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.

—-

Always Greener: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Google Books|Kobo

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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.

—-

The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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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.

—-

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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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.

—-

Star Trek Picard: The Last Best Hope: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound

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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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In No Parking, author Valentine Wheeler imagines a town undergoing change, and what it means for the people who live there. And it all started… with lunch.

VALENTINE WHEELER:

I started writing No Parking because of a chicken wrap.

No, seriously. A new restaurant came to town, and they make a killer shawarma. I was eating a chicken shawarma wrap, and I was listening to a customer complain about our full parking lot, and inspiration struck.

Set in a small town southwest of Boston and southeast of Worcester, not quite making the metro area for either, the town of Swanley is struggling to figure out just what community means and who it’s for. Is it the descendants of the settlers that built the town, the commuters looking for an affordable house in exchange for a longer train ride to work, immigrants seeking a fresh start in a quiet place, the kids who grew up wanting to leave and still somehow stuck around? Ultimately, how can all these groups work together to make a place they all can be proud of and want to live?

I’ve lived in Massachusetts for nearly fifteen years, and every town I’ve lived in I’ve tried to be a part of the community by joining groups, volunteering, being a poll worker, and meeting my neighbors. I’ve always been someone who jumps in with both feet in a new place, for better or for worse; I love town politics and neighborhood associations and anywhere where people who live in close proximity are forced to come even closer together and work out their issues in front of all their neighbors. It’s like a locked-room bottle episode, but the tension’s sometimes wound even tighter.

I see this every day at the Post Office. I work in a small town southeast of Boston, not too far from where the town of Swanley would be. I see so many ways the community rubs up against itself every day in line (and in the certified letters people send each other… honestly, you don’t spend six years working for the post office if you’re not at least a little bit nosy). But I also see the way it can be beautiful. I see condolence cards and wedding invitations, Bar Mitzvah invitations going out to hundreds around the world and postcards crossing back and forth across a mile of town. I’ve watched all the little old houses get knocked down, and huge new ones put up–and seen the fights over the affordable housing and senior living communities when those go up instead.

Watching a town fight itself from a working class town to a tech-startup-filled suburb of the upper middle class has been fascinating, especially since many of the million dollar houses are now owned by the kids of the carpenters and train conductors and beat cops who lived there decades ago. When a town changes, people change with it–some of them, anyway. The question remains, though, of whether it’s the same town at all at the end of it.

Swanley is a town in transition, too, and the key conflict of the novel ultimately breaks down to that question. Who is a community for, and who gets to determine what that community means? Marianne Windmere, the main character of No Parking, has watched her town grow and change over sixty years, and she’s not sure if she’s ever fit in. But sometimes we don’t realize what we have until it’s threatened. Marianne doesn’t know if she loves Swanley. But she’s willing to find out. Because it’s the place that loves her, that knows her, and it’s where the people she loves are all tied together in their own ways. It’s home.

And where does her queer community fit in in a small town? This question, at least, I can answer. Because queer people find each other. These characters–bi, ace, trans, pan, gay, and lesbian characters all find their place in No Parking’s Swanley–and their relationships are woven deeply into the heart of Swanley and the heart of No Parking. We build our own community inside the larger one, and in a healthy community, that building continues outward and upward to fight for other marginalized groups just as hard as they fight for their own.

No Parking has, at its heart, a queer love story, but that’s merely the core of a series of interconnected love stories: a woman falling back in love with her town, the platonic love left behind after the romance has cooled and the relationship ended, and the love of the family you don’t realize you’re building.

—-

No Parking: Amazon|Barnes and Noble|Kobo

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Sometimes storytellers miss out on telling a story. But as Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks learned with Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier, that just means that some stories, you get to come back to.

JIM OTTAVIANI:

Astronauts started on the cutting room floor of another book. More than ten years ago I wrote a graphic novel about the 1960s space race. In the course of doing research for that book (T-Minus), I came across the story of thirteen women pilots who took — and passed — the rigorous physical tests NASA gave the first astronaut candidates that made you shudder and cringe when you watched The Right Stuff.

We all know what didn’t happen next, and I know a good story when I stumble over it, but with only 124 pages to get readers from the dawn of rocketry to landing on the Moon I couldn’t fit that story into that first book.

This happens all the time, and I’ve learned over the years to not just wipe a tear of regret from the corner of my eye and move on. I set the story aside, knowing I would come back to it. And here we are!

But I don’t think having more than a dozen main characters works well outside of sprawling, multi-volume fantasy or science fiction epics, and besides, the Mercury 13 are only the beginning of this chapter of the Space Age. So when I came back to it I needed to find a focal character, and I decided that it should be somebody that wasn’t famous.

Not that Sally Ride’s story isn’t great. It is. So is Valentina Tereshkova’s. (Not to mention the bit where Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols, who appears in the book as well, plays a key role in NASA’s astronaut recruitment.) But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much more fun it is to discover someone new, and that the story itself would work better for me — and you, I hope! — if I made the famous people supporting characters.

Because that’s how real life is for most of us.

How to find her, though? Well, the great thing about NASA is they document everything, so I got to spend weeks pretending to work while really I was just having a ball reading oral histories of women astronauts, looking for someone who both witnessed and made history. And hey, if I ran across a person who sounded like they’d be fun to meet, that’d be a bonus. I did, and her name is Mary Cleave.

She’s been to space! She’s been the boss of NASA’s science directorate, deciding which robots go to space! She has a great sense of humor, which comes through even when interviewed by a deadpan and serious historian! So I started learning more, and working up the nerve to contact her directly. I eventually got her on the phone to pitch her the idea of doing a comic book about her, her colleagues, and doing in science in space.

Over the years people have asked me about that “comics about science” thing a lot, but there’s one group that never questions the idea. That’s people like Mary — the scientists and engineers themselves. They think and communicate visually, so they get it. What a lot of them don’t get (Stephen Hawking was an exception) is why I’d want to write about them in the first place, and why it takes me weeks to draft the initial letter asking them if they’d be interested. Mary was the same: When Maris and I went to visit she couldn’t figure out why everyone’s so impressed by meeting astronauts, or why we thought it was weird to have one offer to pick you up at the airport. “We’re just regular people!”

Well. Sorry, but I don’t buy that. Astronauts are competent and accomplished to a degree you and I can barely even imagine. But still, there’s something to what she said, since the famous and not-so-famous astronauts I’ve been lucky enough to meet are indeed people you can just talk to. Hang out with. Maybe even join at a pub where George Washington and Ben Franklin talked and hung out and had beers, and have some yourselves.

