Guest Post: CONJURING ALIENS

Today I welcome James K. Decker, author of The Burn Zone, and pseudonym of James Knapp, to my blog.  I've read his previous books, State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero and highly recommend all three.

The Burn Zone hits stores February 5th. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Making stuff up is fun, but it’s hard.

Although I've written a lot of Science Fiction, The Burn Zone marks the first time since college that I've ever written about an alien species. They are central to the story, in fact one of the first ideas that sparked the series was imagining one of what I came to call the Haan watching a human from the shadows of an alleyway, but their creation was one of the most difficult parts. At the time, I had a sense of how I wanted them to be - intelligent, and helpful, but secretive. I had no idea how involved coming up with my fictitious species, the Haan, would become.

There have been hundreds of alien species concocted by writers over the years - just go to tvtropes.com and follow any alien thread and you'll see (just finish this post first...once tvtropes sucks you in you will never emerge). Coming up with something that hasn't been done is no simple task, as almost anywhere you step will press your shoe squarely into a used trope. How the haan look physically is something that went through a few iterations, but though I'm sure parts of them may have been done before, I like where they landed. I knew that I needed them to be somewhat humanoid in appearance, but that I didn't want them to be 'prosthetic forehead' aliens (not a dig - some of my favorite television sci-fi like Star Trek and Farscape put them to very good use). Their physiology is very different from ours as you will see, but their spindly figures, translucent skin and glass-like bones are arranged in a two legs, two arms, one head configuration, and for a good reason. I put everything on display with the haan, and their hearts, beehive ribcages and other organs are visible, if cloudy. The ambient light from their eyes illuminates the inside of their faces and skulls, to reveal shapes like feeding tubes, their two brains, and other nodules of less-clear purpose. Alien, but not without a certain degree of elegance, and with an innate level of exposure that makes them vulnerable.

Still, while appearances matter (as the haan well know), the key to any alien race (or fantasy race, if you lean that way) isn't as much about how they look as it is about who they are. Unless you're dealing with, say, the xenomorphs from Alien where the point of them is to be dangerous and little else, then the race has to have depth to it. They have to have societal norms, and deviations from those norms. They have to have purpose, at both the group and individual level. I knew going in that I didn't want a single trait race who came from a planet of merchants, or a planet of warriors. I wanted them to be cohesive as a group, because they have to be out of necessity if nothing else, but vary in attitude as individuals. Nix, the haan we get the closest look at in The Burn Zone, ultimately goes against the grain because he doesn't agree with a lot of his kind's attitudes about their situation.

The haan are essentially stranded in the middle of a huge city, their ship surrounded by a force field. After years of turtle-ing, they slowly began to emerge. We meet them fifty years in, when relations are still tense but they've begun to be granted extra space in the form of colony districts which are surrounded by security walls. Because of the situation they're in, the haan are, understandably, cautious, and secretive. No human has ever been inside their ship, or even behind the force field that surrounds it. They reveal themselves slowly, and what is seen in the first installment of the series is just the tip of a very large iceberg.

What drew me to the idea of using aliens at all, though, and what interested me most of all, was the idea of a much more advanced culture, even a small sample of one, stumbling into an already entrenched society of less advanced people. There may not be many haan compared to humans in the city of Hangfei, but Cortez didn't have that many people with him relatively speaking when he found the Aztecs, either. That's not to say the haan are conquerors - they're not - but they have a huge impact on the world around them nonetheless. The world they find themselves in is extremely overcrowded, and space is at a premium. If the haan want to grow, and to survive, then they'll need a share of that space, and getting it won't be easy. How far they're willing to go, both at a group and individual level, to ensure their race can survive is something the book studies.

I can say no more without risking spoilers. I hope you'll see how their situation plays out in The Burn Zone, and I hope you enjoy the world, and the aliens, I've created.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
James K. Decker was born in New Hampshire in 1970, and has lived in the New England area since that time. He developed a love of reading and writing early on, participating in young author competitions as early as grade school, but the later discovery of works by Frank Herbert and Issac Asimov turned that love to an obsession.

