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The Big Idea: Allen Steele

Posted on June 27, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

Come with us now to another time – a different time! A future that comes to us from the past! A time inspired by the pulp science fiction of another era! The Hugo Award-winning author Allen Steele is your guide to this pulpy future past, as he tells you about the world of Captain Future, a hero from a bygone age, and why he’s resurrected this avatar of a long-gone future to live again in new adventures, including the latest, Lost Apollo.

ALLEN STEELE:

Now that I find myself — unexpectedly and much to my own surprise — publishing my sixth Captain Future adventure, I’m also discovering that I’m at risk of repeating myself when it comes to discussing how and why I came to revive this classic character in the first place.

It would be easy to reiterate the story how I discovered a science fiction pulp hero of the 1940’s as a teenager in the 70’s, later satirized him in 90’s in my novella “The Death of Captain Future”, and finally decided to resurrect and reinvent the character himself in 2017 in a novel, Avengers of the Moon, followed by series of long novellas (short novels, really) published by Amazing Selects as Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future, a semi-regular series of illustrated ebooks and trade paperbacks emulating the pulps of a bygone era .

But this is all stuff I’ve written about before, and if you’re a fan of the series then you probably know these things already. I’ve previously discussed the origins of the revision in the afterword to Avengers of the Moon that was later followed by another essay published in the first issue of EHCF (along with the novella “Captain Future in Love”) and yet another tracing the history of the original Edmond Hamilton version that’s on the EHCF website, https://captfuture.com). If you want the full backstory about the genesis of Hamilton’s character and my efforts to bring back him and his crew more than sixty years after their final Hamilton-canon appearance in the May 1951 issue of Startling Stories, then I recommend that you find and read those essays. Your time will be well spent if this is news to you and won’t be wasted if you’ve heard it all before.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the new novel, Lost Apollo.

After I finished the previous novel, The Horror at Jupiter (EHCF 4), I thought I was done with Captain Future. I’d achieved my primary goal, writing an epic space adventure that would bring back a favorite pulp hero of my youth and send him on a long story arc which would pit him against his arch enemy and send them both across the solar system and beyond. I’d also managed to complete the trilogy, albeit in a different form than originally intended, that I’d begun with Avengers of the Moon. Shortly before the novel was published by Tor, my editor David Hartwell suddenly died. He was replaced by an inexperienced assistant editor who didn’t get what I was doing and didn’t like Captain Future either, so despite the fact that Avengers had solid sales and earned outstanding reviews, she abruptly cancelled the rest of the trilogy, forcing me to find another publisher for the remaining two books, which were eventually published over the next three years as four episodic installments. Well then, so be it; I’d accomplished my mission, and now it was time to move on.

The audience occasionally get the last word when it comes to things like this, though, and it wasn’t long after The Horror at Jupiter came out that I began to get feedback from my readers. There had been only a couple of reviews — most SF critics ignored my Captain Future novels just as they’d ignored Edmond Hamilton’s original series — but nonetheless I received supportive fan mail from readers, and the royalty statements showed that the books were selling solidly, and this proved that the project had definitely been worth completing with a smaller publisher.

But besides that, I’d really enjoyed writing these stories. They weren’t radical, cutting-edge SF that pushed the envelope, but there’s a place in the world for traditional space opera, and plainly there are readers who want that button pushed. Curt Newton and the Futuremen are a fun bunch of guys to write about and I was sorry to be done with them. So why not continue?

By then, I’d had a brainstorm for a new story arc that would depart from what I’d done before. I told Amazing’s publisher Steve Davidson and editor Kermit Woodall that I’d come up with another Captain Future storyline and asked them if I could write another novel (well, maybe two). They were a little uncertain, so I waited awhile for sales to continue to build and then asked again, and once they finally gave me the green light, I finished another project and went to work on the next adventure.

I’ve been a space buff all my life, starting with the original Project Mercury flights in the 60’s and continuing through the Gemini and Apollo programs. I was in middle school when NASA’s last manned lunar mission, Apollo 17, returned to Earth, and I was frustrated and angry when I heard the news that the next three Apollo missions had been cancelled for shortsighted political reasons. Yet it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I learned that the original final mission, Apollo 20, was tentatively planned to land in Tycho Crater … which, as all Captain Future fans know, is where the Futuremen have their hidden moon base.

