ŷ������

Something that has always intrigued me
since growing up watching Star Trek is subspace. According to the pundits this
is either TV chicanery to avoid the problems of communication across light
years of distance, or else it has some credibility from a quantum physics
perspective, and might exist either as a dimension or an intra-dimensional
realm (fitting beneath our physical reality). Related concepts are wormholes,
warp (faster-than-light or FTL) travel, and hyperspace. Since the galaxy is very big,
any Scifi TV series, film, or book inevitably has to decide how to tackle the
problems of travelling or communicating over vast distances whilst maintaining
a comprehensible narrative. If only Einstein had penned some science fiction��








In the cult series Babylon Five, hyperspace
is visualized as a place of shifting oranges and blacks (nice visuals,
actually), and in the Stargate TV series a similar approach is used
(vortex-like visuals). In books it is often less clear. Orson Scott Card’s
Ender series made use of an Ansible, whereby communication could take place
without any time dilation effects. Stephen Baxter in his book Timelike Infinity
describes what it looks like to enter a wormhole. There have also been plenty
of attempts at visualising what it would be like to approach a black hole, with
time dilation and distortion effects on the way in to the event horizon or the
‘accretion disk��. Star Trek Deep Space Nine had aliens living inside a
wormhole, which I thought was pretty interesting, although I personally found the visualization
of the wormhole interior completely unconvincing.




I remember asking someone what you would
see if flying at fast than-light-speed, and he replied that you would see
nothing as there would be no perceptible time at that speed, you would just
emerge at the other end of your trip or wormhole. But I’m a visual writer, so I
like to imagine that something could be seen, even if not by us. Would it be
like Star Trek with stars whizzing past, or should they be at least blue and
red-shifted as according to Einstein? In my first book, The Eden Paradox , I
cheated a bit and waxed lyrical, so that the pilot, Zack, saw




‘pin pricks of ice cold light sliding past
with a glacial grace��.  




Later in the book, when humans discover FTL
by stealing an alien ship, this is what it feels like to enter it:




Vince strode back to the main console and slammed the ankh key into the
recess. As he did so, everything froze and became mercurial. Shades of silver
tinged every facet of the equipment, every line and crack of every face, the
eyes, the pores, all their clothes and every surface. He had the feeling that
they were outside of time while the universe moved beneath them, or rather
moved outside the ship.

He didn’t breathe �� it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but his brain told
him it would be a very bad idea.




And (a later chapter) this is what it feels like to exit:          





Jennifer sucked air
into her aching lungs. The fear of breathing in liquid vanished, or, rather,
was overcome by the desperate need to inhale anything. Despite a faint
sensation of vapour entering her lungs, which she decided was probably
psychosomatic, the dread of drowning in liquid mercury proved erroneous. Even
so, she bent forward to regain her breath. She heard coughing down below.

            Within two minutes Dimitri swept
into the control room along with several other technicians, half of them still
dressed in their sleepwear.

            ‘How long?�� she croaked in Dimitri’s
direction. He looked at his chronometer, and shook his head. ‘According to my
watch, no time has passed, but we cannot rely on anything mechanical, since all
movement froze. I had the definite sense of suspension of time, like being
encased in glass. My thoughts simply paused. A fascinating sensation!��









In my second book, ������’s Trial , which is
more ‘space opera��, I used the concept of Transpace for FTL travel, and true to
my advisors, there is no perception of time by humans or most aliens in
Transpace. However, I bend this rule for the Hohash, an alien artefact left
behind by a super-race millions of years ago. It can move and think during
Transpatial journeys, even while everything around it is frozen. Incidentally,
humans normally puke after such journeys. Like some good wines, we don’t always
travel well.




In my upcoming third book ������’s Revenge  the possibility of inhabiting subspace is hinted at more
strongly, with an alien race called the Shrell
who can shift into subspace. These are creatures who tend subspace, because too
many jaunts through Transpace can bruise or tear the fabric of space, resulting
in rifts where FTL becomes impossible or hazardous. China Mieville’s book
Embassytown is the most fascinating I have read on FTL, with its completely
novel concept of the ‘immer��, which few can tolerate if conscious.




In ������’s Revenge the Shrell are
blackmailed into poisoning a large sector of space around a human-inhabited
planet, which will prevent the human refugees from escaping. But it will cost
the Shrell dear to do so:




The Shrell leader Genaspa, at the front of
six phalanxes of her most trusted warriors, stared ahead with all six eyes
through the eddies of Transpace to the Quintara sector, where the spider world
lay. She already knew all the details, but wasn’t going to miss an opportunity
to train her protégé, Nasjana.

