Category: Genesis Earth Trilogy

Y is for Yesteryear

Star_wars_oldThey say that the golden age of science fiction is about twelve years old.  That’s definitely true for me.

My first exposure to the genre was Star Wars: A New Hope.  I saw it when I was seven, right around the height of my dinosaur phase.  Everything about the movie completely blew me away, from the Jawas and Sand People of Tatooine to the stormtrooper gunfights and lightsaber duels.  After watching Luke blow up the Death Star, I spent the next few hours running around the yard pretending to fly my own starfighter.

In a lot of ways, I’ve never really stopped.

My parents made me wait until I was nine to watch The Empire Strikes back, because it was rated PG.  Without any exaggeration, I can say that those were the longest two years of my life.  I was literally counting down days by the end, and to pass the time without going crazy, I read up on all the books about space that I could possibly find.

My father bought the original X-wing flight simulator game somewhere around then, and I soon became totally engrossed in it.  Since the 386 was our only entertainment system (no Super Nintendo–I had to visit a friend’s house for that), X-wing became the defining game of my childhood.  I spent hours and hours on that game, to the point where I knew exactly which simulated missions the characters from the books were flying and how to complete them faster and easier.

I thought The Empire Strikes Back was a little slow the first time I saw it, but it’s since grown on me, to the point where now it’s my favorite film in the whole series.  Thankfully, my parents let me watch Return of the Jedi the next day, and for the next few months my life felt utterly complete.

Around this time I discovered the Star Wars novels and soon immersed myself in them.  The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton soon became one of my favorites, as well as the Heir to the Empire trilogy by Timothy Zahn and the X-wing series by Michael A. Stackpole.

But it was Roger Allen McBride who first introduced me to a different flavor of science fiction with his Corellia trilogy.  As I mentioned in V is for Vast, those books had just enough of a touch of hard science to intrigue me about the other possibilities of the genre.  That was the last Star Wars series that I read before branching out into other works of science fiction.

The Tripod trilogy by John Christopher was my first introduction to the dystopian / post-apocalyptic genre, depicting an enslaved humanity after an alien invasion.  Those books really captured my imagination for a while.  The Giver was also quite interesting and thought provoking, though since it didn’t involve spaceships or aliens it wasn’t nearly as compelling.

I read a lot of fantasy in my early high school years, including Tracy Hickman, Lloyd Alexander, and (of course) J.R.R. Tolkien.  While I enjoyed those books and immersed myself in them for a while, my true love was still science fiction.  For almost a year, I watched Star Trek: Voyager religiously with my dad.  And every now and again, I’d pick out a science fiction book from the local town library and give it a try.  That’s how I discovered Frank Herbert’s Dune.

In eleventh grade, my English teacher had us choose an author and focus our term papers solely on their books for the entire year.  She suggested I choose Orson Scott Card, but I chose Cormac McCarthy instead.  I’m not sure if that was the worst decision of my high school career, or the best decision, since assigned high school reading tends to make any book feel like it sucks.  I discovered Ender’s Game the following summer, and finished it in a delirious rush at 3am the morning after checking it out from the local library.

More than any other book, Ender’s Game cemented my love for the genre, and showed me just how powerful and moving the genre could be.  It opened so many insights into the world and human nature, reading that book made me feel like I’d opened a pair of eyes that I didn’t even know I’d had.  Looking back, that was probably the moment when I knew I would be a science fiction writer.  I’d known I was going to be a writer ever since I read A Wrinkle in Time at age eight, but to be a science fiction writer specifically, that goal was probably cemented by reading Orson Scott Card.

After high school, I served a two year mission for my church, during which I didn’t read any novels or watch any TV or movies.  When I came back, though, Orson Scott Card and Madeline L’Engle helped me to ease through the awkwardness of adjusting back to normal civilian life.  When I left for college, I expanded my horizons even further, starting with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Princess of Mars.

When I discovered Pioneer Books in downtown Provo, I knew I’d found my favorite bookstore in Utah Valley.  I have so many fond memories sitting cross-legged on the floor in the science fiction section, browsing through the musty used books for hours at a time.  That’s where I discovered C.J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and numerous other authors who are among my favorites today.

When I discovered Spin, Robert Charles Wilson soon became one of my favorites.  I picked up that novel as a free PDF from Tor, and read it over the summer while studying abroad in Jordan.  Once again, that same hard sf sensibility I’d gotten from Roger Allen McBride touched me in an unforgettable way.  But it was the human element of that book that really moved me–in fact, it’s always been about the human element.  The world building in Downbelow Station was great and all, but the romance of Merchanter’s Luck had a much more lasting impact.  Starship Troopers had some good ideas, but it was Mandella’s personal journey in The Forever War that moved me almost to tears.  The intrigue of the Ender’s Shadow series was quite entertaining, but it was Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead that really taught me what it means to be human.

