Whatever

When is a zombie not quite exactly a zombie? For James Knapp, and his new novel State of Decay, it’s when you you take the idea of the undead and give it a whole new socio-political spin — a spin that incorporates free will, social castes, an unending war, and other such fun things. I could tell you more about that, but this is a Big Idea post, and you’re not here for me. You’re here for the author to explain it all for you. And here he is!

JAMES KNAPP:

I didn’t write a zombie story. In fact, although the word ‘zombie’ appears in almost every piece of marketing I’ve seen for State of Decay, it only appears once in the book itself. I can understand why it gets billed like this – my ‘revivors’ are the dead reanimated, and I purposely play with some of the classic zombie mythos – but I still wouldn’t call it a zombie story per se. I’ve seen it called urban fantasy, science fiction, horror, and a thriller (no one’s accused me of romance yet)…all this is fair, and if you like those things (as I do) then I believe you’ll like State of Decay, but to me the story has always really been about two basic ideas:

1. Is consciousness the same thing as a ’soul’, and if not then where might those two things intersect?

2. As citizens of a society, what do we owe it and in turn, what does it owe us?

…and to a somewhat lesser degree:

3. How many PSI can a human bite deliver?

If the first two questions sound high-handed, rest assured third one does get answered, and in the way that you’re probably thinking. At its heart, I would call this a thriller; weapons (and bodies) are smuggled, murders are investigated, conspiracies are unraveled and the risen dead lurk in the shadows of city streets. Still, if you were to strip away all of the shell casings, cybernetic implants and arterial blood spatter (though for the life of me I don’t know why you would ever do that), then the first two concepts are what would be left behind. Don’t get me wrong; I like talking about arterial blood spatter as much as the next person, maybe more so, but here I’d rather talk about some of the underlying concepts that, to me, drive everything else.

I liked the idea of a vast meritocracy where a citizen’s worth depended on their level of service to their society, but part of what interested me were the inevitable abuses of such a system. For my story I decided on tiers of citizenship that, on paper, would work like this: Top tier was earned through military service, bottom tier was for those who refused to serve, and a middle tier was afforded for those who were willing to sign their bodies over to serve as reanimated soldiers after death. In theory, you could start at a lower tier and, by serving the community, work your way up rather than serve.

That’s on paper – in reality (my story is reality, right?), top tier lost much of its meaning to those who weren’t rich, bottom tier became synonymous with poverty, and most people picked the middle ground. This was actually by the design of those in charge, because second tiers still have to pay their taxes while earning a decent wage, and then they eventually die off to help provide a virtually limitless supply of foot soldiers. As for working your way up, the next tier was really just a carrot on a string; you would never feasibly be able to reach it.

If reanimation was to be an easy option, that raised the question ‘who would willingly sign up for such a thing?’ Especially when there are murmurings that a donor’s body might go on to commit all kinds of horrible atrocities? I felt that if the government was careful enough to keep the revivors, the war, and the aforementioned horrible atrocities far enough out of the public eye then that answer would be ‘most people’. It’s always easier and more tempting to pay later than to pay now – that’s why the Devil’s pact-printing machine is always low on toner.

In State of Decay you might decide, just before you slide into that guard rail, that maybe second tier was a mistake after all but it’s still your signature on the dotted line. The Devil always comes to collect in the end. In your invulnerable youth you might not care what happens to your body after you’re dead, but you might end up with a long time to think about it; If a person could be brought back from death with the same memories and abilities, how would that differ from being alive? If you’re conscious, in the same body, with impulses moving once more through your same (albeit no longer warm) brain, are you the same person? Or does something else, something less definable, get lost in the translation? Would choosing second tier be avoiding service, or just delaying it?

Of course, if a person who signed up for reanimation had second thoughts they always had the option of pedaling faster toward the top tier; that carrot on a stick they’d never reach. Not in time.

I could corner you at a party and talk about this until you eventually prayed for the sweet release of death, but my word ration runs dry. I considered utilizing the last hundred words or so for a treatise on arterial blood spray, but instead I think I will leave you with this: At the beginning of this piece I said there were two main themes, but I lied a bit; there is a third theme that I can’t discuss without (I feel) giving too much away. While I know the inevitable spoilers will come, I’d like to keep it on the down low as long as possible. Just know it involves the question of free will and becomes one of the major ideas behind the second book in the series. All three of these concepts (four if you count the biting thing) are the threads that tie the trilogy together.

This is the first step in main character Nico Wachalowski’s journey; here he will begin to learn some truths that he’d never even considered before. To do that, he will have to deal with a string of murders, a disturbed psychic’s obsession, an ex-lover’s questions, and domestic terrorism.

Oh, and zombies. Sort of.

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State of Decay: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Follow James Knapp on Twitter.

People in myths live forever — or do they? For every Apollo or Persephone, there are the women and men whose lives these famous deities intersect in the telling of the tale — but who otherwise fall from the page, and from thought. Can they be resurrected? Katharine Beutner thinks it’s possible, and sets to doing so with Alcestis, her debut novel. Who is Alcestis and why does she deserve another look? Beutner explains all.

KATHARINE BEUTNER:

My Big Idea was to stick myself with the task of retelling a myth many people aren’t aware of in the first place. Alcestis was Mycenaean royalty—her grandfather was the god Poseidon, and one of her sons joined the group of warriors waiting inside the Trojan horse—but she’s remembered largely as a model of the perfectly self-sacrificing wife. She chooses to go to the underworld in her husband’s place when the god Hermes comes to retrieve him; three days later, she’s rescued by Heracles, and brought home to the world above, silent, where she’s celebrated for her virtue. In most versions of the myth, that’s all we ever learn about her, even though she is, to the best of my knowledge, the only female figure in classical mythology who enters the underworld on purpose.

You might say I began writing this novel with a big question, then, rather than a big idea: why would Alcestis choose to die? I wasn’t satisfied with the traditional explanation of selfless wifely devotion, and when I first read Euripides’ version of her story, I was frustrated by how easily the play dismissed Alcestis’s heroism. (Also, I kind of wanted to punch both Heracles and Alcestis’s husband Admetus.) I’d first encountered Alcestis in Rainer Maria Rilke’s gorgeous poem “Alkestis,” which ends with her disappearance. That poem gives Alcestis dignity and grace but also chooses not to portray her experience directly. My novel follows Alcestis from her childhood through her time in the underworld, where she falls under the power of the goddess Persephone.

Any story about a living woman entering the realm of death is inherently fantastical, and I drew inspiration from some of my favorite fantasy novels, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country. Yet I conceived of this book as not only historical fantasy but also a kind of first-contact novel. I wanted to describe what it would it be like, as a human who grew up in that god-haunted world, to face the gods’ alien capriciousness firsthand, and to find your life tangled up with theirs in the way you’d only heard about in songs. In the underworld, Alcestis seeks her sister Hippothoe, who died when they were both children; she also finds herself captivated by Persephone’s passionate interest in her. All of Alcestis’s actions are shaped by her culture and her training as a royal daughter of Iolcus, but she’s woefully out of her depth, despite her own Olympic blood. Despite growing up in a society molded by the interference of gods, she has little notion of how to handle a goddess and even less idea how to resist one.

And that brings me to a second big question: what happens to the usual structure of the mythic romance if that romance involves two women? In one of my high school English classes, a favorite teacher of mine described Odysseus’s entanglements with Circe and Calypso by shrugging and noting that, in the world of the Greek epic, “goddesses happen.” The traditional myth of Alcestis makes clear that her husband Admetus earns his special dispensation from death because he is a favorite of Apollo. I kept that element of the myth and paired it with Persephone’s pursuit of Alcestis. In my version of Mycenaean Greece, goddesses happen to women as well as men.

I aimed to give Alcestis her own epic tale, one as dramatic as the stories of Odysseus, Aeneas, or Orpheus. But I also wanted her to be accessible to contemporary readers of historical fiction and fantasy. In the original myth, Alcestis is supposed to represent the ideal of Greek womanhood, but not because of any special abilities or magical inheritance (unlike Achilles, that big cheater). I’ve tried to preserve a sense of her as a real and ordinary person, to allow readers to enter her world as immersively as she enters the underworld and to fully experience her strange, remarkable, too-little-known story.

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Alcestis: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel here. Follow Beutner on Twitter.

Technical note unrelated to the book: Please see this note regarding the presence of links to Amazon.

Where is the story of the world being told? It might be in the place you least expect: far away from news cameras and press releases. Sara Miles finds her work in those margins — she is the founder of the St. Gregory’s Food Pantry in San Francisco — but more than that finds the inspiration and ideas which inform her latest book on faith, Jesus Freak. Below, Miles goes into detail about looking where others don’t to see something new… and explains why doing so may be what we’re meant to do.

SARA MILES:

In the 1980s, I spent a lot of time writing about wars, mostly revolutions and counter-revolutions–– like the ones in El Salvador or the Philippines––and hanging out with soldiers, guerrillas, peasants and death squad members, as well as other journalists. My big idea then was really a technique. If I had to cover what everybody else thought of as the main event––an election, a massacre, a press conference by some crazy general––I’d focus on the stuff that was happening off to the side.

So I’d ignore the official announcements, the formal interviews with important people, and instead I’d chat with the lady mopping up in the back room of the Presidential Palace, or check out which movies were playing next to the Army headquarters, or spend an afternoon drinking Pepsi with guys stuck digging graves on the outskirt of town in the aftermath of a battle. I liked looking at things slant.

As a methodology, this approach kept me interested––even when I came back to the United States and started writing about electoral politics. The official version, prepared by handlers and delivered by hacks, was always just unspeakably dull. The dutiful Q&A was mostly an opportunity to be lied to. But some really funny things happened when nobody was paying attention. (Ask me about the pool party in Silicon Valley where Tipper Gore played drums with an aging Grateful Dead cover band.)

And this approach to writing remained useful when I had a totally unexpected mid-life conversion to Christianity and wrote two books about faith, including my latest, Jesus Freak. In fact, the methodology became an idea.

Because it turns out that God is very much interested in the margins: in the unlikely, ridiculous, and outcast. It turns out that the center of power––military, political or religious––is actually not where most change takes place. And it turns out that Christianity is all about the unexpected.

Think about the prophets with their mad faith the mountains will be flattened and the valleys raised up; think about Mary, with her conviction that the poor will be filled with good things and the rich sent away empty. Consider the impossible idea of an almighty God who chooses, of all possibilities, to be born to a shameful unmarried teenage mother in a barn; who scandalizes politicians, priests and his own family; and who spends his time on Earth hanging out with crooked cops, whores, and the dirtiest, least attractive foreigners around. Imagine a God who winds up as a despised, tortured criminal, condemned by religious authorities and executed by the state.

“Look away” is a big idea, if one embraced more by fools and losers than by the smart and powerful of our world. But my experience is that the more I look away from the way things are supposed to be, the more I get to see.

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Jesus Freak: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Jesus Freak. Visit Miles’ food bank.

When thinking about “urban fantasy,” we’re aware that the word “urban” sets the fantasy in a particular type of setting — but does that setting (and those stories) require a specific place? For the purposes of the genre, and our conversation, is one “urban” as good as another?

Not for author Margaret Ronald, and in this Big Idea, she explains why the city of Boston is in itself essential as the setting of her acclaimed fantasy series, of which Wild Hunt is the latest installment. Take your places, please.

