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?

Consistent worlds

 One of the joys of being an SF writer is having the freedom to create my very own worlds for my stories.  But this can be a big challenge too.  If I'm creating a world where humans are to move about freely, it limits me in how wild that world can be.

The atmosphere must be the same as ours to be easily breathable, and the gravity needs to be in a range we can deal with.  We know that being in zero-g for any length of time results in muscle wastage.  Being on a low-g planet for years would make it very difficult for humans to go back to Earth's heavier gravity later.  If your world is smaller than Earth is it at risk of losing its atmosphere like Mars did? And where is the water on that world?  If humans are to live there easily in any numbers the world must have an abundant supply.

And then there's the question of what we would eat on other worlds.  Some native foods might not be good for our digestion.  And we all know the havoc introducing non-native plants has caused in different countries on Earth, it could be even more devastating on a planet with poorly-understood ecosystems. Japanese knotweed, anyone?

Our created worlds have to be consistent.  Evolution shapes plants and animals to deal with the challenges of their particular ecosystems.  It would work the same way on other planets.  If you invent a fabulous predator, you have to work out what it preys on.  And where do those prey species feed?

And I haven't even started thinking yet about the nature of the societies that live on that invented world.  But that's another story for another day.

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.