I finished my first novel, Genesis Earth, shortly after returning from that study abroad, and tried to capture the same sensibility from Spin as well as the intimately human element.  Since then, I’ve written several more sci-fi novels, some of them tragic, some triumphant, but in all of them I’ve tried to get as close as I can to the personal lives of the characters.  I don’t know if I’ll ever write a character portrait so intimate as Shevek’s in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I certainly hope to someday.

For me, science fiction started out as a wonderfully exciting entertainment and turned into something much more meaningful.  If there’s anything the genre has taught me, though, it’s that the two aren’t mutually exclusive–that you can have your adventure and learn what it means to be human as well.  Indeed, the more imaginative the adventure, the greater the truths I’ve taken from it.

Because of that, even though I’m almost in my thirties now, I can’t possibly foresee a time when science fiction isn’t a major part of my life.  It’s a love affair that’s grown just as much as I have, and continues to grow with each new author I discover and each new book I write.  When I’m old and grizzled and pushing eighty, I’m sure there will still be a part of that twelve year old boy in me, still running around the yard flying his starship.

Continue reading Y is for Yesteryear

V is for Vast

Pale_Blue_Dot

If you don’t know anything else about the universe, you should know this: it’s big.  Really, really, REALLY big.

How big, you ask?  Well, for starters, take a look at Earth in the picture above.  Can you see it?  It’s the pale blue dot in the beam of starlight on the right side of the picture.  As Carl Sagan so famously put it:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The picture was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft more than a decade ago.  At the time, the spacecraft was about 6,000,000,000 kilometers from Earth, or 5.56 light-hours.  A light-hour is the distance a particle of light can travel in one hour (assuming it’s traveling through a vacuum).  To give you some sense of scale, in one light-second, a particle of light can travel around the circumference of the Earth seven and a half times.

And lest you think that’s actually a distance of any cosmic significance, consider this: the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.24 light-years away.  That’s more than 6,500 times the distance in the photograph above–and that’s just the closest star!

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is between 100,000 to 120,000 light-years across.  If you were on the other side of the galaxy and had a telescope powerful enough to get a good view of Earth, you would see a gigantic ice sheet over both of the poles with no visible sign of humanity whatosever.  The light from all our cities, from our prehistoric ancestors’ campfires, has not yet traveled more than a fraction of the distance across this galactic island universe we call home.

Seriously, the universe is huge.  If you don’t believe me, download Celestia and take yourself for a spin.  In case you haven’t heard of it, Celestia is basically like Google Earth, except for the universe.  Everything is to scale, and there are all sorts of plugins and mods for exoplanets, nebulae, space probes, and other fascinating celestial objects.

I remember what it was like when I first tried out Celestia back in 2010.  I was at the Barlow Center for the BYU Washington Seminar program, in the little library just below the dorms.  I think it was twilight or something, and I hadn’t yet turned on the lights.  The building had a bit of that Northeast feel to it, like something old and rickety (though not as old as some of the buildings up here in New England).  I turned off the ambient light option to make it look more realistic, and began to zoom out.

Let me tell you, the chills I got as the Milky Way disappeared to blackness were like nothing I’ve felt ever since.  So much space, so much emptiness.  It’s insane.  The vastness between stars is just mind boggling–absolutely mind-boggling.

I got my first introduction to science fiction when I saw Star Wars IV: A New Hope as a seven year old boy.  In the next few years, I think I checked out every single Star Wars novel in our local library’s collection.  It wasn’t enough.  Whenever I was on an errand with my mom, I tried to pick up a new one.  I think they even left some copies of the Young Jedi Knight series under my pillow when I lost my last few baby teeth.

One of those summers, we drove down to Texas for a family vacation.  I picked up the second Star Wars book in the Corellian trilogy, written by Roger Allen McBride.  It was completely unlike any of the other Star Wars books I’d ever read.  In it, Han Solo’s brother leads a terrorist organization in the heart of their home system of Corellia.  They hijack an ancient alien artifact and use it to set up a force field that makes it impossible for anyone to enter hyperspace within a couple of light hours from the system sun.  The part that blew my mind was that without FTL tech, it would take the good guys years to get to the station with the terrorists.

All of a sudden, the Star Wars universe didn’t seem so small anymore.  And it only got crazier.  Roger Allen McBride did an excellent job getting across the true vastness of space.  At one point, Admiral Ackbar mused on just how puny their wars must seem to the stars, which measure their lifespans in the billions of years. For the ten year old me, it was truly mind boggling.

That was my first taste of science fiction that went one step beyond the typical melodrama of most space opera.  And once I had that taste, I couldn’t really stop.  As much as I love a good space adventure, real-life astronomy offers just as much of a sense of wonder.  When a good author combines the classic tropes of science fiction in a space-based setting that captures the true vastness of this universe we live in, it’s as delicious as chocolate cake–more so, even.

