The AFICTIONADO® Blog

Yay!  The Lucky Starman is now available on Amazon.  This is the third adventure of Leif the Lucky.  It has a gorgeous cover from Alejandro Colucci that creates some dissonance with the title.  There’s a reason for that.  Leif finds himself stranded in orbit, viewing a destroyed civilization on Earth through the screens of a starship that is running out of food and fuel.  Is Leif really Lucky?  He could be forgiven for doubting it at that particular moment.  Find out what happens next in the book.

Of course, having published The Lucky Starman, my first thought was to move on to writing the next book.  After all, that’s what a writer does.  But no.  There is so much more involved with launching a book today and that’s what I’m busy with now.  The difference from eight years ago when I started self-publishing as an indie is enormous.  When I get past that, yes, it will be back to writing.  Next up will be the fourth Leif the Lucky book.

Before that, I’ll be at Boskone in Boston.  Hope to see lots of you there.

Well, Murder Under Another Sun has been released on Amazon.  A combination of “Yay!” and “Whew!”  Hard science fiction with a murder mystery and a bit of nasty pharmacology.  This is the sequel to Starman’s Saga and it’s the first time I’ve written a sequel.  It’s looking like, in fact, that it’s going to be a series since I’m still writing about Leif.  I’ve always enjoyed getting to the point in writing a story where it feels as though the characters are dictating how the story goes.  Here, I’ve become quite entangled with Leif.  The universe isn’t done with him.  So, I’ll see where he takes me next.

With the book out, though, I can look forward to Worldcon.  This is happening in Chicago, Sept 1 – 5 and the schedule is pretty firmed up at this point.  I will be on several panels: “Terraforming and Alien Life”, “We’re Here for a Good Time *and* a Long Time” (about creating long-lived species), “One Hero To Save Them All”, “Medical Trauma in Science Fiction and Historical Fantasy”, and “How ‘Hard’ Can It Be?” (about what we call hard science fiction and how close to science it comes).  This should be a lot of fun and it’s a good time to be in Chicago.  Hope to see lots of folks there.

It has been a while since I posted – quite a while – and, yes, there is a reason for that.  First, the audiobook for Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally is now available from Audible.  Went live yesterday.  The narration by Cassandra Parker is terrific!

So, there has been a stretch where I have been involved with launching Saoirse on her adventures, trying to finish up a new novel for the fall (title soon!), and beginning the draft on a new adventure for Leif from Starman’s Saga.  I’ve never written a sequel or a series before.  Clearly, everything in a second book has to match, or be compatible, with corresponding points in the previous book.  What has made this an interesting journey are the differences between the world I built for Saoirse and the one Leif inhabits.  The treatment of AI and the possibility of implanted chips, for two quick examples, are very different.  That leaves me feeling like I need to physically wrench my mind out of one universe in order to work the other.  And in the middle of this, I have the other story, which is set in a non-technological universe.  It’s been interesting and it certainly has kept me away from posting.

More updates on theses projects soon, I hope.  There will be the title for the next story.  And I am expecting Leif to set sail again in mid-2022, although I’m hesitant to be to specific this early.

Looking back, it has been a while since the last post and it’s been a busy time.  Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally is featured in this week’s Book Club Babble (www.bookclubbabble.com) with an interview of me.  Do check it out!  Also, Complicated is now available in paperback for those, like me, who like to have a physical book in hand.

Boskone 58 has happened and that was a terrific convention.  There are clearly some advantages to having the conventions online.  Folks can join from anywhere in the globe (and did) and you don’t have to worry about airline tickets or hotel rooms.  The result is – I think – much greater attendance.  In addition, I thought the panels were great.  Lot’s of good discussion and good people on them.  I do miss the ability to meet people I don’t know in the hallway and have a conversation, but the way this convention was run had plenty of compensation for that.  Kudos to the Boskone staff!

