I had planned a
return to the space opera motif for my 2019 novel, this time using good, old fashioned FTL star ships. I had it set in the Aeroday and
Inlopar star clusters that I had imagined for stories many years ago.
I also wanted to make the story a mystery story, just to try my hand
at that type of story. I envisioned a sort of Raymond Chandler style
mystery set on some seedy planets in the Inlopar fringe stars.
However, as you may have gathered from my use of the past tense, the
project didn’t end well. It ended at 7,000 words.
It started out
promising. I had a pretty solid plot and was confident that all the
unresolved details could have been hammered out as I went along. What
tripped me up was time and space. Too much time and too much space.
But before I get into that, let me briefly outline the story I had in
hand.
The narrator of the
Inlopar Stars was a sentient machine star ship captain. It had many
years of experience in the fringe stars of the Inlopar Cluster. Our
narrator was hired by another sentient machine, an insurance claims
adjudicator from the Aeroday worlds to be a guide and assistant
investigator once they reached the fringe worlds. The adjudicator was
investigating insurance claims arising out of the disappearance of a
very expensive yacht in these remote stars and under very
questionable circumstances. The adjudicator had two human
investigators in tow as aides.
The yacht in
question was owned by one of the wealthiest families of a planet. The
family businesses had been mismanaged for many years and the family
was rumored to be on the brink of collapse. The current head of the
family took this very expensive yacht filled with very rare objects
de’art for a cruise to these remote stars, apparently on a whim. It
went missing. The insurance company had quantum entangled indicators
in their office tied to sensors aboard the ship that told them that
the ship did not suffer a catastrophic field failure in FTL flight,
and was still more or less intact. The yacht had FTL boats to carry
off the passengers and crew to safety if it suffered less than
catastrophic damage. None appeared. This being the case, the family
claimed that it was either hijacked, taken by pirates, or suffered some other
sort of non-destructive tragedy, and wanted the
insurance companies to pay up. The insurance companies, suspecting
fraud, given all the iffy circumstances, declined to pay.
The insurance case
came to a head when a multi-million credit sculpture showed up for
auction that was listed on the invoice of the missing yacht. It was
purchased for a small amount at a pawnshop on a planet within the
Inlopar fringe stars. Proof, the family claimed, that the ship had
been hijacked or taken by pirates. However, when examined, the statue
proved to be not the original, but a very well executed copy of the original
piece. The insurance companies were insuring the original, and well,
if it indeed came from the yacht, that would suggest that things were
even more fishy than they had originally suspected. The adjudicator,
sets out with his aides and our narrator follow the trail of this
stature into the Inlowpar fringe in to discover what exactly happened
to the missing yacht.
The story foundered
not because I couldn’t figure out what happened, but because it
involved too much time and space.
I feel very strongly
that if one is going to set a story in the vastness of space, it
should reflect that vastness. If the planets are a few hours away
from each other, via worm-holes or whatever, they why bother with
space travel at all? Especially if the planets become one feature
planets, like the Star Wars’ desert, ice, and city planets. One
might just as well set the story on an alien planet and move to
different locales via cars, planes, or subway trains.
So for my space
story, The combined Aeroday and Inlowpar star clusters needed to be
at least as large as the earth was, several hundred years ago –
back when it took months to travel to the far side of it, and
information traveled only as fast as the ships or caravans. This,
however, meant that yacht had to have disappeared several years
before the events of the story for the case to reach this point. This
made for a very “cold” case to follow and that made it hard for
me to have the investigators to stir up much “hot” action to
drive the story. Adding to this problem was that word of their
investigation would travel through the star systems just about as
fast they did. In a Philip Marlowe story, everything happens within a
couple of days. The bad guys can learn of his involvement and can
react within hours. A telephone call to Bay City could result in
Marlowe getting sapped and ending up a prisoner in a shady rehab
clinic. While I could have some sort of action like this happen on a
planet, the trouble was that with the crime being so old, and the
somewhat lawless nature of the planets involved, the bad guys would
have no reason to react at all. The more I thought about it, the more
it seemed that the story would end up just having our investigators
going from planet to planet, finding and talking to people who knew a
piece of the puzzle until the case was solved. Now, this is a fairly
accurate description of many mystery stories, but in those, the
readers can follow along with the detective, and detect with her or
him since they know the rules of the genre. In the imaginary world of
SF these rules are not known, so the reader would be simply along for
the ride, mere observers. Which, in the end, I thought would make for
a fairly boring story – for me to write, as well as for the reader.
So it is now on to
“Plan B” for my 2019 novel. More on that in future post.
The one lesson I
took away from this experience was that it is hard, at least for me,
to make a new and interesting space ship story, especially after
having already written a 330,000 word space ship story. FTL ships
are basically magic, so I suppose you could have it travel through
some sort of magical space where things can happen to it, but for the
most part the space ship in a story is just a device to move the
story from one planet to another. And that being the case, I’ve
rather come around to the idea of just setting stories on a single
imaginary world where many things can happen to make journey through it as
interesting as possible.
