It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Tag Archives: writing


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On genres, modes, distances and invention

I won’t say where, or on what, I was at the time but this weekend I was thinking about definitions of hard science fiction for a podcast, and my thoughts spiralled out from there to definitions of science fiction itself. And it occurred to me that sf narratives break down into three rough forms: encountering the Other, embracing the Other and rejecting the Other. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to hold true. Think of a random sf novel, like… Dune. That’s embracing the Other – both Paul Atreides becoming a Fremen and learning to  use his new-found powers.

Since its earliest days, science fiction stories have been characterised by distance just as much as they’ve been characterised by science and/or technology. Alongside the Gernsbackian tales of new inventions which would improve the lives of all were stories of alien places and the strange peoples found there. Distance is a signifier for the “exotic” (in both meanings of the word). Before science fiction, they told tales of the South Seas.

The further away a place is, the more Other it is – it’s a simplistic formula, but this is pulp fiction, after all. The difficulty of the journey is less important than the distance travelled. There are very few Shangri-Las hidden in inaccessible mountain valleys, or their galactic equivalents, but lots of worlds on the rim of the empire or the edges of the galaxy. Travel itself is not uncomfortable, but does take time. Real spacecraft are small and cramped, with no amenities. Sf’s starships are interstellar ocean liners with cabins and restaurants and promenades. This is because the journey does not matter, it is only a metaphor. If there are hardships, they are associated with either finding the destination, or at the destination itself. Off the top of my head, the only sf story I can think of in which the journey itself is an obstacle is Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘The Shobies’ Story’ (in Gwyneth Jones’ Buonarotti stories, and her novel Spirit, there’s a similar effect with interstellar travel, but it does not make the journey an obstacle). No doubt there are other stories, though I maintain such stories are rare within the genre.

But then, there’s not much that’s Other about the act of travelling from A to B. Even in the Le Guin story mentioned above, the means of making the journey affects the travellers’ perceptions of their destination, making the act of encountering, or even embracing, the Other so much harder and more prone to misunderstanding.

Space opera, of course, is traditionally predicated on rejecting the Other, as is military sf. The drama in both subgenres typically derives from conflict, either from within the world or from without. And the further the enemy is from known space, the more Other they generally are. Even when they’re humans, they’re typically barbarians from the edge of the empire – though that may simply be science fiction ripping off the history of the Roman empire… which it has done far too many times.

The same argument might well apply to fantasy, even though it is a different genre. I suspect there are more narratives of rejecting the Other in epic commercial fantasy than of the other two forms. Given its generally consolatory nature, this is no surprise. Other modes of fantasy may well be more evenly distributed – I’m not as well read in fantasy as I am science fiction. It might well be that the same argument does not apply to fantasy, given that it is an entirely different genre to sf.

Science fiction is not, and has never been, a branch of the fantastic. You can’t categorise fiction by the degrees of invention it exhibits. All fiction by definition contains invention, whether it’s literary fiction with made-up characters , fantasy with made-up worlds, or science fiction with made-up science and/or technology. Nor can you categorise by trope… because first you would have to define each and every trope. And lay out the conditions under which each trope is fantasy and not science fiction, or vice versa. If a fantasy novel has a dragon in it, then it does not follow that all novels containing dragons are fantasy. And so on. Science fiction is a fundamentally different genre to fantasy, and it’s an historical accident that the two are typically marketed alongside each other.

 


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What I learned self-publishing my book

There were two chief reasons why I self-published the first book of the Apollo Quartet, Adrift on the Sea of Rains: timing and control. I wanted to launch it on the back of Rocket Science at the Eastercon this year, and only by doing it myself would I make that deadline. I also took some chances with the book that most self-respecting editors would have baulked at: not using speech marks for dialogue, writing the flashback sequences in long discursive passages in italics, and using a list of abbreviations and an extensive glossary. I could have just formatted the book for Kindle, and loaded it up onto Amazon. Which is what a lot of self-published authors do. But – if only for my own self-respect – I decided that if I was going to self-publish I was going to do it properly: paperbacks, hardbacks, ISBNs, a proper small press…

And that’s what I did.

To be honest, the hardest part was writing the book. Typesetting it and getting it printed were not difficult. Likewise buying ISBNs. Or setting up the online shop. The launch at Eastercon went well, and I sold a good number of copies – and not just to people who knew me, or who had read other fiction I’d written (sadly, the latter number is lower than the former). And yes, I did have to do a bit of a “hard sell” at times.