He wrote continuously through high school, college and beyond, eventually breaking into the field under the name James Knapp, with the publication of the Revivors trilogy (State of Decay, The Silent Army, and Element Zero). State of Decay was a Philip K. Dick award nominee, and won the 2010 Compton Crook Award. The Burn Zone is his debut novel under the name James K. Decker.

He now lives in MA with his wife Kim.

Guest Post: The Science behind the Fiction

Today I welcome Paul Byers to my blog, author of Arctic Fire, Catalyst and the new short story collection, Act of God.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

As a writer, I enjoy the freedom that comes from writing science fiction. If I want to make the sky green, then it’s green. If I want to have a massive alien fleet of robotic creatures who want to attack earth because they need our oil, so be it. 

Today’s audience is much more sophisticated and educated, most having grown up on such sci-fi staples as Star Trekand Star Wars. Nowadays, a writer can take a lot for granted when telling their story. Everybody has heard of hyperspace or warp drive, phasers, lasers and photon cannons and the concept of faster-than-light travel and beaming is no big deal and doesn’t need to be explained.

But just because today’s audience is savvy, doesn’t mean you can create a sub-space oscillating flux capacitor relay system bent on disrupting the resonating harmonic frequencies governing the tectonic plating grid system surrounding the magnetic fields shielding the earth from the electromagnetic and gamma radiation associated with a mark 12 solar flare eruptions. Deep breath, in others words, do your research!

Even though you have certain freedoms with sci-fi, good fiction is based off of good facts. And as a writer, I sometimes struggle with the amount of facts to include in the story. While doing research, I come across one interesting fact that leads to another, then another and soon all these interesting tidbits are too much and overflow like the sentence above full of $2 words. It’s a balancing act between what I think is really cool and what the reader needs to know about the story.

In the short story, Shooting Starfrom Act of God, the Saturn V rocket used to launch the Apollo Moon Missions and also our hero, Captain Grant, weighs in at 5-6 million pounds. The original Wright Brothers Flyer topped the scales at around 625 pounds. Another interesting fact is that it takes the space shuttle about 90 minutes to orbit the earth. The astronauts would see a sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes. Important to the story, no, but interesting, yes.

Sometimes the lack of facts is what makes the more interesting story. In my thriller, Arctic Fire, part of the story includes the sinking of the Titanic. With the 100^thanniversary of the sinking just past, you think you’ve heard all there is to hear about the loss of the great ship, guess again.

There is some evidence that points to the fact that it wasn’t the Titanicthat sank, but her identical twin sister ship, the Olympic, and that the two were switched in a grand insurance scam. A more intriguing theory is one taken right out of a Dan Brown novel with agents of the Catholic Church sinking the ship in an elaborate plot to achieve their own political ends.

My personal favorite is the theory that it wasn’t an iceberg that sank the luxury liner at all, but the curse of the mummy!

In The Journal, from Act of God, several “unsolved” mysteries are brought up by the characters in the book. In1590, Sir Walter Raleigh started a colony in the New World at Roanoke, Virginia. Today it’s known as ‘The Lost Colony’ because 118 men, women and children just vanished without a trace. Some say they were attacked by neighboring Indians, some say they were assimilated by them and others think they tried to relocate and simply all died. But what really happened?

In 1908 there was a huge crash / explosion in Siberia, leveling over 800 square miles of forest. The official explanation of what happened was an air burst of a meteor, but was it?

To fly off and boldly go… using facts and combining fiction and imagination together is the corner stone to good science fiction. But using facts and “missing” facts to build your stories upon can be just as “fascinating,” as some would say.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from one of the great forerunners of today’s science fiction, Flash Gordon.

Emperor Ming: Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror.
Klytus: Most effective, Your Majesty. Will you destroy this Earth? 
Emperor Ming:Later. I like to play with things a while before annihilation.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

About the Author:

Paul grew up in Oregon on the shores of the mighty and mysterious Columbia River, and spent endless hours daydreaming on the beach in front of his house, making up stories about the ships from exotic ports all over the world that steamed up the river – what secret cargo might they be carrying; did they harbor spies who were on dark and exciting missions?