MARGARET RONALD:

I am not a city girl by nature.  I was born in a small Indiana town, lived there for close to two decades, and went to college in an even smaller Massachusetts town.  When I’m on vacation, I retreat to lakes and cabins well away from civilization; when I think about what got me started writing, I remember biking down flat roads with fields on either side, watching storms approach for miles.

So when I describe Wild Hunt and Spiral Hunt as “urban fantasy,” there’s always part of me that wonders how on earth I ended up writing anything remotely urban.

Some of it is probably part of how my muse operates, since a strong sense of place is something that really sparks my imagination.  After all, the first story I ever sold — “Christmas Apples,” in Realms of Fantasy, also an Evie story — was inspired by a place. I’d visited a friend’s house several times, always in winter, at the turning point of the year. The house was hard to find, difficult to reach even when you knew where it was, and at the times I’d seen it, always a place of revelry and rejoicing, a golden haven against the cold.

A better description of an Otherworld feasting-hall I could not conjure.   And when I started playing with the idea of a story set at that time of year, that house and the feel of it were central to the result.

But with Boston — and with any city, I think — the scale is entirely different.  I think a lot of it has to do with being entranced by the city.  There’s so much here that I want to show to other people.  Doing so in writing is like having a friend over and taking them to all the cool places you’ve discovered over the last couple of years.  You have to see this, hear about this, try this!  Sharing the joy I found in that first discovery is one of the best things about writing a story set in Boston.

And in doing so, I keep discovering more about the city, more than I could ever write about.  There is so much here — and so much of it is hidden to the casual glance.

As an example, take the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  It’s not one of the big tourist draws, nor is it one of the first things that come to mind when most people think about Boston. But if you’ve been there, you have some idea what I mean about hidden magic within a city.

If you haven’t been there, go, preferably sometime in winter or very early spring, when the world has been repainted in shades of blue and gray, warmth is a memory, and green is a cruel joke. Inside what appears to be a dull brick building is as great a wonderland as any hollow hill: a lush garden under an atrium, tiles and columns and sculpture from dozens of cultures jammed together in an arrangement that at first seems chaotic and only slowly reveals itself as part of Mrs. Gardner’s plan. There is mystery here as well: why choose these artifacts, why place them like this, why set the sublime beside the mundane? Why put an ushabti next to an ostrich egg in silver fittings and both below a Titian? (And then there are the empty frames that still hang in the Dutch Room . . .)

Entering this place can be like stepping from one world to the next. Yet it’s still very much part of Boston — in fact, I’d argue that the culture of Boston of the time was one of the major reasons Mrs. Gardner chose to build the museum and fill it to her specifications.

By writing about these places, setting my characters to run around them or discover their secrets or fight their way through the magic that surrounds them, I hope to introduce them to readers — not by showing a realistic portrait of the place, but by pointing out some of their wondrous elements.  It’s like a quick set of introductions at a party: here are some interesting things, now go see what’s true, what’s exaggerated, and what hasn’t even been mentioned.  Or the ways that I introduce characters to the reader.  Here is the Gardner, a place of beauty no matter the season. Here is Genevieve Scelan, in over her head and trying to wrangle what’s left of Boston’s undercurrent together. Here is the tower of Mount Auburn Cemetery, from which you can see the whole city and beyond. Here is Abigail Huston, named for her great-grandmother, a woman with one too many secrets.

Here is the real Boston, deep with history and a thousand hidden sources of beauty or strangeness, a thousand doors to other worlds that are all the more wondrous for being part of our world. Here is Evie’s Boston, reflecting the original and itself reflected in its own fragmented, chaotic undercurrent, in which every deal has the possibility of betrayal . . . and in which more than one Hound is hunting.

Welcome.

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Wild Hunt: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Visit the author’s blog. Read the Big Idea for Spiral Hunt, the first book in this series.

What you want to hear vs. what you need to hear: This is an eternal struggle with writers when they approach someone to read the drafts of their work. What you want to hear (“It’s brilliant! Change nothing!”) is sometimes very different than what you need to hear (“Here are the problems”) — so much so that even when we hear what we need to, we’ll still fight against it.

Josh Sundquist knows of this struggle. A cancer survivor turned motivational speaker, he had written a draft of what would eventually become his memoir Just Don’t Fall: How I Grew Up, Conquered Illness, and Made it Down the Mountain. He knew what he wanted to hear about it. But was he ready for what he needed to hear? Let’s find out.

JOSH SUNDQUIST:

“My advice to you,” the handwritten letter read, “Is to throw away this draft of the manuscript and start over from scratch.”

I was too young to understand it at the time, but I was lucky to receive such a letter. Very, very lucky.

Most first-time authors, upon completing their manuscript, assemble an inner circle of friends and family to read over the draft and give their honest feedback as to whether they think it’s ready to be submitted to agents. But therein lies the problem with this practice. Friends and family are inherently biased to like anything you produce and tell you what you want to hear. You are a genius. This is a surefire bestseller. It would make a great movie, too, probably staring somebody really famous.

What an author needs instead is an impartial reader, someone who doesn’t know him personally. There are two ways to find such a person. Number one, you could approach a random individual in a bookstore or some other place book readers tend to congregate (say, Whole Foods), hand her your manuscript, and hope she has an unnaturally strong inclination towards lending her free time to strangers. Number two, you could pay for feedback from a professional. But most first time authors don’t have that kind of money. I know I didn’t back when I wrote my initial draft.

Which is why I went with option one: Getting lucky with a near stranger. That, of course, is the very definition of high risk behavior (in writing and otherwise), but I was fortunate in that I received the aforementioned painfully honest handwritten letter in response to my request for feedback.

I was only sixteen years old at the time. As it happened, I had been featured in a national newspaper for the motivational speaking career I had recently launched. I was traveling to schools across the country, talking about how I had lost my leg to childhood cancer and gone on to become an internationally ranked ski racer.

After it was published, I sent the writer of the article my manuscript and asked if he’d read it. He was a professional journalist, I figured, so maybe he’d have some helpful suggestions.

He did. And that’s how I found myself reading his handwritten note telling me to throw away my life story as I’d written it and start over.

“You to need to tell us what it was really like for you,” he wrote. “You’re hiding behind motivation.”

He was right. It was a habit I’d developed on stage as a fledgling speaker, coupling motivational clichés with an I’m-so-perfect-and-heroic version of my story. But it wouldn’t be until I returned to writing in my mid-twenties that I was ready to take his advice.

Back in the first draft, for example, I wrote about my amputation like I was some kind of inspirational wunderkind, perfectly resolute in my bravery even at the tender age of nine. Why I wrote this way, I’m not sure. I guess it was a role I thought I was supposed to play as a motivational speaker. But when I wrote the new draft, I was ready to share the real story, the story of how for weeks leading up to the amputation I would sit in bed and hold my leg and cry myself to sleep. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t inspirational. I was just a boy facing the fact he’d never play soccer again.

When I took drafts of this new manuscript to friends and family, I received warnings that certain passages were overly raw and revealing, that they were dangerous to my career as a motivational speaker. But this time around, I knew these readers were too close to me, that they just wanted to protect me, that they in fact loved me too much to be able to step back and understand my big idea: Writing a memoir that connects on a deep, human level means writing a memoir that strips off the public mask and exposes the deeply flawed and frail child hiding underneath.

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Just Don’t Fall: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Visit Josh Sundquist’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Are you prepared for a Scythian invasion? If your answer is some variation of “Bwuh?” then congratulations, you are like most people, who wouldn’t know a Scythian from Parthian, or indeed if either were people, or, say, a type of insect or breed of sheep. And this would also make you suited to live in the world of Alan DeNiro’s novel Total Oblivion, More or Less, in which there is, in fact, a Scythian invasion, just one of a number of invasions, and modern day go-along-to-get-along types suddenly have to deal with the fact the world has changed in strange and incomprehensible ways.

And how do these folks deal with all this sudden incomprehensibility? As DeNiro now explains: Perhaps differently than you might imagine.

ALAN DENIRO:

In a recent study by National Geographic, 63 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds couldn’t find Iraq on a map. In a multiple choice question asking whether Indonesia, Armenia, South Africa or India had a Muslim majority population, about half said “India.” This type of illiteracy (or aliteracy) creates its own “realm of the fantastic” in everyday life–so what happens when people who know little about the world around them are confronted with, say, Scythians swooping down on their town?

Total Oblivion, More or Less is a novel in which Scythians and other ancient European tribes have invaded America from the north. Modern technology soon stops working, and a counterinvasion from a mysterious Empire to the south has led to constant warfare between the two factions. With a devastating wasp-born plague, and a mass uprooting of the local people, most Americans find their normal lives radically different in a few short months. The narrator, a 16-year-old girl named Macy, has to travel down the Mississippi with her dysfunctional family from a refugee camp in Minnesota; her father is supposed to have a teaching job awaiting him in St. Louis. The landscape and river have undergone a radical transformation, however, both geologically and culturally, which makes the journey fraught with peril.

One of the big ideas that let me launch into these waters is that of oblivion, a deep forgetfulness that comes over everyone in the novel like a fog. No one really knows why all of these changes have occurred, and on a macro-level no one is particularly interested in finding out why some dogs have been given the capacity for speech, or why the Imperial capital, Nueva Roma, suddenly sprung up on an island in the Gulf of Mexico overnight.

At times, Macy seems to be the only one at all concerned about the changes going on around her, or is willing to ask why things have changed so much. Most of the people she interacts with don’t really have the time or the energy to deal with the existential questions of why, exactly, the Mississippi River has achieved oceanic depths that allow the traversal of a submarine (which may or may not be from the Byzantine Empire–but anyway, that’s another story) and why Macy can see giant megaliths on the horizon in Iowa. At times she asks pointed questions that are rebuffed. There isn’t an easily determined causality–things just happen in an eternal present that most people accept without too much fuss.

I wanted to use this “unknowing” as the basis for the narrative structure; it was also an attempt at a different type of worldbuilding for me. Rather than construct a solid structure with a carefully worked out geographical compendium, the novel is more constructed like a sand castle close to the shore, with waves occasionally streaming around it and changing the contours of the structure. Moreover, the oblivion in our current American culture becomes one of the backdrops for the novel’s arc.

These various oblivions presented a few opportunities as well as challenges in telling this story. For one, I could keep it close to the vest with my protagonist and freed me from having to do a larger quest to “solve” the problems of the world. Macy is mostly trying to keep her sanity and family intact–and even though she is one of the few characters around who has curiosity about the melding of the ancient and the contemporary, she too has an understandable focus on the here and now–she and her family, after all, are fleeing for their lives down the Mississippi River. Even if there was some kind of larger plot point of, say, a time travel portal open in Saskatchewan, which the Scythians are streaming through (which there isn’t!), Macy wouldn’t exactly have the werewithal to go on a grand quest to make things go “back to normal.” Conversely, this required being as true to Macy’s voice as humanly possible–her observations of all of the crazy things going on around her are (except for very short bridging sections between the main chapters) what the reader has to go on–not only in a storytelling sense but an emotional one as well.

In the popular lexicon, the phrase “total oblivion” has come to mean “absolute destruction,” and in a very real sense that is true in the novel. However, the “more or less” in the title, perhaps, gives a glimmer of hope. Most people in the novel are able to adapt–and despite the terror and chaos that Macy experiences, she has the freedom to construct her own history the best she can.

