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The Big Idea: Maurice Broaddus

Posted on November 20, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Writing can take you places you never expected. For author Maurice Broaddus, that includes the offices of some higher ups in his community. Read on to see where else his newest novel, Breath of Oblivion, has taken him.

MAURICE BROADDUS:
I get called into the principal’s office a lot over my writing.*

By “principal’s office,” I mean local city leaders, officials, or politicians. Usually it involves a story or article I’ve written. Lately it’s been my books getting me in … conversations.

My current trilogy, ASTRA BLACK, is about an independent, self-sufficient, self-determining Pan-African community. Breath of Oblivion is book two (Sweep of Stars is book one. Book three will be called A City Dreaming, all three titles taken from the Langston Hughes poem, “Stars.”) The central challenge faced in Breath of Oblivion is that of a community’s struggle to survive against the forces of (intergalactic) gentrification by Original Earth (O.E.). Systematic forces. Political forces. Economic forces. All leveraged to fracture the community from within (stirring dissent via infiltrators) and without (the weight of everything from those same oppressive forces to O.E.’s military might).

Much of the book is inspired by the obstacles faced while doing community organizing work and reimagining those situations through a science fiction lens. There is a level of reading of my work that could be seen as a thinly veiled critique of Indianapolis politics (admittedly, not that thinly veiled because while I’m many things, subtle is not one of them.) I love writing about my home town because I see it as two things: 1) America in microcosm (its history, how it operates, a cross-section of its people); and 2) an interrogation of my identity (I am in this place, in this time, in this context).

But also, I’m hyper-specific in that criticism because, given my conceit, there’s a high likelihood that that what we’re going through here in Indianapolis is an experience playing out in cities across the country; and history teaches us that the same playbook is still being used.

One of the best pieces of writing advice was given to me by fellow author, Daniel Jose Older: Do that $#!+. I was feeling anxious about a project I was working on, as it plunged headlong into territories of race, class, and politics (at the time a departure from the ways that I had been writing). I called up Daniel and those were the words he gave me. Writers have to be bold and take risks. That what we’re supposed to do, and keep doing, as creatives. Speak truth to power. Be fearless. Keep pushing. It can be scary sometimes (which is why it’s good to have friends who can encourage and support you). In the end, taking those risks, accepting those challenges, only makes you a better artist.

Breath of Oblivion is a book two–with its share of an ongoing murder mystery, assassinations, military action, political intrigue, ancient magic, and starships powered by jazz music—it’s also built for folks to be able to jump into. Despite the calls to the principal’s office, I’m not complaining. It’s a reminder of two things: 1) you never know who’s reading you; and 2) at least I’m being read!

*Not to be confused with a local leader being killed off BY REQUEST, constituting one of My Favorite Bit about the book.

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The Big Idea: Alan Smale

Posted on November 18, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

When you have the chance to write a sequel, you do it… right? Well, for Alan Smale, the answer was not as straightforward as all that. Come find out why he hesitated at first to write Radiant Sky, and why now he’s glad he did.

ALAN SMALE:

So, to review: Radiant Sky is the sequel to Hot Moon, my alternate-Apollo novel published in 2022. Hot Moon was the book I always wanted to write, my “technothriller with heart,” set entirely on and around the Moon in 1979-80, in a different and very fun past where the US and the Soviets both have precarious bases on the lunar surface and the Space Race is still going strong. Vivian Carter, the commander of Apollo 32, gets herself caught up in the Cold War … in space.

A war that quickly turns hot, when her routine mission to bring a NASA Cargo Container to Columbia Station, an old-school Skylab in lunar orbit, comes under attack from a trio of Soviet Soyuz craft, in the world’s first and clunkiest space battle. Vivian and her crew are forced to abandon their planned follow-on exploratory mission to the volcanic Marius Hills region of the Moon and divert to Hadley Base, where they and the eighteen NASA astronauts already crewing that base will have to MacGyver/improvise weaponry from the raw materials around them to defend themselves against a second Soviet assault, this time on the lunar surface. And … matters go on from there.

