Tag: outer space

Trope Tuesday: Settling the (Final) Frontier

I love stories about colonization, especially when they’re set in space.  There’s just something about a small group of rugged pioneers striking out into the harsh, unforgiving wilderness to make a new life for themselves.  Maybe it’s just something about my American heritage, or all those 4x games I played as a kid, but I doubt it.  Ever since the dawn of time, we humans have been on the move, looking for new and better places to call home.  Small wonder, then, that so many of our stories, both ancient and modern, are about settling the frontier.

Since space is the final frontier, this trope is very common in science fiction.  Heinlein was a huge fan of it, but he wasn’t the only one to play with it–not by a long shot.  John Scalzi (The Last Colony), Nancy Kress (Crossfire), C.J. Cherryh (40,000 in Gehenna), Anne McCaffrey (Freedom’s Landing), and Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars) are just a few of the many science fiction writers who have explored this trope in their works.  In recent years, several sci fi miniseries (Battlestar Galactica, Terra Nova) have used it as a major premise as well.  And of course, you have all the classic 4x games like Masters of Orion and Alpha Centauri.

Space Colonies can come in a variety of different flavors:

  • Lost Colony — What happens when the original colonists lose all contact with the outside universe and no one thinks to check up on them for a while.  Can either turn into a story of survival or a clash of cultures, if/when they ever re-establish contact.
  • Cult Colony — Religion is one of the few things that will drive massive numbers of people to leave everything behind and start over in a new world.  Just look at the Pilgrims for a real-world examples.  In space colonies of this type, you can expect to see some extremely radical people, since the isolation of deep space tends to compound their fundamentalist tendencies.  Expect these to be both weird and frightening.
  • Space Amish — Something of a combination of the two, except with much more primitive technology.  Expect to see log cabins, horse- (or giant lizard) drawn carriages, and other tropes closer to the Western genre.  Sometimes, they may be hiding a superweapon.
  • Penal Colony — Australia in space (ahem…IN SPAAACE!!!).  What happens when the empire needs a place to conveniently exile all the troublemakers and rabble rousers.  Not a place for the faint of heart.
  • Wretched Hive — What happens to a penal colony when the prisoners actually run the place.  Like the previous type, except taken up to eleven.  Or not, depending on the history and culture.  Tatooine is the eponymous example.
  • Death World — As the name would suggest, this is not the kind of place you’d want to homestead.  Anyone who does is bound to be a badass.  The Empire and the Federation often recruit most of their soldiers from here.
  • Company World — I couldn’t find this one listed on tvtropes.  Basically, it’s a planet that is owned and governed entirely by a private corporation, which expects to make a tidy profit off of the place.  The colonists are basically indentured servants (since robots simply wouldn’t do) and have almost no property or rights.  Expect the story to be about sticking it to the man.

These are just a few of the many possibilities that you can play with when settling the frontier.  In my opinion, however, the essential elements are as follows:

  • The story is not just about exploring a new world, but establishing some kind of a permanent presence there.
  • By coming to the new world, the colonists must leave everything from their old, familiar lives behind.
  • The colonists must resolve the story conflict through their own self-reliance, not by waiting for an outside force to save them.

I’ve only dabbled with this trope, but it does play a role in many of my stories, most notably in the Star Wanderers series.  Genesis Earth also has elements of it as well, though it’s not the main driver for the plot.  It is a major factor in Heart of the Nebula, though, the (currently) unpublished sequel to Bringing Stella Home.  And in my future books, you can definitely expect to see this trope again.

Up to my elbows in book surgery

That’s probably the best term for what I’m doing with Heart of the Nebula right now.  Basically, I let some of my darlings live, and they grew some extra limbs and started drooling acid without my realizing it.  But now, I’ve put enough distance between myself and the first draft that I have no qualms about grabbing the axe and chopping off heads.

Don’t worry; this is all a normal part of my creative process.  Maybe someday, stories will burst fully formed from my head like Athena from the brow of Zeus, but for now, my ideas are a lot more like baby turtles–if I’m lucky, one or two out of a dozen will actually reach the water and survive.  Protip: don’t follow the lights.

