Alien Holidays

Something that often doesn't happen in science fiction is holidays, yet most of us arrange our lives around major times when you do certain things partly because you've always done them and partly because that's what people do at that time of year. It gets really weird when something like Christmas, which blends a whole bunch of winter solstice festival traditions into the Christian message, and has since kind of spilled out into a month or so that encompasses a bunch of things that are mostly based on the pagan festivals... Er, where was I? Oh, yeah.

It gets really weird when Christmas, in its form as a predominantly northern hemisphere winter festival, gets transplanted more or less intact to the southern hemisphere, with all the midwinter traditional trappings attached. Of course, that's exactly what I grew up with, so I never saw anything odd about fake pine trees and fake snow or the big fat guy in the red suit with all the fur everywhere being right in the middle of summer. In fact, since I moved to the US, I've been consistently weirded out, every year, by the novelty of Christmas in winter.

Then there's the holidays I simply don't 'get' because they were never part of the Australian tradition, like Thanksgiving, and the ones I miss because they're not part of the US tradition.

Now imagine all those traditions on a space station with no seasons at all. Or a planet where the year just plain doesn't match our calendar. How weird is that going to get? (Hint: 'very'). How about praying to Mecca when the direction you'd need to face would put have you kneeling on the wall? (Okay, not so hard if there's no gravity, but the prayer mat would have to be stuck on, then moved each time because the relative positions would keep changing)

Of course, people will adapt. They'll adjust their traditions a bit, put Santa in red board shorts and thongs (the footwear. The thought of a big fat guy in thong underwear is just...EW), and the absurdities of singing about snow and ice and all when it's hot enough to cook eggs on the pavement just won't occur to them because that's how it's always been. Maybe some of the people will have scales and be a bit bewildered about the way these soft-skinned mammals do things, but hey, it's kind of fun anyway, and we can get drunk on their booze and they get drunk on ours, so let's party! (This does rather assume that the aliens in question met a group of Australian or similarly-minded explorers, whose sole criteria for 'is people' is 'shares the booze').

Or maybe it will go the other way, and people will jealously guard their traditions and refuse to change one iota no matter what. I'm not sure I know anyone who's that rigid, but it's happened in the past, so it can certainly happen again. Actually, my money (and I come from a land where they'll cheerfully bet on two flies crawling up a wall) is on 'yes', and 'everything in between'. One thing history tells you, quite loudly if you don't stick your fingers in your ears and go 'neener neener neener I'm not listening' is that if it can be done, it will be done, usually with some kind of sexual fetish attached.

What do you think future holidays will be like? The only answer I don't think is legit is that they won't exist. They will, because marking certain times as "special" is part of how we personally distinguish the passage of time. It's never 'four Novembers back', it's 'Thanksgiving four years ago'.

The Problem With Politics

Politics in fantasy and science fiction, that is. I'm not going near the tar pit that is modern politics in any country.

Something you notice when you read a lot is that most people haven't got a clue how politics actually work, leading to what could be described as Tough Guide to Fantasyland political systems (If you haven't read the Tough Guide, find it and read it. It's hilarious, and boy does it skewer shoddy the fantasy cliches). Sadly, the same kind of thing also shows up way too often in science fiction, complete with the fantasy memes of the Evil Empire - it doesn't matter what it's actually called, if it functions as an Evil Empire, it might as well be one - the noble, heroic anti-imperial forces, usually horribly outnumbered/out-weaponed and so forth.

Part of the problem with imagining other forms of government is that English is actually a very egalitarian language. Over centuries we've lost any distinction between formal and informal address, much less anything more complex. Compare this to some of the European languages where there are formal and informal forms of "you", or some of the Asian languages which have multiple forms of address depending on rank, level of intimacy, level of formality, and so forth. To most native English speakers that kind of distinction is beyond confusing and heads rapidly into the realm of utterly incomprehensible - with the result that we find it very difficult to truly understand the kinds of protocol that go with any highly class-conscious society.

