Research - mixing it up

The job of a science fiction writer is to mix things up to show us a brave - or not so brave - new world. But if we're writing serious SF, that world must include and adhere to all of the scientific principles we've already discovered.

So how do we create something new from the old?   I find that one of the best ways of 'filling the well', as creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls it, is surfing the Internet.  Yes, dear old maligned Twitter comes in handy for many things.

This week I was reading an article about scientists sequencing the genome of tardigrades, otherwise known as water bears - and getting a big surprise.  These microscopic animals are virtually indestructible. They can survive freezing, drying out, radiation bombardment, and the vacuum of deep space.  And scientists have now found that 17.5% of their genome comes from plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses.  Apparently tardigrade DNA breaks into pieces when they dry out, and when they re-hydrate and return to life they drag in DNA from the organisms around them.

Hmm.  It doesn't take much leap of the SF writer's imagination to see someone using bioengineered tardigrades  as weapons.  Or as remedial organisms sent in to restore dead worlds. But if these things are virtually indestructible, and they reproduce, what happens when they mutate into a deadly form?

Or how about taking the idea of the 'wood-wide web' a little further.  The mycelium that links trees in forests extends for miles under the trees.  What if someone on an occupied world found some way to use the wood-wide web as a biological Internet?  Covert operations to overthrow the occupying force would be much easier that way.

I haven't thought of stories linked to these two ideas yet, but they're rattling around in my brain, fermenting.  And some day the perfect story vehicle will present itself.  And chances are that, when it does, it will arrive as a fully-formed story.  That's the way my subconscious works.

I never know how, or when, my constant research will pay off, but when it does it's often in surprising ways I would never have expected.

Environment plus culture equals a story world

This week I was reading a Sarah Galo article in The Guardian about Margaret Attwood.  She was reporting on Attwood's recent talk at the Book Riot Convention in New York.

Attwood said in that talk that her birth year had influenced her world view.  That sounds like an innocuous comment, until you learn that she was born in 1939.  So the first few years of her life took place against the backdrop of the Second World War.  It's no wonder that her birth year has influenced her world view.

As a science fiction writer, most of my work is a comment on various aspects of my current society and culture,  usually I'm pointing out the dangers of human overbreeding, or some aspect of how humans are affecting other creatures on the planet.  I'm very clear about my beliefs and values.  They've come into sharp relief in the last five years or so as I've examined the events of my life and begun to figure out how they all fit together.

But, of course, I'vs focused on my personal history to come to my view of the world.  And Attwood's comments reminded me that personal history isn't the full story.  As individuals, we are placed in the middle of a societal group, a culture, and we live in a specific geopolitical region.  And all those things influence how we see the world and what we focus on in it.

I was born after the Second World War, In England.  I've lived there all my life, and I've been fortunate not to have been forced to lived through a war that affected me.  England has been a peaceful country for all my life.  And my immediate family have no connection to the military and haven't been affected by the wars we've been caught up in in other lands.

And this peace has worked its way through into my literature world.  I'm often reluctant to read - and certainly don't want to write - military SF.  The world of the services isn't one I understand, not do I want to.  My background explains why my protagonists are never military, and why my heroines are usually civilians working away from areas where war is raging.

I'm one of the lucky ones who has never suffered in a war.  And that peace has engendered hope in me that humans will find a bigger peace as a species.  So, for me, no dystopian wandering in a ruined world.  My characters are out rebuilding that world, adding essential hope to the story.

Aimless dystopia - where's the story?

Twice in the last few months I've read dystopian stories that left me wondering why I'd bothered, and why  those writers had spent so long with that particular narrative and set of characters.

I understand the desire to write cautionary tales.  We use the medium of story to question and challenge aspects of our current cultural and political orientation.  Or we want to question the way our political institutions are leaning, or what we perceive as dangerous tendencies in big business to ignore the needs of the planet.  But the key thing is that we challenge those things in a story.

Both the dystopias I read failed the basic tests for what makes a story.  Both had ensemble casts, with the viewpoint switching so often it was hard to tell whose story it was meant to be. One took the form of distant third person narratives that were almost omniscient narrators. Which gave me a big problem.   I wanted to find a character to root for, to care about whether they succeeded or not, but this detachment made that impossible.

Both books also didn't have a real character arc for any of the viewpoint characters.  Things were hopeless and they were wandering around at the start of the books, things were hopeless and they were still wandering around at the end of it.  Both stories were about a bunch of characters' pointless wanderings.  

This might have got across the message of the book, but it didn't tell a satisfying story.  And if I buy a novel I expect to be told a story.  Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  And hopefully something changes within them.  In both these dystopias the only thing that had changed by the end of the book was that some minor characters had got killed.

If I'm to be engaged with a dystopia I need to see characters with hope and vision, characters striving to better the lot of the little band of survivors.  Even characters who ram home the environmental message, determined that this disaster will never happen again.

I want to see that some characters retain their hopes and dreams.  And that they believe it's worth striving for a better life, bettering their situation.  For when human hopes and dreams are totally wiped out as in these stories, then we will be too.

Exciting, violent, full of swearing - dystopian storytelling

One of the judges of a prestigious literary award was recently quoted as saying that one of the reasons the awards committee had chosen the winner was because it was "exciting, violent, and full of swearing."