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Total Oblivion, More or Less: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the novel. Visit Alan DeNiro’s blog. Follow him on Twitter. Learn about Scythians.

Imagine you’re a caveman (this will be easier for some of you than others). Now, you’re handed an iPod. How do you think you would think about it? Would you even be able to think about it? Yes, I know, a deep thought for a Tuesday. But it’s actually relevant to this week’s Big Idea, from author Patrick Lee. No, his new thriller The Breach is not about cavemen with iPod, but it does think on how disruptive technology can be if you’ve never seen it before — and aren’t prepared for it. Take it away, Patrick Lee.

PATRICK LEE:

It was almost Clan of the Cave Bear meets The Dirty Dozen.  That was the first half of the big idea: what would happen if stone-age humans somehow came upon a stash of 20th century weapons and equipment, without meeting the people who’d designed and built it?  Imagine a hundred crates of the stuff just magically showing up in the woods outside one of their camps, twenty-five thousand years ago.  What impact would our technology, all by itself, have on their lives?

Most of it they’d never make sense of: socket wrenches, volt meters, hard drives.  Hell, a toilet plunger would leave them scratching their heads.

But I bet they’d figure out the guns.  Maybe not the first day, but in time — certainly.  Someone smart enough to shape a spear-head from stone and fix it to a shaft with vines — I don’t know how to do that, do you? — would eventually work out that the little open-topped container full of shiny blunt-ended things fits neatly into this opening down here, and then when you move this big thing on the side until all the clicks are done, set the little red/green thing to red, and put pressure against the part that’s unusually well-shaped for a fingertip… yeah, I think they’d eventually get it.  The early lessons would be costly (God help them when they got into the grenades), but they would learn them.  Given time, and a few batteries among the supplies, they might even puzzle out some of the electronics — significant, considering that a two-way radio is still among the most powerful weapons a soldier carries into battle.

These ancient people would never grasp how any of this stuff worked.  Most of us don’t know how it works.  But what little they learned to use would be enough to make life interesting.  I imagine the next few decades of interaction among their tribes and clans would be rather eventful.  And if I’d felt like studying paleoanthropology for a few years to prepare myself to write a book like that, I may well have charged ahead with it.  Actually, no, I wouldn’t have.  So here’s the second half of the big idea:

What if it happened to us?

What if we came upon a supply — in the case of The Breach, an ongoing one — of technology crafted by someone thousands or even millions of years more advanced than us?  How much of it could we make sense of?  How eventful would our next few decades be, among our tribes and clans?

From the beginning, working with this idea, my goal was to root it as realistically as possible in our present world.  I wanted it to feel as if these events could actually be happening.  I wanted the story to creep the hell out of people, the way reports about Groom Lake and Roswell used to, before they got a little too familiar — a thing can only be so scary once it’s been a successful teen drama on The WB.  Think back to the days when Peter Jennings would do an ABC special on Project Bluebook, and your uncle would take a swig of his Michelob and say, “You know, some of that shit’s probably real.”  That’s the feeling I wanted, without actually using Groom Lake or any of its contemporaries.

So that’s the approach I took: a real-as-I-could-make-it tone, and a premise that effectively makes hunter-gatherers out of the modern human race — the select few who are in on the secret — as they try to understand technological relics that are, in most cases, simply beyond them.  And as they deal with the political and global consequences.  And hope like hell they can distinguish the toilet plungers from the grenades.

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The Breach: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from The Breach. See the book trailer. Visit Patrick Lee’s blog.

2010 is here, so let’s drive right in to this year’s series of Big Ideas. And to begin the new year, we have science fiction and fantasy author Sarah A. Hoyt and her new novel Darkship Thieves — for which one of the initiating reasons for the book was the author being annoyed. Annoyed at what? Or annoyed at whom? Hoyt will explain all — and remind us all that inspiration can some at you from any angle.

SARAH A. HOYT:

Most of my big ideas – and a lot of the small ones – start with my being annoyed.  In this case, the source of annoyance was the whole flap about clones and how the cloning technology was going to destroy the world.

Let’s forget for the moment that most journalists, displaying the biological knowledge of the common household teapot, seemed to believe that clones would be born with the memories of the original or would be a sort of dark-universe twin of the original.  That was bad enough but could be ignored.  What couldn’t be ignored was the continuous din of people who should know better for the regulation of this technology.  Let’s make it illegal, they said, because otherwise people will be cloning themselves and having their brains transplanted to the body of the clone; they’ll be using these kids for spare parts; they’ll be–

It went on and on.  Two things bothered me about this: first, the belief that humans would use the new technology only for “evil” purposes and second, the idea that legislation was a sort of magic wand that undid the technological discovery and made it unusable.  The first might be true or not.  Granted that the worst possible purpose is in the range of human uses of any given technology.   However, we don’t always follow through on our evil designs.  We haven’t managed to nuke ourselves out of existence yet, for instance.  As for law stopping it…  It depends whose law and where and how good enforcement is or can be.   I think the war on drugs has shown that nothing can be banned completely, permanently or effectively.

What banning technology can do – look at the war on drugs again – is make it go underground and thereby insure it gets used only for the worst – or at least the most harmful to society at large – purposes.  Drug addiction might be no picnic even if it were openly talked about, but it’s made worse by the fact that the activity is illegal, must be hidden and has taken roots in a whole criminal underground.

In my view, at least, banning cloning – and the inevitable human enhancement – technology would ensure it would be used for all those purposes that people were afraid of.

So I started with two worlds – the one in which cloning and human biological enhancement was banned, and the one where it wasn’t.

Only I’m cursed with a twisty and convoluted mind where no idea can be simple.  Besides the “good world” and “bad world” design was too Manichean to satisfy my inner critic.  Things are never that black and white.

I went back to the drawing board and let other themes fall in – themes that interest me, like the idea of the resilient child that turns out all right despite everything.  And the one that doesn’t.   Like human instinctive – if hidden – dislike of those who are perceived as different.  Tinged with fear when those who are perceived as different are also smarter. Like the idea that there is no technology that would be harmful in the hands of an individual that can’t be made more so – on an epic scale – in the hands of an entrenched bureaucracy.

So when Darkship Thieves starts, in the 24th century, biological enhancements are illegal on Earth.  They didn’t start out illegal, but heavily regulated in most of the world.  In the rest of the world, on the other hand, they’d been used by tin pot dictators and corrupt bureaucracies.  It had started on a massive scale, creating children as fodders for armies, as strength for ethnic majorities, and as smart people who could fix all of the world’s problems.

What this led to was tyranny by super-engineered humans – Mules – who didn’t consider themselves human, partly through having hobbles (including the inability to reproduce) built into their genes, partly through having been raised as things, not people.  It eventually led to a revolt against the Mules and an overthrowing, which resulted in a world wide government of sorts and tight controls on human improvement and artificial human genetic change.

The Mules and some of their more grossly bio-engineered collaborators escape to space.  The still-human servants of the Mules colonize an asteroid.  The Mules themselves go on, into the wider space, because even among their collaborators they are considered odd and inspire fear.

Those still human servants form Eden, a society in which bio-engineering is extensively used and in the open.  They are connected to an Earth that doesn’t even believe they exist through one of the remaining pieces of technology introduced by the Mules – powertrees.  The powertrees grow in the vacuum of space and yield power pods, which can be harvested and are used to power the technology of Earth and Eden.  Edenites collect these pods by flying ‘darkships’ and making use of bio engineered pilots and navigators.

Athena Hera Sinistra, daughter of a Good Man – sort of a regional governor – of Earth tumbles into the midst of Eden society when she’s rescued from the powertrees by a darkship pilot.

The end result could be described, in Shakespeare’s words, as “all are punished.”  Or perhaps “all are redeemed.”  It depends on how you look at it and squint.

Not that there is anything murky about Athena, or Kit, the darkship pilot who rescues her.  They are quite decisive and active in facing what’s wrong with both of their flawed societies and in trying to improve it (in Athena’s case a little… er… forcefully.  The woman has anger issues.)  But in the end their struggle to reach what they consider humanity – humanity as a moral, not just a biological ideal – passes through personal discovery and revelation of deep, dark ills in both their worlds.

They fight against those evils – I cannot seem to write characters who merely whimper about things.  I’ve tried – and emerge victorious for a given definition of the word.  They find themselves as humans – or as human as they’re likely to be.  They find their own places in the universe and an humanity that transcends biological status or appearance.

Of course, they’re only two people, so they cannot change their worlds completely.  That will take time and independently-arising movements.

So we’ll leave my characters, at the end, sure of themselves and willing to continue struggling.  Revolution and wholesale mayhem will have to wait for future books.

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Darkship Thieves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Darkship Thieves. Visit Sarah Hoyt’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

And now, for your linking convenience, an index of every author who contributed a Big Idea essay this year, in alphabetical order, From Adams to Williamson. Catch up on what you missed, and keep these authors in mind when you’re cashing in your bookstore gift cards this week.

John Joseph Adams

C.L. Anderson

Julia Angwin

Paolo Bacigalupi

Steven R. Boyett

Sarah Rees Brennan

John Brown

Jeff Carlson

Harry Connolly

Megan Crewe

David Anthony Durham

Greg van Eekhout

Brian Evenson

C.C. Finlay

Jasper Fforde

Diana Pharaoh Francis

Daniel Fox

Laura Anne Gilman

Lev Grossman

Janice Hardy

Jim C. Hines

Charlie Huston

J.C. Hutchins

Kaza Kingsley

Mindy Klasky

Jay Lake

Tom Levenson

Malinda Lo

Paul Melko

China Miéville

James Morrow

Chad Orzel

Nicole Peeler

Diana Peterfreund

Sarah Prineas

Cherie Priest

Margaret Ronald

Diana Rowland

Carrie Ryan

Robert J. Sawyer

Seth Shostak

James Swallow

S. Andrew Swann

Catherynne Valente

Jeff VanderMeer

Carrie Vaughn

Scott Westerfeld

Edward Willett

Michael Z. Williamson

An excellent collection of authors, if I do say so myself.

Also, for any of you who are wondering when or if BigIdeaAuthors.com will ever see the light of day: Yes, we’re still working on spinning off the Big Idea to its own, fully-featured site. It’s just taking longer than we thought. In the meantime, of course, I’ll still be presenting The Big Idea here, as long as authors are still interested in participating. Indeed, after the new year (and when publicists are back at work), I’ll make a formal call for more of them.

But for now, please enjoy these.

There are many reasons I like Jasper Fforde’s writing, but one of the main reasons I do is that Fforde has the rare talent of taking fundamentally farcical plot concepts (People enter books! Detectives solve crimes in a nursery rhyme world!) and paying them off in ways that are not, in fact, merely farcical. So while Fforde’s books are delightfully loopy and funny, they aren’t constructed in a knockabout, we’re-just-in-it-for-a-lark way. There’s a there there, isn’t there. And that’s harder than it looks.

Fforde’s at it again in Shades of Grey, a book which posits a future in which what you see, chromatically speaking, in a large part defines who you are. A wild idea — a big idea, even — but as you’ll see (although not necessarily chromatically), when Fforde sets to writing, the obvious consequences of such a world aren’t necessarily the first or biggest thing on his mind, when it to comes to constructing his story.

