space opera – Page 5 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

F is for Faster Than Light

Remember that moment in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon went into hyperspace? When Harrison Ford shouted “go strap yourselves in, I’m going to make the jump to light speed,” and the sky lit up as the stars streaked by? That was my first introduction to faster-than-light (FTL) travel, and I haven’t looked back since.

FTL is a major recurring trope in space opera, and not just because of how cool it is. If you’re going to have a galactic empire, you need some way to get around that empire–or at least some way to transmit information without too much difficulty. The distance between star systems is measured not in miles or kilometers, but light years–that is, the distance that a particle of light can travel in one year. Considering how the nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is ~4.24 ly away, you can see the need for some sort of magical technology to bridge the distance.

FTL travel comes in four basic flavors:

Warp Drives — The ship breaks the speed of light as easily as our modern fighter jets break the speed of sound. Impossible to justify, except through hand-waving. The most prominent example of this is Star Trek.
Jump Drives — The ship disappears from its current position and reappears somewhere else. Also requires hand-waving, but is at least a little easier to justify. Battlestar Galactica is a good example of this, as is Schlock Mercenary.
Hyperspace Drives — The ship enters an alternate dimension which allows it to travel faster through our own. The alternate dimension is called ____space, usually “hyper” but also “quasi,” “x,” etc. Star Wars is the classic example, though Star Control II took things a step further by having a hyperspace dimension within hyperspace.
Wormgate Network — The ship (or maybe just the passengers) enters a portal which transports it to a portal somewhere else. A network of these portals allows travel throughout the galaxy. Stargate and Babylon 5 use this method.

An alternate way to do it is to make FTL travel impossible, but hold the galactic empire together through FTL communication. This technology, known as the ansible, features prominently in Ursula K. Le Guin’s books and the Ender’s Game universe. It has some really interesting implications: for example, even though planets can communicate instantaneously with each other, it takes almost 40 or 50 years to go from one to another, but at near-light speeds, it feels as if only a few months have gone by. Thus, if you’re going to travel to another world, you have to leave everything behind, including your family and loved ones. By traveling from world to world, you can skip entire generations, spreading your natural lifespan across thousands of years of normal time.

In writing FTL, one thing you have to be really careful about is to keep in mind ways in which the system can be abused. For example, if jump drive technology makes it possible to instantaneously transport anything anywhere in the universe, then you can bet that someone is going to send a bomb into the White House (or whatever the equivalent is in your fictional universe). Thus, the invention of unrestricted jump drive technology will lead to a very short and brutal war.

This actually happened in Schlock Mercenary, and the solution was Terraport Area Denial (TAD) zones, or broad areas of space where a force field prevents anyone from either jumping in or out. Thus, anyone who wants to visit a planet in a TAD zone has to jump to the edge of the field and travel the rest of the way at sublight speeds.

FTL isn’t always appropriate for a science fiction story. If the story is supposed to lean more toward hard sf, then it’s probably better to stick with our current understanding of the rules of physics, which state that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Still, with things like quantum entanglement and other recent discoveries, if you know the science well enough, even the speed of light might not be an upper limit. But for the rest of us mortals, FTL is basically just magic–a sufficiently explained magic, perhaps, but magic nonetheless.

Personally, I’m a fan of the jump drive form of FTL. That’s the one I use the most in my own books. The cost is that the further distance you try to jump, the harder it is to pinpoint exactly where you’ll end up. To overcome this, you can use jump beacons to draw out anyone trying to jump into your particular sector and have them exit jumpspace next to the beacon. This comes in handy in combat, when the enemy tries to jump a nuke onto your ship.

In the later Gaia Nova books, FTL is facilitated by jump stations spread out in a line across space, with reactors powerful enough to jump ships rapidly to the next point along the line. In the earlier Star Wanderers books, that technology hasn’t been invented yet, so there’s still an Outworld frontier.

It gets kind of complicated, but it’s lots and lots of fun to world build. For example, how does a particular change in the FTL tech alter the galactic balance of power? When settlers try to colonize a new system, what do they establish first–starlanes, jump beacons, Lagrange outposts, or what? As with any magic, changing one thing affects everything else, which also affects everything else, which … yeah, you get the picture.

E is for Empire

Almost every far future science fiction story has a galactic empire of some kind. From Dune to Foundation, from Star Wars to Firefly, there’s always someone trying to rule the galaxy, often in a way that makes life difficult for the protagonists.

Why? Rule of drama, of course, but also because it gives the story a truly epic scope. Just as the classics such as Homer’s Iliad and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are as much about entire civilizations as they are about the people characters within them, so it is with science fiction, especially space opera. Combine that with science fiction’s forward-thinking nature, and you have the potential for some truly amazing stories about humanity’s destiny among the stars.