I didn’t have a beer during our first visit with Mary (I was driving) but next time? Heck yeah. And in the meantime Maris and I got to make a book with an astronaut, and maybe help make Mary Cleave a little more famous.

—-

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The paths we walk in our lives are not necessarily straight and narrow, and in writing her new novel, author Juliette Wade found she needed another metaphor entirely to explain her character’s movements. In this Big Idea, Wade explains on why the metaphor she landed on was Mazes of Power.

JULIETTE WADE:

This is the story of a very old, and very big idea. When I first had it, I was thirteen years old, and the idea was so big that I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it. It was the idea for a world of cavern cities, where families were restricted in their professions, and about conflicts of power… but until I’d turned this idea over hundreds of times, over years, it always seemed out of my grasp. I learned about anthropology, and added a new social awareness to my idea, and realized it was for a work of sociological science fiction. I studied linguistics, and added that, too. I tried to write a story about it, knew it was wrong, and learned more, and wrote it again. I concentrated hard on learning how language and the world around us reflect our concepts of our social selves, and wrote it again.

Until it stopped being wrong, and became the world of Varin.

Varin has a caste system. This caste system has seven levels. It’s easy to think of such a system as a set of boxes, and to think that nobles go in one box, soldiers and police in another, servants in another, then artisans, laborers, merchants, and undercaste. But there came a point when I realized these were not boxes. In a real social system, all kinds of people are born into categories where they don’t necessarily fit. While they may be taught who they are, what their values are, and what they are supposed to be like, often, they struggle. People at every level will make bargains between their personal truths and the demands of society. They will use what power they can wrest from the world around them to achieve their ends. They will make the choices that become available to them.

Societal categories like these are not boxes. They are mazes.

What are the key properties of a maze? A maze is complex. It offers paths, but the pattern of these paths is difficult to see while you are moving through it. It appears to offer you choices, but at the same time, limits the choices you can productively make if you wish to achieve a particular goal.

There are three mazes in Mazes of Power.

The first maze is the competition for Heir to the Throne of Varin. Twelve boys enter, one from each of the Great Families of the Grobal nobility. Each travels a path through public events, interviews, deals, trials, and assassination attempts, trying to reach the center where only one may stand.

The second maze is the tangle of servants’ hallways that run behind the walls of the Eminence’s Residence. Imbati-caste servants, who must not hurry in the public halls where nobles might see them, are allowed to run there. They know the fastest ways from place to place, and they use speakers to listen in on the talk in public rooms, to know when to appear when they are needed, or to learn secrets no one realizes they possess.

The third maze is the society itself. Every person in Varin is born into a path they cannot see, and cannot choose. Some of those paths run through public places, and others through hidden places. Within these paths, the people of Varin make choices, as we make choices, but the choices they make are limited by the larger structure of the society around them. Expectations are set and reinforced, and there are consequences for breaking them. No person, no setting, no interaction exists outside this system. Nothing is untouched.

If you are a Varini, this structure limits you, but it also protects you, because it tells you who you should expect to see in the street, in the marketplace, or at the radiograph office. It tells you what you should say to a person with a green lower lip who wears a gray coat, or to a woman in rust-red, or to a man with a black tattoo on his forehead. It keeps you safe and holds you up, but it also restricts you and presses you down.

Varin was designed to be unlike our world in a great many ways, and to break our Earthly expectations, but it should feel very familiar.

After all, we all walk within mazes of power.

—-

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For The Will and the Wilds, author Charlie N. Holmberg asks: When is a kiss not a quite a kiss — or perhaps more accurately, not only a kiss? The answer: when certain, special, creatures are involved.

CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG:

Once, almost exactly three years ago, Charlie had a weird dream.

In this dream she was in her old house in Midvale, and author Elana Johnson was her mother.

She met this strange man who had a unicorn horn jutting out of his forehead. He was invisible to everyone else but her. Then he lost his horn and needed to get it back. However, the only way to regain the horn was, essentially, to take a maiden’s virginity.

And no, my book isn’t about that. But it is about this strange creature I dreamed up one night who wouldn’t leave my thoughts.

When I relate this dream to others, it doesn’t sound like anything special, yet it really stood out to me. I couldn’t pull my mind from it. So I opened a notebook and started writing down ideas. The first and foremost was this phallic-demon-unicorn-man. Then I brainstormed the place he was from: the monster realm, or “The Deep,” in his words. (Yes, I was watching Disney’s Moana at the time. How did you know?)

I’m a sucker for the enchanted forest trope, and I’d never written an enchanted forest story, so that became my setting. But the forest itself wasn’t magical; the beings within it were. It’s riddled with demons—“mystings”—that hail from another world. A harsh world. A soulless world. It’s no wonder they want to come to the mortal plane. And it’s no wonder humans want to stay far away from them.

I’m branded as a clean author. I couldn’t have demons running around stealing maidenhoods for their phallic headwear. So I turned The Will and the Wilds toward the next best thing: kissing. I love kissing books. I love writing them, I love reading them, and this is the kissingest book of them all.

To get Maekallus to the enchanted forest, I needed someone to summon him. Herein walks Enna, the plain outcast of the local village, wannabe scholar for things of the bizarre. She’s in trouble, and she needs Maekallus’s help. A bargain is struck that binds them together. But this story needs to take up roughly three-hundred pages, so of course Maekallus fails to keep up his end. Of course he’s bound to the mortal realm and can’t go back home. Of course the mortal realm would start eating him alive, and because of their bargain, Enna is subject to the consumption, too.

What about the kissing? Glad you asked!

Maekallus is a trickster and a demon. He doesn’t eat mortal foods to survive; he eats souls. And what better way to eat a soul than through a kiss? And so, as the mortal realm slowly converts his body into a puddle of rank tar, he tricks Enna into kissing him. Into giving him her soul.

But he only gets a piece. Why? Well, that’s a spoiler. Yet if Enna wants to survive, she has to keep Maekallus alive, and that means feeding him a piece of her soul every few days, all while trying to figure out how to break the curse holding him to the mortal realm, and her to him.

As a hot bonus, the more soul Maekallus gets, the more human he becomes, and he starts to feel for the first time.

And that, my fellow kissing-book-lovers, is the big idea behind The Will and the Wilds.

 —-

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When you have a big idea for a story, the question then often becomes — what practical things do I need to do to make this big idea work for the story? For The Vanished Birds, author Simon Jimenez had his big idea, and now in the Big Idea piece, he explains how he made it work, in the context of his novel.

