Tale of the Novels: Seas of Ernathe

I’ve posted here about the new editions of my earlier novels, but I haven’t talked much about the books themselves, how they came about, and what they meant to me when I wrote them. Well, where better to do that than here on Pushing a Snake Up a Hill, which by the way is a pretty good summary of how my writing career has often felt.

Let me start with my first book, Seas of Ernathe. It’s not just my first novel, but my first novel of the Star Rigger universe, a future history that I’ve enjoyed writing in, and that seems popular with readers. It’s not the first story in the Star Rigger chronology, though. In fact, it’s the last! It’s set in a time long after the skills of starship rigging were lost to humankind. It’s about the rediscovery of the art of rigging.

How did that happen? Do I always do things bassackwards? No, not always. But in this case, I didn’t actually know much about the history at the time I was writing. I can’t say exactly why this particular story popped into my head, but here’s how it happened:

Go back to 1974 or 1975. I was living with some friends in Providence, Rhode Island, just off the edge of the Brown University campus (from which I’d graduated in 1971), working on short stories while waiting tables, teaching scuba diving, and diving for quahogs in Narragansett Bay to make ends meet (barely). I’d sold a couple of stories: the first to Boston’s Fiction Magazine, for a promise of $50 (collected years later), and the second to Galaxy. In both cases, the magazines went bust not long after publishing my stories—not my fault, I swear! In any case, the story published in Galaxy was called “Alien Persuasion,” and was my first expedition into the tricksy Flux of rigger space, where star-pilots navigated through a sensory web in a hyperdimensional realm that was objectively real, but that took a tangible form based on images projected from the rigger’s mind. (Remind me to tell you more about that when I write about Star Rigger’s Way.)

During this time, I’d been submitting short stories to some of the original anthology editors—in particular, Robert Silverberg for New Dimensions and Terry Carr for Universe. Both had responded with encouraging rejections. On one occasion, in 1974 (or possibly 1975), Terry Carr wrote back with another rejection—but with a twist. He asked if I’d like to write a novel. It seemed he had made a deal with a new SF line to sign up new writers and shepherd their books into print. If I could just send him an outline and three sample chapters…

I stood dumbfounded, his letter in my hand—then flew to my Olympia manual typewriter and began pounding out an idea for a novel—a completely new idea, one that had come into my mind just at that moment, when needed. It made use of my star rigger background, indirectly, and also my underwater experience as a scuba diver. The story was set on a watery world called Ernathe. Visitors to that world wanted to know what strange tricks of the mind enabled sea creatures of that realm, the Nale’nid, to focus on reality in ways that enabled them to travel instantaneously, and to manipulate matter in a variety of ways. Could this be connected to the secret of the lost art of star rigging? Perhaps, perhaps…

I wrote the novel in a little less than a year, if memory serves. By the time it was finished, I’d moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was living with a different set of roommates and working the night shift sorting boxes for UPS. Seas of Ernathe was published by Laser Books in the summer of 1976.

I clearly remember the moment I first saw a copy—not, as you might think, an advance copy from the publisher. No, I was walking down Mass. Ave. in Central Square when I encountered Drew Whyte, an SF fan I had gotten to know during the previous year. Drew always had bags of books with him. On this occasion, he had a copy of my new book, which I had not yet laid eyes on. He passed it to me. There it was. My first novel. In print, at last! I had done it! It was real! Huzzah!

Cover art by Kelly Freas

I hated the cover instantly. Noted SF artist Frank Kelly Freas had been hired to do all the covers for the Laser Books series. Apparently he wasn’t given much money or much time, because to say the least, the Laser covers were not the highlight of his otherwise distinguished career. Lord, I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. I settled on cheering.