SF writers frequently play the “what if” Q&A game, and in this case the question was, “What if Apollo 20 had landed in Tycho and found Captain Future?” Of course, this meant I’d have to contrive a reason for an Apollo mission from the 20^th century to land on the Moon in the 24^th century … besides the fact, of course, that there had never actually been an Apollo 20 mission in the first place.

I was still mulling this over when I learned something else that I hadn’t known before. I knew that the original NASA astronaut corps of the 60’s included several Black military pilots who’d been in training but had never got tapped for any of the early Mercury or Gemini missions because of racial internal politics too complex (and odious) to get into here. What I didn’t know, though, was that one of the cancelled Apollo flights might’ve included a Black astronaut … which meant that, if history had been different, a person of color could’ve walked on the Moon in the 70’s, something that we’ll see a few years from now when Artemis 1 reaches the Moon but should’ve happened much earlier.

Since I was already working with alternate history, I decided to put a Black astronaut aboard my fictional Apollo 20 flight and even make him the mission commander (I also named him after a couple of teenage friends of mine from Nashville, my hometown). Then I continued to play the What If game by doing what Theodore Sturgeon said ought to be done, and followed the first question by asking the next logical question: what would happen if the astronaut whom NASA intended to be the first Black man to walk on the Moon suddenly found that his singular role in history was going to be denied to him?

Lost Apollo turned out to be a deeper novel than I originally thought it would be. It has plenty of good ol’ New Pulp action and adventure, with everything from a drag race on the Moon to a big space battle (look out for a cameo by the country-punk band The Chicks making a walk-on as a fighter squadron). But there’s also some things here that go beyond space opera.

A quick pitch, then I’m done. The new issue of EHCF also includes, along with interior illustrations by M.D. Jackson, a spectacular cover by my all-time favorite comics artist, Michael W. Kaluta. It’s one of the best covers I’ve ever had for a book, and I’m really proud of it. And there’s also a long-lost interview with Captain Future’s original author, Edmond Hamilton, and his wife and fellow space-op pioneer Leigh Brackett, that was conducted by Darrell Schweitzer in 1978 for Amazing.

Hope you pick it up, and that you enjoy it.

Lost Apollo: Amazon

Author Socials: Web site|Facebook

The Big Idea: N.S. Nuseibeh

Posted on June 25, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      Leave a Comment

Our history will often work to define us, even if we ourselves don’t always see it happening. In this Big Idea for Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman, author N.S. Nuseibeh reflects on a family legend and what that legend might have in store for her today.

N.S. NUSEIBEH:

I don’t remember when I first learned of my ancestor, only that she’s always been there, a part of the family narrative, a one-handed ghost perched on an armrest. This ancestor, the tale goes, was one of the first female converts to Islam, a 7th century warrior who supposedly fought alongside the prophet Mohammed. Quoted in various religious texts, the legends say she lost a hand protecting the prophet in ferocious horseback battles. Not much else is known about Nusaybah bint Ka’ab Al-Ansariyah, but we take our name—Nusseibeh—from hers.

Several centuries later, and I feel as far from this ancestor as possible. An agnostic, unathletic academic now living mostly in England, often I forget that Ramadan is coming until I get a message from my parents, asking if I will be able to come home to Jerusalem for the Eid. And then suddenly I will hunger for it; for the tense pacing in the living room as the sun begins to set, the painfully tantalizing smells of the food being cooked in the kitchen. The gravelly sound of my grandmother praying before the transformative first sips of soup are taken; the ecstatic movements of hands ripping bread, dipping it into fresh hummos. The joy and release and togetherness of it all. I will remember that Ramadan, to me, is about these things: communal struggle, followed by communal gratitude. Abroad over the last few years, in an increasingly Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian society, I have become more and more estranged from the rituals and tastes and values of my childhood, and though I miss it all, it also feels increasingly difficult to find my way back.