SIMON JIMENEZ:

I wrote no encyclopedia and I drew no map before I began writing The Vanished Birds. I laid the track as the train chugged forward and hoped I wouldn’t be outpaced and run over. Of course I was. I wince now as I think back on all the soft resets and double-backs and total rethinks and rewrites I had to do. I’d blame this all on the fact that it was my first book and I didn’t know what I was doing, but that wouldn’t be the truth. This is how I tend to go about all things. Without a plan and screaming in freefall.

The Big Idea of The Vanished Birds came into being as I wrote that first chapter. It’s something of a short story, a completed loop that tells the story of an entire life, structured in a way similar to other time-travel or future tense long-distance relationships, where the pairing has two unequal perceptions of time. The Time Traveler’s Wife. Any Moffat-written Doctor Who episode. Two people in a, well, call it long-distance fling. One is planet-bound and he experiences time as we do, and the other is perpetually traveling between the stars for work, and because of this, she has a very different experience of time.

For her, or for that matter any traveler engaging in long-distance spaceflight in this fiction, time is squeezed short. Her months are his years. She ends up rock-skipping across his entire life, meeting once every fifteen years.

He gets older, she does not.

As I wrote the contours of their decades-long relationship, all I knew—all I needed to know to tell this short story about this farmer’s life and his relationship to the spacefaring woman—was that interstellar travel had a cost of time. This formed the emotional spine that I wanted the rest of the novel to be built on, as it spoke to all the fascinations and fears I was preoccupied with at the time (and still am). The romance and loneliness of travel, and the delusion of leaving it all behind. The anxieties of unequal love. Ageing and obsolescence. I wanted the world-building to reflect some aspect of these preoccupations, the rules of the “game” serving to heighten these dramas, all of it borne of necessity.

The two lovers meet once every fifteen years not because that’s the way the tech works and how the math shook out refer to the wiki page please, but because fifteen years felt like a good rising increment when dramatizing the man’s entire life. You get the big spikes of youth and adolescence and the middle passages. And since I didn’t want her to get markedly older during this relationship (both to juxtapose the increasing difference of their age, and to keep in mind that in the scope of the larger narrative of the novel, this is for her just a brief dalliance), her round-trip journeys couldn’t be more than a few months, her time. This proportion of spent time doesn’t align with any real-world laws—as far as I’m aware at least—which meant I had to push toward the fantastical to justify this reality.

And so I began to whittle out the shape of a Big Idea: Pocket Space, the extra-dimensional arena by which interstellar travel is possible.

Space flight and unequal time. There were hundreds of tried and true options I could draw from considering all the fiction that had come before me. Spool an engine and fold space like a napkin. Fly down the frictionless blue-light highways of hyperspace, with no cost of resource or time. Or be adherent to the laws of spacetime as we understand it today and take your cues from reality. The latter half of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos runs right through the wall of FTL in a particularly memorable way. Travelers are vaporized by the speed of the jump as they move from one point in the galaxy to another, blood and viscera sloshing in their pods, dead as dead can be, until they are slowly, painfully, resurrected. Death then but a necessary evil, to get to where they need to be. I think you can go two ways about it: be stridently authentic or make it all as easy as winking with both eyes. And the further the story takes place from the present day, the more allowance is afforded the improbability of your space magicks or technobabble.

There’s no wrong answer here; it all depends on what kind of story you are telling. If you’re writing a light adventure narrative that takes place across many varied ecosystems in Star Wars-esque style, you probably don’t need to go too in depth about the hyperdrive that flicks the ship across the galaxy. But if your story is directly concerned with the mode of travel people engage in in the future, then that mode of travel will need to have a certain amount of friction and personal/societal cost in order to be relevant to the characters’ arcs and to actually investigate the topic at hand. After all, the believability of a world is directly proportional to the cost of living in that world, for we are justly wary of utopias.

I took a bit from many different sources. My initial plan was to have every journey through Pocket Space adhere to the first ratio I set up, of her months to his years. But as I tunneled further into the book and discovered the other stories I wanted to tell, I realized two things: that A) I needed Pocket Space to be somewhat elastic in its ruleset to allow for different stories about time, and B) I needed Pocket Space to be somewhat fleshed out, and not an afterthought, since it was starting to have greater and greater prominence in the story. There was also the question of coherency and what the reader was understanding about this future-tense travel; not just cursory understanding, but real, gut feeling understanding of the cost of it, the difference between being told how heavy a rock is, and actually holding it in your hands.

I needed the concept to be concrete. For it to have texture and variability and immediate parse-ability when it came to the emotional needs of the story, so people weren’t confused who was where and when and how. To make it more intuitive to the reader I drew comparisons between the Pocket and our oceans. I’m certainly not the first to make links to the ocean and some aspect of outer space, and for good reason. It felt like the most apt link to make, considering the tone and direction the story was taking, of journeying through a frontier space amidst a corporate legacy of expansionism. Gradually the Pocket more and more resembled the old-fashioned maps that charted shipping routes and known currents. Currents, all with their own speeds, their own ratios for time-loss, their own beguiling names. And since there were currents, there were now favored shipping and travel routes. This in turn suggested ideas of galactic control. What systems lay along the quickest currents and what trade routes and what resources were waiting for extraction. The rest followed from there.

That all sounds very tidy, like the ideas had flowed easily along a single current, but the truth is I actually can’t remember where any of it really came from. Everything I wrote here is just self-justifying reasoning developed with the benefit of hindsight. At a certain point it becomes hard to know the origin of any one idea, or the reason why the thing is the thing and not some other thing. The act of writing a self-referential feedback loop of drafting, observation, and re-drafting, the Big Idea born from a thousand small and impossible to remember decisions. I settled on the name Pocket Space because it is simple and easy to remember and, more importantly, the name immediately suggested to me what it was; it didn’t hide its definition behind some impossible to remember made-up term. And I liked the slight contradiction of the smallness of the pocket and the bigness of space; that the mind can’t quite wrangle it.

This is the fun part, the inventing. The part that feels like play. You write of a ship unfolding out of the Pocket, exiting the strong current that it had for months been riding and the action suggests something tactile and strange. Maybe a black substance like tar dripping off the sails of the ship at port. And you wonder what that substance is and its properties, which in turn propagates other ideas about the world. You start asking yourself who the first person was to sail this black ocean and where those uncharted currents finally brought them. What unexpected end. If they were satisfied by this journey, regardless of how they did it, and how long it took. And maybe one day you’ll realize why you do not write with a plan. How the work has always been about you.

