It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Category Archives: writing


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The ethical writer

There was a bit of fuss caused last week by a nitwit post claiming that epic fantasy has degenerated since the days of Robert E Howard and Tolkien (I shall not dignify the post with a link to it). Nihilism and Decadence in populist escapist literature. Oh no! We must be in the End Times! I’ll not bother responding to the article – smarter folk than I have already done that. And done a much better job. But the subject has provoked an interesting line of thought…

There are those who say a writer’s only obligation is to be entertaining. Nothing else matters, providing the text entertains the reader. The aforementioned fantasy fuss would have you believe a writer is also obliged to be morally uplifting – or rather, to reinforce a narrowly-defined moral framework belonging to the writer of the post which started off the whole thing. Which is patently bollocks. In so many ways.

Writers do indeed have obligations above and beyond making their texts entertaining. They have an obligation to get it right.

Shoddy – or indeed a total lack of – research is inexcusable, and tantamount to artistic cowardice. This could mean, in science fiction, getting the science right, for example – something media sf is notoriously bad at doing. But it’s more a repudiation of the myth that you can “make it up as you go along”. Once, perhaps; once, when genre readers were unsophisticated. Not any more. And certainly not now that we have the Internet. Anything in a story that doesn’t seem quite right, you can look it up. You can do the research the writer should have done. And then you can decide not to read anything else written by that person ever again.

Fictionalising real-world examples is no defence. Want to make your fantasyland stand out? Why not look to the caliphates for inspiration? Yes, why not misrepresent and misinterpret someone else’s history and culture just to give your novel a little colour? Those people are unlikely to read your story, so why should you care if they get upset? And anyway, it’s all “made-up”… Except it’s not. Not if its inspiration is so obvious any reader can spot the parallels. In such cases, writers have an obligation to originality in their world-building. And a concomitant obligation to be accurate when the inspirations lie close to the surface.

There are those who claim it is immoral to use real people in fiction – public people, that is, dead or alive; not people the author actually might know. It is, they claim, an “invasion of privacy”. Except, public people rely on a public persona, it is their source of revenue, it is what they “do”. And as such it could be said it no longer belongs to them. If a writer were to use such a person in their text, then they are obliged to make their portrait, when necessary, as accurate as possible. The right places at the right time (providing the point of the story is exactly not that, of course).

Writers are certainly under no obligation to reinforce the prejudices of their readers. In fact, it is the reverse: they should challenge their readers’ prejudices. A good book should make you think about the world around you. It should not make you feel more comfortable with your attitudes; it does not exist to provide a helping hand carrying your personal baggage.

So, all that about a lack of conservatism in current epic fantasy, about these heirs to Tolkien who are spitting on JRR’s grave… It seems these degenerate, nihilistic writers are meeting their obligations: they’re challenging the worldview of the writer of the original post. He may not have responded intelligently, but that’s not their fault. Is it?


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Not a failure of the imagination

I love research. I take a nerdish delight in it. When I’m writing, I want everything in my story to be right. If that means digging through books, or searching the Internet, to find the information I need, then I’m more than willing to do so. I should be writing, of course. Except I can’t write if I don’t know what I need to know, if I can’t make sure it’s absolutely spot-on.

I don’t think I’m capable of writing a story in which I can “make it up as I go along”. I have come to accept that. The nearest I managed, ‘Killing the Dead’ in Postscripts 20/21 Edison’s Frankenstein, was set on an entirely invented generation starship. But I couldn’t let it go there. I had to pick a real destination for the ship, and calculate the length of time the journey would take. But even that didn’t do the trick. So I structured the story according to Dante’s Inferno, and borrowed imagery from it; which gave me a topic to spend hours happily researching.

I have in the past bought a copy of a long-out-of-print and scarce book – see here – so I could read up on something that appeared in a story I was writing. My story ‘Barker’ (see here) required a lot of research into the history and personalities of the early decades of the Space Race. Because everyone in the story except the title character was a real historical person. Fortunately the subject fascinates me and I already own a large number of books on it. See my Space Books blog. And yes, the flash fiction I posted there, ‘The Old Man of the Sea of Dreams’, also required a great deal of research too.

The story I’m currently working on – ironically, a fantasy – has had me researching Supermarine Spitfires and Vickers Wellington bombers. The protagonist is a RAF pilot during World War II, and I wanted to make sure I had all the details of flying those aircraft correct. I could have finessed it, I suppose – a few general piloting terms, perhaps, and then on with the story. But that would be cheating. It wouldn’t convince me.

