MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH!

Some of you may remember that line from the ‘Sixties TV comedy series “Get Smart” starring Don Adams as the bumbling spy Maxwell Smart. (Maybe you caught the movie remake a few years ago, in which case, sorry.) Smart was always within a hair of catching the bad guy or recovering the stolen secrets, but due to an unfortunate tendency to blow things up or trip over his own feet he invariably “missed it by that much”, a quantity indicated by the space between his thumb and index finger.

That little space might as well be as much as a parsec when we’re talking about the difference between a good book and a great one. Laurie hinted at this problem in her post this week when she mentioned how much she’d been enjoying a recent read until she got to the end, where it seemed to run out of steam. What could have been a great book was instead just a good one. Missed it by that much.

I began to wonder about this after I encountered a spate of good-not-great books, all of them SFR and all of them from the same well-respected e-publisher (who will remain nameless). Some of them I found problems with from the beginning; at least one of them was terrific until the very end, when it let me down. But as I began to think about it, I realized there are any number of ways a good book can go wrong.

Plot holes you can drive a starship through. These can derive from a faulty premise (the worst kind) or simply from carelessness (that is, hoping no one will notice that you said the stardrive wouldn’t work in null space in Chapter Two and now you have your hero using it to rescue your heroine in null space in Chapter Ten—just an example, not something I came across.)

One of the books I did read—and I hope I don’t offend here—postulated a planet with a sun so hot it would almost literally fry the skin off you if you were out long enough. And yet before I knew it the hero and heroine were stripping down for a passionate encounter in the blazing sun! Ouch! Talk about a hot scene—and I don’t mean in a good way. That author needs an afternoon with my critique partner, who upon reading such a scene would have taken the author’s skin off with a single look, never mind the white-hot sun.

The outdoor scene wasn’t the most puzzling plot hole of this book, however. The real problem was the premise at the heart of the story, which I won’t describe for fear of giving away the book and its author. The point is no matter how great your characters are, no matter how beautiful your style is or intriguing your ideas, you cannot have a great book with a plot that doesn’t hold together from beginning to end.

Heroes or heroines made out of cardboard. This one is subtle. As a reader, you might not even notice it at first. You might be reading along, and just become aware of a feeling of vague dissatisfaction. Something is wrong; you’re bored with these people, or they don’t respond to the situation the way real people would. Eventually you want to shake them: Wake up! you want to scream. Do something! Smack him! Love her! Really? Is that all you have to say??

The problem is most noticeable with the H/H, but it can also apply to secondary characters. And it is worse with SFR because so many of its writers come out of the science fiction tradition of “ideas first”. Too many writers figure if you get the world-building right, you’re home free. Not so, especially if you hope to create a romance within the pages of your book. For that you need real people.

No villains or villains missing in action. Just because you are writing a science fiction romance does not mean all the conflict must be internal (between the H/H). Or just because you’re in space does not mean all the external conflict must be at a distance. Too many of the books I read either had no identifiable villains or had them “out there” in the enemy ship only. I never saw them, felt them, smelled them. They had no names, faces, thoughts.

Several of the books had a villain, but he didn’t make an appearance until halfway through the book—way too late to make a difference in building conflict. Some editors hate flashbacks, but if that’s what you have to do to introduce your villain early on, I say take the hit for the flashback rather than wait until Chapter Twenty to show your reader the villain's ugly mug. A flashback at least has the advantage of a scene playing in “real time”, rather than having a character “tell” us about what happened years ago to make him hate an invisible villain.

A great villain is indispensable to a great book. Don’t leave us hanging without one.

Where’s the romance? I don’t care what the heat level is, if you have set out to write a science fiction romance, you have to pay attention to the relationship between the hero and the heroine. That means the relationship is equal to the other parts of the story. Sexual tension between the characters builds in an arc the same way the story line builds in an arc, the same way change happens within the characters themselves. It leads to something in the end. If you don’t know what I mean by all that, you will frustrate and disappoint any readers (like me) who hope to see your hero and heroine find love with each other. You will make us wonder why there is a man and a woman in this story at all. Why not just a guy or just a woman? Or two buddies?

