The precious gift of words

As I'm writing this blog post on Christmas Day, my mind has turned to the subject of gifts.  And it's got me thinking about some of the stories and ideas which other writers have gifted me with.

There are some books which I read and re-read, and re-read.  Books that I get addicted to, like a drug  I can't crack and have to keep going back to for another fix.  When l stumble across a book like that, finishing it is a shock, a massive disappointment.  I don't want to leave that world - but more often, I don't want to leave the ideas that the story encompasses.

The books that really make an impression on me leave more than their surface stories on my mind.  They insinuate their ideas and themes into my awareness, and subtly change my world view.  I find myself going back and re-reading favourite sections of text, absorbing the ideas again.

One such book is Anne McCaffrey's Decision at Doona.  The scene that sticks in my mind is of a small Human boy and a small Hrruban cub, their bodies curled up around each other, fast asleep in the Human's bed.  It's the start of a friendship between the two that allows them to persuade the xenophobic elements of their peoples to let them live together on Doona. The boys grow up to be life-long friends, owning a ranch together.  The piece that sticks in my mind is the two fathers' simple decision not to wake the boy and cub up, to allow the friendship to blossom.

Another such book is Stephanie Saulter's Gemsigns.  Genetically engineered humans, and the terrifyingly hostile way some humans respond to them, will always stick in my mind.  A cautionary tale (as if we needed another one) about the misuse of religion for bigotry, discrimination, and hate.

My latest candidate for the title of gift is Karen Traviss's Halo - Kilo Five book Mortal Dictata. This story takes place after the war has ended, and the book is a superb exploration of human morality - or lack of it, in some cases.  Tough marines wrestle with the knowledge of ethically wrong medical augmentation programmes that snatched small kids for their subjects.  And when the father of one of those girls acquires a battle cruiser to force those on Earth to tell him what happened to his daughter, duty and morality collide.

It's the ideas, the concepts explored in these stories that stick in the mind.  They're a precious gift which prises my mind wide open and forces me to examine my own morality and values.

The golden age of SF - a woman's view

This week I read another article praising the so-called Golden Age of SF.  What's meant by this is a time when white males were writing hard SF, often including no women characters.  An age when the stories were tech-fests, with no regard for the impact of the tech on the civilisations using it.  And they often had no female characters - except the odd screaming female to be carried away by an alien.

My definition of the'Golden Age' of SF is very different.  My Golden Age is the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Newly married to a scientists who read SF, I was encouraged by him to start reading and writing in the genre.  At the time I was living in Hampshire, on the south coast of England, and commuting to work in London every day.  That meant a train journey of one and a half hours each way every day.  A perfect time to fill with a good book.

And boy, did I fill it.  I worked ten minutes' walk away from Lambeth Library, and I took six SF books a week out to read.  The library had a brilliant SF collection, and it was on its shelves that I discovered some of the books and female authors I still love today.  Books like Katherine Kerr's Polar Ciry Blues, set on a world orbiting a red giant where the population comes out at night. Books like CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  I still love the Hani tradeship captain Pyanfar Chanur.  Tough, wily, powerful, independent, experienced, skilled in interstellar politics, she's an inspiring role model for all women.

Books like Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen, with its themes of exploitation of a low-tech civilisation by a high-tech one, the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, and cloning.  Books like Mary Gentle's Golden  Witchbreed, with a human female ambassador struggling to survive on Orthe and make sense of a culture where friends might have you assassinated for the good of their people.

And, of course, Anne McCaffrey.  Decision on Doona and Treaty Planet are still two of my favourite books, despite them having few female characters with agency.  What I love about them is the picture Anne paints of humans and the cat-like Hrrubans making first contact and learning to get along together.  The chief catalyst for this is a human boy and Hrruban cub who grow up together. Their inseparable  bond reaches beyond all the false legal barriers the adults of both species try to put up in the way of their friendship.