But once the Eastercon was over, and I was back home, the really hard part began. They say the average self-published book sells less than a hundred copies, and those are mostly to family and friends. I’d gone past that number by selling my book at Eastercon and alt.fiction. But if I wanted sales to continue to grow, I needed to make them online. My next priority might well be writing book two of the Apollo Quartet – the working title is currently The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself – but I also needed to work on promoting Adrift on the Sea of Rains.

And having now spent two months trying to do that, I’ve learnt a few home truths:

1. breaking out of your community is hard
There are about a dozen reviews of Adrift on the Sea of Rains online. Quite a few were done by friends of mine. I value their opinions, so the fact they thought the book good makes me happy. Some of the reviews were done by people unknown to me. But if I want to sell more copies of Adrift on the Sea of Rains, I need more of the latter than the former. I need people who have never heard of me to buy copies of the book. Reaching them is hard – they have no reason to listen to me. I’m an unknown quantity. I don’t even have the benefit of a known imprint on the spine of my book -ie, a logo which indicates a history of publishing science fiction a buyer knows they like.

2. there is no secret place online which will lead to sales
I have started threads promoting Adrift on the Sea of Rains on a handful of forums. I’ve watched the number of views of those threads climb up into the hundreds, but only a few people have actually posted comments. Even less have actually followed the links and purchased a copy. Again, it comes down to being an unknown. I’ve been a member of some forums for several years; people there know me. On others, I’m pretty much a drive-by spammer. People in the former situation are more forgiving of my promotional posts; but in neither case has it proven especially effective at generating sales.

3. quality is immaterial
I made sure Adrift on the Sea of Rains was a quality product – a well-made paperback and hardback, with striking cover art, and properly-edited text. None of that is obvious online. The same is true for the quality of the writing. Amazon provides a preview for the Kindle edition, but is that really enough to get an idea of how good the book is? You read the previews for some self-published authors, and the prose is semi-literate. Yet they seem to sell hundreds of copies a day. I suspect it’s the number of books such writers have available which is the chief factor in driving sales.

4. promoting your book will often lead to you defending your choice to self-publish
The fact that I chose to self-publish Adrift on the Sea of Rains will damn it in many people’s eyes. It’s true the vast majority of self-published titles are complete rubbish – even the successful ones. People will choose to believe I self-published because my story wasn’t good enough for a commercial publisher. (For some reason, small presses never seem to factor into this argument.) I could have pretended Whippleshield Books was not my press, and created some separate online identity to promote it. But that’s a lot of trouble to go to for a lie that would be quickly seen through. I’m operating an open submissions policy for Whippleshield Books, so it’s not a true self-publishing venture, it’s not solely for my books. But that’s a distinction many critics of self-published books consider irrelevant.

5. the internet allows you see how badly you’re failing in real-time
If you publish for Kindle, the Kindle Direct Publishing website displays how many copies you’ve sold on a monthly basis. Other sites, like goodreads.com or librarything.com, tell you how many people on those sites own copies of your book, or have seen fit to review it or comment on it. Very few casual readers will bother to write a short review of a book they’ve read. And when the number of readers is still in double-figures… Unsurprisingly, it can be very disheartening.

I came up with the idea for the Apollo Quartet partly because I’m a big fan of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and partly because I had a couple of ideas for stories which I felt could be thematically linked (a third has changed greatly to fit into the quartet, and another was entirely replaced). I’m hoping that the appearance of each book will increase sales of the preceding volumes. And if, as some of the reviews have stated, Adrift on the Sea of Rains is good enough to appear on an award shortlist or two (providing people remember to nominate it, of course), then that too can only help.

None of this, however, alters the fact that Adrift on the Sea of Rains is a self-published book, a fact which will be seen to define it far more than its story or the quality of its prose. And while I can bemoan that, I can understand why it happens. Because, bar very rare exceptions, self-published books are typically pretty damn poor. Evangelists for so-called “indie” publishing may get all offended when this is pointed out – no, they’re not the future; yes, ignoring self-published books is entirely reasonable – but I’m not interested in promoting the means I used to get Adrift on the Sea of Rains out into the market, I’m interested in promoting my book. I may have self-published it, but that doesn’t mean I automatically support every self-published author on the planet. Nor am I convinced it is the best way to publish a book, or the only way which is economically sustainable in the mid-term. I support those books and authors I like and admire, irrespective of how their books were published.