As Radiant Sky begins, it’s now 1983, and the superpower confrontation has calmed into an irritable, blustering, and saber-rattling détente much like the one we experienced in our own timeline. By now there are two joint US-Soviet bases on the Moon, and the relevant technology has improved quite a bit. Such improvements are typical of what happened in the real Space Program(s), of course: just look at the increase in our capabilities over the course of Project Gemini, when we learned to spacewalk, rendezvous, and undertake extended spaceflights, though an amazing ten missions between March 1965 and November 1966. Or, look at the massive increase in the capabilities of Apollo 17 over those of Apollo 11 in just three years, plus the marathon exploits of the astronauts on Skylab (which are greatly underrated and under-appreciated, in my humble opinion).

Anyway: as we learn in the first pages of Radiant Sky, Vivian Carter is now commanding LGS-1, Lunar Geological Survey One, which will circumnavigate the Moon by way of both poles. “Carter’s convoy” consists of a MOLAB – Mobile Laboratory, a small silver pressurized truck – plus a Lunar Rover and one of those nifty lunar dirt bikes from the first book, with a crew of six. It’s at the same time a breathtaking journey of exploration, and a hardcore scientific sampling mission.

Which all sounds great, but since Vivian Carter is in the picture, you might guess that things are going to go south figuratively, as well as literally. She is, after all, a trouble magnet.

And sure enough, at the lunar South Pole, LGS-1 comes under attack in the most unexpected of ways. I mean, the US now has the Lunar Accord with the Soviet Union, so … who are these guys, who have set mines in LGS-1’s path, and a guy with a rocket launcher on a nearby ridge, plus what looks very much like an armed Lunokhod Rover coming up behind them? And, can Vivian and her crew survive this desperate encounter?  

I absolutely, honestly, hand on heart, intended Hot Moon to be a standalone. I poured into it all my love for human spaceflight: the US Apollo Program that I grew up with, plus the intriguing details we’ve learned since about the Soviet lunar program, and wrote the best book I possibly could – my love affair to Apollo, in all its retro, dorky goodness. But when Book One got some nice reviews, and blurbs from some Big Names, and I was given the opportunity to write a sequel, I … Well, you know what? I didn’t jump at it. I took a few months to think about it, sketching out possibilities, and making sure this was what I really wanted to do. The ideas started coming faster and faster, and the plot built in my head, and before I knew it I really wanted to write Radiant Sky. I wanted to write it a lot.

Book One is still complete in itself. But when I reread it now, it genuinely feels like I wrote it with the express intention of following up with a second book. So many hooks. So many possibilities for interesting character arcs and fun technologies. A general thickening of the plot, in the dangerous geopolitical situation of the 1980s. Past Alan’s subconscious had apparently been hard at work, planting the seeds and laying the groundwork.

So I got to write another Best Book I could write about Apollo, and Soyuz, and lunar exploration and armed conflict. Getting to play once again with a realistic space program in what I truly believe could have been a realistic and attainable version of the 1980s has been a great thrill.

Radiant Sky is an adventure, a human-based thriller of an Apollo program and a lunar exploration initiative that might have been. For sure, it’s full of derring-do and intrigue and character stuff, but just as in Hot Moon, I stay very close to what could have been attainable with the technology of the day – in fact, most of the technologies I’ve used were already on the drawing board when our Apollo Program ended, or are straightforward extrapolations.

Just about everything in Radiant Sky – good and bad, the small-arms fire and military stuff as well as the cool technological advances that benefit everyone – could have been achieved. Vivian’s Moon is dangerous, and there’s an Earth in the background that is politically messed up, but despite my characters’ various trials and tribulations, both books present a deeply optimistic view of human spaceflight, and of humanity itself. We did great things in space. We could have done more.

And, you know what? We still might, in the next ten years. We could be back on the Moon in my lifetime. Or even setting our sights (and sites) on Mars. Suddenly, we’re once again in an era where nothing seems impossible, where science fiction can become science fact, right in front of our eyes.

