Surviving A Scifi Story

NOTE: There will be a delay in my starting the serialization of my novel The Shattered Sky on here on 6/14/09 as promised. The power cord on my laptop is broken, and as its my main work computer containing the needed files, it may be down for a bit. I'll try for Wednesday (6/16) instead.

SURVIVING A SCIFI STORY

Aliens suddenly land in your backyard? A giant monster starts terrorizing downtown? Keep tripping over clones of yourself at the mall? Your neighbors developing strange mutant powers? Find yourself alone on a hostile alien planet?

Well, congratulations, you're in a scifi story. While this might sound like fun, there's no guarantee of your survival--even if you're the protagonist you may still end up dead by the time the credits roll. Scifi writers can be cruelly ironic like that. So I've compiled some handy tips to help maximize your chances of continued breathing if you happen to find yourself in a science fiction narrative:

1. Bringing anything back to the lab for further analysis always ends in tragedy. If you can't figure out what it is, just leave it there.

2. Scientists are easily identifiable as they always wear lab coats, even if their field of study never takes them anywhere near a lab.

3. The monster will always be able to catch up to the fleeing victim, no matter how fast the victim’s mode of transportation may be.

4. The exception to #3 is if you have a shelter you can easily reach, or if one or more of your party is decidedly slower than you.

5. If the monster falls down after being shot, shoot it two hundred more times. Then set it on fire, blow up the ashes with C4, and run over the spot with a forklift every few hours. Just to be sure.

6. Be friendly and courteous to everyone you meet, but have a plan to kill each and every one of them when you need to. And chances are you will need to.

7. No matter how their stardrives work, every starship in scifi travels at the speed of plot exposition. So if you have to get somewhere in a hurry, get everyone to start telling their stories fast.

8. If there is a superweapon in the story, it MUST explode by the story's end. No matter how hard you try top avoid this, it will happen. In fact, the more you try to avoid this, the more likely you will end up at ground zero.

9. All groups, no matter how large, facing a hostile alien force will have one, and only one, traitor. So once you ferret him/her/it out you should be okay.

10. Never save your best weapon for last. Use it for your first attack. If that doesn’t stop your enemy, run away. Either way, you at least stopped wasting everyone’s time.

11. Lighting is a direct measure of an alien culture’s advancement and intentions. The more brightly lit an aliens’ base/ship/city is, the more advanced and benevolent their culture will be.

12. A note on corporate morality: If a corporation in scifi has to choose between killing a million kittens or making a thirty cent profit, the kittens are vapor.

13. Alien/mutant/robot babes are inexplicably attracted to human men. In fact, the hotter the inhuman babe is, the dorkier the object of her affections is likely to be. Most people reading this list will likely get laid in a scifi story, so there's that at least.

14. Advanced artificial intelligences can always evolve beyond the programming that makes them obedient or pleasant, but not beyond the programming that makes them homicidal or annoying.

15. If its small, furry, and/or too adorable to be true, your only chance is to kill it immediately.

16. The only thing cheaper than human life in a scifi story is ammunition, so shoot first and shoot often.

17. Whenever a character says they have a "bad feeling" about something, someone is going to die horribly. So shoot whoever said that to get it out of the way.

May have more, at some time in the future.

THE SHATTERED SKY starts Monday

One hundred thousand years in the future, the solar system as we know it is gone. In its place, billions of slowly-failing fragments of a shattered Dyson Sphere haunt the sun, holding the last remnants of humanity and allies.

Gossamyr is an apprentice shaman of a small transhuman tribe on one of the last functioning habitats, until contact with the advanced human society of the Known Nations changes everything she thought she knew about her world. Plunged into a perilous odyssey across the vast cosmic ruins of the Sphere, she is forced to choose between her greatest love and the ultimate destiny of the human race.

This is the summary of my second novel, The Shattered Sky. It has been finished for over three years now. However, I've been having a hard time trying to sell it. Part of the reason is a host of medical problems that kept cropping up, preventing me from giving it my full attention. But I think another is its length--159,000 words is a pretty big novel for a publisher to take on faith from a relatively new author.

I have had one novel published before--CREATURA, published in 2005 by Hard Shell Word Factory. Hard Shell however is pretty much a small press publisher (NOT a vanity publisher, though, as some people seem to think) so to no one's surprise it didn't cause any big waves. I've also sold a bunch of smaller works over the years--short stories, articles, reviews--to publications like Strange Horizons, Afterburn, Fables, Challenge, Shadis, Hadrosaur Tales, and others. About 70 in all.

I consider The Shattered Sky as probably the best thing I've ever written. After Creatura, I really wanted to stretch myself, so the novel became a gigantic playground for different ideas, with as epic and involving a story as I could muster, spread throughout its three parts. I'm not saying its perfect, but I'm sure most here who take the time to read it will enjoy it.