Is that all? The biggest disappointment of all my reads was one terrific story that had me tearing along at a great pace with fully developed characters, enough sexual tension between the H/H that I could overlook the fact that they were not going to actually consummate the relationship and even the hint of villainy, when skreeeeeee! the thing skidded to a halt in what seemed to be the middle of the story. I sat there with my e-reader in my lap going, “Huh?” I had to read back over the last few pages of the story to realize the author had wrapped up the “mystery” of the tale in the midst of a chaos of fighting.

Okay, so we could maybe have spent a little more time with that, ya think? The ending of a book is crucial—all the pieces must come together just so, like an elaborate dinner that has to hit the table hot and perfectly garnished all at the same time. It can’t look too easy—like in the book Laurie read—or we won’t believe it; it can’t leave things out or gloss them over, or we’ll miss them. The pacing has to make us want to stay up until all hours turning pages, but it can’t drop us in a pile heaving and sweating at the end. I think the word we want is denouement. Wrap up all the loose ends. Make sure we know where your H/H are going next. Make us want to read your next book.

Is that a lot to ask? Yeah. But the great books do all that and more. The ones that don’t miss it by that much. And that much is everything.

Donna’s Journal

Ping Pong

Congratulations, Laurie, on your contest success this season and particularly on snagging the interest of at least one publisher for your manuscript with the Gotcha! Contest. I share your frustration with the feeling of being “stuck” in second or third place, without a first-place win. My own Trouble in Mind seems to have the same problem. I wonder if it’s not simply our relatively unpopular SFR subgenre being forced to compete against the more “acceptable” vamps and werewolves, demons and angels. TIM is more clearly SFR from the get-go, where my first manuscript had a more romantic suspense feel to it and got a few first-place wins. Just a thought.

Cheers, Donna

Have We Found Another Earth?

Mission Success:
Laurie's Journal

Have we found another Earth?

Big news on the science front. It's called GJ 667 Cc, it's a newly discovered planet in the desirable Goldilocks zone of its red dwarf sun, and it may have water, compatible temperatures and other necessary elements to support life as we know it, and just possibly, someday, human life. It's refered to as a Super-Earth because it's approximate 4.5 times the size of our planet.

And it's close in astronomical terms...only 22 light years away. Right in the neighborhood. Close enough to send off a long range probe and expect some glossy close-ups in, say, a couple hundred years.

Read more: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/02/newsflash-habitable-zone-earth-like-planet-discovered-22-light-years-away.html

Exciting stuff, yes? Yes! But there's even more exciting news. To quote Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, "Statistics tell us we shouldn't have found something this quickly...This tells us there must be an awful lot of these planets out there. It was almost too easy to find, and it happened too quickly."

More Earth-like planets than we ever thought possible in our own Milky Way galaxy? Think of the possibilities!

Happenings

I'll be participating in the First Annual Love, Lasers and Light Swords Valentine Bash on the Backward Momentum blog. Be sure to stop in for a multi-author, fun-filled event with prizes...and surprises.

Come show your love for Science Fiction Romance!

From My Leaning Tower of TBR

Zoe Archer's COLLISION COURSE crackled with a 700 amp current of lust and passion when an unlikely partnership forms--or more accurately is heat-forged--between an elite 8th Wing Wraith pilot and a female scavenger. Loved the building tension, underlying conflicts and evolving mutual respect in this short, but very smart, SFR. The story features tight, fresh dialog and an authentic feel to the politics and military culture. (The title may sound familiar, because the cover was featured [as one I'd love to...uh, "borrow" for P2PC] in a previous post.)

My one regret was that although the ending was satisfying, it didn't have that take-me-beyond-the-event-horizon-and-pull-me-back-again bang-up finale I crave. Things went a little too easy for the pair, and the only thing that really held the lovers apart from a future together was a stubborn mindset.

Overall, this was still one of the very best SFRs I've read this year.

Where I'm At

A 2nd place in the Silicon Valley RWA's GOTCHA! contest (in a three-way tie!) netted my third novel a looksie by Ballantine/Bantam Dell editor, Sue Grimshaw. I'm very happy with the outcome and genuinely enthused about the revision, which added new layers of visceral reaction and emotional depth, thanks to a wonderful workshop by Margie Lawson last fall. Inspiration is a wonderful thing.

Novel #3 has been doing very well in the finals department, but so far it's holding a full house of 2nds and 3rds. Sure would like to see that first win come in. Something to work for. :)

Welcome, Pard!

