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Anatomy of a Story: Thicker Than Water

The second of the two stories I’ve put up on this blog is ‘Thicker Than Water’, a hard sf story set on a moon of Saturn. It was originally published in Jupiter sf magazine, issue 23, in January 2009.

Major Gina Priest lives on Tethys, a moon of Saturn. When two raiders from another moon, Titan, attempt to steal some of the fullerenes found on Tethys, they are captured. Gina is shocked to discover that one of the raiders is her brother. She learns she was abducted from Titan at a very young age. After another officer disobeys her orders and tortures the raiders, Gina decides to help the Titans escape and return with them to to her long-lost mother and father.

Here’s the PDF. You might want to read the story before you continue reading this.

The plot of ‘Thicker Than Water’ is based on the story of Iphigenia from ancient Greece. She was abducted as a child and taken to Tauris, where she grew up and became a priestess of Artemis. A pair of Athenians then raided the temple while Iphigenia was present. She learned they were her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. So she lied to the Taurians, and returned to Athens to join her long-lost family. With the statue of Artemis they had stolen.

I forget where I originally came across Iphigenia’s story. It was back in the early 1990s, so it wasn’t on the Web. I’d also found a mention of a mysterious dark patch on Tethys in a planetology textbook I’d bought for reference – Exploring the Planets by Eric H Christiansen and Kenneth W Hamblin (1995). The book’s a bit out-of-date now, but I have the Web instead. I decided that the dark patch was buckminsterfullerenes – carbon molecules in the shape of spheres or tubes, which were thought to be artificial but do occur very rarely in nature. This idea came partly from another story, ‘Black Rain’ (available in Set It In Space And Stick A Robot In It), which is set on Titan, and takes place in an earlier version of the universe of ‘Thicker Than Water’. In that story, the settlement’s manufactory was destroyed by a blow-in of Titan’s noxious atmosphere, and the superconductor cultures were poisoned. So, instead of Aphrodite’s statue, I’d have Orestes and Pylades, natives of Titan, travelling to Tethys to steal fullerenes in order to re-seed their superconductor cultures. It all slotted very neatly together – and this is actually mentioned in passing in ‘Thicker Than Water’.

I wrote the story, and even submitted it to a magazine or two. They rejected it.

Then it sat in the “bottom drawer” for over a decade.

Last year, I dug out the manuscript, read through it, and decided it was worth having another go. But it needed more than just rewriting. While reminding myself of Iphigenia’s story, I came across mention of Euripides, an ancient Greek playwright. He actually wrote a play, Iphigenia in Tauris, based on Iphigenia’s story. So there’s another dimension, I thought. I can tie in an ancient Greek tragedy.

Greek plays, of course, have Greek choruses. So why shouldn’t ‘Thicker Than Water’ have one? And since NASA had posted a MP3 of the radio noises generated by Saturn, why not use the ringed gas giant as my “chorus”? Hence the numerous mentions of Saturn’s radio-noise in the story.

I used the play in other ways, too. I borrowed the odd phrase from the Potter translation (which provides the lines from the play which preface the story). And I named all my characters for the characters in the play. The king of Tauris is Thoas, but I decided to use King instead. Iphigenia, priestess of Aphrodite, is of course Gina Priest. Orestes and Pylades I shortened to Orris and Pyle. And two unnamed characters, a herald and a herdsman, became Messenger and Shepard.

There are a few other scattered “clues” as well – such as “as if from some oracular distance” in the opening paragraph. Oracular. Oracle. Delphi. Get it?

Oh, and Tauris… In the original version of the story, the settlement on Tethys was also a carousel – a ring which rotated at a speed sufficient to provide some gravity – but it was unnamed. When I stumbled across Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, it occurred to me that a carousel could be torus-shaped. So Tauris became Torus. Sometimes research just gifts you things you’d be a fool to refuse or ignore.

I also changed the plot slightly when I rewrote the story. In the original version, Gina decides to help her brother to escape, but when she returns to his cell he has already been taken away. The story ended with her being unable to prevent his execution – as he was pushed out of an airlock without a spacesuit. For the new version, I had the three of them escape successfully. Which then allowed me to bring the alien sentinel more into the story. That – the mysterious alien vessel patrolling the Solar system – was there right from the start, but more as a clue to why Earth had abandoned its space colonies, and as the reason for the Tethysians protection of the sea of fullerenes.

It had always been in the back of my mind to have ‘Thicker Than Water’ (and the earlier ‘Black Rain’) be part of a single fictional universe. In it, Earth has withdrawn all its space resources, shut down its EM broadcasting, and essentially firewalled itself inside its atmosphere. This has left on their own the many settlements and colonies scattered on Mars and the moons of the Saturn, Jupiter and the Outer Planets. These settlements have also discovered a series of strange alien artefacts, most of which resemble extremely unlikely natural phenomena. Their purpose is unknown. And then there’s the mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system which doesn’t take kindly to any kind of interference with these artefacts.