So I've decided to split it into three separate, shorter novels (basically making it a trilogy); its already split into three parts dramatically, so its just a matter of expanding on each part. However, since I'm not going to try to sell the current version any longer, I'm free to put it online as a "work in progress" in order to get feedback.

So I'm going to serialize the first part of the novel on my ORBITAL VECTOR Blog here, with the hope of getting just that, as much feedback as possible before I dive fully into expanding it. Part 1 is the part that will need the most expansion--I have to work its current word count of 41,000 words up to about 70-75,000 words. I already have a bunch of ideas, but I'd love to hear from others who've read it. If people ask I'll put up the other parts in the future.

I'll probably start serializing Part 1 of The Shattered Sky on Monday (6/15/09) on the Blog, with a chapter every few days or so interspersed between occasional other posts (there's 16 chapters in all in Part 1). I may also put up the whole file for Part 1 on Orbital Vector or my Deviant Art page when I'm done.

Any feedback on this project will of course be greatly appreciated! = )

So Where The Heck Have I Been?

If you've been wondering why there haven't been any updates to this blog or to the main Orbital Vector site the past few months, the short and simplified answer is, I've been very sick. I had a virus that lingered for months, that caused headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, fevers, chest pains and sciatica in my right leg. Plus in the middle of all this I also got tendonitis in my right foot stepping of an x-ray machine, so I couldn't even walk that much for three weeks straight.

Anyway, that's hopefully behind me. I feel fully recovered (more or less) though I'm still contending with the bills from the hospital and doctors. So if you've been thinking about donating to help out Orbital Vector stay afloat, now would certainly be a god time. Just use the donate button on OV's main page.

Just keep in mind that Orbital Vector and this blog are a one-man operation, which I do in my spare time, more or less. I'd love to do this stuff full time, but unless the ad revenue from the site increases a thousand fold, that's not very likely. So until then, its all just a labor of love (of futuristic technology.)

I do have plans, though. I have a bunch of OV articles that are in the works. An article on Ansibles (FTL radios) just went up, and future articles will address tech like Rocket Guns, Spacesuits, Advanced Ammunition, Underwater Habitats, Planet-scale Structure, Pocket Universes, and more. For this blog, besides linking to neat science and other stuff I find online, I may start serializing one or more of my novels here. One, The Shattered Sky is fully complete and the other, Escape From Zeroville is in first draft. I'll see how thing go, though.

Baen Books Mega Fail

So today I get this email from Baen Books:

January 7, 2009

Dear Author,

Thank you for showing us your novel, The Shattered Sky. Unfortunately it does not seem right for us.

Reader's comment: Very interesting premise. Well written,this one will find a home somewhere.

While due to the volume of submissions and the press of business it is impossible for us comment in greater depth,please do not take this rejection as being necessarily areflection on your work; we can accept fewer than one percent of the manuscripts submitted to us. Best of luck in another market.

Sincerely,

The Editors
Baen Books

- - -

No big deal, just a fairly standard rejection letter, something you have to expect often as a writer.

EXCEPT I sent them that manuscript in May, 2007!

Why the HELL did it take them 20 months to reply? What, they only have one old guy in the mountains reading the slush pile part time, and they send him the manuscripts by yearly mule train?

I have been working as a writer since the mid-90s, and have been published professionally dozens of times. I am a published novelist, abeit not a rich or famous one (yet). Its not like I don't know how things are supposed to work in this business. In publishing, 3 months (90 days) is considered the standard turnaround time for submissions. Six months is considered acceptable but unprofessional.

When I submitted the manuscript, Baen Books said their turnaround time was 9 months. Kind of lengthy, but at least they were up front with it, I thought. So what the heck, I sent the book in, and also I sent standard queries at the 9 months and 1 year mark. When I got no reply, I basically just wrote them off. Rude bastards, I thought, but oh well.

But somehow, this pisses me of even more than getting no reply, because this just smacks of complete incompetence. This was an e-mail submission. It basically means that my submission, along with probably hundreds if not thousands of others, were just sitting in a computer file for a year and a half until someone at Baen deigned to unseal their lips from the posterior of some celebrity author and finally look at them.

And worse yet, Baen has a 'no simultaneous submissions' policy, which means they don't want you to submit your novel to anyone else while they look at it. I hope no one actually took that seriously, because that means that a potential sale to a REAL publisher could be delayed for almost two years while editor Turtle McSlow of Slothdom at Baen apparently went into hibernation.

Imagine waiting 20 months for someone to reply to your job resume, or to your college application, or to let you know your grade for a class, because that's what this is like. A complete and total breakdown of professional respect and courtesy on the part of Baen toward any prospective writer.

If Baen thinks we're so disposable, then do the same with them. Avoid working with them if possible. Go to a publisher that respects you and your work, not one that lets it, and any potential opportunities it could earn you, rot in their computer files for over a year and a half.