Babel Clash

One of the difficulties I’ve struggled with as a writer - one of the things I’m still trying to get my ahead around, actually - is plot. More specifically, in my case: how do you concoct a story or novel-length plot that doesn’t, at some point, descend into melodrama? Pretty early on in my career, around the time of “Spirey and the Queen”, I hit on a formula that would serve me well for a good few years to come: combining SF and thriller tropes. In the case of Spirey, it was a story of cold-war politics, with two enmeshed superpowers and a desperate mission to catch a defector before they went over to the other side. “A Spy in Europa” is also a cold-war sort of story, with a nod to Thunderball in its climatic underwater fight scene. The thriller elements maybe aren’t so obvious in REVELATION SPACE but you can see the cold war stuff coming out again in REDEMPTION ARK, and of course my fifth novel, CENTURY RAIN, is as much a noirish crime thriller as it is a novel of alternate worlds and space travel. Somewhere near the end of that book, though, I remember writing the big shoot-out on the ruins of the Eiffel Tower and thinking: no more. This is absolutely the last book I ever want to write with a gunfight in it. I think there was a dawning, at that point, that one can start with the best of intentions, envisioning the production of a serious, thoughtful work of SF, and yet by the end of it you’re basically in a Micheal Bay film, with explosions and people flying through the air in slow motion.

It seems to me now, as it did then, that one of the things that can most effectively undermine those good intentions is the introduction of thriller elements into the story. Now, I love a good thriller - Lionel Davidson’s Kolimsky Heights is one of my favorite novels - but there’s something insidious and destructive about the way a plot unfolds once you identify one faction as the antagonists. The baddies, in other words. And obviously there are baddies in CENTURY RAIN, and obviously they have to confront the goodies in some kind of shoot-out. It doesn’t matter whether that’s a literal shoot-out, or some titanic confrontation between ravaging battle fleets - it’s still a shoot-out.

I tried to get away from that in PUSHING ICE, but - if you’ve read the book - you’ll know that there are clearly defined goodies and villains by the end of it, and a kind of big explosion type finale. But the baddies were alien baddies, so that’s all right - and I think their motivation was sort of rational, given the set-up of the premise. They were merely acting out of extreme self-interest, rather than some innate need to be sly and dastardly. Although CR is one of my favorite personal novels, PI feels more realistic, less melodramatic - to me, at least. But it’s still not entirely freeofthose “big shoot-out” elements.

THE PREFECT was designed to be a thriller, and it was explicitly about the limits of freedom and authority in a high-tech society pushed to the brink. Yet while there are many explosions and a high body count, there isn’t - as far as I remember - much of a shoot-out at the end. Some misdirection, and a creepy encounter with artificial intelligence. But I’ve seen criticism of the “Gaffney escapes from incarceration” subplot and I suppose there’s some validity in that; it’s the kind of “penultimate episode of 24″ twist that I felt the story needed at that point. Possibly a misjudgement, in that it took the story into melodramatic, characters-being-held-at-gunpoint directions. Or perhaps I just didn’t handle that subplot with sufficient conviction.

By the time of HOUSE OF SUNS I was really trying to get away from this stuff, and thinking hard about it too, but again I ran into what for me is a fundamental difficulty, which is a tendency for my plots to gravitate towards ancient secrets, buried crimes, double-dealing and so on. I’m fighting that all the way through HOS, and I think it’s a markedly brighter book than any that preceeded it, but still … that tendency toward melodrama is still there, and yes, there’s a shoot-out or two, albeit conducted between relativistic starships with superscience weapons. But if CHASM CITY was about vengeance and redemption, HOS was all about forgiveness.

Much the same could be said for TERMINAL WORLD - I’ll say as little about it as I can, but the central theme, as I see it, is the burying of hatchets, the finding of common ground. Rather than a mission to deliver (or find) potent weapons, I made this one about something far more positive: medicine. Healing. Kindness and altruism. But for all that, it probably has a higher on-page body count than anything I’ve ever written, and, yes, there are some actual gunfights.

Even as I was writing TW, though, I was thinking ahead to the 11K sequence, which has been hatching in my mind for nearly two years, and it was clear that this was going to be something very, very different. I wanted to keep the whole thing entirely free of those naughty thriller elements, but at the same time I wanted to make it readable and exciting. It can’t be impossible, I reasoned - Clarke did it all the time. Of course, Clarke had a mind like a planet … but you’ve got to try, haven’t you? So my groundrules, going into book 1, were basically as follows:

No wars. War is effectively eliminated by the mid 22nd century, largely due to a benign world-spanning mesh of ubiquitous computing, implant technology and robotic telepresence - something I call the “Mechanism”.

No crime. You can’t steal anything, since everything in the world is tagged and trackable. You can’t injure someone, since there are no weapons and anything that might, in principle, be used as a weapon is being tracked and monitored by the Mechanism. You can’t even pick up a rock and try and club someone. The Mechanism will detect your intentions and intervene.

No one is ever unintentionally out of contact with anyone else. Almost all conversations are effectively public. Nothing is ever forgotten or misplaced - “posterity engines” are recording every second of your life from the moment of birth.

No poverty. No famine. No plagues. On the plus side: mass literacy, and global access to technologies of seamless telepresence and information retrieval. Almost no accidental deaths due to technological failure. A median lifespan of 150, and increasing. Rapid interplanetary travel, and a burgeoning, peaceful, solar-wide economy.

But it’s not utopia. There are still lots of reasons to be miserable or less than ecstatic. There’s still money, but not enough for everyone to have as much as they’d like (so scientists still  have to fight for funding, and artists still have to take on tacky commissions), and there are still nation states and governments and politics. There are still some forms of scarcity and the environmental damage of the previous two centuries is only slowly being undone. In other words, it’s a future that, right now, I can sort of take seriously … but that’s just my take, of course. You might find it laughably implausible.

The hard part is, how do you get a story going when you can’t have crime, you can’t have war, you can’t have accidents and disasters? That, really, is the problem I’ve been bashing my head against for the last year. I’m not sure I’ve found a cast-iron, watertight solution - but I think I’ve found one that sort of works for this book, here and now. It helps, needless to say, that this happy state of affairs hasn’t been in place for centuries. The past is still casting a shadow into the present.

Well, I’m having fun, anyway. Just keeping the sliders at the optimistic end of the scale is enough of a challenge to keep me interested and enthused. As to whether any of this comes through in the finished work (which is still untitled; I’m not just being shy about it), we’ll have to see.

I’m off to Switzerland tomorrow; I’ll endeavour to blog during my stay but it might be dependent on the vagaries of travel and local wifi. And this was meant to be a brief post before packing!

Al R

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