The thing with satire is that it has to have a relationship to the world we live in — and if we’re not careful the line between the two becomes blurred. As J.R.H. Lawless notes, in this Big idea for his novel Always Greener.

J.R.H. LAWLESS:

The Big Idea of this novel is, unsurprisingly, a direct result of where I was when I wrote it: Split between the office at the French National Assembly in Paris where I worked and slept, on one hand, and the black and white cottage in rural England where I’d work at a distance and take care of our new-born daughter when I wasn’t needed in Paris, on the other.

It should therefore be no surprise, once again, that the fundamental Big Idea ended up being that the power dynamics of our societies are fundamentally effed and that we, and our children, are all seriously boned if we don’t do something about it.

Not the most original of Big Ideas, certainly — but then again, there’s a reason for that; it’s because the warning remains as valid as it was when all the great dystopian writers penned their warnings about what would happen “if this goes on”. If not more so. But back in the sweet, innocent days of 2007 when I first started working on the piece, I came up with a series of hopefully interesting answers to the question of how best to develop that core dystopian Big Idea.

The first question was: What is the best way of showing the dehumanising effects of where we are headed on individuals, all around the world? The answer was: To show examples of some of the lives affected the most.

Which lead to the second question: What book premise could I come up with that would let me show those lives most naturally and effectively? That’s when I cooked up the core conceit for Always Greener: A future reality show where contestants compete for the title of “greatest victim” of the Corporate-run world, with lens implants allowing people around the globe to experience life through their eyes, 24/7, so they can vote on who the biggest losers are at the big weekly elimination feature shows.

Obviously, the right POV was an important third question, which lead me to my MC, Liam Argyle: A fundamentally optimistic man who accepts the job offer to become the host of this hot new reality show in hopes that it’ll give him a chance to finally make a difference in the world; without realising how violently the realities of the show, and of his contestants’ sorry lives, will challenge his faith in humanity.

Finally, developing the Big Idea meant deciding what tone would best carry that message home. And there was only one choice here, fuelled by the Pratchett and Adams I was surrounded by in my rural English cottage: Dark, uncompromising humour.

Wrap that all together, and the result is an adult SF comedy novel that’s been a long time in the making and hopefully kicks this series off with a bang, before the sequel, The Rude Eye of Rebellion, also hits the shelves in Fall 2020. The book is chock full of the most absurd situations and etymological footnotes I could come up with.

Everything in this book would be ridiculous — should be ridiculous — if it weren’t so damn likely to become reality in the not-so-distant future. Unless we find some way to get off our collective arses and do something about it, that is.

—-

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History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it can inspire writing of the future — as Michael R. Johnston discovered as he started writing the series of which his latest novel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, is part.

MICHAEL R. JOHNSTON:

Some years ago, apparently unconvinced that being a full-time high school teacher, husband, and father (with a toddler!) was enough of a drain on my energy, I decided to go to grad school. This lasted only two semesters before I decided it had been a bad idea and walked away, but the decision to go, and one specific class, changed the course of my life.

The class, Modern Irish Literature, met at the ungodly hours of 6 to 9pm on Monday nights. We covered the literature of Ireland from the Easter Rising of 1916, through the War of Independence, the Irish Civil War and—much later—the Troubles, then up to the present day.

But while the class was fascinating, it wasn’t exciting. The first half of each class meeting was discussion of the reading, complete with student-generated “deep questions.” Sometimes the questions were provocative and thought-inducing, other times they were obtuse and unanswerable, but we’d spend a good hour and a half on them, batting ideas back and forth. And then the professor would read from his essays on the subject.

Listening to someone reading an essay is almost never exciting, and I would often find my mind wandering. One such night, I began to wonder if I could translate the Irish struggle for independence into a Science Fiction context. This was just me doodling, really, because I’d given up on the idea of writing professionally after three terrible novels (only later did I learn how many of my idols started by writing unpublishable novels). The more I thought about this idea, however, the more it began to feel like a story I had to write.

And then, after months of wrestling with it, throwing almost everything out and starting over several times, I had a novel. It got me accepted to Viable Paradise, where the remaining kinks were worked out of the story, and more importantly, my passion for being a professional writer—for writing stories other people would want to read and would pay for—was rekindled.