Seas of Ernathe stayed in print for a year or so, and then it was gone. But it had set me on an important writing path, starting with making the transition from short stories to novels. The next two books were also star rigger books; more on those later. For now, I’m happy to say that Seas of Ernathe is back in print, from E-reads. You can get it as an ebook from a variety of outlets, including Baen Webscriptions and Fictionwise, both of which offer it in multiple, DRM-free formats, including for the Sony Reader, the Kindle, and the iThing. You can also get it as a trade paperback wherever fine SF trade paperbacks are sold! Here, I’ll make it easy. 🙂

Tor.com and Ereads.com Today

It’s been fascinating to watch the parade of commentary by SF authors on tor.com today, as we communally celebrate the 40th anniversary of our arrival on the Moon. (The servers there were getting pretty maxed out for a while, so loading was slow, but they seem to have it under control now.) My own contribution appeared during the early hours and has scrolled onto the second page by now, but I’m in good company, coming between Joe Haldeman and Charlie Stross. (Here’s a permalink to the Moon Landing Day celebration. More of a directory, though. If you’re reading this on July 20, better to go to the main page.)

At first there was no cool picture to accompany my post, but they’ve now added one, and I’m happy!


Also, whether by coincidence or design, Ereads.com picked today to do a nice writeup on my books. They couldn’t have picked a better day for it!

Lunar Footsteps, 40 Years Ago Today

It’s been forty years since we went to the Moon! Hard to believe, isn’t it? I was mentioning memories of the lunar landing to some people the other day, and they looked at me like, What is this ancient history of which you speak? This is what I spoke of:

That’s Neil Armstrong, taking one small step for a man (which I watched on live TV, with breath sucked in and a pounding heart); and on the right, Buzz Aldrin getting his chance in the lens. And don’t miss this stunning panorama of the Lunar Module and the surrounding area, taken by Armstrong. (It’s too wide to put on this page.)

Check tor.com throughout the day for commentary from various writers (including me!) on their recollections of the historic event. Adding a somber note to the memory is the passing the other day of Walter Cronkite, with whom I watched much of the manned space program in the early years.

The one thing I never dreamed as I watched the lunar landing and exploration was that we’d go to the Moon and then not go back for at least forty years. I have guarded hope for the future.

“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.”
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Readercon, BoingBoing, and Lives Passing

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Readercon happened last weekend, and as always, it was a good time. The high points for me, this year, aside from seeing good friends and making some new ones, was a series of workshops that were held more or a less as a sideline to the main programming. Barry Longyear held one on writer’s block, Ellen Klages ran one on using improv techniques to free up creativity (which kept us laughing for two hours), and finally Mary Robinette Kowal gave excellent advice on techniques for delivering effective readings (just in time for my own reading, which followed shortly afterward). The only downside of all this was spraining my foot, while participating a little too exuberantly in one of the improv skits.

Home again, and back to the salt mines. Lucky thing they serve frozen margaritas in salt mines! I got a request to write a contribution to a remembrance of the Apollo 11 Moon landing for tor.com, which I did, appearing soon. I got the fixed-up, wide-screen version of my Sunborn video put up on my own youtube channel (which I hope to expand with some excerpts from my educational, distance-learning TV series from back in 1995, just as soon as I have time to view and edit them). I sent off a note to boingboing.net about it, because as you probably know, they compile collections of all sorts of cool things. I headed off to bed—and the next morning got a congratulatory note from a friend about my video appearing on BoingBoing! The funny thing is, it was posted—with my accompanying words—a few hours before I sent it to them! Time zones, time zones… or is it something more sinister, something… well, I won’t pursue those thoughts further.

The other thing that happened about the same time was reading of the deaths of writer Phyllis Gotlieb, and of Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus. I didn’t really know either of them personally. But I had just seen Charlie Brown in passing at Readercon, and to read of his death the following day was quite a jolt. You can read about both of them at the Locus website, or, for that matter, on boingboing, where Cory Doctorow wrote touching tributes.

“You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Sunborn Video

A while back I wrote that I’d been working on a video piece for a theatrical arts festival called Lydia Fair, sponsored by the Greater Boston Vineyard of Cambridge. Now you can see my video on YouTube!

It is what I would call a video narration, or maybe an audio visualization—or maybe one of you can suggest a more elegant name—of the prologue to Sunborn. I recorded the narration and blocked out the basic image storyboard. Then a talented fellow named Adam Guzewicz worked video and sound wizardry on it, animating parts of it from still images (which I gleaned from various NASA websites), and adapting other animation (ditto on the source). I’m lucky, I guess—that I wrote a prologue that actually could be set to astronomical images.

