Beyond Writing a Science Fiction Novel…

Some nice things can happen when you’ve got a contact with a publisher to have your cherished novel published for the multiverse to enjoy. As you already know, my second novel, A Truth Beyond Full, is under contract to be published by Elsewhen Press. It’s likely to be out later this year in the autumn.

When I first received the contract to be signed, there was to me this strange clause about Elsewhen wishing to promote the sale of ancillary rights to my novel – audio, braille, film, TV serialisation etc. My reaction? Given the experience of so many authors I know, I went ‘yeah, right, in a month of Sundays’. It is one of those clauses I never expected to be invoked, but it would not do me any harm. So I signed the contract.

Roll on a few months… Elsewhen Press had an exciting announcement. They had signed a retainer contract with a company called Pendragon Works. They will examine the list of books Elsewhen Press have or are publishing with a view to seeing what their potential is for selling film or TV series rights. Once they choose a novel that is likely to sell, Pendragon Works will pull together a pack to send round the film and TV companies.

Roll on to last night…. Elsewhen Press kindly set up a zoom meeting with Troy and Omar at Pendragon Works so they could help us understand what they are trying to do. Of course I did my ‘sit in the corner and observe and listen closely’ act.

Some interesting snippets came out of the comments…. like doing a film of a horror novel is more likely than doing one for the other speculative genres because the designing and building the sets is likely to be much cheaper. … Getting a novel into film or TV series sounds very much like a buyers’ market to me in that it’s good to have an intro pack ready in case your type of novel is asked for. … Have an elevator pitch or log line to hand about your novel, just in case you find yourself being unexpectedly asked for it. There was more, much more, but all a good introduction.

One thing I found heartening from the zoom meeting was Pendragon Works saying that they were impressed by the standard and variety of novels Elsewhen Press had on offer. It makes me feel very privileged to have had a novel accepted by them.

As to whether they’ll take A Truth Beyond Full on to promote to the film industry? Let’s just say from what Pendragon Works said, the odds are currently very much against it given its contents. All I’m going to say about that is what is already on the Elsewhen Press’s website:

A Truth Beyond Full is set in a mining colony on Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus. It will be published by Elsewhen Press in 2024.

In the Depths of the Solar System a Revolution is Starting…

I consider the outer Solar System to be my science fictional playground. It’s in that lovely state of being somewhat familiar to Earthers and have enough unknowns to develop super-fascinating ideas to write about. But of course the concern is and always will be that the science will overtake the fiction. You can bet I keep a close watch on any new discoveries going on out there…

First up is the moons the Uranus. Its five largest are Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda. My Uranus novel is set on Miranda. So you can imagine my heart sink down to the Earth’s core when I saw the title, Four Moons Circling Uranus May Be Sopping Wet (link here). You bet I raced my fingers over the keyboard to open the article and read it.

Fortunately the moons concerned are the four largest and not Miranda, which I depict as an ice and rock moon with the appropriate liquid reservoirs (but not water or watery solutions of any kind). Phew! Novel is safe. That was the first thought. And second thought was… my intuition must’ve been working overtime when I started writing that novel!

Meanwhile the New Horizons probe that went whizzing past Pluto and continues on its outward journey from the Sun has its mission funded until 2024. There is an ongoing debate about a further mission extension. NASA is having budgeting problems for various reasons. The proposal has been received to stop the Kuiper Belt exploration part of the mission and concentrate on astrophysics and heliocentric physics. From out in the Kuiper Belt? This does not make sense, particularly as New Horizons will only be in the Belt for another few years and there is no follow-on Kuiper Belt mission planned, or even one that gets close to it. There are a lot unhappy people about this. For more detail, see this link.

The James Webb Telescope took this lovely picture of Uranus in the infra-red spectrum last month (thanks to NASA for this image). Looks like something very interesting is going on in the polar region. I suspect there will more to come on this.

Of course NASA wants to send a mission to the planet. Whether they can find the funding for it is entirely another matter. But there is one thing Uranus does have in its favour – the gravity at the outer edge of the planet is roughly the same as Earth’s. It means if fusion using Helium 3 ever becomes feasible, then you can bet there will mining of the precious gas along its outer edge of the atmosphere. And it will be comfortable for us Earthers too! Yes after Ganymede, this will become the go-to planet. (Mars is further down the pecking order in terms of desirability!)

What does this all mean for science fiction? That is apart from me disagreeing about where best to set up new colonies in the Solar System.

