Barry Kirwan Blog

How to shift a thousand ebooks

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago one of my ebooks (Eden’s Trial) was made free for 3 days. During that time it went from selling one copy every two days to 1400 downloads in just three days. It is science fiction, and it went from being #350,000 on Amazon, to being around #800, and from being nowhere to being #3 in SF on Amazon in the UK and #10 in SF in US.

In this blog I’ll cover what we (myself and the publisher) did, why we think it worked, and what happened afterwards.

First, it is important to note that this is the second book in a trilogy, the first (The Eden Paradox) was published in February 2011 as an ebook (and in October 2011 as a paperback), and the sequel was published in December 2011 as an ebook.

Prior to the three-day ‘sale’ of book 2 (April 30-May2) as a free download on Amazon worldwide, the first book had sold several hundred copies in ebook/paperback, and book 2 less than a hundred. Despite the low sales, there were very good reviews mainly on the UK site (14 for book 1, 7 for book 2), with less on the US site (7 and 6 respectively). There is an author page on the Amazon site, as well as a blog and website, and infrequent tweets. I blog about once a week and tweet a few times a week. I don’t use Facebook to sell my books, I use it to keep up with friends. It’s not that I’m lazy about social media as a form of selling, it’s just that I have a full-on day job, and spend most free time writing (book 3, for example, and short stories). I’m not doing this for the money...

So, my publisher (Summertime) decided to do the 3-day sale and it was a very last minute thing, so I simply tweeted about it several times a day, using various hash-tags like #SciFi, #Science Fiction, #ebooks, #kindle, #SpaceOpera, #Writing, etc.

The spike was incredible to watch. It suddenly broke the #10,000 Amazon ranking for the first time, hitting #8,000, then #6,000, and broke into the hundreds by day 2. I don’t know what the actual peak was, but I saw it less than #500. Meanwhile, in the Amazon genre rankings, it got to number 3 in UK in Scifi, number 1 in Germany in Space Opera, and number 10 in the US SciFi category. I suddenly found my book rubbing shoulders with some impressive titles. Even if it was brief, it was nice to say “hello”.

By Day 2, something interesting happened. Book 1 began to spike, and sold close to 70 books in two days (these were actual sales, since this one wasn’t free). In hindsight it is obvious what happened: people downloaded book 2 for free and realised it was a sequel, then saw that for a few dollars they had book one in a kind of ‘2 for 1’ deal, and they snapped it up. This continued for about a week.

When book 2 became ‘un-free’, it slowly trickled back into the #6,000 mark in the UK, then hovered there for a while before heading back to the >10,000 region. Having shifted 1400 free copies, after the ‘rush’, 35 copies were sold in the following week, similar for book one. At the moment both books are settling back down.

The reasons for any spike at all can’t be taken for granted. There are many free ebooks that don’t ‘sell’, so why did Eden’s Trial do relatively well, given that it is genre fiction, and there has been no media hype, and I’m an unknown author?

First, I think the cover has something to do with it, and some of the ‘headlines’ from Amazon reviews (e.g. ‘Galaxy-bending SciFi’), the brief description on Amazon, and the suggestion that it is a bit different (called market differentiation) from other SciFi (aliens are smarter than humans) whilst still being easy to ‘nail’ in the market: Eden’s Trial is ‘Space Opera’; The Eden Paradox is a science fiction thriller, falling into Amazon’s Scifi/Mystery category. If you’re an author reading this, you really have to know where to ‘peg’ your book in the market, and ensure Amazon puts it there too.

A second point worthy of note, is that until the free 3 day sale, the book’s price was relatively high ($9.30) for a Science Fiction ebook by an unknown author. I have a hunch that a number of people who had perhaps read blogs relating to this book before, might have balked at the price, and so snapped it up when it went ‘free’.

Was it all worth it? After all, how many people who download free ebooks actually read them? When something is free, people can get greedy…

Good questions. From an author perspective, even if only a quarter of the people who downloaded read it, it has been a great way to get it out there to a completely new readership, who I hope may like it, and either review it on Amazon or tell others about it. I also hope a few more will buy Book 1 (and Book 3 when it comes out at the end of the year).

From a commercial perspective, it’s too soon to say. It’s not quite like giving away free paperbacks, where you lose money hoping sales will compensate later. Obviously we’d hoped for a more lasting sale following May 2nd, but perhaps it will come later when more people have read it. As an author, you have to have a little faith in your work…

So, what did we learn? First, if you’re selling thousands of books, you probably don’t need to consider such a course of action. Just keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing (right). Second, maybe a one-day ‘free’ sale is a good strategy – 3 days may allow too much market saturation. Third, if we do it again (e.g. with Book 3), we’ll probably build it up a bit first. Fourth, this thing does pay off if you have multiple books, especially trilogies, series, etc. John Locke in his ebook ‘How to sell a million ebooks’ [give it that title, LOL] he does point out that he pretty much got nowhere until he had five books out there. That was when things took off maybe because of synergistic buying where people saw one book and realized there were more (people like to know there is more of a good thing). This seems to be going on right now with the runaway success ‘Shades of Grey’ and its sequels, three of which were in the top 10 the other day when I looked.

If nothing else, it gave me fresh motivation to work on the finale of my particular trilogy, Eden’s Revenge. It can be tough as an author spending years on a book to see meagre sales, and when a boost like this happens, for whatever the reason, it’s a good thing, for while authors need money like anyone else, what they most want is to be read.

The Eden Paradox is available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones (UK).

Eden’s Trial is available in ebook from Amazon and is coming out in paperback later this year.

Eden’s Revenge will be out as an ebook for Xmas 2012.

Introducing Characters

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 12 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000

One of the trickiest aspects of writing fiction is introducing new characters. It gets more difficult when the novel is about a group of people. The reader needs to get a ‘handle’ on each one, and an idea of how they differ. This doesn’t just mean physical looks, which are only skin deep, but of who they are, what they care about, and how they would react in a situation. Here’s a set of character descriptions (‘handles’), all describing the same character:

Kat was small in stature, had very short black hair and was introverted.
Kat was shorter than the rest of the crew, but it didn’t bother her; she rarely looked any of them in the eye.
Pierre had to duck his head to enter the cockpit whereas Kat walked straight through, hands clasped behind her back, avoiding eye contact with any of the crew, as usual looking as if she’d just stolen something.

The first is dull, and is ‘tell-not-show’. The second is more interesting, because we wonder why she won’t look them in the eye. The third is more ‘show’, and more suggestive of her character, as if she doesn’t trust the crew or herself, though at this stage we don’t know why. Notice that 'show' is longer than 'tell', so we reserve it for key characters. There is no point (for the reader) in investing florid descriptive effort in a 'walk-on' (and walk-off) character.

A time-honoured (aka cliché’d) way to describe someone’s face is to have them catch their reflection in a mirror, say, just after having taken a shower. Again, here’s three versions of the same character description:

Micah stared into the mirror noting the matt of black fuzz on his head, and muddy brown eyes.
Micah caught his own reflection, wondered why he ever bothered to comb his hair, and as for his eyes, they reminded him too much of his father.
Micah gave up on the irrepressible fuzz on top of his head, and stared into his muddy brown eyes, like his father’s. They made him want to punch the mirror.

The point about the third one is that it is less narcissistic, relating Micah to a strong (and evidently negative) relationship, which at the same time tells us a lot about him, and makes the reader (perhaps cautiously) sympathetic to him. The reader wants to find out why Micah feels the way he does.

If a novel is single protagonist or point of view, then each character might be viewed from either an ‘omnipotent’ (narrator or ‘helicopter’) viewpoint, or from the protagonist’s perspective. The advantage of the latter approach is that we get the protagonist’s viewpoint, which can work well combining a physical and motivational ‘handle’, particularly when there is contrast between outward appearance and inner character:

Vince watched Louise’s lithe body saunter around the room, her blonde pony tail swinging from side to side. She glanced back at him with a smile, her bright blue eyes sparkling just for a moment. He smiled back, but only on the surface; he’d watched those same eyes when she killed, when they sparkled just the same, maybe more.

[Incidentally, most male readers are attracted to the Louise character, most female readers want to kill her. She is probably the most commented-on character in The Eden Paradox.]

If there are more character points of view, then this has a particular advantage for describing the ‘hero’ of the piece. Having heroes describe themselves seems self-indulgent, and will make the reader less ‘sympathetic’ to the character. Even if the hero does it in a self-deprecating way, this is also risky, because then the hero becomes less heroic. Far easier to let a secondary character describe the hero. In the following extract from The Eden Paradox, Zack, the pilot of a four-person space craft, enters the cockpit and muses about the crew and their plight. One of the crew, Kat, has had another nightmare, always the same one, about what they will find when they reach the planet Eden. The point of the piece is partly backfill for the reader (this is from chapter 2) and introducing the characters, but it is also preparation for a rather harrowing scene where they will all have to depend on each other. The seeds of how they will react later are all sewn here.

Zack ducked his head as he entered the cockpit the Ulysses’ chief designer had once explained to him was "compact". He squeezed past his Captain and their Science Officer – Blake and Pierre as they’d become after three months of sardine-can intimacy. Busy, as usual. Both working separately – ditto. Pierre was in virtual again, immersed by his visor in data slipstream analysis, oblivious to his surroundings.

From the back of his pilot’s chair Zack caught his reflection and sighed. He’d have traded his cobalt one-piece uniform for his old flying jacket any day of the week. The one consolation was the golden-winged image of Daedalus – the wiser father of Icarus, now employed as the Eden Mission logo adorning the crew’s chests. The crests glinted in the cockpit spots, especially Blake’s, since he polished his every morning.

Zack plumped himself into his servo-chair at the front of the cockpit, to the left of Blake and in front of Kat’s empty comms station. Three men and a girl in a tin can. But then he’d seen the early Mercury and Apollo craft, the Endeavour, and even the Mars Intrepid – those guys would have wept over such luxurious real estate. He fingered the two multimode joysticks that made him one with the ship, and felt his mood lighten. He couldn’t manoeuvre with the warp online, but once they decelerated… He could barely wait.

He stared out at the black velvet of deep space, punctuated by random pinpricks of ice-cold light sliding towards him with a glacial grace. Constellations that’d been his friends since childhood were gone. A girlfriend had said one night, a lifetime ago, that as long as you can see the stars and their patterns, the Big Dipper and Orion, you’re never lost, you’ll always find your way home. Zack’s substantial bulk, maintained despite space rations, shuddered.

He glanced across to Blake, his Captain and vet War buddy for fifteen years, studying a small-scale hologram of ship integrity. It showed the cockpit near the front end of the fifty metre long Ulysses, resembling a hornet’s body, its four sections and two back-up conical ion engines and dark waste exhausts at the rear. Zack frowned. The energy exchanges going on in the back of the fourth compartment were measured in yottawatts, off the imaginable scale. Only Pierre really understood it, but even he’d admitted that if the engineers had got it wrong, they’d be dead in a picosecond. Zack thought of the crew of the Heracles, lost with all hands. He’d known each of them personally.

The harsh red flicker from the Ulysses holo reflected off Blake’s rusty hair and chiselled features, lighting up the bow-shaped scar above his right eye from hand-to-hand combat in Thailand, and the pockmarks on his left cheek from the gassing at Geronimo Station. Blake had lost a lot of men in the War, but always got the job done.

"Seventh nightmare in the past week," Blake said, in his Texan drawl. He didn’t look up from his display.

"Yep," Zack replied. It was starting to affect morale, his own, at any rate; superstition and ill omens made lousy companions on long, confined trips. Seafarers had known it for millennia. Space was like the sea, just infinitely less forgiving.

Blake swivelled his chair to face him. "Anything new?"

Zack understood the implied question: was it like that screwed-up mission ten years ago, where one of their marines kept having nightmares for two full weeks beforehand? He shook his head. Blake resumed his work.

Zack toggled the forward screen control and with a flick of a finger, a single star changed to red – Kantoka Minor, Eden’s star, dead ahead. One more week, he mused; one more week before setting foot on another planet.

Before seeing if Kat’s nightmares have any substance.

He kicked back in his pilot’s chair and pondered: neither the robot-based Prometheus nor manned Heracles missions had returned. Prometheus had arrived three years ago on Eden, but stopped transmitting after an hour. A year later, the manned Heracles had exploded, just five days before arrival, the list of possible explanations long and wild. Still, as they approached the nebula where Heracles disappeared, he was getting edgy, spending more time in the cockpit than was good for his spine; they all were. He glanced at his holopic of Sonja and the kids, smiling and waving, tucked into his console. He tried to smile back.

Kat slipped into the cockpit, furtive as usual, as if she’d just stolen something.

"Anything exciting happening?" she ventured.

Pierre stowed his visor and responded. "I’m afraid so. I’ve been checking and re-checking for the past hour. There’s no mistake. We’re losing oxygen."

Blake collapsed the holo. Kat halted mid-step.

Zack reached base first. "You’re kidding, right? I mean, you have no sense of humour, Pierre, but this time?"

Blake interrupted. "Data."

The reader gets a good idea of who Zack is in terms of what he cares about and fears, and the way he thinks about the other crew members tells us not only about them, but about him, because he thinks about them in a kind way. When he catches his reflection we don’t see his face, because he concentrates on his uniform, and what it means to him (which also makes him a sympathetic character, because, let's be honest, many of us would be studying our own faces :-). There is a hint that Zack is a big guy, but otherwise there is no physical description of him. He is black by the way, mentioned in a previous section in the chapter.

Blake’s is the only face described, mainly by the scars of war, which become relevant as the scene develops. Because the last sentence above is Blake’s, and because he in true cool, taciturn form utters only a single word in a clear moment of crisis, the reader has no doubt who is the leader here, the one who is going to get them out of whatever mess they’re about to encounter (Blake is the proverbial ‘good man in a storm’). The reader already intuits that Blake is the ‘one to watch’, and is drawn to him because he has been described by someone else. It is as if Blake is playing 'hard to get', but he isn't, in fact the reader already get's the sense that this man plays no games at all. The reader wants to get inside Blake’s head, though that won’t happen for another couple of chapters…

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones.

The sequel, Eden’s Trial, is available in ebook format on Amazon, paperback expected Fall 2012.

The finale, Eden’s Revenge, is due out Xmas 2012.

When to slow down the action

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 06 May 2012 08:02:00 +0000

A lot of science fiction and fantasy movies these days, e.g. The Avengers, Locked Down, Thor, etc. are pure ‘action movies’. They survive on fantastic special effects, and comic-strip-speed events – the audience races along from one action scene to the next. They are low on ‘plot’ – the usual stakes being world survival – and character development is kept to a minimum, the favourite character being the one with the wittiest lines (usually Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man).

Books cannot be like this (though comic strips can), because we read books over a longer period, and our interest has to be sustained by what the characters feel, and the special effects are limited by those we can imagine and how vividly the author can write.

But a lot of science fiction readers (myself included) do like to read action-based or thriller scifi. So, how to increase the intensity of the reading experience when the author does not have computer graphic imagery (CGI) at his or her disposal?

The Lost Fleet series (e.g. Dauntless) by Jack Campbell is a good example of action-based Scifi. It is a series of space battles to save the human race. But the main character Black Jack Geary has a lot of internal conflict going on. Campbell uses the gaps in between the battle scenes, explained by the amount of time it takes for the enemy to find Geary’s (lost) fleet, to let these conflicted emotions emerge. It slows down the action, with character development occurring before battle, and his actions in the battle reflecting that character development, so it makes sense.

In my own first book, The Eden Paradox, probably the scene most readers comment on is the ‘ghoster’ section. A ghoster is a genetically modified weapon left on board a ship as a stowaway, to destroy the four-crew ship before it can reach Eden. I could have written this episode as a single section, but instead I split it into four parts:

Realising something is aboard

Encountering the ghoster

Battling the ghoster

The ‘acid on the cake’

Each of these is a chapter in itself (I write fairly short, bite-sized chapters), and is interspersed with a chapter based on Earth, away from the ship Ulysses – this in itself increases tension and suspense, since the reader has to wait to find out what happens.

It would have been easy (and boring) to have had the crew realise there was a ghoster aboard, and say, “Let’s go kill it,” have a battle scene where they nearly get killed, but then they kill it. That could work in a film because of the images that could be conjured up, and because it’s easier to ‘suspend disbelief’ for a couple of hours than several weeks, but like I said, in a book it would read a bit flat. So instead, when they first realize it might be a ghoster, I have the crew in denial. The commander (Blake) actually verbally attacks the science officer (Pierre), practically accusing him of sabotage. This delays the action, increases the character depth (and has the reader wondering if there is some deeper issue between Blake and Pierre – there is), and makes the action more interesting during the battle scene when Blake’s life will depend on Pierre.

Here is an excerpt from when Zack and Pierre first encounter the ghoster inside a compartment at the rear of the Ulysses.

Shoulder-to-shoulder inside the airlock chamber, Zack heard Pierre’s ragged breathing across the intercom.

Pierre checked the dials. "Fully pressurised inside the compartment."

Zack chewed his lip, peering through the small porthole into the darkness beyond. "Time to check on our guest." He opened the inner door to the fourth compartment. As it swung open, the light spilled in from behind them, revealing the outlines of a room ten meters deep crammed with cylinders, boxes, and crates, all strapped down. It looked just like it had done twelve hours ago when he’d checked it over. The lattice of harnesses resembled a giant spider web laid over the contents of the compartment. He stared towards the far wall, behind which the dark matter engines lay, adding to his unease.

They each took one pace into the compartment and clipped their lanyard karabiners onto hull eyeholes. Zack’s gaze swept the room, but he didn’t use the flashlight attached to his left wrist. If there was anything in here, he didn’t feel like lighting himself up. Pierre’s rifle sighting beam flashed upward to the escape hatch which was their Plan B – the ghoster-overboard plan, as Kat had christened it.

"Zack, I don’t see anything." Pierre took a step forward.

"Wait." Zack squinted through the semi-darkness towards the crate at the far end of the chamber housing the neutralino detonator. It was one of two, the other used to start the dark matter ignition after Saturn, enabling them to get up enough speed to engage the warp shell. This one was for the return journey. Something was behind the crate. His eyes tracked to the left, knowing from theory and experience that unaided night vision worked best if you looked slightly off target. He saw it. His head recoiled inside his helmet.

"Kat," he said, voice taut. "Tell me what you see through the internal cameras" He still hadn’t aimed his flashlight, instead straining his eyes towards the location of the detonator. Her reply came through, rendered grainier than usual by the voice-com transmitter.

"Not much. I need more light."

When Pierre went to shine his flashlight on the crate, Zack gripped his forearm.

"Don’t." He was sure now, though he had a hard time accepting it.

Blake’s voice cut in from outside. "Report."

Zack let Pierre reply, while he began to think of tactics to outmanoeuvre what he believed was crouching just behind the detonator. He still had his hand on Pierre’s arm, and felt Pierre’s body jerk.

"Sir, it… my God!" Pierre’s breathing accelerated, bordering on hyper-ventilation. Then he exhaled deeply.

Zack removed his arm. Good – remember your training, because if you don’t we’ll be dead a lot faster.

Pierre’s voice was edgy. "I can see a human head, but… it has no eyes."

Blake didn’t respond. Zack could only imagine how he was reacting; it was Kurana Bay all over again. He couldn’t remember unholstering his pulse pistol, but it was in his hand. He ramped it up to maximum. He spoke in a steady tone. "Don’t move, Pierre. Get ready to fire." He took a deep breath, as he did before any close-quarter battle. His palms sweated inside his gloves. He gripped the pistol harder.

"Skipper," he said, "it’s a ghoster alright, fully awake. Lock us down, seal us in. We’re going to Plan B."