And, without that research, how else would I have learnt that the the first item in the Vickers Wellington Pilot’s Notes Check list before landing is “Auto-pilot.. .. .. cock–OUT”? I kid you not. See page 25 here.

Another story, as yet unpublished, has one section featuring an Alvis Scorpion Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked), so I hunted around until I found a copy of a book about the vehicle. Because I needed to get the terminology right.

Amanda Rutter of Floor to Ceiling Books asked on Twitter today “What book do you wish you had written?” She gave The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle, for its “simply gorgeous prose”, as her answer. I could have named something by Lawrence Durrell, whose prose I certainly admire the most. Or perhaps a science fiction novel that blew me away when I first read it. Or something by one of the my favourite sf writers. Instead, I picked Ascent by Jed Mercurio, because his intense and immediate, and closely-researched, style is how I’d like to write myself.

As a reader I want to know what it’s like, what it feels like, to be there. I want details. I am, after all, reading these books to explore other places, people and times – real or invented. And the last thing I want is glib one-line descriptions, or the distracting blur of authorial hand-waving. I feel novels should have bibliographies – and many novels do include a page of “Further Reading”. I have a work-in-progress which currently has twenty-five titles in its bibliography. It has, I admit, taken a long time to write. I hope it’ll be worth the effort.

I’ve wittered on about this subject before, but that’s because it’s something dear to me. True, fiction is not non-fiction. Nor should it try to be. But neither is it a failure of the imagination to research something heavily before writing about it.


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I write science fiction, me

I don’t write speculative fiction, I don’t write fantastic fiction. I write science fiction. Occasionally, I write fantasy. I use the so-called “marketing categories” because I expect my readers to understand what I am trying to do in my short stories, and readers that will understand are more likely to read fiction labelled as “science fiction” (or “fantasy”). They have an expectation of a certain mode of fiction when they see the label; and I have an expectation that my readers will appreciate what I am trying to achieve.

Which is not to say that science fiction is opaque to non-genre readers; nor should it be. But my primary audience is pretty much those readers who like the same sort of stuff I do. And I like science fiction. I like science fiction with rigour, deep characterisation and good prose – and just because common wisdom has it the genre is incapable of those, that does not mean it needs to be relabelled with some new and entirely arbitrary term. Because all fiction, of whatever mode or genre, is essentially “speculative”. It’s only in the nature of the speculation that differences obtain. “What if?” can be asked in many diverse ways; and there are probably more answers to each variant than there are indeed variants.

The label “science fiction” is just as much a part of the compact between writer and reader as the author’s name, the blurb, even the cover-art. Science fiction as a label may have received more than its fair share of abuse in the decades since 1926, but it remains a fairly well-understood term. To replace it with something even more nebulous, something which seems to want to disinherit the genre’s history, is neither helpful nor useful.

I want to see an end to science fiction’s bad press. This will not happen by side-stepping the criticism through renaming the genre. It will happen when it is commonly acknowledged that science fiction, like all modes of fiction, encompasses both populist escapist tales and complex literary stories. Perhaps then I will not need to label my stories as science fiction. Perhaps then labels will be irrelevant. Nor do I need literary authors slumming in the genre to improve it – whether they acknowledge that they are writing sf or not. I need only write the best science fiction I can write.

And that is exactly what I do.


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Is science fiction becoming more politically polarised?

Last week, this post, Is Science Fiction Getting More Conservative?, appeared on pajamasmedia.com. The writer contacted four right-wing genre authors, and asked their opinion. The article has, at the time of writing, more than 350 comments. Almost none are dissenting opinions.

I’m not going to debate the rightness or wrongness of the article. (They’re wrong, of course.) It just strikes me as interesting how politicised commentary about the genre has become in recent years. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was discovering science fiction, an author’s politics didn’t seem especially important to me. Perhaps it was just my age. I devoured Heinlein’s novels and, while I was never convinced by his bizarre politics, it didn’t put me off his books. Not that I understood quite why they were considered so good, however. The same was true for other works – all those demonisations of the Other, all that libertarian new frontier hogwash – none of it seemed to affect my enjoyment of the sf books I read. Back in the 1960s, I believe, Donald Wollheim polled sf readers and discovered that their preferred form of government was a “benevolent dictatorship” – which tells you more about the immaturity of the genre’s readers than it does their politics.