—-

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At first blush, the ability to do anything sounds like a great idea. But there are reasons that it wouldn’t be… especially when you’re writing a novel. Parker Peevyhouse explains why, and how reining it all in made a difference for Strange Exit.

PARKER PEEVYHOUSE:

When you live in a simulation, anything is possible. But what makes for a good story is limitations.

In early drafts of my new novel, Strange Exit, characters could manipulate their surroundings at will—more so as they came to realize that they were inside in a simulation. Objects would fly, doors would slam. On the surface, it was exciting. But it cut a lot of the tension. If characters can do anything, then what’s to stop them from overcoming any obstacle they meet?

My editor encouraged me to develop more specific rules for my simulation. At first, I struggled to find inspiration. A set of arbitrary rules didn’t seem interesting to me. I thought about some of my favorite movies, like The Matrix and Inception, and realized that the rules in each of those movies (and there are so many rules in Inception!) arose specifically from the way those simulations were designed to be used. More importantly, those rules begged to be manipulated, even while they couldn’t be broken.

In Strange Exit, the sim is supposed to help people adjust to life after nuclear winter. Instead, people keep using it to recreate buildings and neighborhoods that they feel safe in—places to hide from more nuclear attacks or just from anxiety over what they’ve lost in the war. I decided that my first rule would be that characters could only manipulate environments that they had personally created within the sim. So when our main character, Lake, enters a pocket of the sim someone else has created, she’s at a disadvantage. They can make walls grow around her, or firestorms chase her away, and she can’t match that power. They can make every rack in their convenience store sell only Spicy Hot Cheetos and she has to compromise her snacking integrity or go hungry.

Another rule I introduced: when a person leaves the simulation, any pockets they’ve created vanish and anyone who’s inside those pockets wakes from the sim. So every time Lake manages to convince someone to leave the sim, she shrinks the unwieldy program and takes some of the pressure off the failing system. And when Lake finds a partner, Taren, and teaches him this rule, he finds a way to manipulate it further: he creates a pocket in the sim and convinces people to step inside so that when he leaves the sim, they all leave too. Their pockets close, the sim shrinks, and pressure lifts from the life support systems that are on the brink of failing.

Settling on these rules gave me a new vision for the story. I decided to focus on Lake’s training Taren to wake the “sleepers” and clear the sim. Even as Lake teaches Taren her methods, he finds his own way to shrink the sim. The rules of the sim force the characters to be clever and innovative. But more than that, the rules force them to make choices that put them at odds with each other. Soon, their methods diverge so much that they no longer see eye to eye. Taren starts making risky choices that put people in danger, and Lake focuses on efforts that they have too little time to explore. Finally, the two are pitted against each other, more enemies than friends.

Without a clear set of rules for the simulation, the tension between Lake and Taren wouldn’t exist. As the story stands now, their differing visions are what give the story meaning. The sim makes many things possible—odd happenings, and deep explorations of anxieties around nuclear warfare. But the rules that limit the sim force the characters to make difficult choices that reveal the core of who they are and what they believe. It’s the same with any story set in a simulation: we marvel at how characters break the laws of physics, but we care most about how they respond to rules they can’t break—only bend.

—-

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When it came to writing novels, Rod Duncan discovered that it helped for him to get out of his own head, and to take a chance on a character outside of his own personal experience. That character has since taken him places, including to his newest novel, The Fugitive and the Vanishing Man.

ROD DUNCAN:

My first four attempts at novel writing were driven by male protagonists. They earned me a drawer full of polite rejection letters from publishers and literary agents. It was a female protagonist that finally won me the long-sought book deal.

The commissioning editor later told me that she’d been sceptical. Could a male author really manage a first-person female voice? But some small observation early in the book convinced her. From there to the end of the manuscript she turned the pages with confidence, seeing each thought or action of the protagonist not as proof of gender identity, but as evidence of an individual character.

In the Alien screenplay, Ripley was an individual who could have been man or woman. It was only with the casting of Sigourney Weaver that she became female. Why should that surprise us? Unless we believe that each character is required to represent an entire gender.

Films have casting directors, costume designers, make-up artists, actors. But with novels, the readers get to do all those jobs. This is where the magic comes in. Through the creative act of reading, we translate words on a page to pictures in our minds. Much of the impression we get of a character’s gender will be unconsciously constructed. Write a good character and, if your audience believes they are male or female, that’s exactly what they will see.

There are surely differences between men and women. But how much of the difference derives from the asymmetric experiences imposed by society? How much is genetically defined? And what portion of the genetic difference resides in secondary sexual characteristics as opposed to the workings of the brain? In whatever way we answer those questions, the moment we say ‘A woman would never do that’ we are making a sexist assumption. There is at least as much variation of character within the genders as between them.

Some years after my first publishing contract was over, I found myself writing a short story from a male perspective. A private investigator walked a gas-lit street in an alternate history, approaching a dangerous rendezvous. But later, our handsome protagonist needed to disappear. I was taken aback when he removed a disguise and revealed himself to be a woman.

I’d wonder later whether this unconscious reverting to a female voice was in some way an exploration of a more female side of my own personality. Conversely, I might be more comfortable writing female characters because they are more obviously not me. Thus they emerge with more interesting personalities.

Either way, the detective, whose name I discovered was Elizabeth, had a distinctive voice, and was insistent on using it to tell me her story, which grew into a novel, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter, and then into a trilogy, the Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire.

To my surprise, people started telling me that they had fallen in love with Elizabeth. She was strong without being a superhero, they said. And she was apparently so truly feminine that one reviewer questioned whether the author could really be a man. As before, I believe the gender people perceived was largely their own construction.

There are a few tricks, of course – the smoke and mirrors that all writers employ. The places the eye of the description comes to rest. The saying enough, but not too much. Leaving room for the audience. I believe the reason Elizabeth seems female to some female readers, is because they are doing the heavy lifting, creatively speaking.

Not that Elizabeth feels comfortable in the role that the fictional society of my alternate history allows her. She must pass as male to do many of the things she wants to do. But adopting either role, she finds herself modifying the shape of her body. Which distortion is more unnatural, she asks: the binding cloth that flattens her breasts or the corset that thins her waist?

Elizabeth’s second trilogy began with The Queen of All Crows. In this series of adventures, she encounters societies where the role of men and women are very different. It forces her to think about her own relationship with gender. Neither of the available roles has allowed her to be fully at peace with herself.