A rather length aside here - even English royalty is remarkably egalitarian. The rule for speaking with any member of the English royal family is burned into my memory, courtesy an incident from when I was part of a choir in Australia. The choir was singing at a college graduation where the Duchess of Kent (as patron of the college) was presenting the degrees. One of my sisters was graduating, so naturally the whole family was there - me and my mother in the choir, the graduating sister in with the other graduates, and the rest of the horde in the general audience (Yes, my family is a horde. I'm the oldest of 5. Back in the bad old days when the Queensland Government restricted public gatherings, we used to joke that we needed a permit to go anywhere as a family). Security, naturally, was tight, but we choristers were told that if by chance we did end up speaking with the Duchess, the rule was to address her as "Your Grace" the first time you said anything, and "Ma'am" after that. I wouldn't remember this except that... mum is a mad keen photographer and she wanted a photo of the Duchess. So, after the graduation is finished and everyone else has gone home (it was well after midnight) mum manages to find out which elevator the Duchess is going to be using and positions herself there - and gets permission from the security people, who basically said photos were fine so long as she stayed behind this line. I'm hanging back - figure painfully shy mid-twenties in dorky choir uniform and you've got it. Besides, mum's the outgoing, impossible to embarrass one, so if any of the horde gets to talk to the Duchess, it's her. The elevator opens, the Duchess sees mum with camera and pauses long enough for mum to get a nice photo, then heads straight to me. I'm not sure how long I was the very picture of gobsmacked, but it was probably a lot less time than it felt like! There was this moment of pure panic followed by a thought along the lines of "Oh, crap, what were the rules?" Fortunately the Duchess is a very gracious lady who knows how to talk to painfully shy, overwhelmed people - we ended up having a short but relatively sensible discussion about the choir she's a member of, the policies of both choirs about what jewelry the women can wear for performances, how much fun it is to sing certain works and so on. But after being singled out - I suspect because she saw me hanging back and I was in the choir uniform (so was mum, but she was waving the camera around, too) - I'm never going to forget that rule!

Anyway, back to fictional governments and forms of protocol that go with them. What you could call the 'default fantasy' setup involves a king, some number of usually not very well defined nobility, mostly parasitic, and everyone else. It doesn't take too much thinking about the setup to realize it not only doesn't work, it can't work. Part of the function of class distinctions is to define responsibilities - the higher the class or rank, the higher the responsibility. Slaves are responsible for whatever their job happens to be. Serfs (slaves tied to land rather than people) are responsible for feeding themselves and their families fed and usually having enough surplus for the land owner's requirements. Free farmers are responsible for feeding themselves and their families, usually providing at least one armed man for whatever purposes are needed, and paying taxes to their lord in either money or goods. In towns, the various merchants are responsible for making enough profit to keep their families fed, paying taxes to both the town upkeep and the lord, and usually some form of guild association as well. The 'noble' class - ranging from relatively small land owners to control of several cities - are responsible for keeping everything they own in good running order, collecting the taxes for those higher up the chain, enforcing the laws and where necessary making their own laws for problems specific to their regions. Royalty is responsible for keeping the nobility in order, relationships with other countries, maintaining law and order, and generally keeping the whole thing running - which is a huge simplification. In a fantasy setting, the effective limit of a country's size is based mostly on how long it takes to travel from one end to the other. Anything more than a few days becomes very difficult to manage unless there are trusted governors/nobles/whatever in each district who can act as royal proxies if needed. China overcame the distance issue by imposing a common culture on conquered peoples. Russia didn't reach its full extent until the late 1800s, when rapid communication by telegraph was possible. The British Empire managed to hold on to territory all over the world by a combination of local governors with vice-regal authority (that is, they could act as if they were the monarch) and relatively fast shipping which allowed them to reach pretty much any part of the Empire in six weeks.

To successfully deal with all the complications that arise in anything like this, you need to know who is in charge of what, because the actual distribution of control/responsibility gets pretty diffuse in anything large or complex. The whole system might be pretty much invisible to Joe Average - but it needs to be there, or you get the Tough Guide effect where it all seems to exist on tourism from adventurers.

On the science fictional side of the coin, it's often even worse. Those star-spanning civilizations connected by whatever macguffin is used to permit space travel? Impossible, even with the handwavium of faster than light/wormholes/whatever. Here's why: in any sufficiently technologically advanced society, knowledge is the key to wealth, and currency is typically a nominal unit of value rather than the 'hard' currency of less technologically based cultures. One of the things that makes this possible is effectively instantaneous communication, which can be done on a single planet. Over several light years? Not likely. To have a functional currency through a multiple star empire, you need to be able to withdraw money from a bank on planet A, and have that balance reflected instantly in the database on space station Z. I've yet to see anything that takes this into account.