Which is a big deal. And, as I’ve said elsewhere: that is really incredibly astonishingly cool.

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The Big Idea: Sharon Shinn

Posted on November 15, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

For her new novel Alibi, author Sharon Shinn strays a bit from what she’s usually known for, to mix another genre of literature into her storytelling. What mysteries has she uncovered from this process? Read on!

SHARON SHINN:

I write speculative fiction with a high romance quotient, so it’s rare that I dabble in the mystery genre. But that’s where I’ve grounded my newest book, Alibi, which takes place in the near future when teleport is the most common means of transit. (If you can travel anywhere almost instantly, how can you have an alibi for murder?)

Alibi’s structure is a little unconventional in that the death doesn’t occur until about 50 pages from the end. Still, the prologue makes it clear that somebody’s going to die soon. That gives readers opportunities to watch for clues as the story unfolds or start to fret as the main characters take stupid risks that might come back to haunt them once the cops start looking for suspects.

It’s not the first time I’ve tried my hand at a mystery. I’ve published three short stories that follow a fairly traditional whodunit format and one novel (Summers at Castle Auburn) that includes a high-profile murder toward the end of the book. I even wrote a script for a five-minute story that my brother produced when he ran a murder mystery company in Copenhagen ten years ago. (Here’s Part One, the murder, and Part Two, the solution.)

I like writing mysteries for a couple of reasons. First, they make sense of the world—or at least they illuminate one small event in the unceasing tide of bewildering madness. How did this happen? Why did this happen? Who is responsible? These are questions that arise over and over in real life but so often don’t have definitive answers. But in mysteries, the the knots are untangled and the entire pattern is revealed.

Second, mysteries imagine a society in which actions have consequences. Evil-doers are punished. Justice is served.

There’s usually a clear-cut villain in a murder mystery, though that varies by the book. Often, the victim is someone who deserves to die—a blackmailer, say, or a violent abuser. Sometimes the reader is even rooting for the murderer to get away with the crime, because that outcome offers a kind of emotional justice. Other times, it’s the killer who’s the monster, and the pleasure comes from watching the brute come crashing down.

Both of these scenarios are so satisfying because—again—they are so rare in the world we actually live in. In real life, serial killers operate for decades and are never identified; Indigenous girls disappear and the news outlets don’t even notice. But mystery novels make us believe that sometimes right and wrong can be pushed into balance. Sometimes the cruel are punished and the innocent are avenged.

In the mysteries I’ve written, I tend to go with the trope of the scumbag whose death is a cause for celebration. (That’s certainly true in Alibi, where the murder victim is a billionaire whose many unsavory traits include a callous indifference to his dying son.) In fact, in most of my books, even the ones that are straight-up fantasy, my villains are usually irredeemably awful. I don’t bother with much subtlety or nuance. I can’t bring myself to buy into the common wisdom that “everybody has a good side.”

In fact, I can’t imagine that anyone who’s reading the news today could subscribe to that theory. Haven’t they heard about the husband who repeatedly drugs his wife and invites strangers in to have sex with her? Or the pharma bro who jacks up the prices of lifesaving medicines simply to make a profit? Or the woman who kills her children because her new husband convinces her the kids are possessed? I don’t know, maybe in their free time these individuals are rescuing kittens and knitting blankets for homeless shelters. But it’s hard for me to come up with enough good deeds they could perform to offset the bad stuff they’ve done.

That’s what I like about writing mysteries. I can make sure everyone gets what they deserve. I don’t have to pretend there might be extenuating circumstances.

I think mysteries are popular for another reason: They have an intellectual payoff as well as an emotional one, which offers parallel rewards for people on both side of the page. Readers have a chance to match their wits against the protagonist’s and feel a thrill of smugness if they solve the crime before the detective does. Writers have the absorbing challenge of putting together a precise and perfect puzzle that satisfies three requirements of the genre: planting the right clues, providing motives and backstories for a large cast of characters, and playing fair with the reader without giving too much away.