If you’d like to view it in a wide-screen version, go directly to the YouTube page or to my website. (Wide images on this page seem to cause problems for some viewers, so I try to keep them small.)

For best effect, set the viewer to full-screen and high-quality mode, and turn up the sound a bit. Enjoy!

Odyssey Interview

Workshops R Us. A week and a half ago, the advanced novel-writing workshop that I run with Craig Gardner came to an end for this year. It was a seriously good ending, as every one of the six participants is working on material with definite publication potential—some closer to being ready than others, but all good. It was a terrifically encouraging workshop, and I’m especially cheered that the group is going off and continuing to meet and support each other on their own now.

With that done, I’m leaving shortly for a brief stint as instructor-for-a-day at the Odyssey Workshop in New Hampshire, another seriously good program, a much denser and more immersive workshop. I’m going to be working with the participants there on issues of story structure and how plot, conflict, and characterization all play into it.

Odyssey did an online interview with me a while back, and I thought it would be appropriate to reproduce it here, just before I leave. Herewith, the Odyssey interview:

Once you started writing seriously, how long did it take you to sell your first piece? What were you doing wrong in your writing in those early days?

I guess I would call my writing in college the point at which I was writing seriously—by which I mean, trying to produce real stories that someone might want to read, or even publish. I’d had encouragement at that point from family and teachers, including a college writing teacher who told me he thought my work was publishable. It wasn’t. I didn’t know that yet, but the encouragement helped keep me going as I ever so slowly learned the craft of storytelling. It would be another six years and a file full of rejections before I sold my first short story (to Fiction magazine, in Boston).

If I had realized sooner what I was doing wrong, I might have shortened that learning period considerably. The problem was, I wasn’t telling complete stories. I was going with what people told me were my strengths—description and characterization—and missing the need to tell an interesting story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I didn’t understand about story structure. I was writing mood pieces, story fragments. My teachers weren’t really versed in SF, or even in anything resembling conventional storytelling standards, and they weren’t able to give me the direction I needed. I had no workshop to turn to, and was really writing on my own, with occasional feedback from editors like Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg, who liked my work well enough to at least hint at what they didn’t like, as they returned my stories. It wasn’t until years later that I found a source of good, regular criticism, when I met Craig Gardner and he invited me to join the writing group he was a part of. He and I are still members of that group-thirty years later! And Craig and I now run our own writing workshops in the Boston area.

Why do you think your work began to sell?

I’d learned just enough about putting a story together, and the craft of writing narrative prose, to make it over the bar to become publishable. Little did I know at that point how much more I had to learn—and am still learning! But I think the turning point was realizing, somewhere deep in the subconscious, that I had to bring an interesting character through a conflict and to a resolution of that conflict. I think I had to find a balance between the ambiguity that was interesting to me and the kind of resolution that was satisfying to a reader.

As a science fiction writer, I would imagine you devote a certain amount of time to actual research in order to enhance your stories and their believability. When, in your writing process, do you start researching, and how long does it take? Do you have any tips on making the research process more simple? Any favorite websites you frequent?

The amount of research I need to do varies wildly from one story to the next. Sometimes I do none; sometimes I do a lot. When I say none, of course, I’m sort of lying; all of life is research for my writing. All my human interactions, all my experiences as a kid and as a parent, as a loner and as a husband, come to bear on my characters. All my reading, much of it in areas of science and public affairs, influences my stories. Though I didn’t major in science, I’ve always been a science junkie, and my general knowledge of science has been important to my ability to tell stories with scientific plausibility. For particular stories, I’ve done targeted research: nanotechnology, cosmic strings, and supernovas for From a Changeling Star; chaos theory and the Voyager spacecraft findings about Neptune and Triton for Neptune Crossing; tachyons for The Infinity Link; stellar nurseries and stellar evolution for Sunborn. For The Infinite Sea, I drew heavily on my experience as a scuba diver and the knowledge I’d gained from that, years before.