Later in adult life, he moved to another mysterious and provocative city – Las Vegas, just outside the famous Nellis Air Force base. After work he would sit on his porch and watch the fighters take off and land, igniting his imagination with visions of secret missions and rich speculation about what could possibly be hidden at Area 51.

After moving back to his native Pacific Northwest, Paul worked for the Navy and took every opportunity he could to speak with veterans from WWII to the Gulf War, listening to them swap stories and relate the experiences of a lifetime.

So it is this combination of a passionate love of history, a vivid “what if” imagination, and a philosophy of life that boils down to the belief that – there are few things in life that a bigger hammer won’t fix – that led Paul to become a writer of exciting, fact-based action-thrillers. His greatest joy is leaving his readers wondering where the facts end and the fiction begins.

Guest Post: Max Gladstone

Today I welcome to my blog Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead, a new novel out from Tor Books. Check out his website and be back tomorrow for my review of his debut. Here's a little about him, in his own words:

Max has taught in southern Anhui, wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat, and been thrown from a horse in Mongolia. Max graduated from Yale University, where he studied Chinese.
-------------------------

At six a.m. one morning in late August 2006, my friend Wyatt and I stepped off a train onto a broad cement plaza in front of the Huangshan City train station in southern China. A driver received us, and his small black car wound down twenty minutes of road out to Xiuning Middle School, where we spent the next two years teaching.

The Xiuning area has developed in intervening years, but at that time the school sat in miles of farms stretching back to green mountains. Wyatt and I set to learn what we could about this place that had become our home. A fellow teacher guided us through the grounds. The school library stood nearby, and facing its doors a statue of two girls, one standing, the other seated. Each woman's hands clasped a book.

Our guide told us the young women were former students, one of whom now worked as an economist for the UN; the other was a scientist, I believe. Two women who won their way out of the country into the wider world.

That night, Wyatt and I bought beers from a small store across the street and sat on the library steps and toasted one another and the statues. We drank to them, and with them, wondering how they'd felt when their lives led them past strange horizons. We felt an echo of that experience ourselves: far beyond the forests and oceans of our childhoods.

Those statues were our companions through the next two years. We met those women again and again—or, versions of them, kids from villages two hours' walk from the nearest road, who saw their parents once or twice a semester because there wasn't time for them to travel home. Kids who sat through twelve hours of class a day, woke at six in the morning and bent themselves again to their books. Kids who saw in education their chance for a life beyond the fields.

They were right: the Chinese education system revolves around a single test, the Gao Kao, administered at the end of high school. A student with a high score on the Gao Kao gets into the program of her choice at the school of her choice; a student with a low score on the Gao Kao may not be admitted to any school at all. For poor students, the test is a battlefield, and a door to a wider world.

I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, and I'd thought back in high school that I knew ambition. In their dedication, in their determination, in their grit, some of these fifteen-year-olds outclassed the most serious scholars I'd ever known. They worked as if there was a gun to their heads. In a way there was.

Without those students, those statues, my first novel, Three Parts Dead, would have been a very different book. The main character, Tara, is a young woman like many of my students: a girl from a small country town, hungry for the world beyond. That world, though, is bigger than she expected, and more dangerous; the book's beginning finds her reeling, and wondering what she's got herself into.

Writing Tara, I thought back to that first night in Xiuning, the beer and the moon and the statues, and the weight of choices. I tried to capture that tension between ambition and intimidation, that sense of excitement in spite of enemies and challengers. I tried to write something worth those statues. I hope I succeeded.

Find Me Elsewhere On The Web

A friend of mine and former co-worker from the World's Biggest Bookstore asked me to write up a guest post for her Christian Romance blog, A Fair Substitute For Heaven.  The topic: 5 Canadian Fantasy/SF authors you should read (they're mostly fantasy authors, as that's my preferred genre).

I also participated in an SF Signal Mind Meld last week, talking about the most interesting books on our to be read piles.  There are some great books mentioned, so head on over and give it a look.