Recently I went on holiday. I needed a
break. A friend of mine says life is like breathing: you have to breathe in
occasionally. What he means, applied to writing, is that you must read as well.
I’d been slogging away on the most recent manuscript for Edens Revenge, and had
just sent it off to an editor/reviewer, so I decided to go off-grid for ten
days. The only electronic gadget I took with me was my toothbrush. No
smart-phone, no laptop, no IPad. I took six books with me and managed to finish
three and start a fourth (I'm not that slow a reader; there was other stuff to do on the holiday, LOL).
I started by reading two in parallel. Jack
McDevitt’s Firebird, and Ben Bova’s guide for Scifi writers. Since one was
fiction and the other non-fiction, they didn’t interfere with each other in my
head.
I picked Jack to go on holiday with me because I’d had a comment
from a reader of my first two books that I write like him. I wish. I’d read
Deepsix, and loved it. It is a brilliant example of people in a hazardous
environment, getting picked off one by one on a planet in self-destruct mode,
as successive rescue attempts try to save some of them. Jack’s not afraid to kill
off excellent characters, and knows how to make the reader root for otherwise unlikeable characters. The people you meet in this book are truly
‘dimensional’, real flesh and blood; I can still conjure up six of them with
ease, two years after having read it.
Firebird is a quite different setting,
somewhere in humanity’s future, where life is relatively easy-going. This
suited my holiday-mode. The story is mystery, about a physicist who disappeared
forty-one years earlier. The physicist was into ‘multispheres’, i.e. the idea
of parallel universes. This is called ‘slipstream’ scifi, and it’s not
something I’m personally ‘into’, but I wanted to see how Jack tackled it.
The writing is very fluid, smooth, and it’s
an easy read. The main character is Alex Benedict, but the point of view is from Chase,
his partner, who is someone most readers would want to know and have as a
friend. However, I’ll be honest, after 70 pages, I was still wanting some
action, and thought about switching to another book. I wanted to see the end,
so I jumped to the last thirty pages and read them non-stop. I couldn’t put it
down. When I finished the Epilogue, there were tears in my eyes. I had a beer,
and went back to page 71 and started where I left off. Sure enough it ramped up
shortly after that and I read and enjoyed the book despite knowing exactly how
it ended. I read all the way to the end and the Epilogue still had the same
emotional impact as when I’d read it a few days earlier. Bravo, Jack.
There’s not much ‘slipstream’ in it, much
to my relief. What impressed me was the way he can introduce ‘walk-in,
walk-off’ characters in a couple of lines and really ‘nail’ them for the
reader. As with Deepsix, Jack understands human nature and is skilful at
depicting not so much the dark side of people, but rather the depressingly grey
aspects of some of us; in particular, what happened to one of the characters is
sad but all too likely, a kind of passive murder. But the ending is uplifting.
Although Ben Bova’s book is relatively old
now and science has moved on, most of what is between the covers holds
true. It was nice to get certain facts straightened out in my head, e.g. the difference
between a quasar and a pulsar; or between white, red and brown dwarf stars; definitions from a Parsec to Perihelion; etc. The main feeling it impressed upon me was just
how impossibly big the galaxy is, and how unimaginably powerful stars are.
Scifi on film always gives the impression that space is small and manageable,
but the facts prove very different.