I do the research when I realize I need to. That sometimes happens early, sometimes late in the process. My biggest “Oops!” in research was waiting to do some of the supernova research for From a Changeling Star until I was nearly finished. (Stupid, stupid.) I had consulted with an astronomer friend, but hadn’t taken his advice to check with his friend, who was a supernova specialist. When I finally did, I learned that I’d gotten some important things wrong. So while my editor was tapping her foot impatiently, waiting for the manuscript, I was busily rebuilding certain key points in the book, getting it right. (I knew that not one reader in a thousand would know the difference. But now that I knew the difference, I had to fix it.) It didn’t help that it was an amnesia story as well, and some of these key points were being revealed gradually through the story, so I had to change not just one place, but many places. My advice: Don’t do that.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend the NASA-sponsored Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in Wyoming. This is an annual, week-long intensive astronomy course tailored for writers, and covers everything from the basics up through cutting-edge research. A great experience, and one I highly recommend for pro or near-pro writers.

The website I most frequent is Google. Okay, I guess that’s not very helpful. I do check Astronomy Picture of the Day every day. And I get the New Scientist and Discover e-newsletters, which send me down some interesting paths. (I also subscribe to those magazines, as well as to Astronomy, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker.) Mostly, though, I just follow my nose when something looks interesting. I also sometimes, when I need to know something about a subject, find an expert and ask. Very helpful, that.

What’s the biggest weakness in your writing these days, and how do you cope with it?

Finding time and concentration to write, the same as (I’ll bet) for many of your students. It hasn’t gotten any easier over the years. Being a parent and needing to earn income in other ways have, at times, had to take priority over the writing. That’s just life, and I’m not as good at time-sharing my mental and creative work as some people are. How do I cope? I keep at it, and don’t give up (even when I want to). In the actual creative process, I seem to keep taking on story ideas that are more and more ambitious, and more difficult to pull off. This is probably a good thing artistically, and always feels rewarding in the end. But it doesn’t always feel good when I’m in the middle of it!

For me, the hardest part is getting a first draft down. Once I have the clay in my hands, so to speak, I find it much easier to work at reshaping it.

Your 2008 release, SUNBORN, is the fourth book of your CHAOS CHRONICLES series. The first book of this series, NEPTUNE CROSSING, came out in 1995 and is unfortunately out of print. Can you talk about what it’s like to write a series that spans such a great length of time, in publishing terms?

In publishing and marketing terms, what I did with the Chaos books was sheer idiocy. The long gap between the first three books and Sunborn resulted from my taking time out to write Eternity’s End, set in my Star Rigger universe. That book proved really hard to write and took something like six years to finish. It was well received, and got me a Nebula nomination; but the problem coming out of it was that the Chaos trail had grown cold by the time I got back to book four. My outlines no longer made much sense to me, and it took a long time to rebuild momentum. In addition, with Sunborn, I was tackling what turned out to be an extraordinarily difficult narrative challenge: telling a story of cosmic-scale events, but keeping it personal and immediate on the human level. I hope I succeeded, but not without heading down many a wrong path in the process. Still, once I had the initial draft done, I felt for the first time that I knew what I was doing, and I could tackle the rewrite with a clearer sense of the story.

By pure coincidence, the day after I finished the first draft of Sunborn, my editor called and asked me if I’d like to write a novelization of Battlestar Galactica (the miniseries). That was something I was required to do fast, but it was fun and a welcome change of pace. I was retelling someone else’s story, so I was able to use other parts of my brain to focus purely on the craft. It was just what the doctor ordered.

Once Sunborn was done, another year or two down the road, the book was scheduled for publication—and then delayed yet another year for reasons internal to the publishing process. That was pretty frakking hard to take, but it did give me an opportunity to revise some sections after having some months away from the book.

So, there I was, with Book 4 of an out-of-print series scheduled for publication. Tricky, from a marketing viewpoint. (I try to avoid the word “suicidal.”) I knew I needed to do something to renew audience interest in the series—and to try to bring new readers to it. Creating a national scandal might have been a good choice—but I’m not a very scandalous person. So I went with Plan B, which was to release all the earlier books in ebook format, for free download from my website. (You can download them right now, in fact, at http://www.starrigger.net/Downloads.htm.) The results were immensely gratifying. I got many emails from readers who said this was the first they’d heard of me, and now they were looking for my other books, as well. So it definitely increased interest in the series. Did it boost sales of the hardcover book? Damned it I know. (Well, I’m sure it did, but I haven’t a clue as to how much.)

