MY TOP TEN OTHERWORLDLY SIGHTS RIGHT HERE ON EARTH

Write what you know, they tell us. But that’s a tall order for those of us who write science fiction romance. We might be pilots, scientists, military vets, cops or medical professionals on the job, but it’s for certain none of us have traveled in an interstellar spaceship or stood on the surface of another planet. And for many of us our day jobs are even more mundane; working the front desk at the Y was no help at all in writing my Interstellar Rescue series, I can tell you.

Thankfully, like any SFR writer, I have a big imagination and a voracious appetite for books of all kinds. I’ve also seen wonders on this Earth that no author could ever imagine. If you think about it, so have you.

Bison chill by the hot springs in Yellowstone

My husband and I just came back from a trip to the first U.S. national park, Yellowstone, with takes up parts of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. As every schoolchild knows, Yellowstone sits on a massive caldera, the magma climbing from deep in the earth to near the surface and heating ground water to form bubbling mud pools, hot springs, fumaroles and geysers. Chemicals in the water turn the springs and pools dramatic colors and, seen at a distance, the ground seems to smoke. Who could make this stuff up?

Yellowstone has been on my “bucket list” for years. But I’ve seen some spectacular things over the years, many of which I’ve used in some way in my writing:

2) Homestead Crater Dome in Utah—a hot spring inside a huge limestone dome. I went swimming in the warm water. Dark and a little creepy, but fun!

3) Mammoth Cave in Kentucky—the world’s longest known cave system. Stalactites and stalagmites, squeeze-through passages, an underground lake. Unforgettable!

4) A giant sequoia tree named General Sherman in California—the world’s largest tree (by volume) and its longest-living organism.

5) Stonehenge on the Salisbury plain, England—How? And why?

6) Aquamarine waters falling over a chalky white terrace in Pamukkale, Turkey—so bright it hurts your eyes and so delicate visitors must remove their shoes to step over the rock.

7) The Grand Canyon in Arizona—Phenomenal!

8) The ocean glowing with phosphorescence on a moonlit night in The Gambia, West Africa—Tiny diatoms in the water glowed in the dark.

9) An elephant—Think about it. No alien would ever look stranger or evoke such speculation that sentience lurked in a creature’s eyes.

10) An active volcano—Mine happened to be Kilauea in Hawaii. We stood on a cliffside of freshly-made black volcanic soil and watched lava flow out of the side of the mountain down to the sea, where it disappeared in a billow of steam. Primal!

I’ve been lucky enough to see these things in person. But long before I could travel, I had books, then television and movies, to take me there. I “know” a lot more than just what appears outside my window.

How about you? What spectacular sights have you seen here on Earth that inspire you to create new worlds in your fiction?

PING PONG

I enjoyed Pippa and Laurie’s vastly different takes on PASSENGERS this week. I particularly appreciated Laurie’s line-by-line take-down of the critics on this much-maligned movie. But then, you and I obviously agree on the salient points, Laurie! I’m glad you enjoyed the film despite its flaws, Pippa. At least you gave it a chance, which is more than I can say for many of the critics out there. Unfortunately, the state of criticism these days is such that professional film geeks tend to confuse “ponderous” with “deep” and “bleak” with “sophisticated.” Out-of-the-box thinking is not their forte, and this was an out-of-the-box film.

Cheers, Donna

THE NOT-SO-FAMILIAR WORLD OF UNCHAINED MEMORY

Are the Grays real? Survey says "yes!"

Between the pages of every book is an entire world created by its author.  Each world comes complete with a physical topography, a social and political landscape, a diverse population of characters (heroes, heroines, villains, supporting players, innocent bystanders), even, sometimes, a philosophical or emotional foundation.  Building this world and making it believable is one of the most important jobs the author has.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that the world of Unchained Memory, my science fiction suspense romance set to debut February 24, is the familiar one of Earth, here and now. As the novel opens, we are on the solid and well-trodden ground of rural Tennessee (and later, Nashville), a place as salt-of-the-Earth as you can get.  This is the heart of country music odes to hearth and home, a land of continuity and tradition, even in the midst of the huge growth of the last thirty years.

Other settings in the novel keep us tethered to that sense of place and connection: the mountains of West Virginia, the lakes of the Adirondacks.  A secure lifeline is necessary because what happens to our heroine shakes the foundation of everything she knows and changes the way she perceives her world.  That shift in perception alters what the hero sees, too, and, inevitably, what the reader sees.  All of a sudden, the world is not what it was.

