Hey guys, just a heads up that tomorrow and Wednesday are the last days to get all my books 50% off on Smashwords for the annual summer sale. Everything is under $2.50 USD, and the $.99 stuff is free! That might seem like a pretty steep discount, but I actually earn as much from each sale as I would for a trade paperback sale if my books were traditionally published, and I don’t mind passing on the savings to you.
Also, my friend and fellow writer Ben Keeley did a blog post about our low-key backpacking trip up Rock Canyon, so if that interests you, you can check it out on his blog. That rattlesnake was pretty freaky! Good thing he was about as eager to get away from us as we were to get away from him. We didn’t climb any mountains on this one, but we did find a gorgeous campsite on the side of a steep ravine. I definitely want to go camp there again sometime.
I’m taking it easy as far as the writing goes, but making some progress on The Sword Keeper. A lot of it right now is gathering ideas and reviewing what I’ve written so far (eleven chapters, or about 50k words). The first chapter requires some changes, but the rest I’ll probably let stand as it is and pick up where I left off. Once I’m fully immersed in this story again, I think the rest will come quite readily.
In the meantime, here’s a video of Mariam Elieshvili singing “ჩვენ ახლა ერთურთს,” chven axla erturts. I have no idea what the lyrics mean (something about looking for love in each others’ eyes), but Mariam’s voice is amazing and I think I may have a small celebrity crush on her. All this Georgian music definitely puts me in the mood to work on The Sword Keeper, kind of like how all that Arabic music helped me to write Desert Stars.
… and now I want to go back to Georgia. Again. :'(
Every summer, Smashwords does a sale in which authors can enroll their books. This year, I’ve enrolled all of mine at 50% off, so all of them are under $2.50. Check it out!
Genesis Earth A boy and a girl on a voyage to an alien star.
Price: $4.95 $2.48
Bringing Stella Home
He’ll go to the ends of the galaxy to save his brother and sister.
Price: $4.95 $2.48
Desert Stars A tale of adventure and romance from the fringes of an interstellar empire that has forgotten its holiest legend: the story of Earth.
Price: $4.95 $2.48
Stars of Blood and Glory The only hope for the last free stars now lies on the path of blood and glory.
Price: $4.95 $2.48
Journey to Jordan
Travels of a young Mormon writer to Jordan, Egypt, and the Holy Land.
Price: $2.99 $1.49
Decision LZ1527 A boy, a girl, and a whole crew of matchmakers.
Price: $.99 free!
One of the great things about Smashwords is that these prices are the same throughout the world–no extra surcharge for international sales. So if you live outside the United States and don’t have a US bank account, these are the best prices you’re going to find.
These books will remain 50% off on Smashwords through the month of July. Just use the coupon code SSW50 to get the discount. Smashwords does accept Paypal, so you don’t have to sign up for an account or share your credit card information to purchase.
If you’ve been meaning to check out some of these books but haven’t gotten around to it, this is a great way to try them out. And if you want to sample them first, the first 15% to 25% is available on each book’s Smashword’s page.
Depending on the story, he may be a brotherly mentor figure for the main character or play some other sort of supporting role. However, don’t expect him to be much of a plot driver, unless the story is specifically about him. Because of his refusal to suck up or play office politics, he’s rarely in a position to effect change or become a whistle-blower.
Over time, this character may turn into something of a sour knight, developing a thick skin of crusty cynicism to protect his idealistic heart from all the crap he continually has to put up with. Like the Obi-wan, if he’s a mentor figure, he will probably die. If he’s the hero, though, or part of the ragtag bunch of misfits, expect him to be vindicated, possibly in a crowning moment of awesome. Rarely if ever will this guy be the villain–that’s the obstructive bureaucrat, whom this guy hates.
Lieutenant Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist is a good example of this trope. He’s a good soldier who was passed up on all the promotions because he refused to go along with the war crimes done against the Ishvalan people. His sister, who WAS reassigned to Antarctica (though probably by choice), is a whole other story.
Another good example of this trope is Lucius Fox from Batman Begins. The interesting thing about this one is that he’s a mentor figure who actually survives. This is probably because the story requires a lot of badassery from the hero, and Lucius is in no position to fill that role, so there’s no threat of him outshining Bruce Wayne. This is also a good example of the last DJ getting vindicated in the end.