            She
thought-directed “Tell, what you see, what you propose.��

            Nasjana
shifted up a gear, flapping her long wings faster, and moved forward from her
phalanx of fifty, her Second taking her place. She drew alongside and slightly
behind Genaspa. “I see the one-mooned Katha-class planet whose natives call Ourshiwann
and the humans call Esperia. I see two other planets, one closer in to its
Giver and so too hot to sustain life, the other further out and so too cold, a
thin asteroid belt from a former planet, and the ice-scratch of a past comet
with a return cycle of two thousand years. I propose standard treatment: three
opposing pairs at right angles to the Giver, twenty light minutes apart before
we commence the cross-run.��

            Genaspa
sent a sinusoidal frisson down her right wing, a sign of approval.

            Nasjana
did not return to her team.

            “You
have a question?��

            Nasjana
dropped slightly behind. “I have a doubt.��

            Genaspa’s
wings took on a more rigid motion. She’d been expecting this from at least one
of her team leaders, though not Nasjana, her Second. Or maybe, she reflected,
that was why she had chosen her as Second.

“T�����.��

“Where you lead
I follow. What you tell, I do, we all do. But this�� We only poison space when
absolutely necessary, to avoid rift expansion.��

�������Ჹ�Բ�’s
thought stream had come out fast, urgent, and Genaspa realised Nasjana was
worried. But they were short on time. They must be ready, in formation, in
every sense of that word.

“Tell true,
Second.�� She had to wait a full flap-beat for the response.

“Why do we
follow the orders of Qorall? He has brought �� the Xenshra inside the galaxy,
those despicable worms. I fear we will never get them out. And Qorall has
caused more space damage than in recorded Grid history.��

It was a good
question, but not the whole reason Nasjana must be daring to doubt her First’s
judgement.

“Tell deeper.
������.��

Nasjana wings
trembled, slowing her slightly until with an effort she caught up. “My
husbands. I fear many will perish today.��

Genaspa forced
herself to concentrate on the flight, to keep it steady. A First must always be
sure, never wavering. Tell true, she had instructed, and yet she had not told
her team leaders the whole truth. None of the husbands would survive the day.
She and three hundred Shrell would enter the system, she and fifty would
return, all female...







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




������’s Trial is available (ebook) on  with a paperback version due out later this year.




������’s Revenge will be coming out Xmas
2012.

One of the great joys of reading science
fiction is the worlds writers create. Sometimes I remember these long after I
have forgotten the intricacies of the plot or the caprices of the characters,
whether Frank �����������’s dunes of Arrakis or oceans of Caladan, Greg Bear’s
shifting landscape of Eon, Larry Niven’s daunting Ringworld, or Jack McDevitt’s
precarious planet Deepsix.




True world-building, whether science
fiction as above, or fantasy (e.g. Lord of the Rings, or its more contemporary
companion Harry Potter, or the more recent Game of Thrones), takes years of
conception and crafting, building not only an environment, but a culture that
fits that environment.




This is where books can go further than
film or television series. The latter in particular (obviously due to budgetary
reasons), from Star Trek to Stargate, are often let down by having many
episodes shot in a familiar Earth-bound setting, from scrub-land to desert to
forest. Fantasy is similar, hankering back to an undefined ‘Middle Ages��
environment of lords and ladies, knights and peasants. Perhaps this is why the
film Avatar was so successful �� probably anyone who has seen it will remember
the alien forests and the floating islands �� the film had a visionary director
and sufficient budget and computer graphics capability to transport us, for a
couple of hours, to another realm. I’m hoping Prometheus (seeing it next week)
will do the same.




As an author, I don’t spend years on this
aspect. But I do like to experiment with potential worlds, sometimes at the
limits of possibility, to try and make the reader think “hey, that could be
interesting��. Here's a short extract from Eden's Trial , where Pierre has just arrived in orbit around the Ossyrian homeworld.








Pierre’s quicksilver eyes gazed through the
space-portal. The pearl-coloured home world of Ossyria Prime, the Galactic home
of medicine, grew larger. It appeared as if it had been cut into a dozen
horizontal slices, then re-assembled. Each section turned at a different pace,
creating a hypnotic effect. He saw no large masses of water: he’d gathered from
the Omskrat orb �� his handy Ossyrian encyclopedia �� that water was largely
underground, and only occasionally precipitated in precise locations via
environmental control satellites. It took him back to a forgotten childhood ��
it was the most beautiful marble he could ever have imagined.






Here’s another one I’m working on now for my third book in the Eden
Paradox Trilogy, ������’s Revenge . Some rather advanced aliens wanted privacy, so
built their home somewhere unusual and well-hidden, or at the least, pretty inaccessible to lesser species... 




