Robust tech - nuts and bolts in the SF universe

I always have a problem believing in SF worlds where all-seeing tech never breaks down.  There are books where rulers know everything that happens throughout their vast empires every minute.  There are powerful spymasters whose faultless tech always tracks down the rebels.  The problem is, I can't recognise them as human socieities.

I've always struggled with hard SF that focuses only on the tech, that doesn't consider who uses it, or  the impact of that tech on the lives of its users.  And some writers seem to be so in love with the shiny gizmo they've invented that they don't work out the consequences of using it fully.  All too often that tech goes on-line and it works flawlessly.  It always works, and sometimes without any visible signs of a maintenance schedule.  I just don't buy that, not if humans are involved in building it.

You only have to watch the news for a while to notice that humans are always taking short-cuts.  We don't store things safely and they explode, or we don't maintain our tech and it breaks down at a critical moment.  Things blow up regularly, or catch fire.  And very often at the end of the lengthy inquiry we find human error has been involved in causing the accident.  So, unless we can design systems that can prevent humans from taking short-cuts, I think our tech will always go wrong.

The other thing that isn't often featured in SF is basic tech like nuts and bolts.  It seems that many writers find them too boring for their brave new worlds.  But there's a good case for saying that nuts and bolts would be vital in some SF settings, like in the undeveloped wild world of Deon my characters in Genehunter inhabit.  

This week I've got to the point in the story where two of the guys are trying to repair Aris's airscooter after it ditched in the river.  I describe a scene where they take its innards apart to dry out the wiring and components, and try and work out what's shot and what's not.  They're working with nuts and bolts, and components that they can take apart and repair.  They're on a world with no repair shops, so they either fix the tech, or it doesn't go.

I think that's a more realistic portrayal of tech on a frontier world.  In such places it's the self-reliance of the settlers that's going to help them to survive, along with the type of tech they can fix when it goes wrong.  They're going to need to be able to take apart those nuts and bolts.

Introducing the SF world - getting the balance right

As an SF writer, I face a classic tension at the start of every story.  Because everything in my world is invented, I need to provide enough description of everything to show the reader where they are.  But on the other hand, I don't want to slow the action of the story down and bore my readers.

This balancing act is one that every science fiction and fantasy writer faces.  We have to sketch in enough of our setting to show the reader the city, space station, starship, or monarch's throne room.  And we have to establish our setting on the run.  Whilst the Iron Throne has an interesting design, it's the actions of the characters scheming against each other to gain it that readers want to see.

I've just finished rewriting Auroradawn, and that novel presented me with a particular challenge in chapter one. I had to get across the idea that my heroine Arrien is newly bereaved.  She is now the Captain  of a Great Family, one of several powerful wealthy landowners on Vedrana.  I had to explain that each Family had a bioengineered soulship.  The ships had intelligent biomechanical AIs, which have the capacity to reach full sentence through absorbing the memories of their dead Captains,  which is why Arrien is in the Transfer Loft at the start of the novel, transferring her just-dead mother's memories to a crystal to give to Auruoradawn, her soulship.

In 1600 words I've introduced the idea of soulships, memory crystals, and the Starrider Great Family.  Then Arrien's younger brother Baak appears, and he has to be introduced.  I have to explain that he ran away from home two years ago, and that he's now trying to steal the memory crystal.  

I thought all that information was essential for the reader to make sense of the scene I was showing them.  But there were a lot more things that I decided couldn't fit into chapter one. I have Arrien hoping the soulship will Awaken, but I don't explain what that process involves, or the changes it will make to the soulship.  At the top of the chapter I've labelled the location as Mithras, Starrider Great Family compound, Vedrana, but I haven't explained any of those names. 

Those are the sort of choices we have to make when setting the balance of action and description.  And this week I read the finished chapter to Havant and District Writers' Circle.  Most of them are not SF readers, and they didn't get confused by my start, so I guess I've got the balance right.

Evolving science fictional wildlife

This week I've reached the place in my edit of Auroradawn where Arrien is searching for an object in a desert market.  The place is about an hour's walk from where Auroradawn has landed, so I wanted to give my heroine some transport to the town and back.  

I needed a creature that was adapted to a hot, dry, desert environment.  Mindful of the principle of convergent evolution, I thought that the animal I came up with, a tobal, wouldn't be a lot different from Earth's camels.  For example, they would have evolved broad feet, to spread their weight more effectively when walking across loose sand. 

