cold.  Part of that was because I wasn't fully engaged with the world.  And part of that was because multiple first-person viewpoints were continually jumping about the galaxy.  I'd only just worked out who was speaking and where they were before the writer jerked me off to another location with another character.

I've long had a problem with this issue of form over function in SF short stories.  I read extracts from stories in magazines and wonder why they got published.  Quirky viewpoints and obscure descriptions seems to win out often over simple storytelling.

Which brings me back to the four-dimensional agorab.  I have no more idea of what it is than you have.  It probably describes a piece of future tech, maybe alien tech.  But the point is that if I, or you, as the writer don't have a good idea of what our tech does no amount of alien-sounding words will make it convincing,

Part of the appeal of Star Wars is its used universe look.  Yes, there are anti-gravity drives, force fields, and FTL interstellar travel, but all that is everyday to the characters who inhabit that universe.  It's the equivalent of us turning on our laptop or iPad today.

We couldn't have imagined television three hundred years ago, and we can't even begin to imagine what tech we will have invented three hundred years into the future.  The pace of current tech development is so fast that, were we to see 300 years into the future, we wouldn't understand much about it.

But there is a way through this.  We have to remember that tech is invented for a purpose.  Find the need the tech is there to serve and you have the key to inventing something useful.  Remember the invention of the ansible?  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series of books relies heavily on that tech.  The stories wouldn't work without that technology.

And that's the key,  Make your tech serve some purpose and you'll already have gone a long way towards getting the reader to understand it,

Age in SF stories

I recently challenged a comment on Twitter where the writer was focused on getting young people into an SF convention.  My response was "why is everything focused towards the young?"  Being a woman of a certain age, I often find this focus insulting.

It's got me thinking about age in SF stories.  One of my favourite characters, Pyanfar Chanur, is a wily starship trading captain.  She's not young, and her age gives her the wisdom and the nerve to steer a very tricky course through the interstellar politics and warmongering of several species.  She wouldn't have survived five minutes against the mercenary Kif if she wasn't older and wiser.

Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population features an older woman as the heroine of the story.  She's not well educated, and she gets left behind when the colony is lifted off the planet.  She uses her age and her wisdom to make contact with and get along with the indigenous aliens.

Androids can often live fantastically long lives in SF stories, so can AIs. Philip Reeve's Stalkers from his Mortal Engines series of books are ancient tech, and even more terrifying for it.  Anne McCaffrey's Aivas from the Pern books is at least 2500 years old, and still functioning perfectly.

These stories provide a counterpoint and a challenge to our culture's present obsession with everything youth.  Older characters have seen this war before, they know how this menace was successfully tackled twenty years ago on some obscure frontier world.

Age gives us the chance to take the long view, to spot disturbing trends that might be emerging that somebody needs to do something about.  Is there a resurgence of piracy in one sector of space? Who remembers the old pirate Turek? Is this a new incarnation of an old conflict?  Older characters are memory-keepers, and memory and history are important for civilized societies.