From late 2013 to early 2015, I rewrote the book, throwing out a lot of what I’d had, including the parts inspired by history. That became The Widening Gyre, my debut novel. In that story, starship captain Tajen Hunt and his crew discovered that their benevolent alien overlords are anything but benevolent. They kicked the Zhen off Earth and began to recolonize it with humans, no longer content with being second-class citizens of the Zhen Empire.

When I began The Blood-Dimmed Tide, I was able to return to the original idea of freedom fighters fighting a messy and complicated war. Many of the events in the novel are inspired by real events in Ireland, and the fates of some characters were informed by the fates of the real people who inspired them.

When The Blood-Dimmed Tide begins, Tajen thinks he’s got it all figured out. He found the lost Earth, he discovered the treachery of the Zhen, and he’s helped found a human colony to repopulate Earth. He even got the guy. He finally has a firm place to stand again.

But then everything he’s worked for is undone. The clean, easy space battles of Tajen’s past are replaced by a difficult fight for survival against an enemy that doesn’t care who they have to step on to get what they want. And, just as some Irish worked for the British, the Zhen have human agents among the people of Earth, working against the cause of human independence. Tajen is lost, his footing unsure, and he has to find his way back to stability.

Finally, just as in real life, there’s more going on than our heroes know, and events outside of their control are hurtling toward them.

—-

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Who is the bad person? What makes the bad person bad? And how different are they, really, from you and the people you love? As K.S. Villoso observes in this Big Idea piece for The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, the lines might not be as clearly cut as one might hope.

K.S. VILLOSO:

Monsters hide in plain sight.

Epic fantasy usually tackles the concept of good versus evil. The big battle is against dark forces on the outside, threatening to end a time of peace and overturn the way things are. The enemy is an other, a stranger who is someone completely unlike us, whose ways barely resemble ours. And yet they want what we have and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it; it’s up to us to protect the status quo, to answer that hero’s call and rise to the challenge.

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro subverts a lot of genre tropes, and it’s no different when it comes to its approach to this age-old fantasy trope of us versus them. Once the story gets going on, readers immediately realize they don’t know who the enemy is—they don’t know who is them. Queen Talyien doesn’t. She is a fish out of the water, thrown into a whirlwind of events where her primary goal is to survive and find her wayward king. The sinister evil, hiding in the background, seems almost inconsequential and a little typical, the expected backside thorn in our hero’s adventure…until it isn’t. Observant readers will see what’s been there from the beginning. If you look hard enough, you’ll understand that this isn’t a story about building defences against an outward threat, but about finding a cure to the poisons underneath.

Filipino mythology is rife with monsters. The catch-all phrase for most is the aswang, and while they come in a variety of forms—shapeshifters, werewolves, ghouls and vampires that suck unborn children out of wombs—the defining characteristic of most is that they can live right next to you. These monsters might be right under your noses. Your neighbour could be one, the local hermit, maybe even your own grandmother. The pig you slaughtered last night is missing its innards, or a child goes missing…is there an aswang amongst us? You stare at each other with distrust, wondering who it is, if it’s the woman right next to you or the man who just came into town last night.

Stories where the accusation of being an aswang has made people turn on one another or even resort to murder. People have used it to denounce whole villages, claiming that the entire population is riddled with aswang, like a disease that builds on distrust. What you can’t understand, you blame on someone else, and people are always looking for easy answers—even if it means condemning others. But when we seek enemies that way, what we are really saying is that we are just as much capable of being villains as heroes. We could be our own worst enemy. In fact, we very often are.

There are some great, terrible monsters in Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, the series for which this novel is the first installment. But the most frightening thing about them is how they came to be. We let this monster into this house, into our bed. Because for that to happen, first you had to open the door.

—-

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On the occasion of The Last Best Hope, the first novel associated with the Star Trek: Picard television series, author Una McCormack muses on Star Trek, the future it imagines, the present we live in today… and how it all comes together.

