Posting Elsewhere

Briefly, here's a link to a post I wrote on the blog of a writer named Jade Kerrion. The post, like my recent one here, is about writing 'in the shadow of Star Wars'.

The Science Fiction that Kids Love

Not that I'm an authority on what children love about sci-fi adventure, but it's one of those global phenomena that bears closer inspection. My main sources of data are my two sons, aged 7 and 9, who have been Star Wars(r)  fans for as long as they could lisp 'Pew, pew!' and wave a piece of Duplo Lego (r) .

Yes, it has a lot to do with those annoying little  (r) symbols - the commercialisation of playtime. But look at it through the child's eyes without so much cynicism: 'It's so cooool! I am only a fairly small person, but here I am swept into a huge adventure where giant-sized heroes and villains battle it out - and in space! With loud laser bolts, huge spaceships and stuff.'

A scene from the latest epic the boys and I are producing: "Too Many Droids" !!

But is it so different from swords and dragons? Is it actually 'science' fiction at all?

There is still quite a element of futurity, of techy stuff, even in Star Wars which is so notorious for unscience. (eg. Han Solo has this unfortunate line shoved in his mouth when boasting about his ship's speed, something like: 'She's the only ship to have done the Kessel Run in under 3 parsecs.')  I've ended up chatting with the boys about androids, light-years, fusion, and all that, because the words are sprinkled into Star Wars the same way I heedlessly fling oregano over everything I cook. Good science fiction is a kind of innoculation against future-shock. So when they're teenagers or in their 20s and riding in driverless cars and living perhaps through the AI singularity and so on, they'll tell each other, 'We knew about all this when we were little!' And perhaps the future won't be such a scary place to live.

As I write for mid-grade and YA, I have felt a certain amount of responsibility how I make the story world and set my characters romping into orbit. Some of us adults may feel that technology is nibbling away at our humanity, or twisting it into new and frightening shapes, but I don't feel a compulsion to paint it that way in my story. So I ease off on the half-human, half-robotic cyborgs; I let the people pilot their spacecraft even though computers are already doing a better job than most of us could do, here in the 21st century.

I think I can see something! It's a...

A great deal of good science fiction is about looking ahead. For the future to be a good place to live, where people still care for each other, we have to make good choices now - we as voters, as consumers who buy so much electronic stuff, as scientists - and we need to encourage our kids towards better choices. Often in our family this includes saying 'no'. There are so, so many dark places out there in the catacombs and battlefields of kids' SF. Just see the games on sale, the movies some watch. To create something brighter, to pass a flaming torch of inspiration into their eager hands, that's what I want to do. But to do that I need to keep feeding my soul on the light. You can't give people what you don't have.

Blog Etiquette

Perhaps blogs have been left behind in the dust of Facebook and Twitter, those children of brevity and (often but not always) shallowness, but I think not. I think there are many people out on the cyberavenues who are glad to dally long enough to read a blog post, perhaps actually think about something meaningful, before passing onwards to the next click.

If you still value blogs and other forms of more solid content on the internet, then hear my plea! Cultivate us bloggers! Here are a few ways you can do that.

• Leave Comments! This could easily be points one, two and three, but I'll spare you that artless form of emphasis. Even if you say nothing but 'Hi!' it will encourage a writer to keep on crafting words for you. If you find a thought-provoking post, be the first to comment - perhaps you'll start a lively debate!
• If you disagree or dislike what the blogger is saying, then go ahead and tell them... but use at least the same tact and consideration you would if talking face-to-face with someone you respect.
• Mention good posts elsewhere. Spread the good stuff around! Just copy the link from the address bar, and paste it into your next Facebook thing. Or if you Twitter, look up 'bitly', a useful site (one of many, I suspect) which allows you to post greatly shortened web addresses into a Tweet, thereby saving you characters.
• Most of all, treat everyone you meet on the internet as real people! Think about it.

Bye for now... I have to go and say 'goodnight' to two younger 'real people' of my own!

Content to craft?

If ever you grow good enough at something to feel like you've made it, think again. This is the sort of warning I hope you will echo back to me one day when I've reached a higher level of writing. I certainly have no room for complacency.

In fact, I've recently started a job in which I become a trainee, knowing very little, rubbing shoulders with the experts, spending most of my days nodding while others speak pearls of technical wisdom... feeling smaller than I'd like to. And this is at age 47. 

But that's fine. Computer Service Manager - in - training is a good place to be. It is a full-time job, though, so that my writing is reduced to a couple of hours every few evenings. This could discourage me, but I think that work is a great environment in which to gather more story material.


Have you found Randy Ingermanson's Advanced Fiction Writing site yet? It's not hard to find online. One beginner lesson of his that I read reduces the process of writing to this outline of a writer's prime requirements:

1. Content
2. Craft
3. Connections.

At work I can soak up more Content: this is the life-lesson and real-life character material that you pick up by meeting people, doing new things, failing, labouring, making decisions, and so on. You know: real life. Then I aim to keep improving my Craft and Connections in my spare time.