Raising a toast and shouting out a great big welcome to Pippa Jay who's the newest addition to the Spacefreighters Lounge crew.  So glad you're here, Pippa, and very excited about your upcoming SFR release, KEIR. Hip, hip, hurray!

A Gift For You

As a thank you for visiting Spacefreighters Lounge, I'll gift a copy of Barbara Elsborg's CHOSEN (Kindle e-book) to the first ten who comment below and say they'd like a copy--while the .99 sale lasts. Yes, co-bloggers, that includes you! CHOSEN is not a SFR, but a masterpiece of dark, diabolical Romantic Suspense that's being offered at a special price for a very limited time. (You must be at least 18 years old to quality and state this in your comment.) Warning: This novel is gritty and at times disturbing, and not for the faint of heart! Follow the link to read the blurb and see the reviews. All I ask is that if you love the story as much as I did, that you write a review on Google, Goodreads or post it on your site.  Be sure to leave an email address I can send your copy to.

SOYLENT GREEN: IT'S MORE THAN "PEOPLE"

As science fiction writers we are called upon to predict the future in any number of ways, to stare into our creative crystal balls and look upon a hopeful universe of space travel and plentiful resources or a bleak dystopia of devastation and despair. As readers we have the luxury of sitting in our comfy armchairs and smiling indulgently at what past writers have envisioned, or perhaps shivering in recognition at their prescience.

After all, George Orwell might have had the date wrong, but was he too far off in predicting the political and commercial doublespeak of our own era? Will it even be necessary for a repressive government to call out Vonnegut’s firemen when our seductive wall screens (and hand screens) already capture our attention so thoroughly?

I came across an old movie on my own equivalent of the wall screen the other night and was horrified to discover just how close we are to the vision of the future the film represented. Based on a novel by Harry Harrison, SOYLENT GREEN is a classic of science fiction so well-known that most people are more familiar with the final moments of the film than they are with any of its plot or characters. If you don’t know the line “Soylent Green is people! It’s people!!” you’re either below the age of twelve or you’ve been living under a rock somewhere. In a way that’s a shame, because the essential mystery of the film has been destroyed long before we’ve had a chance to learn what it has to teach us.

Okay, I know what you’re going to say. Charleton Heston, really? And those awful ‘70’s styles that just seem to permeate everything like a stain, as if we’d cling to our bell bottoms and bad hair, our polyester and rotary phones no matter what else had changed by the year 2022. Heston, who plays a police detective in the film, even pulls out a revolver and has to reload on the fly, ejecting the shells and pushing in the cartridges laboriously one-by-one as the bad guy chases him down an alley. Surely they had semi-automatics and magazines even in 1973?

But let’s ignore all that for a moment and take a look at the world Heston’s Detective Thorn inhabits. It’s hot, overcrowded, polluted. The rich have gotten richer, the poor much poorer. The economy is barely limping along—at one point, Thorn comments that there are thousands of unemployed just waiting to take his job. Agriculture has collapsed, along with any semblance of a working ecology. New York City’s “tree preserve” consists of about three living specimens in a dome.

Real food—the kind you and I eat—is priced out of reach of all but the very rich. Everyone else subsists on rations of the vegetable protein bars called Soylent, the most recently introduced variety being Soylent Green, made from plankton. Even this foodstuff is limited, however, and there are regular food riots, which are violently put down by the police.

Is any of this sounding familiar? No? Global warming, economic disruption, deforestation, drought, bread riots in Egypt and Russia, perhaps? But wait, there’s more.

Thorn goes to a church, looking for clues to the murder he’s been assigned to solve. He finds it full to the rafters with homeless people. The priest is too exhausted and shell-shocked to help him. (The church is the setting of the film’s final scene, as well.)

Thorn’s old partner, Sol (Edward G. Robinson in his final role), manages to get his hands on some real food. They share a “feast” of a lettuce leaf, a spoonful of beans, an apple each, while Sol reminisces about the world as it used to be.