UNA McCORMACK:

At the end of last year, I visited CERN. Yes, that CERN, of the massive magnets and the Higgs-Boson. I was one of a party that included a bishop and at least one other writer of speculative fiction. We were our own murder mystery in the making. It was a great day, talking to smart people about their visionary work, but the highlight was taking the lift down to see the Complex Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment – one of the two vast particle physics detectors built on the Large Hadron Collider.  We went down, down, underground, and came out to see an incredible monument to human ambition, talent, organisation. The bishop and I looked out across this work and shared the sense of awe and wonder we were both experiencing.

Afterwards, I spent the day in Geneva. I visited the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum. On the way home, I was able to travel on my British/EU passport for one of the very last times. I kept thinking about what human beings can achieve when we collaborate on a large scale. Vast secular cathedrals that bring us closer to understanding the fundamentals of our universe. Humanitarian organisations that bring relief and bear witness. International treaties and agreements that, for all the bureaucracy, have contributed to maintaining peace in Europe for the best part of a century. I thought about how much I’d taken these things for granted across my life, and how fragile these institutions all suddenly seemed.

Such things were much on my mind when I sat down to watch the first episode of Star Trek: Picard. In this, I think, we are following the narrative of a man whose story stands at the intersection of great individual talent and wider, social need. A man whose personal qualities – wisdom, compassion, a humanitarian outlook – once formed the backbone of the organisation he served. But now we find him at a time of his life when the values he holds have become no longer congruent with the organisation to which he has been dedicated.

For those of us of a certain vintage, Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) offered not only a positive vision of humanity’s future, but one predicated upon collaboration, in which species looked beyond ties of blood and nationhood to find common ground with all forms of life. At the heart of this project was the figure of Captain Jean-Luc Picard: explorer, diplomat, scholar, humanist, a man whose chief drivers are curiosity and compassion.

Of course, TNG had its flaws. But in its best episodes, such as ‘The Measure of a Man’, in which the civic rights of the android, Data, are debated, TNG dealt thoughtfully, and committedly, with questions of selfhood, and our obligations to each other. In ‘Darmok’, Picard learns to communicate with an alien species who speak through metaphor, showing the joy of immersion in another culture, and the thrill of meaningful contact with the other. In ‘The Inner Light’, Picard lives an entire different life, as a member of a species long extinct, coming back to his own time to bear witness to the fact that they existed – that they lived and loved, and hoped to be remembered.

In Star Trek: Picard, we are presented with a future where the powers that be are no longer committed to these great ambitions. Starfleet, it seems, withdrew from the great challenge of its age, the humanitarian project to save the Romulan people from the effects of their sun going supernova, making a distinction between ‘lives’ and ‘Romulan lives’. We see a man whose values are no longer shared by the institutions to which he devoted his whole life, and who is struggling with this misalignment.

My British nationality no longer gives me access to my European rights. By a quirk of history, I am able to claim these rights through Irish grandparents. So can my daughter – but my partner cannot. These great endeavours – these great projects of human collaboration and organisation – sometimes we seem to be retrenching. We seem these days to prefer to emphasize what disunites us rather than what might connect us. Science fiction reflects our times back to us – but can also remind us that the future is not yet fixed. And that once upon a time, we dared to dream of futures which were not constructed upon exclusion and exploitation, but which reached outwards in the hope of collaboration, diversity, and mutual aid. Perhaps one day we will learn this trick again.

—-

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One of the cliches of the writing life is the writer in their cold garret, scribbling furiously onto pages. As Kelly Braffet tells us in today’s Big Idea, in her case this cliche is not entirely wrong, and also, it led her on the long and strange journey that resulted in her latest novel, The Unwilling.

KELLY BRAFFET:

Modern book promotion goes like this: you write a book. You sell the book. You edit the book within an inch of its life. Then, in the weeks before the book is published, you write essay after essay and Q&A after Q&A for blogs and websites and – basically – anyone who’ll have you. Anything to get your name out there. Lots of the Qs in the Q&As are very similar, and one of the challenges is to come up with fresh answers. Which is to say that I expected to write more than once about crime novels versus fantasy novels, and about working on the same novel for 20 years, coming back to it in free moments like a room you never quite finish painting; and about, oh, I don’t know, systems of magic and research methods and where I get my ideas. (I don’t know if I get them so much as they accrue in the corners of my mind over time, like mental dust bunnies.)