JASPER FFORDE:

My Big Idea was not to use the Big Idea. Chuck it out, stuff it in the corner and relegate the obvious thread to the ignominy of subplot status. Then have the Small Idea advanced undeservedly to prominence. So my post-apocalyptic book has the nature of the ‘Something that Happened’ not only unanswered, but largely ignored. The remnants of the advanced technology that litter the landscape remain tantalisingly unexplored. All that remains of the Previous – mostly teeth, by now, complete with fillings – are simply trod underfoot. Anarchy is an alien concept; the world is ordered, neat, and static. The questions that dominate my character’s lives range from how they can marry into the Oxblood family’s String empire, the need to conduct a chair census, the visit to the Last Rabbit, the vexing question of where all the spoons went and, most important of all, how one can avoid the cold spectre of social embarrassment in a world obsessed with politeness and order?

I like challenges. Write oneself into something of a pit and then miraculously break free. But this isn’t some form of narrative suicide, it’s another way of approaching Story. Here’s why:

I have twelve or so ‘Writing Rules’ and sandwiched between number Seven: ‘Never use the word Majestic’ and number Nine: ‘On the hoof flexibility’ I have: ‘Always favour the less well trodden path’. An obvious adage, perhaps, but given the lamentable sameness of many novels, one that should be lifted to greater prominence. The theory is simple. You are walking in a metaphorical forest, chewing your metaphorical pencil and making narrative decisions, when you are presented with two paths – a well-worn route to safe, broadly-lit upland literary pastures, and a less-used one – a route towards experimentation, speculation, and risk. So I chose my idea – Post Apocalyptic Dystopia – and then noted the well trodden path: The immediate aftermath of a global upheaval. The population in disarray, citizens fighting for survival in a new world order. Too obvious. How about seven hundred years afterwards, when the fall of mankind has no more relevance than the Dark Ages has to us today? I don’t know about you, but I rarely talk about Edward III’s scandalous claim to the French throne in 1337, but it’s all people talked about then.

So we’re seven hundred years on and – several less well trodden paths later – we’re not talking about survival but simply getting through the day. A day in a different yet recognisable society based on different values and rules – visual colour in this case, where everything from social mobility, aspiration, health and commerce are based around colour. Earn enough and you can afford colorised bananas for dinner. More expensive, but it impresses the neighbours. The strict social hierarchy is decided not on something so hideously old fashioned as choice, intellect or the ability to lie convincingly to electors, but simply the colour you can see. If you are born able to see Purple you’re at the top of the stack; If you are born without any colour vision at all, then you’re at the bottom. Unquestionably objective. These are the sort of less well trodden paths I like. Because once you’re seven or ten less-well trodden paths from that first, the path has become so faint that you might not actually be on a path at all. And if you are now walking through that virgin forest of originality, then you have strayed well.

But it’s not enough to think up a new idea. It has to work. And that’s another less well trodden path all on its own. Landscape is one thing, characterisation and plotting quite another. And this is what I enjoy about the sort of writing I’m attempting in Shades of Grey – to try and give the mundane a narrative force all of its own. Two guys in a room and one of them has a gun? To me, that’s just plain lazy. Two guys in a room and one of them has lied about whether he has seen the last rabbit or not? And this one lie is enough to have someone ostracised by society and a need to prove themselves as redemption? Now that’s drama, and what’s more, it’s unconventional drama. The reader is always looking for something new and fresh and interesting, and since all the stories have pretty much been written, the bold frontier for authors these days is to further the technique of how they can be told – with different settings, different characters, different times – and for me, different values.

In case you’re wondering, we DO find out where all the spoons went, and you can learn how a tree goes Purple, and why the Green Room is better than the Mildew. You may even learn why nobody comes back from High Saffron, why there is a Caravaggio in the Greyzone and what Jane put in the Prefect’s scones. It’s narrative drive, but not as we usually know it. For me, the best Big Idea is the sneaky Small Idea that overtakes you on the inside when you’re not watching.

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Shades of Grey: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel. Visit the Shades of Grey Web site. Follow Jasper Fforde on Twitter.

Want a Big Idea that’s about a really big idea? Well, this week’s book is about quantum physics, and it doesn’t get much bigger than that (well, given the scale quantum physics works on, it actually doesn’t get much smaller than that, but you know what I mean — it’s a really big idea about really small things). Just the words “quantum physics” makes some people itchy, and don’t think author Chad Orzel doesn’t know it — he teaches physics for a living as a professor at Union College. But to show the subject is not as intimidating as all that, Orzel proposes to show that even our canine friends can follow the subject — and use it to their advantage when, say, chasing squirrels.

Thus: How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, featuring Orzel and his dog Emmy discussing Particle-Wave Duality, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Many-Worlds Interpretation and other very cool ideas in quantum physics. Does it work? It does indeed; this is a great book for folks who are interested in science and physics, whatever their previous level of knowledge on the subject (that’s a hint for you last-minute Christmas shoppers). I personally liked the book enough to give it a blurb; I’m a big fan of books that make science understandable for everyone, and Orzel (and Emmy) have just the right touch for that. This is a fun and fascinating book.

All of this leaves unanswered the question: “Why would a person think to teach physics to his dog in the first place”? Here’s Orzel to explain.

CHAD ORZEL:

There’s an old saying that you never really understand a subject until you try to teach it to someone else. It turns out that the best way to understand quantum mechanics is to teach it to your dog.

The big idea at the heart of the book is “Quantum mechanics is just about the coolest thing ever.” Because, really, it is– you’ve got particles that behave like waves and vice versa; objects whose properties aren’t determined until they’re measured; even “virtual particles” that pop into existence from empty space, and disappear again in a fleeting instant. What could be cooler than that? It’s even weirder than science fiction– if you had tried to sell modern physics to a pulp magazine in the early 20th century, they’d have laughed at you. And yet, quantum mechanics is one of the best-tested theories in the history of science. All of these bizarre phenomena are experimentally verified, to something like 14 decimal places.

And quantum physics is not just some abstract idea with no practical implications. Quantum ideas are the basis for most of the coolest things in modern life. You wouldn’t be able to read this without quantum physics: the modern telecommunications networks that form the backbone of the Internet use diode lasers, which rely on the quantum nature of light and matter to operate. Even the computer you’re (presumably) reading this on would not be possible without a detailed understanding of the quantum physics of electrons inside solids, and how they can be manipulated to make silicon computer chips.

Of course, “Quantum mechanics is just about the coolest thing ever” is not, by itself, enough to make a book. If you want to write a new book on the subject, you need a hook to grab people who wouldn’t ordinarily read a book about physics.

In my case, the hook is a talking dog. My dog Emmy, to be precise, whose interest in quantum mechanics and its potential use in catching squirrels and bunnies is the jumping-off point for explaining the theory. Each chapter opens with a conversation between me and Emmy about some aspect of quantum physics, followed by a more detailed explanation of the physics for interested humans (and dogs).

I’d like to be able to say that the whole talking-to-the-dog-about-physics thing was a carefully calculated move to bring physics to a general audience. In reality, it was a total accident– I wrote a couple of talking-to-the-dog blog posts (Bunnies Made of Cheese and Many Worlds, Many Treats), and they were a big hit. The book just sort of happened after that.

Once I started, though, it became clear that dogs and quantum physics are a great fit. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they approach the world as an endless source of surprise and wonder, and readily accept many things that would drive humans nuts. If you’ve ever watched a dog staring intently at nothing, you know that the idea of “virtual particles” will be no problem for a dog. If dog treats appeared out of nothing in the middle of our kitchen, Emmy would take it as vindication (and you can be sure she would see to it that they vanished very quickly). Quantum indeterminacy is not a problem for a dog, as they never believe anything really exists until they’ve sniffed it thoroughly. And surely it’s easier to get your head around the idea of particles that are also waves than it is to figure out what cats are up to.

So, quantum physics is a natural fit with the canine mindset. And that turns out to be a great way to explain quantum physics to a human audience. People can relate to Emmy’s schemes to turn quantum physics to her advantage, and that provides an easy way to make a connection to even the weirdest ideas of quantum physics. If you can manage to think like a dog, it’s not that big a leap to an appreciation of the weird and wonderful quantum world.

Emmy’s voice is also a huge help in keeping the text moving. Whenever the explanations start to get a little thick (and they do, because quantum mechanics is heavy stuff), Emmy breaks in to ask for clarification, or express a key idea a different way, or just comment ironically on the density of the explanation. It’s a great way to keep the material from overwhelming the reader.

This was a fun book to write, especially the dog bits. And I certainly know a lot more about quantum mechanics than I did before I decided to try to teach it to my dog. I hope that humans reading it will enjoy it, and maybe learn some new science that they can teach to their own dogs.

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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit DogPhysics.com, the official Web site for the book. Read a preview of the book and watch videos about the book. Learn more about Emmy, the physics-learning dog, and follow her on Twitter. You can follow Chad Orzel on Twitter, as well.

‘Tis the season for trying new things, and the group of writers behind the online publishing collective Book View Cafe are doing just that, releasing their first eBook anthology of original fiction: The Shadow Conspiracy, a collection of related tales taking place in an alternate, steampunk world. What does it take to build up a home-cooked anthology and give it the depth and quality that these authors, professional writers all, expect and demand of their work? The Shadow Conspiracy editor Laura Anne Gilman is here to show you all the gears in this steampunk world.

LAURA ANNE GILMAN:

The Shadow Conspiracy, a steampunk ebook anthology launching this month, started, not in the usual “hey, here’s a great idea” moment most anthologies lay claim to, but as a natural evolution of BookView Café.

BookView Café is a co-op of professional writers, using our collected skills — not merely writing, but editing, and coding, and promotion and design –to bring our fiction directly to the readers, using the Internet as our medium.   The emphasis, however, is on professional-level work, with every member bringing an established career to the mix.

BVC started with free reprints – short stories, novels, cartoons, interactive fiction – then offered for-premium original material… and then, as we reached our year anniversary, we thought: why not try an original anthology?  Not a standard collection of stories, but something that represented what we’re doing here at BVC — the evolving, interactive, creative nature of our co-op.

The idea had to be one that could inspire all the writers — something that spoke to us all, that would be fun to write — but that we could also put a new twist into it.  Steampunk, everyone agreed, was the obvious answer.  Not because it was hot, but because it, like Bookview Cafe, defied a single definition.  It called on music, and fashion, exploration and science, design, religion, and desire… speaking to every writer differently, yet keeping us within the overarching theme of progress.

The Shadow Conspiracy was thus born out of a desire to see what could be accomplished by a true collective, everyone working both for their own good — every author makes money off the sales – and as a group, weaving their stories in and out of a shared reality.

Having edited two anthologies myself, and acquired many more during my editorial days, I was probably the Official Naysayer in this project.  I warned about the difficulties of getting everyone on the same page, of the time constraints and technical difficulties, and the ego conflicts that were bound to appear when asking everyone to ‘share’ their concepts and make sure that no story, however brilliant, undid or contradicted the work of another.

Despite my naysaying – or, more likely, because of it – I was asked to stand as editor-in-chief for this new project, working with Phyllis Radford, who was the overall project editor.