This is when I think most about my supposed ancestor, this woman warrior who sounds more like a Game of Thrones character than a real person. Who was she? Did she even exist? Are we really related to her? Her story isn’t just relevant to my family. Little is known about Muslim history, let alone the important women in it, especially from that exciting period of swords and tribes, poets and battles. If she really existed, what drew her to Islam? Whether or not I truly am her descendent, what I wanted to do was understand her, this warrior woman who is so different from me, who lived and took part in the dawn of a religion. Who is famous not for being a wife, or a mother, or a saint, but for being a strong protector; a virago. I wanted to know what life was like in 7th century Arabia, especially for women, especially for her, and connect to history through her eyes.

At the same time, though, I also wanted to use her stories to understand my world better, too—to interrogate notions of warriordom and violence, heroism and motherhood, anger and anxiety not only from her perspective, but from my own, as a Palestinian feminist from East Jerusalem, writing and thinking in the 21st century. So this book is about an Arabian warrior woman from the 7th century, but it’s also about being a reader, a Palestinian, a foodie, a worrier. The big idea being that by digging up oft-forgotten characters from history like Nusayba, we might get a clearer sense of ourselves, too.

Namesake: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Web site|Instagram

The Big Idea: Chaz Brenchley

Posted on June 20, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

There once was a saying that “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire” — and in Mary Ellen, Craterean!, author Chaz Brenchley expands on that idea, with a whole new planet for the sun, and empire, to consider. He’s here today to explain how he got to this point, a journey that begins, of all places, in California.

CHAZ BRENCHLEY:

Not wishing to seem contrary, but the best novels—to my mind, at least—come from the confluence of several Big Ideas all swirling together, setting up riptides and surges, hidden currents, all manner of moist metaphors.

That said, there is in fact a single Big Idea underlying not only Mary Ellen but almost all the work I’ve produced in recent years. I blame SETI, mostly.

Thing is, I emigrated from the UK a dozen years ago, to marry a Silicon Valley geek. The house we live in is literally walking distance from half a dozen major Big Tech campuses: Google’s over that way, LinkedIn is down there, Apple is all over the place. SETI’s headquarters is a two-mile stroll from here—and they used to hold weekly seminars where planetary scientists and astronomers would discuss their latest work, discoveries, theories, and so on. On occasion it became clear that there were more Nobel laureates in the audience than on the panel.

Anyway, when Curiosity landed, there was inevitably a lot of talk about Mars; and at the same time there was a conversation going on in the steampunk community about how the genre was dominated by notions of the British Empire, and it really didn’t need to be. So I was following that, and thinking about the Red Planet, and wondering how you could mix current planetary science with the Old Mars of golden-age SF—and again, not wishing to come across contrarian, but my mother was a classic Daughter of Empire (father in the Scots Guards: she was born in Rangoon and grew up in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore between the wars, having one of those strange, privileged colonial childhoods), and I’ve always been fascinated by that whole end-of-empire period; and the further I move away from the UK, the more inveterately British my fiction becomes.

So, in defiance of the mood of the times, I started to think about Mars as a province of the British Empire: how that could have happened, and how it would have changed history back on Earth. (Answer: a lot. George III may have lost America, but he gained a whole fertile planet. Victoria the Queen Empress never actually dies, she merely disappears into a Martian cocoon, so that her heirs become Princes Regent, never King. The Kaiser is far too cowed to make war anywhere in Europe; instead, WWI happens between Britain and Russia, because the Tsar got Venus, which is a hellhole, and he’s had covetous eyes on Mars ever since…)

I wrote a couple of short stories to try out some ideas, which were well received, and then I couldn’t think about anything else.

The rubric for the series got whittled down to “If Mars were a province of the British Empire, then So-and-so would totally have gone there,” where So-and-so is generally a figure from history. Of course Oscar Wilde would have gone, after his release from gaol and aimless wandering about Europe; of course T E Lawrence would have gone, when he was reinventing himself after the war. Of course Kipling would have gone; Kipling went everywhere, he was extraordinarily well-travelled for a man of his time.

So that was happening. Meanwhile—pausing for a sidebar—I was the third of four siblings, with an elder brother and a sister either side of me. It was a rule of the house that I got to read every book that came through the door; through my brother’s library books I discovered adult science fiction, with consequences that are clear to all, and through my sisters’ I discovered the world of girls’ boarding-school stories in general, and the Chalet School books of Elinor M Brent-Dyer in particular. There are sixty of those, with the first being published in the mid-1920s and the last in 1970. They have all the faults you’d expect, all the sexism and snobbery and colonialism and and and, and yet there is a small host of us—some well-known names that would astonish you deeply—who adored them in our childhood and adore them still.