Then you have the lunacy that is standard SF trope interstellar war. By using a quasi-Napoleonic environment, some authors make this sort of limp along, but space is effectively boundaryless. Your space empire or republic or whatever is effectively a collection of discrete islands surrounded by a whole lot of buggerall. If you've read anything about the problems of naval warfare during World War Two, you've got some idea - just extrapolate to three dimensions instead of two, and expand the scale from "big" to "so utterly freaking huge it's mind blowing". The Napoleonic analogy is probably as close as you can get, but even so, the assumption behind that analogy is still one of scarcity of resources when most planetary systems have more than enough of everything for a sufficiently advanced technological base to leverage - and that's without the extremely high likelihood of some degree of replication or fabrication.

Without near-instantaneous communication, there can't be any viable star-spanning anythings - instead there'll probably be a series of effectively self-sustaining/self-contained settlements and settlement clusters, each with its own economic systems and rules - making life very interesting indeed for the space traveler. The likelihood of this generating any kind of empire, much less an Evil one, probably has so many zeros after the decimal point it might as well be zero - except that there's a 100% chance some lunatic will try to form one. (There's a large historical precedent for this. Practically every attempt at building a utopian society anywhere falls into this category, because people aren't perfect and trying to make them fit the vision usually ends badly.) Not to mention that, like the fantasy realms, they're not going to be homogenous. There'll be misfits, eccentrics, leaders, followers, predators and prey, because every society has them.

All things considered, I'd better leave it here, because if I get into economics and how that works - or doesn't - in the vast majority of science fiction and fantasy, I'll have to write a book-length rant, and I'd much rather just write a book that does get it more or less right. I hope.

Who do you think does get it right, or close to right? What do they get right?

How Will We Know?

If you choose to be even moderately optimistic about the future of humanity, it's pretty much a given that at some point we'll end up in space, and we'll colonize all sorts of places, some very like parts of Earth, others... not. It's also pretty likely that sooner or later we'll be able to perform gene modifications, inheritable and otherwise.

Which inevitably brings up the question, will we still be human? And with it, if we stop being human at some point, how will we know?

There's any number of stories in that, ranging from near future SF all the way out to possible futures so bizarre they might as well be fantasy. The question of whether we'll end up as a whole lot of related species is its own subset of these.

At last year's WorldCon in Denver, I wound up in a fascinating discussion with an evolutionary biologist and several other scientists of varying flavors. I don't remember how we got to the question of speciation, but it seems the jury is still out on the question of whether you've got a separate species when two groups can breed but don't (because of geographical or morphological issues), when they can breed but the offspring usually won't be fertile (ligers and mules - which actually can be fertile but usually aren't), or when they can't breed at all. The obvious example here would be dogs and wolves - which are usually considered separate species but can produce fertile offspring - and of course the various breeds of dog, which at some extremes would have a lot of difficulty breeding. While a peke with a stepladder could mate with a great dane, it doesn't happen often, and for obvious reasons it's a unidirectional mating unless some really perverse person wanted to do a test tube fertilization with great dane sperm and peke ova then implant in a female great dane (because there's no way on earth a peke is going to carry those puppies to term).

So... when do we humans speciate, and what will happen then? If we engineer people to live comfortably in null-gravity, are they and their children still human? And of course, where does our old friend evolution fit into all this?

People tend to forget that evolution is still, well, evolving as we speak. Pale skin is an adaptation to living in climates where there isn't that much sun. Lactose intolerance is the human norm - only the cultures where milk is a major food source have a significant number of people who can drink it as adults. People who have been living in cities for generations have, on the whole, brain structures optimized for multi-tasking by comparison with people who have been living in small rural communities (don't ask me for references. This is the stainless steel lint trap in action. I remember weird shit with no idea how it got there).

Here's the thought experiment. Let's say three more or less uniform groups set off to colonize some newly discovered planets. We won't go into how they get there. Group A finds themselves a tropical paradise - big oceans, most of the land masses are in temperate to tropical zones - with plenty of edible plants and animals. Group B's new home has pretty distinct seasons, but adapts very well to Western style agriculture, and also has some large predators. Group C gets the booby prize - they find themselves in a hostile climate where they need to make the most of every drop of water, defend against filthy weather, and protect themselves against a range of predators, poisonous critters, and just plain nasty stuff.

Fast forward a few thousand years, assuming that all three groups have been pretty much isolated and managing without outside intervention, and what do you think you'll find?

