Planet X and the Interplanetary Generation Ship...

Well, it looks like the Solar System is on the verge of having nine planets once again; all those old textbooks will be right again before long! This is great news, as it gives everyone somewhere new to write about, somewhere new to think about. Better still, somewhere a little different. The projections suggest that this is a world larger than Earth, possibly ten times larger, which puts it right into Super-Earth territory - and that will resolve an interesting conundrum, in that we’re finding a lot of those worlds orbiting over stars, but ours seemed to lack one. The chance to get a much closer look at one is going to be well-nigh irresistable.

No, I don’t see a manned mission in the near future. (Though if we find pure, refined unobtanium lying on its surface or it turns out it is occupied by BEM, that might be a different story!) Certainly it would be a target for observation, though, and if we can actually find it, then I can see a lot of time being dedicated to it by observatories on Earth or in space - with a space probe a definite possibility, albeit probably not for a number of decades. A new planet in the Solar System would be interesting enough, but one that represents something we haven’t seen before would be fascinating.

It’s a long way away, though. Previous surveys have ruled out a planet of this size close-in, which suggests that it is probably at the furthest point of its orbit - and with a possible fifteen-thousand-year cycle, that’s a long way. (Conspiracy theories arise - for if it is at the outer part of its orbit, the last time it was close, we were busily inventing writing and agriculture!) That’s a long trip for a space probe, though not an inconceivable one; we’re still in touch with Voyager 2 at the edges of the Solar System, and that was built with much older technology than we now have. If we find it, I’ll predict right now that by 2060, there will have been a probe flyby at the very least. It’s just too obvious a target, and one we could reach with known technologies.

I’ve been fascinated by the Kuiper Belt for a long, long time - something about those cold worlds orbiting out there in the dark, where the Sun provides no warmth or light, appeals to me at some level. The first decade of the century saw the discovery of a host of little worldlets out there, each of them with their own mystery - worlds such as Eris, Makemake, Orcus. I’ve been seriously tempted to write a book set out there for years, but there are some problems to overcome first.

Knowledge being the first. Most of these worlds don’t even have names (fancy having your book being rendered out-of-date within months of release?) and we know very little about them. Now - this isn’t a massive dilemma, in that there is enough known about some of them to provide some interesting locations, and certainly some story options, and there are a lot of fun theories out there to play with. I’ve always thought that the advantage of using a real-world setting is that the universe is a lot stranger than anything we can possibly imagine. Nevertheless, this is an issue.

There’s a big one, though, and it is this. How do we get there? Now, you’re likely thinking that this is science-fiction, and you can just make up some sort of a reason, and to an extent, this is always true. Alamo has the hendecaspace drive, Dune has the spice melange, Star Wars has hyperdrive, and so on - but these things all have limitations. The reverse is true of the Kuiper Belt, in that it is a very, very long way away. Jupiter and Saturn are quick walks around the block in comparison - which means that if you are getting to the Kuiper Belt in realistic time, you can get pretty much anywhere else in the system in relatively short order. Larry Niven got around this by giving his hyperdrive a mass limit, but that means that the characters have all of space to explore - why are they looking at icy rocks in the middle of nowhere?

Therein lies the critical problem. By the time you are getting out that far, you’ve got speeds that suggest the possibility of going a hell of a lot further - or going to other places, faster. So why go at all? Well, again, that’s where the imagination of the poor science-fiction writer comes into play. If you can get from Earth to Saturn in a few days, then having a frontier a few months away becomes a practical proposition, but we’re looking at a long way into the future here. The Kuiper Belt is not somewhere we’re going to colonize in the 22nd century.

Unless.

Perhaps a modest proposal is called for here. Let’s look at one of the old SF stables, the generation starship. A large vessel carrying a community of people between stars, taking centuries or millennia to make the trip, self-sustaining and supporting - who might eventually not realize that they are on a ship at all. It’s one way that we might reach the stars, short of finding a shortcut of some other means, but that story has been written. What about, instead of a generation starship, a planetary generation ship?