But why empire? Because even if we make it out to the stars, we’ll probably still take with us all of the baggage that makes us human. Science fiction may be forward looking, but history repeats itself, and you can’t have a clear view of the future without understanding and acknowledging the past.

Not all galactic empires are evil, but most of them are. We shouldn’t have to look further than the real-world history of Imperialism to see why. Oppression, exploitation, slavery, genocide–all of these have been done in the name of Empire, and many more evils besides. Even benevolent hegemonic powers (such as, I would argue, the United States of America) often end up doing great harm, either through action or inaction.

Of course, all of this makes for some really great stories. When Asimov wrote his Foundation series, he quite literally based it on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. When Frank Herbert wrote Dune, he drew extensively from his background as an orientalist and based the overworld story on the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries. Star Wars is based loosely on the collapse of the Roman Republic, and Firefly echoes many of the old Western tales of former Confederate soldiers heading west after the US Civil War.

It’s worth pointing out that the Galactic Empire is by no means the only form of political organization in space opera. There are actually several, including:

The Federation — A loose organization of stars and planets that usually exists to foster cooperation and mutual peace between galactic civilizations. Rarely evil, but can be crippled by red tape.
The Republic — A more centralized version of the Federation, typically. Exercises more control over its citizens, but not in an oppressive way. Usually features some form of representative government.
The Alliance — A team of political underdogs united to overthrow the Empire and establish a more just form of government in its place. If they win, they usually become the Republic or the Federation.
The Kingdom — A smaller government within the larger political system, often struggling for survival against more powerful forces. Not always democratic, but is often good, at least to its own citizens.
The Hegemonic Empire — Like the Empire, but rules primarily through soft power, ie co-opting their enemies rather than crushing them. May overlap with the Republic or the Federation.
The People’s Republic of Tyranny — The Empire pretending to be the Federation.
The Vestigial Empire — What the Empire becomes when it’s been defeated but not yet destroyed. Still oppressive and evil, but rules a smaller territory and struggles for relevance and survival.
The Remnant — An element from the Alliance that’s gone rogue. The war may be over, but these guys are still fighting it, even if they’ve lost sight of what they’re fighting for.
The Horde — A highly aggressive and expansionist warlord state. By far the most violent and brutal of any political organization, it seeks to conquer and subjugate the entire galaxy.

As a political science major, all these forms of government really fascinate me. I’ve played with quite a few of them, especially the Horde (Bringing Stella Home), the Empire (Desert Stars), the Hegemonic Empire (Star Wanderers), the Kingdom (Stars of Blood and Glory), and the Remnant (also Stars of Blood and Glory). You can definitely expect to see me play with them again in the future.

C is for Cryo

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).

B is for Space Battles

osc_first_meetings If you fell in love with science fiction when you were twelve, chances were it was because of the awesome space battles. That was certainly the case with me. When I saw Star Wars for the first time, I spent hours running around the house pretending I was flying my own starfighter. In some ways, I’ve never really stopped. 😛

Ever since space opera became its own subgenre, space warfare has featured prominently in it, probably for the same reasons that Homer and Tolstoy framed their sprawling epics with a tale of war. Where else are you going to find enough drama to fill volumes? The fact that it’s set in space makes it so much cooler.

There are a lot of things about the space setting that make war stories different from those set here on Earth. For one thing, there’s a huge element of exploration and unknown. Even before we took the first photographs of Earth from space, there pretty much isn’t any corner on this planet that hasn’t been discovered by somebody. In space, though, it’s still possible to stumble on a hidden planet, or find a mysterious alien artifact that can turn the tide of the war (Halo, anyone?).

For another thing, the dynamics of battle are completely different. Sure, some stories treat space like an ocean, and there’s certainly a place for that kind of story, but the more interesting ones (at least to me) take into account all the profound differences. For one thing, the zero gravity means that there is no “up” or “down,” which means that you have to deal with the possibility of attack coming from any direction, not just along a horizontal plane. That concept alone drives the battles in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, where “the enemy’s gate is down.”

One thing that really tickles me is when the story takes things a step further and incorporates things like orbital mechanics and delta-v. I haven’t seen many books or games that do this, but the ones that do have really engrossed me by making the world feel that much more real. Glen Cook did it in Passage At Arms, and the new Battlestar Galactica did it in the viper dogfights (though I’m not sure if they did it on the ship-to-ship scale).

