The segue into hard SF

I've always thought of myself as a soft SF writer, but recently I've had to re-examine that label for myself.  In the novella I've just re-written I've included hypercapnia, submarine diving procedures, data about light absorption in the ocean, and the production of Omega 3 and 6 oils from algal sources.

Hard and soft SF have never been absolute and self-contained, of course.  They've always been a continuum from stories where the tech or science drives everything, to stories where it is faintly in the background, or even not acknowledged. 

In the past I think I've called myself a soft SF writer because I didn't want someone to ask me what kind of scientist I was.  But one of the changes I've found in the last twenty years is that scientists have made great efforts to explain their work to the public in understandable terms.  "Popular science" books now take up a large amount of shelf space in bookshops.  I have a fair collection of them, books on DNA and epigenetics, cell biology, space and hyperspace, and a large number of pages stored on my iPad of research I've done while writing.

I've discovered that I prefer researching on the run.  I write mainly in cafés, and my favourites are places which have wi-if so I can research as I write.  The novella which I've recently completed saw me researching several disparate subjects.  Since I bought an iPad I've found it invaluable for researching on the run.  I will write to a certain place and then wonder what the science is on a particular subject.  And it's now so easy to do an internet search for data.

The ubiquitous Wikipedia always comes to the rescue.  I know we're always warned against relying on that data alone, but it's the matter of a few minutes to cross-check the data I find with academic, government, or research websites and confirm its validity.

As a result my stories have begun to take on more science elements.  Where twenty years ago I might have fudged the science, now today I can do an Internet search and find out how that really works.  Scientists have had to become "popularisers" of their work, and I can usually find a layman's explanation for even the most esoteric areas.  All of which has made it easy for my stories to segue into harder science.

Hanging with my SF tribe

Last week I was blogging Fromm the ExCel centre, in the midst of Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention.  A week later, and I'm back home, thinking about what a great time I had in London, and about how much I learned.

I spent a lot of time with other writers who 'get, the SFF genre. I also had my work critiqued by a group of fellow SFF writers.  My usual critiquers aren't SFF writers, and it was great to get feedback from my own tribe.  I didn't always agree with what they had to say, and some comments had me scratching my head wondering why they'd been made, but listening to the discussions made me feel like I belonged to this tribe,

Do AIs have gender?  Should they have?  Should we be using pronouns other than 'he' and 'she' to denote a multi-gendered future?  The whole idea of  "gender" gets challenged when the intelligence is manufactured and not a product of Darwinian evolution.  

I listened to a group of genre writers talk about how they got their agents.  For the first Angry Robot Ooen Door reading period hundreds of manuscripts were submitted.  Of those, the publisher sent out 65 requests for the full manuscript.  From those requests, 5 authors were signed up.  These writers shared tips on quizzing an agent who is interested in taking you on, and warned against grabbing the first agent interested in you.  And I got a sobering reminder that the query letter is more important than the manuscript.

One of the best mind-expanding lectures was "The Post-Human Future", delivered by the Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees.  "Too many people think that humans are the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree", he said.  "No astronomer can believe that."  He offered the sobering thought that this century might be "the final century" for humans.  He talked of global warming, the dark side of tech development, space and space tourism, and life elsewhere.  And speculated that space could contain a quantum computer the size of a galaxy.

Fact - or at least, hard science speculation - segued into fiction as I went from the lecture to the fan village and stood by the Tardis.  And this was the wonder of Loncon 3.  You could have spent all five days going to serious science lectures and dealt with nothing but hard reality.  But if you're a dreamer and an SF writer like me, absorbing a heady mix of fact and fiction will keep me going for months.  Loncon 3 was one of those magical experiences that will never be repeated, but will live for ever in my memory.

Whose story is this anyway?

I arrived at Loncon 3, the World Science Fiction Convention, at midday yesterday.  Immediately I  got pitched into going to talks and panels.  Unfortunately, I only caught the end of David Fickling's talk, but what I heard was brilliant.  One sobering statistic he came up with was that one in 500 manuscripts is good enough to publish.  Gulp!

But the other panels gave me pause for thought.  I went to a discussion of revising the gender in SF stories, and a discussion of the merits of this year's Hugo Awards Best Novel category.

The gender panel seemed hell-bent on finding evidence of non-binary gender in every SF story, and I came away rather annoyed at that.  Because, like, whose story is this, man?  Maybe, just maybe, the author isn't concerned with that issue in that story.  I'm certainly not.  My Panthera books focus on the issue of wildlife crime, and man's inhumanity to animals.  My stories are about challenging the homocentric superiority complex that so many humans have.  As far as I'm concerned, humans are no more special than any other marvellous creature that evolution has produced and honed.

But these people were determined to examine every story for evidence of non-binary gender, something that just doesn't concern me.  It assumes that the whole question of sex and gender is important, and to me it isn't.  My characters are who they are, and they're not bothered about it.  They accept their bodies, and get on with their real work.

I think if a writer listens to too many reviews or critiques of their work they could get very nervous about ever putting pen to paper again.  But hey, whose story is this?  You want to write about something that examines alternative genders, be my guest.  Just don't expect me to re-write my story to examine this issue, because I won't.

Ultimately it's the writer's choice of what story to tell, and we have to have the courage to stick to our vision, know it is as valid as anyone else's world view, and be strong enough to put our work out into the world.