As I mentioned in that interview, I’m also in the midst of organizing 350 pages of hand-written scenes and notes into a coherent draft for the next book.  I find I work best putting ideas down initially with pen and paper.  Probably because this is the way I grew up and I think with a pen in hand.  That pile of paper then is typed into a Word document and the revising and editing takes place with a digital file.  My guess is that this will be ready around the beginning of 2022, but it’s hard to be sure at this point.  Characters have a way of asserting themselves and changing the way the story is going and I can never tell in advance about that.  No title to put up yet.

The new book is out!  Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally is now available on Amazon both as an e-book for purchase and on Kindle Unlimited.  I am working at getting a paperback version out but that has been delayed by some logistical issues.  Hopefully, it will not take too long.  An audiobook will follow, although that will probably be in the spring.  One thing that trying to make all the pieces fit together does is provide an appreciation of why publishing timelines are so long.  If you want everything to line up so that e–book, paperback, audiobook, reviews etc all hit the finish line together, that finish line winds up down the road a bit.  For example, you can’t do the cover for a paperback or hardcover until you know the thickness of the spine, and you don’t know that until you have the final page count, which means it won’t be ready as fast as an e-book.  In the end, I opted for getting the e-book out as soon as it was ready, knowing other versions would trail.  I’m not sure there is a right or wrong answer here, but I will apologize if you want the physical book in your hand and I will get it to you as soon as possible.

On top of this, Boskone 58 will be here Friday.  Should be a great convention and I hope to see a lot of folks there.

Boskone 58 is coming!

Join me at Boskone February 12 – 14, 2021. This year the convention will be online, so it is easy to join one of the best science fiction and fantasy conventions anywhere. This will be a fun weekend filled with discussions of books, science, art, games, music, and more. Check out the Boskone website at http://www.boskone.org/

The full program book should be out tomorrow.  In the meantime, panels I will be on will be: 1) Bizarre Biotech, Friday Feb 12th; 2) Medical Science in Speculative Fiction, Saturday, Feb 13th; 3) Writing About Fighting, Sunday, Feb 14th; 4) Coping With COVID Sunday, Feb 14th.

See you there!

First post of the new year and, hopefully, bringing to a conclusion a lot of work from last year.  First, Accidental Warrior: The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal is now out as an audiobook.  You can find Hal’s story in audio on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.  This has been a while coming but I hope you will agree that it’s been worth it when you listen to it.  Narrator Alex Freeman, who also narrated Starman’s Saga, did a terrific job with this.

On a not quite there note, Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally looks headed for an early February release with the e-book ahead of the paperback.  There will be an audiobook as well, but this will be in the spring.  Too many things happened in 2020 and, in the end, it has led to a bit of a delay.

On the reading side, I’d like to mention The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow.  This, on the surface, the story of three sisters trying to reclaim the power of witchcraft in an alternate history where witchcraft is real, but has been suppressed by men.  Instead of the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, the whole city (along with its inhabitants) had been burned down and a New Salem built.  On a deeper level, the book can be read as an allegory about gender and racial inequality and is blunt about the issues of violence against women.  Given the events we have witnessed in the real world in 2020, it is both topical and timely.  The author’s prose is enjoyable, a pleasure to read.  My one concern with it is that too many things and places have elaborately described scents.  A little too much olfaction.  The characters are well described and distinctive.  Each of the sisters has a particular role to play and their desires and actions fit the characters.  The plot moves along smoothly with intensity building gradually.  A minor issue for me was that the book starts with a focus on the women’s suffrage movement, but that mostly fades away and seems little more than a plot device later on.  The one point I really did not like was a major twist that comes in late (and would be a spoiler if I go into it).  Suffice to say that I have a problem when a main character abruptly takes an action that does not fit who the character is and one that has significant ramifications.  That put a dent in my enjoyment of what was, otherwise, a very good read.

