The experiment in future

SF writers are often said to be predicting the future.  This can be a occupational hazard for hard SF writers, who dream up all sorts of nifty little gadgets and tech that haven't yet been invented.  If they're writing hear-future SF they are in danger of being criticised for the absence of the tech they've invented when the due date arrives and the invention hasn't.

For us softer SF writers, the experiment in future is more about seeing what happens when we extrapolate our current culture and attitudes, or when we free ourselves from them.

SF gives us a blank slate that we can fill with worlds, peoples, and cultures of our own invention.  If we want to explore a particular injustice we can invent a society with rules that highlight that issue.  Maybe  we'll make the situation worse than it is today, so we can get the characters fighting against it, and through them get our views across.

But no matter how much we might want to detach our future world from today, we never can entirely.  We are humans writing about the human condition, and we're a product of our time, conflicts, and cultures.  However aware of these we might be, we can never totally escape our cultural background and family upbringing.

But what we can choose is which experiment in future to run.  Are we dystopian or utopian?  Recently we've had an awful lot of the dystopian kind.  But I've always had a slightly naive hopeful streak.  I was born a rebel.  And when everybody's telling me how bad it is I'm off looking for the green shoots in the wilderness, the "good" people who balance out the evil.  As the Yes song goes "Without Hope, You Cannot Start the Day".

So my experiments in future explore the resilience of the human spirit and heart.  In a brutal world of cyborg armies my people are looking for the chinks in their armour, the fatal flaw that will bring down the dictator and restore democracy.

I don't buy a world where tech controls every aspect of human lives.  Tech breaks down.  And while humans design and service it, short cuts will continue to be made, and it will continue to break down.  We are a gloriously flawed species, and so is our tech and our future.  But those flaws give me the hope to believe that brutal dictators will always be opposed, and tech used to suppress people will go wrong.  

In search of the story

I've been revising some of my short stories this week, with a view to getting them submitted to magazines.  And I've been taking the magazines' advice and reading what they publish.

Some of my researches have really surprised me. If I'm reading a story about the end of the world, I want to know something about how the world ends, and how the characters survive it.  Instead what I got was a story about a girl delivering books to another girl, going home and taking a suicide pill.  It left me with a sharp intake of breath.  it violated one of the basic rules of storytelling, which is that the main protagonist should survive their ordeal.  

I've read stories of people with symbiotic aliens on their shoulders whose minds and sense of being don't seem to be affected by the presence of the creature at all.  I've read stories that begin with a long discourse on an obscure (invented?) word, but never go on to explain what it means.  That story read more like a dictionary entry than thrilling fiction.  Or perhaps it was supposed to be a bogus history text about this... God?  I really wasn't sure. The author hadn't made it clear.  Then there was the promising story about nanobots cleaning up a radioactive city.  The biotech ideas were good, but it turned out to be far too long, and degenerated into a technical manual for the recycling process.  Somewhere, the story got lost in the midst of the tech.

All this has left me wondering whether this is why I've had trouble selling my stories.  The stories I've read fall into two types.  One set fall into the hard SF mould, and don't seem to worry too much about characters or their fictive journey.  The other set seem to be the other extreme, stream of consciousness ramblings in search of a story.

My stories sit slap bang in the middle.  I have some science and tech, but usually not enough to classify the story as hard SF.  The story is about characters who use that tech, and about its consequences.  And I might be old-fashioned, but I like my stories to have a spine, a recogniseable sequence of events, a beginning, middle and end.  

Hmm. I wonder what reception I'll get when I send the latest batch of short stories out to magazines.

The passing of the old order

I've made the decision that this blog is going to go weekly from now on, so look out for new posts on Friday mornings, unless the universe collapses in the meantime.

I've just got the latest mailing of the BSFA's vector magazine, and the back cover is given over to a memorial to all the SF authors, publishers, prominent fans, and filmmakers who died in 2013.  Reading the list, I got the sense of the passing of an old order.

Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, died last year.  I used to be amazed at the patience it took to re-animate a model twenty four times a second.  It took for ever to get his skeletons to fight Sinbad.  By the time he died stop-motion animation had already disappeared, replaced by computer generated imagery.  There can be no starker example of the passing of the old order.

In books too there's the sense of a major change.  Looking down the list, I hadn't realised just how many of the old order had died last year. Iain Banks was the biggie, and will be much missed.  The  Player of Games is a firm favourite of mine, clever and inventive, and with several powerful messages buried in its narrative.  And Doris Lessing, another heavyweight who'll be sorely missed. Jack Vance, James Herbert, Frederick Pohl.  A lot of heavy hitters left the planet in 2013.

But the passing of this old order brings new opportunities for undiscovered writers.  Publishers have holes in their author lists they now need to fill, and perhaps they'll be ready to listen to our voices now they don't have a sure-fire success author to bank on.  There are gaps in agents' client lists, holes in publishers' schedules, and a chance for the so-far ignored to fill them.

Yes, we do stand on the shoulders of the greats, but their departure from the world stage also frees us. There may now be space and time for our voices and our take on the universe to get heard and seen.  The passing of the greats offers us a chance to have our work looked at afresh, without being subject to the cast shadows of the great falling over it.

The wisdom of years

I have a suspicion that editors are sometimes influenced by our cultural emphasis on young celebrity when looking at the characters in the books submitted to them.  Having become a woman of a certain age, I notice the absence of older women in the books I read, or read about.

It's okay for male characters to be old.  They can manage to hold onto their power too.  How much more powerful can you get than Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings?  But if we translated this character into a older woman she wouldn't be called a wizard.  She'd be called a witch, with all the negative associations that our culture puts on that word.  Or she'd be labelled as an old crone. Instead of admiring her flowing white locks we'd describe her thinning grey hair.

Some writers have managed to slip older characters into their stories.  CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur is a wily starship captain that has been travelling the space ways for a long time. A shrewd political and  interstellar political operator, it is her age and wisdom, her ability to read the big picture of her actions that keeps her alive in her dealings with the dangerous Kif. She is a powerful woman, and one of my favourite role models.

Elizabeth Moon features an older, not well-educated woman, in Remnant Population.  Her pragmatic, practical way of seeing life allows her to get in with the aliens just fine when she is left behind when the colony leaves the planet.  She has a quite, sly way of getting what she wants that is both gentle and strong, and takes no notice of the silly edicts of the men in charge.

These writers' choices of older characrers challenge our youth obsession.  They've seen it all before, the rise of a dictator or pirates, the greedy war of acquisition.  Older characters keep the history, balance the hot-headed actions of impulsive younger people.  They are the memory-keepers of our civilization, the essential link between the lessons of the past and the present,

Original combinations of ideas

Truly original ideas in SF are hard to find.  The genre has been around so long that most of the original themes have been well mined by now.  So how do we make a contribution to the genre?  How do we find something new to say?

Most of the time when we're casting our nets out for plots we're going to come up with ideas that have been used before.  What we're into is reshuffling old elements.  But when we do so, the resultant combination is salted and affected by our beliefs and values.  And our writers'unique voices will ensure that the way we tell the story of those ideas won't be like anything that has gone before.  Or it shouldn't be, if you've claimed your own voice and use it.

I confess to doing this combining of ideas often in my work,  in Eyemind I took Anne McCaffrey's brainships and applied the idea to a landbound Supercruiser.  Her brain became my Mind, her brawn my Mobile.  My favourite book of the brainship series is The Ship Who Searched, which has an archaeology background.  I changed that background to the world of art.  And I made my story a criminal investigation of suspect artworks.  Old ideas, but combined in a new way.

I'm a great fan of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I don't want to write about military characters.  So in my novel Starfire I turned Kylara Vatta into Ria Bihar.  Like Ky, Ria starts her trading life as an independent, but unlike Ky, Ria stays a Trader.  She does have military connections, though.  She's forced to team up with an alien military to recover a vital artefact.