Movies often use flashbacks in order to deepen character or our sympathy for characters, e.g. during a battle when they are giving up, they recall their survival in a concentration camp, and then renew their efforts. In The Eden Paradox I used a ‘retroactive flashback’ which I call the ‘acid on the cake’ (as opposed to the icing on the cake). After the ghoster battle, there is a short flashback to when two of the characters encountered a ghoster once before, in the battle of Kurana Bay during WWIII, and what happened there. Anyone who has read the book will know this chapter, because it deepens Blake’s character, and puts the three foregoing section in a new light (a few readers have told me they wanted to read the book twice, and this plot device is one of the reasons why).

So, the rule for action-based books or thrillers as opposed to action movies is that there has to be strong inner conflict as well as external conflict. However, if you do get a chance to look at The Lost Fleet or my books, or many other Scifi thrillers or technothrillers (like those by Michael Crichton), you’ll realise there’s another rule – don’t dwell too much on inner conflict, and preferably have something interrupt the character’s ruminations. Otherwise it can get too self-indulgent.

Here’s an example. In my second book, Eden’s Trial, Pierre and Kat are marooned on a small ship, running out of air, after their mother-ship has been destroyed. They have sent a distress message via the Hohash, a mirror-like communication device, but don’t have much hope. To slow down the action, Pierre has been reflecting on his life and the lack of love within it so far, although Kat has just given him some hope. They are about to be discovered by a new race, but ‘First Contact’ doesn’t go that well:

Pierre thought about his parents. His father had sacrificed him to research, and his mother had consented, though she’d been upset about it. For one thing, the genetic tampering had made him sterile, so his line would end with him. He wondered if his father, when he’d been bleeding to death on that conference podium shot by an Alician assassin, had maybe, just for a moment, had an inkling of regret about what he had done to his own son. For the first time in his adult life, Pierre didn’t completely reject the hypothesis.

The Hohash began pulsing increasingly frequent random shades of colour. He and Kat shielded their eyes from the rainbow light’s intensity.

“What now?” Kat said.

Pierre guessed what it was – a response. The flashing stopped, and the Hohash mirror surface turned to a swirling cloud of grey. An indistinct figure appeared in the middle, as if walking towards them. He watched in fascination as it clarified – it reminded him of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a dog-like creature in a ceremonial head-dress of golds, blues and blacks. As the picture crystallised into vid-screen clarity, they gaped at the figure, who gave the definite impression of staring back at them.

“Hello?” he tried.

“No sound, remember?” Kat said.

He wondered what to do. The creature stared at them, waiting, and Pierre didn’t know how long it would wait. He gestured to the creature, first with his hands, to come towards them, then, seeing no reaction, closed his hands around his throat, as if choking, trying to communicate they were running out of air. The figure disappeared, and the Hohash face re-adjusted to its habitual mirror surface.

“Well,” Kat said, “not too bad given our extensive experience with first contact situations.”

Pierre slumped. “Shit! This is hopeless. I’ve always wondered why in all the sci-fi vids the whole universe speaks English, or else there’s a handy universal translator somewhere.”

“Lazy scriptwriters. Anyway, maybe it understood. Hey, we just found another race. You’re a scientist, you should be ecstatic.”

He tried to smile. “We could try the sulphur planet again, at least gather some more oxygen.”

“Maybe we could use the bathroom there. I’ve heard sulphur exfoliates pretty well.”

He took her hand. “Kat, I’m really glad –”

The ship jolted hard to one side, and they both sprawled to the far wall. Pierre had the wind knocked out of him, and struggled into a crouching position. Kat had already sprung to her feet when they both heard a loud thunk from above. He looked out through the normally black portal and glimpsed the silver underbelly of a vessel attached to them.

“Oh fuck!” Kat shouted.

At first he didn’t realise why she’d said it, until he noticed his feet and ankles were wet. A warm, transparent liquid trickled, then gushed into their craft, jetting through the air vents. Scrambling to his feet, he sloshed his way over to the environmental controls. Kat beat him to it, and slammed her fist down on it, but the console was dead. He stared in disbelief towards the four upper vents, out of arms’ reach, through which the pink water surged.

“It doesn’t make sense!” he said. The noise of their own personal waterfall made it hard to concentrate.

“They’re going to bloody drown us,” Kat shouted, as she waded over to the inert Hohash.

“But why?” Pierre was trying to think, but the fluid was already knee-deep. “Suits! We need to put the suits on!” she yelled, already tugging the two EVA suits from their holding rack. Pierre grabbed one and tried to don it. With only one leg in, he lost his footing and fell over, so that the liquid poured into his suit, dragging him down. Kat’s hand hauled him up by the collar, and he managed to regain his footing. She already had both legs in hers and zipped it up to her neck, then helped him into his. The fluid was already waist-level. His suit had half-filled with the stuff, which he knew would be a real hazard if he didn’t remain upright.

They both snapped on their helmets moments before the fluid reached their necks. They stared at each other, wide-eyed, as the whole ship flooded to the ceiling, leaving no trace of air. The gushing noise shut off. He heard only his laboured breathing, and the occasional creak from the ship’s hull. He switched on his intercom.

“You okay?”

Her breathing sounded scratchy, but he sensed she was more pissed off than scared. “Bastards! Just when you think it can’t get any worse.”

He nodded inside his helmet. Then he noticed the single red light flashing on the inside of his faceplate. He knew what it meant: his suit’s air cylinder was almost empty. He remembered he hadn’t had time to replenish his suit’s systems since his last sortie on the sulphur planet.

She caught sight of his warning light. “Is that what I think it is?”

He laid his hand on her shoulder. “How’s yours?”

“About twenty minutes. Look, isn’t there some way we can shunt air from my system to yours?”

He shook his head. He saw another red dot flash, meaning his air was almost gone. He had maybe twenty seconds.

“Listen, Kat –”

“Dammit, Pierre, I don’t want to lose you, and I don’t want to watch you asphyxiate in front of me, you got that?”

Pierre stared at her. He thought of the last hour. Any last requests, she’d said. He couldn’t have wished for more. His eyes etched every contour of her face. He sucked in one last breath, feeling the canister’s resistance telling him he was out of time. “You won’t have to, Katrina. This’ll be quicker.”

Pierre raised his hands to his helmet, and flicked open the seals.

In the third book I’m writing now, Eden’s Revenge, I’m working on a chapter where a new character, Petra, is listening to an argument which is central to the plot, but ‘tunes out’ to her own inner thoughts. This is an unusual plot device, because the reader will not ‘hear’ what the other two are saying, but instead will be drawn into Petra’s own state of mind. This creates its own tension, but the reader will (I hope) end up satisfied because in the coming battle, Petra and her actions are the key to winning, rather than what the two men are arguing over (“isn’t that always the case?” I can hear some of my female friends saying).

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones UK.

Eden’s Trial is available on ebook from Amazon, paperback in the Autumn.

The finale of the Eden Trilogy, Eden’s Revenge, will be available in ebook Xmas 2012.

Key ingredients for a space opera

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Tue, 01 May 2012 10:22:00 +0000

Currently I'm experiencing a spike in sales in both my books, so something must be going right. Here's what I think is working, based on what readers and reviewers tell me, and what I'm trying to maintain (and improve) in the finale of the trilogy.

1, Distinctive style
2. 3D characters
3. Female bad-asses
4. Cool ships
5. High stakes
6. Relentless tension
7. Cool alien artefacts
8. A leavening of humour
9. Sacrifice of angels
10. Aliens so advanced they couldn't care less about humanity

1. Distinctive style. First off, I'm not pretending to be a great writer. I love Iain Banks' ingenuity and black humour, and wish I had Hamilton's or Bear's or Baxter's grip on the science behind SciFi, and Orson Scott Card's story-telling ability, Clarke's ability to create wonder, Brin's mastery of aliens, Herbert's capacity to create an entire universe, McDevitt's pace, Morgan and Asher's tension, and Mieville's grip on the English language. I don't. But I can do (so I've been told) page-turning, vivid Scifi that is character-based (I'm a psychologist by training, which I hope helps) and makes readers think about ourselves and where we're headed, and takes an honest look at how incomprehensible and probably awful First Contact is going to be when it happens.

2. 3D characters. Every character is flawed, each one has a weak spot. Micah over-analyses everything; Blake is haunted by a dark past; Gabriel is a deadly assassin except when it comes to his sister, Pierre is a genius but emotionally challenged. The villains don't think of themselves as villains. Most male readers want to be Blake or Gabriel but probably fit Micah or Rudi or Zack or Rashid better. Few female readers want to be Louise, even though they know men might prefer them that way. They probably want to be Kat or Sandy, but in each case there's a price tag. These characters don't get made up overnight. They've been camped in my head for about eight years now.

3. Bad-ass female characters. Louise is like a black widow spider, initially deadly attractive, and then just plain deadly. Men get mesmerised by her. One of my female readers said she wanted to climb into the book and shoot this bitch herself. Kat starts off easy, but has a black streak, and is no pushover. Sandy is a secretary with a tongue like a whip, she'll always have the last word, and make you wish you'd not said anything in the first place.

4. Cool ships. Okay, these are mainly in the second book, Eden's Trial, and in the finale I'm writing right now, Eden's Revenge. The Kalarash have a ten kilometre long organic ship hiding underground, shaped like an elongated crossbow. The one who finds it is blind, and only does so because he can hear it breathing...

5. High stakes. Actually, the stakes start off high and get higher. And they have to remain personal, not abstract. They have to matter to a character we care about, who will end up having to risk everything, probably alone at the end, to avoid catastrophe. Since all my books are thrillers, I can't say what the stakes are, but, well, it's space opera so you can guess.

6. Relentless tension. Well, almost relentless, there are a few spots you can go make a cup of tea. I've done plenty of other blogs on this aspect (e.g 'arrive late, leave early'). When I'm writing, if I'm not gripped myself, I stop. This is why I'm not one of these '2000 words a day no matter what' writers. I often ponder a chapter for a while, refusing to type anything until it just has to come out. That way it's not mechanical, but palpable. I use a two-track construction in all three books, which can allow one chapter occasionaly to ease off (and introduce some foreshadowing or back-story, for example) while the next chapter tightens (see blog 'on tourniquet plotting' for more on this).

7. Cool alien artefacts. Okay, it has to be the Hohash mirror. Most readers who have commented have mentioned this, includiing SF writer Gary Gibson (who also liked the Kalarash ship). These mirror devices are not what they seem, and while more is revealed in book two, their full purpose is only learned at the end of book 3. The other cool artefacts are the 'node', 'Optron' and Sarth missiles in book 1, and the 'resident' (books 2 &; 3), which I'm sure Apple would love to market...

8. A leavening of humour. SF agent John Jarrold first told me he appreciated this in book 1, and he loves Iain Banks books as do I. There's not much humour, because there is so much conflict and so much at stake, but the odd quip - not like Iron Man in the recent film The Avengers, which I like but is not 'serious' - but the type of humour that is spoken in tense moments. That way, it shows the characters' humanity without losing the tension. Read Banks and see how the master does it :-)

9. Sacrifice of angels. (Star Trek Deep Space Nine - you've seen this episode, right?) If there are high stakes, someone has to die. Not just the baddies. A number of readers, especially female readers, have bemoaned the death of certain characters, even pleading for them to somehow return. While one or two do, some good characters get killed off for good. That's life. Otherwise high stakes don't mean anything. Have a look on my website at the Prologue for Eden's Trial, it wasn't easy to write!

10. Aliens who are so advanced they couldn't care less about humanity. The Q'Roth, the Tla Beth, etc. Sister Esma (arch villain with a penchant for Mozart) accuses humanity of being narcissistic, and I tend to agree with her. Aliens won't be humaniform, speaking English, and probably won't be empathic, let alone sympathetic, and are likely to be way ahead of us (various blogs on this - see 'what makes a good alien character?').

So, if there are any authors reading this, #1 is the most important rule. All us struggling new writers need to make a mark, by finding our strengths, and wall-papering over the weaknesses (I have many!), and being a little different from the rest. Not easy. My only other rule is to enjoy writing. It takes so long to do properly, you have to enjoy it, or find something else to do. See 'Writerholics Anonymous' on the Stories part of my website if you're not sure...

The Eden Paradox is available on Amazon in ebook and paperback, and from Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis, and Waterstones UK.

Eden's Trial is available on Amazon in ebook, paperback later this year.

The finale, Eden's Revenge will be available Xmas 2012.

Eden's Trial free for three day period

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:33:00 +0000

The second book in the Eden Trilogy, Eden's Trial, is now free for just three days from Amazon - today until close of business (US time-zone) Wednesday. My publisher and I are interested to see what this does in terms of uptake, so if you're reading this now, please take advantage of it.

We need to start looking for somewhere else to live...

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:31:00 +0000

A friend just sent me a link to a news item. It says we need to start looking for a new home (another habitable planet) now, and if we don't find one, we risk becoming extinct.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/27/3490608.htm [The nice picture to the left is theirs.]

Back in 1976 (I'm showing my age) I took part in a school debate, one open to parents. At the time there was a lot of fuss over space programs and people starving to death in Africa, and where to put the money. I led the 'space' camp, my buddy Mike leading the 'domestic' front.

The school was Catholic, run by priests, so you might say traditional conservative mores dominated the audience. But at the end of the debate, I made an impassioned plea for continued space exploration, arguing that one more nuclear war would finish us, and that we might trash the world even without one, so we needed to have a Plan B.

My side won by a small margin, and Mike and I remained friends.

Since then I've been dismayed by our slow descent into wrecking our environment, with no controls over capitalist expansion and general 'short term thinking'. So I wrote a book about what is likely to happen in the next fifty years, and called it The Eden Paradox, not only because it makes sense in the story, but also because I sometimes think we're kissing Eden goodbye when it's right under our feet.

You probably know the one about how to boil a frog, right? You raise the water slowly, and the frog doesn't leap out, and by the time it realizes it's in trouble, it's too exhausted to get out of the pot.

Well, in my day job I work in the risk area, and there's a new term, it's called 'riskscape'. It's like a landscape, but it is a risk contour, height determining your risk. Imagine a gentle slope downwards, that ends up in a funnel, with no escape. Same thing as the frog.

Right now nobody is going to win an election by promising more space travel, or better satellites to find a habitable planet in the 'Goldilocks zone' (i.e. a planet not too big or small, with oxygen and water, and not too hot or too cold). But maybe afterwards, someone somewhere should have the vision to set up a long term program to do just that.

Imagine if we found one. What impact would it have? It would be hope, right? It would make people look up from their desks and their smart phones (some of which could find the planet in the night sky, with the right 'app') and gaze up at the stars, and wonder. It might make some politicians more inclined to work together (though perhaps I'm being naive).

Hopefully we'll find one, and then work out a way to get there. Before our cooking pot gets too hot.

In my book I set the timer at fifty years. Trouble is, I'm an optimist...

The Eden Paradox is available in ebook and paperback on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones.

In Science Fiction, love is a dish best left to simmer...

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:46:00 +0000

There is a famous Klingon quote in Star Trek that “revenge is a dish best served cold.” Equally, I’d hold that love – in science fiction at any rate – is a dish best left to simmer, and is rarely savoured. Why? Here are seven reasons to chew on:

Love in Scifi is not what the reader is looking for
Fulfilled love kills tension
When the girl gets the guy it’s the end of the story, and Scifi writers love trilogies/series
Romanticism is a fairly recent phenomenon in literature; Scifi looks aeons into the future (or the past)
Scifi writers are poor at writing ‘love’ – maybe also why they often stay ‘poor’ as well (romantic fiction makes much more money)
Aliens and robotic forms may not be capable of love: As Spock would say, “That is illogical, Captain!”
Sadly, there’s no scientific basis for love…

It’s hard to think of a science fiction book or film where love is the central premise; it usually plays second fiddle at best. Readers of SciFi are looking for spaceships, aliens, new worlds, and cunning plots. Think of Star Wars, probably the best-known Scifi film – Luke initially is drawn to Princess Leia, but it doesn’t work out, and in fact she turns out to be his sister. In any case she is more interested (who wouldn’t be?) in Han Solo. But such threads are secondary to the vast sweep of The Empire, Darth Vader, the Force, Obi Wan Kenobe, light sabre fights and the Death Star.

Similarly, all of the Star Trek series played down love. Jim Kirk ‘got around’ quite a bit, but the girl would be gone by the next episode. In the Next Generation, Picard never had anyone steady (almost never had anyone, period!), whereas Riker and Troy had an on-off (mainly off) relationship that didn’t tie the knot until after the entire seven seasons were finished, and we were into one of the later films. In Star Trek Voyager, Janeway and Chakotay had a long term unrequited interest, Chakotay finally falling for Seven-of-Nine (again, who wouldn’t?) at the end. Star Trek Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko fell in love after several seasons, and overlooked his lover’s illegal trade, only to lose her at the end.

The long-drawn-out slow-cook love trope is also found in many other series, e.g. Stargate, between Jack O’Neill and Sam Carter. Whenever they get close to kissing, dastardly aliens interrupt, reminding us it’s science fiction and what we’re here to watch.

In books it’s similar. Scifi classics such as Asimov’s Foundation, Herbert’s Dune, or Clarke’s Rama series, don’t have love as a central premise – it’s not what we remember about these works, although Dan Simmons’ Hyperion has one of its pilgrims’ stories recounting a love story that is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. Alistair Reynolds’ Revelation Space is also a rare, exceptional mixture of galaxy-spanning space opera and ‘love at any cost’. But generally, from Larry Niven’s Ringworld to Iain Banks’ Culture novels, love is in the background. If readers want to read romance novels, these are available by the bucket-full in mainstream or romance fiction. Occasional cross-overs (the Time-Travellers’ Wife) may look like science fiction, but for most Scifi fans they belong more in the romance genre.

Requited love kills tension. It works best – if at all – at the end of a book or film. This is true in any fiction. Think of Gone with the Wind, possibly the greatest romance film of all time. When Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara finally get it together (just for one night), the film ends a few minutes later, which was a really good call, because if it hadn’t, we’d have got up to do something else. In fiction it is the chase that is interesting.

Maybe we’re trained as children, since most fairy tales end with the words “and they lived happily ever after.” As we grow up and watch our parents, we know that at the very least that statement is a gross simplification. But it is as if we’re trained to switch off at that point. Taking a very successful non-Scifi TV series as an example, House, the two central characters (Greg House and Lisa Cuddy) obviously love each other, and at several points in the later seasons they not only ‘do it’, but become an item. The series writers immediately realise their mistake, and at first it turns out to have been Greg’s drug-induced hallucination, and then it becomes ‘reality’ but ‘real life’ isn’t happily ever after and they break up, and then… well, to cut a long series short, each time Greg and Lisa get together the writers go to increasingly desperate measures to break them up in order to regain the tension which keeps viewers watching.

Back in science fiction land, the series Farscape had such strong love tension that the writers allowed the hero (John Crichton) to be cloned so that one of him could fall in love and be loved, only to have that version of him killed off, and for his lover Aeryn Sun to reject the surviving ‘copy’. This was a brilliant plot development, where there was some requited love which actually ended up increasing the tension.

If you study literature, the whole romanticism thing is relatively recent (nineteenth century onwards). I’m sure we loved before then, but, well, life expectancy was a lot lower, and there were wars, plagues, marriages of convenience and poverty-a-plenty, so it wasn’t top of most people’s agendas. Stephen Baxter’s novel Coalescence paints a bleak picture of life in the middle ages and its hardships, showing why the protagonist has ‘no time for love’. The point is, however, that this current fascination with love (pronounced ‘lurve’) may be a passing phase in humanity’s projected history, most brilliantly portrayed in the Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people are not allowed to love in our current understanding of the concept, and sleeping with the same person more than once is frowned upon.

