How “big” does science need to be to be important science? Jim Ottaviani ponders this as he explains the story of Primates, his latest science-related graphic novel.

JIM OTTAVIANI:

Big science. I’ve always been a big fan. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) The Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, the Very Large Array, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, NASA in its glory days, and what the heck, even today’s not-quite-as-glorious NASA…all inspire me. Their scale and audacity exemplify humanity at its best.

But — and you knew there was one of those coming — there’s also something discouraging about big science. When you think back to Marie Curie and her husband Pierre in their tiny lab (a shed, really) on rue Lhomond in Paris or Michelson and Morley in a Cleveland basement, respectively figuring out that there’s radiation that we can’t see and never imagined existing, and that there’s no luminiferous aether to carry any kind of real or imagined radiation, you might also wish for a time when you could make a world-changing discovery by yourself, or with just a partner or two, alone in a small room. Simpler times.

Or not so simple. Because doing science was as hard long ago as it is today, since by its nature science doesn’t get easier the less you know. And you still need enough money to feed yourself while you peer into the hidden corners of the natural world…or just look at what everyone else had looked at before, but with a clever enough hypothesis, sharp enough wits, and the patience to follow both to an unexpected place.

The unexpected place Jane Goodall followed her wits to was Gombe, in Tanzania. Dian Fossey? Karisoke in Rwanda. Biruté Galdikas? Tanjung Puting Reserve in Borneo. And the reason I wanted to learn more about these three — and in my experience the best way to learn about something is to write a book about it — was because their work is the antithesis of big science. One person, a notebook, and (sometimes) a pair of binoculars. That’s all it takes to make big discoveries if you’re as smart and as patient and as tough as Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas.

As usual for me, the story is told in comics. (Or as a graphic novel, if you like. I don’t have a strong preference myself, though I appreciate the sentiment when people bend over backward to use the more dignified phrase.) Why comics? Big science again, or rather, it’s opposite. To make something with the visual impact of a movie or television, as, you know, an actual movie or TV show, I’d need actors and sets and money. Lots of money.

With comics all I need to make something with both the visual impact of those other media and the staying power of a book is a six foot tall stack of reference material, imagination, and something to write with. Oh, and a skilled artistic collaborator, which I have in Maris Wicks. Her art sings, and does so via the simplest of tools: pen, ink, paper. Okay, she colored the book digitally, but you get my meaning: We didn’t need any more room or resources than what you could fit in a basement, or even a shed, to tell a big story.

And discovering what makes us human? That’s the biggest story and the biggest science I can imagine.

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Primates: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s 

Go to the book’s site (contains a pdf preview). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Author Bradley P. Beaulieu wraps up his “Lays of Anuskaya” fantasy trilogy with novel The Flames of Shadam Khoreh, and on the occasion of its release, he’s moved to look back on the entire trilogy and think on what it means to him, and how it relates to our own real world.

BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU:

The Flames of Shadam Khoreh concludes a trilogy that began, at least in my head, some eight years ago. In it, a prince and princess of a Russo-inspired Grand Duchy join forces with members of a violent extremist group whose stated goal for decades has been to destroy the Grand Duchy and its influence in the region. Unlikely allies indeed. Much of the story is about healing a world that is broken, but another part, a much more layered and nuanced part, is about seeing the world as your enemy sees it.

The Lays of Anuskaya is centered on a group of three elemental sorcerers who centuries ago attempted to bring the world to a place of enlightenment. They not only failed, they failed in spectacular fashion, and the world itself paid the price. As the trilogy opens, one of those very sorcerers has been reborn. Through his dreams, and through the brave efforts of others, we find the source of the world’s ills: the fabric between the material world and the world of the elemental spirits has been weakening. Rifts have begun to form.

The true nature of these rifts, and how they might be fixed, is a matter of some debate. The rifts are causing blight and disease and war throughout the Grand Duchy and the neighboring empire, and still the dukes bicker amongst themselves, causing delays at a time when the world can least afford it. The Flames of Shadam Khoreh begins as the pain and destruction from these rifts is becoming dire. Everything now depends on the ability of one boy, the sorcerer reborn, in finding the truth of how the rifts might be healed once and for all, for if he doesn’t, the entire world will suffer the consequences.