I also thought they'd have a water and fat storage system like camels.  I changed them by deciding they looked like leggy equines, and the humps that store their water and fat are in their necks, and under their bellies.  I think we can't ignore the knowledge we have of how evolution by natural selection works.  And that means that any changes I make from 'Earth-norm' have to be justified in evolutionary terms,

I did a similar piece of tweaking in Genehunter with the Ur-Vai.  I wanted talking big cats, and I had lions in mind for my base species.  But the Ur-Vai have also evolved hands and arms as well as their four legs.  This is not impossible.  It might have started out as a random mutation that conferred evolutionary advantage, and was thus passed on to later generations.

I wanted the Ur-Vai to have hands because that made them more feasible as tech users.  So what I've ended up with is a species that still hunts like lions for its food, but has radio, language, culture, and democracy.  They have mates and children, allies and enemies, and they worry like we do too.

In my novel Soulsinger I created alien dolphins who communicate telepathically with the natives.  The creatures bond with a native, and consent to being ridden by them.  We know that dolphins have complex language and social structures, so again I didn't think this stretch was impossible.

I enjoy the challenge of creating something a little bit different.  Yet I still think that creature needs to be one I can believe in.   I'm writing SF not fantasy, so I need a creature that doesn't cross that boundary from realistic into something that is only feasible in a fantasy world.

Riddles and objects - laying a trail of clues

I'm continuing with my rewrite of Auroradawn this week.  The book is structured around the main character, Arrien, being sent off around the planet to find the answers to seven riddles.

When I wrote the book I first worked out the riddles, then decided what the objects the referred to were.  Then I wove the book's plot around them.  Arrien's mother had been studying a gold necklet inscribed with the 'master' riddle, and Arrien only finds about about them when her mother dies.

The necklet tells Arrien that she has to find seven objects, and hints that each of the seven objects is held by one of Vedrana's Great Families.  That gives enough information for her to start looking for the first clue, on a friendly neightbour's land.  But the clue doesn't tell her where on his large estate the object is hidden, nor does it reveal what form the object takes.

As the writer, I knew where and what each clue was, but I had to reveal them through Arrien's eyes, and think like she would.  I know that each clue will be found in the same type of location on each estate.  But I realised as I was working though the re-write that Arrien would have no reason to think that.

And here is where I had to balance the needs of keeping the story flowing against the complexities of the riddle quest.  If Arrien set off to search each Great Family's lands without any idea of where to look, it could take her years to find the riddle objects.  And the reader would have got bored reading about her aimless wandering a long time ago.

So I resorted to some editorial sleight-of-hand.  I had Arrien reasoning that, because she found the first object in a certain type of location, she should start off by looking in similar locations for the rest of the objects on the other Great Families' lands.

She makes an assumption that turns out to be true.  And that allows me to write about her solving the riddles and finding the objects solely by her own efforts.  That first unseen nudge by me has put her on the right track to complete the quest.

I'm happy that I've got the balance right between authorial direction and character freedom, and can now get on with unfolding the rest of the adventure.

 

Crimson, gold, and ice-blue - the power of detailed description

This week I'm continuing with my re-write/edit of Auroradawn.  One of my faults is a tendency to under-describe my worlds, and I'm trying to fix that in this rewrite.  But because I'm an SF author, I'm having to create and describe a whole world.  That gives me wonderful freedom, but I can't rely on the reader to know what's there.  If I want them to 'see' Vedrana, I have to describe the planet in enough detail to allow them to do that.

As in so many things, the devil is in the detail.  In my earlier draft, I had a description of summer alpine meadows dotted with red, blue, and yellow flowers.  But what shade of red or blue were they?  And is the yellow a weak pale lemon, or a deep strong gold?

It's that sort of thing I've been fixing in my re-write.  The flowers are now crimson, gold, and an ice-blue that reminds Arrien of a winter sky in the mountains.  I've described some of the paintings on the walls of the great house, works painted and drawn by Arrien's brother, Baak.  One of them is a graphite pencil study of Arrien and her mother.  As the mother has just died, this has special poignancy for Àrrien.

Describing the paintings also allows me to fill in more of Baak's history.  Two years earlier Baak ran away from home, after a long series of rows with his ex-military father, who didn't recognise his artistic talent.  It's a familiar scenario, a sensitive child having their talents ridiculed because they don't fit their parents' dreams for them.  Describing the brilliance of Baak's artworks allows me to tell the reader that Baak really is a talented artist, and that his father was wrong to rubbish his work.