I try to capture a bit of that in my own fiction, though I’m not always sure how much I succeed.  In Star Wanderers, the vastness of space is especially significant for the characters because their FTL tech is so rudimentary that it still takes months to travel between stars.  All of that time out in the void can really make you feel lonely–or, if you have someone to share it with, it can bring you closer together than almost anything else.  It’s the same in Genesis Earth, which is also about a boy and a girl who venture into the vastness alone.  The Gaia Nova books lean closer to the action/adventure side of space opera, but the same sensibility is still there.

The best science fiction, in my opinion, both deepens and broadens our relationship with this marvelous place we call the universe.  It’s not just a fantastic setting for the sake of a fantastic setting–it’s the universe that we actually live in, or at least a plausible version of it set in a parallel or future reality.  The universe is an amazing, beautiful place, and my appreciation for it only grows the more science fiction I read.  If I can get that across in my own books, then I know that I’ve done something right.

Continue reading V is for Vast

S is for Space Station

downbelow_stationPlanets are not the only setting for science fiction stories–space stations are common as well.  From the Death Star (“that’s no moon…”) to Downbelow Station, the Venus Equilateral to ISPV 7 to the Battle School in Ender’s Game, space stations are a major staple of any space-centered science fiction.

The reasons for this should be fairly obvious.  Before we can go to the planets and the stars, we need to have a permanent presence outside of this massive gravity well we call Earth.  The easiest and most logical place to expand first is to orbit, where supplies can be ferried up without too much difficulty and astronauts can escape in case of an emergency.  Indeed, with the International Space Station, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.

In science fiction, of course, space stations go much further than they do in real life.  They’re often giant orbital cities, with thousands of people living and working there permanently.  Often, they feature some sort of rotating toroidal structure in order to simulate gravity.  If there are settlements on the planet below, the station often serves as a major hub for commerce, serving as a waypoint for interstellar merchants and wholesalers who ferry their wares up to orbit.  And if the planet is still being colonized, then the space station often serves as an important umbilical to the outside universe.

They can also have strategic value in the event of a war.  Battleships need to be serviced too, after all, and a station’s position in orbit can provide an excellent platform from which to bombard or lay siege to the planet.  Alternately, outposts at more distant locations like the Lagrange points can serve as a staging ground for future attacks–a sort of astronomical “high ground,” if you will.  If nothing else, abandoned stations may contain supply caches that can aid a fleeing starship, or provide shelter behind enemy lines, as was the case with the first Halo game.

Stations can come in all sorts of different flavors, from the puny to the magnificent.  The most eye-popping station of all is probably the Ringworld from Larry Niven’s series of the same name.  As the name would imply, the station is a giant ring–so huge, its circumference is the orbit of a habitable planet, with the sun at its center!  Gravity is provided by rotation, and night and day by giant orbiting panels that block out the sun at regular intervals.

My favorite stations, though, are the more realistic ones–the ones that I can imagine myself living on someday.  That was one of the things I enjoyed about Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh–her depiction of human expansion into space is eminently believable, and her stations are a natural extension of that.  I also really enjoyed her focus on the social dynamics of living on a giant station, and what it would be like to live in such a society.

The Battle School from Ender’s Game is another huge favorite of mine.  One of the advantages of building a structure in space is that gravity becomes malleable, so that some parts of the structure can simulate Earth-surface gravity while others leave people completely weightless.  The Battle School uses that to its advantage, with the main training room a zero-g laser tag battle arena, where the students have to learn how to stop thinking in terms of the planar dimensions, where “up” and “down” have any meaning.  It’s really quite fascinating.

It should come as no surprise that space stations pepper my own works.  They’re especially common in the Star Wanderers series, where few worlds have been terraformed and orbital platforms make up the majority of human living space (at least in the Outworlds).  In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, James, Ben, and Stella are all from a space station–a distinction that is especially useful for Stella, since her Hameji captors despise the “planetborn.” Genesis Earth takes that a step further, as spaceborn Michael and Terra have never been to the surface of a planet before until midway through the novel.  Just as going into space is paradigm shifting for us, the experience of walking on a planet proves just as transformative for them.

Continue reading S is for Space Station

R is for Rebel

rebel_allianceJust as sprawling interstellar empires are a staple of space opera, so are the plucky rebels that fight against them.  From Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica, Firefly to FTL, there’s no shortage of characters in science fiction trying to stick it to the man.

I’m not sure how it is in other cultures, but in America, it seems like science fiction upholds a host of values closely related to rebel tropes, such as self-reliance, individualism, freedom and independence, frontier justice, enterprising self-made men, etc.  A lot of this probably grew out of the genre’s early ties with pulp-era adventure fiction, which often featured former Confederate soldiers leaving the civilized world for the realms of adventure following the US Civil War.  That’s certainly the case with John Carter in A Princess of Mars, and echoed to some extent with the Browncoats from Firefly.