What I didn’t expect to write about was my last college dorm room, not at all – but here I am, about to write about it for the second time in a week, and I guess that’s one of the interesting things about writing in general, that it leads you to unexpected places. That dorm room was where The Unwilling was born, and the first thing to know about it was that it was terrible.

I was a senior, which should have earned me a pretty sweet spot, but I utterly tanked the housing lottery, and I ended up in half of a converted attic in one of the older houses on campus. If I stood in the exact center of it I could almost stand upright. My housemates and I did not actually talk to each other, not because we weren’t all nice people but because they were all friends who’d signed up to live together, and I was the antisocial introvert who lost the housing lottery. In general, I think that living situation can be best summed up by the moment when I ran into a woman at a party who was friends with said housemates.

“So, your whole house has scabies, huh?” she said, and then, horrified by my expression: “Wait – you didn’t know?”

Other things that year were less than ideal. Most of my friends had graduated, and the few that were left weren’t on the campus meal plan, so I either ate solo, which was depressing, or brought sandwiches back to eat in my terrible dorm room. I was also nursing a broken heart, and I stopped sleeping. I knew I was depressed and thought a volunteering gig might help, but the one I found was a long commute away and I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would. Nothing seemed good or hopeful, and there seemed to be no road forward. The only things that brought me solace were video games and reading.

In the middle of all of this, I read a fantasy novel by a writer I liked, and was very disappointed. I can write a better fantasy novel than that, I thought. It’ll be about four people who live alone in a castle after their kingdom collapses. There’ll be a tower. There’ll be a big wall, with a city outside it. At the time, I saw no metaphorical parallels whatsoever between my lonely life at the top of Andrews House behind the wall of my depression and the world that would eventually become that of The Unwilling, where my four characters lived lonely lives in a tower behind a literal Wall. I mean, I see them now. But now I’m 44; then I was 21.

Writers have themes that we go back to, over and over again. The stories all change, but they often tend to nibble around the same central theme, like those pedicure fish that eat the dead skin off your feet. I’m very interested in power, for one thing: all of my books are about people dealing with powerlessness, and the power other people have over them. My second constant theme, though, is identity: who am I? Who do I want to be? Who does the world think I am; who does the world think I should be? I think everyone struggles with this issue; there might be somebody out there who feels absolutely no tension between who they are and who the world expects them to be, but I feel like that would require near-superheroic levels of confidence. Living that way would be pretty great, I suppose, but believe me when I say I wouldn’t know.

I’ve spent twenty years writing The Unwilling. During those twenty years, I’ve written five other novels and published three of them. Through all of it, I’ve come back to this story, these four people stuck behind this wall. Part of the allure is that I love fantasy stories, and have since I could read; also, the tropes of the fantasy genre are uniquely suited to exploring that central question of identity. All of the central characters in The Unwilling are given roles at birth: you are the future City Lord, you are his future wife, you will command the army. My protagonist, Judah, is the only one without a prescribed role, and she suffers for it. The existence of magic is a wild card that gives that otherwise heavily controlled world the potential of breaking wide open.

We don’t have magic, unfortunately. Our only hope of breaking the world wide open is constant, conscious examination of those big questions. Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who does the world think I am? How do I bridge the gap between the two – or do I even want to? This is the biggest question of all, and it’s one we spend our entire lives poking at: in the reading of books, in the writing of books, in terrible little dorm rooms. Wherever we happen to be, whatever we happen to be doing. It’s the question that drives us forward. And I’m sure I’ll come back to it in my next book, and my next.

—-

The Unwilling: Oblong Books and Café | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Indiebound |Powell’s

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For his Big Idea on the novel The Light Years, author R.W.W. Greene considers what things make the cut, when civilization itself is on the line.

R.W.W. GREENE:

Moving always sucks. But especially when it’s unexpected. Even someone with Chrisjen Avasarala-level planning skills, when faced with an eviction or a sudden breakup, is going to lose a thing or thirty by the time she unpacks the boxes, bags, and bales in the new digs. Somehow, she’ll end up with both copies of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, no can opener, a single black shoe, two years of Yankee-Swap gifts, and the bad phone charger. It can be a new home, but it’s never the same home, and it’s going to take a while to get comfortable.