A few years ago, a friend told me that he thought mysteries would be the hardest books to write largely because of those three requirements. I replied that I think any type of fiction has to incorporate some of the same elements. The author’s job is to provide just enough information at just the right moment to guide the reader to a defined ending that might be surprising, devastating, or uplifting, depending on the book itself.

Not all fiction has a big final reveal, like mysteries do, but most of it does have an end goal—to make readers believe that the story is real, that it makes sense, that it is as complete and self-contained as a snow globe. Nothing is missing or out of place. That’s not a pleasure we can find often in our daily lives. A novel might be fantastical or mysterious, it might be full of demons or murderers—but sometimes, it’s a better place to live. 

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The Big Idea: Kat Richardson

Posted on November 14, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Sometimes as an author you find a character, and sometimes the character finds you. In this Big Idea for Storm Waters, author Kat Richardson introduces a character who stopped by… and then stayed for a whole adventure.

KAT RICHARDSON:

Classic mysteries, golden age American crime film, and modern fantasy novels—plus a side of pulp-noir style—in a dark fantasy version of Hollywood. That’s where Storm Waters started. Initially I thought it was just some pesky character who showed up (in my post-cancer-surgery brain) and wouldn’t shut up—a phenomenon a lot of writers talk about, but which I’d never experienced before. This guy, whose name was Marty Storm, was such a Hardboiled trope: he talked like Philip Marlowe, dressed like Cary Grant, and drank like Nick Charles. But what he kept talking about was ghosts, magic, family ties of the most toxic kind, and how to break out of them. 

A crime thriller with a magic-using antihero who’s literally haunted by his family’s past and his own misdeeds? Oh, yes. This was something I wanted to write, but I also wanted to modernize my take on hardboiled crime noir, as well as adding in the ghosts and magic, family trouble, redemption, and all the ridiculous glamour and grime of Hollywood’s gilded self-image. Sounds pulpy, but that’s okay. Storm Waters is a sort of love letter to the films and pulp detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, with their witty banter and mean streets, which I love, mixed with my unquenchable urge to throw magic and fantasy into an otherwise  mix.

I had a lot of conversations with Marty. A lot of them were terrible, gruesome, or just… not right, and a lot of them were dead ends, but one stuck. I was out walking the dog, thinking about coffee and ghosts and imagining the fog that would form on the top of a morning’s hot cup o’ joe in a room suddenly gone chilly with the presence of something uncanny and murderous. After that, things began to fall into place with crooked cops, magic, murder, and menacing ghosts. And that’s where the book starts.

But an idea and a character are not enough. So I started digging into crime stories (fictional and real) of the period, as well as the history of Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Long Beach—because even though I grew up there, LA is great at erasing and remodeling its history—then expanding into New Orleans, train travel, Pullman Porters (of which most, sadly, got left on the editing table), and on and on. Eventually I had to come up for air and figure out what I was going to use and what I wasn’t. I had a lot of information about the period I finally chose for Marty’s story: the first half of 1934—the worst year of the Great Depression.  

It was also the first year after Prohibition ended. I’d wanted to set the book earlier, but that would have made Marty too young for the self-examination that I wanted him to undertake on the way to making this story more modern and respectful of certain issues. And I wanted to draw some parallels between the political and social anxiety that was growing in the United States of my own time with the anxiety growing in the 1930s over the events that would ignite the Second World War. Anxiety is the essence of noir. But the first year after Prohibition was a strange adjustment for a lot of people in North America and it adds another thing to complicate Marty’s life, since he used to be a bootlegger, among other bad habits.

I admit I took a lot of inspiration from the American crime and mystery writers of the period: Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Caine, and Raymond Chandler. And also from films like The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, The Public Enemy, and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, as well as the music that was popular (and some that was unpopular.) It’s an interesting time to mess around in, though it does have a lot of potential pitfalls, which I hoped to avoid falling into without completely erasing their implications.