Reviewers have explored various interpretations of Elizabeth. To some she is a woman reacting to the oppression of a patriarchal society. To others she is obviously non-binary. But within her society, this discourse does not exist. These terms would be unfamiliar to her. Is gender a social construction? How deep do the privileges run for those assigned male at birth? Elizabeth has never been confronted with such questions. She approaches the issue from experience and observation rather than ideology.

Even when dressed as a man, she does not doubt her womanhood – though both presentations feel to her like disguises. Perhaps her discomfort comes from the rigidity of those two roles. Or perhaps she would experience a dysphoria in any society, however the genders were understood. Either way, these are not questions she is at first equipped to ask.

The title of this trilogy, The Map of Unknown Things, hints at the nature of Elizabeth’s inner quest. She is exploring a landscape that has yet to be pinned down with the names of ideologies or social movements. But in whatever way we understand Elizabeth’s relationship to gender, it is clear that she finds herself out of step with the world.

The Fugitive and the Vanishing Man is the final book in the trilogy. The tides of history are carrying the world towards war. Elizabeth finds herself working behind the scenes to prevent the disaster. In the wilds of the Oregon territory, she meets someone assigned male at birth but who identifies as neither male nor female. The encounter is like a mirror for Elizabeth, enabling her to understand something of her own nature. She will never be the woman that society demands. Nor can she properly fulfil its ideal of the masculine role. But perhaps she will at last find a way to understand herself.

—-

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For this Big Idea, Kameron Hurley looks at what it takes to get a book right — and how her latest novel, The Broken Heavens, had to look beyond binary expectations to get there.

KAMERON HURLEY:

Two choices: Left or right. This or that.

Choose one or the other. There’s no in-between. No other choices.

From the time we are small we learn that we have choices: yes, or no. Good, or bad. The idea that there are only two choices has become pervasive in our media, our politics, our relationships, and it’s divided us deeply here in the U.S.

When I began writing my Worldbreaker Saga back in 2012, which begins with the novel The Mirror Empire, I too was obsessed with this idea of two choices: the light and the dark. I was writing fantasy, after all! While my protagonists might be morally messy early on, I always knew I was headed for a showdown where they had two choices: good or evil. Genocidal or self-sacrificing.

But it was a false choice.

And it literally took me years to realize this.

At some level I must have understood I was setting up a false choice as I finished the second volume, Empire Ascendant, and began the grueling process of tying everything up in the third and final book, The Broken Heavens. Emotionally, I was rebelling against my own embrace of these false choices, because no matter how many times I tried to get myself to write the ending I had in mind at the beginning of the series, it just never felt… right.

It took writing 90,000 words of… something for my agent to finally call me out. “Frankly, this isn’t very good,” she said. “Let’s take this out of the schedule and have you work on something else.”

I was incredibly angry with her, at first. Angry because she had identified in the writing the fact that I was deeply unhappy with the choices I had waiting for my protagonists, and I had absolutely no idea how to fix it.

Fixing issues this big, things that are so deeply ingrained in you that you have trouble thinking outside of the false paradigm, can take time.

I needed the time.

After the US election, I took a fresh look at the book and wondered if my work was contributing to this narrative of two choices; this idea that all we ever got to choose from were a range of bad alternatives forced on us by powers far larger than ourselves. How was that inspiring? Impactful? Hopeful?

The idea that we only have two choices is a very western, and honestly fairly recent, phenomenon. It’s a fallacy promoted by media for clicks, by political parties for votes, by foreign and domestic forces who want to ensure we remain angry and divided and nihilistic.

The truth is we have an infinite number of choices. Tradition, politicians, friends, family, social mores, will tell you it’s not true, but that’s because thinking outside of those choices is dangerous to the status quo. It upends assumptions about the way the world could and should be.

And in this series, I absolutely wanted to upend the world.

It took a lot of angry writing on my part. Long, long email back-and-forths with my agent, until she suggested I start thinking in another way. What if I stopped focusing on breaking things apart, and instead focused on bringing things together?

And there it was.

It all clicked.

While the rest of the book writing process was not smooth – I still did a tremendous amount of revision of the first third of the book, even after turning it over to my editor – the ending finally worked.  It was true to the world, the characters, the lore, the journey, from The Mirror Empire through Empire Ascendant and now, here, at the end: The Broken Heavens.

I am immensely proud of finishing this book. More so, I am proud that I took the time and didn’t do the lazy, expected thing with how I finished it up.

A fellow writer, Tobias Buckell, once paraphrased some advice from Tim Powers, which went something like this:

No one will remember if a good book was late. And a good book will only be late once. But a bad book? A bad book is bad forever.

I took the time to make The Broken Heavens a good, satisfying story. And it’s made all the difference.

—-

The Broken Heavens: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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If you think you know the horror genre — or at least, you know the greats of the genre — then Jess Nevins has news for you: You’ve probably only scratched the bloody, screaming surface of a genre that goes back literally millennia. He’s here now to tell you what he uncovered while writing his latest book, Horror Fiction in the 20th Century.

JESS NEVINS:

Horror fiction—that is, fiction intended to frighten—is a peculiar beast. It’s as old as human popular culture—the Epic of Gilgamesh has horror elements, and the Epic is over 4,000 years old—but it’s held in low esteem by mainstream critics and readers. Horror fiction appears in every genre of literature, but attempts to create a precise definition of the horror genre have been surprisingly contentious affairs. The horror genre is universal, but what horror readers have traditionally seen is a fraction of what is out there.

It’s that latter point that struck me when I started writing Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century and stuck with me throughout the book. I’ve been a horror reader all my life, but it wasn’t until I read Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s anthology, What Did Miss Darrington See? (1989), that I realized how much I’d been missing. Most of the stories in Miss Darrington are horror, written by women in the first half of the twentieth century. I was fascinated by the stories and went to the standard horror fiction reference books to learn more about the authors.

Those books were silent on these women or mentioned them only in passing. More rigorous attempts at research revealed two things: first, that there were a lot of women horror writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, far more than I’d ever heard of; second, that these women were—through critical ignorance, happenstance, or deliberate action—written out of histories of the horror genre, despite the quality of the women’s work and their significance to the genre.

Discovering this vast array of ignored writers was like a spelunker squeezing through a tight crack in a cave wall and discovering a mammoth cave system, missing from all maps, stretching out for miles in every direction. My Big Idea was to explore the far reaches of the cave system and cover it all in detail—to write a history of the modern horror genre that included everyone important, not just the authors and works that appear in the standard histories.