Speaking of ancient mythology, I’m reading the Argonautica right now, and I can’t help but notice that it would make a really, really, REALLY awesome science fiction story.  No, seriously–think about it.  A group of legendary heroes sets out on an epic voyage in search of some applied phlebotinum macguffin, have all sorts of adventures on strange and distant planets, get the girl to fall in love with the captain, and bring her back with them to their homeworld.  It would also work well as a heroic fantasy, but space is so much more awesome.

Incidently, Kutaisi was the capital of ancient Colchis, where Jason and the Argonauts came seeking the golden fleece.  People still speak of Medea as if she were a real person–generally, they think she was a dirty traitor who sold out her own people.  But people still enjoy the love story, and if you keep your eyes open you can see restaurants and hotels named after her.

So yeah.  Ancient Greek mythology + science fiction = win.  You can definitely expect to see some more of that in my own writing in the future.

In other news, I recently did an interview on fellow indie author Ty Johnston’s blog.  In it, I talk a little about my travel writing, what draws me to speculative fiction, my favorite number (hint: it’s 12), and my insights into the ancient Mayan calendar and the 2012 apocalypse.  It was a lot of fun–you should definitely check it out.

If you would like to host me for an interview on your blog, shoot me an email!  I’m always up for stuff like that.  Otherwise, I’d better roll up my sleeves and get back to hacking up operating on my book.

Trope Tuesday: Space pirates with Kindal Debenham

For today’s Trope Tuesday post, I thought it would be fun to bring on my friend Kindal Debenham to speak about one of the tropes in his new book, Wolfhound.

Kindal and I were in the same writing group in college, and attended Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class together.  I just picked up a copy of his book, and it’s pretty good–definitely the kind of science fiction that I love.  You can currently find Wolfhound on Amazon, as well as Kindal’s self-publishing site.

So anyhow, here’s Kindal’s discussion of space pirates in Wolfhound.

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Space pirates are kind of a staple in science fiction. We’ve seen them in all sorts of different forms since the genre came into being. As the trope states, though, there are basically two main classes. The first class is basically a bunch of violent criminals on a spaceship, kind of mirroring the behavior of modern day pirates in Somalia or Southeast Asia. The second are a corny recycled in space variant of the eighteenth century Caribbean pirate with robotic peg legs and a space parrot. Obviously one is a bit more realistic than the other. 🙂

The version I went for leans a lot more heavily on the first class of space pirates rather than the second. I wanted a smaller scale conflict in order to introduce my main character, and pirates seemed to be a good opponent to use for that purpose. Since the ship that Jacob Hull is on was partially based on the USS Constitution, I decided that I could use some of the pirates that ship fought during its history: the Barbary pirates.

These pirates weren’t your clichéd corsairs with parrots and a desire for plunder. The Barbary pirates were a collection of raiders that operated out of northern Africa. Their motivation was to support their nations by taking ships and capturing crews, which they then added to their fleet and put to work as slaves. In addition to raiding ships, the Barbary pirates also went on slave raids throughout southern Europe. They would accept tribute to ignore the ships of certain countries (think ‘protection money’ for a mob equivalent). The US had to pay about a fifth of the early national budget in tribute to these pirates until the politicians decided that guns were cheaper to buy—which led directly to the creation of the USS Constitution.

Building off of those ideas, I created the Telosian pirates. Vicious, more interested in valuable ransom for prisoners and well armed ships than simple cargo, and willing to do just about anything to satisfy their greed. With an utter ruthlessness only matched by their subtle plots, they made quite a good enemy for Jacob Hull and the rest of Wolfhound’s crew, and they were a much more interesting enemy to fight than a stereotypical Pirate-with-an-Eyepatch would have been. In my opinion at least, though I’m a little biased.

So those are the bad guys of Wolfhound—at least, they’re the majority of the bad guys—and believe me, they live up to their reputation as nasty pieces of work. Hope you guys enojoyed the background, and I hope I didn’t get too history nerd on you guys. See you around!

Trope Tuesday: Recycled IN SPACE!

Or, as my friends at Leading Edge would say, IN SPAAACE!!!

The basic idea behind this trope is that setting a story in space makes it cool and different.  The tvtropes article focuses mainly on how this trope is used in children’s cartoons, but it actually goes much wider.  In fact, most space stories are actually based on stories from other genres, or even from history.