How should teenagers speak?  Okay, that’s a loaded question.  Let’s re-state the question: how should teenagers speak in the book that you’re reading (or writing)? Should they should sound like they just stepped out of a twenty-first century American high school? Or, especially if the book is a fantasy, should they be using the same, often archaic or formal, phrasing that characters frequently use in fantasies that have an old-time (say medieval) setting? I don’t think there is a single good answer to this one. I have seen reviewers praise a book in which the teenage characters use much less formal – even high schoolish – speech even though the setting of the book is far removed from our current society or world. However, that does not necessarily feel right to me. Through much of our history, a male or female was considered adult when they were physically mature enough to handle adult roles (and even before). What we consider adolescence didn’t really exist and I doubt that people in that age group in say the 17th century used their own slang or manner of informal speech. Karl XII of Sweden assumed full power at 15 and led the army in battle as a teen. I imagine his speech was no different than that of other adults. At the same time, of course, if the setting of the book is in the near future or in a society at a comparable level to ours, then, yes, adolescence and distinctive language patterns make sense. Whichever is chosen, though, I think consistency through the book is important.

What started me on this was reading “A Wizard’s Guide To Defensive Baking” by T. Kingfisher.  The main character is Mona, a 14 year old girl with very limited magical powers who works in a bakery.  Essentially, her ability to work magic is limited to doing things with bread. Despite this limitation, a string of very unfortunate events (starting with Mona finding a dead girl on the floor of the bakery when she opens up one morning) leaves Mona as the key person to the defence of her city. The story is fun and moves fast. I liked the characters of Mona and her even younger sidekick, Spindle.  They seemed like real kids, somewhat short-term in focus and not always given to the best decision-making. There were a few things I didn’t care for. Bob, Mona’s magic sourdough starter, is a disappointment.  I was expecting more from the character. Also the language seemed to veer, occasionally, from what seemed to fit the setting to modern teen American. These are minor concerns. In her note at the end, the author indicates that she had received some feedback during the writing that the book was too dark for children. I don’t agree. I would call the book YA and I would have no concern about having my kids read it. (Good grief, we read “Lord of The Flies” when I was in those grades!) I think it would be fine for middle-grade, too, at least for a child who can handle the length of the book. Spindle falls into that age category, which would provide a character to relate to.

Handwavium.  What is it and why do reviewers excoriate writers over it?  Well, handwavium in science fiction is when an author writes about a scientifically impossible idea without attempting to create a basis for it; essentially, the author says, “It is because it is.”  This seems to come up mostly regarding starflight or FTL (faster than light) travel when the author doesn’t try to create some basis for its existence.  Instead, the characters just jump into their spaceship and fly around the galaxy. Of course, the problem with giving a plausible form of starflight is that we can’t come close to doing it in reality.  The Bussard ramjet, first published back in 1960, provided a concept for reaching relativistic speeds without impossible amounts of propellant and was the foundation for Poul Anderson’s famous Tau Zero. Even though the original proton-proton reaction won’t do the trick, the nuclear catalytic ramjet idea published in the 1970’s might. But you still have to go fast enough to light the ramjet. I’ve seen that published as 6% the speed of light in texts on propulsion.  Figuring a means of propulsion to get to that speed is also a problem (it’s the amount of propellant that is astronomical). There are concepts for propellant-less drives, so maybe that’s one way to go. Trying to go FTL is even more speculative. There are publications about wormholes but, unless there are pre-existing ones we could find (and haven’t so far), making them seems to imply a need for negative mass.  The Aclubierre “warp drive” concept has been published by physicist Miguel Aclubierre but I think this also needs negative mass (this is based on what I’ve read, I cannot handle the math involved).  End of the day, using any of the approaches that have some grounding in science as the basis for a star drive is going to leave the author waving his hands at some point and saying, “You just gotta believe it!” (I suppose you could wave a wand just as easily, but then we’d call it fantasy.) What I find interesting is that people will come down hard on books that don’t provide some background for starflight but don’t do so on books that have characters, for example, who have their nervous systems re-wired to provide lightning fast reflexes or other super-human traits. One is every bit as much handwavium as the other. Where I am going to go with this is that I think we, as readers, need to decide what is our personal comfort zone for suspending disbelief. If we need some sort of rationale that at least starts from known physics or medicine or biology then those are the books we will enjoy and we should avoid ones that don’t. If we are willing to simply take it as a given that we can fly to Tau Ceti in a week as long as the characters and the plot are good, then that should be fine, too, because no matter how much science we try to build in, at some point we have to suspend disbelief. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too (that would violate conservation of matter …)