It may go even further, though, to the revolutionary origins of the United States itself.  The frontier has always loomed large in our culture, shaping our values in the early days of settlement and, now that the age of the frontier is largely over, standing for an idealized nostalgic past.  Americans have always favored the self-made individual who stands up to injustice and corruption in high places, and we’ve always had an aversion to the centralization of power and authority.

Back in the days of the Cold War space race, when writers like Heinlein and shows like Star Trek really started to popularize the genre, there seems to have been a real push to promote American identity and values.  The science fiction of that day certainly got caught up in all that, which is weird because as pro-Americanism became the establishment, a genuinely rebellious counterculture began to push back.  To its credit, though, there was plenty of science fiction that embraced the counterculture, especially in the New Wave movement that followed the Golden Age.

So why are we so enamored with rebels?  Probably for the same reason that we all love a good rogue.  Since space is the final frontier, it’s naturally the kind of place that would attract a more rugged, individualistic type.  At the same time, rogues and rebels are much more likely to have exciting adventures than the more mild-mannered folk who are apt to stay at home and conform.  Let’s not forget that most people who read science fiction are adolescent boys (of all ages), hungry for adventure and often a little rebellious themselves.

Though the rebels are often the good guys, that’s not always the case.  It all depends on who they’re fighting against, and how black and white the story is trying to be.  If they’re fighting against the Empire, then they’re almost always courageous freedom fighters standing up for truth and justice and all that, but if they’re fighting against the Federation, things can be a lot more gray.  In FTL, for example, the rebels are the outright antagonists, and you have to save the galaxy by defeating them.

The rebels don’t always win, either.  In stories like Star Wars that skew towards idealism, then in the end they usually do, but in darker, grittier tales (such as most cyberpunk), they may or may not.  And even in some happy-go-lucky adventure stories, the rebels are apt to be martyrs for a lost cause–again, think of the Browncoats from Firefly.

The wide variety in the role of rebels in science fiction is a good indication of a healthy, vibrant back-and-forth in the genre that’s been going on for some time.  It also means that there’s plenty of room for a new writer to take these old, worn tropes and shake them up in a new and exciting way.  As much as we love Luke Skywalker, we love Han Solo just as much, and if you combine him with John Carter to get Mal, then you’ve got a rebellious character that a whole new generation can come to know and love.

I love playing around with these tropes, and do so quite often in my own fiction.  In Bringing Stella Home, James McCoy is very much a rebel, though it’s not the Hameji that he’s fighting against so much as everything standing between him and his brother and sister.  In that sense, he’s kind of a martyr without a cause, a determinator who shakes his fist at the universe even when the more sensible thing is to learn how to cope.  Similarly, Danica and her band of Tajji mercenaries all fought in a failed revolution and have been wandering the stars ever since.  Their backstory features much more prominently in Stars of Blood and Glory, in which things come around full circle.  And then, of course, there’s Terra from Genesis Earth, who isn’t about standing up to the man so much as giving him the finger and running off somewhere where none of that even matters–the frontier ethic taken to its furthest extreme.

So yeah, I’m a fan of this trope, and have been ever since I saw Star Wars and fell in love with the genre.  You can definitely expect to find lots of rebellious characters throughout my books in the future.

Continue reading R is for Rebel

L is for Lost Colony

worthingsagaAs 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.  And in… 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.

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D is for Droids

droidsSome of the best-loved characters in science fiction don’t even have a heartbeat.  Why?  They’re robots, that’s why!

Unlike the mechanical “slaves” (the original meaning of the Czech root robota) that built your car or enable your GPS devices, these robots are a lot more human.  In fact, the word “droid” is short for “android,” which comes from the Greek root for “man” (andr-) and means “manlike.”

In other words, the thing that defines these robots is that they blur the line between machine and man.  And ever since they made their first appearance in some of the earliest works of science fiction (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was arguably the first), that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

Star Trek loves to play with this trope, from Data in The Next Generation to the doctor in Voyager.  But where the droids in Star Trek tend to be angsty and existential, the ones who populate Star Wars already know their place and don’t have any qualms filling it.

My first exposure to droids was when I saw the original Star Wars trilogy as a little boy.  An image of C3PO with his golden humanoid body wandering across the dune wastes of Tatooine will probably be stamped on my subconscious forever.  That, and the little traveling flea market the Jawas ran from their sand crawler.

One of the neat things about droids is that you can go either direction with them.  If you want to get all existential about the nature of humanity and whatnot, you can use them to explore those questions since they’re almost human but not quite.  On the other hand, if you just want an exciting space romp with some unique and interesting characters, you can bring them out as regular characters.