Now that I was basing my stories on the plays of Euripides, I decided to call this my Euripidean Space universe.

Despite all this going on in the background, the story still needed something more. The escape succeeded, and in the process doomed the Tethys settlement – from an implied attack by the alien… That gave me a better ending. But I needed something extra to round out the middle. So I looked to the news. And came up with…

Torture. The Tethysians would torture the two raiders from Titan, and that would in part explain Gina’s motivation to help Orris and Pyle escape.

I’m not actually all that interested in writing science fiction, I’m more interested in using science fiction in writing, in extending the genre. I don’t want to write adventure stories in a science-fictional universe – I consider it a form of artistic cowardice. ‘Thicker Than Water’ is in part a sf treatment of an ancient Greek play – it uses the same cast, and I tried in some way to carry the flavour across. But it’s also about torture, about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Stories should be about something, about something relevant. Even if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens. Perhaps even especially if they are set in outer space and feature spaceships and aliens.

I read through the story now, nine months after it was published, and perhaps one or two of the reviews of it weren’t so far off the mark. Perhaps some of the characters’ motivations weren’t entirely clear – one of the perils, I suspect, of taking a story from an ancient Greek play. Perhaps the ending did seem a little disconnected… but the clues were there. But maybe that’s because that aspect of the story wasn’t intended to entirely stand alone – it would be just one element in a greater story, told through many stories. On reflection, I shouldn’t have relied on that. I’ll know better for the next one. And yes, there are more Euripidean Space stories planned.

Again, I hope you enjoyed both the story and this piece on it. No other stories of mine have been published in the last twelve months, although there’s a few due to see the light of day soon. Some time in the future, I may give one of those the same treatment.


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Catastrophia ToC announced

Editor Allen Ashley has announced the full table of contents of his forthcoming anthology, Catastrophia. The stories, by alphabetical order of author are:

  • ‘Hapless Humanity’ by Brian Aldiss
  • ‘The Phoney War’ by Nina Allan
  • ‘Nanoamerica’ by David John Baker
  • ‘Steven’s Boat’ by Billie Bundschuh
  • ‘Happy Ending’ by Simon Clark
  • ‘Something for Nothing’ by Joe Essid
  • ‘Check’ by Robert Guffey
  • ‘Fade’ by David Gullen
  • ‘Trouble with Telebrations’ by “J. B. Harris”
  • ‘Up’ by Andrew Hook
  • ‘A Hard Place’ by Carole Johnstone
  • ‘Scalped’ by Jet McDonald
  • ‘Noose’ by Adam Roberts
  • ‘In the Face of Disaster’ by Ian Sales
  • ‘Pixels on a Screen’ by Patrick Shuler
  • ‘The Long Road to the Sea’ by James L. Sutter
  • ‘Gravity Wave’ by Douglas Thompson
  • ‘Crashes’ by Stuart Young

I’m in good company there, I see.

See here for the full press release.


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Anatomy of a Story: The Amber Room

It occurred to me some people might find it interesting to learn how I came up with the ideas for my stories, how I approached those ideas, and what I was trying to achieve with the stories which resulted.

First up is ‘The Amber Room’, which was published in Pantechnicon #9 in March 2009. If I were to write a blurb for the story, it would go something like this:

Tina lives in a museum, but this museum contains all the lost art treasures of the world. They were found by her boyfriend Chris, who has an amazing ability: he can visit alternate universes. That’s where he “found” the lost art treasures.

Here’s a PDF of the ‘The Amber Room’; so you can read it before reading the rest of this post.

The idea for the story came to me sometime in March 2007. As far as I recall, it was inspired by the real-life Amber Room itself, mention of which I’d stumbled across somewhere on the Web. I wanted to use it in a story, but, of course, it was lost. So why not write a story about it being found? And since I write science fiction, why not have it found in an alternate universe? In fact, why not have an entire museum filled with “lost” works of art which had been found in alternate universes?

But that’s not actually a story. It needs a plot, characters… a beginning, middle and end…

I remember banging out a first draft in pretty much a single sitting. In that original version, the story focused on Chris, the universe-hopping “art thief”, and was structured as a series of vignettes from his life in no particular chronological order. But it had the same sting in the tail: the identity of Chris’ girlfriend, that she was him from an alternate universe in which his “parents” had had a daughter.

