Sam Kates's Blog - Posts Tagged "science-fiction"
Science Fiction Writers
With the kind permission of Edward Lake, I'm reproducing here an interview he conducted with me that appears on his blog. He has also interviewed 16 other indie authors - the interviews all appear together on the one page and provide an interesting contrast (and similarity) between what influences us as writers. It's here: http://themamlukssaga.squarespace.com...
The interview:
Q: What inspired you to be a writer?
A: First and foremost, a deep and abiding love of reading. Many of the stories I read as a child are still with me today, though I read them forty or more years ago. Books like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Adventure series, and, of course, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles. In my teens I discovered Lord of the Rings and it has captivated me ever since. Then authors like James Herbert, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett came along, and I was hooked.
I started writing fiction in my early thirties for a number of reasons. Here’s a couple. At the time, I was doing a stressful job that I hated. Writing became a sort of pressure release valve, a refuge from dark introspection. It also represented a possible, if unlikely, escape route from a job I loathed to one I loved. At about the same time, I read a number of novels that left me feeling flat, wondering how they’d been published. I can’t now recall their titles (and wouldn’t name them if I could), but felt I could do better.
Q: How did you become a science fiction writer?
A: Although I refer to mainly fantasy and horror books and authors above, I have also enjoyed reading science fiction over the years. Works by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, to name but a few. Pratchett’s Discworld series is generally regarded as fantasy, but actually contains many elements of science fiction.
The title story of my short story collection, Pond Life, is probably the first science fiction story I wrote. It concerns a space ship crashing into a pond outside a sleepy Welsh village and sinking to the bottom. Though the occupants of the craft are slowly dying, they work certain changes in the village’s inhabitants.
I didn’t set out to be a science fiction writer, merely a writer, but it was inevitable that science fiction would form part of my writing output. Many writers, myself included, write the sort of books that they like to read. Since science fiction forms a large portion of my reading pleasure, I was bound to write it. Put another way, we write what we write because we read what we read.
Q: Is there a message you're trying to send to your readers? Or a deeper meaning behind your stories?
A: My intention in writing a story is purely and simply to entertain. Let’s face it, for all its wonders life can be pretty shit at times. I have often found escape and solace in losing myself in other worlds found between the pages of a book and enriched by my imagination. If I can provide the means to do the same for others, I’ll be happy. If readers can find some message or deeper meaning in my work, then that’s a bonus, but wasn’t what I set out to do.
Q: Tell me about one of your projects. How did you come up with the concept?
A: My short story collection contains another science fiction story, an apocalyptic tale: The Third Coming. It was written more than ten years ago, probably closer to fifteen, but I remember thinking at the time that it touched on ideas that might reward further exploration at some later date. Ideas concerning the origins of humankind and a method of faster-than-light travel and the purpose of Stonehenge, amongst others.
I revisited those ideas last year and sat down to write a novel based on them. I do a regular job full time and have to fit writing into evenings and weekends, but I completed the first draft in just under nine weeks, a record time for me. The novel is called The Cleansing and was published in December.
Q: What are some of your favorite science fiction authors, and why?
A: I’ve mentioned some already. I can add Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks. There are many authors whose works I haven’t yet read, but fully intend to, such as Ursula Le Guin, Harry Turtledove and, sacrilege I know, Hugh Howey. Too many books, not enough time…
As for why I like these authors? For the depth of their imaginations and their sheer story-telling abilities.
Q: As it pertains to your readers, what do you hope to accomplish as an author?
A: As I say above, I want to entertain and help provide an avenue to forget about the humdrum for a while. If readers take something more from my work, something that makes them think or view the world differently, then all to the good. But if I only manage to entertain them, that will do.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A week or two into writing The Cleansing, it became apparent that there was way too much story to fit into one reasonably-sized novel. As an unknown, I didn’t want to write a doorstop that nobody would take a chance on buying, so decided to write a trilogy. I ended The Cleansing at about 90,000 words at a point that I felt was a natural place to pause. Not every reviewer agrees and I completely see where they’re coming from, but I hope they understand that I had to end it somewhere (or write a doorstop).
Now I’m working on the sequel: The Beacon. It picks up almost immediately where The Cleansing left off. I’m enjoying meeting the characters again (I haven’t seen them since July) and introducing some new characters that I’m slowly getting to know. Although I shall do everything I can to end this one at another natural pausing point, it will still leave the main story arc unresolved. That will happen at the conclusion of the third novel. I have an ending in mind but have little idea how I’ll get there. I’m relishing the journey.
The interview:
Q: What inspired you to be a writer?
A: First and foremost, a deep and abiding love of reading. Many of the stories I read as a child are still with me today, though I read them forty or more years ago. Books like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Adventure series, and, of course, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles. In my teens I discovered Lord of the Rings and it has captivated me ever since. Then authors like James Herbert, Stephen King and Terry Pratchett came along, and I was hooked.