Here's my guess. Group C will probably be either dead, or a collection of geniuses, because in that environment if you're not smart enough to do the right things and forward thinking enough to do them before you need it, you're dead. They've probably made a bunch of technological advances just to cope with the environment. Group B will be about... well, average. Seasonal variation requires a certain amount of foresight and intelligence, but not nearly as much as a situation that seems designed to kill you if you slip up. Group A, with their tropical paradise? With nothing to kill the not so bright, and a nice easy food supply, they'll probably have changed least, and be, as a group, the least intelligent. Meaning if you picked a random person from A, B, and C, chances are the person from C would be smartest (and probably kind of paranoid), the person from B middling, and the person from A not so bright and probably pretty relaxed and easygoing.

What do you think will happen? And will all three still be human?

Care and Feeding of Plots

The last few posts have sent me cycling back to thinking about plots (as opposed to plotting, which involves ultra-secret societies and if I told you I'd have to... Oh, sorry. Wrong kind of plot): where they come from, how they grow, and of course, the question that makes every writer cringe, "Where do you get your ideas?"

Me, I get ideas and plots everywhere. The problem is keeping the beggars from metastasizing, not finding them. It helps that I read widely, all over the spectrum. One of my recent idea-fodder scores is Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku - who is a theoretical physicist and one of the founders of string theory. In this book, a whole range of science fictional staples including force-fields, teleportation, FTL travel and the like get the "Okay, so how would we do this?" treatment.

It turns out that everything needed to make a force field has been manufactured in some form. Some of the components are still very much experimental manufacture, while others are mature, but they all exist. As such, it's feasible that somewhere within 100 years you could be able go to the store and buy yourself a force field.

Levitation (yes, I want my flying car, damn it!) is in the same range.

Now, watch those neurons fizz at the thought of flying cars equipped with force fields to prevent collisions. Add a hot guy, preferably partially clothed, and we're in... ahem.

Leaving aside fond lewd imaginings, I take a whole bunch of ideas like this, mix and match to get some idea what my world looks like and what it's like to live there, and figure out the overarching motivations of all the major players in that world as they relate to my setting. I don't usually go for complex, intertwining skullduggery for the simple reason that my plots have a tendency to do that to me anyway while I'm working out what's going on.

Often all these ideas (did you know that the founders of the USA wanted to set a fixed-value currency that could never inflate or deflate? Imagine a world where someone did that...) don't go anywhere (Oh, and did you know that relativity is implicit in Thomas Young's equations related to light - and if he hadn't died at 55 it's possible the Theory of Relativity could have been proposed before 1850? Nuclear steampunk!), at least not at first. So I keep reading all sorts of stuff, fiction and non-fiction, and strange and occasionally wonderful things emerge.

After all, the seed of a plot is an idea, and good plots usually have several ideas lurking in the background fraternizing and mixing things up - and breeding - strong characters to drive them (often the disguised spawn of yet another idea), and lots of fertilization to make them grow. Yes, this does mean I throw a whole lot of crap at it and hope something works.

How do you feed your plots? What are your idea seeds, how widely do you cross-breed and how much control do you try to exert over them as they grow?

Brand Names and World Building

I write book length fantasy and near future SF in short story length, so I build worlds. It will sound nerdy but I love it. I love reading about history and sociology. The study of linguistics for instance and how language can not only define your place in the world, but how you see the world fascinates me.

Because I write science fiction and fantasy, I don't write much that is set in our contemporary world. But recently I've been reading books from the incredibly popular Dark Urban Fantasy genre (DUF). These have been fun and easy to read, with good pacing and likable characters.

Coming fresh to the DUF genre, one of the things I noticed was the use of brand names in the narrative. In theory it is like writing in short hand. The author doesn't need to explain what the car/watch looks like, they just give the brand. This brand name will tell the reader the character's social status and wealth or lack of it.

As long as the reader knows the brands. I don't.

I found some of the books so heavy on brand name usage that it was like reading an SF book, where the author introduces a lot of invented nouns. At least in an SF book the author will plant clues in the narrative to explain the meaning of the invented nouns. With brand names the author assumes you know all the associations.

Brand names in contemporary narratives. What do you think of this?

From Whence You Dream

*Apologies about being late again. I forgot it was Wednesday. Sorry.*

Dave mentioned in his post – and I guess we are still in that vein of discontent – that we don’t see much “puzzle” sf. Part of this, I think is because it is so very hard to write. I have a nodding acquaintance with science and read about science constantly, but I think just the research for a problem short story would take me as much as research for an historical novel. And it doesn’t pay as well.