Of course, Scifi writers might just be geeks who don’t get much ‘luvvin’, and well, as the saying goes, you ‘write what you know’, the implication being that the converse also holds. Well, I’d have to disagree (I would, right?), and there are some notable ‘proofs’, such as Orson Scott Card who writes great Scifi (Ender’s Game, etc.), and also writes romance [thanks Orson, for shielding our collective reputation!]. Iain Banks is another eminent Scifi author who writes in other genres. I also remember, when producing my fist Scifi book, having professional editors asking me to tone down the ‘love’ angle, as it didn’t fit the genre, and downright remove some of the more exotic sex scenes: simply not done, old chap!

Of course when it comes to aliens, they might not love at all. Geneticists would tell us that love is all about procreation, and in fact is a myth we’ve woven onto a biological need to further the species. This possible truth is easier seen when mapped onto fictional alien species, especially when the method of procreation can be rendered less human (e.g. insectoid species laying eggs). But good Scifi writers don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and for example I always found a strong part of the film Alien to be that the alien in question was fiercely protective of her offspring, which makes sense for any species, and we don’t have to call it ‘love’.

What does annoy me, however, is ‘love colonialism’ [Star Trek is guilty of this over and over] wherein humans convince non-loving aliens that they are really missing out, and that love is some universal truth. It might be, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves; bacteria do pretty well in terms of survival without it.

Aliens in my books don’t normally exhibit strong love tendencies, though they ‘care’ in particular for their own, although in my third book I do have a very advanced species (called the Kalarash) who seem to have some depressingly familiar love issues: e.g. a couple of them have not been talking to each other for half a million years after a tiff. Beneath this seemingly flippant situation is a deeper hypothesis – that love might be a product of civilisation. Very advanced cultures might eschew love and go beyond it (as in Stargate’s idea of ‘ascension’), or else it might be the ultimate goal.

I have to confess that in my second book (Eden’s Trial), I have a couple of drones (artificial intelligences) fall ‘in love’ (they experience ‘perfect electronic resonance’), though it is brief, and in keeping with Scifi tradition, it doesn’t end well… More seriously I’m exploring the effects of genetically-engineered advancement on the ability to love, in all three books of the Eden trilogy, most strongly portrayed in Eden’s Trial between the characters Kat and Pierre.

Which brings me to the seventh premise, that (regrettably?) there is no scientific basis for love. Love may simply be an inferred (learned) experience that we map onto natural hormonal responses: we feel something (endorphins), and we learn to call it love. Certainly as any of us who experienced teenage love and then fell out of it, it feels like drug withdrawal, doesn’t it? Endorphins are a natural drug we can secrete in our heads (when I was a kid I misheard this word, and thought we had dolphins in our heads, which is not such a bad image).

At a more basic level, a very young baby smiles, and we respond (this is an instinctive response) and learn to love the baby, though we know if we think about it logically that the baby in question has no concept at that age of who or even what we are, or of caring or loving, or pretty much anything beyond being hungry or comfortable or in pain or needing to do certain bodily functions. Is this analysis a bit brutal? Sorry. Follow this logic, though, and you end up with ‘love is just something we make up’; it’s not real. It’s the blue pill (I’m referring of course to the film Matrix, not Viagra).

Alternatively, science and science fiction have to accept the possibility that love is real (phenomenologically speaking, this is ‘true’), but science is too dumb (yet) to be able to measure it. I hinted at this, and the importance of love for an alien species, in my short story The Sylvian Gambit, which is essentially a Scifi love story (a little violent, I’m afraid), wherein the protagonist says near the end: “Love: wrap an equation around that.”

So, where does this all end up? Well, love may be second fiddle in science fiction, but since science fiction is essentially the exploration of human nature in possible futures (or pasts), to have no love interest whatsoever weakens it both as fiction and as an honest exploration of our nature and possible evolutionary pathways. Love can enable us to do terrible things, but also great things, including advancing ourselves individually and collectively. That's something worth writing about!

So, in both the fictional and science fiction sense, love creates possibilities.

Rock on, humanity!

The Eden Paradox available ebook& paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Amichellis, and Waterstones.

Eden's Trial available in ebook from Amazon, paperback Fall 2012

Eden's Revenge due out Xmas 2012

Free short stories (Scifi & Fiction) online here.

Science Fiction and Medicine

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 15:45:00 +0000

William stared at his hand, curled his fingers, watched supple skin stretch taut over fresh knuckles. It felt so fragile after Q’Roth armoured flesh. His arms, however, still had the appearance of corrugated iron, blue-grey from shoulder to wrist, petering out into tan hands. Good enough. He held his breath as he pulled the sheet off to reveal his new legs. A metallic blue sheen glistened over powerful, hairless musculature, tailing off in sturdy feet with five toes, all of them prehensile.

The above is an excerpt from Eden’s Revenge, by no means the first (or last) science fiction book or film to consider the possibilities with medical advances. While few science fiction books are uniquely focused on health, many have this as a background thread, including how it affects society. So, why the obsession with medicine?

Science fiction explores our hopes and fears, and the possibilities in between. All of us sooner or later experience sickness or injury, and many of us lose loved ones or friends along the way; mortality is part of being human. So the idea that a particular disease could be cured, a prosthetic limb re-grown, or our life expectancy (and youthfulness) extended, is attractive. But usually science fiction imposes a personal or societal cost on such boons – like the proverbial deal with the Devil: you know that somewhere down the line, there’s going to be a cost.

My favourite SciFi medicine-related aliens are the Vidians from Star Trek Voyager, a race with a horrendous disease, whose only means of survival is to steal organs from other races, including humans. I was fascinated by their plight, wonderfully brought out in successive episodes of Voyager, where at first they are depicted as despicable criminals, and only later are their other attributes (e.g. incredible medical prowess) discovered.

In the (brilliant, if violent) SF book Altered Carbon (Richard Morgan) people can cheat death – if they can afford it – by having back-up copies of themselves inserted into new bodies (called 'sleeves'). Morgan explored the downsides of effectively living forever, with what he termed the Methuselah complex, where incredibly old but young-bodied people basically get bored, ever seeking new and more perverse thrills.

In Peter F. Hamilton’s equally compelling (and violent) Mindstar Rising, the hero can ‘gland’ substances at will to affect his capabilities. I borrowed this for my short story ‘Executive Decision’, wherein the heroine secretes various synthetic hormones whilst trying to mitigate the fall-out from an alien weapon (the cost for her is very high in the story).

Most science fiction, however, doesn’t delve too deeply into the medical science itself, just what it can do. Thus, futuristic hospitals are usually displayed in film and TV as swanky affairs, bright white or pastel shades with superb beds and definitely no needles (hypo-sprays being the Star Trek surgical implement of choice). In the book I’m currently writing, I wanted to do something a bit different in terms of ‘hospitals’, and make them more alien. Let’s return to William’s bedside for a moment, after his operation to make him human again…

He lay back on the pillow, inspecting the stars through windows on the domed roof. The vast hangar containing him and other alien patients was so strange that at first he thought his eye surgery had gone awry. Swathes of colour – violet, red, teal, and apple, swirled in the air as far as he could see, never mixing. Each layer was grainy, with fine particles that moved like sand beneath a wave, shifting and flowing, occasionally surging from one spot to another. The ‘air’ around him was teal. It had no taste or texture, and he had no idea of its function. The surgeons – squid-shaped creatures, transparent so that he could see all their organs and watch their two hearts twitch – drifted and surfed in the currents. When they had worked on him it had felt like a feather-touch, even when they had peeled back his armoured ribcage as if it were made of paper. He’d expected terrible pain when the anaesthetic wore off, but there was none at all, not even an itch.

One of the squids had gurgled to him in Largyl 6. “Sure want this? Q’Roth physiology beautiful design – human arrangement flimsy.”

William told the squid it was necessary for political reasons. The surgeon made a strange gulping motion, then got back to work. Afterwards, the squid whispered that it understood, and had added some refinements to make life in a human body more bearable. William wondered what those might be, but no surgeons had approached him again since the operation, several hours ago.

He guessed the various coloured layers were for different patient species on the hospital ship, run by the Level Ten Ngankfshtra – he could no longer pronounce it properly with a human tongue – and that the swirling sediment had multiple purposes including bio-containment, regeneration, sterilisation, and monitoring of recovery progress and health parameters. Infinitely better than the last time he’d been in hospital, though he did miss having human nurses around.

Star Trek considered numerous medical angles and their attendant moral dilemmas, from episodes in the original series, which had, for example, a race without disease and a chronic over-population problem, so they used Captain Kirk to incubate a fatal disease. In Deep Space Nine the 'Dominion' inflicted an incurable and painful disease on a population as a control and punishment mechanism, and even the legendary Julian Bashir couldn’t cure it, the only solution being euthanasia in its final stages.

Another Scifi ‘trope’ is disease we might inflict on ourselves, due to accidental release of experimental medicinal substances that could kill tens of millions. This possibility is unfortunately closer to fact than science fiction, as some advanced medical labs do study highly virulent flu strains in order to try and create vaccines. This prospect has led to TV series such as BBC’s ‘Survivors’, where less than one per cent of the population survives such an outbreak. In my first book, The Eden Paradox, I assumed this will happen sometime in the next few decades, though I chose a nano-plague (via a release of invasive airborne nannites from a nanotech research lab) rather than a flu virus (and yes, nannites are currently being developed in certain labs around the world). Michael Crichton also explored this possibility in his book Prey, and of course his original smash hit book and film, The Andromeda Strain.

In my second book, Eden’s Trial, I had an alien race entirely bred to serve as the galaxy’s doctors. The Ossyrians have a Hippocratic oath but, given that the galaxy is also something of a jungle with predators wishing to use medicine as bio-weapons, they have to be capable of defending themselves and their technology. The following excerpt from Eden’s Trial shows how they react to such attempted theft while they are trying to purge the local population of a disease. The scene is seen through the eyes of two humans, Kat and Pierre, who are onboard one of a number of Ossyrian ships in orbit around the infected planet.

Kat watched from the viewport of their small pyramid that had detached from the mother ship. The huge silver ball shed pyramids like crystal snowflakes falling from orbit towards the yellow-green planet below. Despite herself, she was impressed by these Ossyrians, and relieved that compassion wasn’t a uniquely human trait. She felt Pierre’s hand touch hers, tentative, unsure. She took it, wrapped her fingers around his, and squeezed. She would lose him, sooner or later. Sooner, she decided. She let go.

She stepped away from the portal and glanced at their upright dog-like Ossyrian minder Chahat-Me, who was maybe looking at them both, maybe not – it was impossible to tell with the Ossyrian’s quicksilver eyes. Kat sat cross-legged in front of the Hohash mirror. It displayed data on the progress of the medical mission as she’d requested. She’d studied epidemiology at University, and was interested to see how much more advanced this race was at dealing with pandemics.

The Hohash entertained a number of vistas and displays with fuzzy maroon borders: some were actual pictures relayed from the surface. One showed the Ossyrians in golden encounter suits which she presumed served as protection against the plague, either for themselves or to prevent them from becoming carriers. They streamed out, administering equipment and drugs. Some Ossyrians were on foot, others on amber sleds that skimmed the surface as smoothly as an ice skater on a frozen lake.

Another vista showed Ossyrian pyramids, slowly spinning, traversing the landscape at low level, dispersing a colourless haze over the landscape. However, she was drawn to one particular data screen illustrating circular pictograms of the spread and density of the affected areas: concentric circles radiating out from an obvious epicentre. Three-dimensional graphs, like mountain ranges, showed intensity of the plague as a function of the region, and time since it had started. As she stared at it, she knew something wasn’t right.

It looked perfectly normal, exactly what she’d expect from her knowledge and understanding of epidemiological incursions; a textbook case. She studied it harder. It was a classic example. Too classic. She stood up and grabbed the Ossyrian’s shoulder.

“It’s a trap. It’s so perfect an example of plague radiation, so classic a mixture of randomness and single node origin that it has to be false. Someone has lured you here.”

Chahat-Me’s mercurial eyes danced.

“What’s she saying, Pierre?” Kat couldn’t yet interpret the Ossyrian ‘eye language.’

He moved side to side with her. “I don’t know, it’s too fast, too complex, or both. I think she’s communicating with the others, rather than us.”

Kat supposed he was right – their Ossyrian guardian had that look of being elsewhere, as far as she could tell. Abruptly, as Kat looked on, fascinated by the shapes in its eyes forming and collapsing at almost subliminal speeds, the eyes settled down, then appeared flat. But she wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Chahat-Me held out her two arms, and each one split into two thinner ones, peeling apart as if they had only been lightly stuck together, all the way to the armpits. Kat and Pierre both took a step backwards. One pair of the thinner arms swung back behind Chahat Me to a wall control panel, and blurred into action. The space they occupied went dark, just before their craft rocked heavily.

Kat tumbled into a corner, her head smacking hard against one of the benches. She tried to get up but a sudden burst of acceleration squeezed her into the soft fabric, her internal organs pressing against her back ribs. She realised they must be doing high-G manoeuvres, straining the inertial dampers to their limit. When it stopped she ended up rolling helplessly into the centre towards the other side, only to be stopped by one of Chahat-Me’s feet which stamped down on her chest, pinning her to the floor. The room spun a few times and then a sense of normality returned, leaving only a trace of nausea, reminding her of her space sickness training two years earlier.

The foot released her. She sat up, glaring at Chahat-Me, but she managed to growl a begrudging “Thanks, I think.” Pierre was already standing behind her, and helped her to her feet. “What –?” But she didn’t need to ask, as soon as her gaze reached the portal. She saw the mother ship shattered into several large chunks, surrounded by myriad smaller fragments. Flames sputtered and winked out as soon as they formed, as the oxygen flashed into space. She glanced at the Hohash, still in view mode, giving ugly close-up shots of Ossyrians tumbling into space, jerking spasmodically for a few seconds before freezing into corpses that would shortly be cremated as they fell through the atmosphere. A number of Ossyrians on the planet lay prone on the ground, their encounter suit helmets smashed open, their muzzles gasping and bodies twitching, clearly unable to make any concerted movement. Nerve gas, she reckoned. The low-level pyramids were crashing, one by one, she presumed due to some kind of EM pulse or similar device disabling their engines or guidance systems, probably both. She watched the mother ship explode into even more fragments.

Only then did the other ships appear – black, spiked spheres reminding her of long-spined sea urchins. They approached the fragments and pricked their hulls. They’re boarding the mother ship, or what’s left of it.

“Why?” Pierre said.

Kat knew it was a pointless question. What he really meant was how could they? She reckoned it was probably technology capture by a lower level race. Then came a shock. The Hohash showed some of those boarding. They were wearing space suits and though she couldn’t see their heads inside the helmets, they definitely looked humanoid. She snuck a glance at Chahat-Me, to find that she was communicating with Pierre. She waited, trying not to look at the carnage.

“Mannekhi raiders,” he said, “Level 5.” He seemed about to speak, but stalled, staring at the Ossyrian.

“What?” Kat asked.

Pierre’s brow creased, and he looked from Chahat-Me to Kat, then out the portal. “We’re … we’re cloaked. So…”

Kat walked up to him and gripped him by his elbows. “Pierre, talk to me. What’s going on?”

He turned back to her, then sat down on the bench. “The Ossyrians have a vow to help people, a kind of Hippocratic oath.”

She folded her arms. “So, they’re going to stand by, while these Mannekhi bastards –”

“No. No, that’s just it. They have a higher oath, related to Galactic security. If the Mannekhi get the technology, the database from an Ossyrian mothership, well…” He waved a hand, listlessly.

She glanced through the portal again. Around thirty of the spike-ships festooned the collapsing hull fragments of the Ossyrian’s mighty vessel. “What can they do?’ What can we do? We’re just one tiny ship, maybe the only ones left alive right now.”

Without warning, Chahat-Me seized Kat’s shoulders and spun her around to face her, catching both her wrists and locking them in a vice-like grip. Kat’s eyes went wide. “Pierre!” But she sensed no movement behind her. Damn – he knows what she’s going to do to me! She watched as Chahat-Me’s second pair of aluminium-coloured arms transfigured at the ends into large syringes.

“Pierre! What’s going on?”

He stood up, laid a hand on her shoulder. “Chahat-Me is saving your life.”

With a blur, the first syringe stabbed into the left side of her neck, a fraction of a second before the second one punctured her belly.

“Christ!” she yelled, just as Chahat-Me released her. She took a swing at the dog-faced alien but hit nothing more than air, nearly falling over.

“Kat, don’t,” Pierre said quietly.

She regained her balance, and glared at the dispassionate Ossyrian, then turned to Pierre. “Wanna see if you can move that quickly too?”

He moved right in front of her, chin bared. “Go ahead. I won’t move.”

Her fist ached to connect with someone, or something; she realised how much she’d been holding in this past week. She thought about hitting the wall, but she’d given that up years ago. “Tell me what she just did to me.”

Pierre walked over to the portal. “Come and see.”

Reluctantly she joined him, just in time to catch a flash of emerald lightning. For a moment, as far as she could see, space turned an eerie green, then faded back to black. “Fireworks. So what?”

He nodded towards the vista. She watched. The bustle of activity slowed down. Ships still moved, but nothing changed course. One or two of the spike ships collided, bursting into flame for a second before snuffing out. Her anger subsided. Everything was stilling, silent – she tried to avoid the word which most aptly described the scene, but said it anyway. “Dead?” She tried to imagine how that could be.

He nodded.

“How?” So fast, she thought, so damned efficient.

“An Ossyrian weapon, like an electromagnetic pulse, but tuned only to organic signatures. Operates on what they call the epsilon spectrum: subatomic, penetrates hulls and shields.”

She felt light-headed, nauseous. “Then why aren’t we dead?”

“The weapon targets anything organic without Ossyrian DNA. The ship’s cloak transmits the DNA signature, and, I already have some Ossyrian DNA, and now … well, now you have some too.”

She sensed there was something else he wasn’t telling her, but it would wait. She moved back to see the Hohash, and was aghast. “The population! It’s wiping them out too!”

“I know. You were right about it all being too perfect. Most probable scenario is that the inhabitants, or at the least their government or factions of it, were in on the raid from the start. Probably they were promised advanced technology by the Mannekhi.”

She stared in disbelief. “But that’s all supposition. You don’t know that. Chahat-Me doesn’t know that for sure!”

Pierre faced her. “Kat, thanks to you they had a few seconds to take the appropriate precautions, or at least to set in motion their contingency protocol.”

“A few seconds! A few seconds to decide and execute genocide!” Her fists were ready for use again.

“The Ossyrians are Level Eight, Kat, compared to our Level Three. They think much faster than we do, and have considered all manner of scenarios before, including this one, and the appropriate response.”

“Stop talking like a diplomat, Pierre! It doesn’t give them the right –”

“But it does, Kat, that’s the whole point. That’s how this galaxy works.”

“Like the Q’Roth culling us. That okay with you too, Pierre?”

She saw his confidence falter, a crack in the façade. Too little, too late. But she had nothing more to say. She moved to where she could see neither the Hohash nor the portal, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. Pierre kept his distance, but the Ossyrian walked over towards her. It opened its mouth revealing the fibrous layers, like she’d seen once inside a dead whale’s jaws. A shrieking noise like a psychedelic choir emanated. Through the cacophony, Kat made out two distorted words: thank you.

Kat turned her head aside, unable to think of a suitable response.

The last provocative thought I’ll leave you with is that other alien races might consider us as a disease or virus, something to be contained as in Greg Egan’s masterful novel Quarantine, or eradicated (Greg Bear’s Forge of God series).

Let’s hope that idea remains science fiction.

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and Ampichellis Ebooks

Eden's Trial is available as an ebook from Amazon, and in paperback Autumn 2012.