One morning, it occurred to me that if Mars were a province of the British Empire, then the Chalet School would absolutely have a sister foundation there. It was already canonical in the series that boys were sent Home to English public schools for their education, but girls were not; the province would be aswim with daughters of civil servants and industrialists and military men, all in need of a decent education…

Thus was the Crater School born, on the rim of Lowell Crater Lake, in a Mars replete with canals and atmosphere and aliens and a busy, thriving, multiracial community (we have a whole planet to populate and farm; immigrants are always welcome, from all over, so long as they swear fealty to the Empress Eternal). Unsure of this notion as a commercial proposition, publication-wise, I set up a Patreon to see if anyone might actually be interested in reading stories from such a school—essentially, I’m writing children’s stories for adults—and as it turned out, a fair few people were. The Patreon hosts upwards of half a million words by now, and grows fatter every month. And then Cheryl Morgan at Wizard’s Tower Press offered to release Crater School books in physical and ebook formats, which delights me.

Meanwhile—sidebar!—we lost my mother-in-law, Dr Mary Ellen Williams Walsh (née McKay), whom I adored. She had been an English professor, and a remarkable woman in many ways; it was she who definitively demonstrated that Wallace Stegner had plagiarised much of his Pulitzer-winning novel Angle of Repose, from the life and letters of Mary Hallock Foote.

I very much wanted to pay tribute to Mary Ellen’s memory; and thus the Crater School acquired a new pupil, a scholarship girl from the Planum who has a very eventful and unusual first term—and thus we have Mary Ellen, Craterean!

Mary Ellen, Craterean!: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo

Author Socials: Web site|Facebook|Mastodon|Substack

The Big Idea: Dan Rice

Posted on June 19, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      Leave a Comment

Inner demons: we have them! We (mostly) don’t love them! And in this Big Idea for The Wrath of Monsters, author Dan Rice looks at how these inner demons affect (and maybe even prey on) the characters he’s created.

DAN RICE:

One of the great things about speculative fiction is that a fantastical spin can be put on everyday occurrences, from tidying the house to resisting temptation. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to clean their kitchen with a wave of a wand, such as Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter series? And most people resist temptation all the time. Do you go back for seconds? Do you eat one more chocolate? With the right words and setting, resisting everyday temptation becomes refusing to turn to the dark side of the force.

In The Wrath of Monsters, the third installment of The Allison Lee Chronicles, Allison and her friends battle inner demons with varying success. In many ways, their trials are manifestations of the struggles people face daily. Allison must coexist with a literal monster living inside her, always pining to unleash its transgressive desires upon the world. Is her inner monster different from the cookie monster in many young children, constantly pressuring them to filch one more cookie from the jar? In a literal sense, there is a difference, but metaphorically, I think not.

Allison’s squad’s struggles mirror her own. Haji possesses magic he neither fully understands nor can completely control. Even worse, he suffers from withdrawal from the drugs used to superpower his magic. Haji wants magic and is willing to use drugs to enhance his powers, even though he knows doing so is detrimental to his health and dangerous for those around him. I think this is a tremendous twist on a temptation young people face all the time. My older son is in middle school and already knows peers who vape. I suspect these students understand that vaping is bad for their health, but the one-two punch of peer pressure and addiction makes it hard to stop once they’ve started.

Allison struggles with doing the right thing by not allowing her inner monster to go too far. This is a battle she doesn’t always win. She’s blacked out and done terrible things, leaving her riddled with guilt. On the other hand, her bestie, Dalia, crosses moral red lines seemingly without regret. She justifies her actions by claiming she will do anything to protect those she loves. The question for Allison is whether she can accept this new side of her friend, especially when she is remorseful for doing similar actions.

It’s terrific how the ordinary can become the fantastical in speculative fiction. Sometimes in the speculative story, this is done by playing with what is found in the real world, such as drug use supercharging Haji’s magic. Other times, the transformation is more metaphorical. People don’t literally wrestle with inner monsters, such as Allison does. But most people resist temptations regularly despite their inner demons telling them otherwise.

The Wrath of Monsters: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|iBooks

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s website. Follow him on twitter.

