Why Stealing Light is sort of like Star Wars, except that it isn't

Somebody made a comment here that made me think it might be worth clearing up a point of potential confusion arising from the fact that even though Stealing Light is the first of a projected series of three, you couldn't necessarily tell that from picking a copy up in a shop. It's not like it actually says 'Book One of the Shoal Sequence' anywhere on the cover or inside. Here's why.

It's because of the way certain contracts panned out. There was a contract between me and my publishers that included Stealing Light, but not necessarily anything beyond that. As a result, Stealing Light sold as a standalone novel. It was only during the course of writing it that it occurred to me I might be able to either extend the story in interesting directions, or write other stories set within the same universe.

I think it's fair to say the publishers really liked Stealing Light. Liked it so much, in fact, that they followed up on a passing suggestion on my part via email that I might be up to extending it into a series. At this point the book hadn't yet been published. Further, I suspect they wanted to watch and wait to see how well this book did before necessarily asking for more of the same.

As it is, the contract for another two books got signed pretty quickly, and I'm working on the second right now. If you want a point of comparison in terms of how things worked out, an example might be the way the movie Star Wars ended up getting made.

Star Wars is a movie with a very distinct ending. When it's over you think, yeah, it's over. We all know Lucas already had plans for other movies, but nobody was signing on the dotted line until they saw how that first film performed in the cinemas. As a result, Star Wars - despite being subtitled 'Episode Four' - was required to be an entirely self-contained narrative. That there was room for sequels (and, unfortunately, prequels) was obvious and ultimately fortuitous. You could say the same for the Back to the Future movies.

Which is kind of why Stealing Light ended up with sequels but doesn't say 'Book One' on the cover. It could, but I'm not sure whether or not it should. I like to think anyone could pick it up, read it, and feel like they'd read a finished story without necessarily being mugged into buying another book to find out what happens next - but that's not to say there aren't strong hints in the narrative to suggest what might be coming if they chose to read more.

I wasn't sure until fairly recently whether Book Two was going to be a direct sequel or a separate narrative set in the same universe. As it is, it's a direct sequel. I can't even say for sure if Book Three will follow straight on from Book Two, although it's starting to look very likely.

I'm about halfway through book two at the moment. I suspect it's going to end in such a way that again you feel like you've read a complete story, with a definite end ... but with big fat teasers to suggest something really, really cool might be happening in book three, should you choose to buy that when the time comes. In fact, let's not call it a trilogy ... let's be really up the ass and call it 'three sequentially linked but nevertheless distinct narratives'.

I'm not ruling out the possibility of a separate novella set in the Shoal universe at some point. There's a story I have in mind that's currently intended to be part of Book Three, but I'm not sure yet whether it'll fit in neatly with everything else I'm expecting to happen. If it doesn't quite fit, I may write it as a separate story.
Hope that clears up some potential confusion.

redesign

Ah, the joys of procrastination. I decided a wee bit ago it might be a good idea to rearrange the website, since in terms of the code that's holding it up it's getting kind of out of date, so I'm thinking of tarting it up a bit. I've been using the page carrying the new excerpt from Stealing Light as a kind of testing area for this, but whether or not I carry that design over to the main blog is another matter, and whether or not I chuck out that excerpt design and start all over is yet another matter. I'm picky. But it does feel like something like this should really be there, and on top of that I think I'll be saving the excerpt in a couple of easily readable formats - pdf, rtf, etc - for reading on everything from e-ink readers to PDA's.

toy fix

I don't know about you, but every now and then - okay, every couple of months or so - I get a severe rash of technolust usually focused on some financially-as-yet-unavailable toy that would probably have every Marxist on the planet tutting and shaking their head at my unbridled desire for gadget consumption. On the other hand, there's my parallel mental self-flagellation for even thinking of spending such money when I don't have a day job and the income from a writing career is sporadic by nature. Basically, I have to get my hands on an E-ink reader so I can decide I don't really want one or, worse, buy one of the damn things.

I had a moment a bit like that on my last visit to Taipei, when I finally got to play with an Asus EEEpc, the relatively inexpensive mini-laptop that's apparently shifting by the bucketload in the States. I'd read a lot about it and did indeed engage in a fair bit of pre-emptory technolust which was finally sated by playing with one in a gigantic computer store in the centre of Taipei and realising it wasn't really quite for me. Don't get me wrong, it's very cool and for a lot of people I'd recommend it, but it was just so teensy-weensy I couldn't see me getting a great deal of practical use out of it.

Now if I can only hypnotise myself into developing a desire for things that are cheap and easily available, like cardboard boxes and interestingly shaped pebbles, except that's not really the point of unreasonable material desire, is it ...