Eden's Revenge is due out for Xmas 2012

Children in Science Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 07:32:00 +0000

Every since I watched Village of the Damned as a kid (directed by Wolf Rilla, 1960, based on the SF book The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham), I realized that kids could be pretty scary. Then I watched The Tomorrow People which was about kids who were the 'next generation', and they were good, if bit nerdy, so I relaxed. At the end of the day, whenever kids turned evil in Scifi movies or books, I could relax and then say, well, it's just Scifi.

Then I read Lord of the Flies, by Nobel prize-winner William Golding, and it changed my mind. Not SciFi, it's about kids who get shipwrecked on an island, and it ends up getting pretty ugly.

I read the whole Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, and thoroughly enjoyed all of them, for different reasons. Ender's Game is about a bunch of kids on an orbital platform being trained for a space battle with an alien race. Although Ender is the main character, I actually found the Bean character more interesting and like a kid, albeit well beyond his years. Card obviously understands kids and how they think and interact, and how they can be cruel to each other, including killing each other. In 2013 it will be released as a film, with Harrison Ford starring as one of the adults in charge of them.

Somewhere between Ender and Lord of the Flies, is Greg Bear's novel Anvil of Stars, part of the Forge of God series. Anvil concerns a group of children sent on a mission to destroy an alien race. As usual with Bear, his grasp of the science underlying SciFi is impeccable, but his insight into kids under pressure, and how their neuroses can fester and manifest, makes this novel a great study, taking Lord of the Flies into space. Although a bit long (I nearly gave up on it in the middle part), it has a superb climax and 'bullet-proof ending', rare in SciFi.

What makes kids an interesting Scifi topic is the idea that we so-called adults can't control them, that they can outsmart us. Also is the idea that they haven't yet been 'socialized' or 'civilized', and so don't have the same limits we do.

Typically in Science Fiction there are a group of kids, or one kid, and the question is whether society will tolerate them or not. I wanted to turn that idea around. So, in my current novel (Eden's Revenge) all human children have been genetically 'upgraded' by an alien race, and surpass their parents by the age of twelve. This creates a mountain of social problems. At a time when the entire race is under imminent threat, the kids get the upper hand.

However, unlike Bear or Card or Golding, it's mainly viewed from the adults' point of view, except one kid called Petra. This is because most conflict is felt by the adults, not by the kids (except Petra). The inevitable question in the book is whether the kids will desert their parents and start a new race, leaving their forebears to disappear into obsolescence...

The Eden Paradox is available on Amazon as ebook and paperback and also on Barnes & Noble, Omnilit, AmpichellisEbooks, and Waterstones.

Eden's Trial is available on ebook on Amazon and in paperback later this year.

Eden's Revenge will be available first as an ebook by Xmas 2012.

Tourniquet Plotting

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 12:18:00 +0000

If you want to write a page-turner, there has to be tension. This makes it hard to put a book down. The reader needs to know what happens next.

This can be surface-level tension, as in much of the best seller the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, where the reader is pulled along by a succession of events, and at the end of each chapter is a hook that makes you want to see just around the next corner (where there will be another hook, of course). However, some readers may feel manipulated by such writing, and if they analyse the plot afterwards, will realise there were ‘tricks of the trade’ to keep them reading, and the plot was rather convoluted, and, viewed as a synopsis, didn’t hold up that well. The same can be said of TV series like ‘24’, where some people feel that once you have seen one series, you’ve seen them all. Doesn’t mean it isn’t good fun or entertainment (I enjoyed both and borrowed some of Dan Brown’s techniques), and doesn’t mean it won’t sell a million, but at the end of the day, it’s superficial.

Then there’s character-based tension, where a character is put into a set of escalating events, and his or her mettle will be tested to the limit. A straightforward (and perfectly-executed) example of this is Lee Child’s 61 hours, which also uses a time-based ‘countdown’ to raise the reader’s pulse, as Jack Reacher is pitted against a rather nasty villain in a freezing mid-American town. The ongoing question for the reader (well, this one) is not only who will survive, but also whether the hero can kill in cold blood when it comes to it.

There is story-based tension, such as Lovely Bones, which, unusually, starts with the narrator informing the reader how she was murdered by a serial killer. The tension hangs around whether the serial killer will be stopped or not. This is gripping fiction about something that is any sane person’s worst nightmare, so there is a natural tension inside us already, it just needs good writing to bring it out.

Tourniquet Plotting

So, what is tourniquet plotting? A good metaphor for tension is a rope. Is it taut or slack? Rope is a nice metaphor, because the writer can imagine pulling the reader along. But if the writer makes the plot too complex with too many loops and flashbacks, the writer will either tie the reader in knots, or else hang themselves in the process. Also, coming back to surface tension, it can make the reader feel ‘yanked along’ every now again, and they can get annoyed by it.

Okay, so what is a rope made of?

Individual strands.

The way I write is multi-protagonist (see also some better writers than me, like Jack McDevitt, David Brin, Dan Simmons, etc.). It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But it has an advantage in plotting for tension. I introduce characters one by one, and they each have their lives, goals, and conflicts, and there is a mystery to be solved. I go back to characters frequently so the reader doesn’t lose track (e.g. using an alternating chapter format). Each character holds a piece of the puzzle. Only the reader sees the tapestry that is building.

There are no ‘spare characters’. Each one has a specific role. There are no ‘loose ends’ in the rope. Same goes for events. Things happen for a reason, even if that reason is not apparent at the time (a number of people say they like to read my books twice).

I write books in classic three parts (Parts 1, 2 and 3). By the end of Part 1, a number of the strands have already tightened, others have not. For the main protagonists, the tension never eases off for the rest of the book. By the end of the second part, all the strands are under tension, and the reader has the feeling the plot is literally turning, the strands getting closer, forming a braid. By the end, all the main (surviving) characters literally come together in one key place. In this final part, the braid tightens like a tourniquet.

I had a professional reader review my second book (Eden’s Trial) prior to publication, and she remarked that two thirds of the way through, she began to wonder if I could tie up everything, but then in the last quarter she simply couldn’t put it down, because everything came together.

To do this requires careful plotting from the start, and at the least, by the end of Part One of a book, a good vision of the rest, and who will be left standing by the last page. It can also require a lot of editing once the first draft is completed, with careful pruning of strands (even cutting some out) that don’t really add anything, or tightening others related to the central protagonist(s), so the reader knows which strands to pay most attention to.

It also needs good characters to begin with, and a storyline that is not too ‘contrived’. In this vein, I feel that Lord of the Rings, for example, was more successful than Harry Potter, where I found the last few books a little contrived with the ‘Horcruxes’ which just seemed to stretch out the story without much added value. Did anyone really doubt that Harry would survive and win the day? Whereas with Frodo, there was a real chance that he would slip into the netherworld.

There are two main dangers of this ‘tourniquet’ approach. The first is that some readers, particularly those who prefer a single head to view the world through, may get lost or lose interest. This is a danger with multiple point-of-view characters, especially if readers read, say, a chapter a week, because it will be difficult to remember who is who. The solution here is to give the reader a good ‘handle’ for each character, and make sure the reader could pick each one out of a police line-up. The second danger is that if there is not sufficient action, all the reader will see are strands lying limp on the floor, and she/he may get bored. Usually if there is enough action from the start, this helps. As mentioned earlier, some strands should stay taut throughout, until they are almost at breaking point by the end. Usually with books like this, if the reader gets past the first 60 pages, they are locked-in for the rest.

An exception to tying up all strands is with book series, such as trilogies, like my own. In the first two books, there are a few strands left deliberately open. These usually occur near the end of the book (in the second book, in the epilogue), so the reader knows these are essentially links or even ‘teasers’ to entice them to read the next book. This is like a piece of rope stretching into the void. If the reader has enjoyed the ride so far, they will grab that rope.

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook format from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ampichellisebooks, OmniLit, and Waterstones UK.

Eden’s Trial is available as an ebook on Amazon (currently free with Amazon Prime) and will be out in paperback in the Autumn.

Eden’s Revenge is in progress and will be available as an ebook for Xmas 2012.

Internal Conflict in Science Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:04:00 +0000

British SciFi writer Gary Gibson just did an interesting post on the subject of internal/external conflict (see http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/blog/internal-vs-external-conflict-by-gary-gibson/ ). Basically external conflict is fairly easy, especially in science fiction and fantasy, where there can be a malevolent enemy or force to fight against. The epitome of this frame is the superhero (and perfect counterpoint, the super-villain), or the classic Star Wars or Lord of the Rings scenario (the ‘force’ and its ‘dark side’; the ring and Sauron). It’s good fun, and can be solid entertainment. But we know reality isn’t like that, it’s rarely black and white, or the primary colours of a superhero’s cape.

Internal conflict, however, is where we live. In superhero terms, this is most evident in Batman but also Spiderman, both very ‘conflicted’ individuals, so we root for them, because they’re like us. So, in fiction, how does it work?

W.C.Fields famously wrote ‘there are three rules for successful fiction; nobody knows what they are.’ Well, I agree, but here are some rules for writing internal conflict:

It has to be realistic, something the reader can relate to (empathise).
It has to be true to the character’s nature.
It has to be relevant to the plot.
It should tell us something about the character, his or her ‘mettle’.
It has to raise, or at least enrich, the ‘stakes’.
It has to lead (eventually) to action and resolution.
It should be well-written, fit the situation, and not be melodramatic.

All of the above rules can be broken, but you have to be a damned good writer to get away with it.

Realistic internal conflict

Ever loved someone who didn’t love you back? If not, then good for you, but a lot of people empathise with this situation. In the following extract from The Eden Paradox, Micah loves Antonia, who barely recognises his existence. He’s got a lousy track record with women because of his introverted character (rule 2), but suddenly she has to depend on him (rule 3) to try and save her lover. Micah gets angry in the following sequence for reasons earlier in the chapter, and then regrets it, but it firms his resolve to help her (rules 3, 4 & 5), though it will put him in danger. There is a partial resolution of this particular internal conflict near the end of the book (rule 6), but the real resolution doesn’t come until book 2, and again in book 3.

The set-up: Micah has just been interrogated by Vince for a murder he didn’t commit; Antonia is following him on the metro (called the Bubble in 2065), because her lover’s (Katrina’s) ship, the third mission to Eden, has gone missing, and she thinks Micah can help. Micah and his murdered colleague Rudi analyse data returning from the space-craft via a simulated landscape. Micah has recently found a covert 'avatar' (here called a ‘simulacra’) of Katrina in this virtual landscape, who can maybe tell him what is happening on the real ship, ninety light years away.

It had been a long day. Micah was bone tired, and broody as hell. His mind swirled with dark thoughts, like sharks circling, hunting bait-fish. He headed toward one of the high speed bubbles that wormed out of his building, to start the trek home, then slowed; the back of his neck tingled. He turned around, sure someone was following him. But all his eyes met was a flood of flushed, rush hour faces, irritated he had blocked the flow, delaying them a few precious seconds. Unable to pick anyone out from the crowd, he carried on and squeezed into the lozenge-shaped bubble that would flush him and his fellow commuters down to Kaymar Nexus. Just as the doors were closing, someone slipped in behind him.

It was so packed he couldn’t turn around. Hardly anyone ever spoke on the bubbles. Dismal music played, mercifully drowned out by the whooshing and rattling of the mass transit system kids aptly called the pea-shooter. Several teenage commuters wore I-vids – opaque sunglasses cradling their eye sockets, evanescent light patterns occasionally leaking out – seeking refuge outside of the present.

He felt eyes burning into the back of his head. A synthetic, incomprehensible female voice blurted out the name of the next station. Micah decided he was getting off, no matter what. The noise whined down and they jolted to a stop, the doors opening a little too early so that the person behind him stepped out. Micah twisted to see a bedraggled Antonia standing on the platform, eyes edgy, in amongst passengers trying to board. With an effort he carved through them and disembarked from the bubble, whose doors zipped shut, as it catapulted down the tunnel to its next destination. The bubble’s wake blew her skirt around her legs. He tried not to look.

There she stood, the girl of his dreams, right in front of him on the platform with its ebbing wash of people. Four minutes max before the next one. Patches of his recently-aired anger from his debrief with Vince hung like flotsam around him. It wouldn’t take much to set them off again.

"Why did you follow me?" he said. He still had a faint thread of hope, though his rational mind said he was wasting his time.

Her face flushed, her hands wrestling each other. "I came here to find out something."

He didn’t want to get angry with her – or did he? He wasn’t sure.

"You came to ask me about the simulacra in the landscapes," he said.

"How did…? Wait – Vince doesn’t know, does he?" Her voice betrayed more than a hint of concern.

"Not yet, though he’ll figure it out soon enough."

She looked crestfallen. Micah was feeling fed up, anger at being rejected welled up inside him, heading for the surface. He went on the offensive.

"I saw Katrina’s simulacrum in Rudi’s landscape. Rudi’s world is pretty ravaged. The Katrina simulacrum wasn’t in good shape." He noticed how she became increasingly motionless, holding herself together, barely breathing, not meeting his gaze. He had to be sure. "To be honest," he said, "I don’t think she will survive – "

"Stop! Stop it," she said, not yelling, which made it worse. "You’re hurting me!"

Micah recoiled. The words cut through him, snapping off his breath. The angst deserted him, leaving him suspended like a surfer whose wave had just vanished into thin air. His bravado freefell. What the hell was I thinking! Now is no time to behave like a bastard; like my father.

She bit her lip, eyes swimming in salt water, but held his gaze, not caring.

"Micah, you have to help her. The real Kat, I mean. I keep having these terrible… She and I …" she choked off. He closed towards her cautiously, like a child who had hurt his sibling when playing rough, not meaning to cause real pain. He reached out and touched her arm, gesturing to some uncomfortable-looking fixed seats plastered with seedy holo-graffiti. He hoped they hadn’t been desecrated by the tramps who slept there. They sat down on the gaudy, unyielding plastic.

She sniffed tears away and stared at the swirling incandescent ads on the opposite wall. "We met at an international dignitaries’ function nine months ago – my uncle is the Slovakian ambassador – I’m not usually into girls, but she was so funny, in a dark sort of way. She stole a kiss from me. It changed my world."

Micah felt hollow. But he said nothing, accepting his retribution for how he’d just acted.

"Ever since, we’ve been seeing each other secretly, up until the launch. We signed a three-year pax agreement before she left orbit." She glanced at him sideways. "You’re okay, aren’t you, I mean with girl-girl… Oh, never mind. Anyway, about a week before we lost contact, the messages she’d been sending me via the simulacra stopped. I knew something was wrong, that someone was tracking it down. I didn’t know if it was you or Rudi. I was going to talk to Mr Kane. When he was murdered, then Rudi, I was desperate. I knew the danger had penetrated the Eden Mission staff. I didn’t know who to trust."

He cleared his throat. "Antonia, I’ll do my best to help you get back in contact with Katrina –"

"Kat, if you don’t mind."

"Okay, Kat – and I don’t mind at all," he lied, because this was hell. "But I’ll need your help tomorrow finding the simulacra, if it’s not already decompiled."

"Gladly, I want to do something!" Her face lit up. She pressed her hand on top of his. "I hoped you’d help. It means a lot to me." She retracted her hand. He stared at his own hand, making sure it didn’t follow hers. Commuters began clogging up the platform.

The first wisps of air ruffled her blouse as a bubble thrashed its way down the tube, its braking screech getting louder. He stood up. "Tomorrow, then."

She stayed seated as he turned towards the platform’s edge. He struggled not to look back. The bubble arrived, a popping sound as its doors opened. Boarding it, engulfed by the sweaty throng of other passengers, Micah caught a last glimpse of her, head hung down, as the bubble vomited out of the station.

He wondered how his father would have handled it. He’d probably have somehow seduced her away from Katrina – Kat – seeing their Lesbian affair as a challenge. Seduction had been his father’s other forte, so he’d heard. But it wouldn’t be his path. He recalled his mother sobbing alone at night, when he was too young to understand, but not too young to make the connection. Every hero has a dark side, Vince had said.

His stop arrived. As he and the anonymous crowd flooded out of the station into the constant warm breeze of Kaymar cavern, a flower-seller, whom his mom always complained was ridiculously over-priced, called out to him and other passers-by. His father had always brought home red roses for Micah’s mom – afterwards. Micah bought white.

The following extract concerns another protagonist, this time Blake, from the second book Eden’s Trial. In the first part of the book, Blake managed to save mankind, but ended up in a coma. He awakes four months later, rescued by Rashid, only to find that everything has gone to rack and ruin, after a despot (Shakirvasta) has seized power. Always the soldier, the commander sending others to their death or victory, he’s had enough. His wife Glenda is dying of cancer, and he wants to see her, no matter the cost. Even if he knows it’s a bad decision, he’s just been through too much. But Rashid has an ace up his sleeve…

Blake paced the small cavern. His heart thumped loudly in his veins. He’d had enough. He pressed his eyes closed, then thought of his priorities. And there lay the solution, he realised. His priorities, not ‘the people’s’. His heart eased off.

“So, Glenda is in this new central complex at the heart of the city?” He picked up and checked the pulse rifle: fully charged.

Rashid frowned. “It is not so simple. The city is effectively under martial law.”

“She’s my wife, and neither of us is technically a prisoner, right?”

Rashid sighed, and hung his head. “Your good wife told me to give you a message, if you became…”

“Difficult?” He rammed the rifle into the one of the skimmer’s gun slots.

“She said use it only as a last resort, to stop you doing something… foolish.”

“Rashid, after what I’ve been through – after what we’ve all been through – I can’t just leave her there. Even if Shakirvasta takes me prisoner, I’ll be closer to her.” He parked the second pulse rifle in the remaining gun slot. “Coming?”

Rashid squatted down. His hand glazed across the sandy floor. “Please, reconsider. At least, let us form a strategy, gather support. Give time for the rumours of your escape to reach the population, and let Shakirvasta’s true nature be exposed by his actions.”

Blake felt the anger brewing inside him like a thunderstorm. He’d not given up everything just so Shakirvasta and his cronies could turn their new society into a dictatorship, with people working the land as effective forced-labour or as minions in ‘services’. And as for Jennifer – how had he misjudged her so? But he recognised a deeper seat to his anger. His mentor, General Kilaney, had warned him about it. He’d said that given enough time, every career soldier, at least once, will seriously question if the people he’s prepared to fight and die for are worth it. He realised he was boiling inside that particular crucible right now. He’d done his part, freed people from the Alician menace, only to see them hand power to a megalomaniac. How could they be so stupid? The only person he wanted to save now was Glenda. Nothing else, and no one else, mattered.

“Sorry, Rashid, but I’m done with saving other people all the time. I went to Eden knowing my wife had terminal cancer, knowing I might never see her again. Then I ran a suicide mission against Louise, saying goodbye to Glenda again. And now she’s a prisoner. This is personal, Rashid, I’m done being the Commander; I just want to save my wife, you understand that, don’t you?” He knew damn well Rashid understood – Rashid had gone to Eden leaving his wife behind, never to see her again. Blake knew he shouldn’t have said it, but it was out now.

Rashid found a pebble on the floor, and weighed it in his hand, saying nothing. Blake mounted the skimmer, and grabbed his helmet.

“Commander, here is the message.” Rashid spoke to the floor. “Glenda said that Zack told her about Robert. That was all she said. I do not know what it –”

Rashid stopped as Blake’s helmet slammed into the wall, then ricocheted off onto the floor several times before sloshing to rest in the pool of water.

Blake sat on the skimmer, breathing hard, his arms hanging by his sides. His right hand trembled, the one that had pulled the trigger all those years ago. “Zack had no right,” he whispered, his voice almost breaking. He gritted his teeth, remembering his and Zack’s botched rescue attempt to save those captive boys near the end of the War in Kurana Bay. His own son, Robert, had been… transformed by the enemy into a mindless fighting machine… Only he and Zack had known. Robert had been declared missing in action, presumed dead.