The audiobook for Accidental Warrior is completed and off to QA at ACX!  I’m hoping this process won’t take more than a few weeks but, with everything else that has been upended during this pandemic, I’m keeping my fingers crossed.  In the meantime, it’s back to working on getting Complicated finished and ready for publication.  That is now looking like January.  Was hoping/planning for before Christmas, but it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen.  And while that’s going on, I need to find time to write on a new project.  It’s all fun, though …

One topic that comes up frequently is how to write about something you haven’t experienced directly.  The answer – to me anyway – is research.  I have seen people write – and heard them declaim – that you can’t write a story about war if you weren’t in the military, can’t write a spy story if you never did that, can’t write about medicine if you’re not a doc and on and on.  I think there is a kernel of truth here.  Direct personal experience can inform your writing and it should help make it more vivid.  Could Tolstoy have written the way he did about Austerlitz or Borodino if he had not served in the Crimean War?  Still, careful research can allow a writer to describe scenes they have not seen.  It has to be that way.  There is no writer currently living who has experienced a nineteenth century battle or a clash of medieval knights.  In the same way, being a doctor today is not going to allow a writer to invent a medicine-based scene in a story set in a world at the level of the middle ages.  You need to do your research.  Granted, the more direct experience you have, the easier it is to do the research and reach a good result, but you have to do that work and, if you do it, I do not think you need to start off by being an expert.

For recent reading, I would like to mention Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu.  This is a fascinating book.  Mars has revolted against Earth and won its war of independence forty years before the book opens.  Hard feelings, tension and the potential for renewed conflict remain.  The two planets have very different social, philosophical and political structures.  Earth is presented as individualism and capitalism taken to an extreme (maybe gone amok) while Mars is shown – initially – as close to a socialist ideal.  The story focuses on a group of Martian teenagers sent to Earth for their high school years – the ultimate in foreign exchange students.  As the book proceeds, the author develops both the good and bad sides of the structures of Earth and Mars in contrast to the simplistic views that many of the characters hold (and are presented at the beginning).  This evolution is shown through the views and experiences of the students who undergo a profound culture shock, both in adapting to Earth and on returning to Mars.  This is done very realistically and is like the experience of many students today who study in other countries during their high school years (also for college students who do this and folks who work as expats, but I think the impact is greater when one is younger).  This book is really about social and political structures and the philosophy that goes with them.  It brings to mind, for example, works of Ayn Rand (although the political perspective is very different!).  The use of glass as a building material on Mars made me first think of We by Zamyatin, but in Vagabonds a good scientific and engineering reason is given for its use.  It is important to realize before starting in on this big book that it is not action-based, there are no battles.  While there is a little adventure, there is not much and readers looking for that will be disappointed.  This is an intense book about people, the way they perceive their lives and the social structures they live in.  There are a few interesting items that may be a function of translation.  The government of Mars is the “Boule”, an old Greek civic structure.  This seems to work well for the way the government is described, but the head of the Boule is the “consul” which comes from the Roman Republic and Empire and feels a little jarring.  More difficult is the use of the word “atelier” to define what feels like guilds or collective organizations.  I would love to know about possible alternative translations for the Chinese word used in the original and why Mr. Liu chose “atelier”.  Overall, I found this an excellent book and definitely worth reading.