The implications of real-world space physics on warfare are quite fascinating. Rocketpunk Manifesto is an excellent blog that’s almost entirely dedicated to exploring them all, with all sorts of fascinating discussions on what the “plausible mid-future” may look like. But even if all you’re looking for is an entertaining romp through space, the story telling possibilities are so much greater when you take the constraints of physics into account.

For example, if it takes months or even years to travel between planets, and orbital trajectories are fairly straightforward to figure out, how does it affect things if you can see the enemy fleet coming at your planet that long in advance? If escape velocity from a gravity well like Earth is so difficult to achieve, what does that mean about the possibility of long-term planetary sieges? And if starships are so far apart and moving so fast as to make full-on broadsides unlikely, how does that shape the battle tactics and strategy? In spite of the physical constraints (or indeed, perhaps because of them), the possibilities are endless.

Man, I love me some good space battles. One of my recent sci-fi favorites that features some epic battles is Wolfhound by my friend Kindal Debenham. In my own work, you’ll find lots of them, especially in the Gaia Nova series (Bringing Stella Home, Stars of Blood and Glory, and to a lesser extent Desert Stars). They say that the golden age for science fiction is about twelve years old, and that’s definitely true for me. Expect to see lots more space battles from me in the future.

A is for Aliens

Alien 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.

Trope Tuesday: Neutral Good

Arguably the best of the good-aligned characters, the Neutral Good can always be counted on to do the right thing, whether that means working within the system or rebelling against it. Whether young or old, soft or shrewd, nice or not so nice, these are the guys (and girls) most likely to save the world and defeat the enemy with love.

From the easydamus character alignment page:

A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them.

The Neutral Good is not devoid of weaknesses, of course. Although they are devoted to good, their lack of commitment to law means that they are not always willing to enforce it. Also, for those who just want to get things done, this alignment can be somewhat limiting, in the way that a commitment to any higher ideal usually is.

Interestingly, this is a very common alignment for heroes in space opera stories. Case in point, Luke Skywalker: even though he’s young and reckless, he’s not above learning the ways of the force and joining the Jedi order. Miles Vorkosigan from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series also falls squarely into the Neutral Good camp. Moving on to manga and webcomics, Alphonse and Winry from Fullmetal Alchemist both fall under this alignment, giving balance to Edward’s more chaotic outbursts. Agatha from Girl Genius is also a Neutral Good…at least, when there aren’t any wrenches nearby.

There are quite a few characters with this alignment in my own work. Even though she’s a mercenary captain, Danica from Bringing Stella Home falls squarely into this alignment; she’s got a tough outer shell, but she’ll do anything for her men, even…well, I don’t want to ruin Stars of Blood and Glory. 😉 Also from Bringing Stella Home / Sholpan, Stella is solidly Neutral Good, which is part of why the ending is so deliciously twisted. In Star Wanderers, Jeremiah falls into this alignment mostly through default, which is good for Noemi because the circumstances of the novel put her totally at his mercy. And in Desert Stars, this is probably Mira’s alignment, though she’s easily manipulated by her Neutral Evil mother.

What can I say? I’ve got a soft spot for Neutral Goods. Considering how well this kind of a hero fits in to a classic space adventure, it shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Wolfhound by Kindal Debenham

Jacob Hull may be just a spacer’s son, but he’s not afraid to dream big. As an ensign in the Celostian Navy, his biggest dream is to pilot a destroyer like the Wolfhound, the brand new ship on which he receives his first assignment. But when pirates attack on their training exercises and drive them far from the rest of the Celostian fleet, Hull realizes that his dream might be more than he asked for…

Full disclosure: Kindal Debenham is actually a good friend of mine–we were both members of Quark in college and still keep in touch as alpha readers for each others’ books. That’s not why I’m saying that I loved this book, though. I’ll admit, I had a few doubts when I first started it. The descriptions are a little wordy, the formatting isn’t perfectly clean–but none of that really matters, because the story is AWESOME.

Why is it so awesome? Because it’s full of characters you want to root for, facing one impossible conflict after the other, each one bigger and more daunting than the one before. The story gets off to a decent start, but it really starts to take off after the first third or so, and just keeps getting better and better right up to the end.

Seriously, this is the kind of book I used to hunt for in the library as a kid. It reminds me a little of the old Star Wars novels by Timothy Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson and Michael A. Stackpole. Forget dark, dystopian futures and boring, high-concept stuff–this is some rip-roaring space opera, with stations you wish you could visit and starships you wish you could fly.