Despite the enthusiasm for the idea, getting everything in order wasn’t easy.  Editing an anthology is compared to herding cats for a reason; everyone had their own ideas, and their own takes on the history.  Our job, as editors, was to take all those views, and make them into a non-contradicting whole, without taking away from the uniqueness of each entry.  All of my worst fears were realized – and then put to rest, as everyone stepped forward with their best game, and their most professional attitude, giving us not only fabulous and wildly inventive stories – but working with each other to ensure that the continuity was logical, if not always marching in lockstep.

And, in the end, I’m proud and pleased to say that The Shadow Conspiracy, our first all-original anthology, is true to the nature of Book View Cafe: individual creativity, harnessed to a greater goal.

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The Shadow Conspiracy: Amazon Kindle| Book View Cafe Bookstore

Read an excerpt here. Visit Laura Anne Gilman’s LiveJournal.

As the proprietor of The Big Idea, every once in a while I get to pull rank and pop up a book that’s of personal interest to me, and here’s one that is: Air, by James Swallow, which is an adaptation and novelization of the first three episodes of Stargate: Universe, which is, of course, the TV show I am the Creative Consultant on.

Science fiction writers and readers have varying opinions on novelizations and what they mean in the genre, but leaving aside that discussion, I think one thing that’s often overlooked in the discussion is the professionalism of the people doing the novelizations: Here are folks who have to take a script, bump it up to novel length, get it done usually in a short amount of time — and get it right. Yes, that’s work.

In the case of Air, it was brought to my attention when James contacted me during his writing, asking me questions about the show so that what ends up in the TV series is also what ends up in the novel — basically, doing the behind-the-scenes legwork and research that often gets taken for granted by readers (and sometimes, other writers).

I was happy to help him then, and right now, I’m happy to give him the floor to tell you a little more about what it takes to adapt and expand a script into novel form.

JAMES SWALLOW:

“I guess it’s not like you had to do a lot of work, really,” said the guy at the bookseller’s table, with a sniff. ‘I mean, it was pretty much all done for you already, yeah?”

Uh, no.

No, not at all, actually. See, when I was hired on by Fandemonium Books to adapt ‘Air’, the first three episodes of the new television series Stargate Universe, what they asked me to deliver was a novel. That’s why they call it a novelization. Your standard sixty minute teleplay script? You’re looking at under ten thousand words, right there. I had three of ‘em, and I had to turn that into a book that deserved an eight buck cover price. I had to take what I had and, at the very least, expand it to three times its size. And not in the whipped butter kind of way, where they froth it up and pump air into it. No. I had to do it with words and prose and narrative, pitch and moment and drama – and all without breaking the story that had already been created.

I had to fill Air with, well, stuff that wasn’t just air. This is a bit about how I did it.

Air wasn’t my first novelization – I adapted The Butterfly Effect a few years back, getting to put back a lot of the stuff that had been cut in order to get Ashton Kutchner on screen as early as possible. That was a fun experience for me, memorable as it not only introduced my writing to a whole new demographic – teenage high school girls – but because it also got me more fan mail than anything I’d written before. A lot of it was from people asking me how I felt about the movie they had made of my novel.

The way I made Butterfly Effect and now Air work for me was linked to the way that I write. I see my stories unfold in my head like a feature film, and when I’m making notes I use script shorthand to set scenes; I try to write the prose equivalent of whip pans or contra-zooms, wide shots and medium shots. In short, I’m directing it in my head. I took this approach with Air, imagining myself doing the job that episode director Andy Mikita did in the real world – which is a lot more than just adding ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ to the end of Brad Wright’s and Robert C. Cooper’s dialogue.

In some ways I lucked out, because SGU’s producer Joe Mallozzi had a blog full of images from the show in production and of the actors they had cast, so I knew how Air was going to look and what the voices of the people in it would be. But then I was also up against the knowledge that I didn’t know everything about these characters, so I couldn’t lay in nuances and subtle clues that would pay off down the line, and anything new I brought to the party ran the risk of being utterly contradicted by the ongoing show.

And I didn’t have was any opportunity to see the finished cut and edit of the episodes until several weeks after the manuscript had been delivered. While I worked from the three episodic scripts that made up the pilot, I was a good way through the writing before I discovered the drafts I had were months old, with key details that differed from the final versions; it was only thanks to the help of a certain creative consultant that got solved (thanks, John)… The challenge was to paint inside the lines but still deliver something with originality.

So what did all this leave me with? In the end, Air the novel isn’t ‘Air’ the TV episodes, and I’m happy that it isn’t. After all, what would be the point of reading a book that slavishly follows every tiny element of the TV stories? What the novelization brings is what made me read novelizations as a kid – an internal viewpoint for the characters that explores them in a way that TV just can’t do, a seamless story experience that broadens out the scope of the narrative, and a chance to see the bits of plot that were cut for time.

The latter is the kind of thing that DVD extras bring us now, and in no small part I imagine that’s why then novelization is something of a dying art; but back in the day the book of the film was the only place where you saw that kinda thing, like, say, Alan Dean Foster’s tense adaptation of Alien with the chilling cocoon scene still in place. So I put back in Rush’s monologue about the origins of the starship Destiny and the confrontation between him and Jack O’Neill; but I also added new stuff and expanded out what was already there, lengthening scenes and deepening motivations.

There’s a perception that tie-ins are bereft of originality, that they’re a straight-jacket for creativity, and a haunt of lazy writers, but that kind of commentary largely comes from people who don’t read them; generally, from sniffy lit-snobs who complain that tie-ins are stealing all the shelf space in stores and think that all other media are barren artistic wastelands.

In a larger sense, writing a tie-in is no different from the work of TV scriptwriters working on a series that they didn’t create; and when you think about it, writers who adapt a book into a movie are eligible for an Academy Award, while writers who adapt a movie into a book (which requires considerably more writing) are often labeled as hacks.

But the fact is, a great part of telling a tale in one of these fictional worlds is that a writer actually has to work harder under these constraints, and that challenge can inspire you not only tell a tale that fits the texture of the world you’re writing in, but also to bring your own unique authorial voice to bear on it. Plus, you get to play with cool stuff, like Stargates.

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Air: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit James Swallow’s LiveJournal.

Writers are often asked where their ideas come from, but any writer knows that coming up with ideas is only a small portion of the battle. The major portion of the writing battle is showing up — putting your butt in the chair and doing the work of getting the idea out of your head and on to the paper or monitor screen. J.C. Hutchins knows all about this: His novel 7th Son: Descent is jam-packed with ideas, but for Hutchins, the proof was in the writing — actually getting it down and seeing how all those cool ideas work in the real world. And how did they work? Hutchins will be pleased to fill you in.

J.C. HUTCHINS:

Fiction writers excel at two things: masturbation and lying.

Lying, that’s the fun part — finding the Big Idea, and then dumping gobs of sweat equity into crafting a superstructure and characters that convincingly supports it. Even when a mythology is based on facts, there’s always a clothesline upon which a writer hangs half-truths and outright lies. Invent authentic secret history and technology to accommodate, say, the conceit that human cloning has been around for at least 15 years, and you’ll get buy-in from the reader. Snag that, and you’re gold.

In contrast, masturbation passes the time, but doesn’t move the needle. Writers love to fondle those wonderful ideas they’ve yet to commit to paper. Man, it’s going to be such a good book, crammed with such great concepts . . . as soon as there’s time to write it. You even have a Moleskine notebook and pricey fountain pen and a stack of receipts as tall as a Venti Doucheacino Latte to accompany those spiffy notions. Hell, you’ve pud-pulled about your future success so much, you’ve made a playlist of the music Spielberg will use for the movie soundtrack.

When I was conceiving 7th Son: Descent back in 2001, I was a compulsive mental masturbator. My ideas weren’t entirely new, but I reckoned their presentation could be: A story set in present day in which human cloning — and the recording of a human’s memories — had been a reality for nearly 20 years. Seven men, unwitting participants in this experiment, each with identical childhood memories but unique skill sets, are assembled to stop a global threat they’re unqualified to combat. A well-funded villain so cruel he’d make Blofeld wet the bed. Stolen Russian nukes. Dangerous mindwipe tech that could make an assassin anyone or anywhere. Monster truck-sized conspiracies. Automatic gunfire. Fate Of The World stakes.

But I was all talk, no action. I was Wanky McWankerton, in love with words I’d yet to write. I did this for nearly two years. If every sperm is sacred, God wasn’t irate with me — he was effing thermonuclear.

The kick in the nads that eventually moved me from wanking to writing hinged on the villain. I knew how he would threaten the world — those nukes weren’t a red herring; they’d be used later in the story — but floundered when it came to who he’d be. I finally realized my seven everyman clone protagonists needed a villain that contrasted and enhanced their extraordinary origins. It’d up the ante for them as characters, add an emotional “this time it’s personal” angle to the story.

So I made the villain, a man code-named John Alpha, the very man they were cloned from — the man whose childhood memories they shared. This provided some great potential for emotional conflict, and would give a logical reason for the government scientists to assemble the seven clones — after all, they were armed with insights about Alpha no one else had. Further, the villain could mastermind a vendetta against the heroes and the experiment’s scientists . . . all while laying the foundation for a scheme that would decimate the world’s economy and create global chaos. My Big Idea was so big, I wound up writing a trilogy. (The publication of the sequels hinges on the sales success of 7th Son: Descent.)

Groovy. My noggin was chuggin’, but I needed a spectacular opening; a catalyst to bring the government scientists out of hiding and enlist the help of the seven clones. Aha. Murder the U.S. president, using an unlikely assassin. The mystery behind this bizarre slaying would propel the first act of the novel, introduce our heroes and readers to the crazy-ass tech that would fuel the rest of the book and series, and give me fodder for Descent’s opening lines: “The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy. . .”

Boom. Once those words popped into my head, I started writing. While the years of concocting idea after idea was helpful, it was absolutely unsatisfying in comparison to rolling up my sleeves and crafting the tale. Lying. I got to tie up those fact-based clotheslines and hang lie after lie upon them, manufacturing secret histories and technologies that would support my Big Idea — human cloning isn’t near; it’s already here — and building characters who would react realistically to that revelation and rise to the challenge of taking down their psychopathic progenitor.

In the midst of this, I made sure each of the seven protags represented a facet of the human cloning issue. The POV blue-collar type frets over issues of identity, the priest has an intense crisis of faith, the geneticist wigs over the ethics, the insane messianic computer hacker does the Snoopy dance because he’s a living conspiracy theory, and so on.

I also saw opportunities to explore some relevant sub-topics: nature vs. nurture, classic Pandora’s Box and abuse of power stuff, the concept of “if I’d taken another life path, where would I wind up?”, etc. I tried to squeeze some character-driven gray matter in my conspiracy-soaked popcorn potboiler.

7th Son: Descent shouldn’t be in print, actually. It was rejected by agents in 2005, was released as a podcast a year later, and thanks to the support of thousands of fans, finally got on the radar at St. Martin’s. It was released in print a few weeks ago. It’s fitting that a story that was nearly never written due to all my wanking would require such a circuitous seven-year-long path to publication. I am karma’s bitch.

But the experience taught me that Big Ideas are only truly worthwhile when you — surprise! — actually follow up on them. Less talk, more action. I’ve swapped my Moleskine and fountain pen for loose leaf and Flair felt-tips. I deleted that movie soundtrack playlist years ago. I’ve traded my Starbucks visits for Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru.