Basically there’s going to be a lot of new stories needed to deal with the latest discoveries about what is going on out there.

Uranus Bound?

As every schoolchild knows, Uranus is the seventh planet of our Solar System. And it sure is an oddball! It’s tilted on its side, has one set of closer moons in orbit around its equator and another set further out whose orbits are aligned to the Sun’s elliptical plane. The further moons are captured moons.

It was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 from his back garden at 19 New Kings Street, Bath (now a museum dedicated to the Herschels). While observations from Earth have improved over time, it was only ever visited by one single proble, Voyager 2 in January 1986. And that was only a brief fly-by.

Photo taken by Voyager 2 on its Flyby

One thing for certain is that it is nightmare working out what the days, nights and seasons are on the moons and even the planet itself, especially if you’re writing science fiction about it. Fortunately for me, most of my action took place underground, which made my life much simpler.

But Uranus has been in the news recently. An influential panel of scientists have recommended in its decal review that NASA should make visiting the planet a priority. There is a launch window in 2031/2 that could take advantage of a slingshot manoeuvre using Jupiter.

Why the interest? Because we understand so little about planet formation of planets of this size. Yes, we understand how gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn can develop, and also how rocky planets like the inner four of our Solar System (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars). But Uranus’ and Neptune’s developmental path remain a mystery. Understanding that better would then help us understand our stellar neighbourhood much better – and we all know where that can lead!

For further details, link to Uranus article here.

When it comes to science fiction, Uranus is one of the most neglected planets of our Solar System.

The earliest such works, such as Stanley G. Weinbaum‘s 1935 short story The Planet of Doubt and Clifton B. Kruse‘s 1936 short story Code of the Spaceways. These both assumed Uranus was a solid planet where aliens lived.

Celcelia Holland’s only science fiction novel, Floating Worlds, published in 1976, correctly depicted as a gas giant. It had floating cities – but the planet was white, not cyan as it was photographed in 1986.

Other famous stories include “Dies Irae” by Charles Sheffield published in 1985 about life in the atmosphere and the 1999 short story “Into the Blue Abyss” by Geoffrey A. Landis where there is life in the ocean below. Finally there is Ben Bova’s Uranus, which is the first of the Outer Planets trilogy, which sadly he did not have chance to complete.

Of Uranus’ moons, Ariel  appears in J. Harvey Haggard‘s 1930s novella Evolution Satellite, and Miranda in the 1993 short story Into the Miranda Rift by G. David Nordley and Falling by Martin McGrath in 2004. Miranda also made a brief appearance in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Blue Mars.

This may seem like a a good list, but when compared with other planets, it really is underwhelming.

And yet it is so strange that I’m surprised not more has been made of it in science fiction.

Illusion – Short Story Published

I’m absolutely over the moon that my short story, Illusion, was published yesterday by Kraxon magazine. My heartfelt thanks go to the editor. You can read it here.

As you can guess from the picture below, it is partly set on Miranda, that Frankenstein moon of Uranus, the seventh planet in our Solar System.

This makes it my third story published by other publishers this year. Yay! A good year for my short stories. The others are:

Rings Around Saturn, Kzine Issue 26, January 2020 – UK Amazon,US Amazon

Slivers of Hope in Space Force: Building the Legacy Anthology, May 2020 – UK Amazon, US Amazon

Even better, the anthology I helped edit last year, Distaff, has had one of its stories included in the Best of British Science Fiction published by Newcon Press, Ab Initio by Susan Boulton, and incredibly keeps on selling through Amazon. Who would have thought a chance comment on a website would have led to this?

The Year Past

Some years are better than others, some worse. 2018 was a mixture for different reasons. Spring saw me down with shingles – it was the three months of sheer exhaustion that got me. But it did not stop me going to EasterCon in Harrogate. It’s a nice place, where amenities are compact and the convention atmosphere was friendly  even if it did snow on Easter Monday!

Of course the highlight of EasterCon was having Geoff Nelder’s short science fiction story, Angular Size, shortlisted for the BSFA shorter fiction prize. It did not win, but that came as no surprise, considering what he was up against. I have seen Geoff’s writing career take a step up since, whether it is as a result of his hard work or being shortlisted I’ll never know, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.

I was fortunate enough to get two stories published this year:

• The Colditz Run in The Last City anthology by Dust Publishing
• Iceborne, Earth-born by Kraxon Magazine

Like all my stories, they have a special place in my heart. In the case of The Colditz Run, it was one of those stories that just worked for me. If you want to read it, I’m afraid you’ll have to buy the anthology – click on the cover below.