Sometimes I have the outlines of a book firmly in my mind from the beginning, and can write the book within those outlines. Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century wasn’t like that. Every cave I entered had further tunnels to crawl through. There were female authors of horror fiction to be considered, but also women who were known as mainstream writers but who occasionally dabbled in horror, with excellent results. African-American literature had its share of works of horror, as did Latinx literature, and Native American literature, and Australian Aboriginal literature, and LGBT literature, and all of those needed to be included. A number of the Gothic Romances of the 1960s and 1970s were written to frighten. I could not ignore horror fiction in comic books and roleplaying game fiction and Young Adult fiction. And there were many horror writers who produced sustained excellent work, but through no fault of their own are now completely forgotten. They, too, deserved a place in my book.

Most of all, there were the horror writers from outside the Anglophone world. Of whom there were many. So many, and so few translated into English. I realized that if I was going to write a history of the horror genre in the twentieth century, I would have to include horror writers from around the world, and not just those from the United States and the United Kingdom. A lot of intense research and difficult translations followed, but in the end I was able to include the major non-Anglophone horror writers and works in my book.

Reading all these new-to-me authors and works shaped my thinking about the horror genre itself and my reactions to the standard reference works on and histories of horror fiction. Too many of them, it seemed to me, relied on received wisdom and traditional judgments to guide who would be included in the encyclopedias and histories and who would be excluded. Viewed from a twenty-first century perspective, the results were problematic: too many mediocre white male horror writers; too much space devoted to English-language horror; too much repetition of received wisdom; too much rejection of new understandings of gender, sexuality, and race; too much regurgitation of tired and discredited ideologies and biases.

I didn’t set out to write a revisionist history of horror fiction, but in some respects that’s how Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century turned out. I do pay due homage to the generally-accepted greats in the genre, from Algernon Blackwood to Thomas Ligotti. But what I also do is devote significant attention to overlooked, underserved, and ignored authors, and point out where traditional critical narratives about horror fiction are misguided or incorrect. For example, I argue that H.P. Lovecraft was a popularizer more than an innovator, and the inheritor of a tradition rather than a writer without precedent. This is a revisionist argument—but one that is based on facts, inasmuch as this kind of argument can be based on facts.

The Big Idea for Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century was to write a truly global history of horror, and what I hope readers take away from my book is an appreciation for the wonderful variety of the horror literature of the world. The American and English horror authors we know so well—the Ambrose Bierces and Richard Mathesons and Robert Aickmans and Caitlin Kiernans—are very good. But so are Silvina Ocampo and Jehanne Jean-Charles and Dino Buzzati and Ge Fui and Mieko Kanai. The horror genre isn’t Anglophone, isn’t something only men read and write, and isn’t limited to hoary tropes, motifs, and plot dynamics. The horror genre is global, nimble—and glorious.

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Horror Fiction in the 20th Century: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

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A life of adventure for some often involved pretending to be someone other than you were… but was it possible in some cases that what was being pretended was closer to who that person always was meant to be? It’s a thought that Niki Smith has considered for The Deep and Dark Blue.

NIKI SMITH:

So early next morning she softly arose,
and dressed herself up in her dead brother’s clothes,
She cut her hair close, and she stained her face brown,
And went for a soldier to fair London town.

— English Folk Ballad, Sweet Polly Oliver

 

As a kid, tales of girls chopping off their hair to have adventures as knights or soldiers were my first glimpse of the wider, queer world that was waiting for me.

Finding these stories was exhilarating. Legends of women who dressed as men to fight in battle go back to the Trojan War! Mulan disguised herself to take her father’s place. Shakespeare uses the trope in five separate plays, sometimes for hijinks, other times for adventure, always for drama. The stage was all-male profession: male actors playing women characters who disguise themselves as men, toying with and winning the hearts of other men… every layer was messier, more exciting. It was queer.

I was a preteen when Mulan was released and my copies of Tamora Pierce’s Alanna quartet were already dog-eared from rereading. The trope has only grown since then: Terry Pratchett, Scott Westerfeld, Bloody Jack, Voltron. Countless girls disguising themselves as boys to live the lives they always wanted, as knights and pirates and soldiers! My to-read list is constantly growing; I can’t resist a revisit to one of my favorite childhood tropes.

But in all the fun of blurring gender roles in those stories I devoured as a kid, in the legends and myths and fantastical adventures—those girls were always girls, deep down. A new life, an adopted name, shorn hair, yes, but living as a boy was always just a temporary facade. And despite the “gender bending”, the layers of queer undertones, the flirting (and often falling in love!) with boys while in disguise—each story ended with a firm return to life as a straight, cis girl. Even as a kid, I knew I wanted more.

And I wanted more in so many ways. The heroine of these stories was always that—a girl. Pretending to be a boy was the only way to have an adventure. No matter how exciting the fantasy world, no matter if there were dragons or swords or magic spells, a woman’s life was always tedious and full of boring needlework. It was something to escape.

Society calls old, unmarried women “spinsters”—why? Because they earned enough through their work spinning thread to support themselves independently. In a time when marriage was expected, their skills meant they were free to make that choice for themselves and maintain a life of self-sufficiency. When I sat down to write The Deep & Dark Blue, I knew I wanted to flip the trope of the girl who hates to do embroidery on its head. I developed a system of magic with its roots deep in “women’s work”, in fiber arts, textiles, spindles and weaving, all powered by a magical indigo dye. And watching over it, an enclave of women, the Communion of Blue, carefully passing down its secrets to a new generation of girls.

All of that led to The Deep and Dark Blue, my queer fantasy middle grade graphic novel. Two siblings on the run after a coup, seeking refuge with a mysterious order of women… but for one twin, changing her name isn’t a disguise. It’s the chance for a young trans girl to live as herself for the first time, surrounded by the magic she’s dreamed of for years.

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When cultures meet, is there always a “clash” — or is there a way for disparate peoples to not only get along but thrive? This was a line of inquiry that Matthew Hughes is interested in, and pursues in his new novel What the Wind Brings.

MATTHEW HUGHES:

Back in 1971, when I was an English major at Simon Fraser University, I happened across a footnote in a book about cross-cultural contacts. The author was making the point that castaways arriving on foreign shores – like Japanese fishermen washed up on the coast of what was to become British Columbia – usually fared poorly. But the footnote mentioned an exceptional case: shipwrecked African slaves on the jungle coast of sixteenth-century Ecuador who allied themselves with the local indigenous people to form a mixed society – the “Zambo state” – who survived and prevailed against attempts by Spanish conquistadors to re-enslave them.