But there is something beyond that – something that ties in with discussions at Liberty con the weekend before last. There was a panel on why children aren’t all that interested in space anymore. It tied in with several panels I’ve attended or participated in as to why fantasy is doing better among children than science fiction.

Always the conclusion of the panel is something like “because we’re living in science fiction now.” It is a conclusion to which I offer a dissenting opinion. That is not it. That is not even vaguely it. Because, my dears, I was once referred to as “a child of the lunar age” and I fail to see my moon colonies and – do I need to say it? – “Dude, where’s my flying car?”

No, the reason children by and large aren’t interested in science fiction – and beyond the terrible teaching of science many of them receive, I hear. This is a part I don’t know from personal experience because my children, except for one year, have had excellent science and math teachers – is that we’ve become all too serious about it.

Okay, okay, I can see you all frowning, and you can stop it. You can stop with the “science is a serious thing” too. Yes it is. But when something becomes so serious that you can no longer be playful with it, it is in fact dead.

What first attracted me to science fiction were the big what ifs. What if there was a civilization on Earth before us? What if our ancestors came from space? What if we were visited by an alien race that changed our way of life completely?

At fourteen I read – no, devoured – the whole line of “Chariots of the gods” poppycock. At some level I think I already knew it was poppycock, but it was interesting and exciting, and it made me dream. So did a lot of the science fiction I read at the time: Have Spacesuit Will Travel; Puppet Masters; City; Way Station; Our Children’s Children. It made me dream and speculate and ultimately sent me into learning real science.

Could any of those books get published today? Spacesuit, maybe, updated for the new tech. The others? Not a chance. Puppet Masters? But we “know” xenobiology wouldn’t allow for this; City? But ants could not civilize even if...; Way Station: why would they need a transmission station on Earth? How does it work? Our current science indicates... Our Children’s Children? Time travel could not work in that way. And if we sent them back in time, why haven’t we found any remnants.

I could give you counters to all these dream-killing thoughts. If you think about it, you can imagine ways around it, and there’s always “what makes you think our science is the definitive word?” What if there’s something as big as “heavier than air can’t fly” that we hold immutably true and isn’t? However, I couldn’t get it past the science-fiction editors (except maybe Baen who have more imagination than most and a fondness for space opera) and I certainly couldn’t get it past the reviewers.

And there we come to the core of it. We’ve become small and petty and scolding, holding on to those verities we “know”. We’ve forgotten how to – or are scared of – dreaming big dreams. And then we wonder why kids aren’t interested in science fiction? Oh, my heavens – they aren’t interested because it’s become another lesson to be learned, while sitting quietly, mind, and not playing with your toys.

(This is, I think , why Steampunk is big. It allows one to dream again.)

So am I saying we should publish “garbage” like our ancestors came from the stars? Yes. Yes, I am. A respectable liar-for-pay like us should be able to come up with some reason to explain away all those skeletons and evidence of human evolution on this planet. (I can come up with three off the top of my head.) And because humans are always more interesting than aliens we can’t understand, a respectable liar for pay should be able to come up with ten reasons why aliens will resemble us; why there are humans in the stars; why the starts are – to quote a book title – our destiny.

No, I’m not saying do PFA. What Rowena and Dave said about “some nano machine that is in effect magic” has been annoying me for decades. Ditto for a lot of other things (though I have a fondness for parallel universes.) Look, guys, I have to come up with a logical background for my FANTASY much less my SF. A good liar creates a background that makes people wonder – and which sends them back to check the details. And when you do this with kids, they will go back and study the science, at first to figure out a way it COULD be true. And then they’ll be hooked.

When all we’re offering them is exacting priesthood and barren worlds, in my opinion, there’s nothing there for them. Or for us. So let’s learn to dream again, and teach it to our children.

What do you guys think? Am I being too cavalier with sacred science? Do we have to watch that our kids don’t stumble off the path, even at the price of losing them forever? Who here wants to set off, right now, to a world where ants have developed a civilization, dogs are intelligent, and humans are hopping along the stars, meeting species they can in fact talk to? And how many here read about the big impact on Jupiter and thought ‘it’s aliens, trying to alien-form the system to their requirements’? How many of you look at the starry night and would like to think there are humans out there among the stars, and one day we’ll join them?

Sean Williams talks Shop

Sean Williams (courtesy Cat Sparks)

Sean is a prolific speculative fiction Australian writer, with 16 Aurealis Award nominations and 8 wins, a Phillip K Dick Award nomination, four New York Times best seller lists, including one that debuted at #1, plus he’s an all round nice guy.