The fight drained out of him. Glenda’s message was as clear as it was brutal. No more botched rescues: use your head. He knew she was right. And the message was double-edged – she might well be angry with him, or not, he couldn’t tell. He could imagine her pounding him with her fists, tears running down her cheeks, screaming ‘How could you?’ Maybe that was what he wanted, or needed.

His breathing slowed. He remembered Pierre once used a French expression about the need to maintain one’s sang froid – cold blood. His right hand stilled.

He dismounted, walked past Rashid, and retrieved his helmet, shaking it a couple of times to rinse out the fetid water. He went over to the field stove and began preparing tea. ‘Names, Rashid. I need names of those you trust with your life, those who are on Shakirvasta’s side, and those who could be turned to our advantage. And I need schematics of the city, as well as the political infrastructure.’

Rashid came to Blake’s side. He stood to attention, and saluted. “Good to have you back, Commander.”

So, internal conflict is usually the key difference between us and super-heroes – they can make the right calls all the time, it’s in their DNA, whereas we can’t, unless with a little help. But perhaps that's what maybe makes us worth saving.

The Eden Paradox is available in ebook and paperback on Amazon, Brnes and Noble, and from Waterstones (UK)

Eden’s Trial is available as ebook from Amazon (currently free with Amazon Prime), and will be in paperback in autumn 2012.

The finale, Eden’s Revenge, will be available in ebook December 2012, paperback Spring 2013.

For a light-hearted exploration of superheroes and their lack of internal conflict, see my free short story ‘Conversation with a Superhero’, on my ‘Stories’ page on my website.

Science Fiction and Dreams (2)

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:55:00 +0000

One of the most interesting devices used with respect to dreams, or altered realities, is how we know whether we are in a dream or awake. This has been used in a number TV series, notably Star Trek Next Generation and Voyager - in the former, the 'Moriarty' episodes neatly covered this dilemma when a holo-character began tricking the crew into believing they were in reality when in fact they were trapped inside s holo-program. Similarly, a Voyager episode covered a species that attacked people in their sleep, keeping them trapped there. Only one person, Chakotay, could determine if he was in a dream or not, by seeing if Earth's moon was in the sky (given that they were 80,000 light years away, this was a good motif to choose).

In the heady days of the drug-exploring sixties and early seventies, dream exploration was in vogue. In particular books by Carlos Castaneda (e.g. The Teachings of Don Juan and Tales of Power both published by Penguin, interestingly enough in their Psychology/Philosophy division) explored lucid dreaming with the assistance of drugs like peyote, found in the Mexican desert. Dream control (I tried it) entails first paying more attention to your dreams - e.g. by writing them down upon waking, since they are gone within seconds. As the practice continues, it is possible to become aware you are in a dream. The question is whether you can then influence it. I used to wake up. Sometimes i'd go back to sleep and the dream would continue, but I never had any control over it. To have control, according to Castaneda's writings, you just had to hold your hand up in front of your face, and look at your palm. The very few times I got close, back in the seventies, something would happen in the dream that would distract me. After about a year I gave up.

Back to science fiction. Ever since William Gibson's Neuromancer and cyberpunk science fiction, and now more reinforced as we move ever closer to immersive technologies and media, and battle simulations that become more and more real, it becomes possible to envisage total immersion approaches, where it might be possible for someone to be unsure whether they are in the real world or not. This, after all, was the basis of the hugely successful Matrix series of films.

The question I've been exploring in two novels is how aliens might use this with humans (in the first blog on this subject, as an interrogation device). For example, rather than an alien race coming with ships and slogging it out in a big sub-orbital battle, what if they could simply shove us all into a mental simulation, and move in while we lay inert, comatose, at their mercy? How would we know? As in the previous blog, the film Inception offers a glimmer of hope, in that certain details might give the game away (near the start of the film, someone who is in a dream-like reality recognizes that the carpet is wrong). In dreams, our subconscious often 'papers over the cracks' such that we seem to accept bizarre events as if they were completely ordinary, and upon waking, think, good grief, how did I not know I was dreaming? One hopes, therefore, that if we were in some kind of perfect simulation, that the subconscious might rebel (as in my previous blog story excerpt).

Anyhow, here's a dream excerpt from The Eden Paradox, chapter 2, where I borrowed a bit of dream psychology from Castaneda.

Kat heard the footfalls pounding behind her, getting louder, closing. She sprinted towards the Lander, cropped black hair glistening with sweat, muscular arms punching through the gritty breeze. Her slate-grey eyes remained locked onto the desert terrain five metres ahead, like she’d learned in the Falklands. She dared not look back, partly because she might trip, but more because she would freeze if she saw it bearing down on her. Two hundred metres. The open hatch promised sanctuary. Zack – be there!

She ran full throttle, clutching her helmet in her right hand. She’d seen the scalpel-sharp claws: one slash and she was history. She flung the helmet over her right shoulder, and counted. One – Two ... She winced at the crunching noise. As if it was egg-shell, not carbo-titanium, for God’s sake! How far behind? She couldn’t work it out. It didn’t matter; the hatch was barely a hundred and fifty metres away. She raced, ignoring the muscle-lock cramping her lungs, the strain in her thighs begging her to slow down. Go to hell!

Pumping her arms harder, she drew in a breath, and vaulted a table-height rock, grazing her left knee and almost losing footing as she landed hard on the other side, arms flailing to maintain balance. As she got back into her stride, the ground shook as the creature hit the deck behind her without missing a beat. Her legs finally got the message – she increased her speed.

***

"Now would be good, Pierre," Zack bellowed. He watched Kat’s mouth twitch, her thin lips pull back in fear, eyes darting wildly beneath pale eye-lids. His instinct was to place one of his stocky black hands on Kat’s shoulder to comfort her, or else shake her to bring her out of it, but he stopped short – they’d agreed not to wake her. Pierre strode in as fast as the synth-grav would allow, deftly manoeuvring between the stasis cots in the cramped second compartment, pianist-length fingers meshed in a tangle of short black hair even a crew-cut couldn’t subdue. "About time," Zack said.

Pierre primed a contact syringe, and in one smooth movement flicked it switchblade-style towards the side of Kat’s neck. There was a hiss, like a sharp intake of breath. A wash of deep red crawled across her face then vanished.

"Will it calm her down?" Zack frowned at her normally smooth, fine-featured face, now crumpled like a piece of paper, slick with sweat.

"No, but she’ll realise she’s in a dream. If she remembers, she can control it."

Zack looked down at their youngest crew member. Yeah, if she ain’t too shit- scared. Her chest rose and fell with increasing speed. "Her vitals okay?"

Pierre tapped the holopad next to the cot – several red spikes radiated outward, but none pierced the edge of the surrounding green hexagon. "Tolerable. In the dream she’s running, so her lungs work faster."

Zack chewed his lower lip. The nightmare was coming more regularly the closer they got to Eden, and Kat reckoned it wasn’t a normal dream, always exactly the same. So they’d decided to try a lucid dreaming technique, injecting a stim during the nightmare, so she could maybe control it, and recall what was chasing her.

Pierre gazed into the mid-distance as he discarded the syringe. "Do we run because we’re afraid, or are we afraid because we run?" He said it as if reciting, a hint of his Parisian accent lingering.

Zack sighed, wondering for the hundredth time why Pierre wasn’t back in MIT, surrounded by his best friends – equations and a muon-scope. "Spare me the psy-crap, Pierre." He glared at him. They both knew why she was running.

"I have to go. I’m finishing some tests. There’s a strange variance –"

"Whatever." Zack gave him a sideways look. "I thought you liked Kat?" Pierre hung there for a moment, then spun on his heel, and retreated to the cockpit. Zack re-focused his attention on Kat, planted himself on a mag-stool, and leant back against the graphite-grey inner hull. "Take it from me, kid, sometimes it’s okay to run. You run as fast as you damned well can."

***

Kat felt a pricking on the side of her neck, like an insect bite. Her cheeks and scalp burned. It was the signal she’d rehearsed, so she knew she was in the nightmare again – the same one she’d had every night for the past week – injected with the stim as planned. But it didn’t help – just because she knew she was in a nightmare didn’t mean she wasn’t terrified. Yet she needed to see the creature, to bring back details that would be flushed away as always, moments after waking. She knew what she had to do to control the dream: hold her hand up in front of her face and see her palm. That was all.

Even as she began to raise her right arm, a bone-shaking roar erupted from the creature. Her ears shrivelled in pain. The wake of the primal howl hit the back of her head. Though she didn’t think it possible, she increased her pace one final time, as if her transition from mortal fear to pure panic allowed one last gear-shift. But it was right behind her. She wasn’t going to make it. She tried to believe it was just a dream, telling herself: Look around! See it before you wake up! But she couldn’t – she imagined its claws raising, ready to strike.

For the first time she noticed that although she was in a desert, the light was a ghostly green, like an old radar screen. Why? No time to figure it out. Zack was at the hatch, beckoning wildly with one hand, levelling the shoulder-mounted cannon with the other. She tried one last time to turn to see the creature, but her neck refused. "Get down!" she heard Zack shout, just as the creature swiped her feet from under her, and she fell, flying through the air like a high diver in slow motion, before sprawling downwards, crashing through the desert floor into blackness.

Kat sat up sharply and hit the rubber pad above her cot with her head. "Shit! Every – bloody – time!" She collapsed back, breathing hard. She drove her fingers through wet, matted hair, and laid her forearm over closed eyes, waiting for the tremors to subside. She was safe, back on the Ulysses. Not that she’d left it in the past three months since they’d departed Zeus Orbital. She breathed out slowly to bring her pulse under control, and tried to recall. What had been chasing her? What had been so important, aside from the obvious – to escape? She couldn’t remember. Vague, receding thoughts uttered muffled cries through a thick fog in her mind – something about colour – something was green. But what? And why did it matter? By the time the mist had dissipated there was nothing but the distant low grumble of Ulysses’ engines, cushioned by the susurration of the aircon, with its attendant hospital-like smell. The nightmare, along with all its secrets, was gone, as usual. Her shoulder and neck muscles unwrapped, and she let out a long sigh. She wanted to sleep more, but not at the risk of nightmaring again. She heard the scrape of a mag-stool and left her forearm in place. "You babysitting me again, Zack?"

Without giving away a 'spoiler', there's a lot more to this dream than meets the eye.

One word of advice if you are a Scifi writer - if you ever have a dream and think it might make a great story, you have about thirty seconds to find a piece of paper and a pen and write it down before it starts to fade.

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones.

Eden's Trial is available from Amazon (free for a limited period if you have Amazon Prime)

Eden's Revenge is due out December 2012.

Science Fiction and Dreams (1)

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 07:58:00 +0000

I’ve always had a fascination with dreams, especially since I’ve died in three of them. So, I was enthralled when I watched the film Inception, with its ‘dream within a dream’ premise. I’d been planning a novel where aliens would use dreams as interrogation techniques. Why? Because (a) truth drugs are too easy, and make for boring fiction, (b) telepathy also means no tension, since an interrogator simply reads your mind, and (c) when dreaming, and when remembering dreams, we try to rationalise even if what is happening is not rational, and (d) it is a space where we can access our so-called subconscious.

Dreams tend to be the province of fantasy more than science fiction, but then maybe Scifi is missing a trick – a dream is an altered reality, and if it can be manipulated then Scifi can play with it (as in Cyberpunk Scifi). It becomes less fantasy, and more an exploration of ‘inner’ space. Ever since the classic film Forbidden Planet, I realised that the biggest, scariest monsters are those hiding in our minds (in the ‘Id’).

I didn’t want to use an old cliché where somebody sees something in a dream, has a revelation, all that stuff which has been done to death already. I wanted an alien mind using it to probe one of ours. But to make it more interesting, what the alien is looking for is buried in the subconscious mind. To get at it would not be easy.

The story is as follows (it is chapter 7 in the novel at the moment): A female character (Kat) knows something, but doesn’t know she knows it – an alien (Kalarash) has planted it in her mind. It is an image of something left hidden on a planet, that the Kalarash is going to come back for. It is a weapon of awful magnitude. Another alien (Qorall) wants the information, and tries interrogating Kat, but she can’t tell him even if she wanted to. Qorall isn’t telepathic, and even if he was, he could only access her conscious mind. So, he sends her into a dream. In fact, I used the Inception approach, and she is inside a dream within a dream. As in Inception, the first or upper dream layer doesn't yield results, so he sends her deeper.

Kat only trusts one person, her sister, who died when Kat was a kid. They used to go surfing together, she and her older sister Angelica (‘Angel’). In both dream layers, it is Angelica who is trying to get the information out of her, but in the layer I’ll show you in a minute, Kat is a teenager again. This is because as an adult, Kat is very tough and a bit of a kick-ass character, and so is giving away nothing in the ‘upper’ dream layer.

The dream starts off ‘normal’, but Angel (Qorall) slowly twists the scenario, putting emotional pressure on Kat. Angel brings up characters (Micah, Pierre, Louise) who are people in Kat’s adult life, further confusing Kat-the-teenager, and playing on human psychology to bring the hidden piece of information to the surface. Kat’s own physiology is resisting in the form of a headache that worsens as Qorall gets closer to finding what he is looking for, as the dream slowly but surely transforms into a nightmare…

Kat lay face-down on the beach, the sound of the surf roaring in the background. She wiggled her toes, trying to dislodge the wet sand stuck between them, towel damp underneath her tummy after the last frolic in the waves surfing with her sister. When she was on the long board behind Angel, nothing else mattered, not her damned exams, not even her uncle’s odd behaviour toward her; the way she caught him staring at her when she was bending.

Some boys played football close by; there were always boys close by when Angel was around. Kat had zero interest in boys, and looked the other way whenever her sis kissed one of her boyfriends. Angel said Kat’s time would come, but she was already fifteen, and reckoned her hormones had other plans.

Kat was starting to burn; she knew she should really turn over, or get into the shade. But she wanted a deep tan like her sister. Besides, the sun could block out all kinds of things, bake them out. She heard Angel stir, and teased open an eye, squinting in the blazing sun, to see the silhouette of her sister standing above her, squirting sunscreen into the palms of her hand. Angel promptly straddled Kat’s back, and began rubbing oil into her.

Kat moaned as Angel’s hands repeatedly pressed the grooves on either side of her spine, up and over her shoulders. “Oh God, Angie, that feels good!”

Angel varied her massage routine, eliciting more groans from Kat. The boys stopped their football. She leaned forward, close to Kat’s ear, lingering for effect. “I’m giving them some wet dream material.” They both burst out laughing. Angel dismounted, and sat next to her.

Kat turned over, propped up on her elbows, letting her head roll back, feeling the sun beat down against her small breasts, and her throat. “You’re killing them, sis.”

Angel lay a hand on Kat’s stomach, and drew circles with her finger. “But what a way to go, eh?”

They both laughed again. Kat lay down flat, feeling as light as the cirrus clouds wisping across the azure sky. She shaded her eyes to spy a gull soaring overhead, crying out for its mate somewhere.

“You miss Pierre, don’t you?” Angel said.

Kat did. She hadn’t talked about it, not to anyone else. “Like hell,” she said. She turned toward Angel, saw the frown. The boys were calling lewdly to Angel, but she never took her eyes off Kat. Abruptly Angel’s head turned to face the sea.

“He had no right to just dump you like that.”

Kat’s lips tightened. She didn’t like to talk about it; but she’d never seen her sister so concerned before. Their whole family was pretty stunted on the emotional register. She’d not even talked about it to her new best friend at school, Louise. “He had to go, you know that.”

Angel turned back, a flash of anger, opened her mouth as if to say something, then shook her head. “I know, but I’ve just never understood.”

Kat sat up, moved closer. Angel had always comforted her, been the big sister, stood in for their mother who’d died when Kat was barely two, and had protected her from her Goddam-awful uncle when their father had gone completely off the rails and drunk himself into oblivion. But now Angel was in pain. Kat stretched out her arm and, hesitatingly, placed it over Angel’s shoulders. Angel folded into Kat’s embrace, the first time their caring relationship had ever reversed direction. Kat felt her eyes water. The boys quietened, and moved further towards the breaching waves.

Kat needed to talk about it; had needed to for a long time. She drew in a breath. “Micah said Pierre’s gone to get help.” Her head started to ache; she should get out of the sun; it was so damned hot. She picked up her straw hat and put it on.

“Where on Earth is he going to get help, given the storm that’s coming. Don’t be naïve, Kat, he’s dumped you, that’s all there is to it.”

Kat felt as if she’d been slapped. What had gotten into Angel? “I don’t know any more than what Micah said, I’m not even sure he knows, but –”

“Listen to yourself, Kat. It’s pathetic. Men stick together, cover for each other. Micah, Pierre, they’re all the bloody same. Christ, I should know.” Angel broke free of the embrace, sat apart, dug into her bag and fished out a cigarette, lighting it with a fluency that looked so adult. But Kat hated it when Angel smoked. She only smoked when she was angry – no, when she’d been let down by somebody.

Kat looked away. The boys had moved closer again, yelling something. Suddenly the ball landed right next to Angel, showering them both with a hiss of sand.

Angel was on her feet in a second, shouting. “For God’s sake piss off and leave us alone.” She picked up the ball and gave it a mighty drop-kick toward the ocean. She took a long drag, staring at the boys till they ran off to retrieve their ball, looked down at Kat, and then dropped the cigarette into the sand, burying it.

She knelt down next to Kat and put her arms around her. “Sorry, Sis, I’m being a real bitch today. Forget about it, just forget the whole damned thing.”

Kat shook; if Angel wasn’t there for her, she wouldn’t – couldn’t – cope. But Angel hugged her tight, rocking her. She thought of Pierre, how he’d left, deserted her. But she couldn’t be angry with him anymore; he wasn’t the first to leave her, everyone did sooner or later. But she believed he would come back. Why? She tried to focus. Why would he come back? She flinched at a stabbing pain behind her eyes. God, not another migraine!

Angel released her from the embrace. “I hope he does come back, Kat. For you.”

Something clicked in her mind. “Not for me.”

Angel opened her palms upwards. “Meaning what? Don’t tell me he’s got a crush on me, I couldn’t –”

“No, no,” Kat said, with an urgency to verbalise the revelation while it loitered in her mind. “Something else! The Kalarash were here for half a million years.”

Angel rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows that, Kat. But Louise told me that Micah searched all the caves, the oceans even. Nothing. Gone, the same as Pierre.”

Kat gave her a quizzical look. “How does Louise know Micah?”

Angel put on her cynical face.

“Oh, I see.” Kat felt her face flush. “Well, anyway. The Kalarash did leave something behind.”

“Besides a few Hohash, you mean?”

Kat nodded, just as pain lanced through her left eye. She cried out, cupping a hand over her face, squeezing both eyes closed. Angel moved toward her.

“Come here, let me see.” She pushed Kat’s hand aside. “Open your eye.”

Kat tried, but couldn’t open the left one.

“Open it!” Angel shouted, her voice sounding odd, distorted.

Through her right eye, Kat saw dark shadows as the boys gathered around them. The pain grew, as if someone was pulling a needle through her eye-ball. “Angel, help me, please! Call an ambulance!” The boys hands reached out, pinned Kat to the sand.

Angel’s voice hardened. “OPEN YOUR EYE!”

Kat squirmed, trying to escape the boys’ grip and the blinding pain; she felt her left eye was boiling inside its socket. Angel’s fingers became talons, trying to tear open Kat’s eyelids, but they were glued shut. Through her other eye she saw the gull circling above, framed against a sky of pure fire. It dropped down, wings fluttering, until just above the boys’ heads. It landed on her chest.