Think of it. Some burning need to get to Pluto, or Eris. Something we find there that is worth investigating, or some crazy patriotic super-project. It might take thirty years for a one-way trip, maybe seventy years for the complete journey, but that’s not a problem. Three generations. One gets the ship out there, one conducts the scientific exploration, one gets the ship home. Perhaps somewhat more plausible than the usual generation ships might be, but still a way of exploring the concept - and one, I think, that has never been done before...

So, You Want To Write A Book...

One thing I’m not going to tell you in this post is how to write. I’m going to assume you know that already, and there are a lot of excellent resources elsewhere that can guide you along your way. What I’m going to cover instead is the process of getting it to publication, and sustaining a work rate to see you through an extended period, and to establish a firm release schedule. That is perhaps one of the most important elements of publishing as it stands today, especially self-publishing - consistent releases. The other I’ll get to in a minute, as it is one of the ‘little secrets’ I’ll be talking about.

A great piece of advice I received some time ago was that you should write your first draft as if it was your last - which means correcting as you go, going back and making changes and alterations. I will stress here that it does not mean that you don’t go over it again after you’ve finished - but rather than giving yourself a very boring week or two going over all the changes you’ve noted down as you went (and if you are like me, struggling to decipher your month-old handwriting) do it as you go. It saves an awful lot of time in the later drafts. While you are writing, make sure that you have a clean manuscript - keep formatting to the absolute minimum - which will save you even more time at the end of the process, when it comes to formatting your book for publication. It’s a lot easier to not add lots of extraneous stuff in the first place, rather than having to get rid of it later.

Another good piece of advice I had - one nugget from an otherwise terrible book - was to write what is on your shelves already. Don’t write to a niche, don’t write to a market, write what you like to read. If you enjoy military science fiction, write that. If you like werezebra romance, write that. (And by tomorrow, someone will have, if they haven’t already.) The reason for this is simple - you’ll already know what works and what doesn’t. You know what you like, you know what people expect, you know what has been done before and whether you should do it again. If you pick something you don’t know - you’ll struggle, and if you try and write something you don’t like, you’ll almost certainly fail.

Series sell. That’s rule number one of publishing today. I’m not saying that stand-alone novels do not sell, or that they are necessarily a bad idea, but I am saying that you will have a greater likelihood of success in the current market as it stands with a series concept. Furthermore - series are easier to write. There, I said it. When you write a book, there is always a ‘thinking time’ beforehand, coming up with plots, characters, setting. If you are writing a series, you can carry over substantial parts of the last book into the new one, without having to reinvent the wheel each time. Characters should and must evolve and change, of course, but they’ll be doing that based upon the plots of each book. You will always need to add new elements, of course, and that’s part of the fun...but the further you go, the easier it is to write a character you know about. You don’t need to spend hours working out names for locations.

It might, I suppose, be suggested that such a series concept could be too limiting. That’s certainly possible, but the key thing here comes right at the start - the concept should be designed to give room for different stories, different ideas, new locations. Leave blank spaces on the map to come up with new concepts, make sure that there is the capacity to add new missions. If you are doing ‘Seal Team Nine’, don’t tie them down to a very specific operation - give them a wide-ranging brief, so they can go on anti-terrorist missions against different targets all over the world, rather than spending all their time hunting down one man in Kazakhstan, with all their skills and talents focused on that specific task. Keep it open, and keep it flexible.

There are some problems, I freely admit. You need to be careful that you don’t copy, well, yourself. Something I watch for very carefully is duplication of plot or storyline, or even accidental reuse of names. (I did it once in one of the early books, with a pretty prominent character in both occasions - on that instance, I opted to actually work the shared name into the story, but that was only because I caught it in time. Keep notes - or at least lists of names - for future reference. A character and location database will make things a lot easier later on.)