In many respects it was the inverse of a
Dyson Sphere. Humanity had long ago conceived the idea of constructing a sphere
of immense diameter around a small star, creating a self-contained world within
the Dyson shell, with effectively infinite energy supply. The Tla Beth had gone
one stage further and built a home inside a sun �� well, a supernova to be
precise. Pierre looked upwards towards the reflective shield, indigo in colour,
shading the inner asteroid-sized planet in permanent twilight. He had no idea
how it worked, but as a defence it was ingenious; even star-breaker weapons
were unpredictable against a supernova, and nova bombs would be a self-evident
waste of time and energy.

            The
ground was smooth granite. With each step its marbled blues and greys swirled,
as if the floor was alive, reacting to him. He guessed what it meant. The
entire surface was receptive, recording and processing everything. Ukrull had
once told Pierre that the highest intelligence was pure perception; apparently
the Tla Beth placed a high value on data and information.

            He’d
expected a grand city. The Tla Beth were legendary in Grid Culture, and also
mysterious, leading to many fables and artistic renditions of a fantastic
crystal metropolis in golden skies where they might live. But after an hour of
walking, something he relished after being cooped up in the Ice Pick for
months, he had seen no structures whatsoever. Ukrull filled him in.

            “Tla
Beth energy creatures. Ephemeral. Self-sustaining. Entire planet tech. Makers.
If need, supply. Power no problem here,�� he said, flicking a claw skywards.

            Pierre
did the rest of the math: the ‘planet�� must have an inner core of exotic
matter, so the ‘makers�� could fabricate anything �� ships, weapons. It could
then shrink as the matter was converted, and local gravity would be updated.
No, he thought, the Tla Beth themselves were probably tolerant to massive
gravitic shifts �� it wouldn’t matter to them. He gazed down at the whorls
around his feet and understood. The flooring was creating local gravity for him
and Ukrull. It represented yet another defence mechanism against uninvited
invaders.







My only rule for exotic worlds is that they
have to be at least feasible (The Tla Beth are an ancient race with incredible
technical prowess, and exist largely in energy form). Such a world would not be
favoured by so-called ‘mundane science fiction��, which prefers not to speculate
beyond what today’s understanding of physics would tolerate. Not sure Einstein
would have agreed with such blinkering, and as a reader I like to have the
bounds of my imagination stretched. The other rule is that there has to be an
implicit relationship between a world and the people or aliens who live there.
In my short story The Sapper, essentially a crime mystery, events unfold on a
floating island above old Manhattan. The mechanics of this sky city are not
dwelt upon in the story, other than engines are referred to. What I do mix into
the story is that only the extremely rich live on these islands �� which are
being systematically brought down by a terrorist (hence the title of the story:
a sapper is an military engineer who brings down buildings, bridges, etc.).
What the reader ‘gets�� is that it takes fantastic resources to keep the islands
afloat, and that in this unspecified Earth future, the divide between rich and
poor (living down below in awful post-war conditions) is far more polarised
than today. This gives the piece (and the reader) a ‘social rationality��, even
if the physics aren’t explained. The only other rule is to have evocative
writing which is highly visual. Here’s an excerpt from the opening of The
Sapper, as the Inspector, who doesn’t realise his own life is in jeopardy,
arrives for the first time at one of the sky cities targeted by the sapper.






Chief Inspector Alexei Gregorovich sat in
the copter, absently stroking the antique fob watch that never left his side,
passed down from his great grandfather. The two-man craft hovered still as a humming
bird, awaiting docking clearance. He leaned forward until his brow touched the
cool glass window, and stared down at New Manhattan Island, one of ten fabled
sky cities.

Like most people
down below, Alexei had never seen one in real life before. Poised just above
the cloud layer, it really looked like an island. Synthetic vines straggled
over the terrace’s edge like seaweed, drooping into the sea of water vapour.
Azure swimming pools, each covered with a transparent pressurised blister,
glittered near the island’s edge. Closer in, four steel towers guarded the
central tetra-glass pyramid. The island hung motionless and serene, three
kilometres above ground level, directly over old Manhattan, which never saw
sunlight. He tried not to think about the power requirements keeping it
floating there, when down below brownouts occurred almost every evening.

The powerful,
the rich and the beautiful lived in sky cities, where there were no mutations;
a rad-free zone. And this one would all come crashing down in the next hour
unless he stopped the terrorist known as the Sapper, nicknamed after the quaint
term for an engineer who undermines buildings. The Sapper had downed two
islands in the past month.

            Alexei
spotted two stealth drones buzzing like honey bees around the island complex.
He glanced upwards, knowing geostationary satellites armed with lasers could
take out any missiles fired at the island. The perma-cloud below concealed
automated and fully-armed fogships, always listening, probing with their radar.
God help anyone who ascended above base level without the proper security
codes.