“Get it off me! What the fuck is going on? Angel!” She glanced at Angel, but she was busy clawing at Kat’s left eyelids, teeth bared with the effort. The gull leaned closer, its own blood red eyes peering into Kat’s. One of the boys behind the bird unsheathed a knife, and passed it blade-first to Angel, who loomed closer.

“Now we’ll see what you’re hiding, Katrina.” Angel raised the knife high above her in a closed fist...

Does Qorall get the information? You'll have to wait and see. But in my novels, at least people don't die in dreams. Kat will still get to kick some more ass before this is over.

The greatest potential for dramatic tension with dreams or altered realities in science fiction is when characters are not sure if they are in a dream or reality. But that's for another blog...

This is an excerpt from Eden’s Revenge, in progress, the third and final part of the Eden Trilogy:

The Eden Paradox is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook and Barnes and Noble in ebook, and Waterstones in paperback.

Eden’s Trial is available in ebook on Amazon, currently free for Amazon Prime subscribers for a short period.

Eden's Revenge, the finale, is due out December 2012.

On Writing Groups

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 16:32:00 +0000

For an unpublished writer, writing groups can be an essential process whereby you learn or hone your craft, gaining critical feedback that corrects common mistakes, as well as getting new ideas on how to make your words lift off the page and leave indelible footprints in a reader’s imagination. But they can also be brutal, unfair, and even catastrophic for an inexperienced writer, resulting in a poor or emasculated style, loss of motivation, and giving up that dream of getting published. I’ve been in various groups over the past ten years, and thought I’d share some perceptions (aka opinions) on what is good and bad about them.

I’m going to cover the following:

Why writers need them
How they work
Why and how they go wrong
Different ‘levels’ of writing groups
Alternatives to writing groups

I’m only going to focus on physical (face-to-face) groups, not virtual (online) ones, since I’ve never been involved in the latter, and some or all of what I say below may not apply.

Why writers need them

Not every successful writer has been through the ‘writing group’ process. A few may be talented enough to write brilliant, captivating prose in perfect contemporary English, the first time we set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. But, let’s face it, most of us aren’t that good! It used to be the case that agents and publishing houses would search for raw talent, and then the agent or more likely a publishing house editor would hack it into shape, sometimes remodelling it completely, killing off redundant characters, shifting tense and point of view, deleting certain chapters and demanding new ones. Such a process can radically change the original manuscript. But a lot of publishing houses have lost editors in today’s financially lean, streamlined business processes. They are more than ever looking for a better standard of writing, also because more and more people are writing. So they look for ways to reject work, and what better way than to look for common mistakes, indicative of poor writing?

Writing groups contain writers. There is a key difference between a reader and a writer (or critic or book doctor). A reader will generally tell you whether they liked what you wrote or not. It’s that simple. They might say they loved a particular character, a scene, something witty the heroine said. Alternatively, they might tell you (usually way too politely) it didn’t quite work for them. But they won’t say why they liked it or failed to. The average reader is not going to point out that there were too many point-of-view shifts, that sentence structures were too invariant, language too complex, pace was jagged, characters were ciphers, and similes were clichéd: because they don’t know this meta-language that sits underneath the writing, they haven’t learned the craft. Readers can give you general feedback, and it is important, but only other writers can give you constructive feedback. As a beginning writer, you need to know what you’re doing right, and what you’re doing wrong. Otherwise you are at sea without a compass…

Here’s an abbreviated, composite example from one of my early writing groups, a particularly seminal one etched into my memory, after the other writers present had all read my very first science fiction short story:

“The plot is too clichéd, it will never sell. You may not have read it before, but trust me, this story has been done to death.” [My grip on my sheets of paper tightens.] “You need to read more science fiction if you’re going to publish in this genre. Also, all the sentences start ‘He’. It’s repetitive – read it aloud and see if you can try not to slip into a trance.” [Group laughs, I brave a smile.] “Your dialogue tags are a mess, it’s hard to work out who is speaking, and they sound like comic strip heroes – why are there no women in your story, by the way, and why are they all caucasian with English names, and all heterosexual?” [Other members nod assiduously. I stare at the offending piece in my hand. Was it really that bad? Aren’t I supposed to write what I know?] “However…” [I hold my breath.] “The characters are interesting.” [I dare to look up: a few nods. I sense a lifeline in the offing.] Someone else chips in. “Yes, I agree. I normally hate science fiction, but I found this Blake character interesting; something broken inside him.” [My grip on my pride-and-joy loosens, so I can pick up my pen, write down the possible salvation of three months work.] “So, my advice, take these characters, and change the story. There’s something there.”

The person speaking, by the way, a guest at a week-long writers’ workshop in Paris, was the editor Michael C Curtis of Atlantic Fiction, hence I took every word seriously. Five years later it got published, not as a short story, but as a novel, and writing groups helped me navigate every step of the way.

How they work

Usually they are led by one person and the group as a whole has less than ten people. The more people there are, the less time for each person’s work to be reviewed. Three is an absolute minimum, four to six is a nice number. Each writer sends out a piece of work (usually 2-3000 words in length, 12 point Times New Roman, double-spaced, numbered – getting into such a discipline is important for later, when you start to submit to agents) at least a week before the meeting to give people time to read it and comment on it.

The group leader is usually the most experienced, and ideally is published herself. She (okay, obviously it can be a guy, right?) will say “Let’s start with [insert name]’s piece, and give her overall comments, some good things, some things to work on or change, and then go through it page by page in 5-10 minutes. Others who have read it may chip in if they agree with a point, but generally wait their turn, particularly if they have a different opinion. Here is an important rule, which not all writing groups follow:

The writer says nothing during the feedback process

There are two main reasons for this. First, we are all naturally defensive. We want to say “Ah, that’s not what the character meant/thought.” But the point is, that when it is published, most readers will not pick up the phone and call the author about page 23 where it doesn’t seem to make sense. Rather they will simply put the book down and switch on the television, your book will get poor or no reviews, and your dreams of being a famous writer will get pulped along with the remainders and returns that cannot be sold by the publisher. Second reason is that you have to listen carefully: sometimes feedback is gold, but if we jump into a conversation the feedback may be cut short, and later more important points lost. Most people don’t like giving tough feedback, and will abort if you are defensive, or worse, argumentative about it.

In any case, soon it will be your turn to give feedback, though it often happens that someone whose piece you really liked ‘hated’ yours. It’s good to have alcohol at these groups, to oil the egos, which is why the ones I go to are always in the evenings.

At the end of the review of your work, they will all hand back to you their print-outs with hand-written notes scrawled all over it: ticks, smilies, comments, question marks, words highlighted, entire passages with a line through them, etc.

Now, the hard part: what to do with them. The next morning or whenever you can get back to it, you look through the comments and the notes you made at the meeting. I usually do the small stuff first, the minor edits and typos and grammar, then look at the larger comments, the ones that may mean a lot of work or a total re-write. There are four scenarios:

(a) One or more people made comments or edits that you straightaway agree with, and you have either that ‘Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?’ reaction, or the ‘Hey that’s a great idea!’ reaction. Do the edits.

(b) One person had a problem with your writing which the others did not, and you still don’t. So, give yourself a break, and ignore it.

(c) Two or more people had the same problem with your writing and you don’t agree with it. Tough one. You need to change something, even if you don’t do their proposed correction. Consider taking the changed piece back to the group later on (not straight away, as they will still remember it too well and will need to come at it fresh).

(d) They all have the same problem with your writing, but you know deep inside you they are all terribly, unjustifiably wrong. You may need to change writing group, because maybe they are wrong. But if people in the new one tell you the same thing, accept where the problem really lies.

Why and how they go wrong

If everyone in the group is inexperienced, including the group leader, then it will be a case of ‘blind leading the blind’, and can be a nice social event, but at best won’t be effective in improving your writing, and at worst, because people in such an environment often try to be nice to each other, will reinforce bad styles and habits.

Even if there is a good group leader, things can go wrong, because people often act differently when in groups, depending who is in the group; it’s called group dynamics. As an example, perhaps the leader decides a particular writer needs a bit of a talking to because she keeps making the same mistake and ignoring feedback week after week (it happens), and attacks her piece. Others, who originally might have thought it was okay, can be drawn into the fray, and make their criticism harsher. You can see when this happens by watching if other writers ‘update’ their comments while listening to your piece being critiqued/torn apart. If you are lucky, it’s in a different ink and you can work out what they originally thought and what they later thought. The reverse can happen (the so-called 'halo effect', whereby all get carried away and think your piece is great and you know it isn't really, though is less common).

Sometimes we haven’t made the time to read all the pieces properly, and our comments are superficial, or for example, stating ‘didn’t get this’ or ‘what happened to the gun mentioned on page 4, why wasn’t it fired by the end?’ Maybe it was fired, but we skim-read the text. In this case the writer of the piece will go back and over-write, emphasising (and ruining) text which was fine to begin with. In a good writers group, other writers will call you out and say ‘you didn’t read it, dummie, it’s on page 7!’ and then pass you some more wine. If you’re in this position (and it can happen to anyone), it’s best to say you haven’t had time to read it properly and sit there quietly (passing the wine around).

Another problem is over-editing. Some people will fancy themselves as great editors, and may say ‘Great piece, really liked it,” and then hand you your work buried under a forest of critical comments and lines where they have suggested you delete text. They may have re-written parts for you. Well, take a look, because if nothing else they spent a good deal of time on it, but feel free to ignore the comments. Look for those which sound right. It is your writing. Often if words are crossed out, especially adverbs, it will sound better, and read more smoothly. But moving paragraphs around, blocks of text re-written, etc. – take it with a pinch of salt. If it works, include it, if not, bin it. Don’t just hone your craft, hone your judgement about who makes good criticism of your work: whose comments make it better?

Different levels of writing groups

By now it should be clear that the benefits and hazards are most acute for the beginning writer, who doesn’t know whose judgement to trust, least of all his or her own. Such a writer should not rely solely on the writing group. There are writers’ courses and conferences, and thousands of books on how to write, how to improve in areas such as plotting, dialogue, voice, etc.

There are also different levels of writing groups. Beginners’ groups are there for people to ‘try it out’, to see if it is ‘for them’. They may do short exercises just to get people into the habit of writing anything at all, and discuss concepts such as point of view, voice, dialogue tags, etc. Often people in such groups end up reviewing contemporary texts (best-sellers), or talking about films. In such groups there is almost no criticism, because the group leaders are trying to usher them into the world of writing, and don’t want to scare them off.

The next level of writing’ group is for unpublished writers, and maybe one or two in the group have gotten their first short story published in some obscure magazine, but they all know most of the basics of writing, and can learn from each other whatever else they need to know. This group contains people who have decided they want to be writers, but are not yet sure of their genre or how to break out of short story into novel, for example. This can actually be a really happy time for a writer, because there is a lot of hope and creative exploration. But a lot of work done at this level will remain unpublished, unless it is dusted off later when the craft has been mastered to a sufficient degree.

The third level is more serious, and probably at least some of the people at this level

are already published, maybe writing their second or third book. The craft is well-known by all, and critiques are often at a higher level, e.g. how does this chapter relate to the one we read a month ago? The pace seem wrong, the character has shifted.’ Etc. There will still be small edits and big ones too, and occasionally even good writers will turn in a lousy chapter, but the group is mature, people take criticism on the chin, and then get down to fixing any problems raised.

Of course, there is little point in going to the wrong level of group. A beginner surrounded by honed writers won’t be able to follow the discussion or feedback, and a seasoned author attending a beginners’ group, aside from having a social evening and maybe an ego trip, won’t gain much out of it.

My golden rule for writers’ groups is simple:

Find people whose comments improve your work, and stick with them.

I’ve been attending various writers’ groups for ten years now. About three years ago, one of our favourite group leaders (Jen Dick, a poet, incidentally, and a damned good prose editor), left Paris. Within three months, three of us set up a small group, which now has a membership of six. We don’t have a leader, but we meet on a Sunday night roughly every three weeks, have a meal and some wine in a brasserie near Montparnasse in Paris, and then get down to serious criticism.

Alternatives to writing groups

If this is not for you, or you can’t find a group, there are alternatives. Online groups are popular, though I’ve never tried one. Book doctors also exist (either alone or through literary consultancies) whereby someone (usually a published author) will (for a fee) review your work and tell you how to improve it. It’s not cheap, but you get what you pay for. I usually take my work to a lit consultancy after it has been through the wringer with my fellow trusted writers several times. Courses exist on self-editing, and on almost any aspect of writing, and as previously mentioned, there are books galore on how to write.

But all in all, I’m in favour of writing groups, despite their potential downsides. Writing is a craft, it’s never learned in one go or one crash course, and the learning never stops. It’s best done over time, with good company, good food, and… did I already mention the wine?

Barry Kirwan is author of science fiction novels The Eden Paradox and Eden's Trial, both available on Amazon.

Anatomy of a Book Signing

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 06:48:00 +0000

I've done some book signings recently and thought I'd jot down some observations on how to make them work (and fail), with the benefit of hindsight. I'm going to cover the following ten aspects:

Advertising
Timing
Location
Set-up & 'equipment'
Support
Genre
Customer behaviour
The 'pitch'
Attitude
Expectations, financial and personal

Up front advertising can make a huge difference. Ideally you want to use social media, Facebook and Twitter in particular, the former to get friends there, the latter to get anyone else who might be interested. The bookstore can advertise it on their website, and we (my sister and I) made up posters and flyers and put these up about two weeks before the date; too early and people forget, too late and they have something else to do that day. Two weeks worked for us. Newspaper articles and radio interviews in the same week are excellent ways to advertise an event, unfortunately we didn't get any takers.

We did it on a Saturday, between 10:30am and 4pm, the day after World Book Day. Saturday is good for business, and also there is more chance for support (see later). 'Traffic' dropped off around 1:30 so I grabbed a quick lunch then, and by 4pm it was starting to tail off.

Location was Waterstones in a shopping centre in Camberley, a provincial town 30 miles from London. I did it there because my family is in the area. I did another one in London, and sold twice as many books. But I have to say I enjoyed the Camberley one more, after all, it was where I grew up (I now live just outside of Paris).

The 'set-up' is pretty much all in the picture, with the table in clear view as you entered the shop. 'Equipment' was as follows:

A table and chair
A poster outside the store, inside the store, and in the main adverstising area of the shopping centre
Around 200 A5 flyers on quality paper
Copies of the book in various appealing arrangements on the table
Print-outs of reviews of the book
Business cards of the book(s) showing the front cover with details on the reverse side
Bookmarks for the book based on the front cover
Two nice pens for signing
Coffee
It also helps to have an eye-catching front cover!

Support was mainly my family, particularly my sister, who stood outside the shop with flyers, trying to get people to come inside and take a look. This accounted for about half the sales - the rest were people in the shop who took an interest. The bookstore staff were great, but it was a busy Saturday (nice to see as an author).

My genre is science fiction rather than mainstream. One slight inconsistency was that the science fiction and fantasy section in the bookstore was at the back, and I was at the front, but I don't think that mattered too much in this case. However, it is not the easiest genre to sell, since not everyone likes SF. A couple of people did talk to me about the book, and stated they preferred fantasy. I wasn't going to mislead them, and made it clear that it was SF. Others however, said they liked thrillers, and my book certainly falls into that category, albeit it is a thriller set in 2065, and has SF feel.

Genre is something you have to be clear about in your own mind. Someone asked me if it was Steampunk, and I said no, but that if anything, it had cyberpunk elements (it does, influenced as I was by William Gibson's Neuromancer). It also helps to say which authors it resembles and who my favourite authors are (these are not necessarily the same). But in short, you need to know your own genre and sub-genres, adjacent genres, and other genres. It helps if you are well-read.

Customer behaviour is intersting (well, I'm a psychologist, so what else am I going to say!). Many people would enter the shop and see me sitting there, and then avoid all eye contact. To make it easier on them (and me) I picked up a book by Mike Reynolds (a bit like Lee Child - I was sitting in the 'Crime' section), read a chapter, and then picked up a Philip Kerr novel (better writing, I'd have to say). I'd glance up occassionally, maybe catch someone's eye, smile as if to say 'I don't bite', then carry on reading. Most smiled back.

Most people then carried on their normal business, took a quick glance at the poster, then went ahead to buy the book they came for. Others, however, would drift closer to the desk and maybe pick up the flyer. I'd lower what I was reading, wait a few seconds, and then say something, usually "Do you like science fiction?" If yes, then I'd ask who they liked, and draw comparisons if there were any. If they liked someone I'd read, I could say what my favourite book by that author was. If not, I'd be honest and say I hadn't read that author. They'd then ask me what my book is about, and I'd give them my pitch, which I came up with about six months ago when I had to pitch the book to WHSmith in Paris:

"It's set fifty years in the future, Earth is pretty much an environmental mess, and a new planet is discovered which appears to be perfect. However, the first two missions there fail to return. This book is about the third mission."

I don't think of this pitch as a hook, by the way - it is more the bait on the hook. I'd wait to see what they said, maybe adding 'It's basically a thriller set in the future." Since SF people like trilogies, and most readers want to know if you're a 'one-book wonder' or a serious professional writer (someone worth investing time and money in), they'd often ask if there was another book in the making. I could then show them the card for book 2 (only on ebook at the moment), but could say it was coming out in paperback in September, and that I was currently writing book 3.

People would then look at the back of the book, maybe open and read something inside (mostly not). Then, they'd say something like 'Well, why not," and buy the book, and I'd ask who to dedicate it to, and check how they spelled their name. And I'd genuinely smile, and shake their hand, because as an author these little three minute transactions are important.

About a third who bought it weren't normal SF readers, but liked the look of the book, the fact that it was a thriller, and probably it was also simply the chance to get a signed copy of a book.

Some people politely declined, or said it wasn't their thing. I'd smile and say that's okay (because it is). One guy overheard my pitch to someone else (who declined), and then said "I've never heard of you, but I liked what you just said, so I'm going to buy it for my sister who likes this sort of stuff." Great.

So, my attitude was that I was happy to be there, because I was: it took me years to get published, and my family and friends came to see and support me, and it was a real pleasure to see so many people buying books, and to meet people and make the occasional sale.

In the end we sold fifteen books; not that many, but apparently about average, and not bad for a genre like SF. The bookstore's record was 95. In the London one I sold 30 and would have sold more if I hadn't have run out of stock.

Is it worth it? Financially, no. Posters and flyers cost money, and the profit for say 30 books probably won't cover it, although in the few days following there was a spike in sales via Amazon both for hard copy and ebook, a delayed effect probably due to the flyers distributed. But it can be good for 'word of mouth' after-selling, especially as some people who bought it probably never would have otherwise.

Personally, it was definitely worth it, especially as it was my old home territory. I've always loved books and reading, and bookstores, particularly Waterstones, and it was just nice and down-to-Earth to meet complete strangers and see them get interested in my book, something I miss with Amazon, for example. For me, it has been a final 'right of passage' as a beginning writer.

So, it is often said that writing is ten percent inspiration and ninety per cent perspiration. But the inspiration part is important and necessary. Book signings can be inspirational to an author, not in the sense of generating ideas, but in the sense of being motivational, that what you are doing is real and worth the effort.

I'd like to give a special thanks to my sis, Janice, for making it happen :-)

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback and ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, OmniLit and Ampichellis.

Eden's Trial, the sequel, is available in ebook on Amazon, paperback due out Autumn 2012.

The finale, Eden's Revenge, is due out in ebook Xmas 2012, paperback Spring 2013.

Is Telepathy Possible?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:43:00 +0000

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

How often do we say such things? Especially if we really know someone well, or maybe if we don’t, but we know the situation and human behaviour and can ‘figure’ what the other person has in mind. But that’s not telepathy, right? That’s what most of you reading this are thinking...

