Brothers in Exile – Page 4 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

BROTHERS IN EXILE now on Goodreads!

If you’re on Goodreads, Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile (Book I) now has it’s own page! The expected publication date is May 10th, so all it really has is a title or a blurb, but more should be coming out soon.

This is something new I’m trying out, so that people have a chance to add it to their to-read lists and hopefully give it some visibility before it’s published. I’m not sure how to update people when it does come out, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure that out before then.

In the meantime, if you’ve been looking forward to reading it, feel free to add it to your to-read list!

New book coming soon!

So the A to Z blogging challenge is coming up again this year, and to get ready for it I’ve decided to put together my posts from last year into an ebook! I’ll be releasing it at the end of this week, probably around Friday or so. Here’s the cover:

The space art is a picture of the Carina Nebula, taken by the ESO VLT (credit: ESO/T. Preibisch). The bookstore image is one that I took myself, of Pioneer Book, one of my favorite places in Provo. I’ve spent many, many hours happily browsing their Sci-Fi section. 😀

The book is basically an exploration of some of my favorite Sci-Fi genre tropes, starting with A is for Alien and ending with Z is for Zenith. This is basically a blog-to-book sort of thing, like what I did with Journey to Jordan. The original blog posts are still up, though, so if you want to read through them online, you can find them here.

In the meantime, I’m hard at work on Sons of the Starfarers and should have Brothers in Exile ready to publish in May. If all goes well, I’ll publish them in six week intervals, so you’ll get Comrades in Hope at the end of June and Strangers in Flight at the beginning of August, with the first omnibus sometime in September. That’s the plan, anyway–we’ll see how well it holds.

I’m also working to get new cover art for all the Star Wanderers books. I’ve found someone to work on them, and she says she can get them done quickly, so we’ll see how that goes. The print versions for the omnibuses may take a bit longer, but they should be out by the summer at the latest.

That’s just about it. Better get back to prepping Science Fiction from A to Z for publication–lots of work left to do!

What I’ve been up to lately (besides short stories)

It’s been a while since I did an update post, so I figure I should do one of those to let you guys know what projects I’m working on. There are quite a few of them, and I’m happy to say that the writing is going quite well! If I don’t post on this blog very much, it’s probably because I’m busy writing.

Anyhow, here’s what I’m working on (and what you can expect to see in the coming months):

Sons of the Starfarers
Book II: Comrades in Hope

This is the project that’s been taking most of my attention. What started out as a novella has grown and morphed into a short novel–I expect it will top out at just under 40k words. I’m just past the 2/3rds mark now, where it’s still a slog but I can just about see the end. I was hoping to finish it this week, but now it looks like I’ll be pushing it back into April.

That’s okay, though, because my second big project is:

Sons of the Starfarers
Book III: Strangers in Flight

I’ve been itching to start this one for a while, and last night I finally opened up and started it. In the first book, Brothers in Exile, the two starfaring brothers Aaron and Isaac find a beautiful girl covered in henna tattoos and frozen in a cryotank on a derelict space station. In this, the third book, the girl finally wakes up and we get to see things from her point of view.

With the way I’m writing Sons of the Starfarers, it’s going to be structured in a series of three book arcs. Since I want to release the books in each arc fairly close to each other, I don’t want to publish Brothers in Exile until Comrades in Hope and Strangers in Flight are both complete. So even if I end up taking a break from Comrades in Hope for a little while, if I’m working on Strangers in Flight, it’s not putting things off since I’d have to write that one first anyway.

I am really, really excited about these books, and when you read them, I think you will be to. I’m trying to think of ways that I can share them, since it’s hard to talk about something if it’s not actually out there for you to read. Maybe if I posted a series of short excerpts from the first book, no longer than 400-500 words each? I generally skip over blog posts where authors sample their own books, but maybe if they were shorter excerpts, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem. What do you guys think?

So that’s what I’m working on writing-wise. Here’s what I’m working on publishing-wise.