Set a realistic target. This will not be your first book - I know most people write several novels before they get something they are willing to show other people; I did myself. (Don’t throw them away, though, even if you don’t think you can revise them. You never know what you might be able to steal - I used a character name from a rediscovered short story I wrote when I was fifteen not long ago, and I managed to lift the core plot of an old novella - with a lot of changes, tweaks and additional subplots - for Malware Blues, the last Alamo novel.) By now, you should know what you are capable of doing in a day, or a week, or a month. Set that target, and make sure you allow room for maneuver. (Currently - though on occasion I’ve done 10k days - I aim for around 3k a day, as an example, about three hours of writing.)

If you don’t have a firm idea yet, it doesn’t matter, because the next thing I’m going to talk about is a concept I borrowed from the world of the webcomic - the buffer. Don’t be in a position - and we’ve all done it - where you are needing to get a book finished for release in a few days time. (Yes, you can always postpone it, but we’re talking consistent schedule here.) Have at least one, maybe even two, books already written, before you start. With Alamo, I finished the second novel before I released the first. (That day, as I recall.) That means you already have a head-start, and it is worth maintaining. If you have a new series in mind - write the first one, and go as fast as you are comfortable doing without compromising quality. Say you can manage a thousand words a day? That’s a seventy-thousand word book in seventy days. Add twenty for editing, and that’s four books a year. See how it adds up?

So, you have your book, and you’re ready to move to the next step. I’m going to assume that you opt to self-publish, rather than going on the agent/publisher route, simply because I have no experience at that. When I decided that I wanted to do this for a living, I knew that I wanted the control and the higher royalties I would get by taking that route. Speaking purely personally - I have never had any regrets about taking that decision. I will say - make sure you are getting the best deal you can get, and don’t necessarily take the first offer that comes along.

Here’s a secret. If you’re written a book, you’ve done the hard part already. It gets a lot easier from here. You don’t need anyone to hand-hold you through the publishing process, though there are a hell of a lot of, frankly, scammers who will try and convince you otherwise. That doesn’t mean you should do everything yourself, of course, but it does mean that you should make all of the decisions. Really, it breaks down into three areas. The first is something you should not do yourself, the second is something you can do yourself, and the third is something I would recommend you definitely do yourself.

The first is the cover. This is surprisingly important; you might be thinking that your book is being sold electronically, that it is just a file on a computer, but the cover is still going to be the first thing that people see, and will be responsible for selling your book. Think of it as a chain. If someone likes the cover, they’ll take a look at the blurb. If they like the blurb, they’ll look at the first page. If they like the first page, they’ll read the first chapter, and at that point, you’ve probably got a reader. Look around for a good cover artist, take a look at their work, and find someone that suits what you want to do. I will, as ever, recommend Keith Draws, but there are many talented people out there. Don’t do this yourself unless you actually have the skills for it. The key test is that your cover must look to have the same quality as a book published by one of the bigger publishers. If your funds are limited, spend them here.

Then comes editing. You can go expensive or cheap with this one. It is possible to do it yourself - at least, to a degree - but you need multiple pairs of eyes on your manuscript, one way or another. Getting some beta readers is always a good idea, people who can take a look at your work and tell you what they think - as well as any typos they spot. Often, this is cited as something that a publishing company does well, but that isn’t always the case. Not that long ago, I picked up a copy of a book that had originally been self-published, later picked up by a bigger publisher, and was astonished by the errors they had managed to introduce. There are a lot of good people out there that you can hire - and that means that you remain in control of the process.

Now we come to formatting, and here, in my opinion, is something you should do yourself. If you can use a word processor, you can almost certainly format your own book. I use Alkinea to convert an Open Office file, and it’s never given me any trouble - I’ve got it down to about a fifteen minute process now. Just make sure to check it on a Kindle, as well as on your computer, before you upload. The trick here is to keep the formatting simple; less to mess around with, and with a novel, you aren’t looking at anything complicated anyway. Just page breaks, and possibly a map, as well as a table of contents. (Big tip here - put your TOC at the end. It’s always off-putting when it is the first page in a sample file, and Amazon at least doesn’t care where it goes as long as you put one in there. The reader will be able to instantly flick to it anyway, so he or she won’t mind either.)