That’s the big idea I kept in the crosshairs while I wrote The Light Years, which is springing from the presses at Angry Robot Books this month. In the book, which is set a mere thousand years from now, Earth has burned to a cinder and humanity is no longer living there. Generation ships, hibernation pods, and a little faster-than-light-travel for the well-to-do have given the species a fresh start, and after several hundred years in survival mode, things are settling into the new normal. There’s finally time for a few luxuries. They can begin unpacking the box marked “The Humanities.”

Naturally, time and travel left big gaping holes in all the packing boxes, and even with the best intentions, there was no escaping Earth without leaving a lot behind. There was data loss at every point in the exodus.

After all, the statue Winged Victory of Samothrace was so very, very heavy. It was carefully scanned, of course, along with The Mona Lisa and Starry, Starry Night. The Google Books servers were uploaded to the ship-based computers, along with as much of the Library of Congress as could be digitized and everything on Spotify and iTunes. All the shows on the streaming services came along, all the memes on Twitter, all the approved YouTube videos, even the ones being made right… now. I mean, now.

Now.

Is it still a work of art if the original no longer exists? That’s something the Earth refugees will no doubt want to debate later, after they’ve built the infrastructure of a new civilization. People with the means will debate it, I mean. Philosophy and classical studies will be luxuries for quite some time, I’m afraid.

The richer countries were better represented on the What-To-Bring-To-The-New-World Committees, which could explain the loss of so much non-Western art and culture. There was a representative sampling collected, but with only a generation or so to plan, sacrifices had to be made. And was it such a loss? If no one had made a parody or dorm-room poster of it by 2050 or so, how relevant could it be?

Hey, you know how after a breakup you tend to go through Facebook and Instagram to get rid of the pictures of your ex? There was a similar move to tidy up history and culture for posterity. No one remembers which version of Huckleberry Finn made the cut, and there are numerous books and films mentioned in the archives that were judged unworthy for inclusion. (However,  the director’s cuts of Bloodsport, Home Alone 2, and Zoolander were carefully curated so that future audiences could enjoy them.) In a different political climate, different decisions might have been made, but that’s democracy for you.

Many of the recorded histories reflected poorly on the countries working so hard and spending so much money on the fleet of colony ships, so the rougher parts got sanded smooth or trimmed away. There was little political will to bring the mistakes of the past into the new future.

Science and tech? They brought everything relevant, of course. Every theory. Every paper. Every debunked anti-vaccination and Intelligent Design study. All those adverts about crystals and CBD oil. It was far easier just to bring everything then to engage in politically divisive debates over facts and merit, and the really important bits were locked away under patent and copyright and statutes of secrecy.

What else was there to pack? Pictures and videos of beautiful places. A recording of the mating calls of loons. The sound of a busy street in Manhattan. Genetic samples (but there was no way to get samples of everything) and seeds. A few, small personal items.

More data was lost in transit. Most of the Earth’s citizenry traveled frozen or in massive generation ships, but representatives and build teams from the greater nations had faster means. They got to the new worlds first to make them ready and, as was their due, claim the best spots. They set the rules, created the social system, and decided what was cool long before the other refugees arrived. Family recipes were modified for available resources, and soon no one remembered what a real meal from the Old Country tasted like.

Remember how the old iPod shuffle algorithm was only pseudo-random? That’s also how the bowdlerized, gerrymandered version of the Sum Total of Human Knowledge contained in the colony ships’ computers worked. Stuff that people wanted to find got stored at the top, search-engine-optimized and nicely cross-referenced with keywords. Other stuff was never seen again, like that song from that album that never shows up on your playlist. It’s still there in the depths, where even the nerdiest of the data-spiders never go. (Somehow, though, “Friends” made it into the zeitgeist again. Go figure.)

And, thus, a new civilization (and book) was made from what we carried from the old.

Most anyone who has taken a creative-writing class has been asked to consider the following prompt: Assuming friends, family, and pets are safe, what is the one thing your protagonist would grab whilst fleeing his or her burning house? A rational character would, of course, grab the perfect, narratively-useful, archetype-defining thing for its creator to use. However, rational behavior is a lot to expect out of someone in panicked flight, and I expect most civilizations, most lives–real or imagined–are made and remade from those off shoes, duplicate CDs, unfilled needs, and broken pieces.

—-

The Light Years: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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