I used to worry about the fact that I couldn't come up with leading-edge shiny tech.  It took me a while to realise that SF is as much about the cultures, politics, and social structures that tech facilitates and creates as it is about the hardware.  These days I'm more likely not to worry about inventing something brand shiny new.  I'm more likely to use someone else's invention and see where it takes me.

I've finally got comfortable with the idea of re-using old ideas.  If my characters are string enough and my voice my own, chances are my readers will still want to know about them.

To jump, or not to jump

One of the problems we SF writers have is the perennial one of getting about the universe in a reasonable length of time. It's that pesky Mr, Einstein and his theories of relativity that cause us problems.

 So what do we do if we want to get around the universe? Generation ships are only any use if you want to set your story on the ship, or your novel uses an incredibly long timescale.

 But if you have a character like my Ria Bihar, the Trading captain of my novel Starfire, she needs to get about the universe rather more speedily. Enter the fiction of the hyperspace jump, warp speed. A leap into an as-yet undiscovered other realm to get somewhere fast.

We have to trust that our readers will suspend their disbelief and accept the jumps,and it helps them to do that if we make the jump as realistic as we can. CJ Cherryh does this brilliantly in The Pride of Chanur. She shows us the exhaustion of the crew, the dulled senses when emerging from jump, the shedding of fur, the worry that the jump vanes wants bring you out into normal space any place you recognize. These details bring the process alive and allow the reader to believe in it.

The fiction of the jump is just too useful to pass up, and I'll be using it I my fiction for a long time to come.

Telling the reader what's happening

Reading some of the short stories published by SF magazines recently, I've been surprised that they were published.  I came across one the other day where a character had several, I think they were sort of puppies or kittens, growing, I think, out of her body.  The writer didn't clearly articulate how this worked.  I think one of them was supposed to have died and the viewpoint character was supposed to be upset by that, but I wasn't sure.

After a few sections, I skim-read through the rest of the story, hoping something would happen.  But it didn't.  It seemed to be a series of scenes about this character's life in which nothing much happened.  The only conflict or problem seemed to be around this dead, whatever it was, but it didn't seem to be driving the character to do something.  If she'd wanted revenge, and that revenge brought down a powerful leader, or maybe the being who died was destined to be the next leader and its death changed the fate of the nation, I could see the point of the story.  But there didn't seem to be any meaningful consequence coming from that death.

This is the sort of SF that frustrates me most.  If you're going to have other beings growing out of someone's body, I expect that to be important for the story.  And I expect you to have a decent stab at working out the biology too.  This particular story seemed to have no narrative drive, no sense of anything that happened in the story being important.

There seems to be a mentality in some SF circles that it's OK to write mysterious, half-understood stories, because we have to make the reader work, don't we?  That's fine, but you have to give me enough clues to let my imagination go to work.  It is, after all, your world not mine, and I can't come to understand it, or your characters, if you don't tell me about them.  And I want to know why I'm reading about them, what problem or challenge they're facing right now.  I'm not particularly interested in what they had for breakfast, unless it's their last, or the people are starving and breakfast is a rare thing.

I've also come across some stories recently where style has triumphed over substance.  Short, sharp, one-word paragraphs have been used in abundance, for no sensible purpose.  Or a writer has started the story with a grabbing action scene, and then wandered off into a tedious flashback for several pages, dragging the story down.  It seems that experimental is still more important for some magazines than good storytelling.

It's time for a return to straightforward storytelling, writing in a way that the reader can live fully in our worlds, understand what is going on in our stories.  I suspect that some writers feel that dressing up a story with a glossy style can hide a weakness of plot or logic.  But it doesn't.  I'll see through that and judge the story as wanting.

So please, when you're inventing new creatures with others growing out of them, tell me what's happening properly.