The big benefit of formatting yourself is that you can make changes instantly. Maybe you spot a big typo, just after you launch - it takes a few minutes to fix. You want to update the book with details about a sequel? Easy. If you contract out, it slows you down and costs you more money each time you make a correction. Having said that, if you really want to, you can always hire someone to do this and there are plenty of people who do - and if you are doing something more complicated than a novel usually will be (purely in formatting, of course, not story or character) then it definitely is worth considering.

There’s a lot of debate over paperback copies of books, and there are different schools of thought on the issue. The one time I tried it, I didn’t even come close to paying what I spent on it, and it isn’t something I plan to repeat in the near future, for whatever that is worth. The ebook will almost certainly be your main seller in any case, so it is best to concentrate your main focus there, and treat anything else as an extra. I’d happily sign a print-only contract for Alamo tomorrow if anyone offered.

What I’m trying to say with this long semi-rant is that if you can write a book, then you can publish one. You don’t need anyone to hold your hand through the process - furthermore, we’re living in one of the best times for a new writer to break in. You have the ability to sell directly to the readers, and to let them make the decision whether they like your work or not. So, what are you waiting for?

Where were the heirs of Dan Dare?

What happened to the British Space Programme?

I mean, the one that we should have had in the second half of the 20th century. I’m less concerned about the future, for reasons that I’ll get to at the end of this post, but right now I’m talking about what might - hell, should have been. (And yes, I’ve been listening to a lot of David Bowie in the last few days, with special reference to Space Oddity.) There’s really no reason why we couldn’t have had one, not really - I’m going to hear a lot of arguments about budget and cost, but we built an independent nuclear deterrent, not to mention that we actually put a satellite in space with our own launcher, even with the limited funding we had.

British post-war technological development is a catalogue of disastrous foul-ups. Our computer designs from the Second World War were largely squandered, the Miles M.52 had an excellent chance of beating the Bell X-1 to Mach 1, and we were making advances in aerospace technology that really should have seen us go further. We had a collection of V-2 rockets, and even a plan that probably would have worked to put a man on one, throwing him up into a limited sub-orbital trajectory. Hell, we built a nuclear weapons program, only to later on throw it aside and move to buying from the United States.

My conclusion is that all that was missing was an advocate. Someone who would have argued for a British space effort in the same way that there were arguments for a British nuclear programme - perhaps if the United States had been a bit more willing to share data early on (especially given all the help that Britain gave to the Manhattan Project, after all) a co-operative nuclear weapons programme of the 1940s might have been realistic. Not cancelling the Miles M.52 gives us a rocketplane in RAF service, and that would have got Rolls-Royce seriously into rocket engines.

We needed - with acknowledgement to Warren Ellis - a Ministry of Space. A lot of the technological efforts required were in works anyway, with designs for spaceplanes and rockets being produced. Even without this attention, we had Black Arrow, developed from Black Knight. Let’s say that Black Knight continues on its funding, which gives us a satellite launcher in the early 1960s - with realistic funding.

Let’s go a step further and ask why? If you want a point-of-departure, try this one. The Megaroc, the manned V-2, is approved in 1947, after the flight of the Miles M.52. While it would have taken years, a different Minister of Supply might have conceived of it as a prestige project for the post-war years, something to keep Britain on the map. Not that crazy - the Labour government of the day was determined to prove their patriotic credentials, and this might just have appealed. The result? Britain gets the first man in space, some time in the late 1950s. We’re only talking about a sub-orbital hop, well within the reach of the launchers at their disposal. So - Captain Eric Brown is the first man in space.