New Star Wanderers covers (and print editions)

So the cover designer I’ve been working with for Star Wanderers told me this week that he’s overextended himself by taking on more work than he can handle and that unfortunately he has to drop some clients. That’s unfortunate but understandable–we all have limitations, and things come up in life that we can’t always plan for. We’ve parted amicably, and he’s promised to get me the files I need to pick up on the cover work where he left off.

I’m really anxious to get the new covers done, though, and would like to find a good cover designer as soon as I can. If you guys have any recommendations, please let me know. Ideally, I’d like to find someone who I could work with long-term, since there definitely won’t be a shortage of work anytime soon!

Because of this, though, I’ll probably keep the original space art covers for the POD books at least for the foreseeable future. The omnibus editions will feature the new art, though, and I’ve just bartered with a friend of mine to do the typesetting for those. I’m not sure when they’ll be out, but it will probably be sometime in the late spring / early summer.

As for the print edition of Star Wanderers: Deliverance (Part VIII), that should be out approximately whenever I get around to it, which would be sooner except that I’m so busy writing Sons of the Starfarers. I’m not sure how many of you are waiting on that one–the print versions for the individual novellas have been selling better than I’d expected, though still at a trickle, so that’s not quite at the top of my priorities right now.

Blogging A to Z Book

Last year, I did the Blogging from A to Z challenge and had a lot of fun with it! The topic I blogged on was science fiction, with a new post each day in April starting with “A is for …” “B is for …” etc. Well, I’d like to do that again this year, but first I’d like to put together last year’s posts into an ebook. It shouldn’t take too long–probably no more than a week at the longest–so I’ll probably take care of that next week or so.

For this year’s challenge, I’m going to blog about publishing. I already have the first few posts planned out: “A is for Amazon,” “B is for Big 6 (now 5),” “C is for Contracts,” etc. These posts aren’t meant to be advice, more just sharing my perspective and experience, since hey I’ve been indie published for 3+ years now, which might as well be 3+ decades what with the way the industry is changing. So even though there’s a lot I’m still learning, I do have a few things to share.

That’s just about it. Better grab some lunch now and head out to write. See you!

Teaser for SONS OF THE STARFARERS: BROTHERS IN EXILE

Hey guys–some news about Sons of the Starfarers, my next big series. While I’m working on Book II: Comrades in Hope, I’m also getting Book I: Brothers in Exile ready for publication. If all goes well, I’ll be publishing it in May, with books 2 and 3 coming shortly thereafter.

Today, I put together a teaser / book description. Here it is:

TO WAKE A FROZEN GIRL FROM THE ICE, TWO BROTHERS MUST UNITE TO FACE AN EMPIRE.

Deep in the Far Outworlds, a derelict space station holds the bones of a long-dead people—and a beautiful young woman locked in cryofreeze. When the star-wandering brothers Isaac and Aaron find the sleeping girl, they soon realize that they are her only hope for rescue. If they don’t take her, then slavers certainly will.

With no way to revive her, they set a course for the New Pleiades in the hopes that someone in the star cluster can help. But a storm is brewing over that region of space. After a series of brutal civil wars, the Gaian Empire has turned its sights outward. A frontier war is on the verge of breaking out, and the brothers are about to be caught in the middle of it.

They both harbor a secret, though. Somewhere else in the Outworlds is another derelict station—one that they used to call home. That secret will either bind them together or draw them apart in

SONS OF THE STARFARERS BOOK I: BROTHERS IN EXILE.

What do you guys think? I’m not so sure about the opening hook–that’s probably going to get tweaked. What about the rest of it?

In other news, LTUE is in two days. I am excited! I’ll be on five panels this year: Being a Foreign Speaker, Planet Building, Writing Romance, Epublishing Short Stories, and Starting the Next Project. If you’re going, be sure to drop in on one of my panels or catch me out on the main floor. I’ll be there all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (and maybe in the evening for some filk as well)!

