They came charging down from the far side of the field, all looking very excited, heads up, faces tight, eyes wide. I stopped, curious if it was really me they were coming to see. They surged up to the stone wall, the bravest and blackest at the front, their shiny noses out. “I don’t have any food.” I held my hands up for them to see. “See? Nothing.” They gazed back, their excitement intensified.
Maybe I was the first person they had seen in days. Maybe they were just lonely. “Beautiful day, isn’t it? The sun might even come out.” They were affixed on me, amazed at everything I said and did. “You must be very content here, knowing there is no abattoir on the island.” They waited, bunching up closer. “The key is to always stay here. Right?”
I approached, and the nearest wheeled back, causing a mass but brief wave of panic. I had my hands in the air again. “It’s fine. I promise. Just a nose scratch.” I tried again, and they moved back again, the nearest jumping back and forth between his fore and hind legs like a toy. I waited and they waited too, some looking off, perhaps thinking another better of me might arrive soon. I offered my hand and they bounced back again. “Well, then…”
I continued my walk alongside their wall, and they followed until they came to the corner of their field and huddled there in a great mass. I stopped and waved. “I’ll see you soon.” They stared back as I continued along, both of us a little lonelier, and then I met the pigs.
World building is writing hell. As incredible – even fun – as the idea might sound, it isn’t. By anything being possible, there is no place to start. Even if it seems like a matter of just picking and choosing and away you go, it isn’t. Not for me. While I might have the germ of an idea – such as using dark matter to fuel an inter-generational spaceship – fleshing that out is akin to chronic constipation. My writing practice is centered on the small things – an image or line of dialogue – and going out from there. It is an inductive approach to writing, finding the bits of evidence to create the whole, such as the serval image at the watering hole that begat My Bad Side.
Photo Credit: Michael Nichols, National Geographic
I didn’t know what that image meant at the time, but I knew it meant something and used it to find what might be next.
Building worlds demands the opposite to my approach to writing, a deductive method, going from the big picture to develop the small, focusing on time machines or warp drives, creating a story from those. This is what grinds my flow to a halt. If I can’t see where I am – the details of what it looks like to live on board a spaceship – I am perpetually stuck.
I got into the world of speculative fiction by accident. The protagonist in an earlier book, Dee Sinclair, stumbled ahead and wondered aloud if she might venture on to something else. As far-fetched as her world appeared at the time – a sex performer holed up with her pet serval – it was nothing compared to Greenland where she witnesses a fledgling world constructed before her eyes. This is the outset of Anori, the first book of The Cx Trilogy.
The crux of the speculative/sci-fi genre is world building, something beyond what we live in today. It isn’t just a matter of a propping up a couple of rocket ships and having characters walk about in space suits. Every detail has to be in tune. My most effective world building elements in Anori are Holoweb and Second Skin because they were simple to envision – a three-dimensional version of today’s internet and a spray-on fashion statement – and only a step ahead of what we have now.
I raised the world-building stakes in the second book of the trilogy, Aqaara, where Dee boards a generational spaceship bound for a planet light-years distant. Daily life aboard the spaceship took a long time to create, not just the details of the sleeping quarters and gatherings places but, more importantly, the mindset of leaving Earth to never return. I was in the Highlands of Scotland while mapping out this world, a far cry from outer space but at least isolated and quiet.
I planned the design of the ship while hiking, soaking wet, through the silence, but could not attain a genuine sense for what it felt like to live in this space, to sleep and eat, to lose all sense of time with a lunar or solar cycle, to see people every day – there was no day! – and to not know when, if ever, the journey might come to an end. That took another two drafts – in Puglia and then New York – to get it so it seemed like it really was so.
The final book, Mina, demands a literal new world. That’s where I am now. The temptation to settle for lunar landscapes and prehistoric beasts remains hard to resist. After all, what do I know about another planet’s flora and fauna? I have settled on a leopard seal/hedgehog hybrid as the creature atop of the food chain, as well as string of camera-stealing starlings. Who knows what the deep seas will offer? Something astonishing should happen soon.
My challenge with world building has given me pause. As transfixed as I can be in the fantastic landscapes of science fiction – where absolutely anything is possible – the writing craft must remain the focus. In other words, while the visions presented in this genre might be spell-binding, the characters, dialogue and construction of the narrative remain the foundation. My aim in writing The Cx Trilogy is to bridge the gap between literary fiction and speculative fiction, and not just build worlds but build worlds where we can literally picture ourselves alive and wondering. We will see what Dee’s progeny find next.
I will be off-line for the remaining weeks of July in the Scottish Highlands.As John Williams wrote in Butcher’s Crossing, I hope “to accept the silence I live in and find meaning in it.”