And this detail also functions as a sneaky set-up for book two of the trilogy.  In book two the riddle quest switches to finding clues in symbols incorporated into paintings.  The reader doesn't know that at this stage, but in book two Arrien will be forced to find a series of paintings, and identify and decode clues wrapped up in symbolism in those works.  By then I've already established Baak's talent and knowledge of art, so it's natural that he would take the lead in searching for those clues.  Which allows Arrien to keep the matter within the family.

The challenge of detail in the second book is about inventing symbols, colour associations, and delving into the history of painting.  But that's a whole new story.

Familiar strangeness - the weird everyday in SF

I'm editing Auroradawn this week, and the early chapters talk about my heroine, Arrien, bonding with her soulship.  The novels brought me up against the problem of describing the strange in familiar ways.

What is a soulship?  It's a biomechanical creation, with an organic flesh hull that was specially grown.   It has a biological/mechanical mind.  It started out at as high-level AI on the verge of consciousness.  

So far, not so strange, but it's at this point that the narrative does turn odd.

One of my inspirations for Auroradawn was reading Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders book Ship of Magic.  I loved the way the heroine, Althea, felt connected with the Liveship Vivacia.  Robin describes it as Althea having a sense of connection with the liveship's 'near-life'.  The idea inspired me, and I wanted to write my own version of it.

Ship of Magic is very definitely fantasy.  Liveships come alive through the flowing of their dead captains' 'anma' into their timbers, and each death brings the ship closer to awakening.  Auroradawn is firmly SF.  I re-worked Robin's ideas in an SF context.  Instead of a hull made of wizardwood, Auroradawn has a bioengineered organic hull.  I have each dead Great Family Captain's memories being transferred to a crystal that is linked into a reader in the soulship's Memory Room.  The ship reads the memories it contains, and integrates them with the memories of each previous Captain.

At some stage, a critical point is reached where the memories tip the high-level AI over into full sentience.  The current Captain carries a command implant in her head, and the ship is able to talk telepathically with its Captain on Awakening.

But all this strangeness is familiar to my heroine Arrien.  She's grown up knowing it, and so my challenge was to write the scene through her eyes, yet provide enough explanation for the reader.  Arrien wouldn't stop to explain how the system worked, she's known it from birth.  But the reader can only learn about her world through Arrien's eyes and mind.  I had to find a way to get the information across in her narrative, in a way that didn't seem awkward or forced. 

I think I've got the balance right, but I'll see when I send the novel out on submission.

Submissions and the Imposter Syndrome

This week I've been coming across lots of references to the imposter syndrome.  One definition I found  defines it as "a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in the face of information that indicates the opposite is true."  It's associated with high-achieving people, who don't believe they're as good as they are, and especially with women.

I wish I'd researched this fully years ago.  I'm beginning to realise that the imposter syndrome has worked its way into my writing world.  I'm always berating myself for  not having enough richness of description in my work, or enough emotional depth to my characters.  Who am I to put myself up against all the published authors I admire?

I'm still struggling with imposter syndrome in relation to magazine short story submissions.  The  syndrome goes into full throttle when I read phrases like "fresh voices", "stories that push the boundaries", "intricate storytelling" in submissions guidelines.  I've already blogged about how meaningless these phrases are, but they still act to shut me out.  But it isn't the magazines who are stopping me, it's my imposter syndrome. 

I'm cutting off possible story markets because my imposter syndrome tells me there's no point in submitting to these magazines, as my story isn't fresh enough, intricate enough...  blah, blah, blah.  And it tells me that on absolutely no evidence.  Some of those magazInes I've never submitted to, so how can I know whether my story is what they want or not?  This makes me wonder if the imposter syndrome is partly to blame for the low level of submissions by women writers.  If it's causing others to self-select, not sending stories to some magazines, just like I am.  

I recall from my corporate days that men will apply for jobs they only have 80% of the skills for, women generally won't.  That's happened to me too.  The old imposter syndrome has always been part of my life, I just haven't realised until now how much it was shaping my writing actions.  But no more.  I'm now making it my mission to submit to those "leading-edge" "intricate" "fresh voices" magazines.  It's  time to kick out the imposter syndrome and get some real evidence in its place.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com