I thought: that would make a great historical novel. But it turned out to be difficult to research, because most scholarship was in Spanish-language academic journals.  Still, I kept it in mind as the decades rolled by and I eventually became a novelist. So, when the teens of this century arrived and North American scholars began writing about the Zambos, I could do the research and write the book.

Over my fiction-writing career, two themes dominated: I tended to write about outliers struggling to thrive in social environments not made for their kind; and the societies I created were often diverse, full of odd people energetically pursuing odd goals.

Writing about oddballs comes naturally to me, because I am one. Writing without judgements about diverse cultures came from observing how diversity gives a society strength and resilience. So when I came to write What the Wind Brings, it made sense to me that the Africans, many of them survivors of wars among well organized West African states, would combine with Ecuador’s Nigua people, who had spent generations fending off attempts by the expanding Inca empire to come subjugate them.

Military skills combined with an intimate knowledge of a challenging landscape offered an advantage. But the marriage of African and Nigua was not made in heaven. The Africans, as I envisioned them, came from a patriarchal culture; the Nigua, like many indigenous peoples of the Americas, I assumed to be matriarchal. Both groups had customs and ingrained habits that required rough edges to be rubbed smooth. And so they were, by mutual agreement.

The resulting mixed society outfought and out-thought the Spaniards, until finally the latter agreed to leave them alone. The Zambos endured for generations, and today their descendants are a distinct, thriving culture within the Ecuadorean social mix.

My own cultural background was originally working-class British, a typical Liverpool mongrel of English, Irish, Welsh strains, with a little Manx. I came to Canada as an immigrant child in 1954, and I was lucky we came then because Canadian immigration policies in those years discriminated strongly in favor of WASPs – even men like my father, a 40-year-old unskilled and uneducated laborer with a wife and five children.

Then, in the 1960s, those policies gave way to new thinking. Canada began to welcome newcomers from all over the world, including people who were formerly legally discriminated against, like Canadian-born Asians who had long been barred from becoming pharmacists or architects under provincial laws governing the professions.

The official Canadian term for such people, according to the census, was “visible minorities.” In 1961, when I was twelve, less than one percent of Canadians fit that bureaucratic category, some of them the descendants of American slaves who were brought to Nova Scotia after the Revolution, others the children of Chinese railroad builders who never went back to China (though they were harshly encouraged to do so).

By 1981, under the new immigration rules, the percentage had increased to 4.7, and by 1991 it had reached 9.4. By the time of the 2016 census, the number had risen to 22.3 per cent, and that did not include the more than four per cent of my fellow citizens who are aboriginal people and are not, for arcane bureaucratic reasons, classified as “visible minorities.”

By 2031, visible minorities, almost all of them first- or second-generation immigrants, will account for a third of Canadians.

But at the same time we have been taking in people of all colors and cultures, we have not imposed a “melting pot” ethos on the newcomers. We are a multicultural society. We follow Rodney King’s advice: we all just get along.

Well, not quite all. We have our racists and reactionaries, most of them in rural settings where visible minority immigrants don’t tend to settle. And our record regarding aboriginal peoples leaves a lot to be desired, though we’re now finally making real efforts toward reconciliation.

But here’s the thing: there is no established political party in Canada that opposes immigration and multiculturalism. Recently, a Conservative Member of Parliament left his party and tried to start one. His “People’s Party” ran candidates in October’s federal election – and was roundly rejected by the people, attracting a paltry 1.6 percent of the nation’s votes. Their defector/leader lost his seat.

So, in my lifetime, since washing up on Canada’s shores, I have seen my country evolve from whites-only to all-are-welcome. We have grown no ghettos; yes, first-generation immigrants tend to settle in neighborhoods where the neighbors look like them, but their children spread out and live among the rest of us. Intermarriage is too common to be remarked upon. There is no National Front in Canada, no Know-Nothing Party. No Stephen Miller would ever rise to a position of power here.

That is the one of the big lessons of my life, and it’s the idea I have sought to express in What the Wind Brings. Without beating a drum or ladling in infodumps, I wanted the reader to come away with an understanding that diversity is strength, that we succeed by finding ways to all get along and by looking out for each other.

These days, it’s a timely lesson.

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“There is nothing new under the sun,” as some playwright once said — but is it possible to put a new and intriguing spin on a old concept and in doing so make a really cracking tale out of it? This is of interest to Charles Soule in his new novel, Anyone. And here, with his Big Idea piece, it might be of interest to you as well.

CHARLES SOULE:

Anyone is a book about body-swapping. It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last. There’s the amazing Takeshi Kovacs series by Richard Morgan, starting with Altered Carbon, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, and of course, Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday – among many others. The idea of experiencing life in someone else’s body is one of those concepts that comes around a lot, because it’s a pretty fascinating and alluring idea. It’s something we, as yet, just can’t do. We’re trapped in the meat in which we’re born, we see through the eyes we have, and that’s that until the day we die. Who wouldn’t want to experience life as someone else, even for just a little while? I know I would. Whether it’s terrifying or invigorating or some weird version of the uncanny valley I couldn’t even begin to anticipate, I know I’d learn something profound.

(A quick digression – we can’t get into another body (yet), but a process does exist by which we can get into other minds, and you’re doing it right now: reading. If a book is good, if it hits that transportive state that takes us out of ourselves and into the story, then, yeah – we’re living as Harry Potter or Lisbeth Salander or Jack Reacher or Mina Harker for a while. Writing is a bit like that too, but it’s harder to get there; you’re both creating and experiencing the character at the same time, so it’s twice the work.)

Digression complete. My point is that body-swap stories aren’t uncommon, and that alone wasn’t the Big Idea grand enough to build my second novel around. It wasn’t body switching I was interested in. I wanted to see what would happen in a world not too different from ours where it became commonplace to just inhabit other people’s bodies for a while, like renting an AirBnb. I wanted to find out how society would change if you didn’t know just from looking at someone the sort of body they’d been born into. When I started, I didn’t know the answer. Seriously. That’s the fun of writing a high-concept speculative fiction story, by the way – or really any story. You start with a question or a puzzle, and then you solve it by telling the tale. I didn’t know all the ways the body-switch technology in Anyone, called “the flash,” would affect the world when I started writing the book, and I was surprised by some of the places the story went. True, no-joke surprise. It’s one of the best things about writing a novel. You never know what’s going to happen until you really dig in.