Later, after I’d discovered fandom and started attending conventions, I remember conversations about authors’ politics – laughing at rumours that David Drake wore a belt with a swastika buckle, for example. But it didn’t seem to have any bearing on the fiction I read (not that I read Drake anyway). Even when Iain M Banks started writing his – famously left-wing – Culture novels, it scarcely seemed relevant. The Culture would be a nice place to live in, yes. So too would John Varley’s Eight Worlds – the fact that Earth is forbidden, notwithstanding – and Varley is often quoted as the successor to Heinlein.

But now, the debate over politics within sf texts, and without, seems to taking up more and more bandwidth in the genre commentary space. Perhaps it’s simply because what were once private conversations have become public – it’s an artefact of the Internet. Or maybe the US’s drift further to the right over the past twenty years has made previously extremist views more mainstream. Certainly the Internet has meant that US voices are now among the loudest in genre conversations in other countries, conversations that were once protected by the Atlantic Ocean.

What makes this worse – to me – is that the right seems to be dominating the conversation. Declare that sf is becoming too “conservative” (ie, right-wing, rather than its old meaning of “reactionary”), and right-wing fans will jump in to agree. Say it’s becoming too left-wing, and they’ll jump in to disagree. It’s almost a war – except only the right are fielding troops. They’ll tell you the left is just as guilty of spreading propaganda and lies, but… where? I can’t see it. I look at the genre landscape, and the loudest voices are often those of the right. Don’t forget it’s only the right that has its own version of Wikipedia (and anyone who claims Wikipedia itself is left-wing is an idiot).

I don’t have an issue with the personal politics of authors. They are, after all, personal. If those politics flavour their output, and I disagree politically, then I probably won’t read them. It doesn’t mean I categorically won’t, however. There are some tropes in sf which seem a natural fit for right-wing sentiments – autocratic galactic empires, libertarian space pioneers, etc. – although I suspect that “fit” is more a matter of custom than the result of any real thought or speculation.

There are few consciously left-wing sf texts, and most of those are dystopian. Even Banks’ Culture is a bit of a cheat as it’s a post-scarcity civilisation. There are also few near-future novels which show a happily socialist Earth (Ken MacLeod’s springs to mind as excellent examples). It often feels like Reaganomics has cast a shadow over the next fifty years as far as science fiction is concerned. Perhaps this disparity is why conversations about science fiction often seem to gravitate rightwards – there isn’t enough critical mass on the left to counter it.

Surely it’s time to redress the balance? We live in a science-fictional world, after all, and it’s certainly not a monocultural one-party state. I would, of course, prefer to see more sf which met my own political preferences. And I’d like to see such sf discussed intelligently. By both sides. I don’t think it’s doing the genre any good to have two antagonistic camps – one of which is armed; guess which – and one is not.

But then I also believe utopias are possible. But maybe that’s more a result of my politics than my taste in literature…


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Anatomy of a Story: A Cold Dish

Back in October 2009, I wrote a piece on my first Euripidean Space story, ‘Thicker than Water’ – you can find it here. ‘A Cold Dish’ was the second of my stories set in that universe, and it too was published in Jupiter magazine – in Jupiter 28, April 2010.

‘A Cold Dish’ is based on the play The Suppliants by Euripides. The play recounts how Theseus approaches the king of Thebes in order to ask for the bodies of the Seven Against Thebes, the seven leaders of an army which failed to invade the city-state. In Ancient Greece, burial rites were very important, and wars fought over dead bodies were not uncommon in the literature of the time. Unfortunately, this plot didn’t translate well to my Euripidean Space universe. It wasn’t really dramatic enough. Further, the need to bury dead heroes is not a cultural urge which translates to modern Western European culture.

In the universe of my Euripidean Space stories, the Earth has locked itself off behind a firewall for reasons unknown. This has left a number of off-planet settlements – on Mars, in the Asteroid Belt, among the moons of Jupiter and Saturn – struggling to survive. Patrolling the Solar System is an alien sentinel, origin unknown, which appears to exist solely to protect a number of alien artefacts. Unfortunately, these artefacts are not obvious – some of them could be somewhat unusual natural phenomena. In ‘Thicker Than Water’, for example, the artefact was a sea of buckminsterfullerenes on the moon of Tethys.