The Big Idea: Dave Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Posted on June 18, 2024    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

I’ve known Tobias S. Buckell and Dave Klecha, as friends and writers, for coming up on twenty years now, so it gives me a special kick to be able to have them both as co-presenters of this particular Big Idea post. They’re talking about their just-released novel The Runes of Engagement, which answers the question: What if you took a squad of Marines and had them run a real-life role-playing adventure? Here are Tobias and Dave, in conversation about what it took for them to roll on this particular initiative.

TOBIAS S. BUCKELL AND DAVE KLECHA:

Tobias: Right. So you know how they say the best ideas come to you in the shower? I’ve read that this is because the shower is a protected creative space: you’re not on your phone, or being interrupted by phone calls, and the routine is automatic. This gives your mind time to wander, to be creative, and you can be hit by just sudden jolts of total euphoria. This is where BIG IDEAS come from! And my totally awesome Big Idea is so brilliant, so awesome, so cool, it’s going to convince every single one of your readers to just run out and pick up this book right–

Dave: Wait, wasn’t this OUR idea? I can assure you it did not appear during a shared shower… so maybe we should tag who is speaking.

Tobias: Right, right, that’s super presumptive of me. Unlike most of the Big Ideas, I can’t say THE BIG IDEA came just from me because there are two names on the cover. This trick on the readers has been revealed by the Art Department (who we can’t be mad at because, look at that cover. Look at that chonky good boy of a dragon!). 

Honestly, I had been hoping to just coast on all your hard work and act as if this entire book was my brilliant fever dream when really, I often have no clue where some of the funniest pieces of this book came from. Dave, what’s your memory of the spark that really animates this whole project? What made us crazy enough to risk our friendship of (whispers) so many years to spend all our free time on a goddamn novel? No one reads anymore anyway, right?

Dave: Okay, first… this definitely hasn’t been all my hard work. I could just as easily say I was hoping to coast on your experience in publishing. But that’s not really how this shook out. What animated this, for me, was the opportunity to do something creative with all of those conversations we’ve had over the years, sharing ideas, cracking each other up, and otherwise driving our wives nuts.

Tobias: Well, first of all, my experience in publishing over 25 years is nothing I want to coast on because it’s been more like the sort of turbulent plane ride that leaves confused readers vomiting in a bag, but that’s nice of you to suggest my career is a ride anyone wants to be a part of. I’m just happy to be in the air, or theme park, I’m sorry I’ve lost control of this metaphor. What I’m trying to say is that we came to this project based entirely on just how much it delighted us, and how much we enjoyed cracking each other up. Taking that experience out for the year(s) it (can) did take us to put this together was a pure delight. I can recall,however,  that the earliest seed of this came from a request to write a military fantasy short story for a John Joseph Adams anthology…

Dave: …and of course you thought of me to collab with, since I’m a writer who has actually spent time in the military. 

Tobias: That’s it, that’s the ONLY reason I reached out to you. Not 20 years of being close friends or staying up until four in the morning talking about the world. Just your service!

Dave: Right… Not that I want to be just that guy, but I have to admit, I do enjoy writing that kind of stuff, especially when it comes to trying to convey the reality of life on the ground and subverting expectations. These aren’t exactly the Marines one might expect from consuming other military-set stories, after all. The fun part for both of us, though, and what I think is really going to be fun for the reader is also paying homage to various fantasy stories and playing with expectations along the way.

Tobias: I knew we both adored Diana Wynne Jones “Tough Guide to Fantasyland” as well as various fantasy games in common, and tons of books (the obvious and not so obvious). But to be honest, we initially had a tough time finding a way into a ‘military fantasy’ short story, Dave’s experience and my own creativity notwithstanding, we both didn’t have an ‘in’ for a long time. We almost didn’t write the story! Until I was standing in a shower… I’m not even kidding by the way… and I thought I’d ask Dave what he thought about “Marines go to generic Fantasyland: chaos ensues.” That’s a germ of a thought, not a whole story, but it was Dave who came up with the secret sauce that I think made the book something special. Something more than just a gimmick of an idea that I initially had. That was the important soul of this project, the thing that’ll make you go buy it (because look, we’re working here, we’re trying to convince you to spend your heard-earned cash on our little fever dream here), and it is that… okay Dave, you take this, I’ve done the hard bit and set you up 😊.