A few years ago when I was running the EnVision workshop I asked Sean to come along to talk to the aspiring writers about what it means to be a professional writer. And he told a story I’ve never forgotten …

Sean: It was ten years ago, or thereabouts. I'd just sold my first fantasy series to Harper Collins and received a major Australia Council grant to write it. The three books were due across a two-and-a-half-year period, which didn't seem too onerous. Having just quit my day job, I knew I'd have time to spare. Easy.

At about the same time I managed to interest Ace in a new space opera trilogy, co-written with Shane Dix, with delivery dates spanning those same two and a half years. That made six books, giving me around five months per draft. That was a slighter brisker pace, but as half of them would be collaborative novels, I figured that would still be doable. (Anyone who's collaborated knows that such work nets half the money and takes twice the time, but we'll gloss over that to get to the meat of the story.)

Six books, signed for but not delivered. Then my agent called in the middle of the night to say that Shane and I had been offered the chance to write for Star Wars. And not just one novel, either. A whole trilogy.

My agent said, "Oh, in the next couple of years or so, I think." I said, "That makes nine books in two and a half years. I don't know if I can write that fast."

He said, "Do you know you can't write that fast?" I said I didn't.

He said, "Well, let's just sign the contract and see what happens. If you fall to pieces, we'll work something out."

I did the maths. I added up the number of books and divided it by the number of days. That came to about 1375 words per day, every day, for 30-odd months. That was daunting, but not too daunting. After all, I'd already proven that I could write fast when I had to. Furthermore, if I aimed for 1500 words, that'd give me a small sanity-break between books.

Next I mapped out the due dates on a calendar. Three books of these nine were due the same month, but it was possible to stagger the drafts and get them all in on time, even when including the time Shane needed to work on six of the books. Some would even be ready early.

So I said yes. And started writing. To some people 1500 words a day may sound like a lot, but it isn't for everyone, once you get into the swing of it. Especially if that's all you're doing, every day. What I hadn't counted on was that it wasn't remotely all that I was doing every day. I hadn't counted on publicity, writers' festivals, interviews, all the mail from Star Wars fans, and three sets of page proofs, say, all turning up in the same week. And so on. The last six of those thirty months were

pretty hellish, but I did get it done. By taking the challenge, I learned what I was capable of.

I usually stop the story here, even though it isn't quite finished yet. My major concern was not with getting the words down: it was that I would drop the ball and release a crappy book. I don't regard myself as a book factory, you see. Being a writer who can work fast isn't enough, because being a writer at all means not just maintaining a baseline quality, but challenging yourself as well. The three series I wrote in those thirty months were very different to each other, and each of those nine books was a challenge in some way. I'm proud to say that, even as the pressure mounted, the quality of the writing went up too. The nine books earned two awards, seven nominations, and three New York Times bestseller listings. One of the last of the nine was recommended by Locus in the same category as Neil Gaiman and Isabel Allende. That's what really makes me proud.

Q: You have 8 book series published or due to be published as well as four independent novels. Some of your books are for adults, some for young adults, some are fantasy, some space opera, some near future noir. And you’ll have had 75 short stories published by the end of this year. If you had to describe yourself as a writer, how would you phrase it? (Other than busy!)

Sean's latest anthology.

Sean: I'm almost as eclectic in my writing as I am in my reading, but that isn't a particularly helpful response to your question. Given that I'm about to move into thrillers and crime fiction as well, I really have no idea how to categorise myself. I just write what I'm most passionate about, and I hope that the market will find a way to accommodate it. Writing under a pseudonym has always appealed to me, so maybe I'll explore this possibility in times to come.

For all my genre-hopping, though, there are themes and ways of storytelling I constantly return to. Speculation, sure--hence all the SF. Australian landscape--overflowing from my fantasy. The blurring of identity--hence crime fiction. Definitions of humanity and the limits of physics--space opera's the perfect vehicle for both of these. People of all shapes and ages--should go without saying for any writer.

Q: You have a long history of collaboration behind you--ten novels with Shane Dix, several short stories with Simon Brown--but just lately you've been concentrating on solo work. Was the transition hard to make? Do you have any plans to collaborate again?

Sean: I do enjoy collaboration, and that's one of the reasons I keep coming back to the Star Wars universe. No, it's not just about the money and the sales, or even clinging to the dreams of my faraway youth. It's working on part of a much larger story, with dozens of other authors, in a universe that is always expanding, always surprising. That's one of the key delights/terrors of collaboration: you can never be entirely sure what's going to happen next. Given that authors traditionally work in a garret with no feedback at all until the book reaches the editor, it's quite a jump into the unknown. I think it's a good thing for writers to take that jump every now and again.