I’d already decided what the alien artefact would be in this, my second Euripidean Space story, and that dictated its setting. The Saturnian moon Mimas is sometimes known as the “Deathstar moon” because it features an enormous crater, Herschel, which covers a third of its face – as is obvious from the photo below. Herschel resembles a huge radio-dish, like Arecibo or Jodrell Bank. Identifying the artefact gave me part of the story’s plot – the “seven” would attack Mimas to prevent the Mimanteans from experimenting with the artefact. Herschel Crater also gave me the story’s title: ‘A Cold Dish’.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI

But it still wasn’t enough. Happily, the title of the story – it was originally only a working title – provided the answer: revenge. Theseus’s mission to Mimas would be partly to retrieve the bodies of the dead heroes, but would also be driven by revenge. My Theseus analogue I named Spiro Maris – the Spiro, I suppose, from his adventures in the Labyrinth on Crete. I don’t recall why I gave him the family name Maris. The other characters in ‘A Cold Dish’ also bear names derived from their Greek counterparts. The Seven of Euripides play were Amphiaraus, Capaneus, Hippomedon, Parthenopeus, Polynices, Eteocles and Tydeus. Not all are named in ‘A Cold Dish’, but of those that are… Capaneus was known for his immense strength, so I called him Armstrong. Amphiarus means “twice-cursed”, which became Bimalison. Hippomedon… well, “hippo” is horse, so I named him Steed. The two Foote brothers are so named because their father was Oedipus, or “swollen-footed”.

As an example of “just enough information”: in ‘Thicker Than Water’, I’d named the settlement Torus for its carousel living-quarters. This phonetically aped Tauris, the name of the city where the Euripides’ play I’d based the story on had taken place. I felt I needed something similar for ‘A Cold Dish’. The Suppliants takes place in Thebes, but I couldn’t find any reference to the name’s meaning. So I decided to use the name as is for the Mimantean settlement. But I called it The BES, without actually bothering to work out what the acronym meant. The Built Environment System? It didn’t really matter.

As for “too much information”. I realised I didn’t know how large Saturn would appear in the Mimantean sky. The moon orbits at a mean distance of 185,520 kilometres, so I suppose I could work it out. Or I could finesse it, of course, and simply not mention it. But it felt like a useful detail. Instead, I went hunting on the internet, and on the JPL-NASA website found this:

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

The webpage here contains a number of artist’s impressions of the surfaces of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

I had a plot, a cast and a location. Now I needed an opening. I had this image in my head of figures in spacesuits encrusted with ice, so that’s what I used. Maris is inspecting the frozen bodies of the Seven, and then returns to the BES to negotiate with the Mimanteans. The rest of the story more or less wrote itself. I needed a Greek chorus. In ‘Thicker Than Water’, I’d used Saturn’s radio noise, but I wanted something different. So I decided to have all voice communication in the BES broadcast throughout the settlement. That allowed me to insert the grieving mothers, who provide the chorus in Euripides’ play, into the story and, as a bonus, gave me some pointers to the character of the Mimanteans. I also managed to include a reference to Theseus’s boat (also known as Granny’s broom).

The more I read up on the Ancient Greek characters on whom I was basing my cast, the more information I could insert into the story regarding their backgrounds. For each of the Greek city-states, I picked a moon: Athens became Rhea, Troy is Iapetus, Sparta is Hyperion, for example. Likewise with the personalities from the myths: Oedipus I renamed Rex Foote, Agamemnon is Stanovsky, Helen of Troy is, er, Helen Bright, Paris is Alexander Lek… Some of these may well make appearances in other Euripidean Space stories.

Some might say I’ve put far too much into ‘A Cold Dish’. All the references to Euripides’ play and Greek myths, which most readers won’t actually spot, some might consider those irrelevant in “a fun pure SF piece” (as Rich Horton described it on sfsite.com). But I believe stories should be more than just “fun”. I’d like to think there’s plenty to unpack in my stories, not just what appears on the surface. I feel that enriches the reading experience.


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A new vocabulary for the critically-challenged

Over the last few days Lavie Tidhar, ubiquitous sf writer, has been putting together a tongue-in-cheek dictionary of new critical terms for science fiction. He calls it The Science Fiction Dictionary of New Criticism and you can find it here. A couple of days ago, this resulted in a few people providing him with suggested terms and definitions on Twitter. I came up with several, but they were a bit too silly to use. As you can see below…

Blogposer n, a writer who hopes to boost their book sales by regularly posting contentious articles to their blog.