Later, Sol is the first to discover the truth about Soylent Green, and his response is to “go home” to one of the city’s planned-euthanasia centers. He chooses his “ceremony”—the colors, the music—in a place of space, peace and cool beauty. While he is enjoying his guaranteed 20 minutes of serenity watching large-screen scenes of Earth as it used to be, Thorn arrives to try and stop him. But Sol convinces him he is at peace with a simple line: “See? I told you. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Even Charlton Heston can’t kill the emotional impact of Thorn’s reaction when he sees what Sol has been talking about all these years. There really was a world of beauty and life once upon a time on an Earth now irretrievably dead.

We felt that loss watching Thorn’s face in the theaters in 1973. The real outrage expressed in that film was enough to fuel the environmental movement and lead to legislation to clean up the air and the water, to protect endangered species and to support efforts to slow population growth around the globe.

And yet here we are. The planet is warming, with consequences no one could have predicted in 1973. The human population continues to expand. Non-human species continue to disappear at an accelerating rate. The oceans are at risk and with them the global ecology. Climate change may cause not only food shortages, but more critical water shortages, and sooner, rather than later.

Watching SOYLENT GREEN used to be almost laughable, an experience worthy of the boys from Mystery Science Theater 3000. These days I don’t feel much like laughing. If it weren’t for all that polyester, I could be watching CNN.

Welcome Aboard, Pippa!

So happy to welcome our newest blog partner, Pippa Jay, who has already stepped up with her inaugural post. Glad to have you with us, Pippa!

Cheers, Donna

Pippa's Journal - Inaugural Post

Hello! *waves* As the new girl onboard I thought I'd better introduce myself before progressing to more insane ramblings. So hi, my name is Pippa Jay - author, blogger and self-proclaimed goddess of angst. I'm extremely honoured to be joining the Spacefreighters Lounge.

What else can I tell you? I'm a UK author with a US publisher, which makes life a little interesting. I fell into writing sfr by mistake - I'd always thought of myself as a straight scifi author but my characters decided otherwise and now I don't seem able to write anything in speculative fiction without a dash of romance. I can't say I'm sorry about that in the least. For twelve years I worked as an Analytical Chemist in the Metals and Minerals industry, but I've been a stay-at-home mum for the last decade. I started writing Keir in 2009 as a way to save my sanity, although my husband views my literary endeavours as proof that I completely lost it, lol!

Action!

So, in July 2011 I signed a contract with Lyrical Press Inc for my sfr novel Keir, which now has a release date of 7th May--less than 100 days from now! To say I'm excited is an understatement of epic proportions. :) I've already got dates and places lined up for the virtual book tour which will run from the 1st May (Beltane) until the 14th, and you can find the itinerary on my blog here. There's also several guest posts scheduled by visiting authors, and a couple of blog hops including a day of sfr related posts and events over at Backward Momentum for the 14th February which will be well-worth a visit! 

In the meantime, I'm trying to get a scifi short finished and self-published on Amazon, have a scifi novella and an sfr short story out on submission, and I'm trying to hammer out the flaws in my sequel to Keir ready for submission. However, an sfr novella that grabbed my muse over Christmas - Tethered - is proving a constant distraction, especially after the blurb for it won the SFR Brigade Pitch contest last month. :) I also have a free scifi short - The Bones of the Sea - up on Smashwords.com. It was an experiment, both in terms of writing a short story, something I've had difficulty confining myself to, and as a self-publishing project. At the time I'd yet to know my first contract would be coming my way.

Bookshelf

I've just finished reading the third book that I set as part of my SFR Reading Challenge 2012 but have yet to review it. I've been posting the reviews here as I go. So far I'd heartily recommend Nebula's Music by Aubrie Dionne (a fellow Lyrical author) which is scifi with romantic elements. Also a stunning sfr read is Ambasadora by Heidi Ruby Miller. Heidi has a second book set in the same universe coming out later this month, so I'll be adding that one to my TBR pile. :)

Ping Pong

At Laurie on subject of prophecy. Considering the number of Armageddon predictions that seem to have cropped up over the last few years, I worry that at some stage mankind might seek to make them self-fulfilling. I don't believe in the ability to predict the future completely, because surely the knowledge would alter the certainty. However I do believe in the ability to foresee a vague shape of the future, whether by individuals or as a global consciousness. I believe in premonitions because I've had them myself. 'Interesting' is a word I find myself using a lot, and I agree times are interesting. A disturbing thought since "May you live in interesting times" is apparently a Chinese curse!