Dave: Yeah…. Yeah the setup is the hard bit, okay. So what Tobias is alluding to relates to two things I don’t honestly see often enough: an actual military unit working together, developing an idea of a unit, and supposedly modern folk with all of our cultural history not being aware that they’re in a genre story. The secret sauce then is a whole Marine Corps rifle squad, thirteen Marines and a sailor, each of whom have varying relationships with fantasy literature, games, and films, bouncing off each other and engaging with their own expectations as they undertake an adventure in fantasyland. Unlike, say, every character in a zombie movie or show who has never seen a zombie movie or show and has no idea what to expect or what’s going on. That’s fun, in its own way, but I love engaging with this idea, with exploring what it would be like and how confounding, frustrating, hilarious, and exhilarating it could be.

Tobias: the meta is what made all of this click in our collaborative conversations, and what left us filled with so much joy about it. I’ve been watching Lower Decks recently, and it’s that same sort of nerd love combined with deep lore knowledge. But the characters are also so aware of their situations within larger Star Trek history and shenanigans that it somehow becomes something more than just a jab at Star Trek, but a love letter. While also taking the piss thoroughly. We set out to just take some of these set pieces we kept talking about in RPGs, literature, and just have fun with them. For example–

Dave: Ooh, tell them about the ethereal spring!

Tobias: In the numinous glade?

Dave: Pfft, like there’s another ethereal spring? Of course the one in the numinous glade.

Tobias: If anyone has heard us talk about this book this is probably our favorite scene, yes. I remember cooking this one up in a bar together and laughing. We knew it had to be in the outline when we started looking at each other after the story was published and going “is there a book here?”

Dave: Get to the good stuff already, dude.

Tobias: The squad’s bouncing around in Fantasyland wilderness. They’ve encountered obstacles classically from any given generic fantasy situation you can think of. They’re hungry, they’re out of water, and lost. And when all hope is lost, they stumble across a numinous glade–

Dave: Can’t just stumble onto an ordinary glade when all hope is lost, after all.

Tobias: Right, with dancing flecks of light and dappled colors like an impressionist painting from a French master. They’re uncapping canteens, splashing water on their faces. And nymphs appear, beckoning them further out into the cold, clear water. The marines, entranced, move forward. Then a dirty-ass shepherd starts shoving at the nymphs with a crook, scattering them. His sheep are shitting all over the numinous grass, or eating it.

Dave: There’s always a helpful stranger in a fantasy novel after all, though rarely one so grungy. Who stays grungy, by the way, and doesn’t turn out to be the lost king in disguise or something.

Tobias: I swear there’s nothing special about the helpful shepherd. I’m being honest here. Don’t read this book expecting the shepherd to be anything other than a grungy stranger.

Dave: Pay no attention to the grungy shepherd, or the lost orphan, or anyone who might be standing around in a convenient beam of light.

Tobias: See, meta, fun, and yet, one of the things that grounds the book and again, makes it more than just something taking the piss… is that Dave (and I, from my own limited research ability) wanted to really do well by the Marines in the story to reflect Dave’s experience in the military and give the readers a side of it that they may not have seen.

Dave: Which is to say that it’s not all giggles and laughs. The Marines have a serious job and it has serious consequences for them. And we strove to show that balance, between people doing a tough job and the sorts of experiences that make it bearable for them.

Tobias: For me, getting details right about how things work brings a sort of authenticity to the experience. It makes the world lived in. And while the fantasy world is fantastical, the details of the Marines escalate the experience of the world. They ground it and make it more human, letting us counter-balance the humor with some amazing characters. But mostly, mostly, I hope you’ll check this book out because if enough people do, I’ll get a chance to maybe do another project with such a fun co-creator.

Runes of Engagement: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Tobias Buckell Socials: Web site|Bluesky|Instagram

Dave Klecha Socials: Web site|Bluesky|Instagram

Read an excerpt.

The Big Idea: Tim Pratt

Posted on June 13, 2024    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Unless, of course, you decide you can make as many cakes as you want and do as you please, like author Tim Pratt has done in his newest novel, The Knife and the Serpent. Follow along in his Big Idea to see just how many slices he was capable of fitting in to the story.