In my own work, the best example I can think of is Tiera from Desert Stars. She’s fiercely stubborn with an uncompromising sense of honor, which results in her being stripped of her claim of inheritance due to her stepmother Shira’s wiles (although ‘stepmother’ isn’t quite the right word–how do you describe your father’s evil second wife, when he’s still married to your mother?). I’ve got some interesting plans for a sequel where she’s the main character, but that book is still in the early conceptual stages.
In my own life, I’ve actually fulfilled this trope. I don’t care to discuss the details of it publicly, but back when I was interning in Washington DC, I had a very negative experience that this trope describes perfectly. It’s one of the reasons I hate Washington so much, and decided to become a global nomad who makes a difference on the ground, rather than pushing papers in someone else’s petty empire of personal influence. It’s also one of the reasons why I started the Star Wanderers series–because I wanted to tell a story about people on the space-bound frontier, as far away from the galactic empire as possible.
I may not write many stories about vast bureaucracies or other hierarchical organizations, just because that doesn’t interest me, but whenever I do, you’ll probably see this guy pop up. As someone who’s been there, I have a lot of sympathy for this character. You’ll probably see him (or her) pop up in my work from time to time.
One of the best things about a good science fiction story is that it can take you to another world–literally! Well, not in the sense of actually physically taking you there, but if you want to experience the thrills of an alien world from the safety of your favorite chair, the best way to do it is to immerse yourself in a good space adventure story.
Planets are to science fiction what islands and continents are to fantasy. It’s possible to tell a story where no one ever sets foot on one, but then you’ve basically got a sea story (since space is an ocean, at least in most space opera). Even then, your characters are probably going to put into port from time to time, if for nothing else than a change of scenery to make things interesting. And if there’s anything science fiction interesting, it’s the wide variety of possible planet types.
For example, what would a planet be like if it were covered completely by water? If the world-ocean was so deep that there was no visible land? Assuming that the planet orbits within its sun’s habitable zone, where the temperature ranges allow water to exist as a liquid, then you would have a pretty interesting place. What would the hurricanes be like? A lot more intense than the ones here on Earth, that’s for sure.
Then again, suppose that the planet was a bit closer to its sun, and most of that water existed in the atmosphere as a gas. You’d have some pretty intense atmospheric pressures on the surface, but the density of the atmosphere would make it much easier to keep airships and flying castles aloft. In fact, that might be the most practical way to settle that kind of a world.
In our own solar system, there is an incredible amount of variety. On Mars, for example, glaciers of dry ice cover the southern pole, while the sun sets blue in a normally dirty brown sky. The tallest mountain actually summits above the atmosphere, and every few years, dust storms cover the whole world. And believe it or not, Mars is a lot more similar to Earth than anything else in our solar system.
On Titan, rivers of liquid methane flow down mountains of water ice, while black carbon dunes drift across a desert shrouded in orange haze. While the sun rises and sets with predictable regularity, the planet Saturn is suspended at the same point on the horizon and dominates a large portion of the sky. Don’t expect to see any rings, though–Titan orbits along Saturn’s ring plane, so the rings are mostly invisible.
Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, is also dominated by its host planet. Water ice covers the surface, but deep, deep below, there’s a massive liquid ocean that has never seen the light of the sun. What sort of monsters lurk in those depths–an ocean buried beneath a world?
Jupiter itself is pretty intense. A gas giant world with swirling bands of planet-sized clouds, it hosts a monstrous hurricane large enough to swallow at least two Earths. This vortex has been churning across the planet for over 150 years, and possibly as much as 350. I still remember the chills I got when I read 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the scientists’ probe dropped through the haze to a cloud deck as massive as one of our continents here on Earth.
Gas giant planets can be really interesting. They aren’t human habitable, since the gravity and pressure are so intense that anything man-made would be crushed before it could hit the surface, but those same forces can lead to some other interesting things. For example, at the lower levels, you may find storms that rain diamonds. Go further still, and you find an intense magnetic core that’s just on the verge of being able to sustain nuclear fusion. Detonate enough nuclear material down there, like they did in a short story from the Halo universe, and you can turn the planet into a star.
And that’s just our solar system. What about the hundreds of exoplanets that astronomers are now discovering? The first one to be confirmed, believe it or not, was orbiting of all things a pulsar! Imagine that–instead of the life-giving rays of a sun, the planet is bathed in highly lethal X-rays and gamma rays.
Of course, there are plenty of planets orbiting stars like our sun, but most of the ones discovered so far are hot Jupiters–gas giant worlds that orbit so close to their sun that the years are measured in hours. Some of these planets are so close that the sun is actually blasting the atmosphere away. We haven’t discovered the rocky core of a gas giant world that’s been destroyed in this manner, but theoretically it could exist.
