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| First cover with its first title. This would end up being the first 1/3rd of The Bright Black Sea |
I can pin part of
the blame for instigating The Bright Black Sea on a
website/magazine called Raygun Revival. It was on the web from
about 2006 to 2012 and featured short stories and serials recalling
old fashioned space operas. I can’t say I actually read many, if
any of the stories – I really can’t read books on a computer (the
scrolling gets to me) but the idea of writing the type of story that
they might welcome was certainly one of the threads that lead to The
Bright Black Sea. I did start to
write a short story – on my ipad – with the idea of submitting it
to them, but I didn’t finish it, and it got lost… But while
nothing concrete came from my
interest in Raygun Revival,
it planted the seed to write
an old fashioned space opera.
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| A cover prototype, never used. |
Of
course, I
must go
much further back in time
than Raygun Revival to find
the true origins
of my space opera. I wrote it
as a
homage to all
of
the space operas of
my youth, from E E Smith,
Andre Norton, Heinlein, A Bertram Chandler, and many others who told
stories centered around space ships. The space ship is, to me, the
defining feature of space operas – it carries you to adventure.
However,
the seeds of The Bright Black Sea were planted even earlier. I think
I can go all the way back to the
old Flash Gordon
serials that I watched on the small screen of a b&w TV in the
1950’s. And from that on to
the first SF books I read: the Tom Corbet, Space Cadet
series,
along with the Tom Swift Jr. books. My
decision to set my story based
on old fashioned rocket ships
was both a challenge to myself and a nod Flash
Gordon, Tom Corbet, Digg
Allen, as well as
Arthur C Clarke’s The Sands of Mars,
the first “adult” SF paperback I read. No
faster than light drive. No artificial gravity. It was “rockets
away, lad!” And
magnets in the soles of your shoes!
And
it was a challenge. Those
old rocket ship stories still had a
solar system to explore when
they were written, with the
steaming jungles of Venus, the ancient
ruins of Mars, the mines of
the asteroid belt, and all the rest. Setting a rocket ship story in
today’s
solar system, while certainly possible, did not interest me. I
wanted the romance
of the jungles of Venus and
the dead cities of Mars. So
I had to invent a place where I could invent anything I cared to,
without sacrificing the authenticity that using rocket ships brought
to the tale. I would, of course, have
to fudge science somewhat to
get everything working – everything from inventing materials that
would protect my spaceers from the
deadly radiation of
space, to making
plasma/fusion
propulsion easily do-able, to genetically
engineering humans to be able
to live in free fall, low gravity, or high gravity without health
issues. I also wanted a wide canvas to paint my stories against, and,
with travel between stars that
were light years apart
impossible with my rocket ships, I had
to invent a place were I could cram as
many planets and even stars
into a relatively small
space of space.
But
they couldn’t be too
close, either. If there is one thing that makes me close a book, it
is when
authors chose to set their stories in the “galaxy” and then make
every planets
a subway stop apart. The universe is really, really big. The galaxy
is really big. And yet I often come across stories where stars are
just several hours away from each other. And then, as often as not,
they’re one feature planets – a desert planet, an ocean planet, a
city planet…That being
the case, why not set the
story on a planet, or
even a continent, and have
cities or locales so that
the heroes can drive,
fly,
or even
take a train to? But
before this turns into
one of those observations directed at the clouds, I’ll just
conclude by saying that I wanted my locales
to be a realistic distance
away from each other, but close enough that I could write a variety
of stories about routine travel between them. So I gave each star a
whole host of habitable planets, and packed
the stars very, very close together by
making them the debris of a
failed supernova. In this
way, I made travel between planets a matter of days or weeks with
months between the solar
systems. I created the Nine Star Nebula.
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| The Lost Star in orbit. |
And
that brings me around to yet
another thread that
lead to The Bright Black Sea,
which is sea
stories. I can remember at
least looking at the Howard
Pease’s
“Tod Moran” series of juvenile
sea stories on the library
shelves while I
was selecting
Heinlein’s juvenile books.
I don’t think I actually checked
one
out back then,
though I did
pick a few up
when I came across them at
book sales later in my life.
Still, that seems to suggests
that I was interested in sea
stories from an early age as well. I certainly started reading them
in late teens and 20’s.
There were Basil
Lubbock’s books about the China clippers, W Clark Russel’s
Victorian era sea
stories, C. S Forester, and
later, Patrick O’Brian’s
(and many other’s) stories of the Napoleonic era.There was Erskine Childer's The Riddle of the Sands as well as the
tramp steamer stories of C J Cutcliffe Hyne, Guy Gilpatric, and
others. I was never brave
enough to go to sea myself, so
I went to sea from my armchair. So,
with my love of sea stories, I made my
rocket ships, ships with crews, not airplanes with a pilot and perhaps passengers, or
subway cars that whisk one from stop to stop.And I imagined that the distance
between planets was an ocean
to sail across in days
or
weeks, not something to fly over in a couple of a few hours.
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| The ancestor painting of the present cover |
But seeing that I've a lot more to talk about, I think I'll bring this post to a close. In the next installment in this series I will discuss the how The Bright Black Sea came to take its present shape, what my original plan for it was, and how and why I abandoned that plan.
Stay tuned.
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