That’s all for now. Take care, and I hope to see you at LTUE!

Juggling projects (and trying not to drop them all)

Many, I wish I could write faster. I probably can, but there are times when writing is an uphill slog, and you can’t put your foot on the accelerator too hard or your tires will spin out.

Right now, I’m about halfway through Star Wolf (formerly HEART OF THE NEBULA), and I’m in the part of the manuscript that needs the most work. I’ll probably be throwing out 60%-70% of what’s in there now and rewriting it from scratch, at least until the last five chapters. That’s not the hard part, though–the hard part is untangling the storylines that need to be kept from the storylines that need to be thrown out. I’ve already outlined the basic structure, but for the next couple of chapters, I’ve decided to abandon my revision notes. Now, everything is murky.

So that’s what I’ve been up to in the last few days. Star Wolf is a novel in the Gaia Nova series, and will probably end up around 120,000 words or so. That’s around the same length as Bringing Stella Home, or perhaps a bit longer. Definitely a change of pace from the novellas I’ve written in the last couple of years. As much of a slog as it is now, though, it’s got a lot of good stuff in it. Action, adventure, political intrigue, hard moral choices–not to mention space battles, generation ships, and cryonics gone horribly right.

But really, I want to get this one finished so that I can work on Sons of the Starfarers Book II: Comrades in Hope. I’m so excited about this one, I’m thinking about putting Star Wolf on hold for a few weeks so that I can just write it. Of course, a few weeks will probably turn into one or two months, and by the time it’s finished I’ll want to move immediately on to book 3.

Which actually might not be a bad thing, since I want to launch Sons of the Starfarers as soon as I can. It seems like you guys have really enjoyed Star Wanderers, so I think that you’re going to enjoy Sons of the Starfarers even more. I’m already getting the feedback from my first readers for Book I: Brothers in Exile, and while there are a few minor fixes to make, the story itself seems pretty solid. And the places I want to go with this series … man, it’s going to be awesome.

Just to give you a taste, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Brothers in Exile. Isaac and Aaron have just arrived at a derelict station on the fringes of settled space, light-years away from the nearest human being.

“So this is Alnilam station,” he mused as he peered out the forward window. The station’s hull was a dark gray, the beacons at the ends of the antennae a deep flashing red. Though it shone a little as it reflected the stars, their light was too dim to give anything more than the basic shape of the structure. On the inside of the wheels where the windows should have been, there was a blackness as dark as the night on the planet below.

“I’m picking up something,” said Aaron.

“Is it a transmission?”

“No, it’s something else. Radiation signatures, concentrated mostly at the hub.”

Isaac’s heart fell. “That would be one of the station reactors, probably leaking fuel or coolant internally.” Proof that no one’s alive in there after all.

“Well, it can’t be that big, since the wheel engines are obviously still working. And I’m only picking up radiation immediately around the reactors, so it’s not like it’s leaked down to the rim. If anyone’s still alive—”

“They can’t be. If they were, they would have fixed the leak.”

Aaron bristled. “How do you know that? For all we know, the engineers are gone and none of the survivors knows what to do about it.”

“If there are any survivors, why haven’t they hailed us?”

“How should I know? All I know is that it’s possible. You can’t refute that.”

I guess I can’t, Isaac thought. Instead of admitting that, though, he kept silent, peering at the ghostly derelict as if lost in thought.

“We should dock and go in there,” said Aaron. “Peek inside, take a look around. Even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can at least find out what happened to them.”

“Are you crazy?” said Isaac, his heart beating a little faster at his brother’s suggestion. “We have no idea what’s in there. For all we know, the place is infested with some sort of disease.”

“So we go in EVA suits and take a quick sterilizing spacewalk before coming back. No big deal.”

“It’s still a dumb idea. We’re not going.”

Aaron scowled and rolled his eyes. “So what, you just want to turn around and leave? Abandon this place without finding out what happened?”