A one-off? Unlikely. We’d have something equivalent to a sub-orbital Mercury, but once started, projects like this can be tough to stop. We were close in any case, and this likely seems the Black Knight launcher getting a lot more funding. The future that Arthur C. Clarke wrote of in his early books, British flights launching from Woomera, happens. Now we have a three-cornered Space Race, and would we have been able to resist competing in that? Yes, there would have been diplomatic pressure to push us back, but by this point, a lot of companies are involved, a lot of jobs at stake in marginal constituencies. Things a Government does not want to mess with.

So the race to the Moon has three participants, maybe even four if the French choose to stay in the game, perhaps with some sort of early European co-operation. (Given Concorde, it’s not unrealistic to see an Anglo-French space programme coming into view in the 1960s if we’ve both got something to put on the table, and that has some pretty immense repercussions. Not only are we a major player in the race, we’d have a chance of winning it.)

We’re getting a lot more into the realm of theory here. I suspect that this means that Truman gets his way, and Britain subsumes its nuclear programme into that of the US much earlier, saving the money for something else. Likely we’d have thought along the lines of spaceplanes; there were designs for such programs in the UK as early as 1962 - but I suspect we’d end up with rocket/capsule projects instead, simply because they are cheaper. In terms of satellites, well, the communications satellite was devised by Arthur C. Clarke - so we might well see a British version coming along earlier than Telstar, maybe a Telstar Ring around the world. (Interesting what careers might be butterflied by this. Clarke was in the RAF during the war, and if a British space programme was abuilding, he might have been tempted back in.)

Ultimately, we’d end up co-operating with someone as the expenses rose. It would just be a matter of when. A European partnership probably keeps us in the driving seat, whereas a United States partnerships probably means that Neil Armstrong’s Lunar Module Pilot is British. (If we’re actually putting people into space, we’re not going to settle for a share of the science.) Maybe we don’t try for the moon at all, but we end up with a much earlier International Space Station, sometime in the 1970s.

I’d like to think we would, though. And that in this other world, a Union Jack rose on the moon, sometime around 1972, with the crew of the ship playing Bowie, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles as they drifted through space. Something that makes me smile. (Yes, I did love Ministry of Space. Yes, I do wish we’d done it, and I’d like to live in the world where we did.)

As for the future? Well...things are looking up. The British space industry is actually booming, the Isle of Man is one of the major hubs of commercial space activity, and we’re building a spaceplane in Bristol that is actually being properly funded. At this rate, sometime around 2030, you’ll be able to get to orbit on the weekly Skylon flight out of Heathrow. Something to look forward to, at least. And yet, I still wonder what might have been, in that world where Eric Brown (look him up, seriously) rode a modified V-2 to orbit on the fifth anniversary of the Coronation...

Book Review: The Stellar Fox, by Glynn Stewart

A few months ago, I read and enjoyed ‘Space Carrier Avalon’ by this author, and at the time I last reviewed it, I said that I couldn’t wait to read the sequel. Which I did the day it was released, finishing it in a matter of hours. I suppose I could leave this review at that point, as I suspect that sentence alone makes it clear how much I enjoyed it, but that would make this a pretty sorry blog post, so I’ll carry on in a little more detail.

I think any series author will say that one of the hardest books in a series to write is the second book. In the first book, you’ve got the fun of creating a new cast of characters, a new setting, and you can completely twist every element in order to fit the plot. In the next book, it gets a lot more difficult. Everything published in the first book is now a fixed reference point, and you’ve got to bend the plot to fit the characters. In a long-running series, this is less of a problem, as by then the past canon and the characters are providing plots of their own, but in the second and third books, you haven’t quite got that yet.

Take it that I know how hard it is to write that second book. Worse - if the first book was a success, you’ve now got extra pressure on you for the next one. You want to keep it running, you want to satisfy the fans of the first one, and to come up with a story that fits your world without copying what you did the first time, or resorting to formula. This can be very difficult (and in part, is the reason I hate doing two-book plots, and attempt to avoid it where I can.)