It's at times like this that I despair of our society.  That is dystopian storytelling at its worst, bringing out the worst that humans can be.  We may not always think about it, but what we write about, and the way that we write it, involves making moral choices.  We choose whether to tell a light or dark story, we choose the amount of violence we put into it.  We can choose to write about murder, blood and gore, about wholesale slaughter with spectacular special effects.  Or we can choose to write on a less bloodstained slate, and focus on the devastation those deaths produce in the lives of those around them.  

I suspect that how we choose to write depends on how we see our writing.  If we see it as purely entertainment, we might feel the need to compete with Hollywood's blood and gore, to have the same level of sensationalism in the text.  But if instead we want to focus on the fallout from those deaths, we need to be more subtle.  To focus on the grief and loss, to examine what changes as a result of the death.  And that takes us to somewhere other than the world of shallow entertainment.

We might still have a whole planet full of people dying, but their deaths aren't gratuitous.  They're there to illustrate the evil in the story.   Having less violence and swearing in the narrative can be far more effective in getting a message across.  But that presumes that the text has a message.  Sometimes I worry that all there is in these bloodthirsty books is blood.

I need to believe that humans can be a civilised species, that we can make moral choices in extreme  situations.  Anne McCaffrey's Sassinak is a military officer.  She's forced to sit back and watch a whole colony of people die in order to follow the slavers instead.  She has to allow the smaller evil in order to stop the much larger one.  It's a choice that haunts the character ever after, but it was necessary.

Literature like this teaches us something in its stories.  It shows us that being military doesn't automatically mean being violent.  And it shows us that violence has a price.  We should remember that next time we praise a book for its violence and swearing.

Liberty and quiet power

Last week I was reading an SF book about a kick-ass female pilot out to save the universe.  At the same time I was reading blog posts about the quiet power of introverts in effective management, and at first the two ideas seemed to conflict.  Don't we need the kick-ass extrovert types to save the world?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes the tenacity of quiet power can achieve more.

To achieve the overthrow of a regime one needs intelligence, and to build a base of support for your alternative ideology.  If the regime is of the brutal type that tends to squash alternative modes of thought, this needs to be done very quietly and carefully.  And if you're planning on going behind enemy lines it helps if you don't draw attention to yourself.  The quiet power of the self-reliant introvert comes in very handy there,

I started thinking about instances of quiet power in the SF stories I love.  In Anne McCaffrey's All the Weyrs of Pern, the quiet  power is AIVAS, a rediscovered AI that teaches the descendants of the original colonists all the science they've forgotten since their ancestors landed on the planet 2,500 years ago.  With a combination of that knowledge, the use of the colonists' bioengineered dragons, and some handy left-over antimatter drives, they change their orbit of a planet.

I think also of the quiet power of CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  She's a tradeship captain who gets caught up in an interstellar, multi-species diplomatic incident.  It's her trading smarts and ability to quietly hide that help her to save her ship and defy a vicious race of aliens that threatens the destruction of her home world.

Even among military SF stories there are examples of quiet power.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series Grace Vatta is an older woman who wields great power.  She's the Rector of Defence for her planet, and gets to order its Spaceforce around.

A mind-wiped teenager in Teri Terry's Slated series of books keeps her reawakening memories of her past secret while she quietly uncovers the truth of a totalitarian government and its evil schemes.  She watches, waits, gathers information, and when the time is right she destroys the evil system.

While kick-ass heroes create sound and fury and blow things up, the chances are that it's quiet power that figured out who the real enemy and real threats were.

Rebels and low tech survivors in the SF universe

A lot of science fiction is heavily reliant on shiny tech.  Tech-based stories routinely involve cyborg enhancement of organic beings, consciousness downloads or transfers, or reliance on avatars or environmental tech to survive on otherwise hostile worlds.  These stories often don't consider the human factor on that tech.  Somehow the all-seeing emperor always knows what's happening in every area of her vast far-flung star empire, something I j just can't buy as an idea.

I've never been one for worshipping at the altar of SF tech. I don't feel the need to own every leading-edge device, and I have concerns about the immersiveness of gaming and virtual worlds. I question and challenge how good those things are for me, how good they are for the long-term development of a cohesive civilisation.  In my SF I'm always with the rebels who don't live in tightly-controlled cities.  

My heroes and heroines are likely to be living outside the control of the city's all-seeing AI.  They probably don't rely on tech to survive.  They use their skills and self-belief to get them through the harsh winters.  These are the people who will survive when our shiny tech breaks down.  And unless human nature changes in the future, it will break down.  The profit Imperative will still tempt companies to take short-cuts in rushing tech to market, and to skimp on vital maintainance procedures. 

Because I have an interest in wildlife conservation, much of my SF is set on unspoiled wild worlds.  It involves characters who love being in the wilderness.  This is partly my desire to write about the natural world and wildlife issues, to envisage a future where the natural world and its creatures can survive.   But some of that writing  explores what happens when humans arrive on new worlds and begin exploiting wildlife for human gain.  I'm writing cautionary tales, and, I hope, providing a sliver of hope for the future too.  Because the defenders of wildlife win in my books.

The future will contain rebels, people who can afford intrusive tech, but who refuse it.  People who wish to stay un-augmented, relying on their own wits.  I envisage many of them would leave Earth for less crowded planets, founding colonies in touch with the natural world of their homes.

When the shiny tech starts to fail it is these people who will survive, people who know how to light a fire and hunt for their dinner in the wilderness.  When the banking system has collapsed and no-one has access to their credits any more, we'll need their skills as hunter-gatherers to survive.

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.