An advantage that droids have over humans is that they’re harder to kill and easier to bring back to life.  Star Wars leaned on this a lot, especially in episodes IV and V.  When R2D2 got shot in the battle of Yavin IV, right before Luke blew up the Death Star, I just about died.  And yet, they brought him back easily enough for the throne room scene because he’s a robot–all they had to say was “we’ll fix him up” and you knew that everything would be better.

So yeah, droids.  I haven’t done much with droids yet in my own writing, mostly because I’m a bit conflicted in my thoughts about the upper limits of AI (which I explored somewhat in Genesis Earth).  Most of my robots are actually cyborgs, and that’s something completely different.  Still, I can see myself playing with this trope at some point in the future, probably when/if I introduce some aliens or start a new series.

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C is for Cryo

halo_cryochamber

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).

Continue reading C is for Cryo

A is for Aliens

cantinaAlien races–what would science fiction be without them?  They’re as fundamental to the genre as elves and dwarves are to fantasy.  If you’re reading a book and an alien being from another planet shows up on the page, that in itself is usually enough to make the story science fiction.

My first exposure to aliens came from Star Wars IV: A New Hope, which I saw as a kid sometime back in the early nineties.  The cantina scene with the weird, catchy music and all the frighteningly creatures both scared and fascinated me.  Here were a bunch of humans, mingling with these things that looked like monsters as if nothing were strange or unusual.  In fact, it soon became clear that these weren’t monsters at all, but regular people–that is, as regular as you can be without being human.

I think the main reason for including aliens in a space opera story is that it makes the setting feel more exotic and otherworldly.  It can also add all sorts of interesting possibilities for plot and character, depending on the different capabilities of the various alien races and the way their culture shapes them.  Babylon 5 is a great example of this, with the characters from each alien race interacting with each other in ways unique to their various cultures.

One way to think of science fictional aliens is to put them on a spectrum with two extremes.  On the one side, you have the more familiar aliens–the races from Star Trek, for example, which are basically human-like except with weird skin or bone ridges to physically distinguish them.  On the other side, you have the truly bizarre–the kinds of aliens that are so different from us, we cannot possibly conceive their thoughts or the way they see the world.

The main advantage of the more familiar alien types is that they’re easy to understand and relate to.  Yeah, they may look weird, but they don’t think or act much differently than the Russians, or the Arabs, or whatever human culture they roughly parallel.  In fact, it’s not uncommon in fiction of this type for the aliens to be less “alien” than the Japanese (at least, in Western fiction–obviously, it’s different in manga and anime).  This, in turn, is the main weakness with aliens of this type: they are so readily understandable that it’s easy to lose that sense of otherness.

The main advantage of the more extreme kind of alien is that it can make a much stronger impact, which makes for a more compelling and thought-provoking story.  For example, the Hypotheticals in Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin trilogy are so fascinating because we know so little about them.  They have the power to shape entire worlds, manipulating space and time itself, and yet none of the reasons behind what they’re doing make sense–if indeed there’s any reason behind it at all.  Or in Octavia Butler’s Xenogensis trilogy, it’s not too hard to figure out what the aliens are trying to do, but the way in which they do it, impregnating the main character through their tri-sexual biological capabilities makes for a profoundly disturbing story.

The disadvantage, of course, is that aliens of this kind are much more difficult for readers to relate to.  If the aliens are so advanced that their thoughts transcend our own, or if their sensory organs are so different that we cannot possibly conceive of how they see the world, then it’s very difficult for us to get inside of their heads.  For this reason, aliens of this kind tend to become more of a force of nature than actual characters–or characters in the aggregate, in the way that humanity is the main character of most of Arthur C. Clarke’s books.

Personally, I’m more of a fan of the extreme alien type.  The universe is so vast, and our understanding of it is so lacking, that it rings a lot truer to me.  The odds that we are alone in the universe are so infinitesimally small that refusing to believe in the existence of aliens would be akin to believing in 1492 that the Earth is flat, and yet if/when we ever make contact, I can’t help but wonder how different from us they’ll be.  So much of what we take for granted is just a fluke of our particular circumstances here on this planet–the chance combination of so many variables that changing any one of them would completely rewrite the story of how our species evolved, much less our civilization.

There is a place for the more familiar aliens of space opera, though. They make for some very entertaining stories, provide a fun escape from this world when that’s what we need.  They also give us a chance to look at ourselves through a lens that strips away our stereotypes and prejudices.  We might have some very strong opinions about immigrants, for example, or people of a different race or color, but none of us are prejudiced against Sand People, or Klingons, or Androsynth.  In space opera, most alien races are loosely based on real-world cultures, so it’s possible to draw parallels without all the cultural and historical baggage.