Disstopia n, a pessimistic science fiction novel in which the characters show no respect to each other.

Lard sf n, a sub-genre of science fiction set in the near-future and in which the population of the earth is morbidly obese.

Slipsteam n, interstitial fiction on the border between the mainstream and steampunk genres.

Smearp v, the practice of a writer basing alien races/fauna in their book on unflattering portraits of enemies or rivals. Term derived from “calling a rabbit a smeerp”.

Spockalypse n, a type of science fiction in which the survivors of a global or galactic disaster are entirely unemotional and logical; or any global or galactic disaster brought about by people who are entirely unemotional and logical.

Fuckerization n, the practice of a writer inserting the names of enemies or rivals into a novel and having said characters meet gruesome ends. Term derived from “tuckerization“.

Pingularity n, a science fiction trope in which humans have themselves uploaded into microwave ovens.

Peckulative fiction n, a sub-genre of science fiction in which birds have taken over the earth.

Yurtual reality n, a science fiction trope describing any invented artificial environment which simulates the steppes of Central Asia.


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The comfort of strangeness

I’m currently bogged down somewhere in the middle of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. This was one of the major genre novels of last year, with a marketing budget normally reserved only for the witless bios of A-list celebs, and subsequently praised everywhere. In The Passage, an attempt to “weaponise” human beings by infecting them with a virus from the Amazon goes horribly wrong. The twelve experimental subjects – all prisoners from various prisons’ death rows – escape, and so infect the population of the US. The virus effectively turns its victims into “vampires” – super-strong, averse to light, immortal, animalistic, and continually craving blood. That’s the victims, of course, which it does not kill. Within the space of a few decades, the US (and, by typical jingoistic extension, the world) has been reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, in which “virals” run amok, and small pockets of humanity barely survive in armed camps.

The Passage is a fat book of almost 800 pages. It is also the first of a trilogy, which apparently earned a $3.75 million advance. The movie rights were also bought for $1.75 million three years before the book was published. It is also nowhere near as good as the hype would have it.

Cronin’s two previous novels were literary fiction, and The Passage certainly opens in a similar vein (no pun intended). This is the best part of the book. But the rest of the novel is a mish-mash of movie tropes. It owes almost nothing to the literary traditions of vampire fiction or apocalyptic fiction. Its aesthetic is pure Hollywood. And that, I think, explains both its success and the reason why it is not as good a novel as all that money and marketing would have you believe.

I’m all for cinematic prose. It works well in science fiction, which, in many cases, relies on visuals for its sense of wonder. But written science fiction also requires a central premise, and often privileges that at the expense of other elements of the writing. At the very least this means that the idea has to be good – it has to be thought-provoking, it has to generate wonder; it might even be unique. Some sf novels are based around a single premise; others throw out ideas on every page.

But The Passage seems to have used the cinema as a source for its genre tropes. And in that medium ideas and conceits have been so watered down by the demands of film-making, by over-exposure, by aggressive marketing, that whatever sense of wonder they may have once possessed has long since been eroded. There is nothing that is new in The Passage. True, the ideas are slickly executed. But familiarity does indeed breed contempt.

Good science fiction thrives on the new and original, on the unique angle of attack. It needs strangeness. And, by extension, so do sf readers. True, there are degrees of originality, degrees of strangeness. And readers’ thresholds for each do vary…

It occurred to me recently that genre fiction – and The Passage is perhaps a harbinger of this – is increasingly shedding strangeness. Some tropes are getting little ragged around the edges, the chrome is beginning to look a bit tarnished. For a genre which formalises conceptual inventiveness, much of it seems to prefer using recycled tropes and familiar settings – and more so now that it did in the genre’s past. Perhaps this is a consequence of science fiction colonising other media, of the genre now belonging to everyone and not just a minority community.

I’m not convinced this has resulted in a positive feedback loop. Much recent sf feels bland, and the product of a system of thought rather than of individual artists. Not all science fiction, of course. Many excellent, and very individual, novels are published each year. But maybe the genre as a whole needs more strangeness injecting into it.

As science fiction changes to be more approachable for those who consume it in other media, so it becomes less satisfying for those of us who sup direct from the well.