Or what about the planets with highly elliptical orbits that traverse the habitable zone of their stars? Imagine: a world where the winters are so cold that the oceans freeze solid. After several of our Earth years, the spring brings a massive thaw. For a few short months the weather is actually quite balmy. Then, as spring turns to summer, the heat grows more and more intense, until the oceans begin to boil! When the summer reaches its zenith, the planet is nothing but a scorched desert wasteland. Soon, though, the autumn cool brings back the rains, with storms so intense that they refill the oceans in just a matter of months! Then, the deep freeze of winter begins, and the world returns to its long icy tomb.
One of my favorites, though, is the ribbon world that Asimov predicted in some of his stories. Worlds like this occur most commonly at class M red dwarf stars, which are so cool compared to our sun that planets within the habitable zone are tidally locked. This means that the sun neither rises nor sets, but remains stationary in the sky. The day side is burning hot, with either a barren desert wasteland or a giant hurricane large enough to cover most of the hemisphere. The night side, on the other hand, is so cold that all the water is completely frozen. The only habitable parts of the planet exist in a ribbon-like swath where the sun is just on the other side of the horizon, casting the land in perpetual twilight.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually discovered a planet like this in the Gliese system. Gliese 581g, or “Zarmina’s World” as the lead astronomer dubbed it, was discovered back in 2010. I was so excited by the discovery that I dedicated a blog post to it. Since then, the findings have not yet been confirmed, so it isn’t safe to call it a planet for sure, but if/when it ever is confirmed, it may be one of the first truly Earth-like planets to be discovered (at least, as Earth-like as a ribbon world can be).
In much of science fiction, there’s a tendency to make planets single biome only. Thus, you have your desert planets (Arrakis, Tatooine, Gunsmoke), your ice planets (Hoth, Gethen), your ocean planets (Calamari, Aqua), your jungle/forest planets (Dagobah, Lusitania, Kashyyyk), and even planets that are nothing but giant cities (Trantor, Coruscant). Some of the more recent series like Halo try to avert this, but even today it’s still fairly common.
If there’s anything that modern astronomy is showing us, though, it’s that the variety of planets and worlds out there is beyond anything we could possibly imagine. This is why I get a bit irked when an otherwise excellent series like Firefly makes out every planet to be like Wyoming. What about Gliese 581g? Kepler 22b? GJ 1214b? Kepler 16b?
As more exoplanets are discovered, I can’t help but believe that science fiction is going to experience a paradigm shift. What was once purely the realm of imagination is now being confirmed as reality. Alien worlds exist–alien Earths, even. And just as our conception of Mars changed from the Sword & Planet tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars to the hard sf epics of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, so will our conception of other alien worlds.
I’ve got a lot of different planets in my own books, some borrowing a lot from the recent exoplanet discoveries, others leaning closer to the single biome worlds of classic space opera. In Desert Stars, Gaia Nova is kind of a cross between Arrakis and Trantor, with giant domed arcologies covering half the planet’s surface while the rest is mostly desert and wasteland. In Bringing Stella Home, Kardunash IV is (or rather, was) an Earth-like world, with forests, mountains, and oceans. In Stars of Blood and Glory, New Rigel is a straight up ocean world, while Ebitha from Star Wanderers is an ocean world tidally locked to its dwarf M class sun. I haven’t yet played with the elliptical planet, but I probably will someday.
One of the things I love most about a good science fiction story is that it takes me out of this world. With all the incredible new discoveries that astronomers are making, that aspect of the genre is only bound to get better. They’ve certainly enriched my own work, and will doubtless continue to do so in the future.
One of the key things that makes space different from Earth is that nothing is ever stationary. Anything close to our planet that isn’t moving at a good clip (measured in miles/kilometers per second) is liable to plummet like a brick. Gravity is still in effect, even though you’re in free fall and thus don’t really feel it.
The way to get around the falling problem is to orbit whatever celestial body you’re plummeting towards. When your tangential velocity gets high enough, gravity becomes your centripetal acceleration, and the system becomes rotational rather than discrete. In other words, you’re still falling, but you’re moving fast enough to cross the edge of the horizon before you hit.
Just to give you a scale of how fast you have to go to make this work, the International Space Station (ISS) is orbiting at about 230 miles (370 kilometers) above sea level, and it makes a complete rotation around the earth every 90 minutes. That means that the good folks who live and work up there see about 16 sunrises and sunsets per day.