“That’s right. We know that the station is dead, and that’s enough.”

“But we don’t know that,” said Aaron, raising both of his hands. “We don’t know hardly anything. All we know is that no one has answered our transmissions and there’s a small reactor leak at the hub, but everything else looks fine.”

It does not look fine, Isaac thought to himself. His palms felt clammy, and he was already beginning to regret his decision to come to this system at all.

“Listen,” Aaron continued, “even if there aren’t any survivors, maybe we can find some fuel and supplies to make this trip worthwhile. It’s more than a parsec to the nearest settlement, and even if we go straight there we’ve already burned through so much that we’ll have to sell half our cargo hold just to resupply.”

That much was true. Even with the credit they’d built up around this sector, they’d be dangerously low on fuel if they turned around now. The Medea was a small ship, and it could take them almost a year to make up their expenses if they cut their losses now. Still, the thought of setting foot on that derelict made Isaac’s skin crawl.

“It isn’t safe,” he muttered. “Whatever happened here, we shouldn’t get involved.”

“But we are involved,” said Aaron. “We’re involved just by being here. And since we’re already involved anyway, we might as well find out what happened to these people so that we can get their story out. They deserve that much.”

That’s right, Isaac thought. They certainly do.

“Okay, I’ll bring us up to one of the rimside docking nodes so we can go in. But I want you to stick with me, Aaron—understand? No running off—we do this together.”

“Yeah, yeah. Together. Got it.”

I hope you do, Isaac thought as he stared out the forward window at the derelict station. Down below in the planet’s atmosphere, lightning flashed silently, illuminating the tempest for a single instant before the lifeless world returned to darkness.

Oh man … so much awesome stuff to write! When the first three books are written, I’ll publish the first one, and publish the other two soon thereafter. I don’t want there to be a long gap between releases. But between book 3 and book 4, there will probably be a bit more time, since I intend to organize this series in groups of threes.

That’s just about it. Tomorrow, I’ll probably spend most of the day working on short stories, since there’s a story idea that’s screaming at me to be written. With short stories, you’ve got to move fast, because they will get away from you if you don’t write them immediately. But if I get a chance I’m probably going to start Comrades in Hope, because that’s the one I really want to be writing.

So many projects to juggle … I just hope I don’t drop them all!

LTUE, current WIP, and other assorted updates

So even though I haven’t been too good about blogging this past month, I have been busy writing. Besides the short story in my last post, I’ve been steadily revising Star Wolf, formerly titled HEART OF THE NEBULA. It took me a while to get back into this story, but I’m fully involved in it now and it’s coming along nicely.

So far, I’ve only been revising through about 2k words per day. I’m hoping to push that up to at least 4k words, though, which means that I should finish it in the first week of February. I definitely want to get it done before LTUE, because there are other projects I’m anxious to get working on, especially Sons of the Starfarers. I want to launch that series this summer, but I still have to write books 2 and 3 … gah! Must … write … faster …

In other news, I recently got my schedule for LTUE. It looks like I’ll be on 5 panels this year, including on one with Eric James Stone and Dave Farland. Am I feeling imposter syndrome right about now? Why, yes, thank you for asking. :p In any case, here’s what the schedule currently looks like:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

4:00 pm — Being a Foreign Speaker
6:00 pm — Planet Building

Friday, February 14, 2014

12:00 pm — Writing Romance

Saturday, February 15, 2014

12:00 pm — ePublishing Short Stories
6:00 pm — Starting the Next Project

I’m definitely excited for this year’s symposium! Orson Scott Card is going to be there, as well as Brandon Sanderson, Dave Farland, LE Modesitt, and pretty much all the regulars (except for Howard Tayler–I heard he’s not coming). I’ve also got a bunch of long-time writer friends who will be there, many of whom are on panels of their own. It’s going to be big this year, and definitely a lot of fun!