In a sense, all fiction is just the culture speaking to itself, so when we read about aliens we are really reading about ourselves.  Encountering the Other in a non-threatening fictional world enables us to face the real-world Other with understanding and compassion.

I haven’t written very many alien stories yet, but I have a couple cooking in the back of my mind.  Genesis Earth has an alien encounter with a bit of a twist to it, but the characters in my Star Wanderers and Gaia Nova series are all human (well, mostly).  If/when I do introduce an alien race, I plan to do it right, which will almost certainly involve a first contact story.  But that’s for Saturday’s blog post, not today’s.

Continue reading A is for Aliens

Projects, projects everywhere …

… and not a clue where to start.

Seriously, I feel like that guy in the Russian proverb who’s chasing two rabbits.  Except, in my case, it’s more like a dozen.  Here’s what I currently have to choose from:

Stars of Blood and Glory — This one is in publishing mode, and should be out in a week or two.  I’ve gone through all the line/copy edits from my editor, finalized the book teaser–all that’s left is the formatting and cover art.  The preliminary sketches look really good, so it shouldn’t be too much longer before it’s ready to go.  Of course, it’s more of a publishing thing than a writing thing, but still important.

Lifewalker — This is a rough draft that’s only about 15% to 20% finished.  It’s in a totally different genre than I’m used to writing (post-apocalyptic / weird western), but so far it seems to be coming along fairly well.  I hit a block a couple of weeks ago and put it on the back burner for a while, but I may be ready to pick it up again.

Star Wanderers: Benefactor — This is another rough draft, about 35% to 40% finished.  It’s a parallel novella to Star Wanderers: Fidelity, except from Jakob’s point of view.  Right now, I’m in the phase where everything sucks and I don’t know where to go with it.  It’ll probably turn out just fine, but I may have to put it on hold for a while.  However, if I could just push through and finish the damn thing, that would be preferable.  It’s only another 15,000 words …

Star Wanderers: Dreamweaver — This is a first draft that I need to revise.  Last night, I looked over it for the first time in eight months.  Opening the file was like pulling out an unopened bottle of wine that’s been sitting for years in the back corner of the wine cellar.  So far, it seems pretty good, but I’m going to wait until I hear back from one of my first readers before doing any serious revisions.  After that, maybe run the first chapter through Kindal’s writing group, and if everything seems good, I’ll probably publish it sometime in April/May.

Star Wanderers: The Jeremiah Chronicles — This is purely a publishing project.  Basically, I want to bundle the first four Star Wanderers stories and release them as an omnibus.  To do this right, though, I’d have to commission some cover art, which takes time and money.  Since it’s not a writing project, and I already have enough publishing projects on my plate, I’ll probably put this one off until Dreamweaver is out.

Mercenary Savior — Long term followers of this blog might recognize this as the old title for the novel that became Bringing Stella Home.  Well, I plan to recycle that title, as well as the original prologue, in a prequel novel that basically tells the origin story of Danica Nova and her band of mercenaries.  So far, I’ve got the prologue and the beginnings of the first chapter.  Haven’t looked at it in a few months, but if I get stuck on these other projects, I just might pick it up again.

Heart of the Nebula — A second or third draft that needs a deep revision.  This is probably going to consume all my writing time for six to eight weeks, and I’d rather do it all at once rather than in chunks.  It’s been on the back burner long enough that I can probably pick it up again, but I want to finish a rough draft first.

The Sword Keeper — I’ve still got this one on the current projects bar, but it’s been a while since I’ve worked on it, so it’s pretty much on the back burner.  I think it’s at about the 40% mark, though honestly I have no idea.  It’s an epic fantasy novel, a bit outside my usual scope, and it’s turning into a beast of a book.  The story is pretty solid, though, so I’ll probably finish it before the end of the year–that is, unless the muse drops an anvil on me (which has definitely happened before).

Empress of the Free Stars — An unwritten novel that’s been kicking around in my head ever since I finished Stars of Blood and Glory.  Basically, it’s a direct sequel from Hikaru’s point of view … except that I can’t really discuss it without giving away spoilers (TO A BOOK THAT ISN’T EVEN OUT YET).  In any case, the prologue has been beating on me to get written, and I finally caved and started it last night.  I’ve got a pretty good idea for what’s supposed to happen in this novel, but there’s still a whole lot of room for the story to surprise me.

Edenfall — Ah, Edenfall … this is probably my most neglected story.  I started it a little over a year ago, but hit a block, and then Star Wanderers happened.  I’ll pick it up eventually, but to really do it justice, I feel like I need to go backpacking in the wilderness for a week or two.  The weather isn’t good for that right now, so it will probably have to wait until spring.  Or maybe I’m just making things too complicated.  We’ll see.