If you’ve spent your whole life living planetside, orbital mechanics can be a bit difficult to grasp. Here are just a few of the basics:
Since orbit is basically free fall, you don’t need to fire your engines to stay aloft. In fact, once you’re parked in a stable orbit, you can stay there almost indefinitely. This is how satellites work: we use a rocket to put them in position, but once they’re there all they need is a minor adjustment from time to time. The moon is basically a giant natural satellite, and it doesn’t need any sort of thrust to stay aloft.
As objects fall closer to the body they’re orbiting, they orbit faster. Just think about how figure skaters speed up when they pull their arms in closer to their bodies. The main reason for this is that the object has a much shorter distance to travel to make a complete revolution. To understand how this works, take a CD and measure the inside edge versus the outside edge.
However, since your tangential velocity is proportional to your centripetal acceleration (ie gravity), the way to jump to a higher orbit is to speed up. Conversely, the way to fall to a lower orbit is to slow down. An object’s angular momentum (mass X tangential velocity) is proportional to the distance of the object from the rotational system’s center of mass, so changing the object’s velocity will also change its distance from the center.
So if you’re in a spaceship and you’re about to collide with an object on a parallel orbit, the way to avoid it is not to nose your ship up like an airplane. Instead, fire your engines and try to go faster (or slower, as the case may be). It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but your altitude will change accordingly. The anime/manga series Planetes really got this right.
However, even though you’re moving faster at a higher orbit, you have a lot more distance to travel, so it actually takes longer to make a complete orbit. If you go high enough, you can eventually get to the point where the orbital period equals the rotational period of the celestial body you’re orbiting. We call this a geosynchronous orbit. If you’re orbiting around the celestial body’s equator, then to a person on the surface, it appears as if you’re stationary. You’re not, of course–nothing in space really is–but both you and the person on the planet’s surface are moving in tandem, so that’s how it appears.
Ever wonder why satellite dishes all point in the same direction? This is why. The signal comes from a satellite in geostationary orbit, where it doesn’t move relative to the people on the surface. Thus, if you know where to point your dish, you will always get a signal since the satellite doesn’t appear to move.
An orbit doesn’t have to be circular, but the barycenter (ie the center of mass for the whole system, where the mass of both objects cancels each other out) has to be at one of the focal points of an ellipse. This is how comets work. An object in an elliptical orbit will speed up when it gets closer to the object it’s orbiting, and slow down when it gets further away.
It’s possible–indeed, quite common–to orbit two celestial bodies simultaneously. For example, since the Earth orbits the sun, anything orbiting the Earth must also orbit the sun at the same time. If you’re close enough to the Earth, this doesn’t really matter since the Earth exerts a much more immediate force. But when you get further away, interesting things start to happen.
A Lagrangian point is a point of gravitational balance between two orbiting celestial bodies of unequal mass. Basically, they’re points of equilibrium where objects appear to remain stationary, so long as they continue to orbit in tandem with the other two celestial bodies.
In science fiction, these are great places to put space stations and other orbital settlements, since they appear as fixed points relative to the planet or moon that they’re moving around. In real life, asteroids tend to clump around these points in a planet’s orbit, especially the L5 and L4 points. Jupiter has so many of them that we call them the Trojans and the Greeks.
Since orbital mechanics can be a bit difficult to grasp, a lot of science fiction gets it wrong, especially space opera. For a recent example, just look at the Halo series–unless those Covenant ships have some sort of magical drive, there’s no way they could hover above the surfaces of planets the way they do. Orbiting does NOT equal hovering. And in Halo: Reach, where Jorge knocks out the main ship for the Covenant advance force … yeah, if a ship that large actually fell from orbit into the surface of a planet, it would be moving fast enough to make a crater the size of a small continent, kicking up enough dust and debris to cause a mass extinction event like the one that killed the Dinosaurs.
At the same time, when a science fiction story goes the length to get the orbital mechanics right, it can add a surprising amount of realism. A good example of this is Passage at Arms by Glen Cook. I loved how he depicted the orbital siege of the main colony world, with the way the orbital space battles looked like from the planet’s surface. The human forces were able to keep a toehold on space due to a low orbiting asteroid that the aliens couldn’t get to without exposing their forces to attack, and that served as the staging ground for the main characters to fight back.