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Life slowly returns to normal…

… or something like it. It’s back to the day job after the past fortnight’s frenzied festivities. I spent Christmas in Denmark with relatives, where it was very cold and very white. Happily, Denmark is a nice country, and so much more civilised than the UK. I spent the New Year at home doing absolutely nothing. Which is the way it should be spent. I hope everyone else had an enjoyable Christmas and New Year spent in fit fashion.

But now it’s back to the day job. And, outside that, time to start thinking about writing projects for 2011 – most of which will be continuations of stuff from 2010 that I failed to finish…

It is also awards nominations time, and it is customary – apparently – to point out what a person has had published during the past year that is eligible. But I’m not going to do that. Actively touting for nominations a) makes a mockery of the award because quality becomes irrelevant, and b) is the sort of toadyish behaviour I dislike. Yes, I know: awards are just popularity contests, but quality should factor into it somewhere. My own stories from 2010? If you liked them enough to nominate them, you’ll know what they are. Myself, I shall only nominate novels and stories I’ve actually read, and that I think are worthy of nomination.

In the coming weeks I hope to finish my write-up of Gwyneth Jones’ Bold As Love Cycle, post two pieces on L Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle, read and write about Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos Archives quintet, continue my reviews of “British SF Masterworks”, post monthly reports on my new reading project, and continue to write the sort of stuff which seems to demonstrates only that my taste in sf appears to be diverging more and more from what everyone else likes and is writing…

Let’s hope 2011 proves a good year.


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The road to 2011

Although it’s the road to hell which is, they say, paved with good intentions. And I have plenty for 2011. I had a number for 2010 as well, of course – see here. And I actually managed to complete some of them.

Okay, so I failed on the reading challenge, but I did read quite a few of the authors and series I named: WG Sebald (er, no), Michel Houellebecq (yes), Kazuo Ishiguro (yes), Paul Scott (no; although I did buy several of his books); the Marq’ssan Cycle by L Timmel Duchamp (yes; well, only book 5 still to go), the Bold As Love Cycle by Gwyneth Jones (yes; see here), Destiny’s Children by Stephen Baxter (no), and Canopus in Argos: Archives by Doris Lessing (still planning to read this). Sadly, I didn’t quite manage to keep my Space Books blog up to date…

Nor did I manage to finish a story a month. I actually completed five. And a bunch of poems. On the plus-side, six of my stories saw print in 2010. And one got praised in a national newspaper, the Guardian – see here.

I made it to Fantasycon (see here and here), but not NewCon or Novacon. I didn’t quite make the gig-a-month – only 11, unfortunately. I also failed to attend either Bloodstock or Damnation, but I already have my ticket for Bloodstock 2011.

And now, for this coming year…

I have a new reading challenge – see here – so I’m hoping I to complete that. I also have a pile of books which I need to review for SFF Chronicles. And there’s my own ongoing series here of British SF Masterworks. I read Christopher Hodder-Williams’ 98.4 over Christmas, so I’ll be posting a review of that here soon. But I do have several others from the list to read and write about.

I’d like to read more classics: Lawrence, Orwell, Dickens, that sort of stuff. I also plan to finish off Ishiguro – his books, that is, as I own all but one. Likewise David Mitchell. And read more books by the following: Margaret Atwood, Michel Faber, Adam Thorpe, Toby Litt, Paul Scott, and WG Sebald. I’d like to get started on CP Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series, and I’d like to read more new science fiction as I’m usually behind the times when it comes to the new shiny. And then there’s my Space Books blog… I really do need to get back onto a regular schedule of posting stuff there. It’s not like I’m short of books, or DVDs, to review for it.

Writing a short story a month may be beyond me, but I certainly want to be more prolific. I’ll see if I can finish six in 2011. Small steps… And a novella. Oh, and poems. Not just banging up drafts and ideas on sferse, but taking some of the ones from there, polishing them and submitting them.

I don’t think I need to do anything blog-wise in 2011. I posted here frequently enough, and I’m happy with most of the content. It might have been a bit sf-heavy, but that’s not unexpected. Don’t like the template, though; I’m going to change that at some point.

Finally, I’ll continue watching the BBC adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays… which is about the nearest I can get to a resolution for films.


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The craft of space

I can’t decide if the success of USAF’s X-37B mission a couple of days ago is the most exciting thing to have happened recently regarding space, or simply further evidence that the US’s space programme is moribund. The Boeing X-37B is an unmanned orbiter which, like the soon-to-be-retired Space Shuttle, is thrown into orbit atop a launch vehicle (an Atlas V) but lands like an aircraft on a runway. The X-37B landed at Vandenberg AFB on 3 December after 220 days in orbit – photos here and video of the landing here.