I’ve noticed on some science fiction sites a clear distinction between those who accept telepathy in science fiction, and those who do not. The latter deem it implausible, which means there is no scientific basis for it, and so any scifi with telepathy would, to them, be at best fantasy, and at worst sheer rubbish.

But telepathy is an interesting premise. Science fiction is always asking “What if…?” For example: what if my partner/boss/sibling could read my thoughts? What would happen to society? And if we met aliens who could somehow read our thoughts, would they like what they saw, including revulsion at least in some of us at something non-human, as well as fear, because we would know they could see it? Would it bode well during a ‘first contact’ situation?
Unlikely.

My favourite science fiction exploration of telepathy was in the TV series Babylon Five. During one or two of the later seasons there were humans who had evolved with a basic level of telepathy. They were persecuted, seen as a hazard to society, but also used by a ruthless organisation called PsyCorp to try and fathom aliens’ real intentions. The series hinted at an eventual forthcoming war between telepaths and ‘normals’. Since the telepaths were vastly outnumbered, even armed with telepathy, they were likely to be extinguished. An evolutionary dead end...

But there are two fundamental questions not often addressed: how would it actually work, and how would a telepathic society function?

Saying that an alien or advanced human could see inside your mind or read your thoughts is simplistic, and belongs more to fantasy than science fiction. And yet we do often ‘know’ what someone is thinking. What we are actually doing is drawing on a wealth of information and experience. We are predicting; making an educated guess. We all give off little clues about our thoughts in our non-verbal behaviour – ask any poker player, they are always looking for ‘tells’ that could give away whether their opponent is bluffing or not. But mainly we either know someone really well, or we know the situation really well, or both. We’re not always right, and a vast amount of fiction plays on this, where a character believes something about a lover’s intentions, but is mistaken, and we, the reader, know the lover’s true thoughts and feelings, because the author has graciously stated them for us clearly in black and white on the written page (granting us ‘telepathy-by-proxy’).

It’s still not telepathy. But what is thought? At the end of the day, we have a brain, and there are millions of neurons, flashing electronic pulses in particular patterns every second. For decades scientists have been studying ‘brainwaves’ (electroencephalography, or EEG), trying to determine what underlies thought. At best, we can determine overall effects such as arousal, vigilance, etc. Such science is still in its infancy. But what if there was a hyper-intelligent alien who could sense electronic (neuronal) pulses, as well as pheromone responses and ‘galvanic skin response’, for example (I used the latter back in the ‘80s when a psychology under-grad, linking sweat response to fear and arousal reactions during driving scenarios). What if such an alien could also study how we behave, and begin to make correlations? In some senses it still isn’t telepathy, because it is based on inference, not direct ‘reading’ of thoughts, but to many practical purposes, the distinction starts to have less meaning. Such an alien, schooled in human behaviour and able to detect all our physiological responses, would ‘appear’ to be able to see our thoughts.

Notice I’m not proposing humans could do it, because I don’t think we have the right ‘kit’, the right senses, to bring it off. But what if an alien race evolved with such senses built-in, so they could ‘read’ each other, or had some form of ‘collective consciousness’? Then we go back to the next question: how would such a telepathic race function, what would their society look like?

Rather than being evil and manipulative, I think they could be the reverse, a race of pacifists. Why? Well, for a start, they couldn’t lie to each other. There would be no misunderstandings. There would be complete empathy. No wars. No weapons, because the other side (why would there be one?) would see it coming… There might be less passionate love affairs, certainly less adultery… They would be very trusting. And very vulnerable to other species … including us.

I had a go at exploring this in my short story The Sylvian Gambit (originally published in Andromeda Spaceways), wherein humanity meets such a race. How does it go? Let me put it this way: it isn’t a comedy.

In my third book in the Eden Trilogy, called Eden’s Revenge, I’m experimenting with the ‘inferential telepathy’ idea a little more, with several extremely advanced alien races who can predict our basic thought patterns (to them, we are like rats in a maze, and they can work out which route we’ll take to get our cheese). To some extent, so far, I’ve made light of it, imagining for example, how a conversation might run between a human and such creatures.

In the following extract, Pierre, a human, is having a ‘conversation’ with an advanced alien called a Tla Beth, who is an energy creature (the ‘Ice Pick’ referred to below is the name of Pierre’s semi-intelligent space ship). Both the Tla Beth and Pierre are trying to find the almost-extinct mythical race called Kalarash, of which there are only two known to still exist…

Abruptly the transmissions stopped. The Tla Beth’s upper half was almost black, a single white dot in its centre. It spoke to Pierre in a flawless English accent.
"We have located one of the Benefactors, a Kalarash.”
Pierre knew better than to ask where; undoubtedly the information had already been uploaded into the Ice Pick’s nav-mind. The Tla Beth answered his next questions before Pierre had finished forming them.
“The second one. The Tla Beth and Kalarash have an uneasy relationship. Yes.”
Pierre tried to catch up fast, reverse-engineering his questions. The one that left the galaxy, or its mate, who was still somewhere inside the galaxy? [The second one]. Next. Why send us, why don’t you go find the Kalarash? [The Tla Beth and Kalarash have an uneasy relationship]. Next. Is it because of what happened to the Level Eighteen race? [Yes].

The key word in the extract above is ‘before’: the Tla Beth (a ‘Level Seventeen’ race – humans are Level Four) answered Pierre’s questions before he’d finished thinking them. This is therefore highly advanced prediction, based on the context and the Tla Beth’s knowledge of Pierre’s thinking patterns. Again, not strictly telepathy, but close enough, and it makes for interesting ‘dialogue’.

Telepathy isn’t going to feature large in my book, largely because I also find it not that plausible, except perhaps within a single alien race who might have evolved that way, but also because in a science fiction thriller, telepathy can be a real ‘tension-killer’. That’s why I have another character, Ukrull, who is closest to being actually telepathic, and is the quietest, most taciturn personality in the entire series. If he was a blabbermouth, it would stop the reader turning pages, because although we authors let readers experience telepathy by inviting them inside characters’ heads, we can’t afford to let readers see too much. In fact, if one day humanity suddenly became telepathic, I reckon most authors would be out of a job!

The Eden Trilogy is a science fiction series based on a single premise: what if we’re not the smartest kids on the block? In The Eden Paradox we first encounter an alien race, and it doesn’t go well. In Eden’s Trial, we discover that there is a vast alien society elsewhere in the galaxy, with most races far more advanced than us, and humanity struggles to survive. In Eden’s Revenge, the finale, there is a galactic war, and, despite our galactic short-comings, humanity plays a pivotal role, and the future of the entire galaxy will hinge on one man’s decision…

The Eden Paradox is available in paperback (Amazon, Waterstones) and Ebook (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, OmniLit, Ampichellis). Eden’s Trial is currently only available on Amazon Kindle, but will be released in paperback later in 2012. Eden’s Revenge is in progress, due out as an Ebook end of 2012, paperback 2013. For the Sylvian Gambit and related (free) stories, see ‘Stories’ on this website. http://www.barrykirwan.com/.

Writing out of genre

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:29:00 +0000

I write mostly science fiction, but every now and again I try to write something completely different. Why? Aside from the fun side, and the challenge, it improves my 'voice' in my SciFi work. Otherwise, I notice a kind of same-ness starts to creep in, particularly in dialogue. So, I just had published a short story about a secretary having a particularly bad day, with a particularly bad boss. Will she exact revenge? Check it out here.

For me what was interesting was to write from the narrator's point of view in a very different voice from my usual characters. What I am finding in my science fiction writing now is that the women have the most interesting, fresh lines. What's new, eh?

Write like a film

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:39:00 +0000

One of the most frequent comments I get about my books are that they read like a film. My writing wasn’t always that way, though. I remember one of my writing teachers getting everyone in our writing group to draw a piece of equipment I’d described in a chapter. The drawings were completely different. Worse, none of them was what I’d intended.

Since then I worked on it a lot, and also read more SF authors to see how they described new worlds, ships, aliens, and artefacts. Scientists like to use precise measurements, but most readers don’t want to have to do algebra while relaxing with a good book. But basic geometric shapes can be used. Colours are important, but I avoid basic colours (red, green, etc.) and try to add texture. Names can be all-important to help the reader ‘bind’ the information into a conceptual whole, i.e. a picture. Here’s a description of a space ship:

The approaching ship was somewhere between an elongated cone and a javelin, the outer hull laced with metallic scarlet and purple shades rippling from the tip back to the aft section. Its texture reminded him of a moonlit lake, but its sleek lines suggested power, and above all, speed. It was hard to gauge the size, but as it approached Hannah filled them in.

“It’s a Scintarelli Star-piercer, according to the onboard database, Level Eight design, about two hundred meters in length, minimal jump drive, built for inter-stellar non-Transpace flight. Crew complement two, registering as Mannekhi, a Level Five race.”

Micah tore himself away from the screen to face her. ‘Two?’

Note that at the end I try to increase the ‘wonder’ factor by having Micah state the obvious question – why such a long ship for only two people?’ Having characters relate to the item being described (in this case the ship) brings the ship off the page, and avoids the description sounding like a tech-spec document. Note also that he had to tear himself from the screen. This is one cool ship…

Another approach is to give skeletal information and let the reader fill in the gaps. This can be made more interesting by adding suspense or mystery. In the next excerpt, three men are standing on a glass platform in a cave above an underground ocean. One of the men, Rashid, who is blind, can 'see' something in the ocean's depths via a sonar band he wears around his head, called a ‘dolphin’:

Blake had to ask. “So, what exactly is in the ocean?”

Rashid spoke softly. “A ship, like no other we have ever encountered.”

Blake turned to see where Rashid was staring, but only saw the dark sheen of the ocean reflecting from the domed cavern’s glow. “I don’t get it, Rashid – your sonar shouldn’t be able to detect a ship through glass, air and then water. The dolphin’s just not that good.”

Dimitri spoke while turning on a small apparatus lying in the centre of the glass floor. “Yes, Rashid, I am also intrigued. I only found a signal when using the ultra-low frequency scanner.”

“It is breathing,” he replied, “very slowly.”

Blake stared first at him, and then glanced down again through the glass floor.

Dimitri focused instead on the screen illuminating his face in green. “Come, Commander, take a look.”

Blake saw fuzz at first, then a figure emerged. He made out a triangular section like an arrowhead jutting out from a narrow neck, joined to the body of the ship, which was shaped like a semi-circle at the top, tapering down at the bottom. The ship resembled an elongated crossbow, pointing straight upwards out of the ocean.

“Arjuna,” Rashid said quietly, gazing through the floor, since he could not observe two-dimensional displays. “The mythical archer from the Bhagavad Gita. This is a noble ship, if ever there was one to behold.”

Blake read the scale on the scanner. The ship was ten kilometres long.

Arjuna is described as Blake sees it: first he picks out the geometric components, then he uses an allegory, in this case a crossbow. Again, in this case I use Rashid’s Indian heritage to add some mystique to the ship, to ‘bring it off the page’, and then add the scale at the very end to increase the impression.

‘Landfall’ is one of the parts of a Scifi story I always look forward to, when our heroes (or villains) approach a new planet or space station. Here’s one of mine from a chapter entitled ‘Gridfall’:

Grid Station 359 Alpha grew large in front of them on the viewscreen, reminding Micah of a giant sea urchin, hundreds, maybe thousands of electric blue spines stretching out into space, myriad ships docked at the ends. The central hub was lozenge-shaped. Every part of it – and his ‘resident’ told him it was forty kilometres long – glinted dark phosphorescent indigoes and blues. But the hub wasn’t the most impressive item on their viewscreen.

The space-port acted as a node on a ringway, a conduit of sliding colours. Micah recalled as a kid seeing a cuttlefish at the Monterey aquarium, how it changed colours fluently, different shades of browns and greys rippling up and down its surface. Yet this was on a more majestic scale, and wasn’t just about aesthetics. The light show was a side effect of the type of radiation his resident translated as Eosin harmonics, propelling ships around the Grid without the need for fuel. Occasionally a swathe of colour, like the aurora borealis, whip-lashed from the hub to the ringway’s horizon, indicating that another ship had just been catapulted into the Grid network. The ten kilometre diameter conduit lasered into space in both directions from the hub, cutting a bold line across the black tableau of space.

Here I’ve borrowed twice from undersea creatures (sea urchin & cuttlefish), and tried to give the impression of ‘vastness’, and used words like ‘majestic’, and ‘hundreds, maybe thousands’ – implying the viewer can’t count them all and is overwhelmed by how many there are, and the final touch of this huge conduit lasering into space towards infinity, giving the sense of space and distance we look for in ‘space opera’.

Vividness, and visual clarity, must also work on a small scale. Here for example is some ‘encounter gear’ called a ‘shrouder’, designed to protect the wearer and others from potentially lethal microbial infection.

The encounter gear was less cumbersome than he’d imagined, amounting to lightweight self-fitting copper-coloured suits, a matching metallic headband, and two pencil-width booms curving around from the ears to the chin, leaving a gap for the mouth. His resident confirmed the shrouder device was operating, neutralising microbes exiting the mouth and nose, and any foreign flora which might try to enter. Despite a glove-tight fit, he didn’t sweat inside the suit; again, something inside acted on his sweat immediately. So, aside from looking like some cheap, decked-out retro-punk rock band leader, he felt relaxed, at least until he exited the ship.

I’ve not over-complicated it, and left fine details up to the reader’s imagination (e.g. does the copper-coloured suit have a zip? Any emblems? Up to you...). The last part is mildly humorous, because none of us really ever enjoy wearing protective clothing (do we?).

Last for this blog, when describing aliens, I use a light touch, giving outline details, and usually at least part of the alien’s anatomy can be related to something familiar. In the last example below, the alien eels at the end are not intrinsically interesting, until our heroes see what they get up to…

Before them stood a Christmas tree-like array of hemispheres, each about the size of a football stadium. Micah could see ten at any one time as the tree slowly rotated. The tree was in the centre of a vast honeycombed sphere, with thousands of bubbles – more like blisters from this viewpoint – like the one they stood in right now, encircling the tree. He couldn’t see inside any of the others, but the overall effect was a thousand insect eyes gazing on the tree Sandy had aptly christened Babel. Fine opal tubes snaked from the hemispheres to some of the blisters, reminding Micah of a sea anemone’s tendrils waving in the sea currents, hunting plankton.

“Hey, boys, you’ll want to try this,” Sandy said, exuberant again. She had picked up a metal visor from several lying on a shelf, and was studying the habitats.

Micah took one and held it to his eyes. At first nothing happened as he looked towards the tree. Then as he noticed a liquid environment he unconsciously tried to focus, and the image immediately zoomed in, spying various creatures, some like ancient marine dinosaurs on Earth, others squid-like, though none looked like actual fish.

“Infini-vision,” Zack said, “every pilot’s dream! Mil-tech tried to develop this just before the War. It must senses eye muscle movements and amplify accordingly – but this is real smooth!”

Micah found four basic environmental types – air-like, heavy gas, liquid, and dark. The dark ones were opaque to the visors, although Micah thought he saw shadows moving within the blackness.

He focused on one of the air environments, finding a menagerie of alien life-forms, from grey mushroom-shaped creatures whose means of locomotion escaped him, to a quadruped beast with an upper body of a scarlet manta ray. Numerous lime-coloured, diamond-shaped organisms with four rings around them rolled around the alien food market like gyroscopes, the diamonds remaining upright. His resident produced names for the various aliens he saw, but he paid no attention, just feasted on the abundance of forms life had found according to planetary demands and environmental niches. Darwin could have worked here forever.

“Hey, check this out,” Sandy shouted, “fourth level down the tree, last habitat on the right, central section.”

He pulled back from the visor, located the hemisphere, and then re-applied the optical device. At first he couldn’t make it out, but then he saw what she must be referring to. A black eel was lengthening itself impossibly into fractal patterns, in front of a white, straight eel. The white eel began to do the same thing, interlacing and meshing with the black eel. At first the fractal patterns made no sense, even though it was kaleidoscopic to watch, but then he realised that this dance was generating a black and white cube. A number of other alien life-forms had gathered to watch.

Sandy laughed. “Shouldn’t they get a room?”

A few guidelines I use.

The first is that I need to be able to see it clearly in my head, rotate it, see it in light and shade, and see how it moves. It is too easy for me as a writer when writing first draft, to let the words drive the image, that is, to write down text that sounds cool, before I have the actual image. By second draft the image has to solidify and have words driven by the image, not vice versa. By third draft the image is clear and I have foreground and background.

Second, I test all my images with a pool of people, because only then do I find out if it is working. Sometimes people go ‘Huh?’ Then I have to rework it.

Third, I don’t overdo it. This is Scifi (same goes for fantasy), not conventional fiction like Thomas Hardy describing every loving detail of the English countryside. Scifi readers like to exercise their imaginations. I sketch enough visual details to give the reader a ‘handle’ on the image, and let their minds do the rest.

Fourth, I have my characters interact with the environment and relate to it. In today’s economically-obsessed society, I could say I leverage emotional engagement from characters to objects and settings. Or, to put it another way, and as Chekhov (the writer, not Sulu’s pal) might have said, you can describe the pulse pistol sitting on the table with as much detail as you like, but it only gets truly interesting when someone picks it up.

All the above extracts are from Eden's Trial, available on Amazon (currently free with Amazon Prime)

The first book, The Eden Paradox, is also highly visual, and is available from Amazon in ebook and paperback, and Waterstones, UK.

For battle scenes, check out my other blogs tagged 'battle'.

Will book signings become a thing of the past?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:52:00 +0000

I had an interesting discussion with my publisher yesterday about book signings, and it made me wonder if they will become a thing of the past. I hope not. I did one back in October last year and I am doing another one in a couple of weeks, and I think they are a great way to meet readers, some who've come to buy the book, some who haven't but are maybe a little curious, and talk with them.

Of course book signings rarely make any money, after the posters, advertising, selling books with a narrow profit margin, etc. It's even hard to make an 'indirect' business case for them, for example by saying that they will generate new customers who will be more enthusiastic than just buying it off the shelf or from Amazon, and so help get a better base from which to spread the word about a book.

But if they don't make any money, why do them?

Well, many writers aren't actually doing it for money (and let's face it, it's very hard to make a living as a writer these days, unless you're a best-seller). I'm organizing this one in my home town, and my family will be there and they've been supportive throughout. I also plan to organize another one in Paris sometime later this year for the sequel, because I owe so much to the writing community in Paris itself. So, for me, it's about giving something back, and meeting some new people.

Another reason is that it is good for readers - I've been to a few myself and there's just something special about it, and if you have read something by the author, then it can be fascinating to see what the author is actually like. Of course you get a signature and maybe a dedication, which makes the book personal.

It's also good for bookshops, who are struggling to compete with online retailers. This is one thing bookshops can do, and can do well, that Amazon can't. It generates a buzz, and they can sell more books on the day, and not just those of the author present. It can become a social event - for example, mine is science fiction, so maybe some scifi people will come and meet other scifi readers.

Of course the long term threat is ebooks, currently occupying up to 30% of the sales market. I'm not against ebooks, as both my books are in electronic format too. But even as a science fiction author I find it difficult to imagine an electronic book signing event - or maybe I just don't want to.

I can imagine a future where there are no physical books, e.g. 100 years from now. Maybe someone will think of a smart alternative that will replace the book signing event. Until then I'm glad to be around now when an author can still meet readers, sign a book for them, shake their hands, and feel like he or she has done something useful.

The Eden Paradox A fast-paced Scifi thriller that starts with a murder and ends in a threat to Earth's survival. Available on Amazon in paperback and kindle, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones, UK.
Eden's Trial The stunning sequel where humanity enters a hostile galaxy and will be judged on its fitness to survive. Ebook on Amazon, paperback late 2012. CURRENTLY FREE ON AMAZON PRIME.
Eden's Revenge - The trilogy's climax, where the fate of the galaxy will rest in one man's hands - available Ebook end 2012, paperback 2013.