For hard sci-fi, orbital mechanics is absolutely essential–you’ll be tarred and feathered if you get any of it wrong. For soft sci-fi like space opera, it’s not essential, but it adds a lot to the story if you can get it right. In any magic system, the limitations are what make it interesting. If you’re writing science fiction, then physics is your magic system, so knowing how it works can really add a lot to your story.
For example, in the recent Schlock Mercenary storyline, the characters board a spaceship with an artificial gravity generator centered around a large cylindrical pylon that runs the length of the ship. One of the implications of having Earth-strength gravity around such a small object is that you can actually throw a baseball into orbit. And that’s just the beginning! Needless to say, I’m really interested to see where Howard Tayler takes this story in the weeks and months to come.
Even though I write more space opera / science fantasy type stuff, I do the best I can to get my orbital dynamics right. You can see this in the space battles in Stars of Blood and Glory and Bringing Stella Home, as well as the setting elements in Desert Stars. When the desert tribesmen look up at the night sky, they gaze at the stars and satellites–hundreds of satellites, many of them starships bound for distant spaceports on the more civilized side of the world. One of the reviewers said that the world felt so real it was almost like he could reach out and touch it, so I guess I did something right. I’ll definitely keep it up in the future.
As we discussed in I is for Interstellar, space colonization is a major theme of science fiction, especially space opera. Of course, things don’t always go smoothly. Space is a really, really, really big place, and sometimes, due to war or famine or simple bureaucratic mismanagement, colonies get cut off from the rest of galactic civilization. They become lost colonies.
Some of my favorite stories are about lost colonies: either how they became cut off, or how they reintegrate after so many thousands of years. In many of these stories, the technology of these colonies has regressed, sometimes to the point where the descendents may not even know that their ancestors came from the stars. When contact is finally made, the envoys from the galactic federation may seem like gods or wizards.
Because of this technological disconnect, stories about lost colonies often straddle the line between science fiction and fantasy. After all, Clarke’s third law states:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Of course, the line between science fiction and fantasy has always been a fuzzy one. Hundreds of attempts have been made to define it, but they all fall short. In the end, it often breaks down to certain recurring tropes, like dragons and wizards versus ray guns and rockets, but even that doesn’t always work.
For example, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern is technically about a lost colony far into the future, but it’s got dragons and castles and other tropes that belong squarely in fantasy. Then again, the dragonriders have to fight alien worms who invade every few dozen years from a planet with a highly elliptical orbit, so there’s still a strong science fiction basis undergirding the whole thing.
And that’s just Dragonriders of Pern. What about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, or C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy?Trigun is more western than fantasy, but it’s also full of sci-fi tropes like giant sand-crawling monster ships and a weird post-apocalyptic backstory. And then there’s all the Japanese RPGs that combine magic with mechas, with Xenogears as one of the best examples. For a distinct Middle Eastern flavor, look no further than Stargate.
It’s no coincidence that all of these stories feature a lost colony of one kind or another. When the characters don’t know that they’re living in a science fictional universe, it’s very easy to throw in tropes from other genres. By no means is it required–Battlestar Galactica and Dune are evidence enough of that–but they certainly present the opportunity to do so. After all, lost colony stories basically present a hiccup in humanity’s march of progress, breaking the essential science fiction narrative for all sorts of interesting side stories and tangents.
One perennial favorite of science fiction writers is to suggest that Earth itself is a lost colony from some other galactic civilization. That forms the entire premise behind Battlestar Galactica: the original twelve colonies have been destroyed in the human-cylon wars, and the last few survivors are searching for the legendary thirteenth colony of Earth, hoping to find some sort of refuge. Apparently, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish cycle also plays with this trope, though she’s never very explicit with her world building. It can be a bit tricky to twist the lost colony trope in this manner, but if pulled off right it can really make you sit back and go “whoa.”
My personal favorite is probably Orson Scott Card’s The Worthing Saga, about a colony of telepaths that breaks off from a collapsing galactic empire and actually becomes more advanced than the rest of humanity. When Jason Worthing and Justice re-establish contact, the descendents of the galactics are basically pre-industrial subsistence farmers who view them as gods–which, in a certain sense, they almost are.
It’s a great story that really entranced me, not just for the science fictional elements but also for the distinct fantasy flavor. Orson Scott Card’s handling of viewpoint in that book is truly masterful, so that I felt as if I were viewing everything through the eyes of his characters. Since the farmers don’t know anything about their spacefaring ancestors, all the parts from their point of view feel like a completely different story. It was really great.