But don't hold your breath waiting for my next book...

Next in the series...

So Ghost Brigades was a pretty good read, all in all, and now I'm on to the next in the series, The Last Colony, but it's not the last! I discovered a fourth book, Zoe's Tale, about one character from the last two books.

The Last Colony  is less about war, and more about the struggles of ordinary people trying to make a new life for themselves on a remote alien world, despite the machinations and secret plots of their own government and the threat of being wiped out by alien attack. It reminded me strongly of Allen Steele's excellent Coyote series, especially when (==small spoiler==) John Perry and Jane Sagan go sprinting off into the forest to rescue some of their colonists from ... whatever creatures are out there... I almost expected a boid to jump out at them!

It contains all the great plotting and wit you expect from Scalzi; the  (==small spoiler==) convenient box of tricks that Hickory and Dickory turn up with looks like a little bit of a rushed job - there might have been other ways to rescue the colony from that attack that weren't so much of a rabbit-out-of-hat, but I'd have a hard job inventing one that runs smoothly. Really I'm just mentioning this so that I have something to comment on. Makes me feel a little less intimidated as I write my own stuff. 

As for the Big Ideas behind the writing, I'll have to post about that another time. Got a few things to do now... bye.

John Scalzi's ... Ghost Brigades

One thing I liked straight away about this book is that I found it in hardback in the library - always gives a book more depth and character - and the next thing was the cover art. I like! I like it in a boyish way, with a little of the same wow! gosh! factor of walking away from first seeing Star Wars on a big screen at age... ten? twelve? The cover has a space battle above a planet, anyway. Pretty generic, but it sets the scene. Inside back jacket tells me the artist's name is John Harris. Let me look him up... Aha. I see that he's illustrated for the likes of Allen Steele and Jack McDevitt, both of whom I've been reading in the past few months.

But onto the story. John Scalzi is a joker, which I learned from following him on Twitter. Read the opening of Ghost Brigades and you'll see an example... let me say no more. It was a neat trick, well pulled off. So far, I can see that JS is staying true to the war-in-space genre of the first in the series, Old Man's War (see my last post), expertly imagining future technology, alien technology, interstellar genocidal warfare, and what that might do to the human (and other) people who get caught up in the military mincing machine. This last part, the human story, is the only reason I would read the whole thing. What happens to people who live and breathe the disciplined and controlled application of deadly violence?

The world we live in is over-militarised, and I grew up in a town neighbouring one in which 'squaddies', ordinary soldiers that is, are trained, barracked and sent out to do our government's bidding, to do their dirty work. And from the few times I met those young, beer-inclined, very physical men, I've wondered what chance they ever had of enjoying a normal human life, if there is such a thing. They're trained to be tough, ruthless and to obey their commanding officers. Civilians stay in their comforable homes and feel horrified at the innocents being bombed, sometimes at the expense of their own tax money; meanwhile, the frontline soldiers often feel that they're paying the price for those civilians' comfort. There's something screwed up here; perhaps you can enlighten me and tell me why one group of people are turned into killers so while the rest of us rest easy and veg out in front of TV.

Governments maintain armies to keep hold of their status and economic position, not essentially to keep you and me in beer and Pringles. (Is this turning into a rant? I'll stop here) So thankyou Mr Scalzi for making me think a little. If your series is intended, in part, to be a mediation on the present state of affairs, I'd better keep reading until the end of Book Three to appreciate the fulness of your thoughts.

John Scalzi's Old Man's War

Did you ever read 'Starship Trooper' by Robert Heinlein? It was fun as a teenager to read. Starships (obviously), space marines with jet packs, laser guns, lots of battles. Then I thought, hey, the 'Skinnies' and the 'Bugs' that the trooper fights don't get much mercy. Aren't they kind of people too? Does this breed or reflect a kind of contempt for the 'collateral damage' and civilian casualties in the wars waged by the Western world on those so-called 'hot-beds of terrorism'? The debate over this novel was long. Heinlein was talking about the need to cultivate a citizen's willingness to serve his or her country.

Along came John Scalzi, and in his debut novel published in 2005, 'Old Man's War', tackles the same subject with a number of major twists and updates. I saw it in the public library and snatched it up - JS is one smart writer. I haven't reached the full expose of what's going on in his world, but it does look like he's asking the questions I had - Does waging war deface the warrior's humanity? Is it enough to say 'Violence is human!' or, 'It's necessary - we gotta defend ourselves' ?

It's a well-told story, with well-imagined characters, but liberally peppered with blood, gore and post-human stuff. Maybe I'll let you know what I think when I've finished it.