Do you write each installment to be read as a stand-alone, or is each book in the series interconnected, so knowledge of previous volumes is necessary to understand the current one? Do you have any advice for writers working on multiple-book series of their own, and would you handle your own series any differently now than when you first started?

The story is a continuing arc, but each volume is a self-contained story that comes to a conclusion—and sets the stage for the next. I worked hard to build enough recap into the early parts of the stories that someone could pick up any book and enjoy it. But no question, the best way to read the series is from the beginning.

Advice to others? Don’t do what I did! (That’s my advice for investing in the stock market, too. Watch what I do. Then do something different.) I’m only partly serious, of course, but that part is sincere. I think where I went wrong was thinking that I could write a series of short, snappy novels that cumulatively would form a long, complex story. (This, you see, is what I always seem to do—write long, complex stories. I was trying to find a way to do it in a more sustainable way.) Then each Chaos book turned out a little longer than the one before, and soon I was writing a series of long, complex stories. People seem to like them. I’m proud of having written them. But making me independently wealthy, they’re not. 🙂

Your work is known for strong characterization and internal conflict. How do you use that internal conflict to create a character arc for the whole novel? Do you plan it out in advance, or do you discover it as you write? And how do you tie your characters’ internal conflict with the external conflict of the larger story?

Well, geez, if I tell you that now, what am I going to talk about when I get to the workshop?! I’ll tell you this much: I always have some vision for the overall story and character arc before I start writing. But much of it, I discover as I write. I seem to require the tension of being in the middle of the story to draw the full understanding of the character conflict out of my subconscious. I’m a very intuitive writer. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing until I’ve done it. There are people who can do all of that before setting down a word of the story. I hates them! (Preciousss…)

As a guest lecturer at this summer’s Odyssey Workshop, you’ll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

To quote the captain in the movie Galaxy Quest: “Never surrender! Never give up!” Or was it the other way around? Anyway, that’s the approach you have to take in writing. It can be terribly frustrating and discouraging when you can’t seem to get it right, or you think you’ve gotten it right and then a reader tells you, no, it’s actually still just warmed over beetle-dung, and you want to throw it all in the river. That’s when you have to remember those words. Not to shout in defense of what you’ve written, but to take a deep breath and keep at it until you do, finally, get it right.

Oh, and try to write something you would want to read yourself.

What’s next on the writing-related horizon? Are you starting any new projects?

I am currently doing battle with the first draft of the fifth book of The Chaos Chronicles, tentatively titled, The Reefs of Time. Damn if I didn’t once more set myself some challenges that I don’t yet know the solution to. Why do I keep doing this?

I’m also working on getting all of my backlist into “print” as ebooks.

And I’m just finishing a short video piece for an arts festival sponsored by a local church: an audio visualization—for lack of a better term—of the fairly cosmic prologue to Sunborn. I hope to have that up for online viewing in a few weeks. I’ll put a link on my downloads page once it’s available. It’s 3 minutes long, and I think it’s pretty cool. Stop by and check it out! [Update: I’m still waiting for a few final changes by the guy who did much of the video editing. Soon.]

“If you wish to be a writer, write.” —Epictetus

SF Authors at Falmouth MA Public Library

Yikes! Can it really be two weeks since I last posted? Yes, I guess it has been. Well, I’ve been kicked into action by the need to let folks know (belatedly, yes, yes) about this:

Tomorrow evening (June 17), I’ll be appearing with a small group of other SF/F folk at the Falmouth Public Library on Cape Cod. Joining me will be Jennifer Pelland, Michael Burstein, and Walter Hunt, all from eastern Massachusetts. We’ll be talking about our work, answering questions, and (we hope!) selling and autographing books.

Falmouth Public Library, 300 Main St., Falmouth, Massachusetts. 7:00 – 9:00

If you’re in the area, why not stop by?

And Now On To Baen Webscriptions!

A fine day, book-wise. My whole slate of E-Reads titles appeared today on Baen Webscriptions, along with two Rudy Rucker titles, as part of the E-Reads June package (11 books for 60 bucks). They are, of course, available individually as well. If you missed the Fictionwise sale (now over), this is a great segue: they’re on sale at Webscriptions for $6 each, for a limited time. And at Baen the books are always multiformat and DRM-free.

