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Planet Surface (Detail)
Nurse G
Rai
Priya
Pseudo-crustacean
Pseudo-shrubs (detail)
Book Cover for 'A Children's Crusade'
The Dome (detail)
Jorja
Book Cover for 'The Leftover Girl'
Han
Alphane life (detail) , dome in distance
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Senhora Daguia
Marta
Su Ying

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Month: September 2016

Blog entry fourteen: Significant others

Blog entry fourteen: Significant others

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This blog entry should be read in conjunction with chapter fourteen. Significant others is somewhat episodic and something of a mixed bag. It’s function is essentially to advance various plot elements, and so lacks the strong narrative of the chapters it sits between.
This is all well and good; a novel that consisted solely of action sequences would probably make no sense, and would also lack depth and effective characterisation.
We open with Marta Fernandes viewing an Earthside packet sent by Miss da Guia; two things have become clear: Miss da Guia’s career plans have gained traction, and Marta Fernandes is starting to develop a greater awareness of the role the media plays on the home planet.
She understands that the Children on Alpha 5 are now ‘famous’, but hasn’t begun to comprehend what this means!
For the moment events on Earth are only really a mildly diverting sideshow as she’s much more more exercised by things happening closer to home. Her anxiety over whether the twins will bond with her, and regard her as their real mother. Her battle of wills with Rai and Jorja over the naming of the infants. Her fear that she will be permanently sidelined scientifically by the Mission authorities, combined with her struggle with Nurse Gee over how to progress her work with ‘Oswald’, her pseudo-crustacean research subject…
She also learns something really important about the crusties, from Han of all people, although she has to dig the information out of him.
Marta wins some of the battles, but loses others and these outcomes will be pivotal in how things develop from here on in…
For now, the chapter finishes on a more hopeful note as our little community comes together to welcome its two youngest members…

Blog entry supplemental two: The Sick Rose and other references

Blog entry supplemental two: The Sick Rose and other references

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As I’ve probably already said, I understood from the start that I would write only one extended work of science fiction. A prequel (or should that be sequel) to Lights in the sky is underway, but although the Alpha Mission looms large in the background, the new novel is already taking a somewhat magic realist turn! So far I’ve only got provisional titles (it was going to be the The World we left behind, but now the ‘left-behind’ or possibly ‘the left-over World’ are under consideration). One decision I have made is that I will write it under my mainstream nom de plume, Stephen Clare…
I think it’s important to try and articulate why I’ve written the trilogy and where the inspiration came from. The original inspiration is actually a nonfiction work, Brian Aldiss’ history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree (later published in a revised and expanded edition as Trillion Year Spree co-authored with David Wingrove), which I essentially used as the syllabus, if you like, of my own self-guided study of SF and related literature. Of course, like all generalisations this is an oversimplification! I started reading SF and other forms of imaginative literature well before I came across a dog-eared copy of Aldiss’ SF history in an East London second hand bookshop; but if you go through the book, all the fictional inspirations for LITS are there. So, Mr Aldiss, I am forever in your debt!
I’ve getting ahead of myself recently; the reason being that as I prepare more chapters of A Children’s Crusade (a Kurt Vonnegut reference!) for publication on this website, the inspiration for specific passages and episodes within the novel become apparent!
For example, I specifically reference William Blake in a future chapter by the simple expedient of having the protagonist, Marta Fernandes, study the great London mystic as part of her continuing education. Like the rest of the Children, Marta starts by resenting having to study such an apparently irrelevant subject as English Literature, but unlike the rest she ends up drawing parallels between her rather strange existence and subject matter of one of the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Sick Rose.
Later references include Lewis Carroll (from Alice’s Adventures underground), and in the same chapter, the rather obvious debt I owe to the writings of Philip K Dick…
Both, of course, feature in Billion Year Spree…