Ice borne, Earth-born is special because it happened on Miranda, a moon of the planet Uranus and was about a heroine I’d been working on for some time, Torvinne. This really is a short story, but after all the frustration of having no publisher accept Torvinne’s longer stories, this story’s publication came as a welcome joy. You read it here for free here. 

(I’d also decided to stop sending out Torvinne stories after this… and believe there were some spectacular science to be had in her novella… but there was no point in continuing to beat my head against the publishers’ hard steel wall and the shingles was really getting me down at the time.)

During the summer I got involved in an anthology that a group of us female science fiction writers from a certain forum are hoping to publish next year. Yes, I did say female. When a gentleman on the forum asked if he could join us, we politely suggested that the chaps produce their own anthology. Ahem… no sign of one so far… Hopefully more news on the female writers science fiction anthology  in the New Year. (And yes, if the suggestions pan out, you are going to need to hold onto your hats (to use an archaic saying) when the news breaks.)

To all my readers,  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

 

 

 

Planet by planet through the Solar System!

It has been a long term ambition to publish an anthology that contains my stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies that has one story for each planet in our Solar System. Here’s the latest list:

• Mercury – Displaced – ‘the new writer’, Volume 66, May/June 2004
• Venus – Flex and Flux – Aphrodite Terra anthology, Whippleshield Books, December 2016
• Earth – Cold Pressure – Jupiter 26, Isonoe, October 2009
• Mars – A Fate of Dust – Full Frontal Lobe e-zine, Issue 2, October 2012
• Jupiter – Agents of Repair – Jupiter 29, Thyone, July 2010
• Saturn –
• Uranus – Iceborne, Earth-born, Kraxon Magazine, April 2018
• Neptune – Life Sentence – Jupiter 8, Phasiphae, Spring 2005

The observant among you may have noticed that there is one missing! The most visually interesting planet of them all – Saturn. The trouble is that in many ways it is too rich a place and many authors have been drawn to it like bees to a honey pot. And a lot of science fiction has been written about it. Yes, I did have a story about Saturn, centring on its moon, Hyperion, but I’ve now retired it from submitting it to publishers who might have been interested in it. Nor, for various reasons am I going to return to it to improve the story.

But what am I going to of about Saturn, which another author has not already done?

Well, new discoveries keep crawling out the vacuum. Recent announcements include Venus being able to sustain bacterial life and confirming that Uranus smells of hydrogen sulphide – rotten eggs to you and me.

Now when I wrote my Venus story, I was fully aware that the planet’s upper atmosphere could sustain human life. It is but a small logical step from there to say the upper atmosphere could sustain bacteria. That was obvious and left me wondering what the fuss was about.

My reaction the Uranian rotten eggs is that such a fact would only be useful if you had a plane or spacesuited person flying through the atmosphere and the fuselage or spacesuit was breached. A good warning of something wrong. The left me with a ‘there’s not much I can about this fact’ situation.

But that doesn’t mean that some interesting fact about Saturn will not emerge that could be the basis of good science fiction story. After all, there’s all that Cassini probe data to analyse. But this means sitting around and waiting for something to be found and announced. Could be quite a while.

There is one aspect I have not yet seen anything written about – the hexagon cloud formation around the north pole’s vortex (which, by the way has changed colour from mostly blue in 2012 to a more golden yellow in 2016). But, like the Uranian rotten eggs smell, I don’t yet see how to develop a story where this hexagon is a catalyst for a human story.

 

In the meantime, you know that short story I am writing that is supposed to be 10,000 to 12,000 words long. Looks like it’s heading for twice that size. How did that happen?

Dag nab it, Saturn will have to wait, while I finish this novella… a novella I say!

 

Intro to the Ice Worlds

Woot! Woot! Woot! (Whoever came up with those action station noises on Star Trek?) I am absolutely delighted to have had a short story accepted by Kraxon magazine that is going to be published at the start of next month. (No, this is not an early April Fool!)

Iceborne, Earth-born is set on Miranda, a moon of the planet, Uranus, and is I hope the first outing of Torvinne!

I know stories should stand on their own words, but this serves as an introduction to a new ice world. A very different one from the glimpse we see of another ice-world, Triton, in Guard Cat (see here for UK Amazon).

What I find curious is that there is so little science fiction written about the impact on the way humans live of ice worlds. Yes, there are the usual surface habitations and staging points, but they are there at convenient points in the star systems and stories. So they don’t need the icescape!