Writing this book was an adventure and it took me to a lot of places I’d like to revisit in future volumes, if I get the chance: the man who vanished from a ferry between Los Angeles and San Diego and was never found, the tales of ghosts around the old Plaza of downtown,  the flooding of the Los Angeles river in 1938 and the drastic change that made in the landscape and politics. Like its setting, Storm Waters is not the real world, but it has some reflections of it in flickers of silvery projector light.

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The Big Idea: Andrew Romine

Posted on November 13, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

We can’t all be Jedi, or captains of the Enterprise, but maybe we can be Ellen Ripleys, maybe we can be heroic in our own right. Venture on and see how author Andrew Romine explores this concept in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Mosquito Fleet.

ANDREW ROMINE:

How Do You Want to Go to Space?

My first (sadly, fictional) voyages to space were aboard the Millennium Falcon and the starship Enterprise. I think I was 12 or 13 when I first saw Ridley Scott’s Alien, and it must have been late night on HBO or Cinemax (I’m not quite old enough to have caught the first run in theaters). I was prepared to be terrified, but I didn’t expect the deep sense of wonder that preceded that infamous chestburster scene, nor the scrappy, breathless fight for survival that followed.

I rooted for the blue collar crew of the Nostromo harder than for Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk. After all, you knew those guys were going to prevail. Things weren’t so certain for Alien’s space truckers; they were way out of their league against a sinister and unstoppable force of nature.

Alien could have been just another monster movie, but the credible vibes of the flawed crew and their ordinary, working world elevated it. They acted in turns heroically, selfishly, and in full-on animal panic. Just like real people.

The ships that make up my “Mosquito Fleet” are inspired by actual maritime history. The term has been used to describe a number of small flotillas of trawlers, schooners, ferries, gunboats, and other sailing vessels. These fleets are often a hodgepodge of civilian ships plying the coastal waters of settled areas where there are no roads or rails.

One such ragtag fleet served the Puget Sound region of western Washington state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chartered by the Puget Sound Navigation Company (or otherwise independently operated) these ships hauled passengers and cargo from destinations both settled and wild. When I first started dreaming up the characters of The Mosquito Fleet, I knew I wanted to go to space on a ship like that and tell the story of hardworking spacers who try to make ends meet by hauling passengers from one area of wild space to another…

The weary crew of the Grass is Greener are just looking to complete a long route to a remote colony world. The captain has health worries, and the engineer works too hard to keep the ship running. Naturally, there’s a synthetic crew member aboard too. Lira is the stim-addled navigator, haunted by the disaster that destroyed her previous ship.

In the Alien films, androids are often portrayed as the (not-so) secret villains, tools of the corporate plot that dooms our heroes. In Lira, I wanted a synthetic that is as much at the whims of life on the edge of space as her crew. She has no secret source of strength or company directive to fall back on. She’s just trying to make a life one day at a time like everyone else.

Antagonist Durance Pike, like many absolutists, longs for a simpler world that truly only exists in his mind. As one routine ferry voyage comes to an end, this farmer-turned-agitator falls prey to the siren call of a lifeforce beyond his reckoning.

The novel follows the journeys of other spacers, too, never veering far from Lira and Pike’s central stories. There’s Nikela Abreu, a corporate flunkie determined to extract profit for the Company in the wake of Pike’s trail of destruction while grappling with unpleasant truths from her own past. Cam is a spacer aboard an aging tug who by saving an adrift castaway uncovers a dark secret that could change the Spinward Colonies forever.

The spacers of The Mosquito Fleet are mere specks of dust in the cosmos, confronting horrors from beyond the deep time of the universe, but they are not small people. They all go to space hoping to pay the rent, get health care, and escape from the poor choices of their pasts.

To me, they are far more interesting than the Rebels of a galaxy far, far away, or the brave explorers boldly going to Space. I hope The Mosquito Fleet convinces you a little bit of that, too.