In other news, a couple of days after posting about my goal to travel to the Czech Republic, a job landed in my lap that seems like the perfect way to save up the money. It’s with Google Fiber, and involves escorting technicians to the various utility huts scattered throughout the city, opening the doors for them, and sitting around while they do their work. With luck, I’ll be able to get a fair amount of writing done while I’m on the clock. And even though it’s an on-call position that might only go 10 or 20 hours some weeks, I’ll be paid for the full 40 hours (and not at minimum wage).

I have no idea how the job will work out yet, but it seems like a great opportunity to save up a lot of money while still having plenty of time to write. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news, Brothers in Exile is out with my first readers right now. One of them already finished it, which kind of shocked me. If they don’t find any major problems, I’ll go ahead and write the next one, hopefully finishing it before the end of March.

Sons of the Starfarers is going to be another novella series like Star Wanderers, but I’m going to go a bit longer on the individual books, like around the 35k to 45k word range. The omnibus editions will be in groups of three, so books I-III for the first omnibus, IV-VI for the second, VII-IX for the third, etc. I’d like to go to at least nine books in this series, though it could certainly end up going longer. I only have a very loose idea of where it’s going, but it feels like nine books at least.

That just about does it. Right now, I’m up to my knees in Star Wolf, so that definitely takes priority. But I definitely want to get back to Sons of the Starfarers, so I’ll try to finish it as soon as I can. If only I was one of those writers who could knock out 10k words every day … maybe someday. In the meantime, I’ll just keep plugging along as best I can.

Later!

Back to novels again

So yesterday I finished the rough draft of Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile. It needs work, but at least I’ve got something to work with. Of course, before I can do that, I need to take a break and work on something else.

For my next project, I’m going to do a massive revision of a novel I wrote almost three years ago. Heart of the Nebula is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and features James McCoy as the main character. He’s older and (somewhat) wiser, with a lot more responsibility resting on his shoulders as an officer in the Civil Defense Corps of the Colony. With the Hameji occupation driving them into famine and poverty, the stakes are a lot higher than the first book, and the dangers and intrigue a lot more complex. Not only are there pirates and criminals to deal with, but the Patrician is playing his own game, and James soon gets caught up in it.

Currently, this book is a real mess. I’ve attempted numerous revisions of it before, but finished none of them. The first part of the book is probably pretty close to where it needs to be, but then there are a bunch of broken subplots, characters who were excised from certain sections and left in others, scenes and chapters out of order, and relationships that develop either way too fast or hardly at all.

Before I dive in, I’m reading through the whole draft and making notes on a scene by scene basis. I’ve got a map set up for where all the scenes need to go, and I’m putting together a checklist of all the changes I have to make. I did the same thing when I wrote Bringing Stella Home and Genesis Earth (come to think of it, Desert Stars as well). Hopefully, this will help the revision to go quickly and to fix all the broken elements without watering down or polishing out the good stuff.

Probably the most important thing about revision notes is that they help me to separate my critical mind from my creative mind. When I’m looking at the book in my critical mind, I want to throw out the stuff that isn’t perfect and make lots of changes to the story. However, that can be a lot more destructive than constructive, since it’s the creative mind that really makes the good stuff. By writing a set of notes before diving into revisions, I can keep my critical mind from making too many changes to the actual story, and identify the problems so that when I go back to make the changes, I can switch the critical mind off and keep the creative mind on. And often, instead of making the changes I told myself to make (or rather, the changes my critical mind told me to make), my creative mind comes up with something else that puts the story on a much better path.

That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see how it goes. The revision notes are going pretty quickly now, and even though things are going to get more complicated deeper into the book, I don’t think it will take me more than three or four days to finish them (unless I get called in to a job somewhere). Once that’s done, I’ll dive right into the book, probably tossing half of it and rewriting from scratch.

Thing is, it’s been a long time since I’ve worked on a novel this way. All last year, I’ve been writing novellas, and while some of them have required overhauls, it’s never been too complicated. With novels, though, it can be a mess. I’m sure I can do it, but I’m not sure how long it will take me. Hopefully no longer than a month, but I’m not going to stress it. The important thing is to do it right, and to really immerse myself back into this world.