Waiting for acceptance

Anna Banness, in September"s Writing Magazine, talks about writers making their work unforgettable.  My ears pricked up when I read "I believe that what makes a writer's ideas stand out can be summed up in one word : truth."  I found that idea very interesting, given the dozens of SF stories I've sent out that have spoken my truth and have all been rejected.

My truth is an uncompromising, individualist, feminist one.  My protagonists are tough, professionally-qualified, competent women making successes of their lives.  Bottom line : they don't believe in romance, and often not in the value of sex either.  But this rejection of traditional "family values" and "sexiness" has not been welcomed by the so-called speculative fiction magazines that are supposed to examine different futures.

Yes, I speak my truth, and yes, that might well make my work unforgettable.  But only if someone gets to read it.  And in order to reach those readers in any numbers my stories need to pass the gatekeepers who edit the magazines.

I ask myself who they worry about.  If the magazine has subscriptions, then I'd argue that its' subscribers are the main concern.  If most of the people who pay to keep the magazine going are white and male, the editor is going to think twice before accepting a story that challenges their dominant world view, and maybe offends a few readers.

Anna Banness talks about "people who write very beautifully but have very little to say because they're afraid of exposing themselves."  Yes, but we have to weigh this against the oft-given advice: write for the market.

Okay, so we never really know if the market will want our work until we submit it, but there's still a tension here.  If the SF market is perceived as predominantly white men who think that sex is okay then  there's very little chance of a woman writing about a world where women don't rate sex getting her stuff published.  It's too much of a challenge to the status quo.

In the past I have been afraid to expose my real beliefs, my innermost thoughts.  But no more.  And if that means I have to wait a while longer until the world is ready to accept my world view, then so be it.  I'm done with pulling my punches.

The Bechdel test and me

I've been reading a lot of stuff recently about the gender imbalance within the speculative fiction genre, and one of the things I keep coming across is the Bechdel test.  The test is named after Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist who set out the idea in her 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.  It's been taken up by the SFF community as a handy measure of how well we're doing - or not - in gender parity.

A work of fiction passes the Bechdel test if it contains more than one woman, and those women talk to each other about something other than a man.  It sounds like a great idea to me, but how many of my own works pass the test?

Snowbird - yes.  Top starship coder Jian Kabana talks to talented engineer Mai, about starships.

Darius - same characters talk again, this time trying to save an orbital shipyard from sabotage.

The Fall of Freyr - yes.  I have a whole female investigative team talking among themselves about their professional mission to survey the planet's culture.

Jade - yes.  Kaath, my xenobilogist, talks to Sarry about the strange fauna she's discovered.

Eyemind - yes.  Artist Keri Starseer talks to Ennis, Governor of Altius, about her mission and her Mind partner Bi.

Auroradawn - yes.  Arrien talks to other Great Family Captains about her riddle quest.

Starfire - yes.  My Trader captain Ria Bihar talks to a female stationmaster about piracy.

Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, Panthera : Death. Plain - yes .  Ren Hunter talks with the head off the Conservation Authority and with female security chiefs about her work.

So I'm doing pretty well in passing the Bechdel test.  I've always had strong female heroines in key positions in my stories, but now I stop and think about it more.  I actively think about switching some roles to women, to create a more even gender balance.  But here's the thing.  None of these books has yet been taken by a mainstream publisher.  Could the presence of strong female protagonists be one reason why?  I'd hate to think so, but I'm not so sure.

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.

What kind of sensawunda do you want?

I was reading the latest copy of the BSFA's  Focus magazine this week.  The major articles focus on world-building this issue, and something Gaie Sebold said stuck with me.  She talked about being attacked by the "shiny".  What she meant was that the technology ran away with her storytelling, hijacking it and sometimes backing her writing into corners where she didn't want it to go.

I'm not attacked by the "shiny" in that way.  Although I, or my characters, would use a cool new piece of tech, I'm not likely to build a story around that gadget.  I'm far more likely to build a story around misuse of the tech, which is what I've done with the Panthera books.

That doesn't mean I don't have any interest in cutting-edge science.  To write the Panthera books I had to delve into DNA and epigenetics.  And delving into that world, finding out how creatures are created, is magical.  There are around twenty-three thousand genes in every human, and every one of those genes is in every cell in our bodies.  We have fifty trillion or so cells in our bodies, and each one of them is packed with DNA.  How can so much data be packed into such a tiny space?  To me that evokes a sense of wonder.

Look at how a fly dodges you swatting it.  How can it have a brain at such a tiny size?  And yet it does, one that controls flight dynamics, and drives reproduction and feeding behaviour.  Recent research into the brain has shown striking similarities between fly and human brains.  Just how can so much be crammed into the space of a pinhead?

This is the nano world that humans are only just starting to explore themselves.  But nature has been creating nano-structure architectures for centuries.  But how much SF explores the wonder of the natural world?  And yet it could be a rich vein for stories.  Time and again, when scientists set out to find the most efficient way to deal with a problem, it turns out that nature had it licked aeons ago.

We have learned to look at nature's structures for clues to how to tackle problems, but I still don't think we celebrate her enough.  That's what I've tried to do in the Panthera books, and no doubt will do in books yet unwritten in the future.  My sensawunda lies in the natural world.