Asia Burdette experiences a life-altering tragedy. In her quest to understand what has happened, she seeks the help of psychiatrist Ethan Roberts.  In their search for answers they draw back a curtain on a much-expanded, much darker vision of Earth and its place in the galaxy.  Not only are we not alone, but apparently we are the last ones to know it.

Earth is the clandestine battlefield in an ongoing struggle between an intergalactic slave-trading empire and the abolitionist crusaders that oppose it. The sexy/gutsy men and women of Rescue (the Interstellar Council for Abolition and Rescue), some of them human and some of them not, fight slavery in all the organized systems of the galaxy.  Earth, with its proximity to one of the major jump nodes (permanent wormholes) used for space travel, and ready supply of adaptable sentient beings, is a frequent target of the “Grays”

.

And here a note about interstellar slavery:  Imagine a galaxy in which technology is very much available and advanced, but is still expensive and prone to breakdown, especially on, say, mining or agricultural planets. Imagine, too, that space travel is easy and cheap, and labor is there for the taking. Add in a few details:  the Grays are puny little things, not very strong, and have a violent psychological reaction to certain vital mineral crystals being mined. Humans breathe roughly the same oxygen/nitrogen mix as the Grays, eat virtually anything and don’t react at all to those crystals. Finally, the Gray society itself is in conflict about the benefits and disadvantages of using slaves, but for now, they can, so they do. 

And before you say we’d know if aliens were taking us, well, some people say they are. Do you believe them?

A 2012 National Geographic poll cited by both ABC and Fox News showed that 36 percent of Americans believed UFOs were real.  Ten percent had seen one.  Seventy-nine percent believed the government was withholding evidence of aliens from the public.  And 55 percent believed there were black ops teams, similar to the Men in Black, whose job it was to track down people with knowledge of aliens and UFOs and “silence” them.

Hmm.  Sounds like the basis of a good story.  (As it happens, Asia and Ethan end up on the run from some of those very same “Men in Black”.)  It also sounds like we may already be living in the world I created for Unchained Memory.  If we just open our eyes.

DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!

Stay with us for all the excitement in the next few weeks as Sharon Lynn Fisher’s SFR novel Echo 8 debuts Monday, February 2; meet the heroes, heroines and villains of Unchained Memory and Laurie A. Green’s Inherit the Stars; and both books debut at the end of the month (Inherit the Stars February 22; Unchained Memory February 24).  It’s a Triple Launch Extravaganza all month on Spacefreighters!

THIRD ANNUAL SFR GALAXY AWARDS

It’s time to honor the best of science fiction romance in word and onscreen as the 2014 SFR Galaxy Awards are announced tomorrow.  Awards program organizer Heather Massey of The Galaxy Express SFR blog has corralled her judges and the selections are in!  The website opens for business at 9:00 a.m. EST Saturday, January 31,and the judges’ selections start rolling out at 10:00 a.m. EST.  Check in with us all day at the following links:

10 am Charlee Allden

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round-one.html

11 am Donna S. Frelick

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round-two.html

12 pm Laurie A. Green

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round.html

1 pm. Marlene Harris

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round-four.html

 

2 pm. Jo Jones

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round.html

3 pm. Heather Massey

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round-six.html

4 pm Anna McLain

http://sfrgalaxyawards.blogspot.com/2015/01/3rd-annual-sfr-galaxy-awards-round_28.html

Cheers, Donna

SFR Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop: Worldbuilding

"Setting" is vital to all fiction, but creating the world in which your characters interact is never more important than in science fiction and, by extension, science fiction romance, where that world must be made up out of the whole cloth of the writer's imagination.  After all, that world doesn't exist (yet, or at all, or hopefully ever) except in the author's mind, and it's up to her to make it real for the reader.

For this year's SFR Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop, two of Spacefreighters' regulars -- RITA-nominated author Sharon Lynn Fisher and Donna S. Frelick, 2012 Golden Heart Double Finalist,  consider "worldbuilding" in science fiction romance.