And I would hope others apply the same to me and Adrift on the Sea of Rains.


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The serendipity of writing

This weekend, I’ve been working on the second book of the Apollo Quartet, which will now be titled The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself. It’s a line from the final verse of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Hymn of Apollo’ (1824):

VI.
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine is mine,
All light of art or nature;—to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.

Not only does the poem title link to the quartet title, but the quote I’ve used also sort of explains the plot.

Apollo Quartet Book 2 is partly about a colony on an exoplanet… and in my researches, I discovered that Apollo is the god of colonisation. Which is a pleasing link.

But, even better – the story requires a form of faster-than-light travel, and for reasons I no longer remember, I decided that the story’s FTL spacecraft were actually repurposed asteroids. This was because they needed an “anchoring mass” of – and I plucked this figure completely out of thin air – five gigatonnes. So I went googling for real asteroids with masses in the region of 5 x 1012 kg. And the first one I found was… 1862 Apollo.

I love it when shit like that happens.


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How science fiction works

Let’s be reductive and say science fiction refers only to those subgenres which occupy what is generally considered the genre’s heartland – hard sf, space opera, soft sf, first landing, first contact, military sf, etc. Let’s call all the rest “speculative fiction”, a term I dislike, but since they seem not to bother with the science aspect it is perhaps more appropriate.

Let’s say there are two types of science fiction as defined above. There is the type of science fiction that appeals to people who would happily read supplements for a role-playing game. And there is the type for people who would prefer to read a physics text, or a book about the engineering involved in building the Saturn V. Both types, at heart, operate by adjusting a reader’s sense of scale and turning that which cannot be conceived into something which can. Or vice versa. For example…

Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Look at the photograph above. That’s the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn. The photo was taken by Cassini-Huygens, a space probe which launched in 1997, and the Huygens part of which descended to Titan’s surface in 2005. Saturn orbits between 1.3 billion and 1.5 billion kilometres from the Sun. Earth orbits between 147 million and 152 million kilometres from the Sun. If you could travel to Titan in a straight line (which you can’t), it’d be a journey of around 1.2 billion kilometres… That’s equivalent to flying from London to New York and back over 108,000  times, or 6.5 million circuits of the M25 (at an average speed of 120 kph, that would take you about 1,150 years).

Numbers. They define our world – what we can directly see and experience, and what we can’t see or experience. As those numbers increase in size, so our sense of place in our world is increasingly diminished. Using science we can investigate, and gain an intellectual understanding of, this feeling of diminution. Science fiction, however, postulates situations in which we can experience it directly. It also gifts us with agency in this new world being explored. It is a visceral, albeit vicarious, manifestation of what science can show us.

Science fiction is scale, its uses and abuses. It can take something huge and beyond direct human experience, and by giving it the purpose of something within the reader’s real-world frame of reference, render it unfamiliar:

Planets. Seven of them. Armed and powered as only a planet can be armed and powered; with fixed-mount weapons impossible of mounting upon a lesser mobile base, with fixed-mount intakes and generators which only planetary resources could excite or feed. (p 40, Second Stage Lensman, EE ‘Doc’ Smith (1953))

It can directly manipulate the human frame of reference, and make of it something which would otherwise be strange and impossible to fathom:

It was not clear what had happened to the man for the next million years or so. One line of argument held that he had expanded himself to encompass a massive swathe of galactic space – swallowing hundreds of thousands of systems, across thousands of lights. (p 239, House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (2008))

Or, it can simply map parts of the real world we cannot experience, and allow us to compare the scale of our frame of reference with that being described:

It took an effort to remember that the distance to the horizon was more than ten times that on Earth. That the storm was two thousand kilometres across. That the sky was hydrogen and helium a thousand kilometres deep, with cloud layers of ammonium ice above and decks of ammonium hydrosulphide and ammonium-rich water-ice and water-droplet clouds below, endlessly blowing around this vast world. (p 215, The Quiet War, Paul McAuley (2008))

There are a number of rhetorical tools and literary devices science fiction uses to manipulate scale and the reader’s perception of it. Analogy is a particularly common one – by directly referencing something known, and of a size encompassable by the reader’s mind, the sf text can make manageable the scale of something normally beyond comprehension. This is not always a good thing, as it can have a trivialising effect.