I started writing fiction in my early thirties for a number of reasons. Here’s a couple. At the time, I was doing a stressful job that I hated. Writing became a sort of pressure release valve, a refuge from dark introspection. It also represented a possible, if unlikely, escape route from a job I loathed to one I loved. At about the same time, I read a number of novels that left me feeling flat, wondering how they’d been published. I can’t now recall their titles (and wouldn’t name them if I could), but felt I could do better.
Q: How did you become a science fiction writer?
A: Although I refer to mainly fantasy and horror books and authors above, I have also enjoyed reading science fiction over the years. Works by Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, to name but a few. Pratchett’s Discworld series is generally regarded as fantasy, but actually contains many elements of science fiction.
The title story of my short story collection, Pond Life, is probably the first science fiction story I wrote. It concerns a space ship crashing into a pond outside a sleepy Welsh village and sinking to the bottom. Though the occupants of the craft are slowly dying, they work certain changes in the village’s inhabitants.
I didn’t set out to be a science fiction writer, merely a writer, but it was inevitable that science fiction would form part of my writing output. Many writers, myself included, write the sort of books that they like to read. Since science fiction forms a large portion of my reading pleasure, I was bound to write it. Put another way, we write what we write because we read what we read.
Q: Is there a message you're trying to send to your readers? Or a deeper meaning behind your stories?
A: My intention in writing a story is purely and simply to entertain. Let’s face it, for all its wonders life can be pretty shit at times. I have often found escape and solace in losing myself in other worlds found between the pages of a book and enriched by my imagination. If I can provide the means to do the same for others, I’ll be happy. If readers can find some message or deeper meaning in my work, then that’s a bonus, but wasn’t what I set out to do.
Q: Tell me about one of your projects. How did you come up with the concept?
A: My short story collection contains another science fiction story, an apocalyptic tale: The Third Coming. It was written more than ten years ago, probably closer to fifteen, but I remember thinking at the time that it touched on ideas that might reward further exploration at some later date. Ideas concerning the origins of humankind and a method of faster-than-light travel and the purpose of Stonehenge, amongst others.
I revisited those ideas last year and sat down to write a novel based on them. I do a regular job full time and have to fit writing into evenings and weekends, but I completed the first draft in just under nine weeks, a record time for me. The novel is called The Cleansing and was published in December.
Q: What are some of your favorite science fiction authors, and why?
A: I’ve mentioned some already. I can add Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, Iain M. Banks. There are many authors whose works I haven’t yet read, but fully intend to, such as Ursula Le Guin, Harry Turtledove and, sacrilege I know, Hugh Howey. Too many books, not enough time…
As for why I like these authors? For the depth of their imaginations and their sheer story-telling abilities.
Q: As it pertains to your readers, what do you hope to accomplish as an author?
A: As I say above, I want to entertain and help provide an avenue to forget about the humdrum for a while. If readers take something more from my work, something that makes them think or view the world differently, then all to the good. But if I only manage to entertain them, that will do.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A week or two into writing The Cleansing, it became apparent that there was way too much story to fit into one reasonably-sized novel. As an unknown, I didn’t want to write a doorstop that nobody would take a chance on buying, so decided to write a trilogy. I ended The Cleansing at about 90,000 words at a point that I felt was a natural place to pause. Not every reviewer agrees and I completely see where they’re coming from, but I hope they understand that I had to end it somewhere (or write a doorstop).
Now I’m working on the sequel: The Beacon. It picks up almost immediately where The Cleansing left off. I’m enjoying meeting the characters again (I haven’t seen them since July) and introducing some new characters that I’m slowly getting to know. Although I shall do everything I can to end this one at another natural pausing point, it will still leave the main story arc unresolved. That will happen at the conclusion of the third novel. I have an ending in mind but have little idea how I’ll get there. I’m relishing the journey.
Tale of a Tale
A question that is often asked of writers is, “From where do you get your ideas?” As most writers would, I imagine, agree, it’s not an easy question to answer. Here’s my take on it.
What if? I ask myself that a lot. It’s how nearly all of my ideas for stories begin. Just two little words that can open worlds of possibilities.
Though not always. The hypothesis may lead nowhere and is quickly discarded. Sometimes only hints of potential are revealed, perhaps to be filed away for another time. What if that bloke sitting opposite me on the bus is a psychopath? Nah, he looks like an accountant. But what if he’s a psychopathic accountant? Hmm, I quite like the juxtaposition of madness and mundanity. Perhaps he’s cannibalistic and preys on tradesmen, a sort of plumber-munching number-cruncher. One day, maybe…
On occasions that what-if question leads to places where my imagination scrambles to follow. That’s what happened with the Earth Haven trilogy, but to explain I need to go back almost twenty years to where it began.