Star Wanderers; Wanderlust — A Star Wanderers story from Samson’s point of view.  This one is going to be tricky, but I’ve actually got the whole thing plotted out already.  However, I don’t want to write it just yet, because there’s still a bunch of other Star Wanderers stories that need to come first.  Or maybe I will write it, and let it sit for a while until I write the others.  Maybe it’s better to finish it first and let it sit for a while, just to be safe …

Those are pretty much all the projects with titles that are floating around in my head right now.  There are a few others, like parts VII and VIII of Star Wanderers (from Mariya and Lucca’s points of view, respectively), but those aren’t quite ready to start.  With all of these, I’ve at least got some words on the page.

So now that I’m in that frustrating space between projects, I think I’m going to take a week or two to just let my creative mind do whatever the heck it wants.  Hopefully, I’ll get excited enough about one of them to see it all the way through.  I’m not going to stress about word counts so much as putting time in at my chair, doing something.

Man, I wish my creative side weren’t so scatterbrained.  Though as long as I’m still finishing stuff, I guess it’s all right.

And now that I’ve procrastinated long enough by writing this blog post, it’s time to go hang out with my friends and procrastinate some more.  Later!

LTUE 2013

Man, LTUE 2013 was this weekend, and it was AWESOME.  One of the best conventions I’ve ever attended.  I spoke on my first panel, attended my first book signing event as an author, and got to meet up with some old friends, as well as some amazing new people.

Since I live tweeted most of the panels I attended, I thought it might be interesting to repost a few of those here, with some additional thoughts.  So…here goes!

THURSDAY

I believe this was Scott Parkin from the “What Do You Write?” panel. Good advice. Megan Whalen Turner also had some very interesting things to say on the subject of genre, which I have since forgotten. But I recorded it, and the recording will eventually be made publicly available in the LTUE conference archives, or so I’ve been told.

This one was from the “What Is ‘Punk’ Literature and Its Many Genres?” panel. David Butler and Larry Correia were HILARIOUS. Nearly got into a wrestling match right in front of us.

And when the esteemed Mr. Butler began to describe his book, I swear, a choir of steampunk angel Moronis somewhere began to sing a heavenly chorus. I mean, he had me with Edgar Allen Poe faking his death to become a secret agent, but Orson Pratt’s phlogiston guns? Eliza R. Snow as chief counterintelligence officer for the Kingdom of Deseret? I will definitely be checking out this book, City of the Saints (which is apparently a finalist for the 2013 Whitney Award).

David Butler is also a way cool guy. I hung out with him a bit in the dealer’s room, chatting about Mormon history, Lyman Wight (“shoot and be damned!”), Sir Richard Francis Burton’s expedition to Salt Lake City, and all sorts of other crazy zany stuff. And the whole time, he was playing a guitar. So yeah, definitely a way cool guy.

This discovery CHANGED MY LIFE. Also, it helped me to save immensely on lunch money, as well as join in on some way cool conversations with other panelists as they desperately tried to escape their fans. Okay, not really, but the green room was AWESOME.

Howard Taylor’s presentation on teasers was tremendously insightful. In a nutshell, he said that a teaser (aka book description on Amazon / back cover) should have or at least point to the following things:

  1. The inciting incident
  2. Character action
  3. Conflict
  4. Hook

We then went over a few examples, including some good ones that broke these rules, and finished up by doctoring a couple of teasers volunteered from the audience. Howard Taylor admitted to me later that he wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way he presented it, but I get the impression that he’s never entirely satisfied with anything less than perfection. It was a great workshop.

From “Engaging the Reader.” Great panel. Lisa Mangum described the planning / drafting / revising process for each of her first three novels, and they were all wildly different. With seven novels under my belt so far, I can definitely relate. Some, like Genesis Earth and Stars of Blood and Glory, practically write themselves. Others are like having a c-section with a hacksaw. And others…yeah, I’m not going to go there.

FRIDAY

Okay, maybe I said one useful thing: when there’s a language barrier, little things become big obstacles. One of the other panelists, Anna Del C. Dye, also had a bunch of stories about adapting to a foreign language and culture (in her case, the United States).

Overall, the panel was really, really fun! I also had some cards out for Star Wanderers: Outworlder, and a bunch of people came up afterward to get them. Guess I must have said something interesting. I hope you guys enjoy the book!

 

From “Current Trends in SF.” Great panel–it totally wasn’t just another over-hyped discussion about what’s hot right now. I asked how the panelists think the trend cycle will change in the age of self-published ebooks, and they had some very interesting things to say. They all agreed that speed to market, while it may give some advantages, isn’t a make-or-break game changer, or even really a good strategy (unless you really love the trend you’re writing to). Some things change, others remain the same. It will be interesting to give this one a re-listen.

 

 

From “Creators in the Community.” Probably one of the best panels of the entire convention. Tracy Hickman is really on top of the changes in the publishing world, and had a lot of interesting things to say about it in all of his panels. As for the subject of writerly communities, much wisdom and insight was shared by all of the panelists. Definitely look for this one.