Stealing Dakota

On writing Stealing Fire, a direct follow-up to Stealing Light; it's about halfway there, and so far I don't expect to be doing any major structural alterations when I go through it for the next draft. It's pretty much all there.

Like I mentioned before, the idea was to call the three books Stealing Light, Stealing Fire and Stealing Time, with a nice uniformity to the titles. As names go, Stealing Time isn't really the greatest option because it doesn't really mean anything ... at least not yet. Then I took a look at the basic structure of the first third of Stealing Fire, which goes something like this:

Dakota gets kidnapped,
Dakota escapes.
Dakota gets kidnapped again,
Dakota escapes again.

Crudely speaking, of course. But it did rather lead to the temptation, instead of calling the new book Stealing Fire, to call it 'Stealing Dakota'. Eh, maybe I'll think on it.

web designs

It's been a while since I screwed around with HTML web design in any significant way, so I was pretty pleased with myself when I managed to modify a CSS-heavy blogger page design for the Stealing Light Excerpt (specifically, I spent half a day figuring out how to get that left hand column in with the help of a couple of online tutorials). Pleased enough I'm thinking of having a go at giving this here blog page a similar makeover. It's been needing it for a while, though I'll probably put some other kind of image in the background when it comes to that.

Along with that, I'll be putting together opening excerpts for Angel Stations and Against Gravity using very similar templates, and expanding things a bit to include info on upcoming books and the like. Bit of a New Year makeover, if you like.

When I look at the Stealing Light page, I see the image below. If what *you* see looks literally nothing like this - if it's got columns sitting one on top of the other, that kind of thing ... let me know, so I can fix it.

Hoover's Ghost

Back when I was writing my second book Against Gravity, I thought it would take terrorists nuking Los Angeles to persuade the US government of the late 21st Century to carry out mass arrests of its own citizens. Apparently it doesn't take that much at all, if the details of a newly declassified account (found via Boing Boing) are anything to go by:

"Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote."

Excerpts

In a fit of unprecedented procrastination, and at least partly motivated by a discussion over at David Louis Edelman's blog on what people look for in a writer's online presence, I have finally - finally - put together an online excerpt of Stealing Light, being the first couple of chapters thereof. Somehow it seemed the right thing to do. There's already an excerpt up at Pan Macmillan's website, but it's very small. I figure something slightly more substantial might be a better idea. So here it is. I'll be linking it into my main blog here at some point ... soon-ish.

Festivus

Moondust

I read a review of the book Moondust, which consists of interviews with post-Apollo astronauts, on Ian Sales' blog where he makes the following comment:

"In one telling scene in the book, Smith goes to see Dick Gordon (Apollo 12 CMP) at a Star Trek convention. Gordon is sat alone in a corner of the signing room, while long queues stretch before the tables of TV actors. Gordon, a man who really went to the Moon, is ignored. I know which person's signature I would treasure more..."

Which strikes me as one one of the saddest things I've ever heard. It's the kind of scene you wish could be somehow retroactively inserted into the film Space Cowboys.

writing update

Book update: the sequel to Stealing Light is almost at the halfway mark on the first, rough-ish draft. Draft is a misleading word in some ways, since it creates an image of an author bashing away on a manual typewriter until he has a complete manuscript, then marking it with a pen and then typing it out again, with appropriate adjustments. On a computer, things are much more organic, in that as you add new details into a constantly growing text file, you often take a step back into earlier parts of the story, adjusting them to fit the new material, and making various minor or major tweaks as you go (at one point during the writing of Stealing Light, I ripped out twelve thousand words of Dakota backstory that weren't working for me and brainstormed a brand new backstory over the next couple of days. It's easier than you think, once you get some practice: just open up a new file, call it 'rough notes' and type out whatever ideas come to mind until you have the germ of an interesting subplot).

I'd say there's about three phases a modern manuscript goes through - there's a first 'draft' of the appropriate length. Then you rework it from the start, chopping and changing sentences and paragraphs, trying to make everything clearer and more dramatic. Then a third run-through just to see what you missed the first two times. Then you find someone foolish enough to volunteer to read it and make comments. Phil Raines was one of the few people who read Stealing Light before it got emailed to the publishers, and the suggestions and comments he made definitely influenced the final shape and outline of the book. So then there was another short period of making adjustments, and then off to Pan/Tor.

In terms of time, you've got: full rough manuscript, eight to ten months. Redraft, maybe two months. Final redraft, two weeks, tops. Post-comment adjustments, two to ten days.

And then the publisher reads it, and you're into the unique hell that is the editing process. Word by word, line by line, paragraph by paragraph. I'm very glad to say I'm a long way from that on the new book.

A personal take on the distinction between sf and fantasy

When I work on a story, I've got three main concerns. 1: It has to be strong in terms of plot and action, because that keeps my publishers happy. 2: It has to have some thematic depth, something that fleshes it out and makes it more round and whole (because that makes me happy). 3: It has to have a certain level of plausibility.