Ben has a great style for making
‘knowledge-dump’ fun, and I enjoyed every page of it. I’m not sure how much of
it will enter my writing, but hopefully it will stop me from writing some
‘boo-boos’ in my own science fiction. Funnily enough, the last book I started
reading (still reading it) is Consider Phlebas, the first of the Culture novels
by Iain Banks. The writing, as always, is sublime. However, early on, the main
character makes an observation that a Culture ship could hit an enemy vessel a
trillion kilometres away. Having just read Ben’s book, this stopped me. A
trillion? Really? Isn’t that like several light-days distant? Having just read
that Earth is one AU (Astronomical Unit) from the sun, equal to 149 million
kilometres, and Pluto is 39 AU or roughly 6 billion kilometres away... So, it
would be like shooting from the sun at an object 160 times further away than
Pluto. When you factor in time-dilation effects and the fact that everything is
moving anyway (the galaxy rotates), well, that is some pretty impressive
shooting. In my books I limit my battle distances to a couple of million
kilometres, so it is a matter of hitting a target less than a light minute
away, which I still consider to be extremely advanced, given the power requirements
to do any damage to an enemy ship, and given likely target acquisition
capability. Here’s a brief excerpt from forthcoming Eden’s Revenge, for example:
Blake was about to ask when the Transpar,
Zack, broke in. “We are not alone. A Q’Roth warship, range two million
kilometres, stealth mode. I cannot yet tell the vessel’s class.”
“Marcus,
relay it to Gabriel now!”
Marcus
stuttered the message in Hremsta as fast as he could.
“Blake,
this is Micah. We aren’t picking up any vessel other than yours.”
Blake
frowned. Since when did Micah speak
Hremsta? “Micah, Zack’s at the controls, patched into the Hunter’s sensor
arrays. I don’t doubt him – if he says it’s there, it’s there.”

“Roger.”
He turned to watch Zack’s crystal fingers blur over the controls.
Marcus nodded.
“Co-ordinates sent.”
Blake was thrown
sideways out of his chair as their ship lurched to one side. He clawed his way
back, struggling against the G-force of intense acceleration, noting that
Marcus had managed to stay with his console. “Report,” he barked.
The Transpar
responded with its cool, tinkling voice. “The warship fired on us and the Ossyrian
pyramid-ship, too. We took minor damage, and I am executing a fractal defence
pattern so they cannot get a fix on us. The inertial dampers will protect you
now – my first evasive manoeuvre was a little extreme.”
Blake regained
his chair. “Show me the Ossyrian vessel, split screen.”
The pyramid spun
slowly, punched by pulse beams from the warship. Stealth mode had failed, and
the pyramid hung like a spinning sapphire in space, bleeding gas and occupants into the void. Hell’s teeth! How could
they detect and target it so accurately from so far away?
Anyway, Iain Banks knows megatons more than
I do about Scifi, LOL.
The third book I read was The Illustrated
Man by Ray Bradbury, a classic. The intro where a stranger meets the illustrated
man is captivating. Bradbury has a very concise, hard-hitting style that
thrusts you into the moment, and the concept is enthralling. I then read some
of the ‘stories’ that are the essence of the man’s tattoos. I found them enticing
but also dispiriting; his view of human nature is not exactly optimistic, this
set of stories tending towards the bleak. I didn’t much like the one about the
witches and novelists, as it was more fantasy, but read the others. I just
needed a drink after the last one.
By the end of the holiday I had settled
into Banks’ sure-footed style and depiction of a war between two
mega-civilisations, with his own brand of ‘gnarly’ humour. I’ve already read
about half the Culture novels, so it is about time I read this one.
I have to say it was pleasant being
off-grid for 10 days: no sms, phone calls, emails, facebook, goodreads,
twitter, or checking the latest sales figures on Amazon or how many people are
reading my blog posts (sad but true). And it was very nice to immerse myself in other people’s
writing and, after a while, stop thinking “that that’s a cool turn of phrase, I
should borrow it,” or “that’s a cool way to describe
people/asteroids/whatever,” and just enjoy reading. By the end of the holiday I
could tell I’d relaxed, as I had to ask someone what day it was.
Now I'm waiting for the report on Eden's Revenge, the official one, and those from five separate readers. I hope to finish Consider Phlebas before then, as once the reports arrive I'll probably disappear into an editing black hole...
Now I'm waiting for the report on Eden's Revenge, the official one, and those from five separate readers. I hope to finish Consider Phlebas before then, as once the reports arrive I'll probably disappear into an editing black hole...
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