DONNA:  Well, you'd have to say the way we've done things so far in our novels couldn't be more different, huh, Sharon?  You have that beautifully evocative, eerily ALIVE Ghost Planet, and I have, well, Earth.  Mostly.  At least in my first novel, Unchained Memory, most of the action takes place here and now, with only a few scenes set off-planet to give readers a feel for the trauma my heroine has gone through at the hands of her alien abductors. I did have to invent a means of interstellar travel (through wormholes) and the whole galactic battle between slavers and their staunch (sexy) abolitionist opponents.

In my second novel, Trouble in Mind, more of the book takes place on distant planets in the series universe -- the aliens' home planet, particularly -- and on ships in space.  In order to write that one, I had to think through what kind of universe my Earth existed in -- not only one in which alien slavers took people from Earth regularly to use as they willed, and are opposed by our heroes, but also one in which there exists a colony of returned slaves (Terrene); several other alien races, with their own characteristics and home planets and languages (mostly curse words!); and a whole race of warlike telepathic aliens and their culture that is central to the plot.  Oh, and something about Navajo culture, too.

For the third book, Fools Rush In, I had to add more about ships and space travel, particularly traveling through jump nodes (wormholes) to various places.  That made my brain hurt.

Keeping all this straight is a challenge.  More than once I've though of actually writing a "Bible" for the Interstellar Rescue series universe.  Right now that exists in notes in my computer, on scraps of paper in my inbox and in random thoughts in my sieve of a brain.  Not so good!

SHARON: I think Unchained Memory's world was a great way to start your series, Donna. We've talked a lot on this blog and others about the level of acceptance for science fiction-y elements among the romance reading community. I think sometimes the perception is that our worlds will be too cold and uninviting, with too much tech talk. I think whether intentionally or not, you and I both kept our first-book worldbuilding pretty accessible. Though Ghost Planet is set off-world and has some seriously alien components, the world itself is earth-like and easy to visualize without requiring a ton of description (leaving plenty of room for developing the romance).

My second Tor book, The Ophelia Prophecy, has a near-future Earth setting. It's post-apocalyptic, which readers are familiar with thanks to the popularity of TV shows like The Walking Dead and the book and movie, The Hunger Games. Thanks to those previous works (and countless others) an author doesn’t have to really spend much time talking about what a post-apoc setting is like. Ophelia does have some fairly fantastical worldbuilding that is driven by science, but should feel familiar due to the fact it was inspired by artist Antonio Gaudi. 

I think it's a balancing act, though. Even if we choose to keep our worldbuilding accessible and force it to share the stage with character and relationship development, it's critical for it to feel rich and believable. 

Did you think at all about accessibility in writing your series, Donna? 

DONNA:  Ooh, Gaudi!  You mean the guy who designed the Barcelona cathedral, right?  That should be interesting!

Yes, I think about accessibility a lot, and if I happen to forget it for a moment, my critique partner, Linda, who is not an SF fan, reminds me pretty quickly!  The original idea of my series was to gradually lure readers new to SF further and further away from what was most familiar to them.  I felt if they liked the little bit of otherworldly stuff I gave them in Unchained Memory, they would be willing to accept the wilder stuff I gave them in Trouble in Mind.   By the time they picked up Fools Rush In, they would be willing to head out into space with me.  

This premise, though, is all founded on the solid foundation of my characters and their stories.  If my readers don't love them and want to follow them, I'm sunk!  All of my books are companion novels, with characters who show up in more than one book.  You can read them in any order, really, but if you like a secondary character in one book, chances are that character will get his or her own book some day.

I agree with you that the post-apocalyptic future is one many readers are familiar with.  Did you have trouble setting a romance in that kind of a bleak world?

SHARON: I think that's a great strategy. Once a reader connects with an author's voice, I think they are likely to follow them anywhere. Or at least that's what we hope! The Ophelia Prophecy also is heavier on the SF elements, with a slower-to-develop romance. But definitely has a big payoff at the end.

And yes, Gaudi is the Sagrada Familia guy. Which leads in nicely to answering your question: I managed the bleakness factor by setting the last two-thirds of the book in a world that is far from bleak. The genetically modified, conquering race has made Granada, Spain, (home of the Alhambra) their capital city. The ancient architecture itself is beautiful, but with the Gaudi-like embellishments the post-biowar city is transformed into something vibrant and whimsical.  

Okay, time for you guys to chime in!  Here are a couple of questions -- answer the one you like best.