So that’s what I’m working on now. I hope these updates on my writing projects aren’t too boring. They’re really helpful in writing the Author’s Notes at the end of each book, because I can go back to my blog, drill down the categories by book title, and see what I was working on at various different times when other stuff was happening in my life. For a book like Heart of the Nebula, that’s going to be important, because it’s been almost three years in the making. For most of that time, it was just sitting on the back burner (or, more accurately, the fridge), but it’s out again now and I’m focusing on it again. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo

I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo because … yeah, I’m not going to talk about nanowrimo.

I’ve been doing a lot to get the print versions of the Star Wanderers novellas up, but beyond that, not a whole lot of writing. Still one scene to go in Sons of the Starfarers: Brothers in Exile (that’s the working title, anyway), but I keep putting it off because … I dunno. So many other things going on, maybe? Sometimes it’s the easy stuff you put off the longest, sometimes, the hardest stuff. But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo …

In any case, I set Thanksgiving as the deadline to get all the print versions out for Star Wanderers, and it looks like I’ll be able to hit it. Outworlder, Fidelity, Sacrifice, and Homeworld are already up, and should propagate to Amazon in the next couple of days. Dreamweaver is in the proofing process, and I should be able to typeset Benefactor and Reproach in the next couple of days. It’s a relaxing thing to do while listening to podcasts, and the books are short enough that I can get all the work done in just a few hours.

In December, I hope to release a new Star Wanderers book: Deliverance, which covers the events of Homeworld from Mariya and Lucca’s points of view. This was a fun one to write, so I’m looking forward to getting it out there for you guys to read. It’s with my first readers now, who should get back to me by the first week of December or so. The draft is already pretty clean, so unless they bring up some major issues, I should be able to get it out fairly quickly.

And after that, I think I’m going to take a break from the Star Wanderers universe for a while to work on some novels. It’s been fun doing the shorter stuff, and I’ll definitely return to the novella form in the future, but there are a bunch of unfinished projects screaming at me to work on them. First among them is probably Heart of the Nebula, which I haven’t even touched in almost a year. It needs a huge overhaul–I’ll probably scrap a good half or so from the middle, probably more. But the ideas behind the story are solid, and I would really like to get another Gaia Nova novel out soon.

But the one that’s calling the most to me is probably Lifewalker. That’s the post-apocalyptic one with the guy wandering down the ruins of I-15 with a copy of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn toward a Las Vegas populated by cannibals. There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s the 10 second pitch I’ve been giving people. The voice on that one was so different from anything else I’ve done, I had to take a break from it after I got to a good stopping place. But recently, it’s been calling out to me to finish it. I’ll probably move on to that one if I don’t go to Heart of the Nebula first.

Then there’s Edenfall, The Sword Bearer, a couple of other untitled ones, that Sword & Planet story I said I’d write … holy crap, so many unfinished books. I feel like I’m a bad writer whenever I don’t finish everything I start, but that just seems to be part of my process. Hopefully none of my readers are too impatient to get any particular book–although, come to think of it, that kind of pressure might be just what I need.

Either way, I really need to get back to writing. But I already said I wasn’t going to talk about nanowrimo (I wonder if this blog post counts?)

😛 Later.

Nanowrimo is kicking my butt

… but that’s a good thing. While procrastinating my daily word count, I’ve almost finished Book I of Sons of the Starfarers, formatted and orders proofs for the first four Star Wanderers novellas, alpha-read most of another book for a friend, and done a bunch of other things (which is nothing compared to a friend of mine, who procrastinated by getting a job).