The X-37B could be exciting because it’s a new orbiter. Admittedly, it’s the Space Shuttle’s Mini-me, and it’s robotic. But it’s new tech, and it’s likely to be kept up to date. So it might well be the first in a whole new, and evolving, generation of spacecraft. Which is important since, after all, launch vehicles haven’t substantially changed in more than fifty years. Rocket engines still work the same way; the same fuels are still used. But a cutting-edge orbiter? That’s a different matter.

Of course, there are a number of crewed spacecraft already in use, or at various stages of development. Soyuz, which is, ahem, as old as I am. Shenzhou. Also a handful of uncrewed spacecraft, such as Progress, ATC, H-II. SpaceX’s Dragon has had one test flight, but it was a stripped-down version and it’ll be a while yet before it’s capable of lofting people into orbit. Then there’s all those currently on the drawing-boards of numerous companies: Excalibur Almaz, Skylon, Lynx, CST-100, Dream Chaser… And, of course, NASA’s own Orion spacecraft.

I’m still not convinced that COTS, the reliance on the commercial sector to open up space, is going to work. It needs long-term, capital-intensive investment to really exploit space, and private companies won’t, and often can’t, do that. They may help populate LEO, but anything further, and more interesting, is out of their budget and timeframe. Perhaps it’s time the ESA’s member-states upped their contributions and set about doing something exciting involving people.

Some of you are no doubt wondering why this post isn’t on my other blog, A Space About Books About Space, as that would seem better suited to the topic. But I wanted to drag the news about the X-37B into the ongoing series of whinges I’ve posted here about realism in space-based science fiction. If it feels like I’m going on and on and on about this, it’s because a) I find the nuts and bolts of it all fascinating, and b) I think there’s plenty of opportunity in it for science fiction to do something interesting.

Which is not to say that I completely repudiate space opera and all that fanciful magic tech you find in most space-based science fiction. Yes, yes, I know: they’re literary devices. But the problem with literary devices is that they quickly become set-dressing. And then before you know it, they’re being used all over the place without any real thought for how they ought to be deployed. And, you know, sf has been doing that sort of thing for eighty years, so perhaps it’s time to try something a little different. Not that realistic space-based sf – or, as I call it, “spacecore” – has never been done before. You have everything from Jeff Sutton’s First On The Moon to Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series of novels. And plenty in between. For me, however, the two touchstones are Jed Mercurio’s Ascent and the BBC television series Space Odyssey.

More by accident than by design, I’ve been quite faithful in my own short fiction. My Euripidean Space stories (see here) may feature a mysterious alien sentinel loose in the Solar system, but otherwise treat space and space travel realistically. And my story in Postscripts 20/21, ‘Killing the Dead’ (see here), was set aboard a generation starship – so no fancy bending of the laws of physics there. I did say a couple of months ago that I was going to try writing a genre heartland sf story, with FTL and aliens and all the space opera trappings. But I couldn’t do it. One turned into a slower-than-light story, and the other ended up as a UK-based anti-capitalist tale.

Of course, not every sf story idea is suitable for either space opera or spacecore. But at the very least focusing on the mechanics and physics of space travel should prevent writers from writing skiffy – ie, sf stories that don’t really need to be sf. You know the sort I mean: the space destroyer and her noble captain, re-fighting WWII in outer space. I think they call it “military sf”… Recognising that space is not just the blank stuff between plot points can only help concretize the sfnal elements of a story, can only lead to a story which will only work in the setting invented for it.

These days, no sf writer has an excuse for not making an effort – all the information you need is at your fingertips. Everything you could possibly want to know, about everything from the interstellar medium to star maps to the Pioneer Anomaly, can be found somewhere on the Internet. And all those spacecraft I mentioned earlier? There’s plenty of info on those to be found online too. You can get a very real idea of exactly what is required for travelling or living in space.

There are too many monsters in science fiction these days. It sort of takes the science out of it. Shine a spotlight on the hardware, on the physics required for all to work, and we might get back to the sort of sf that inspired generations of scientists and engineers. It’ll be optimistic too. It’s the nature of the material.

And, it goes without saying, there’s more than enough wonder for everyone.