I have long been fascinated by end of days tales in film and in books. It was almost inevitable when I started writing fiction in my early thirties that I would sooner or later pen one of my own. And it started with a question: what if the apocalyptic event involved mankind being wiped out deliberately? Other questions followed hard on its heels: who would do that? Why? How?
And again, what if? What if we were created by an advance guard of beings from a distant planet and the bulk of their population is only now heading this way?
This led to more questions, more possibilities. If we were created by off-world beings (I’m hesitating to use the word ‘aliens’ since they are, on the face of it, more us as we would ideally like to be: non-violent, altruistic, cerebral), then to what purpose? If this took place many millennia ago, we would have been little more than shambling, rutting foragers, possessed of simple brains yet a compelling instinct to survive and procreate. Maybe we were created as expendable slaves, little more than drones, designed to face toothed and tusked and clawed danger in place of our masters; to spread out and populate and colonise; to cultivate and construct; to prepare the way.
But what if the arrival of the rest of the off-worlders was delayed, perhaps by thousands of years? Mankind would have proliferated, grown smarter, become warlike and warring, developed cunning and technology, demonstrated a nasty streak and a tendency to violence. The peaceful incoming beings would now be vastly outnumbered. Would humanity welcome them with open arms and a peck to both cheeks, or with open enmity and missiles to both flanks?
Those who remain of the advance guard must make a decision: allow their people to arrive to a barrage of detonating warheads, or take action that will clear the way for a safe arrival. Wouldn’t it be ironic if humankind must now itself be eradicated as it has become the obstacle?
These are the questions I mulled over as the twentieth century drew to a close. While people fretted about the Millennium Bug, I wrote a short story that began to answer these questions, while posing more: The Third Coming.
The twenty-first century arrived and then along came the e-book revolution. It passed me by. By the time I paid attention, trying to get noticed as a new guy on the block was like trying to stand out at Woodstock by wearing a flower in your hair.
I jumped in anyway. Bundling ten short stories together, including The Third Coming, I published the collection Pond Life in August 2012. I hadn’t thought about The Third Coming in more than ten years. While my regular career took unexpected turns, writing had taken a back seat, though the longing never disappeared. Back it came, bubbling to the surface as ideas in that short story began to nag at me.
The off-world beings inhabit a planet hundreds of light years from Earth, yet the story demands they have the ability to travel here in months. Traditionally, science fiction writers have employed concepts like wormholes or hollow asteroids or dimension-bending bubbles to allow faster-than-light travel to exist in their stories. The method of travel hinted at in The Third Coming was none of those. A force exists that we’ve all heard of and that moves a great deal faster than light. What if (there it is again) the beings had discovered a way to harness that force?
Other questions raised by the short story vied for attention. What was the original purpose of Stonehenge? Were the dinosaurs really wiped out by a meteor? Can any of this provide an alternative explanation for the so-called missing link between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man?
The catalyst that drove me to the keyboard to formulate answers came when a reviewer of Pond Life mentioned that he would like to see the world in The Third Coming explored in more depth. In May 2013 I wrote a scene describing the effects of a deadly virus on the human body. Nine feverish weeks later, the first draft of The Cleansing was done. In a private nod to the origins of the novel, the Millennium Bug took on a new meaning.
But the story wasn’t fully told. Too much to fit into one reasonably-sized book, there would be two sequels. I know that many readers find trilogies unsatisfying, having to wait for the next one to come out while their ardour cools, but it was either that or write a doorstop. And, seriously, who would buy a doorstop written by a virtual unknown? Over the course of the next two years, I wrote The Beacon and The Reckoning, bringing the Earth Haven trilogy to a close.
Even as I finished the first book, there were questions still nagging at me. Many of them started, ‘What if?’ Some reviewers of The Cleansing posed their own questions. Niggling, itchy questions that I endeavoured to address in the sequels.
It doesn’t only start with ‘what if?’; often, it ends with it, too.
What if? I ask myself that a lot. It’s how nearly all of my ideas for stories begin. Just two little words that can open worlds of possibilities.
Though not always. The hypothesis may lead nowhere and is quickly discarded. Sometimes only hints of potential are revealed, perhaps to be filed away for another time. What if that bloke sitting opposite me on the bus is a psychopath? Nah, he looks like an accountant. But what if he’s a psychopathic accountant? Hmm, I quite like the juxtaposition of madness and mundanity. Perhaps he’s cannibalistic and preys on tradesmen, a sort of plumber-munching number-cruncher. One day, maybe…
On occasions that what-if question leads to places where my imagination scrambles to follow. That’s what happened with the Earth Haven trilogy, but to explain I need to go back almost twenty years to where it began.