By 'certain level of plausibility', I mean: it might contain an idea or concept entirely fantastic and/or impossible within our current understanding of the laws of physics and the universe as we know it (force fields, FTL etc), but contained within that idea or concept is the notion that our understanding of the universe is sufficiently incomplete that new paradigms might, maybe, some day make the apparently impossible possible, or at least potentially achievable. When you live in a universe where once-impossible things like atomic bombs and space travel have since become everyday, where the instantaneous teleportation of information is well researched, and where concepts such as multiple alternate universes are regarded as entirely plausible by people incredibly better qualified than me to hold such opinions, the act of suspension of disbelief becomes rather more easily achievable. In fact, for me to say that something is either possible or impossible when I am unqualified to hold any such opinion (by dint of not being a physicist or a scientist) strikes me as entirely foolish.

Yes, personal force fields that let you hit a mountain and the mountain breaks (as in Stealing Light) are completely fantastic, but try and tell me Hugh Everett's Many Worlds theory is any less bizarre (or his theory of quantum immortality, for that matter). And yes, I am aware there's vastly more evidence for Everett's notion of multiple universes than there is or likely ever will be for personal force fields. But that's one of the fun things about being a science fiction writer.

Now to my primary concern here: it has on occasion been suggested to me that science fiction is a branch of fantasy. I disagree, and here's why.

Science Fiction is largely driven by the idea that the universe and its workings are still largely unknown. The human mind is driven to enquire into its nature in order to understand it. That understanding, though incomplete, is increasing. Science Fiction, then, is a form of writing that allows one to speculate on the apparently impossible, given that history is littered with incidents in which the impossible has been shown to be, in fact, possible. It's this latter point that allows for the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of a reader (or this reader, anyway).

This is not to say that all things impossible will eventually prove to be possible; but the incompleteness of our knowledge allows some of us to freely speculate, and to imagine the impossible made possible without feeling too guilty about it. This is particularly rewarding for those who, like me, lack any scientific training and yet have a fascination for the achievements of modern science. Given that scientific history is primarily composed of a series of paradigms giving way to each other as successive generations of enquiring minds throw up new questions with the aid of constantly improving tools, one might feel further justified in speculating on a world in which the current paradigms could perhaps also be superseded.

If we take 'fantasy' in its purest form - which to me usually means elves, magic swords and orcs - I think it's fair to say these are things which neither exist nor are going to exist, ever. One might speculate as to the (im)possibility of faster-than-light travel, time travel or alternate realities; no one to my knowledge has ever speculated on the possibility of finding elves, orcs or magic swords any time soon. Let's be clear: I do not say this to denigrate fantasy in any way, and I also acknowledge that as definitions go, it's an appallingly crude one. However, it is very much my contention that a work of 'fantasy' in this particular sense offers a fundamentally different form of experience from that provided by the majority of works of science fiction. Let me repeat: this is not the same thing as suggesting either form is intrinsically superior or inferior to the other; it is not to suggest a lack of equivalence in the writing skills necessary to produce either. I merely want to make clear my opinion that the suggestion one is somehow a branch of the other is, to my mind, incorrect.

I know there are probably countless examples and counter-examples. I don't lay any claims to impartiality in my reading tastes either, because I've generally avoided books with elves, orcs and magic swords like the plague throughout my life. I have never in my life picked up a book with a dragon on the cover and thought, 'gee, I really want to read that'. So why do I feel the need to make this distinction?

Because I get a bit annoyed when people tell me I write fantasy in such a way that the implication is (to my ears, anyway) that a work of fiction containing aliens and space craft is somehow the same as one featuring magic swords, elves and dragons. They're different forms, with different aims and different appeals. One might as well say science fiction shares many traits with, say, the detective genre, because both are bodies of fiction. It's a statement that is equally, on analysis, both true and untrue.

For me, sf and fantasy (within the very narrow definitions I've used here) merely are what they are; different things with different aims living in different boxes, that sometimes share the same audience - but not always.

cranky geeks

If you slide over to crankygeeks.com, a web-based video discussion show about tech and arts, you'll find the current show has some good advice for would-be writers. A quick search on the site reveals an earlier episode featuring Neil Gaiman as a guest, who also has similarly good advice on the life of a writer.

The filming for the short drama I wrote (co-wrote, really, given it turned into a collaboration between myself, a script editor and a director) for a BBC mini-project has had its filming date moved back to late January, which is a shame because I'll be out of the country at the time. But, it is getting filmed, which is the main thing: I have no idea how it's going to come out, since there's a big difference between a written script and a filmed script (as I discovered during a workshop earlier this year run by a TV director). But I should get a copy of the finished film sometime, I think, in February.