Meanwhile, I got word from E-Reads that the books at Fictionwise have been selling strong out of the gate, which is good news indeed. Before this big push and the free downloads program, my ebooks sold hardly at all. Now, we seem to be turning that around, and a whole new audience really does seem to be discovering my work, and picking up my backlist, as well.

Finally, I’ve gotten several really encouraging and heartfelt emails from readers who have done just that—found my freebies and gone on to read the others. (Some have made generous donations, as well.) It’s just so encouraging and restorative to have folks finding and bring the older books back to life!

Link and Seas Now in Ebook

The final two titles of the new Ereads push appeared yesterday on Fictionwise! Now available in multiple, DRM-free formats are The Infinity Link and Seas of Ernathe. (And for a limited time, they’re 40% off.) This is the first time in over thirty years that Seas of Ernathe has been in print. The Infinity Link has been unavailable for close to twenty years.

With the exception of Alien Speedway (see post of a few days ago), all of my novels are now available in ebook format. A number of them are, or soon will be, available in trade paperback, print-on-demand format, as well.

If you were thinking of giving some of these novels a try, now’s the ideal time, while they’re still discounted! See my ebooks page for all available titles.

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” —Benjamin Franklin

What Do West Wing and BSG Have in Common?

I wrote this days ago, and then forgot to post it! Ah, me. I got busy picking up my daughter from college, and one thing led to another, and here we are. In the U.S., it’s Memorial Day, a time to remember with gratitude those who have fallen in defense of our nation. Maybe that’s not such a bad occasion to offer some reflections on Battlestar Galactica, whose fictional crew sacrificed much in the defense of humanity.

As we all know, BSG ended recently, and my comments on that (which I posted earlier on another website) will follow in a moment. But lately my family and I have been watching another favorite show, The West Wing, from the beginning. (I picked up the complete DVD set for a relative song on ebay.) I’ve been vividly struck by two things these shows have in common:

1. Edward James Olmos! I had seen him before, as Judge Mendoza, but had not recognized the actor. Prior to BSG, I wasn’t all that aware of Olmos, although I realize now that he’s been in a lot of great stuff, including the movie Blade Runner (where, as in BSG, they talked about “skin jobs”).

2. Brilliant writing of human drama and engaging dialogue, coupled with a thundering inability to write anything about science. In West Wing, if I feel any reference to science coming on, I steel myself to groan. I know I will. Perfect example: In one episode, Sam is concerned about a UFO that’s been tracked for several hours from Hawaii to the American coast. It turns out to be harmless—a Russian rocket booster that (paraphrased from memory) “failed to achieve a high enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity.” That’s just stupid on so many levels. But let’s start with the fact that a reentering booster would burn up in a matter of minutes, not hours, and that the tracking people would know exactly what it was the whole time. In the commentary below, I mention a similar lapse in credibility from BSG. The thing is, the writing on both shows was so terrific otherwise that I was completely willing to forgive these lapses. It’s funny, because I would never overlook that kind of dunderheadedness if I were reading a work of hard science fiction. That must say something about the importance of expectations as a viewer or reader.

Here’s my BSG commentary, reprinted from SF Signal’s Mind Meld:

Much has been written about the end of our beloved Battlestar Galactica. I avoided reading most of it until recently, because I hadn’t seen the ending and didn’t want any spoilers. (Yes, I wrote the miniseries novelization, and at the time was given access to a limited amount of insider background informationthough not enough to keep me from writing a few things that shortly became “noncanonical.” But I had no more idea than you did where the story was going in the end.) A couple of weeks ago, I finally watched the last few episodes in one long burst.

Whoa. Not altogether what I’d hoped for—but powerful stuff nonetheless.

My reactions were intense and complex. On the one hand, it was a stunningly choreographed conclusion, breathlessly paced, and to me at least satisfying in the sense that we finally found resolution, and our characters, battered and bruised, finally found a measure of peace. Even Kara. Yes, even Kara Thrace, Starbuck. The change of tone at the very end was perhaps a bit overdone. But I felt our people had earned it.