TIM PRATT:

The big idea behind my new multiversal space opera The Knife and the Serpent is basically: Oh The Audacity.

People talk about kitchen sink books, but this is more like a whole restaurant supply store. After all, why shouldn’t I get everything I want? Once I wrapped up my last series, the duology Doors of Sleep and Prison of Sleep, I started thinking about what to write next, and found myself vacillating wildly.

 Should I go back to my roots as a contemporary fantasy author? I love the intrusion of the magical and unexpected into modern life, especially the way eruptions of the uncanny push people to extremes that reveal the true contours of their characters. Or should I go back to space opera, and indulge my love for plasma rifles and incomprehensible aliens and AI starships (actual machine minds, not the autocorrect- with-plagiarism variety we’ve got these days)? Or maybe I could do another multiverse series, and continue to explore strange worlds and bombard my characters with cascading alternate realities? (I was writing multiverse stories before they were cool… and then continued doing them while they were cool… and I am still doing them, even though they’re becoming less cool again.)

I couldn’t decide which one to do, so I just… did all of it. 

The Knife and the Serpent is about a genderfluid grad student named Glenn at the University of California, Berkeley who discovers his girlfriend (and domme, but that’s a whole other thing) Vivy is, in fact, a secret agent for a group of meddling do-gooders called the Interventionists, who punch fascists and protect the vulnerable across the Nigh-Space continuum (a swath of hundreds of adjacent realities with varying levels of habitation and technology). This discovery puts a bit of a strain on their relationship, which only gets worse as Glenn becomes entangled in Vivy’s latest mission. In a parallel plot threat, Glenn’s ex-girlfriend Tamsin discovers her ill-tempered, brilliant inventor grandmother is actually a refugee from the universe next door… and murderous thugs from that reality have come to Earth to settle old scores. 

So there I’ve got my contemporary-fantasy-esque intrusions of the weird into the everyday, complete with a magic door to a neighboring reality (well, technology so advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic, anyway), and a chance to satisfy my daydream of watching nasty little fighter spaceships cruise over the Berkeley hills and buzz the Golden Gate Bridge. The multiverse element offers me potentially hundreds of strange universes to explore, and who doesn’t like options? The space opera comes in once Glenn is inadvertently dragged into one of Vivy’s missions on another level of Nigh-Space and meets her fellow Interventionist, the snarky AI starship The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie (Eddie to his friends), shortly before an eruption of space violence. Glenn’s further introduction to the multiverse includes visits to a shattered Dyson Swarm and a secret Interventionist base hidden amidst the wreckage of an ancient space battle.

Tamsin, meanwhile, makes her way to the Old Country, the alternate universe her grandmother fled, with the goal of discovering the secrets of her heritage, and claiming her otherworldly inheritance. That other reality is politically regressive, ruled by oligarchs, but it’s far more advanced technologically than our own, and Tamsin is confronted by a dizzying array of sci-fi strangeness including at least two flavors of psychopathic clones, a city flooded by an alien sea in an interdimensional incident, a convivial swarm of deadly killbots, orbital prison camps, a mad science lab hidden in a mountain, and a whispering computer assistant with a matter-of-fact approach to violence. (There’s more, but I should leave you with some surprises.)

The separate paths of those characters converge as Glenn and Vivy take on a mission that collides with Tamsin’s efforts to claim her stolen birthright, leading to heists, infiltrations, abductions, prisons breaks, sabotage, and a healthy dose of interpersonal complication. (It’s bad enough when your current partner and your ex start talking about you together; it’s even worse when they’re talking about you on an alien world while psychotic augmented clones try to kill you.)

I’ll admit there’s some danger in putting all your favorite tropes in a blender and turning it on high—things can get muddled and overstuffed—but I believe the clarity of Vivy and Glenn’s romantic partnership keeps the novel emotionally grounded. It’s not just a bunch of over-the-top sci-fi weirdness happening for its own sake; it’s about the impact of those disruptive elements on people, and that’s the core of what makes science fiction great for me. Whether I pulled it off remains to be seen, but I hope you’ll give it a try; I’ve written a lot of novels in my career, and this is one of the most personal, ambitious, and fun books I’ve ever done. Does it have something for everyone? Maybe! But it definitely has everything for me.

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