One thing I’ve rarely talked about is the fact that 9/11, the Iraq War, and the surrounding conflicts were one of the primary sources of inspiration for this story. Like so many people—not just Americans, but people all over the world—I was greatly affected by the events of 9/11. There was rage and confusion and a deep desire to “get to the bottom of it,” to understand why the perpetrators of that crime had done what they’d done. The more I searched for answers, however, the more I realized that it’s an endless story with endless causes and endless consequences.

Look, I’m a pragmatist. There are hard truths in our world. I’m fully aware that there are legitimate reasons to use violence to achieve an end, but it also seems that too often violence (or the threat of violence) is the first thing we reach for in our arsenal (a funny word to use when you’re trying to broker peace, but somehow it seems apropos; and by the way, when I say we, I mean the entire human race). So much of our politics is posturing and refusing to give in for fear of being seen as weak or “appeasing” the enemy.

This is true in many conflicts around the world and was true of the conflict in the Middle East, and as I watched the conflict unfold, it built within me a frustration that was hard to reconcile. It was in that frustration that the seeds of The Winds of Khalakovo, the first book in the trilogy, were laid down. Those seeds started to bear fruit as I fleshed out the conflict that’s told in the story, one that has roots in generations past but that’s coming to a head just as Winds opens.

The heart of the story—a tale of irreconcilable differences—didn’t change very much in the telling. It continued to be the primary driver of what happened. But I was able to show where some people, if they try hard, can meet in the middle, and I was able to bring that new perspective to several different characters. That was one of the more gratifying things for me, to show a tale in which the characters learn and come to understand another culture from a perspective that was beforehand very limited. Not everyone ended up agreeing with the other side—that wouldn’t be a truthful story—but they certainly understood more if nothing else, and all of that came from my inner desires for us, in this world, to do the same.

So what’s the Big Idea? The Lays of Anuskaya isn’t about our world. It isn’t about the conflict in the Middle East. But it was born there, certainly, and so it’s hard to escape some parallelism. I suppose if I had to formulate the roiling of inner desires that led to this book, I’d say it’s a plea for us to look further than today.

It’s a plea for peace, as told through a tale of war.

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The Flames of Shadam Khroeh: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Smashwords

Read an excerpt (scroll down for links). Visit the author’s blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Lauren Beukes’ latest novel, The Shining Girls, is hot. How hot? So hot that even before US publication, it was snapped up by Leo DiCaprio’s production company to be made into a television series. Why is it so hot? Because Beukes is one of the best writers of speculative fiction working today, and The Shining Girls a fine example of just how good she is. And to what does she credit for the genesis of this latest book? Why, the Internet, of course!

LAUREN BEUKES:

Writers write – that’s the most important thing, getting those pesky words onto the page. But writers also mess around a lot on the Internet.  And sometimes, just sometimes, that can pay off.

Take me, for example. I threw out the idea that I should write about a time-travelling serial killer during a bit of silly Twitter banter. And then quickly deleted the tweet because I realized I had to write that, right now, before someone else thought of it.

I had the image of a limping man giving a little girl an impossible toy that hadn’t been invented yet and a promise that he would be back to get it when she was grown up. I knew he had a house that opens onto other times that allows him to stalk young women through the decades. And I knew that when he did come back to find her to fulfill his promise, that she would survive and turn the hunt around.

It’s nice to have a strong premise to start with, but “serial killers” and “time travel” are two genres with a strong tradition, from Silence of The Lambs to Twelve Monkeys. I’m a big fan of the remix and the best mash-ups riff off the best things about the original and subvert them in a way that hopefully says something new or interesting.

Which meant, alas, I couldn’t write Bill & Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree from the dinosaurs to the Dark Ages with a stop-off in World War Two to kill Hitler.  Although that would probably have been a lot of fun.

And in fact there would be no killing Hitler. Not in my universe.

Between grandfather paradoxes, multiverse theory and the natural inclinations of subatomic mesons, I opted for classic Greek tragedy-style fatalism. By trying to resist your fate, you put into action all the events that will ensure that it comes about. Throw in some loops and snarls and paradoxes, and hey, voila!