I’ve gotta rush back to the house and computer, see. I’ve got more lying to do.

—-

7th Son: Descent: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Listen to audio and read excerpts of the novel here. Follow J.C. Hutchins on Twitter.

Where do you go in a book series when you’ve wiped out five billion people in the first book? Jeff Carlson knows, because Plague Zone is the third book in his acclaimed “Plague Year” series — and yet, as Carlson explains in this week’s Big Idea, all the thought-out plans of the author can (and perhaps should) take a backseat when inspiration comes, even from a most unexpected source.

JEFF CARLSON:

As a writer, you face two big challenges with a series. First, each book needs to work as a stand-alone for anyone who’s new to your work. At the same time, it’s important to jump ahead with each installment, always racheting up the stakes.

I try not to mess around. The first book in the trilogy, Plague Year, opens with five billion dead as the remnants of humankind cling to mountaintops around the world because the runaway nanotech self-destructs at low air densities. So. That’s all good scary fun — but what do you do for an encore? It was tough enough to outdo myself with the second book, Plague War. How about a little romance? Politics. Bug swarms as big as small cities! Bwah HA ha ha ha!!!

But now what? In the course of the first two books, people on all sides of the war develop weaponized nanotech based on the original machine plague. This played naturally from the story. The surviving nations are desperate for food and land. They’re driven to use any advantage they can find, so it seemed obvious to continue in that direction.

Nanotech is impressive stuff. By the time the curtain opens in third book, it wouldn’t have been too incredible for my warring nations to be using next generation technologies to create supersoldiers with bulletproof skin and Wolverine bones. Heck, maybe they could turn invisible by bending the light with a zillion microscopic mirrors embedded in their uniforms. Levitation! The ability to go without food or water!

No, no, no, no, no.

One of my Big Ideas, ironically, was to keep Plague Zone “smaller” as far as the technology goes. I didn’t want to get that far ahead of myself. The first two books are plausible — if outlandish — and more disturbing because of it. Zone needed to fit well with the others and yet push the envelope, too, so I had to find a different way to up my game.

I came up with my best bad guy yet. I love smart bad guys. More to the point, this let me expand the scope of the story by another order of magnitude. Year is a fairly personal story. Most of its focus is on two survivors of the machine plague and their quest to defeat it. In War, the camera pulls back a little more. The global conflict that was in the background of Year explodes onto the stage in War as the U.S. is invaded by two foreign armies.

With Zone, I was finally able to personalize the enemy. The lion’s share of the narrative continues to be with Cam and Ruth and other favorites, but we also spend a good deal of time with a Chinese Elite Forces colonel with secrets and surprises of his own. Awesome!!! No matter where you live, you could probably hear me cackling like a demented witch stirring up a lovely pot of evil.

The second Big Idea came from a fan. This was the surprise ingredient. It fell into my lap more than two years ago at one of my very first book signings. I can only take credit for keeping my eyes and ears open, which, after all, is one of the main functions of being a writer.

My mother-in-law had given Plague Year to a friend of hers. Neither of these sensible family women, both German emigrants in their late sixties, are anyone you’d peg as readers of sci fi end-of-the-world novels, but mom-in-law was very proud of me and her friend thought it was interesting to know an author, so they both took a chance.

It turns out the friend is in a book club. Her name is Ingrid Wood. Ingrid’s spent a lifetime debating the intrinsic values of character in Michener and Irving and Auel, so I was pleased when she got my address from mom-in-law and wrote to say she’d really enjoyed her first-ever science fiction novel.

Ingrid came to my book signing armed with discussion points, which was hilarious. I was very nervous. This was a hometown event. Everyone brought friends. Picture me standing in front of a crowd of forty people just trying to keep my nerves down to a low rattle. I’d already worked up a spiel about real-life nanotechnology and breaking into publishing… and Ingrid kept interrupting with  questions about the motivations of Character A or what Character B really meant in Chapter 7 when he recalled some long-lost tidbit from his childhood.

Man, I’m not writing The Joy Luck Club. I like to think my books are full of honest human drama and well-written, evocative moods and imagery — but they’re also big, fun, rock-and-roll thrillers loaded with gunfights and exploding helicopters. Yet she made my head explode with one perfect question.

At the time I was writing the sequel, War, and I thought I knew where I was headed with the third book to cap the trilogy. None of those plans went out the window. It was more like Ingrid crashed my party like a gang of bikers, bringing a whole new level of mayhem to my intentions.

It wouldn’t be right for me to give away too much about Plague Zone, so I have to play coy and give you a fake name.

What she said was: “What does Moe do after this book?”

Moe? Who’s Moe, you’re asking. Man? Woman? Is that a Zoe joke? I can’t tell you. Ingrid was right that I’d left a small thread hanging loose in Plague Year, but there are several characters who are left behind or lost or run away in one action sequence or another. Catastrophes are rarely neat. In my mind, that had been the end of Moe.

Now I stood there staring at Ingrid. What I was thinking was: “Holy jumbolee! What does Moe do after this book?”

Ingrid was disruptive and outspoken and nearly derailed my little event, but she had a killer instinct for storytelling. Those few words were exactly the fresh wrinkle I needed to make the story pop…

…so Moe is back, people. That’s the Big Twist Inside The Big Idea.

I hope you like it as much as I did.

—-

Plague Zone: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read a sample chapter from the novel. See samples from the other books in the series, plus short stories. Read his blog.

You can’t accuse Scott Westerfeld of not thinking big. When he put together his latest trilogy, of which his terrific new novel Leviathan is the first installment, he not only reordered history by providing an alternate version of World War I, but also also fiddled with biology, technology and indeed the whole general run of scientific advancement from the 19th century forward into the 20th, by positing the existence of both vast, clanking machines of war and amazing new genetically-designed creatures, also used for (you got it!) war.

And to top it all off — and this is something Westerfeld’s particularly proud of — he decided to reimagine the way people read novels here in the 21st century. You know, just for kicks.

How did he did this? Well, in this Big Idea, not only will Westerfeld tell you, he will show you.

SCOTT WESTERFELD:

A picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s start with this:

Okay. It’s night, and moonlight streams through the camouflage netting, suggesting hiding and sneaking. (And, cheating a bit, the caption says “Stealing Away.”) The spiked helmets tell us that it’s World War I. A pair of Iron Crosses suggest Germany, but then we spot a tiny Hapsburg crest, so it’s Austria-Hungary. A young boy is pulling on his glove, preparing to drive the HOLY CRAP IT’S A WALKING TANK.

That is, in a nutshell, what I’ve come to love about illustration: in one glance you can mix storytelling with world-building, the familiar with the outlandish, and the fastidiously accurate with the Just Plain Historically Wrong. Unlike linear text, images dump all their information all at once, letting the viewer “read” the result in whatever order their brain sees fit.

My new book, Leviathan, has about fifty of these visual info-dumps, all masterfully executed by Keith Thompson. Mind you, I didn’t start writing the trilogy with illustrations in mind, but about sixty pages in, I had a Big Idea.

In ye olden days—let’s say 1914, when Leviathan is set—most novels were published with pictures. Whether you were reading Charles Dickens, Jane Austin, or H.G. Wells, you expected to find a half-dozen plates among the pages. And these images had great power in shaping an author’s work. For example, Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker cap does not appear in Arthur Conan Doyle’s text, only in Sidney Paget’s drawings, and yet it’s part of our iconic image of the character.

Why these pictures disappeared is open to debate. It may have been the explosion of cheap paperbacks, or the collapse of the illustration industry after newspapers, advertising, and mail-order catalogs started using photographs. It may have been changes in literacy rates, or the advent of film or comics as mass media. But for whatever reason, novels for adults gradually became illustration-free over the middle of the last century. Novels for teenagers followed suit soon thereafter.

(Dear pickers of nits: I am aware that graphic novels exist. But I’m talking about prose novels with illustrations, which are a different form altogether.)

The Leviathan trilogy is set in an alternate history with alternate technologies, so I thought to myself, what if novels hadn’t lost their images? What if, instead of shrinking to zero, the number of illustrations in the average book had increased to, say, fifty?

In the world of Leviathan, technology has split into two tribes: the Germanic Clankers, who are machine lovers, and the British-led Darwinists, who weave the life-threads of natural creatures into fabricated beasts. (To put it simply, in this world, Origins of Species was an instruction manual.) So I needed someone who could draw both fantastical machines and strange creatures. Keith Thompson fit that bill perfectly. He’s been a conceptual artist for films and video games (like Iron Grip and Borderlands), so creating new worlds has been his job for a long time. But what sort of new world?

Leviathan is often described as a steampunk series, and fair enough (walking tanks!). But it hews closer to alternate history than most steampunk, with the son of the Archduke Ferdinand a character, and the timeline for the early war matching our own history closely. But in a way, the most “alternate” thing about it for me was simply writing an illustrated novel.

For one thing, I had to become an art director. (To maintain creative control, I agreed to pay Keith with my own money rather than the publisher’s. This is not the usual way with an illustrated book.) This new role meant knowing all sorts of details that a prose novelist could ignore. Sure, before writing this series, I would often claim to have imagined every scene down to the last detail. But that was all lies! Turns out, I didn’t really know what kind of wallpaper was in this room, or what sort of boots that character had on at that moment.

And it’s not just the details; there are also big-picture issues to contend with. In Leviathan, the Great War is not simply between two treaty-groups of countries, or two ideologies; it’s between two technologies. So to represent them, Keith had to create two opposing aesthetics. As you can see from the Stormwalker above, Clanker design has that clunky futurist, WWI-tank look. The Darwinists are more organic and art nouveau. Take a peek at Captain’s Hobbes’ cabin, where a nautilus motif appears in the mirror frame, the fabricated-wood desk, and his cufflinks and hat. (All of that Keith’s idea.)

Every image has to help build the world, or it’s a wasted thousand words.

On top of all this art direction, illustrated books require a different pace of storytelling. The series I’m best known for, Uglies, has more hoverboard chases than slow conversational scenes. But with an image gracing every chapter, stuff really has to happen in Leviathan. And not only is action important, but my characters have to arrive at new and wondrous settings to keep the backgrounds fresh. (It’s just lucky they have an airship.)

And finally, there’s the technical side of illustration: the aspect ratio of the trim size effects every composition; there are contrast issues (can’t write too many scenes at night); and even the type of paper becomes important! Luckily, I had a very indulgent publisher who gave me seventy-pound paper (only thirty pounds short of cookbook weight) and an amazing design team. They budgeted for color end-papers, which allowed Keith an amazing allegorical map of Europe. The result is a beautiful book, and one heavy enough to stun a lupine tigeresque.

So let yourself imagine if technology really had taken a different turn, and no one had invented photography, or if cheap paperbacks, or comics, or whatever it was that killed illustrated novels had never appeared. All of us writers would be facing a different set of challenges every day, and making novels would be far more research-intensive and collaborative than it is today. Imagine how a cultural imperative of fifty pictures per book might have changed the works of Charlie Stross, Octavia Butler, Salman Rushdie, or Angela Carter.

Now that would be an alternate world worth visiting.

—-

Leviathan: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit the Leviathan page, which includes links to an excerpt, the audio version of the first chapter, read by Alan Cumming, and other goodies. Follow Scott Westerfeld on Twitter. See a gallery of Leviathan illustrator Keith Thompson’s work.