These books are my Golden Age of SF, one based on people, not tech,

Keeping up with the real world

I've started an rewrite of my novel Snowbird recently.  The original text is over twenty years old, although it's been tinkered with several times since.  And as I was writing it struck me how much real world tech and scientific knowledge has changed in that time.

A large section of the novel takes place on a planet I call Angiris.  I modelled it on Mars, with some tweaks.  Twenty years ago I had no access to the Internet, and very little knowledge about the planet.  The only facts I could get at were in dusty old books about the solar system.  How different things are now!

Contrast that with 2015.  NASA has sent the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers to the planet, and there are three spacecraft orbiting the planet.  We've been mapping and measuring Mars from orbit for a solid decade now.  The spacecraft can see features on the surface as small as a desk, and have recently reported that liquid water may still be intermittently flowing on Mars's surface.  Twenty years ago I wrote about an imagined sunset on Angiris.  Today if I want to see what sunset on Mars looks like I can go to the Internet and download images taken from the surface of the planet.

There have also been massive changes in our knowledge of DNA and genetics, and forensics techniques.  The Hunan Genome Project has sequenced the human genome, and we've sequenced a fair few animal genomes too.  And gene editing is a science fiction idea come true.  Twenty years ago I couldn't even imagine how one could cut out parts of DNA and splice new sections in.

When I first wrote Snowbird I had a skull and bones show up in a power transfer conduit, and I fudged how the man was identified.  Now I've assumed DNA can be taken from the bones and used to sequence his genome. And I've assumed we'll all have our genomes on record, as an ID.  I have a cyborg character who got that way as a result of massive war trauma.  But now we have stem cell regrowth techniques, and I had to justify why his limbs weren't regrown that way.  It made the things he'd suffered even more immoral and horrific.

The other big chunk of the book is about the creation of a sentient AI.  We're still a long way off this, and it's still firmly SF.  It's nice to know that something I'm writing is still imagination, and that the world hasn't completely caught up with me yet.

Visualising my brave new worlds

I've just finished reading an SF book by a best selling author whose work I love.  And it confused the hell out of me.  This writer specialises in creating tangled political situations which are often interstellar and multi-species. And often I fail to grasp all the nuances of the situations she creates.

I've always thought that failure to understand everything that was going on was mine, but now I'm not so sure I am at fault.  Because in the book I've just finished she fails to physically describe her settings clearly enough too.

Part of the story is about spacers training in pod-simulators.  From her early descriptions of them I didn't get any clear idea of whether the pods were in zero-g, in vacuum, or whether they were free-floating or somehow tethered.  Later she talks of pods drifting up to the access, which seems to suggest they're floating in zero-g.  Later still she reveals that they're bolted to some kind of track.  And by this time I was really confused.

I'm a little naive in this respect.  I do want a new world sufficiently described to me.  After all, I can only see what the author tells me.  And if they don't describe something enough I get confused. And they run the risk that I get fed up with their book and abandon it.

I've recently realised that one of my faults is that I don't properly describe places.  I'd have such a clear picture of them in my head that I'd just write a passing reference to the scene and move on to the action.  But, of course, the reader has no idea what's in my head.  I need to put it on the page.

This week I've started rewriting my twenty year old novel Snowbird.  Half of the novel is set on an orbital shipyard.  I knew it had three rings, Central, Middle, and Deep Space, and that they were all fixed to a central cylinder.  I'd also made some lists of who and what occupied each ring.  But when I came to rewrite I found that wasn't enough.  Each ring has five levels, and I needed to know what was on each level.  So I made a plan for each level. And now I can describe the place properly.

For planet-bound stories I draw maps of the land.  And I colour in the different habitats with watercolour pencils.  That makes it easier to know if my characters are going north or south, along the base of the mountains, or are close to a river.  And my description has improved a great deal with these in front of me.  Now I'm off to draw diagrams of the starship Chilai herself.

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.