I hope this is the start of a very interesting science fiction publishing journey for me! Because there are more wonders to be had on the ice worlds, some of them incredibly mind-boggling. I still remember the day I was doing some research into a certain ice world and two facts sat side by side and I had a “hold on a minute” moment. That turned into a “that can’t happen, can it?” moment. I checked, triple-checked, absolutely many times checked, but yes it could. This story is still lurking around to find a publishing home.

Thank you, Kraxon. I suspect you don’t know what you’ve started, but it’s magazines like these that help writers get a toehold on the publishing ladder.

 

That Smug Feeling…

I’m having a full half an hour of feeling smug and self-satisfied. But only half an hour, mind. It won’t do to get too comfortable with the feeling.

Why, you may ask?

I’ve had the markers reports back on the manuscript I submitted for my third semester’s work on the MA Creative Writing course. Yes, they gave helpful and constructive criticism on where and how to improve the manuscript… some of which has already been seen to.  Below are some of the comments, with bits missing so as not to give the plot away.

“The plot is fascinating and the narrative world is exceptionally well constructed – this is a major achievement and essential for success in the genre – and the writer should be congratulated for how well this has been done. …  I also never lose the sense of significance I feel about this powerful imagined world. “

“This simple story set on a moon of Uranus pioneers a way of writing … ; there is nothing quite like it published at the moment. It’s a hugely ambitious novel aiming to progress the genre and I think it will.” 

I could not have done this without the help of the tutors and fellow students on the course. A big Big BIG thank you to all of them.

Now, I’d better get back to some serious (or not so serious, depending on your point of view) science fiction writing. Gloat over! 

 

 

A new Probe for Uranus?

I’ve finally got round to reading my Journal of British Interplanetary Society – the Sept/Oct 2010 issue.

Guess what?

One of the articles is about Uranus Mission Concept options. The mission, if it gets off the ground, is scheduled to be launched sometime in 2020 to 2023. Its tier one objectives are:

1) Determine the atmospheric zonal winds, composition, and structure at high spatial resolution, as well as the temporal evolution of atmospheric dynamics;

2) Understand the base structure of the planet’s magnetosphere as well as high-order structure and temporal evolution of the planet’s interior dynamo.

Nothing about the moons in that lot. Phew!

But one of the tier two objectives is to make remote sensing observations of the large satellites. Is this going to affect my novel, Miranda? Well, they suggest it’ll take the probe 13 years to get to Uranus… so the earliest it’ll get results back from it is 2033. Double phew! It means my Miranda novel won’t get dated so quickly… if it gets published that is.

But what really saddens me about the probe is the serious lack of new tech. The only two areas where research is needed are ultraflex solar arrays (6.7 metres in diameter), which are significantly larger than current arrays, and Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG) which is already being developed by NASA for other missions and will be ready to be deployed in 2014. Otherwise the probe looks very reminiscent of Voyagers 1 and 2, only somehow more compact and clunkier. Oh where oh where has the elegance of engineering gone to?

Herschel Museum at Bath

Today, I had the pleasure of visiting 19, New Kings Street, Bath, otherwise known as the Herschel Museum. It was from its back garden that William Herschel discovered the planet, Uranus in 1781.

What I found surprising was that it was such a small place. Yes it was spread over five floors, although we were only allowed to view three floors. How could such a small place place produce such a momentous event of scientific discovery? How could it contain William and his sister, Caroline Lucretia Herschel, both people overflowing in genius?

I also noticed the decor was good at hiding the coal dust, a big problem in those days, but then you would expect a woman to notice such things…

What I found really extraordinary was that in the little house William was able to make his instruments (musical as well as astronomical) from scratch, including having a small foundry to melt and mould metals. And it acted as a home as well. So compact!

Go there if you have a chance…

But this does bring up the question of where did Britain lose its way in being the forefront of scientific discoveries? You only need to look at the history of John Couch-Adams and the discovery of the planet, Neptune to understand why. If it hadn’t been for the part George Airy played in that story, Britain rather then France and Germany would have been the first to discover Neptune. I don’t know of anyone that has written an alternate history where Neptune is discovered by the telescopes at Cambridge University. But think how it could have changed what scientific discoveries were made when. This would have inevitably led to different systems being used in society! Britain could have invented the rocket for instance, rather than passing a safety law in 1875 that prevented people having and using rockets. And what a difference that coud have made to World War 2…. The mind boggles…