Right now, I’ve got about 3,500 words written, which means I need to write about 2,000 words a day in order to hit 50k words before the end of the month. Actually, that shouldn’t be too hard–most of the difficulty of writing is just getting out of the way, so when I put my hands on the keyboard and say “whatever you do, DON’T STOP WRITING,” good things actually happen. At a nanowrimo get-together at Dragon’s Keep in Provo, I knocked out 1500 words in about an hour using that method. It’s actually quite liberating–I should do it this way more often.

So why only 3,500 words, instead of the 11,666 that I’m supposed to have? Because I REALLY REALLY REALLY have to finish this Sons of the Starfarers book, and that’s been taking up virtually all of my time and mental space. I hit the action stuff a couple of days ago, and things were just flowing, but now it’s that last crucial scene and I’m not quite sure how to pull it off. Probably I’ll write something and change it later, or tell myself that at least so I can just finish it and move on.

But UURGHH!

Anyways, that is all. Back to writing.

Trope Tuesday: Made a Slave

Just because something is heinous doesn’t mean that it won’t make a good story. In fact, the Rule of Drama practically guarantees that it will make a good story. For some weird reason, we humans are fascinated by things in fiction that would horrify us in real life, and love it when our favorite characters are put into situations where we would never want to find our loved ones. Perhaps there are many reasons for this, some of them better than others.

One of the worst situations in which anyone can find themselves is slavery, in which they basically become the property of someone else. Slavery takes many different forms (and has many different tropes), but the thing they all have in common is the denial of freedom, dignity, and the basic human rights that most of us take for granted. So when a character who’s free gets made a slave, you can usually expect to see some pretty high drama as a result.

As the tvtropes page for this trope explains it:

There is often a scene in which the character is being sold on the slave market, showcasing all the evils of slavery; the protagonist will witness how families are torn apart, will have to undress and be examined like an animal, and will perhaps be beaten … If he looks strong, he will be told that he will go to the galleys or the mines — a Fate Worse Than Death — or perhaps to the Gladiator Games. If she (or occasionally he) is attractive, she will be told that she will make a buyer very happy indeed.

If the main character is a slave, this is usually a part of his (or her) backstory; it’s fairly rare for a character to be born into slavery these days, probably because slavery is no longer considered an acceptable social institution in our modern Western society. In older stories, the slave character may be of noble birth, setting up a sort of Cinderella story where they realize who they are and eventually come into their own. That still happens, though usually it’s more about them taking power into their own hands to rise above their awful circumstances.

Surprisingly, this is a trope you’ll see with some frequency in science fiction. Heinlein wrote a novel about it, pictured to the left (one of his better ones, in my opinion). It happens quite a bit in the Sword and Planet subgenre, as well as any gladiator-type tale. You’d think at some point our technology would become sufficiently advanced that we wouldn’t need to enslave each other, but apparently we will use manual labor in the future. Besides, at it’s core, slavery isn’t about acquiring cheap labor–it’s about owning someone, taking away their freedom and control. Until human nature itself changes, we’re probably going to have to deal with slavery in one form or another for the forseeable future.

In any case, there’s something rousing–perhaps even inspiring–about the story of a character who rises above such an awful situation to win back, against all odds, their rights and freedoms. That’s probably why we still enjoy retelling this trope. A character can’t truly rise until they’ve bottomed out somewhere, and as far as hitting rock bottom goes, getting made a slave is pretty dang low.

I’ve played with this trope in a couple of my books. In Sholpan and Bringing Stella Home, Stella goes through pretty much everything on the tvtropes page, which sets things up pretty well for … well, I won’t spoil it. 😉 In Stars of Blood and Glory, Abaqa tries to make the Princess Hikaru his slave, but since they’re both teenagers and he’s younger than her, it ends up being rather hilarious (she gets rescued soon afterward too, so it doesn’t stick long enough for the really bad stuff to happen. And then the rescuers … well, I won’t spoil that either).

Right now, I’m playing with it a bit in Sons of the Starfarers, though I’m not sure where it’ll end up exactly. Probably not so far as this trope, but I never really know what my characters will do–or what will happen to them.