My first novel was actually a lost colony story, combined with a first contact. I trunked it a long time ago, but many of the earliest posts on this blog are all about my experience writing it. As for my other books, Desert Stars contains elements of this, though the lost colony in question is actually a nomadic desert society that lives on the capital planet of the galactic empire, just outside of the domes where all the more civilized folk live. Heart of the Nebula is basically about a society that puts itself in exile in order to escape the privations of the Hameji. Andin… no, I’d better not spoil it. 😉
The lost colony isn’t one of the flashier or more prominent tropes of science fiction, but it’s definitely one of my favorites. It’s a great way to add depth and intrigue, as well as bend genres. For that reason, I think this trope does a lot to keep science fiction fresh.
As much as science fiction looks to the future, it also of necessity looks to the past. And as much confidence as it places in the scientific method, it often turns to religion, simply because of the scope of the great cosmic questions that such stories inevitably pose.
For these reasons, it should come as no surprise that the best science fiction stories often include knights and shamans, priests and warrior monks. Far from degrading our view of the future, they greatly enrich and humanize it, bringing a sense of meaning and destiny to an otherwise cold and lonely universe.
The best example of this is probably the Jedi from the original Star Wars trilogy. I still get shivers when I hear Yoda explain the force:
Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
There are plenty of other examples too, of course–harsh ones like the creeds the Cylons follow in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, which they use to justify their genocidal war against the humans. And then there are the quaint and simplistic ones that happen when a primitive race makes first contact with humanity … as well as the ones from a race so advanced that they make us look like barely evolved monkeys.
So why is religion so prominent in science fiction? Probably because the best science fiction stories act as a mirror that allows us to see ourselves better. Throughout history, religion has been one of the most important parts of any human civilization. Even the modern secular cultures still grasp at the same cosmic questions, striving to find meaning beyond the animal drives of food, sleep, and sex.
At its core, every religion is about telling a cosmic story. There’s a reason why the Bible starts with the words “in the beginning,” and why the first sura of the Qur’an names Allah “The Merciful and The Compassionate.” Since the best science fiction also tells a cosmic story, is it any surprise that there should be overlap between the two?
The best science fictional religions are the ones that make you want to believe. The Force in Star Wars was definitely like that to me (the original trilogy, of course–before all that midi-chlorian nonsense). Orson Scott Card’s philotic web also turned me into a believer, at least for the duration of those books. Even Eywa from the movie Avatar had some deep undertones that made me wish I was a part of that world.
Religion plays a huge role in my own books, not just the stuff that I believe in real life (though I’m sure that influences my writing), but the stuff that I think the characters would believe.
In Star Wanderers, for example, most of the outworlders are pagans who pray to the stars. In that universe, astrogation is an act of worship. The Deltans subscribe to a fusion of pagan and Christian beliefs, which in turn affects how much they value families and children. I won’t spoil it, since it comes as something of a reveal in Homeworld, but it definitely drives the series. And of course there’s Jeremiah’s New Earther background, with its guilt complex that leaves him emotionally scarred.
My favorite religion to write so far was the faith of the desert tribesmen in Desert Stars. I wrote that book just after spending a summer in the Middle East, and my experience of the Muslim culture definitely was a huge influence. The tribesmen pray to the Temple of a Thousand Stars, the temple erected to the memory of Earth soon after the first colonists made planetfall. The first half of the book follows Jalil’s pilgrimage to the ancient temple, through the domes filled with strange and decadent people.
When I started the Gaia Nova series, I wanted to create a science fictional universe where any of our real-world religions could still plausibly be true. The way I got around all the conflicting prophecies of the end times was to have a human colony mission leave Earth soon after our time. When the colonists woke up, they’d lost the location of Earth, so naturally all the religions developed around the idea that Earth had received its prophesied glorification and become a heavenly paradise.
That’s the short explanation, anyways. But the books themselves aren’t so much about that as they are about the characters. If religion is important to them, then that becomes an important part of their story. And since religion is so important to us here on Earth, I can’t help but believe that it will follow us to the stars.
Almost every far future science fiction story has a galactic empire of some kind. From Dune to Foundation, from Star Wars to Firefly, there’s always someone trying to rule the galaxy, often in a way that makes life difficult for the protagonists.
Why? Rule of drama, of course, but also because it gives the story a truly epic scope. Just as the classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are as much about entire civilizations as they are about the people characters within them, so it is with science fiction, especially space opera. Combine that with science fiction’s forward-thinking nature, and you have the potential for some truly amazing stories about humanity’s destiny among the stars.