For the (free) full story of The Sapper, published
in Piker Press in 2011, click .






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




������’s Trial is available from in
ebook format, with the paperback version due to be released by publishers
Summertime in the Autumn.




������’s Revenge is due out Xmas 2012.

On May 22nd The Eden Paradox gets featured on Kindle Nation Daily, so I decided to dust off my very first blog back in early 2011, and update it as to what lies behind the concept of the Eden Trilogy, and why I wrote the novels. I can sum it up in four questions:




1. Why haven't we met alien life yet?

2. When we do, will aliens be friendly or hostile?

3. Will they be smarter than us?

4. Will we survive the experience?




I've always loved Science Fiction, and I'd intended to write another SF novel called The Games, but got caught up in a short story that featured a four man crew landing on Eden, and managing to upset an indigenous alien species they didn't even know was there, and getting killed in the process. I took it to a workshop in Paris in summer 2006, headed by Michael C Curtis (fiction editor of Atlantic Fiction). Some people hated the story, some loved it, but they all liked the characters, and Michael advised keeping the characters and changing the story. That's what I did...






I read up on Fermi's paradox - why, if there are logically many habitable planets in the galaxy, haven't we encountered serious evidence of extraterrestrial visitors? Several obvious answers - the galaxy is really vast, so nobody's found us yet; they found us but we're not interesting; the galaxy is very old, and civilisations may have come and gone and we might be in a 'dead patch'; etc.




So, I figured, what if there is civilisation, but it is very far away, and we're not that exciting a prospect, except that an alien life form has gotten interested in us. What are the chances they are friendly? And if they're not friendly, could we puny humans do them any damage? Well, yes, I thought, because the laws of physics suggest that nuclear weapons and possibly nanotech invasion would be nasty for most (corporeal) organisms, no matter how far advanced. So how would they avoid these? Inside help, I thought, and there I had the makings of a story which has ended up a trilogy.






As I worked on it, and particularly as I got into the second book ( Eden's Trial ), I got more and more interested in alien intelligence, how different and more advanced it could be - not easy to conceptualise, obviously, but worth some effort. Why would it be more advanced? Well, if you think about galactic timescales and traveling distances, and times for any alien society to rise, mature, stagnate and fall, chances are even that there will be species some millions of years ahead of us on the evolutionary scale. So, Star Trek, where humans are pretty much top dog, is a nice idea, but...




The Eden Saga isn't just about aliens and space ships; far from it. It's about humanity, and what could happen if we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a far superior civilisation - would we cope? Could we adapt fast enough? To me these are important questions, because the answers reveal things about ourselves, and because one day, as we see further into the galaxy, we'll find something, or something will find us. Then it won't be fiction anymore. I believe we should think ahead...




It has been immense fun, and sales have ticked along with the occasional spike and foray into the top 10 SciFi ebooks on Amazon, and some great feedback both from Scifi enthusiasts and non-SF readers alike, which keeps me going as I plough ahead with the finale, Eden's Revenge . I won't say too much about it, other than that even if humanity isn't the smartest kid on the alien 'block', we're going to play a pivotal role in a war which could end all life in our galaxy. At the start of the series, in The Eden Paradox , almost no alien races have heard of us. By the end of Eden's Revenge, that's definitely going to change. 




So, the answers to the above questions, according to the books are:




1. We already have, a long time ago, and they're due back

2. Mainly hostile or at best utilitarian; altruism is not that common an alien value

3. Mostly, some by a long way

4. Well, for this one, you have to read the books...




The Eden Paradox is available as paperback and ebook on , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis, and Waterstones UK




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




Eden's Revenge is due out in ebook format for Xmas 2012

A couple of weeks ago one of my ebooks
(������’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
������’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: ������’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, ������’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 , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones (UK).




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




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

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
���dz���ٳ󾱲Բ�.��


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, ������’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 , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis
and Waterstones.




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




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

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, ������’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
�����ٳܲ��پ��DzԲ�.��

            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, ������’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 , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones UK.




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




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

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 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 '' on the Stories part of my website if you're not sure...



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



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



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

The second book in the Eden Trilogy, Eden's Trial, is now free for just three days from - 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.

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.



[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 , Barnes & Noble, Ampichellis and Waterstones.

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 ���������DZ�’s Foundation, �����������’s Dune, or ����������’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
(������’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 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 , 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 , Barnes & Noble, Amichellis, and Waterstones.




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




Eden's Revenge due out Xmas 2012




Free short stories (Scifi & Fiction) online .