You know what else has loops and snarls and ugly echoes that come up again and again? History.  Especially recent history.

Which is why I decided to contain the time travel over 60 years, from 1931 to 1993 (thereby specifically avoiding cell phones, the Internet, CCTV, Google Streetview and Reddit jumping on board to solve the mystery in two days flat)

There are obvious parallels in the book; the Great Depression of the 30s and our current recession, surveillance society and erosion of privacy in the name of the War on Terror, mirroring the tactics of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the fact that women’s right to control their own bodies is apparently still somehow up for question according to politicians.  But I was also interested in how cities have reshaped around highways, how the world has changed and how we’ve adapted, how all of that explains who we are right now. I could do that through the eyes of my serial killer, Harper Curtis, who is too cynical to see anything but ruin and rot, but we can pull focus to see the bigger picture.

I read a lot, watched documentaries and YouTube videos, listened to oral histories, re-visited Chicago, where the novel is set, to location scout and interview insightful people from Chicago architects to criminal defense laywers, cops, historians, sports reporters and music journalists.

On the other side of this remix, I had to contend with the stereotype of the serial killer.

I tracked the killings very carefully across the timelines with a murder wall above my desk full of notecards and red string and evocative photographs of the eras; Harper’s killing timeline, which gets uglier and more elaborate as he goes on, jumping all over the place so his MO is impossible to track, the actual historical timeline, the totem objects he leaves behind on the bodies and the novel’s timeline, playing out between his story, Kirby, the survivor’s, and the young women of the title.

I also did a lot of research. It was a sad horror reading up on true crime cases. The banal reality is that serial killers are generally not the Chianti-sipping diabolically sophisticated Hannibal Lecter predators of our popular imagination. Most of them are vile and violent losers with impotence issues and very little insight into why they do what they do.

But despite the lack of inner life, in the news and in fiction, serial killers usually get more attention than their victims. There are so many dead girls. Dead girls every day. At worst, the young women are a bit of violent titillation, the gorgeous tragic blonde with glazed blue eyes and her dress rucked up to expose her stockings, lying with limbs akimbo in a spreading pool of blood, or chained up naked in a basement having her eyeball gouged out.

At best, they’re just one more piece in the bloody puzzle the detective has to solve. A tragic loss, especially one so young and beautiful, but we usually don’t get to know a whole lot about who she was before she was a corpse.

All of which meant I was much more interested in “the shining girls” Harper goes after than writing about him.

Killers often have a general type – which could be vulnerable people at risk, like sex workers or runaway kids, or much more specific, like Ted Bundy’s predilection for co-eds with brown hair and a middle parting.

But what if it wasn’t a physical type?

What if my killer was attracted to young women with a spark, who stood out in their time, who weren’t afraid to fight convention, or were still afraid, but pushed through anyway, who had fire in their guts and a burning curiosity and the desire to set the world alight. That would drive my killer insane. He would have to cut it out of them.

Trigger warning. There is cutting. The violence in the book is terse, but it is shocking. It’s supposed to be. Because real violence is shocking. And we shouldn’t forget that, what violence is, what it does to us, personally, and the ripples it sends out through society.

There’s a moment in the book where Kirby says, “How am I supposed to let this shit go?” pulling down the scarf she uses to hide the scar across her throat. And she’s right. How can we?

I dealt with it by narrating the attacks not from the killer’s perspective, riding on his shoulder, complicit, getting off on it, but from the victims’, the horror hung on a few terrible details right at the end of a chapter that has been all about their lives. We’re with them at the end, in the shock and pain and fear and outrage.

I tried to make it about the emotional impact. To make it real. I worked to make the women breathe on the page, so you would feel the loss of them. Not just as mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, but as people in their own right, from a young activist to a bohemian architect accused of being a dirty Red, an African American Rosie the Riveter war widow or a burlesque dancer who literally glows because she dances in radium paint and Kirby, the one who got away, but who has allowed her life to become derailed by the attack.

Ultimately it’s a story about obsession, free will and determinism; Harper’s compulsion to kill and Kirby’s obsession with finding him, being trapped by fate or kicking back against it.

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The Shining Girls: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the trailer (US|UK). Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.