Man, I’d forgotten how cool the guys at Dungeon Crawlers Radio are! They interviewed me back in 2011, when I was just getting ready to publish Genesis Earth. This time, we talked about space opera, sci-fi romance, language barriers in marriage and all the crazy things I have to look forward to, and a bunch of other stuff. I also shared some of my thoughts and opinions on self-publishing myths, especially regarding the “tsunami of crap.” We coined a new word, “nerdaissance,” to describe all the awesome new stuff that’s coming out now, thanks to the ease of self-publishing.

So yeah, it was a great interview! I’ll definitely be cross-linking once it goes live.

From “Effective Book Covers.” Great panel with some very good artists and cover designers, including Isaac Stewart who does all the maps for Brandon Sanderson. Although some parts were geared toward illustrators, most of the advice was for writers (especially self-pubbing writers) who are looking to design their own covers. Lots of great and insightful perspectives from the visual arts side of things.

FRIDAY NIGHT BOOK SIGNING

Okay, I’ve got to be honest: when I went into the mass signing with my cardboard box of CreateSpace POD novels, I didn’t expect to sell anything. I figured that was just my ticket to get a seat at a table and hand out cards for Star Wanderers: Outworlder to some of the casual book browsers.

Well, I was pleasantly surprised! An uncle of one of my old mission companions was impressed enough to buy a couple of copies. I think he’s one of these guys who likes to buy things from new authors to help encourage them. It’s great to see people like that. He told me to keep writing, and I told him I definitely would!

Lots of people snagged the card for Outworlder, and I came up with a pretty decent pitch: “it’s about a starship pilot who accidentally marries a girl who doesn’t speak his language.” That raised a lot of eyebrows! A lot of people were really happy to see a science fiction story, especially a space adventure. I get the impression that there’s a craving for this kind of stuff in the market that isn’t currently being satisfied. So yeah, that was very encouraging!

After things wound down a bit, I wandered around the signing checking out some of the other books. Saw a couple that I recognized from the Kindle Boards, which was interesting. Chatted with them, as well as a bunch of geeky guys about chain mail, Halo, Frank Herbert, and all sorts of awesome stuff. Man, the best part about sci-fi/fantasy conventions is the chance to just talk with people! So much interesting stuff. It was great.

SATURDAY

 

 

From “Write For the Market or Write What You Know?” Another great panel. Definitely will be re-listening to that one.

From the main address with Megan Whalen Turner. She talked about book censorship and the need to teach children how to make their own reading choices, rather than keeping them sheltered and making the choice for them. She pointed out how every time a New York Times article comes out bemoaning some YA book for inappropriate content, it’s kind of hypocritical because there are so many other books they miss. The Golden Compass, for example, didn’t even pop up on their radar until the movie came out. Kids don’t magically become mature, well-adjusted adults when they turn 18–we have to teach them to make these choices (and mistakes) for themselves.

From “How Does Your Story Mean?” Great discussion on the writing process. Saw a lot of other good live-tweets during this one.

Okay, I take back what I said about the best panel of the convention. THIS was definitely the best. “The Engines of Exploration,” with Howard Taylor, Megan Whalen Turner, Roger White, James Owen, Kevin Evans, and Charles Stanford–the panel was packed. It basically turned into a round-robin discussion of which commodities are most essential to modern civilization, which ones will be the most valuable in the event of a societal collapse, and which ones will take us to the stars. The eventual consensus on each of these eventually came down to goats. Seriously. GOATS!

 

From “Writing Romance Without Erotica.” Lots of delicious awkwardness, as well as some really interesting thoughts and perspectives on the subject of romance. One of the panelists talked about the importance of “character penetration” without realizing about halfway through the panel how hilarious that phrase sounded in this context. But yeah, there was also a lot of wisdom in there as well. There are a lot of strong opinions about sex and romance floating around in this part of the world, so it was a very spirited and interesting panel.

 

 

The last panel of the convention (technically, symposium, but whatever) was “eBook Publishing” with some highly successful indies like Michaelbrent Collings. As you can tell from the tweets, it was a bit controversial, but very, very interesting. Questions were flying all over the place, on subjects ranging from formatting to building an audience. The biggest shock to me was that none of the panelists (none of them!) are on Smashwords. It’s a wild, wild west out here in indie-land. Makes me wonder, maybe I should publish to iTunes through another venue? Hmmmm…

So yeah, that was pretty much the whole convention/symposium. I finished it out by playing Alhambra with a bunch of friends from Kindal Debenham’s writing group who came down from Seattle and Idaho. Good, good times–it was actually kind of sad to say goodbye. Definitely worth coming 11 time zones to attend.

All I can say is that I am STOKED for Conduit!