Sometimes the leap has to go the other way. Certainly, working with Shane was a lot of fun and became a very familiar way to write space opera. I'd already begun the process of weaning myself from the collaboration with the Geodesica books, but he was still there to hold my hand. Astropolis was where I finally walked off into that big, bad universe on my own, with no one but myself to blame or give credit to when the book came out. That was terrifying in a whole new way, and just as invigorating.

Future collaborations are not impossible. Shane and I would like to write a fourth Evergence novel one day (The Roche Limit) and I'm working with a couple of people on film projects. Whether they come of anything, time will tell.

Q: You’ve support the writing community by serving on the management committee of the South Australian Writers Centre and now you have nominated for the management committee of the Australian Society of Authors. You’re a busy, successful writer, why do you take time out from your career, to serve the community? Do you have personal goals you would like to see? Eg. Genre writing achieving more respect?

Sean: I do spend a lot of time on committees, these days. I'm also a founding board member of the Big Book Club Inc. and I'm just finishing up a term as Chair of the Arts SA literature advisory panel. I judge for competitions like Writers of the Future and Somerset, and I teach as well. Why?

I guess it's because in the past I've been helped quite profoundly by other writers filling similar roles, in their own time. The late Peter McNamara was a great role model in this regard. He was a publisher, writer and an editor, and passionately committed to improving the lot for every other publisher, writer and editor in the wider community. Not just SF. Not just South Australia. Everywhere he could reach. He did things I could never do. But he did demonstrate how important even the attempt was. I don't think it's saying too much that the cohesion we currently enjoy in the Australian SF scene owes a large part to his efforts, and the example he set. So every time I'm invited to be involved in a large or small way in the betterment of other writers, I can't help but ask what Peter would have done, and to remember what a difference it made to be on the receiving end of such efforts.

Garnering respect for the genre is something I do rail about, but that I suspect is a battle that can't be won by anything other than writing good books. Humanity's natural desire to speculate about the other is gradually overtaking the critics, academics and readers who regard our field with disdain, and that's why we see it creeping more and more into the mainstream. I do worry that SF is becoming a "genre of the gaps"--turning its back on everything that becomes popular or is widely accepted, like Star Wars or The Time Traveler's Wife, simply because these works don't conform to some idea of what the genre should be--but that's not really a matter for such committees. I mainly want to make sure that good books reach a wide audience, and that good writers are rewarded by being paid.

Q: You’ve tutored at Clarion South several times now. (Clarion South is based on the US Clarions. It’s a 6 week boot camp for writers of spec fic. Each tutor comes in for one week). This must be incredibly exhausting but also inspiring. Can you share some insights with us?

Sean: I frequently harangue my students with m "10-and-a-half Commandments".

That's what I call them, but they aren't really commandments as such. They're more like first principles, along the lines of "If you want be a writer, here are some guidelines that will work for everyone." I've bounced them off dozens of people until I feel like I know them by heart.

When I rattled off the list to a group of wonderful writers in Melbourne last year, I was absolutely floored when one of them put up her hand and suggested that all of these first principles rest on one that was even more fundamental. I was stunned. A Zeroth Commandment, one I'd never even considered! It was a revelation.

That's why I like to teach. It forces me to examine anew everything I take for granted, each time I stand up to say something, and it forces me into contact with people possessing their own ideas, their own insights. I learn as much from my students as they learn from me, be they first-timers or practically hacks in their own right, like the WOTF or Clarion crowds. What I get out of the process is more than balanced by what I put into it.

The Zeroth Commandment, btw, was commitment. If you're not committed to being a writer, if you aren't absolutely sure that this is what you want to do, then no amount of first principles will help you. You might as well give up now and get a real job (as Charles Brown of Locus once advised me, way back when), and save you and everyone around you a whole lot of grief.

Q: I notice you write for YA and adult, plus you write across spec fic genres. Some might argue that this dilutes your readership. Based on experience, would you agree or disagree?

Sean: My experience doesn't reveal anything about this question, to be honest. The readers seem to work it out. Having good covers help, of course. There's no mistaking The Grand Conjunction for The Scarecrow, for instance. The difference is obvious just by looking.