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The Big Idea: Yaroslav Barsukov

Posted on November 12, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      8 Comments

Art imitates life. Or maybe life imitates art? It certainly seems that way in author Yaroslav Barsukov’s Big Idea for his newest novel, Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory. Come along and see for yourself the parallels drawn between our two worlds.

YAROSLAV BARSUKOV:

When I was writing the Big Idea essay for my Nebula-nominated novella Tower of Mud and Straw, I had no clue I had a prophetic book on my hands. Tower, a work of science fantasy, had been outlined in December 2019 and written in the period from January to May 2020, a year before the first Russian military buildup near Ukraine’s borders and two years before the war started.

There’s a version of Russia in both the novella and my new novel Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, which is inspired by it (and no, you don’t need to have read the novella—an extended Director’s Cut of it forms the novel’s first half). More specifically, the kingdom of Duma is based on the 19th-century Russian Empire, with a dash of Austro-Hungary thrown in for good measure.

Everybody is expecting an invasion, and that’s why they’re building this mammoth tower—as a deterrent. People talk at length about how there have always been rumors of Duma attacking, even when they were kids. There’s even a burned-down village by the name of Poltava (a victim of a recent border dispute) the heroes visit at one point; the real Poltava is a city and a region in Ukraine that came within an inch of being invaded by Putin’s forces. Kirkus, who did a starred review of the novella (they also gave Sleeping Worlds a starred review a couple of weeks back!), thought these were Cold War vibes. Hell, I thought so too! We were so wrong …

After Tower of Mud and Straw had made the Nebula shortlist, there was an immediate interest from Russia’s largest traditional publisher, Eksmo. The translation came out in February 2022, just a month before the war, and some of the Russian bloggers couldn’t even read it. “I switch on the TV, news comes on, I turn it off and pick up a fantasy book instead—and it’s the exact same stuff!”

I’ve always been shy about saying I’d predicted the war. I used to say the novella had anticipated it—until a reviewer of Sleeping Worlds pointed me to something one of the character says.

“Consider this: if the tower doesn’t get finished within the next two years, Duma will attempt an incursion.”

The sentence was written in April 2020.

April 2020 + 2 years = April 2022. I was off by two months.

I just had breakfast the other day with the wonderful award-winning writer from Odesa, Anna Mikhalevskaya (I’d narrated one of her beautiful stories for PodCastle), and she said, “It’s like, it’s all there, right on the page.” I never intended to write a prophetic piece, mind you; it all happened by itself. And it wasn’t the first time—in 2019, StarShipSofa ran a story of mine in which Reagan ends the Cold War by raising a black dome over Russia’s European part, effectively plunging the country into international isolation. In 2017, I penned a novella about a magical plague in Vienna, which had people self-isolating and measuring saturation—albeit not with oxygen but with magic.

So for the new novel, Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory, I tried to predict the end of the war. Consciously, this time. Of course, there’s no end in sight, and I had to reach for speculative elements: the nature of reality, quantum mechanics’ observation theory. In a fantasy novel, yep. I know I’m crazy!

But if you think I’m a little too crazy, I’ve got more for you. In Sleeping Worlds, part of the action takes place in Duma’s capital. I envisioned the city as home to a huge seagull population. As soon as he arrives, the main character asks the woman who brought him there, “Seagulls? But we’re nowhere near the sea, right?” She responds with, “They look regal, but they really are flying rats. They feed on garbage.” Lo and behold, it’s August; I fly to Glasgow for the Worldcon. I go out for dinner—and there they are, the seagulls. “But Glasgow doesn’t have a coastline, right?” And the person next to me goes, “Doesn’t matter—the gulls are scavengers, they eat shit off the ground …”

Sleeping Worlds also deals extensively with propaganda and the distortion of truth, a lot of which we were seeing right now, during the latest US election race. There are no foreigners in Duma, no criminals, no neurodiverse, and their own tower (spoiler alert!) is “an instrument of peace.”

You could write it all off as coincidence(s). Or not. In any case, don’t listen to anyone, not even me—instead, I’d love you to pick up Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory and make up your own mind.

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