That they found and settled the world known to us as “Earth” came, of course, as no surprise. Most of us, I think, had been expecting an Adam and Eve story (or should I say, Adama and Eve) all along. How could it have been different? It seemed built into the very fiber of the series, from the start. And while the “Adam and Eve” story is perhaps one of the most clichéd ideas in all of science fiction, there is no reason that even a clichéd story cannot be retold in a fresh and engaging way. So I had long ago decided to forgive that point, granting that if the BSG people could tell it in a sufficiently original way, I wouldn’t quibble.

So, did they or didn’t they? Well…yes and no.

Plausibility-wise, the notion that the fleet would agree to transport all of the people down to a wilderness planet, equipped only with what they could carry, give or take a few Raptors, and send the rest of their considerable technology into the sun, was absurd. Suspension of disbelief—come back! What else can I say about that? Except it was probably considered necessary to the plot not to have too much star technology lying around to be unearthed by latter-day Indiana Joneses.

But BSG has never been about plausibility in the scientific or technological sense. Do we all remember back in—Season 3, was it?—when the fleet had to fly through an exploding star, instead of…um, going around it? And does anyone believe that after all this time, they would have left the fleet dependent on just one Tylium ship to supply the needs of everyone? Okay, forget scientific plausibility. It was never there to be an issue. When I wrote the miniseries novelization, this was something I encountered in a multitude of small ways, and I did my best to strengthen plausibility where it felt thin. But this BSG has always been about other things, anyway—humanity at war with its own worst elements, and the dark places of the soul where people find the strength to endure, and to fight back. For all of its edges, it was never hard SF; it was pure human-drama SF, and every time it careened near the edge of a cliff even in those terms, it always somehow staggered back.

So forget the scientific plausibility part. What about the angels? Starbuck—an angel? That seemed to stick in a lot of craws, including my wife’s and daughter’s, mainly because it seemed from out of left field, and not terribly…well, plausible. For one thing, how come Starbuck was a solid, hard-drinkin’, kick-your-ass physical kind of angel, while the Six and Baltar angels were purely will o’ the wisps, here this minute, gone the next, visible to no one else? And why did Starbuck have to go through such torment, trying to discover who she was? Is she the only angel who doesn’t know she’s an angel? I grant all of those quarrels. And yet—despite my qualms, I kind of liked it. For one thing, how many real SF shows have ever been willing even to entertain the notion of there actually being a God (even if he doesn’t like to be called that, says Baltar), or heavenly or spiritual beings? BSG had the nerve to do that, and do it baldly, in midst of a gritty human drama. Did they do it successfully? Certainly not all the time, and probably not at the very end. But my hat’s off to them for trying.

Having written a BSG book in which I was invited to make up answers to some questions that the producers couldn’t, at that point, answer for me, I was perhaps a little oversensitive to certain small points in the conclusion. One that comes to mind is Caprica Six, who had no name in the miniseries. I called her Natasi in my novel (and no, I didn’t notice that Natasi was “I Satan” backwards until a reader pointed it out). That seemed fine with the BSG staff at the time. Later, David Eick was quoted as saying that he’d imagined that Baltar never knew Six’s name, even as he carried on a torrid affair with her. Truthfully, I never found that believable. Then we saw it happening, in the final chapter, and I went, “Gah!” You win some and you lose some.

I will defend the writers against charges of racism stemming from the interpretation that the fleet personnel obviously subjugated and lorded it over the indigenous population, right up through the present day. What (goes the argument) about the African origins of humanity, which present-day evidence strongly supports? Well, as I read the ending, fleet personnel gradually intermingled with the native population, as their remaining technology wore out or failed, and thus 21st Century humanity is very much a blend of the native and immigrant forms of human. So Lucy and Eve and all of our other forebears are still very much a part of the picture. As for the Cylon blood—well, I guess there’s a little bit of that in our DNA now. Somewhere along the way, we lost the glowing spines, though. Tough break, that.

But now we know: “All Along the Watchtower” is in our racial memory. It just took Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix to give it back to us.

(Check out other authors’ comments on the earlier Mind Meld page.)

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