So yeah, I loved this book. Great read; once I got into the second half, I couldn’t put it down. If you’re a fan of space adventure stories, you should definitely check out this book. It’s available from both Amazon and Smashwords as an indie published ebook, and it’s actually holding it’s own quite well on the Amazon bestseller lists. It definitely deserves the spot! Oh, and if you want to check out Kindal’s blog, you can find him here.

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!

Interview with Slava Heretz

I met Slava Heretz online shortly after I started publishing my books. He’s another indie writer who specializes in science fiction and space opera. I’m reading his short story / novelette series Outer Pendulum right now, and it’s pretty good. If you like a good space adventure, I think you’ll like his stuff.

Anyhow, we decided it would be fun to interview each other on our blogs, so here he is.

Tell us a little bit about your books.

The Outer Pendulum is a space opera which I am releasing in monthly 10,000 word installments. The story is set in a galaxy where humans are the unwanted newcomers, escaping an oppressive life back in the Milky Way, only to find themselves facing another kind of tyranny: the seemingly endless stream of piracy and corruption in their new land. Our hero is Captain Eli Saffinger, a former New Alliance Navy captain turned mercenary fleet commander. His mission, which he accepts reluctantly, is to escort a freighter carrying extremely valuable mining equipment to the only allies of the weakening colonial state. So his journey begins in Corsair (Outer Pendulum, Book 1), where he must immediately confront the most ruthless and dangerous privateer in the galactic region.

How long have you been a writer, and what got you started?

I started serious work on a near-future technothriller back in late 2007. I think that’s really when I began to consider myself a writer. As opposed to earlier dabbles with fiction back in my youth, I actually spent a very large portion of my days dedicated to this project — and to be perfectly honest, I’m still not exactly sure why. I just suddenly had a story to tell. It came to me one day in the shower and I said to myself, “Hey, Slava, let’s write a novel.” So when the idea for The Outer Pendulum popped into my head this past spring, I had the wisdom and experience from my many many mistakes to give this story more life, energy and passion.

What draws you to space opera and science fiction?

As an only child I had a lot of time to just sit there by myself and dream up wildly imaginative tales of space travel and cool technology. Some of these ideas were good, some not so much. But I always marveled (and still do) at the things which I have no hope of ever accomplishing. Theoretically I could be a rock star. I have no talent for it, but at least the occupation exists. But no matter how hard I work at, there is no way in my lifetime, save a true miracle, that I will ever travel to another solar system. And because of that, the possibilities of the imagination are endless. I love that.

Who are some of your favorite authors?

Dan Simmons for his wonderful characters and settings. Iain M. Banks for that touch of witty humor we all love and need. And M. John Harrison for anytime I want a truly warped, weird, yet poetic reading experience — he’s kind of the Stanley Kubrick of sci-fi noir.

Why did you decide to self publish?

I had submitted several pieces of fiction to traditional publishers in the past. Many of them flat out ignored me. Others, however, sent very positive rejection letters. That’s when a light bulb appeared over my head. I asked myself: why am I waiting for months to have one person tell me I write well, when I could let the world of hungry readers decide for themselves? It wasn’t long before I discovered Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords. I soon realized what a revolutionary idea it was to allow authors to simply create and let the market speak for itself.

What have you learned from your indie publishing experience thus far?

I’ve actually learned quite a bit about readers of indie literature as a whole. I’ve heard the complete spectrum of praise and criticism about my series. Some have absolutely loved the story. Some have vehemently hated it. But if I were to pick out some things that they all had in common they would be a) a seemingly insatiable appetite for reading within the genre b) that MOST of them actually do read samples and/or product descriptions before buying and c) that this growing community of open-minded folks is truly willing to ignore the stigma of indie publishing and seek out works by self-published authors. I can’t say that for them it’s an easy job. But they try, and I thank each and every one that contacts me — because it seems in the end, the reward of finding a few self-published diamonds far outweighs the possible tedium of sifting through the ever-growing rough.

What are your goals and plans for the future?

First and foremost, I have to finish The Outer Pendulum. I envision eight or ten installments culminating into a complete saga by summer of 2012. There is also an audiobook/podcast in the works. There will even be a multiplayer online card game based on the universe within the story. I mean, I have a ton of other ideas kicking around in the ol’ noggin — such as books in other genres. But this will certainly keep me busy for the next several months. It’s really been a lot of fun writing the series.

If all of us have at least one impossible dream, what is yours?

I would love to meet a sentient alien. I can’t say with 100% certainty that they exist, but I really hope so. If I may quote one of my favorite TV shows — “I want to believe”

Slava lives in Brookline, MA with his beautiful wife Alyssa, his neurotic dog Duke and his passive aggressive cat Chester.

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.