A new brand of terrorism, or an old one?

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:30:00 +0000

Science fiction is often about predicting the future. When I watch the news these days, seeing the riots in Athens, for example, which sadden me tremendously (I love Greece and the Greeks), and how most of us are having to pay the price for mistakes we didn't make, I wonder where all this is headed. There is a saying that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, but where will that end up?

In The Sapper, a free short story (read it here), the place is not Athens, but New Manhattan, several hundred years in the future, where the super-rich live separated from the rest. But one man rebels.

I grew up reading Robin Hood, who 'robbed from the rich and gave to the poor'. The recent film with Justin Timberlake 'In Time' had a similar theme, and although I thought the execution of the film wasn't that great, the premise was interesting. If Robin Hood were around today, would he be branded a terrorist?

The Sapper is a futuristic 'Whodunnit?' (more a 'who's going to do it?'), and is much grittier than Robin Hood or 'In Time'. It includes violence because I fear where we are headed. If the rich continue to cream off our money and then make us dig deeper for more, eventually the situation could become desperate. The terrorist in The Sapper is not some loon or religious fanatic, he's a middle class engineer who's had enough, and so he's more difficult to stop. So, this is a future I never want to see.

If you step back from the 'financial crisis', there are two points I'd like to make. First, the money went somewhere. No aliens came and took it off Earth. We still have plenty of resources, they are not distributed well. Second, the global economic 'business model' has become unstable, particularly in Europe, but elsewhere as well. An alien watching from afar might tell us we need another one, though I've personally no idea what it is. It might of course sort itself out. I hope so.

Ten ingredients I look for in space opera…

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:11:00 +0000

What I enjoy about space opera are the possibilities of life, of surprises – which largely comes down to a ‘sense of wonder’. Something new, not easy in a trope as popular as Scifi. But good authors do it repeatedly, some of my favourites recently being Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space), and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, which I’ve just discovered.

Good space opera gives the reader the feeling that space is impossibly vast, or as Douglas Adams put it, it’s really, really big. This is often achieved by showing how long it takes to get anywhere even if travelling faster than the speed of light, whether the author incorporates Einstein’s relativity complications (like Greg Bear, as in the Anvil of Stars which I’m reading now), or not (I side-step them).

I hope to see new alien races and species that are very different from us (e.g. David Brin’s Uplift), yet still understandable, or at the very least understandably incomprehensible (Peter F Hamilton is very good at this, e.g. Timelike Infinity). If the galaxy is mainly full of us, then the society should have advanced sufficiently for this future ‘us’ to feel a little alien, a great example being Iain Banks’ culture novels.

Love interest can of course be there, but Scifi is not known for being overly romantic, much less bodice-ripping, so these aspects tend to be underplayed, with unrequited love (Banks; Reynolds) being my preference, or sex-without-lust (Bear; McDevitt) taking a back seat (pun unintentional).

A sense of history – that is, mega-history, with ancient races, mythological, often those credited with seeding current races or civilizations. Sometimes all that is left is an artefact which humanity discovers (Greg Bear’s Eon), or Larry Niven’s Ringworld, or even a planet as in Jack McDevitt’s Deepsix. Other times the ship wandering through our system is inhabited by inscrutable aliens (Arthur C Clarke’s Rama series). All of these things give us a sense of how small, but also how young and new we are, compared with how old and advanced or defunct the rest of the galaxy’s inhabitants could be.

Tech is usually obligatory for space opera, and often focuses on mode of communication, transportation, getting high, and avoiding old age. Good Scifi doesn’t dwell on it, though, and treats it as almost mundane, making it more acceptable. After all, this is reasonable – it hasn’t taken long for humanity to take I-Phones for granted.

Big battle-scenes don’t always feature in space opera, but for me they are a helluva bonus. Invariably they link with Tech, and deep plots… Jack Campbell does these really well (e.g Dauntless).

Deep plots and strategy: a galaxy is going to be like an unbelievably complex chessboard, so strategies and plots should be suitably involved, and at the least, not stereotyped.

Fantastic ships: these can either be very large and complex, or sleek and graceful, but they should be cool. Whilst I enjoyed watching the heaps of junk in Firefly lift off, they’re not what I want to read about (Babylon 5 had the coolest ships).

A sprinkling of physics can give you the feeling the writer has some scientific knowledge, though most of us don’t want to read a thesis. What can be interesting is to read about cutting edge science, e.g. dark matter, neutronium, yottawatts, things on the frontier of science.

In my first novel, The Eden Paradox, which was a scifi thriller more than space opera, I only had a few of the above. In the sequel, Eden's Trial, I had eight. So, I’m working on putting all ten into the finale, Eden's Revenge, but please let me know if I’ve missed anything major!

The Eden Paradox, ebook & paperback on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones.
Eden's Trial, ebook on Amazon
Eden's Revenge - coming end 2012

Eden's Trial on Amazon Prime & Eden's Revenge Update

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

First - just to let people know that if any of you reading this have Amazon Prime, Eden's Trial (ebook) is now free for you for a month. It means you can download it for free from Amazon while the offer lasts.

Feedback so far is mixed on the two books: some prefer The Eden Paradox, some Eden's Trial, and the rest just ask me when Eden's Revenge will be coming out :-) Below is an update on progress.

So far I've penned six chapters of book 3 (Eden's Revenge), which is the climax of the trilogy. It's not easy, as I've not yet determined the overall arc of the middle and end of the book, though I know the ending, and who will be left standing.

Part One of the book is called 'Petra', and concerns a new character, a genetically engineered young woman. For fans of The Eden Paradox, Gabriel is back (I had yet another fan ask me for this just today) - well, his son, at least. I am working on deepening the emotional aspect of the book, and also the scifi in terms of space battle scenes (because there is a war going on), but as always keeping it as visual as watching film. I've been reading various authors for inspiration including Jack Campbell, who writes amazingly well on battles whilst keeping the reader interested in emotional subtext. All in all, Eden's Revenge is still not 'hard science fiction'. I want to keep it 'accessible'.

Also I'm developing the alien 'characters', particularly the Level 19 Kalarash, who it turns out have a dark sense of humor (similar to Iain Banks' 'minds' in his Culture novels), and some hostile environments including a malicious forest. But of particular interest are the spiders, whose role in the coming galactic war is hinted at in the closing pages of Eden's Trial. All will be revealed at the end of the book...

Anyway, here's a taster from Chapter 3:

Beneath a lapis sky, Kat dodged between the pine spears raining down on her, each one whistling on its fifty metre descent before puncturing the mossy ground with a dull ‘pfft’, spattering musky soil into the air all around her. Fucking trees! She managed to hurdle a root rising from the spongy undergrowth in front of her, then duck as a branch swung down to head height. Up ahead a clearing invited, but she knew better – the shards of pine, self-sharpening as they tipped off the trees like weighted arrows, would get her for sure if she were out in the open.

Kat ran close to the broad, gnarled trunks; she could imagine snarling faces in the bark’s twisted patterns, but she knew these trees weren’t that intelligent, probably not even self-aware, just damned lethal. As she lingered next to one, trying to catch her breath, a vine curled up her leg. She pulled out her knife and rammed it hard into the tree that reminded her of a giant redwood with a seriously bad attitude. She doubted the trees felt pain, but she needed to make a statement. She yanked her leg out of the coil and worked out her next sprint path, squinting through the forest of branches and leaves descending around her, trying to cocoon her into a shallow grave. A jet engine flared somewhere overhead – another reason to stay under the canopy.

She bolted away from the malevolent fir, rolling on the mossy ground to avoid spiky wooden claws reaching down for her. Just as her head was lifting from the ground, a patch of violet daisies squirted pollen, catching the left side of her face. Pain lanced into her left eyeball. Staggering blind for a moment, a branch from behind connected with her head like a baseball bat and sent her sprawling.

Thick vines lost no time in trapping her ankles. Struggling onto her knees, she fished for her knife and found its sheath empty, the glimmer of her blade out of reach, sinking into the undergrowth as if it was quicksand. She looked upwards: four massive pines loomed overhead, tilting, closing around her. She knew what was next. Considering her options, she decided she had none, other than becoming fertiliser. Sharp cracks above announced that a shower of spears was on its way. She kept her eyes open. Rather than pointlessly placing her hands over her head, she folded them, and held her breath.

to be continued...

The Eden Paradox available in paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Waterstones

Eden's Trial available in ebook from Amazon (free with Amazon Prime), paperback Autumn 2012

Eden's Revenge - due late 2012

See also 'Stories' on this website, for free published stories online.

Eden's Revenge - Prologue

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:01:00 +0000

I'm working on Book 3 of the Eden Trilogy, about six chapters in (out of thirty). Below is the current opening section (Prologue). There are two types of Prologue - those that tell in straightforward exposition what has happened in previous books, and who the characters are; and those that bring the reader into the new book via a story in itself. The first is pure exposition and can be a bit boring (and maybe a bit lazy on the part of the author). The second is more challenging (risky), and so is more interesting for the reader and author alike. Here's an extract from the current version I'm working with, the first page or so:

In the darkness of the inter-galactic void, just outside the Hourglass Galaxy, a ruby gash opened in the fabric of space. The tear widened to a bloodshot eye, an obsidian pupil irising open at its centre. A ship emerged, shaped like an elongated crossbow, metallic hues of aquamarine and scarlet rippling back along its ten kilometre long shaft. The eye blinked and was gone. Space snapped closed as if the portal had never been there.

The ship and its four passengers hung outside the shimmering galactic barrier that billowed like a giant, translucent sail, buffeted by dark energy riptides trying to seep in. The three humans in the arrowhead fore-section stared in awe at the broiling tumble of stars speckled with violet nebulas, the galaxy’s tightening ‘waist’ visible as a brightness that hurt the eyes after nine years inside the trans-galactic shunt. The fourth occupant, Kalaran, was elsewhere and everywhere on the ship, his mind long since melded with its organic-metal physiology. He sent the access codes, but the barrier stayed up.

Kalaran fired the tiny black-hole syringe into the barrier, and it set to work, quiet and invisible for now. He’d designed it himself, and imagined it chewing its way through the barrier’s epidermis, numbing the galactic sheath as it bit deeper, to prevent alarms being raised. He checked that the hollow moon he had hauled all the way from the Silverback Galaxy – which humans called the ‘Milky Way’ – was intact, and remained masked in its null-entropy field. He hoped he wasn’t going to need it, but it was insurance; Kalaran hadn’t come this far for nothing. If he was going to stop the enemy, Qorall, whose troops had already overrun half the Silverback galaxy, he needed an ally, or at least another Kalarash ship, only seven of which existed in the known universe. But he was Level 19, unused to asking for anything, let alone saying “Please.” He was more comfortable with stealth. Yet he’d been contaminated by these humans’ morality, so just this once he would try.

After reaching the age of two and a half billion angts, Kalaran had hoped he was done with arguing. Within a few human days his former colleague arrived at the other side of the barrier, and the onslaught began. Kalaran had at least expected a ‘Hello’. Truth was, when there were only seven of your species left in the entire universe, each in its own adopted galaxy, and all of them leagues ahead of every other registered species, privacy became a premium, and irritability a honed reflex.

He didn’t stop Darkur’s thought-probe interrogating every facet of the ship, including downloading the entire thought structure of the three humans onboard. As if that wasn’t rude enough, Darkur refused to followed protocol and drop the barrier. The Kalarash species weren’t big on reunions, or hospitality. Evidently, a face-to-face meeting was not on the agenda. But Kalaran relaxed – Darkur’s scans failed to detect the moon, which now drifted a couple of hundred thousand kilometres away in the starless void. Darkur – your complacency will be your undoing.

So - how does this work as a Prologue? For the reader who hasn't read books 1 & 2, he or she knows that there is a War in our galaxy, that humans have a role to play, and that there are these superbeings who have pretty cool ships and can travel between the galaxies. The focus is on Kalaran, a 'Level 19' being - which raises the question of what level humans are at - who are probably far more intelligent than we are, but who still have recognisable character traits, despite being ancient. These traits are not unwholesome or aloof, however - we might even get to like this species. Incidentally, when writing this piece I had in mind Iain Banks' culture novels and his 'superminds'.

The new (to Eden) reader should also get an idea of the 'register' of science fiction in the book - not too 'hard' science fiction - most people know what a black hole is, and certainly what a syringe is, and can 'get' the combination when applied to a barrier, and it is very 'visual' writing. For 'hard SF' enthusiasts, there is also enough 'SF-tech' to be interesting, though they will be querying the existence of such a barrier, and the nature of a transgalactic shunt. But in both cases, and for both types of reader, there is enough material to enable the 'suspension of disbelief' for now, and the basic plot intrigue (galactic war) and a 'sympathetic' alien character should keep the reader wanting to read the next page.

For the reader who has read books 1 & 2, this should be an interesting opening, because the Kalarash as a species are an enigma in book 2, and suddenly in book 3's prologue we get to meet one properly. Readers of book 2 know who the three humans are, and will be waiting to see them get involved. But they will also be wondering what is happening to the other characters back in the 'Silverback' galaxy, especially since nine years have passed since the end of Eden's Trial.

As I said, this type of prologue isn't easy to write, but is surely more interesting than straight exposition. More challenging for this author, in any case!

When I'm happy with it I'll post the whole of the Prologue on my website.

The Eden Paradox is available from Amazon in paperback and ebook; paperback also available from Waterstones in UK and WHSmith in Paris
Eden's Trial is available on ebook from Amazon (paperback later in the year)
Eden's Revenge will be out late 2012.

How I write short stories - beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:54:00 +0000

People ask me how I write stories, so here's a Scifi one I'm working on. Like all short stories it should have a fresh, catchy first line, one that grabs the reader's attention, sets the tone and tells the reader what it's about. So, it starts like this.

First Contact hadn’t been a problem; fifth was catastrophic.

Like it? It's about an invasion, but not the normal run of the mill type. But it is aggressive. First I show it as seen externally:

The Krilleyan ships decelerated so hard from faster-than-light speed as they reached the solar system that they triggered massive EM spikes. Ninety-eight per cent of Solar and planetary defence techware was fried in less than a second. By the time Pluto Delta’s detection grid had relayed the inbound swarm, the first of the five thousand starfish-shaped ships had already breached Earth’s atmosphere. Orbital missile stations, the few that had the latest EM-proof bioware borrowed from a friendlier species, had no chance to lock target. At least one general ordered panic-fire; the last order he gave, as one of the inbounds edged its descent vector, the kinetic impact obliterating the station while leaving the starfish unscathed.

So, the writing will be smoothed out later, but I'm happy with the name (Krilleya), and there's enough peppering of SF words in there (bioware, faster-than light) to set a SF tone, but not so much that it seems like 'hard' Science Fiction. I use imagery that people can imagine easily (starfish-shaped craft). But on the first page I also want to introduce the protagonist, and make the invasion more palpable, which I do in the next paragraph:

At ground level, Salak couldn’t run for the grinding pain from the screeching hailstorm of ships. Kneeling, hands plastered over his ears to escape the crushing din, he raised his head just enough to see the coral-coloured ships as they tore through the sky, pink and black whorls trailing behind them. They didn’t seem interested in braking. He staggered to his feet, just as three mil jets, in what must surely have been a suicide chase, fired on one of them. Flames billowed on one of its fingers, stretched behind it like a ragged flag, and were left behind. It pummelled into San Francisco Bay, the jets following it, and with horror he realized what was coming next.

The name Salak is a bit 'Vulcan', but it's easy enough on the mental tongue. The main senses here are sound and vision. We've slipped into Salak's point of view, though it could still be the narrator's, but the key sentence that begins to set the tone of Salak's personality is 'They didn't seem interested in braking.' This will become important later, because his state of mind is what resolves the story later on. The end of the para is a challenge to the reader - what does he realize is coming next?

He turned and ran through the crowd behind him, sprinting up San Fran’s notorious stepped lanes, dodging the stalled cars and dazed people. The concrete underneath him shook, knocking him off his feet. It was hard to hear people’s screams above the hammering bass shock waves that segued into a sizzling hiss as four more ships struck the water. A friend, Sarah, stood nearby, willow-like, transfixed, watching the show. He shouted to her but his voice sounded muted in his ears, just as he saw blood trickling from hers. Salak touched his own lobes and felt the wetness there, too. He grabbed her by the shoulders, but she didn’t react, didn’t see him. At first he pulled her by the wrist, but she was dead weight, so he picked her up in a fireman’s lift and ran again, trying to take two steps at a time. As his hearing failed, each ship’s impact sounded like a distant gunshot, and then stopped; no more ships. He kept running, and didn’t turn around, didn’t need to. Each time he passed somebody he saw their eyes grow wider; some fell down in panic, and he felt bad that he couldn’t stop to help them, but it was just him and Sarah now. A sound of thunder – more like a feeling in his bones – grew behind him, and the afternoon city was plunged into shade by the wave about to engulf it. Salak stared ahead, focused on the steps, careful not to fall, and ran as fast as his legs could carry them, always upwards.

So, from here on it stays with Salak. I've introduced Sarah, a more normal contemporary name which together with 'Salak' gives the impression this is in the future but not so far, and Sarah is a possible future love interest, or counterpoint. Salak is set up as a sympathetic character, but also pragmatic - he knows he can save Sarah, but if he tries to save any more, he'll save no one; yet still he feels guilt. But also he acts, focusing on one simple thing, climbing to beat the tsunami wave.

From here there is a section break and the story shifts to several days later, having mentioned Salak's background - he is in the new exo-diplomatic corps, an alien comms expert - when mankind tries to retaliate. I skip a few paragraphs ahead, to where the ships have settled to the bottom of the oceans:

But the ships just sat there. That was fine with the Generals, except that none of their weapons managed to damage or dent the starfish hulls. Salak and others the world over tried to communicate with the ships, even using dolphin proto-language and whale-song, and the four new alien dialects, but silence was the only response.

Inevitably, the US President took the tactical lead and agreed to deploy a nuke against a cluster of the ships deep in the Solomon Trench – the Solomon Islands had long since acceded to global warming. It worked, one of the ships was damaged, three of its five fingers broken off and melted, the central husk smashed and scorched.

The reprisal was terrible. Within thirty minutes, tsunamis occurred at fifty coastal locations worldwide. Severe weather patterns erupted worldwide: cyclones, hurricanes, floods, and three days of black cloud obscured the sun and plunged Earth into darkness.

There were no more tac-nuke strikes.

And so the ships just sat there, inert.

Except they weren’t, of course. They were incubating. On the first full moon, almost a month after their arrival, billions of Krilleya larvae left their egg-ships and headed upwards.

That's the set-up of the story. Hopefully, if you've got this far, you'd want to know more. The story's working title at the moment is Diplomatic Solution, and it takes a few different angles on conventional themes like invasion, what an alien race might want from Earth, the difficulties of communication when there is no common frame of reference, and how far diplomacy might go for the sake of peace.

What I've shown here is second draft, and it will be about draft six by the time I send it anywhere. In any case, it will end up in my 'Stories' section of this website sometime this year. Stay tuned...

The Eden Paradox is available on Amazon in paperback and ebook

Eden's Trial is available on Amazon in ebook

Edens Revenge is coming end 2012...

Waterstones Book launch event, Camberley, Surrey, UK, 3rd March

noreply@blogger.com (Barry) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:55:00 +0000

First 'official' book launch at a bookshop in my home town (more or less) is scheduled for Saturday March 3rd at Waterstones at 11am. Hope some of you reading this can make it, even if you already have the book, would be nice to meet some (more) of my readers!