• Favorite type of SFR setting?  (ship in space, distant planet, alternate universe, near-future/Earth, post-apocalyptic)  
• Favorite world? (SFR preferred, but SF works too!)

BLOG HOP PRIZES

Spacefreighters is giving away a copy of Ghost Planet to one commenter -- print, Kindle, or Nook. Folks in the US or Canada have the option of choosing a signed print copy. If you want to be excluded from the drawing for this, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Following are the main blog hop prizes:  

1st Prize 

• $150 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner's choice) 
• An ebook bundle -- Ghost in the Machine, Bayne, Recast Book 1:Wither, Recast Book 2:Clash, Alien Adoration, Switched, Reckless Rescue, Wreck of the Nebula Dream, Keir, Terms & Conditions Apply, The Key, The Plan, Starburst, Marya, The Iron Admiral, Sasha’s Calling, Trouble at the Hotel Baba Ghanoush, Winter in Paradise, Once Upon a Time in Space, the Telomere trilogy, Winter Fusion, Blue Nebula, Demential, Wytchfire, Maven, Fires of Justice, Interface, Girl Under Glass, Breakout
• Bonus books - Ghost Planet, The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy and Deception, Games of Command

2nd Prize

• $50 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner's choice)

3rd Prizes

• Four $25 Amazon or B&N gift cards (given to separate winners and their choice)

Don't forget, you must leave a comment with your email address AND sign into the Rafflecopter to win the prizes. And to increase your chances, hop along to the other blogs!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Building a Near Future World

The Outer Planets, my Near Future SFR, is in the final phases of trim down and tidy up. I’m really excited to see what kind of reception this one will get from publishers. It fills a niche that isn’t often seen in SFR—that of a future that’s within the lifetime of most readers.

Take a step into the year 2039—just 27 years from now.

And say “Happy Birthday” to my heroine. She was just born yesterday. Literally.

Creating a Near Future world presents some fun twists. When there’s a reference in the story to “His Majesty, the King of England,” I think most readers will know exactly who holds that title.

Writing Near Future is a lot like writing a Contemporary with cooler tech. The world and society isn’t that much different from what we know today, it’s just a bit older, wiser and more battle worn.

In the year 2039, the next couple of decade are past tense. The world is experiencing a new dawn, emerging from borderline dystopia, where a global economic collapse and continuing climate change resulted in a scramble to survive. In the previous two decades, the melting ice sheets decreased the salt content of the oceans and partially altered the currents of the Atlantic Conveyor, throwing weather patterns into chaos. While the oceans rose, drowning coastline cities worldwide, drought turned former breadbasket regions into dustbowls. The effects on society are dire.

Water riots were commonplace. Mobs formed to loot stores—not to steal electronics to resell on the street, but to take the food they need for their families and children to live. In rural areas, communities formed raid gangs that stripped crops clean and butchered livestock on neighboring farms. Moral principles took a back seat to survival. Outbreaks of anarchy prevailed. The United Nations disbanded as governments refocused on maintaining order inside their own borders and protecting their citizens. Police states and martial law became commonplace.

By 2032, the climate begins to stabilize, thanks to an enforced scale back in greenhouse gas emissions, and the world returns to more normal conditions, socially and economically, leaving mankind still shaking in its boots at what could have been.

And what might be again in the not too distant future.

The Nations is formed, a multi-national entity with a focus on expanding and diversifying mankind’s interests beyond the “all the eggs in one basket” scenario of having the fate of the species tied to one planet.

International resources are pooled to re-ignite a global space exploration program. ASP—Armstrong Space Port—with its orbiting shipyards begins construction in orbit in 2033 and is completed by the close of 2035. A year later it houses a population of over 15,500 military, corporate and support personnel.

With regular shuttle flights from ASP, temporary bases are constructed on the Moon and Mars as the first step in establishing permanent mining operations.

With the fire-up of ASP comes Project Destination. Spearheaded by The Nations, it’s an ambitious multi-national exploratory mission to the Outer Planets—Jupiter and Saturn—or more specifically the 120+ moons they share between them—to identify resources and future colony sites.

Construction of the Nations’ Star Ship—NSS Destination—is underway. And the debate about crew selection begins…

Your turn to envision the future. How do you see it? Do you think it might unfold much like the past described in The Outer Planets or do you think history will take a very different course?

Next Week: Building a Crew