Jeff VanderMeer returns to his weird, fantastical city of Ambergris in his new novel Finch, but as he explains in this Big Idea, there’s more going on in this stand-alone tale than just the rich vein of fantasy he’s previously explored in this world. Finch has more on its agenda, and the idea that more is merrier when it comes to genres. Is he right? Let’s see if he convinces you below.

JEFF VANDERMEER:

Sometimes a Big Idea is about combining several different big ideas in such a way that they create what you hope is A REALLY BIG-ASS IDEA. If you do it right, these ideas create what you might remember from high school science classes as a chemical rather than physical reaction. You can’t separate out the parts, and readers don’t even notice those parts. All they notice is character and story.

In my novel Finch, a reluctant detective named John Finch and his partner Wyte must attempt to solve a difficult double murder. If Finch doesn’t, there will be a severe beat-down from his boss and if he does solve it, another faction will probably put a bullet through his head.

Fairly standard set-up, right? But layered onto that core situation are a number of major complications. The novel isn’t set in our world—it’s set in my fantastical city of Ambergris. Finch is basically a conscript. Finch’s boss, Heretic, isn’t human—he’s a gray cap, an intelligent species that has risen from the underground sections of the city and used advanced fungi-based technologies to subject Ambergris to a brutal Occupation. The people who might kill Finch if he solves the case are rebel factions fighting the Occupation. His partner Wyte is literally disintegrating into spores due to a fungal disease. The two bodies, found in an empty apartment, appear to have fallen from a great height. One of them is a gray cap missing its legs.

To make things worse, Ambergris is now the equivalent of a failed state. Although the gray caps run things, even basic necessities like electricity are inconsistent at best. The gray caps use human traitors called Partials as their security services, and to gather intel through spore cameras that supplement their vision. However, so much information is constantly coming in that the gray caps can’t process it all. This gap is what gives many people a chance to survive.

But that gap and others like it mean that Finch’s life is complicated by the presence of other forces that have slipped into the city. In a word, spies. Infiltrating from foreign countries, most are attempting to acquire gray cap technology to gain an advantage against other countries. These spies often come into conflict with the rebels. The rebels, meanwhile, are composed of two rival factions engaged in a civil war that ended only because of the need to band together to fight the gray caps. Not only do they have their own intelligence services but the simmering resentments of the old conflict sometimes puts them at cross-purposes despite their joint objective.

So…maybe it’s time to start counting. Just how many genres are we dealing with here?

(1) Noir. The set-up, the lone, reluctant detective, his friends who may or may not be in on the up-and-up, the number of beat-downs in crappy alleys, all reflect a strong noir influence. (Indeed, the British Commonwealth rights to Finch just sold to Atlantic’s new Corvus imprint, the backbone of which is mysteries and thrillers.)

(2) Thriller. Given the number of times John Finch gets embroiled in gun battles or chase scenes, I think it’s fair to add this designation, which also speaks to the novel’s pacing and the idea that a good thriller provides a test of the main character’s resolve, of their ability to persevere despite almost insurmountable obstacles.

(3) Political Thriller. With scenes involving illegal interrogation, prison camps, and other repression, you might even think about tacking on the word “political” to “thriller”, a very specific subgenre of the normal thriller. You might even start thinking about words like “Baghdad” or “extraordinary rendition.” This is entirely intentional, as is the rebel tactic of using suicide bombers. Fantasy gives me the distance to include the political so that hardwired into the story rather than a didactic statement.

(4) Spy Novel. Finch is faced with a mystery, but when the proliferating list of suspects includes a retired spymaster named Ethan Bliss, an operative from the country of Stockton named Stark, and a friend whose allegiances are uncertain, we’re suddenly in John Le Carre territory. Le Carre’s brilliant fiction is all about the individual attempting to survive in a world of hostile institutions; his spies are as often in conflict with their employers as with the enemy. He’s also exceptional at combining action and introspection, lessons that served me well in writing Finch. (Yes, there’s also the James Bond spy model, but James Bond wouldn’t last five minutes in Ambergris.)

(5) New Weird Fantasy. Okay, you may be saying, but Ambergris is still identified as a New Weird setting. Yep, and that still comes into play. Ambergris is a secondary-world decaying, fungus-shrouded major, centuries-old metropolis. That setting shapes all of the characters, all of the other elements—in sense, it’s the broth in this cross-genre soup. It’s what makes it possible for all of the other elements to work in harmony.

So that’s my Big Idea: the ultimate cross-genre mash-up in which one character finds the pressure turned up to “11” and the only way out is to navigate a landscape scarred by civil war, occupation, infiltration, insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, betrayals, and, oh yeah, surreal fungal technologies. John Finch is an honest man with militia training, clear-headed and quietly brave, but even he may find it difficult to make it out alive.

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Finch: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt of the novel (pdf link), and visit the book site. Listen to the novel soundtrack. Follow VanderMeer on Twitter.

I’ve made no secret that when I was a teenager, one of my favorite novels was Ariel, by Steven Boyett. Why? Because here was adventure-packed novel with great dialogue, an epic quest and a love story (of sorts) at the end of the world (or at least the end of the world as we knew it). At fifteen, this was the novel I knew I wanted to write one day — and if not this novel, one that felt like it. And to top it all off, Boyett wrote the thing when he was in his late teens. There was hope for me yet.

Fast forward, oh, 25 years, and into this last summer, when two cool things happened to me: I got to actually meet Steve — indeed, I basically dragged him out to dinner at Worldcon — and I discovered that after all this time, a sequel to Ariel would be coming out: Elegy Beach. I squeed like the 14-year-old I once was.

And I am happy to say Elegy Beach did not disappoint me. The good thing about it was it was as interesting and exciting to read now as I remember Ariel being when I first picked it up. The great thing about it, to me, was that it wasn’t just a sequel — not a simple revisit to the world of Ariel, but tonally and in the construction of its story, a progression from that book. It’s (relatively) easy for a writer to go back to the scene of his or her most famous book and grind out a crowd-pleasing followup; it’s rather harder to move on from that book, in the same universe, and make your readers feel the weight of the change — even when still giving them a compelling read. Elegy Beach does that, and makes the world Steve’s created in both books that much more complete.

Now that I’ve gushed enough, it’s time to bring Steve onto the stage to talk about Elegy Beach, and visiting the world he made years ago with Ariel… and bringing it up to date, not just with our time, but with him.

STEVEN R. BOYETT:

Elegy Beach would not exist at all without a Big Idea that grabbed me hard enough to make me write the novel in the first place. For decades I insisted I would never write a sequel to Ariel, and I meant it. In some odd way I still do.

Premise-wise the big idea that grabbed me was the notion of magic as a kind of software. Or more accurately an operating system to which the machinery of the universe now responded. I called it spellware and I ran with the notion, though not as far as I’d originally intended. My underlying rationale was the viewpoint that in what for purposes of conversation we’ll call the real world the universe’s OS is commonly regarded as Newtonian physics. Yet current cosmogony tends to think that this OS is randomly formulated. That in the microinstants immediately preceding the Big Bang the pressure and heat were so incalculably intense that laws of any kind could not exist, that the possible laws of any universe were in constant flux. Then biff bam boom it all goes off, and immediately things cooled enough to lock a set of laws in place. The spinning jackpot pictures stuck. Entropy was our friend this once. As Carl Sagan pointed out, the speed of light could have been slower. Time could have moved differently. Mass and gravitation could have had a different relationship.

From our perspective these different laws would violate our own. They would be magic.

Adding to the fun are the uncertainties and apparent violations at the quantum level. What once was the province of university courses in existentialist philosophy is now spelled out on palimpsest chalkboards by leading physicists. The role of intent in shaping the world. The influence of observation. Measurement as determinator.

So I approached spellcasting as a kind of hacking, really. And surmised right off the bat that castings could be broken into basic units that could be rearranged in any number of ways. In code. In language. And macros could be created that would record castings to let them play out later. Spells could be password-encoded. Copied. Hacked.

Let me quickly say that I know that all of this is bullshit. That I was simply looking for a science fictional explanation for a fantasy idea. And that no matter how thoroughly I worked out the explanations and implications of the notion it must inevitably tilt hard at the windmill of the real. But it was a lot more fun than deciding that the happy little elves raise magic beans because the glowing mushroom in the great king’s basement gives them special powers. Or whatever it is that fantasy writers do.

For a long time this was just a five-finger exercise. A couple pages’ worth of notes I jotted down. Then I realized that the notion fit perfectly into the premise I had created with my novel Ariel when I began writing it in 1979. The idea that a Change occurs in which technology stops working and another set of laws, let’s call them magic, takes its place. In fact spellware explained it.

Oh god no I will not write a sequel to a novel I wrote when I was nineteen.  And sat down to write.

###

Anyone who has written anything more complicated than a recipe knows that the thing you write can often have a different notion about itself from yours. It surfaces on the page like a black spot on an X-ray. And anyone who tries to deny or argue with it is just asking for trouble.

I’ve learned at least that much.

So I got out of the way and let the writer part of me write the novel. And as it formed I realized that the big idea of spellware wasn’t this book’s Big Idea at all. It was just an idea.

People who don’t create a lot tend to hoard their ideas like some kind of gold. They send you emails and say Let me tell you my Idea. But anyone who lives in the place where ideas are made (or at least within hearing distance of it), be they writers or mechanics, will tell you that ideas are cheap as sausages and most of them aren’t very good. I have storage boxes full of them. Lots of writers do. Bookstores are chock full of them too. Science fiction and fantasy tend to be about their ideas, to the extent that it’s perfectly possible to write a work of fiction in the field fueled by little more than an idea.

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But for me it ain’t enough. I need theme. Resonance. Lamination. Characters. Landscape is a character, sure, but not the main one. It has to be about more than its premise or events. It’s the difference between Moby Dick and Jaws. Novels about celestial aberrations or colossal engineering feats to me are simply tour guides populated by figures who elucidate them. I need the foreground and background to not trade places.

Elegy Beach takes place about twenty-seven years after the Change depicted in Ariel. Now a new generation not only has no memory of that world, it can’t imagine why the Pre-Changers are always going on about some great loss that’s had no impact on them whatsoever. They aren’t ignorant, they’re truly alien.  They’ve grown up on a different world.

As I swam deeper into the growing stack of pages that was Elegy Beach I realized that it was about the devastating necessity of the outgoing generation to be supplanted by the incoming one. To regard one another with faint suspicion and even derision. For the old to pass the torch and realize what an act of faith it is to think it will remain alight. For the young to regard the torch itself as a kind of Trojan horse, a gift whose purpose is in part to subjugate the recipient to the memory of the giver. I wanted to delineate the contribution, sanctimony, iconoclasm, and entitlement of Baby Boomers. I wanted to explore what I loved and disliked about this newer generation of information-saturated serial collaborators. And I wanted to set them against each other. The only way a generation can prevent itself from being buried by its inheritors is to build some static, fascist system that may be powerful but does not evolve and certainly does not accommodate fundamental change.

That was Elegy Beach’s big idea. It’s about other things, too — for one thing, as Ariel was my bildungsroman so Elegy Beach is my midlife-crisis novel (surely there’s a nice big German word for that too). It’s even about my own relationship to my first novel, and it offers the idea that one way to escape a storied past is to befriend it. It perpetuates my firm believe that the object of any quest exacts its weight from the seeker’s heart and soul, as any Grail knight worth his salt found out.