This writer manages it brilliantly. Space Carrier Avalon was a fast-moving space adventure story, with plenty of twists and turns and some stunning action sequences, and Stellar Fox continues in the same vein, but manages to still surprise. Further, the events of the last book have some real relevance to this book - and that might seem obvious, but all too often, it didn’t. If you win a tremendous victory against desperate odds, then that achievement is going to be recognized. It isn’t going to be business as usual. In this book, that’s used as one of the basic elements of the storyline - no spoilers, that’s right in the blurb. What do you do with a hero, especially one you desperately need?

The setting is consistent and makes sense in its own context, which is vital. Enough of the characters come back to provide good continuity, but not all of them do - and that satisfies another of my personal bugbears, as far too often a crew will stay together forever with no real reason to do so. In the real world, people get promoted and transferred. A USN version of Riker would have been forced out of the Navy long before he took his command - twenty years at the same rank? Crazy. Rant over.

What this second book had to do was to consolidate the excellent basis of the first, and this it does extremely well. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, and the first in the series, to any fans of military science-fiction, and I’m already looking forward to the next book to come! It is available for purchase at this link, and there is also a paperback version as well; I read the Kindle version, and found the formatting excellent. Go get it!

Book Review: Roman Mask, by Thomas M. D. Brooke

I picked up this book a couple of days ago, and given my recent binge on Roman historical fiction, it was inevitable that it would creep to the top of my reading list sooner or later. I'd heard excellent things about it in any case, so once I finished my work for the day, I sat down to read it. I looked up an hour – and eight chapters – later. Without quite realizing how much time had passed. It's less and less often these days that I read a book in a single sitting, but with this one, I made an exception.

Roman Mask is written in the first-person, which is usually one of my bugbears; I often find that it is done badly, that it makes it harder to engage with the characters. Not in this case. The plots and twists and turns are wrapped into the lead character, always a different thing to do, and the author manages to pull the reader along an engaging trail of breadcrumbs to the end of the book, and there were a lot of turns that I really didn't see coming.

As usual, I won't be giving away any spoilers, but to anyone who knows anything about Roman history, telling you that it is set in Germania in AD 9, in the camp of Governor Varus, should tell you everything you need to know about where this is heading – right to Teutoberg Forest. One of the greatest defeats the Empire ever faced, where German tribesmen wiped out three legions. I won't share the details of what happens in the plot, instead encouraging you to pick up the book for yourself, but I will say that I was surprised on more than one occasion, and everything fit together as a supplement to the historical record. (I will also say that I knew the story of the battle before reading, but that the knowledge did not at all detract from my enjoyment of the story - moreover, such knowledge is, in my opinion, not needed to enjoy this book. Though I suspect you will want to know more after reading it.)

Therein often lies a problem for the author working in historical fiction, meshing their story into the established history. Part of the game is to find a way to interweave a plot into the established fact – or whatever passes for it, depending very much on the time and place the book is set. Roman Mask does this extremely well, and I was slightly surprised to see that this is the first published work by this author. It certainly doesn't read like that.

There are strong hints that a sequel is in the works (certainly, I hope so) though this book is completely self-contained. Definitely there are places where a follow-on story can be written, and I'll certainly be the first to pick it up when it comes. Suffice to say that I'll be eagerly waiting for more works from this author. This one is a real page turner, and I highly recommend it. I read the Kindle version, which is available here; there is also a paperback version available.

Battlecruiser Alamo: Malware Blues is out!



Beyond the frontiers of known space, the remnants of the conspiracy that almost destroyed the Triplanetary Confederation are making ready to strike again, now with ancient alien weapons of unimaginable power at their disposal, weapons they are prepared to use to accomplish their desperate goals. The Battlecruiser Alamo, beleaguered by infiltrators and saboteurs, is the last hope for the galaxy as it ventures into the heart of a shattered planet in a bid to stop the traitors from completing their plans, with annihilation as the price of failure. Can the Alamo and her crew face their toughest test yet, or are they doomed to die in the ruins of Phaeton, the last casualties of a ten-thousand year war...and the first of the next one…