But why empire? Because even if we make it out to the stars, we’ll probably still take with us all of the baggage that makes us human. Science fiction may be forward looking, but history repeats itself, and you can’t have a clear view of the future without understanding and acknowledging the past.
Not all galactic empires are evil, but most of them are. We shouldn’t have to look further than the real-world history of Imperialism to see why. Oppression, exploitation, slavery, genocide–all of these have been done in the name of Empire, and many more evils besides. Even benevolent hegemonic powers (such as, I would argue, the United States of America) often end up doing great harm, either through action or inaction.
Of course, all of this makes for some really great stories. When Asimov wrote his Foundation series, he quite literally based it on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he drew extensively from his background as an orientalist and based the overworld story on the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Star Wars is based loosely on the collapse of the Roman Republic, and Firefly echoes many of the old Western tales of former Confederate soldiers heading west after the US Civil War.
It’s worth pointing out that the Galactic Empire is by no means the only form of political organization in space opera. There are actually several, including:
The Federation — A loose organization of stars and planets that usually exists to foster cooperation and mutual peace between galactic civilizations. Rarely evil, but can be crippled by red tape.
The Republic — A more centralized version of the Federation, typically. Exercises more control over its citizens, but not in an oppressive way. Usually features some form of representative government.
The Alliance — A team of political underdogs united to overthrow the Empire and establish a more just form of government in its place. If they win, they usually become the Republic or the Federation.
The Kingdom — A smaller government within the larger political system, often struggling for survival against more powerful forces. Not always democratic, but is often good, at least to its own citizens.
The Hegemonic Empire — Like the Empire, but rules primarily through soft power, ie co-opting their enemies rather than crushing them. May overlap with the Republic or the Federation.
The Vestigial Empire — What the Empire becomes when it’s been defeated but not yet destroyed. Still oppressive and evil, but rules a smaller territory and struggles for relevance and survival.
The Remnant — An element from the Alliance that’s gone rogue. The war may be over, but these guys are still fighting it, even if they’ve lost sight of what they’re fighting for.
The Horde — A highly aggressive and expansionist warlord state. By far the most violent and brutal of any political organization, it seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire galaxy.
As a political science major, all these forms of government really fascinate me. I’ve played with quite a few of them, especially the Horde (Bringing Stella Home), the Empire (DesertStars), the Hegemonic Empire (Star Wanderers), the Kingdom (Stars of Blood and Glory), and the Remnant (also Stars of Blood and Glory). You can definitely expect to see me play with them again in the future.
I think every science fiction writer has a cryo (aka “human popsicle“) story sitting around somewhere, even if it’s just in the back of their head. It’s one of those tropes that keeps coming back, just like the alien invasion, the robot apocalypse, and the Adam and Eve plot.
The basic concept is pretty simple, even if the technology is a bit more complex: a human or animal undergoes rapid freezing in order to put themselves into stasis for an extended period of time. Months, years, or even centuries later, someone thaws and resuscitates them so that they wake up in a completely different time and place.
There are a lot of good reasons why going into cryo makes sense in a science fiction universe. One of the more common ones is that the characters are colonists on a mission to an alien star, and their spaceship doesn’t have a faster-than-light drive. Rather than go through all the trouble of building a generation ship, the designers instead built a series of cryo chambers to put the colonists into stasis for an extended period of time. It might take centuries or millennia for the ship to reach its destination, but when it does, the colonists wake up as if it’s just been a long, dreamless night.
In The Worthing Saga, Orson Scott Card has a somewhat unusual rationale behind the prevalence of cryo in his universe (though they call it “hot sleep,” and it’s induced by a drug called soma). Only the rich can afford the technology, and the imperial overlords very carefully regulate the use of it so that there’s a clear hierarchy based on who goes under for the longest amount at a time. It’s a way for the citizens to achieve a simulated form of immortality, by skipping five or ten years every year or two of their lives.
In the Halo video game series, the UNSC uses cryo as a way to preserve their greatest military assets, the Spartans, for the times when they’re needed. The first game in the series starts when John-117, aka the Master Chief, is awakened just as the starship Pillar of Autumn crash lands on a mysterious alien structure. Like something from an old Norse legend, the third game ends when the Master Chief seals himself into the cryo chamber of a derelict starship, telling the AI Cortana “wake me when you need me.” (highlight to view spoilers).