I have long been fascinated by end of days tales in film and in books. It was almost inevitable when I started writing fiction in my early thirties that I would sooner or later pen one of my own. And it started with a question: what if the apocalyptic event involved mankind being wiped out deliberately? Other questions followed hard on its heels: who would do that? Why? How?
And again, what if? What if we were created by an advance guard of beings from a distant planet and the bulk of their population is only now heading this way?
This led to more questions, more possibilities. If we were created by off-world beings (I’m hesitating to use the word ‘aliens’ since they are, on the face of it, more us as we would ideally like to be: non-violent, altruistic, cerebral), then to what purpose? If this took place many millennia ago, we would have been little more than shambling, rutting foragers, possessed of simple brains yet a compelling instinct to survive and procreate. Maybe we were created as expendable slaves, little more than drones, designed to face toothed and tusked and clawed danger in place of our masters; to spread out and populate and colonise; to cultivate and construct; to prepare the way.
But what if the arrival of the rest of the off-worlders was delayed, perhaps by thousands of years? Mankind would have proliferated, grown smarter, become warlike and warring, developed cunning and technology, demonstrated a nasty streak and a tendency to violence. The peaceful incoming beings would now be vastly outnumbered. Would humanity welcome them with open arms and a peck to both cheeks, or with open enmity and missiles to both flanks?
Those who remain of the advance guard must make a decision: allow their people to arrive to a barrage of detonating warheads, or take action that will clear the way for a safe arrival. Wouldn’t it be ironic if humankind must now itself be eradicated as it has become the obstacle?
These are the questions I mulled over as the twentieth century drew to a close. While people fretted about the Millennium Bug, I wrote a short story that began to answer these questions, while posing more: The Third Coming.
The twenty-first century arrived and then along came the e-book revolution. It passed me by. By the time I paid attention, trying to get noticed as a new guy on the block was like trying to stand out at Woodstock by wearing a flower in your hair.
I jumped in anyway. Bundling ten short stories together, including The Third Coming, I published the collection Pond Life in August 2012. I hadn’t thought about The Third Coming in more than ten years. While my regular career took unexpected turns, writing had taken a back seat, though the longing never disappeared. Back it came, bubbling to the surface as ideas in that short story began to nag at me.
The off-world beings inhabit a planet hundreds of light years from Earth, yet the story demands they have the ability to travel here in months. Traditionally, science fiction writers have employed concepts like wormholes or hollow asteroids or dimension-bending bubbles to allow faster-than-light travel to exist in their stories. The method of travel hinted at in The Third Coming was none of those. A force exists that we’ve all heard of and that moves a great deal faster than light. What if (there it is again) the beings had discovered a way to harness that force?
Other questions raised by the short story vied for attention. What was the original purpose of Stonehenge? Were the dinosaurs really wiped out by a meteor? Can any of this provide an alternative explanation for the so-called missing link between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man?
The catalyst that drove me to the keyboard to formulate answers came when a reviewer of Pond Life mentioned that he would like to see the world in The Third Coming explored in more depth. In May 2013 I wrote a scene describing the effects of a deadly virus on the human body. Nine feverish weeks later, the first draft of The Cleansing was done. In a private nod to the origins of the novel, the Millennium Bug took on a new meaning.
But the story wasn’t fully told. Too much to fit into one reasonably-sized book, there would be two sequels. I know that many readers find trilogies unsatisfying, having to wait for the next one to come out while their ardour cools, but it was either that or write a doorstop. And, seriously, who would buy a doorstop written by a virtual unknown? Over the course of the next two years, I wrote The Beacon and The Reckoning, bringing the Earth Haven trilogy to a close.
Even as I finished the first book, there were questions still nagging at me. Many of them started, ‘What if?’ Some reviewers of The Cleansing posed their own questions. Niggling, itchy questions that I endeavoured to address in the sequels.
It doesn’t only start with ‘what if?’; often, it ends with it, too.
Sci-fi & Fantasy Book Bonanza
The Elevator is included in a multi-author promotion this week of around 100 science fiction and fantasy books offered free in return for mailing list sign-ups.
Details of the promotion here.
Even if you already have The Elevator or are already on my mailing list, it might still be worth paying the promotion page a visit as there may be other books there that take your fancy.
And if you don't already have The Elevator or aren't on my mailing list, why the heck not, might I ask? (I'm teasing, but can't work out how to add those smiley face things on here.)
Utter Bunkum & the Suspension of Disbelief - Part 2
For a change, in the form of a book quiz:
http://samkates.co.uk/2019/08/23/utte...
http://samkates.co.uk/2019/08/23/utte...
The Protagonist Speaks
An interview with Milandra of the Earth Haven trilogy: https://theprotagonistspeaks.com/2021...
On Being a Science Fiction Writer
An interview from 2014: http://samkates.co.uk/2021/02/05/on-b...