There is a great deal of implication in the findings of science. The photograph earlier in this post does not in and of itself present a particularly impressive-looking picture. It’s a stretch of orange ground littered with pebbles. But it’s on Titan. Which means… the launch of the space probe, the journey there, the distance the probe travelled, the mechanisms which comprise the probe and the science behind them, the descent into Titan’s atmosphere, Titan’s surface conditions… the real and true fact that it is an alien world.

Science fiction not only gives us the orange photograph, but it also shows us how it was achieved. It makes explicit the wonder. And since wonder is central to science fiction, then to define wonder is to define science fiction:

…where:
W = wonder
lg = greatest distance mentioned in the text
tg = greatest length of time mentioned in the text
Nn = number of ideas/nova in the text
Nf = number of ideas/nova reader has encountered previously
ir = closeness of the viewpoint character to the reader as a function of background, worldview, attitudes, etc – ie, an indicator of their ability to identify with the character
jn = number of situations of jeopardy for point-of-view character(s)
ja = amplitude of situations of jeopardy for point-of-view character(s), where 1 is fatal
Cn = size of cast in the text
Br = bandwidth of the reader (calculated from educational level, number of books read, age)
Dr = willingness of the reader to suspend disbelief


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Fragment

So a year or two ago I had this idea for a postmodern planetary romance, a Leigh Brackett-style story as much about story as it was about the events in its strange and implausible world. But like most such projects – and I have an embarrassingly large number of them – it never got beyond some vague ideas and a couple of hundred words. I had a great title, ‘Gods of Saturn’, and what I thought was a pretty cool opening, but then other new shiny ideas captured my attention and my postmodern planetary romance got filed away in a forgotten folder. Until now. Maybe one day I’ll do something with it, actually finish it off perhaps, but for now it qualifies as one of those “stories that never were”, of which I have far more than I care to enumerate. But rather than let it go totally to waste and, in part, to perhaps prompt me into actually working on it and maybe finishing it, here’s the opening of ‘Gods of Saturn’ for you to enjoy…

Of all the winds which blow across the sand seas, an easterly is the most disagreeable. From that quarter, the town of Kumpara boasts no defence against the scouring grains of sand. The western wall of Pu Chou rises behind Kumpara’s tumbled blocks, and curves enfolding arms to north and south. But to the east: nothing.

There was, however, much which could be said about the couple who strolled along Kumpara’s long stone jetty one day in the Age of Helium, as small wisps of easterly wind whipped up dancing devils of sand.

Kumpara had seen better years, but had yet to reach the nadir of its decline; or its subsequent rise to quiet gentility. See it now, and perhaps you would find it hard to picture the narrow streets thick with blinding red dust, the sand whipped into fountains fifty feet high, and every house shuttered and doors firmly bolted. Those who lived there knew better than to risk the wind’s wrath.

A local spy – and there was one – who watched the young couple will have deduced they were strangers to Kumpara. The wind was not yet dangerous, but only the foolhardy or ignorant remained out once it began to blow. So too did their garments advertise their origins. The young lady was dressed in a fashion yet to be seen in the town. The eye in the telescope might have glimpsed the split skirt which was common at that time in the capital city, Xu; the high-collar, with its arcane symbols of rank and allegiance; the long gloved sleeves. Her companion was equally well-dressed.

As they turned to stroll back along the jetty, some feeling or whim caused the young woman to look back. She halted, head turned and, as if conjured into being by her gaze, features formed on the face of Saturn. The lemon and orange and tan stripes swirled like the ingredients of some decadent cocktail. It was a vast face, a face which filled the planetary canvas on which it appeared, and it caused the spy to drop his telescope and scramble from his vantage point.

As a result, he did not see the reactions of the Xuan lady and her companion. He did not see her turn her back on the face in disdain.

If such an occurrence sounds remarkable but the couple’s reaction does not, it is because at that time the gods of Saturn would often manifest on the face of the gas giant. From their celestial vantage point, they would gaze on each of the moons and on each of its civilisations. Their impact depended very much on the moon’s distance from Saturn. Here on Janus, where Saturn occupies a significant portion of the horizon, the gods held sway more than on, say, distant Iapetus.

When a god appears, all see him or her. When a god speaks, only those to whom they direct their instructions hear.

Lady Eresu turned to Captain Quradu and took his arm. She gently pulled him about. “Ignore him, Quradu,” she said softly. “He cannot harm us.”

The captain dropped his hand from the butt of his tantalum-pistol. That looming face – its presence alone in the sky suggested great power. Quradu looked up at Lady Eresu – as befitted her rank, she was a head taller than he – and noted her lack of concern.