So why are cryo stories so prevalent in science fiction? For one thing, they’ve been floating around in our cultural subconscious a lot longer than the genre has been in existence–just think of Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle. For another thing, the science is not that far-fetched. Certain animals can be revived after extended periods of frozen stasis, and according to the New York Times, it’s happened at least once with a human being. Science fiction has a long history of turning fiction into fact (for example, Arthur C. Clarke and communication satellites), so perhaps it’s only a matter of time before human cryotech becomes a reality.
I’m definitely a fan of this trope in my own writing. Genesis Earth has a chapter with a rather horrific cryothaw scene, which I later spun off into a short piece titled “From the Ice Incarnate.” I haven’t played with it much in my latest books, but in Heart of the Nebula which I hope to publish later this year, the cryotech plays a very important role in the plot. And if I ever write a prequel to my Gaia Nova series showing how that universe got started, it will feature a cryo colonization story. The main premise of that series is that a group of human colonists fled 21st century Earth and went into cryo to colonize a distant corner of the galaxy, but when they woke up, they couldn’t find Earth anymore, so it became something of an ancient holy legend (which is a major driver for Desert Stars).
If you fell in love with science fiction when you were twelve, chances were it was because of the awesome space battles. That was certainly the case with me. When I saw Star Wars for the first time, I spent hours running around the house pretending I was flying my own starfighter. In some ways, I’ve never really stopped. 😛
Ever since space opera became its own subgenre, space warfare has featured prominently in it, probably for the same reasons that Homer and Tolstoy framed their sprawling epics with a tale of war. Where else are you going to find enough drama to fill volumes? The fact that it’s set in space makes it so much cooler.
There are a lot of things about the space setting that make war stories different from those set here on Earth. For one thing, there’s a huge element of exploration and unknown. Even before we took the first photographs of Earth from space, there pretty much isn’t any corner on this planet that hasn’t been discovered by somebody. In space, though, it’s still possible to stumble on a hidden planet, or find a mysterious alien artifact that can turn the tide of the war (Halo, anyone?).
For another thing, the dynamics of battle are completely different. Sure, some stories treat space like an ocean, and there’s certainly a place for that kind of story, but the more interesting ones (at least to me) take into account all the profound differences. For one thing, the zero gravity means that there is no “up” or “down,” which means that you have to deal with the possibility of attack coming from any direction, not just along a horizontal plane. That concept alone drives the battles in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, where “the enemy’s gate is down.”
One thing that really tickles me is when the story takes things a step further and incorporates things like orbital mechanics and delta-v. I haven’t seen many books or games that do this, but the ones that do have really engrossed me by making the world feel that much more real. Glen Cook did it in Passage At Arms, and the new Battlestar Galactica did it in the viper dogfights (though I’m not sure if they did it on the ship-to-ship scale).
The implications of real-world space physics on warfare are quite fascinating. Rocketpunk Manifesto is an excellent blog that’s almost entirely dedicated to exploring them all, with all sorts of fascinating discussions on what the “plausible mid-future” may look like. But even if all you’re looking for is an entertaining romp through space, the story telling possibilities are so much greater when you take the constraints of physics into account.
For example, if it takes months or even years to travel between planets, and orbital trajectories are fairly straightforward to figure out, how does it affect things if you can see the enemy fleet coming at your planet that long in advance? If escape velocity from a gravity well like Earth is so difficult to achieve, what does that mean about the possibility of long-term planetary sieges? And if starships are so far apart and moving so fast as to make full-on broadsides unlikely, how does that shape the battle tactics and strategy? In spite of the physical constraints (or indeed, perhaps because of them), the possibilities are endless.
Man, I love me some good space battles. One of my recent sci-fi favorites that features some epic battles is Wolfhound by my friend Kindal Debenham. In my own work, you’ll find lots of them, especially in the Gaia Nova series (Bringing Stella Home, Stars of Blood and Glory, and to a lesser extent Desert Stars). They say that the golden age for science fiction is about twelve years old, and that’s definitely true for me. Expect to see lots more space battles from me in the future.
Hey guys, just a heads up that tomorrow and Wednesday are the last days to get all my books 50% off on Smashwords for the annual summer sale. Everything is under $2.50 USD, and the $.99 stuff is free! That might seem like a pretty steep discount, but I actually earn as much from each sale as I would for a trade paperback sale if my books were traditionally published, and I don’t mind passing on the savings to you.
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If you fell in love with science fiction when you were twelve, chances were it was because of the awesome space battles. That was certainly the case with me. When I saw Star Wars for the first time, I spent hours running around the house pretending I was flying my own starfighter. In some ways, I’ve never really stopped. 😛