Love is a quest.

This essay is more abstract than I’d intended; I think I must save my concreteness for my fiction. But talking about fiction seems necessarily less concrete to me; fiction itself is an abstraction. What I set out to tell you is that Elegy Beach is a big fun book full of interesting characters who have breathtaking adventures and harrowing escapes in a faraway land that only superficially resembles our own, a land that fans of dragons and unicorns and special-effects-laden wizard battles will have a grand good time exploring. For all these things are true. But in a world that ably demonstrates that it can commodify almost anything, the only reason I can see to employ these worn-smooth tropes is to subvert them. To use them to talk about why such tropes exist at all. This seems to be an approach I’ve had in almost everything I’ve written (including, apparently, this essay).

I confess I’ve mostly found it difficult to just sit back and have fun for fun’s sake. Most fun things are fundamentally useless (not that fun itself isn’t useful, I feel obliged to add). And despite virtually all of the above I’m basically a silly person who thinks it’s fu to make stuff up. But even so for me to want to make (or read, or watch, or attend) a thing I have to feel that it’s about something more than its events or premise.  Else what’s the Big Idea?

—-

Elegy Beach: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read or listen to excerpts from Elegy Beach, at the Elegy Beach site. There is also a site for Ariel. Visit the author’s blog. The author is also an acclaimed DJ; listen to his latest mixes.

From a small mud volcano in southeast Asia to the very end of the world? That’s quite a journey. But it’s the journey Diana Pharaoh Francis took in the process of writing Bitter Night, the first book in Francis’ new “Horngate Witches” series of fantasy novels. Along the way, Francis considers a new kind of apocalypse — call it an intelligently designed apocalypse, one intended for a very specific purpose. Francis has quite a lot on her mind, it’s clear, none of great news for the humans in her books, but that’s what they get for being fictional characters. Here in the real world, you don’t have to experience the end of the word (YET), but you do get the read how Francis imagines one into being. Lucky you!

DIANA PHARAOH FRANCIS:

It all started with the mud volcano in East Java. The volcano, named Lusi, spewed out (and continues to spew out) the equivalent of a dozen Olympic-sized swimming pools of hot mud per day and the expectation is that it will go on doing so for decades, if not longer. It’s buried farms and towns and factories. Its power is inevitable and slow moving, chasing everyone in its path to the sea. Not a good thing when you live on an island.

Then there was the collapsed bridge in Minneapolis. And Hurricane Katrina (which chronologically happened before Lusi erupted, but only began agglomerating together into a Big Idea after I started thinking about the others). Disaster after disaster—tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, drought, fires, famines, mudslides, tornados—and all of them seeming to be coming at us more frequently and with increasing death tolls. What could be the meaning of it? Why was it all happening?

The answer seemed obvious: None of these are accidents. It’s all deliberate: an attack on humanity. But to what end?

Genocide. Apocalypse.

I love a good apocalypse.

This is where I started rubbing my hands together in gleeful anticipation. I was sure I was on to something. But I didn’t have a story yet. I needed answers to the questions yammering at me—what brought on this particular apocalypse? And why not do it right and just set off the Yellowstone volcano or let a meteor come take care of things in one fell blow? Cliché yes, but that wasn’t a good reason for why not. The real problem is that that sort of destruction is too easy, too quick, and frankly, it kills indiscriminately. I didn’t want an extinction level event. I wanted to kill a lot of people and unravel and restitch the world, but I didn’t want to annihilate everything, because there didn’t seem to be much fertility in that sort of novel: “Everybody and everything dies. The world is sterile. The end.” Great story, eh?

So there had to be more behind this apocalypse and it had to have something to do with what brought it on and who was going to live and who was going to die—or perhaps it might be better said as who was intended to live and who was intended to die?

The answer lies in the villains and therefore the heroes of Bitter Night. My Big Idea and my zygote story were nothing without characters.

Aside from a great apocalypse, I like a really good villain—one who is as good as he his bad, and following that logic, I appreciate heroes who are as terribly flawed as they are heroic. Hitler thought he was a hero, the British thought Napoleon was evil—it all depends on perspective (except that Hitler really was evil, but that’s not the point today). So I got to thinking—what if the apocalypse was a good thing—at least for someone? Who would benefit from it? Who would be willing to commit genocide?

Humans are always being accused of destroying the world with our carelessness, our arrogance and our decided sense of invincibility. Sooner or later, someone might want to teach us a lesson—rein us in a bit. I began thinking of all the things that might share the earth with us—creatures of potentially no little power. These would be things from myth and legend and folklore. What if they were tired of being driven into hiding, their powers dwindling, their lives steadily eroding has humanity poisons the magic of the earth? What would they do if suddenly they had the means to take back their world?

They’d fight back; they’d overthrow the evil invaders who are destroying them and they’d slaughter everyone they could. Human annihilation.

All right, not all of humanity. Just most of it in order to bring back the balance of magic in the world. Ever since humans have been ascendant, magic has been fading away. Soon it will be gone forever. It’s time to rebalance the scales and restore the magic before it’s too late.

Obviously humans are going to see the war as evil—after all, most of them are going to be slaughtered. On the other hand, the magical creatures who’ve been verging on extinction are going to see it as salvation. But there are a few in the middle—those who used to be human, for instance, or their allies, and those who don’t like being manipulated and pushed around—who have to figure out where they stand. Because the natural disasters are only the start. The guardians of the earth who’ve begun this apocalypse are going to need an army to go house to house and clean the vermin out, and the question for the few in the middle is—which side are they going to fight on? No one gets to be neutral Switzerland in this war.

What you might be able to see is that Bitter Night was quickly becoming epic in scope, and in fact, that was the thing I wanted to do all along. That was the real Big Idea. I wanted to figure out how I could bring some of the epic qualities of high fantasy into contemporary fantasy. I wanted to meld the best qualities of each type of book, which includes fast-pacing, rich description, gritty stories, world-ending dangers, snarky repartee, fantastical creatures from myth and legend, and real-world slang, fast food and guns. And on top of all that, I get to make my own personal apocalypse. It’s good to be a writer.

The final finishing touch to my Big Idea was that this was not an apocalypse that could be prevented—no last minute saves, no deus ex machina. It’s the end of the world as we know it and it’s unstoppable. This book isn’t about saving the world, it’s about the struggle for salvaging what can be salvaged and learning to live with what’s left. It’s about those people struggling with making choices and standing by them. It’s about villainous heroes and heroic villains.

And that, in a nutshell, was my Big Idea. But before I go, one last thing. You might be wondering of Lusi made an appearance in the book. The answer is no. It catalyzed my imagination and was the golden seed for the whole novel, but it didn’t get so much as a mention. Maybe next time.

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Bitter Night: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Bitter Night. Visit the author’s LiveJournal. Follow her on Twitter.

Does a “beach read” novel need an intellectual justification? Probably not, but if it actually has one, that’s always a bonus. And as it happens, literature professor and debut novelist Nicole Peeler has some rigorous and righteous background justification for her novel Tempest Rising, which follows the mystical adventures of half-selkie Jane True. Not only that, but Peeler also lays out some deep thoughts on “urban fantasy” in general, and why it speaks to us here and now. Hey, that’s a pretty big idea, so it’s good we’re all already here. Let’s get to it.

NICOLE PEELER:

By trade, I’m a professor of English literature. And yet, when I finally wrote a book, it wasn’t the study on the pre-ideological formation of values in contemporary fiction that I’d always intended. Instead, I wrote an urban fantasy named Tempest Rising, which is about a girl who discovers she’s half-selkie.

In other words, I wrote a book that, on the surface, is the opposite of the novels I teach and read for my day job. From its inception, I envisioned Tempest Rising as a “beach read,” something fast-paced and sexy that a reader could gobble up in a day. Conversely, I teach Modernist literature, one of the most intellectually challenging genres possible, in that Modernism sought to elevate aesthetics over ethics and to eradicate the literary axioms taken for granted by writers and readers for centuries. These were texts meant to challenge, complicate, and obfuscate reality.

And yet, the Modernists weren’t merely being obstreperous. Rather, they were attempting to forge a literary style that was not only original, but also more effective at representing their lived experience than the rigid conformity to surfaces which is literary realism. As I teach in my classes, Modernist literature was fractured and difficult not because the Modernists were jerks, but because they were weathering the death throes of the philosophical assumptions Western culture had taken for granted for so many years. In many ways, then, Modernist texts are traumatized texts, testifying to their authors’ struggles to make sense of a world apparently crumbling around them.

Which leads me to my idea for Tempest Rising, specifically, and for urban fantasy, in general. There’s been much talk in the media about the “rise” of urban fantasy. Oftentimes, this coverage is attached to a particular cultural obsession with sparkly vampires. And yet, as most commentators have admitted, there is more going on with this interest in the supernatural and the paranormal than a mere teeny-bopper fad. There’s something about urban fantasy, with its very specific images and themes, that appeals to readers from diverse generations and walks of life, right at this moment.

When I started planning my own urban fantasy, it was very obvious to me what my Big Idea was going to be. I’ve always been fascinated with religion, mythology and fairy tales, and especially the idea of Jungian archetypes: the theory that, somewhere in the deepest recesses of our brains, lie the imprinted memories of our earliest ancestors. Jung’s theory explaining why diverse cultures share similar mythologies is fascinating, needless to say, but I’d always been a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, wielder of Occam’s Razor. When I imagined myself asking Holmes the same set of questions that inspired Jung, Holmes’ response was obvious: “Perhaps these creatures exist.”

And so, the world of Tempest Rising was born: I knew the sorts of supernatural creatures that would populate my world and how they would live amongst us. The idea of archetypes that first hooked me, however, has also offered me insight into the current interest in the supernatural and paranormal. According to Jung, we soothe our fears of that which goes bump in the night by weaving narratives–complete with morals, warnings, and vivid images of loss. In other words, folk and fairy tales are an attempt to make sense of a chaotic world, just as the grand aesthetic experiment that was Modernism was also an attempt to make sense of a chaotic world.

Think, now, of the times we live in, post 9/11: a world riven by various wars, natural disasters, the real plague of AIDS, the media plagues of Avian and Swine Flu, an increasing distrust of authority figures, and the nihilistic horror of terrorism. In a time of chaos and uncertainty, is it any wonder that urban fantasy, the genre of the contemporary fairy tale, is on the rise? After all, urban fantasy offers a vision of the world in which traditional evils–vampires, werewolves, zombies–are often times merely misunderstood. Meanwhile, traditional heroes–vampire hunters, government agencies, the Church–are often revealed to be sanctimonious, narrow-minded, and murderous zealots. The binaries neatly dividing good and evil are blurred in this genre, and the underlying message in many urban fantasies seems to be that the individual must make his or her own choices: that we must rely on our own experiences and intellect in a world that wants to brand outsiders as evil, to force ideological dichotomies on reality, and to make soldiers of us all.

Urban fantasy, like its folkloric and literary predecessors, offers no more and no less than a narrative restructuring of life: one which highlights cultural anxieties about our world even as it offers escape through storytelling. So move over Modernism! These “beach reads” bite back. And we like it.

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Tempest Rising: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt of Tempest Rising. Follow Nicole Peeler on Twitter. Visit her group blog, The League of Reluctant Adults.