I began by thinking about how we, as a species, approach other human beings. We make so many instant categorizations upon a first encounter with someone new. There are the basic, surface groupings: age, likely gender, physical characteristics like height and weight. Of course, those can all be misread, but it’s part of the information set we gather about a person at a glance. And then there’s the less conscious set of assumptions we might make whether we want to or not: things like socio-economic status. Those things come to us because of whatever biases we’ve grown up with; the cues we’ve come to recognize as having certain meanings, even if unfair or unwarranted.

So, the Big Idea in Anyone was to create a world where that did not exist. If you don’t know who the person you’re interacting with “is,” in the way we define that now, then you have to categorize them more by “what they do” – in other words, their actions. I like that idea very much. We should all be judged by what we do. What we put into the world, good or bad.

Now, look. I know body-swapping wouldn’t immediately create a utopia free of preconceptions or assumptions about other people, and the book acknowledges that. Human nature is human nature. We like to other-ise people. We like our tribes. I think it’s hardwired in from the earliest days out on the savannah trying to figure out what we can eat, what might eat us, and who might help us find more things to eat. But in the grand tradition of science fiction since its very beginning, Anyone lets me take a Big Idea (what if anyone could be anyone), apply it to society, and see what comes out the other side.

There’s obviously much more to the story – intrigue, spills, thrills and chills, page-turning action, twists and turns and a heck of an ending – but that’s the Big Idea I started with.

When anyone can become anyone… what defines who we are? Again – we are what we do. To quote the big theme statement of the novel: you are you.

Anyone is out now. I hope you’ll check it out, if you get a chance.

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There are few words more laden with negative association than “traitor” — it’s an apparent repudiation of country and of honor. Is there ever a time when there could be more to the word than that? Author Colin MacIver muses on this subject in his Big Idea post for his novel Turncoat.

COLIN MacIVER:

Throughout history and legend, there have been traitors and turncoats. Roland had his Ganelon; Arthur his Mordred. As we move forward, motivation appears more complex, or we simply know more about the actors. Was Benedict Arnold simply a disgruntled subordinate or was he unfairly passed over and therefore returned to his primary allegiance? Approaching the present, we have the English public school graduates who gave UK national information to the Soviets for ideological reasons from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Perhaps most difficult to explain is the case of Robert Hanssen, a senior CIA officer, who for twenty years sold US classified data to the Russians. He was caught in 2002 and placed in solitary confinement. Chris Cooper played him in the 2007 movie “Breach.” It was while watching this movie that I recurred to the eighteenth century agent, code name Pickle, a man deep in the counsels of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, who failed a second attempt at rebellion in Scotland after the ’45. Those few authors who have deigned to mention Pickle have concluded that he acted from hope of gain.

My belief, my big idea, is that, while not discounting a mercenary motive, I have discovered a more honorable intent for Pickle turning his coat. He believed that a second rebellion could fail and that the subsequent punishment of clans in arms would bring a retribution so great it would amount to genocide. So he shopped his Prince and his cause.

I cannot conclusively prove this so I wrote my account of PIckle’s actions not as history but as fiction. To bring out the story of Pickle, I have an historical figure, a grandson of the great Daniel Defoe, Daniel Baker, travel to the Highlands to interview one of the last living survivors of the ’45. This format allows for a steady unwinding of the history of the second aborted rising while also allowing for comic and romantic interludes.

Pickle eventually died in an alleged “hunting accident.” For what did he sacrifice his honor and his life? Like him, I do not believe the Highlands could have withstood a second purging. On the other hand, if an invasion by Charles had succeeded in reinstating the Stuart dynasty, the slow progress of the United Kingdoms toward constitutional democracy would have been interrupted, with results we can only speculate upon.

A turncoat Pickle was. A man without honor, I don’t think so. But I leave the reader to decide. And, oh, yes, I have not given you the name of the man both Baker and I think was Pickle. If I did, you probably wouldn’t buy the book.

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In this Big Idea for her new novel The How & The Why, author Cynthia Hand looks into what makes us “family” — whether it’s genetics, blood, love, care or… more than that.

CYNTHIA HAND:

I’ve always had a hard time with the way adoption is portrayed in television and film. My central complaint, speaking as an adopted person, is that the portrayal is so often wildly unrealistic. These stories tend to focus on the search for the adoptee’s “real” parents and give little-to-no energy to understanding the adoptive parents. For example, look up, “Who is Superman’s father?” and you’ll find page after page on Jor-El, not Jonathan Kent. Or think about how in Once Upon A Time, the biological mother, Emma, does battle with the adopted mother, the literal evil queen. Or how the creators of The Umbrella Academy responded to questions about the incestuous relationship between Luther and Allison by saying “They’re not even related,” and “They are not biological.” The message comes through clearly: what makes a relationship “real” is blood.

For most adoptees, that is simply not the truth. Our “real” relationships are with our parents, and by parents, we mean the people who loved us and took care of us every day.

Therefore my goal as I set out to write The How & The Why was to give a realistic portrayal of adoption–one that thoroughly examines the different sides. The big idea was to show the point of views of both a teen birth mother and a teen adoptee and to examine the way each of them experiences “family.”

What ended up happening as I wrote the book, of course, was far more complex. Yes, my characters have a variety of family in their lives—biological and adopted, friendships, connections, and support systems that defy the conventional definition of what it means to be “related” to someone. What I didn’t expect was how much of the novel ended up being about how people shape their identities out of the stories they are told about themselves.

This made me think about how I had shaped my own identity, as an adopted person. I followed my character, Cass, as she tried to understand herself through her adoption, asking who am I over and over again. Then I followed S, the birth mother, who was basically asking the same question. I could see the invisible connections S had with Cass: the shape of their feet, their hatred of anything cherry-flavored, how they both felt gazing up at the moon—things they shared without even realizing it but that still inevitably connected them.

This made me wildly uncomfortable when I applied it to myself. Through the writing of these fictional people’s stories, I came to realize that who I am has been shaped by my relationship with my parents, of course, but it had also been forged from what I got from my birth parents, both in DNA and something even less tangible–those invisible connections I still had with them. Which are real, too.

Writing is funny that way. You start off having something definitive to say — adoptive families are real families — and then the narrative veers away toward something deeper. You come to figure out what you know through writing it. You discover things about yourself you never dreamed were there, lurking in the unexplored shadows. It’s what makes writing worth it, in the end.

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