I emailed the draft to a group of friends to see what they thought to it. We’ve been emailing each other stories and novel excerpts for several years now; I value their comments. They liked the central premise, but not the way I’d chosen to tell the story. I rewrote it, making Tina the central character and giving the narrative a linear structure. I sent this second draft to my friends. They liked it a great deal better. However, they still weren’t keen on the ending – initially, the story explained that Tina and Chris were alternate versions of each other. I changed that, made it, well, subtle – i.e., having Tina look at a pair of photographs which reveal the truth… And that too nicely linked in with the Amber Room and the whole concept of “lost” art, turning it into a metaphor of the central relationship. Sometimes, you get to a point in a story where all the choices you made earlier, without really knowing why you made them, suddenly slot together and it all works.

After that, it was simply a matter of refining and polishing the prose. At one point, it occurred to me that since the Amber Room featured four mosaics depicting the five senses, then I should do the same in the story. So every section is written such that it references each of the five senses, beginning with Tina hearing something, then seeing, then touching, and so on.

For example, from the first section: we have “The slam of the door echoed in memory, but she heard now only the metronome click of her heels on the marble steps” (sound). Later in the same section is, “The windows to her right painted great rectangles of sunlight on the floor” (sight). Then “Whenever in the Room, she felt a desire to run her fingers over the mosaics’ tessellae…” (touch), and “The Room soothed her, calmed her. It smelled of history” (er, smell). And finally, “… the wine tasted unnaturally full-bodied and rich to her” (taste). It’s not always a smooth progression – and looking back at the story now, I can see a couple of places where I slipped up and used a sight reference in a line that should have been sound reference, and so on.

Choosing to use the senses in this way also proved useful as it provided a framework for the descriptive writing. Because I could only use imagery specific to the sense referenced at that point in the narrative, I had to think harder about my sentences and word-choices. Take the line “She glanced back up the cochlea-curve of the staircase”. Originally, I’d used “nautilus-curve”, which was the image I wanted; but “cochlea” is hearing-related, and of a similar shape, so I used that instead. And I think it works better too.

Then there was the research. Every single piece of art mentioned in the story is real, and very much lost. When you’re writing, research should hurt. You need to get everything right. Sf is not like it used to be – you can’t just blithely invent stuff, or wave an authorial hand in front of the reader. Like you, readers have got access to the Internet, and they can fact-check as well as you can. Science fiction doesn’t mean you can make it up as you go along. On the contrary, it’s harder to write because you can’t rely on readers’ assumptions or common knowledge.

And, I should point out, it was while researching more about the Amber Room that I learnt of the four mosaics it contained. Which I then fed back into the story as a framework for the prose in each section. So none of it was wasted.

As for the roll call of alternate history sf mentioned on page four… The novels and stories mentioned are all ones I’ve read, and some of them I admire a great deal. Sticking ‘The Amber Room’ in among them was just my attempt at a little postmodern humour. And the “two films – different futures dependent upon whether or not a train was caught” on page seven… Most people have realised that one is Sliding Doors; the other is Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

‘The Amber Room’ was a deliberate attempt to write a “literary” sf story. I wasn’t interested in exploring the central premise. I was interested in the premise’s effect on two people and their relationship. How their relationship came about, how it was progressing. And I wanted the story to be about politics too, about the complicity and greed of politicians. Yes, I could have written a story in which Chris uses his experiences of all those alternate universes to create the perfect political system, or to help humanity reach the stars, or something equally sfnal… But that would be a different story and, to tell the truth, I’m not that interested in writing sf which privileges the central idea. I see the premise, the sfnal aspect of the story, as an enabling device – it enables a story that could not take place without it, that could not be transposed into another genre. If you can swap out the furniture and change the labels, and the story remains unchanged, then it’s not science fiction.

‘The Amber Room’ is by no means perfect – there are rough spots in it. But I achieved what I set out to do with it, and I stand by it. I was disappointed it received so many rejections – five, according to my records – before Pantechnicon took it. I thought it was better than that; I still do. I’d like to think others do as well. And I’d like to think others have found this dissection of it informative and useful.

I hope to do the same soon for the other story of mine I’ve posted here: ‘Thicker Than Water’.


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Thicker Than Water

My story ‘Thicker Than Water’ was published in Jupiter magazine’s January 2009 issue. Unlike ‘The Amber Room’ (see here), it received a couple of reviews and was described as an “exciting story” (SFRevu) and “a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting” (SF Crowsnest). SF Site was less complimentary – “I was not really convinced … either by the motivations of anyone involved, nor by the potentially interesting conclusion, which is not sufficiently a part of the rest of the story.” For the record, ‘Thicker Than Water’ was inspired by the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. Click the link below to download the story in PDF format.

Thicker Than Water