One always hopes, of course, that the vast audience for Star Wars will drift across to original books by the same author, and to a certain extent that is true. But there's not a huge crossover. I have a Star Wars audience, a SF audience, and a fantasy audience. That's how I tend to think of it. And now, I guess, I have a fantasy audience that's split into kid, YA and adult age-groups, if those distinctions really mean anything. I basically count myself as fortunate to have any at all audience for the stories I love to write.

Q: In 1984 you won the Young Composer's Award for a theme and three variations for string quartet with flute, oboe and trumpet soloists called "Release of Anger". Its original title was "Cowled they the Rampant Gargoyle Down" which sounds like Angry Young Man music to me but I can’t reconcile this with a string quartet. Do you listen to music as you write? Does each separate book series have a musical album or suite of albums in your mind? And do you ever see yourself getting back into music in a big way?

Sean: I say that I would love nothing more than to have the time to take three months off writing each year and work solely on music. If I'm honest with myself, though, I'm not sure that's such a good idea. Maybe it's been too long. Maybe I only ever dabbled and simply don't have the skills now to do anything of value, so I'd just be wasting my time.

But what is this "value" I speak of? How hard can it be to re-learn the skills? What's wrong with dabbling in the first place?

I think I'd still love the opportunity to see what would happen if I did give it a go. I'm getting more and more ideas for musical projects as time goes on, and I guess that creative energy has to go somewhere eventually.

These days I write almost exclusively to experimental ambient music, cycling through all sorts of artists and sounds (never vocals, rarely structured in a conventional way, never ever boring) but usually coming back to the maste Steve Roach at some point. Quite often one track will stick through a project, triggering the right neural nets in my brain as I sit down every day. Just lately I wrote a novel while listening to a single track by Brisbane muso Deepspace, aptly titled "Another Empty Galaxy". At this very moment I'm listening to a couple of collaborative albums by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. They'll cycle around until the next ambient space opens up, as required.

Q: What’s inspiring your writing at the moment?

Sean: Apart from music, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin opus, which I'm halfway through. Garth Nix and others have been telling me to read these books for years. I can't believe it took me so long to pay attention! When I picked up the first one last year, I was instantly hooked me.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 5 years, and in 15 years?

Sean: Hmm. That's a tricky question. It was much easier in the early days. The goals were more clearly defined, then. "Finish a short story." "Sell a short story." "Finish a novel." "Get a novel published." I mean, is there anything quite as important as that? "Sell a novel overseas"? "Win an award"? "Publish in hardback"? "Be a natcon GOH"? "Write for Star Wars"? "Appear on the New York Times bestseller list"? They're all good things, but I wouldn't count them as goals as such. They're just things that happened along the way.

These days my goals relate to maintaining the career, because if I can't eat, I can't write. Maintaining the career, though, isn't just about keeping the cheques rolling in, whatever it takes. I need to keep learning new skills and conquering new fears. Romance? Check. Sex scenes? Check. Kids? Check. Realist setting? Working on that. Humour? Still far too chicken to try.

So in five years time I expect to be facing challenges I can't imagine now or still dealing with some familiar ones that I haven't conquered. I do hope to be writing more than one book a year only by choice, not because I have to, as is currently the case. I'd like my kids' books to have reached an audience overseas, as is currently not the case, so I can keep on writing them. I'd also like to have finished my PhD and at least dabbled with writing some new music.

In fifteen years, who knows? Maybe I'll have slowed right down, creatively, and taken up teaching as a career path. (Not that teaching isn't creative in its own way. It absolutely should be.) Maybe I'll have sped up. Maybe I'll be working in film or TV (two areas that seem to be creeping back into my life at the moment). I doubt I'll have retired completely, since I enjoy it so much.

Anything's possible, though. I'm fully open to the idea of going back to uni to study maths.

Q: I hear you can make a mean curry. Do you have a favourite recipe you'd like to share with us?

Sean: Ah, curries. I'd eat them every day, given the chance. One of my favourite recipes is a simple but deliciously spicy marinated chicken curry, which you can find in the Women's Weekl y Easy Curry cook book (my secret revealed--gasp!). We have a teenager in the family, Seb, who from the age of two refused to eat anything more complicated than steamed veges or a hot dog. At about 12, though, he started expressing interest in more lively food, and with great nervousness he tasted a teaspoon of this curry. He absolutely loved it, which is a sign of how delicious it is. Don't hold back on the coriander, and it'll taste even better if you have the time to grind the spices yourself. Like all things in life, the more you put into it, the better it'll be.