For example, Asimov’s Federation series is based on Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, David Drake’s Lieutenant Leary series is based on Patrick Obrian’s Master and Commander series, and Frank Herbert’s Dune is based on the rise of Islam.  Westerns are especially prone to get the space treatment (Firefly, anyone?), which is where we get “wagon train to the stars.”

At its worst, this trope is nothing more than a pointless gimmick.  At its best, however, it can produce some extremely good work.  The key, as always, is to work within the limitations of the setting.

One of the best examples of this is Dune.  Frank Herbert didn’t merely lift 7th century Arabia into space and call it Arrakis; he created a distinctly alien world with its own history, culture, biology, and role within the galactic empire.  For example, Herbert solved the FTL problem by linking interstellar travel to the spice, tying his space-Arabs to the politics and economics of the rest of the galaxy.

Interestingly, your space physics don’t have to be perfect for this trope to work; they just have to be believable.  For things like artificial gravity and faster than light travel, most people will accept a little hand-waving, provided that you do it well.  The important thing, as always, is the story.

Conquering the mountain

So this last weekend, I decided to solo climb Y Mountain.  For those of you who don’t know, Y Mountain is one of the smaller mountains along the Wasatch range local to the Provo/Orem area.  It’s called Y Mountain because of the enormous letter “Y” painted on its side (yeah, that’s what they do to mountains in this part of the country).

Of course, the only reason I did a solo hike was because I’ve been up this mountain multiple times before and I know the trail.  Plus, it’s kind of a smaller mountain–it’s still over 8,000 feet, but the trail is only about 2 miles long.  I’m a slow hiker, so it took me about three hours to get to the top.

To get to the top, you first have to hike the Y, which is the most boring part.  The trail is literally wide enough for a truck to drive up–that’s how they repaint the Y every few years–and it’s all on the side facing the valley, so all you can really see is city.

After the Y, you go up a much smaller trail that cuts across the face of the mountain south, into Slide Canyon.  At the entrance to the canyon is this really cool rocky outcropping that some people call Lover’s Point–I like to call it the Citadel.  The trail winds up the canyon a ways, passes another really cool overlook, and turns a couple of bends before you reach the canyon head.

This is where things get interesting.  At the head, there’s a small meadow surrounded on all sides by forest.  On the right is a campsite, where the trail forks and heads up to Maple Mountain.  If you stay left, though, the trail eventually takes you to the summit of Y Mountain.

The next half mile or so is pretty strenuous.  The trail goes through an aspen grove, past another meadow, into this freaky dark forest, past another meadow, into another forest…and then you find yourself in this vast meadow, above the trees, surrounded on all sides by mountains.

I have to be honest: when I got to this point, I was absolutely terrified.  The roar of the city was gone (and yes, the city roars–it’s a very distinct sound), the only other people around were a couple of hikers somewhere behind me, whom I hadn’t heard in maybe an hour, and all around was such incredible vastness…it’s hard to explain without actually being there.  I just felt so small and isolated, surrounded by this immensity of nature that didn’t know who or what I was, or even that I was…

It was AWESOME.

By the time I got to the peak, the sun had set and the stars were already coming out.  I only climbed to the false summit–the one with the view of the entire valley–and from there, I could see past Point of the Mountain all the way north to Sandy, with Spanish Fork and Elk Grove to the south, and Utah Lake a giant puddle in between.  It was pretty cool.

But again, the alone-ness of the place really got to me.  It made me wonder: is this how future space explorers will feel, when they’re traveling between stars?  I can’t imagine how much greater is the vastness of space, compared to what I felt.  If so, what kind of an effect with that have on the people who live out there on the fringes of settled space?  How will it affect their culture, their religion, their sense of who they are and what their place is in this infinite universe?

I wish I could say I felt this huge sense of triumph after getting to the top, but honestly all I could think was: “oh crap, now I’ve got to walk all the way down.”  I did it the same way anyone does anything–one step at a time–and thankfully, I made it down without incident.

Passed a young couple up on a date; they were pretty impressed that I hiked by myself, and gave me some water (which was fortunate–I ran out at the summit).  Passed another pair of backpackers who were hoping to camp overnight on the summit, but other than that, I didn’t see anyone else until I got to the Y.

So that was my adventure this weekend, and how I celebrated my 27th birthday.  It was totally worth it.  In a couple of days, I’ll share the photos.