Putting Backstory into your Book

I missed the last few challenges for the #storycraft chat but this one I just had to do. Since the chat was about backstory I thought I'd give a sort excerpt from my latest book Pale Fire.

An hour into the flight and working on my second scotch, I opened the folder. Cath could be considered a mild indiscretion, a flirtation with folly. No one in my world would blame me if I walked away. But we had a deeper connection and I couldn’t let it go. Not yet, maybe not ever.

I began to read. Several pages into the report I discovered I had been part of this twisted experimental genetics project since I was four. Four fricking years old. What the hell did they need to terrorize a baby for? It appeared that we had been chosen at a very young age. The Project had been operating since 1947. We were second-generation guinea pigs. How special.

I turned the page and stopped short. It was a picture of Cath as a child. Even though it was an old picture, I knew it was her—no one else I’d ever seen had hair the color of hers. I closed my eyes for a moment. I had been set up. Used, abused, and set up for this.

The file contained dates and detailed references to what procedures were done when we were taken. Each time they injected us with something, every sample they took, all the little surgeries that were done—everything was there up until I was twenty and Cath was fifteen.

The reports became vague and I could tell something odd had happened. While at first we had occasionally been abducted together, suddenly that became the only way we were taken. I shuddered. It read almost as if they were breeding us. I put the file down and waved at the flight attendant. I needed another drink.

She came back with my scotch and I thanked her. I didn’t want to go back to reading the file, but it was like a bad car wreck; I couldn’t help myself, I had to look. I opened the file again.

The #storycraft Flash Challenge

The challenge was 300 words from an inanimate object's point of view.




Garden

He sat as he had since the family brought him home, still, unmovable, a joy to look at in the carefully tended garden. The children loved him. They clambered over his surface, playing. He liked the children, enjoyed their laughter and the way they made him a centerpiece to their games for the short time they loved him.

Sometimes he wondered where he would go next as he listened to the world flow around him. The lives of others came and went, mere sparks flashing past in his long life.

He wasn't sure when he began to realize it was lonely. Maybe it was the day the children no longer came to play. Or, it could have been the night the mouse living under him picked up her babies and moved them, one by one. He didn't remember the last time he had been with others of its kind. That startled him. He had never forgotten anything before. With a soundless sigh he began to know longing.

The family left, another took their place, a young couple with no children to play on him. Bored, he went back to sleep.

A commotion in the front seeped into his awareness. He woke to find many people scurrying about in the garden. They pruned the trees and replaced the flowers. The chatter of the pansies annoyed him but at least their silliness was something new. He put up with it. Suddenly he saw her, riding toward him in her wheelbarrow chariot. Moss and bits of dirt clung to her like jewels. The workers placed her beside him.

"There, now this old rock doesn't look lonely anymore." The worker gave him a pat.

They nestled close together. "It's a nice garden," she said.

"Yes, it is." He wasn't lonely anymore.

Science Fiction - A Rant

I do some reviewing for Night Owl Reviews and I used to edit for several publishers. I've been a life-long science fiction and romance reader. And I'm seeing something that bugs the heck out of me. I'm seeing stories where the authors are combining science fiction and romance. That isn't what has been bugging me though, I love the combination, I even write it myself.

The thing that bugs me is the number of books I see billed as science fiction romance where the author has made the assumption that calling a car a transport or having a character zip around in a flitter and talk to an intelligent cat with six legs makes the story science fiction. Sorry but it doesn't. Neither does copying things like warp drive, light swords, pointed ears and strange colored skin. Or setting the story on a space station or a planet with five moons and a green sky. I've seen books by authors who use the terms planet, galaxy, and solar system interchangeably, not having a clue concerning the difference between these things. They plug in a few spacey sounding terms and make the hero blue skinned and telepathic and bingo, they think they have science fiction. Um...No.

I have a suggestion for all the authors who want to write science fiction because they've seen all the Star Wars movies and every episode of Star Trek ever made. Read some science fiction. Read Heinlein, Niven, Asimov, Herbert, Bova, and Blish. Also Cherryh, Lichtenberg, Duane, Bradley, Tiptree, and LeGuin. There are thousands of great books out there. Hundreds of great authors. Read and pay attention to the world building, the aliens they describe, the culture the humans live in. Don't just copy a few terms you liked from the Matrix movies and rewrite Biff falls in love with Muffy. (Mary Sue / Gary Stu is a whole other rant.)

You want to write about people on a world with a green sky? Fine, take a minute and find out what would make that sky green, and would the people be able to breathe it or would they have to wear some kind of environment suit? Would they need air locks on their homes? What other problems would they have? Carnivorous grass maybe, who knows, the possibilities are endless. Research it; your story will be better for it. With Google and the internet these days research doesn't take much time at all.

Alright, rant over. For now. So, just in case you're wondering what I've read myself and personally recommend here's a short list.

H Beam Piper – Little Fuzzy (available on Kindle for free.)

James H Schmitz – Agent of Vega, the Telzey and Trigger stories (available online from Baen Books.)

Jacqueline Lichtenberg – Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends, plus the Sime-Gen books.

Marion Zimmer Bradley – Colors of Space as well as the Darkover series.

Frank Herbert – the first four in the Dune series.

Robert Heinlein – All of them, particularly Red Planet and Orphans of the Sky.

C J Cherryh – the Chanur books, Cuckoo's Egg, Cyteen, the Foriegner series, and Wave Without a Shore if you can find it.

Alan Dean Foster - The Flinx and Pip series.

And there are dozens of others. Go on, be brave, extend your horizons. It doesn't hurt a bit.