Alpha Mission – Page 3 – Lights In The Sky

Blog entry sixteen: Around my heart in eighty hours

By C Stevens | 25th October 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

As before, please access this blog after you have read Chapter 16, for which it serves as a commentary…
Around my heart in eighty hours begins a period of narrative experimentation in the novel, and the next three chapters are linked both thematically and stylistically.
In this chapter we are now seeing things wholly from Marta’s POV. The narration switches to a first person stream of consciousness; not original I know, but it indicates that her alienation from the Mission, her lover, and her friends is now almost complete, and I felt that this could not be adequately expressed via my usual use of the privileged third person…
It’s important to bear in mind that Miss Fernandes is extremely self-centred and rather spoiled (as are all of the Children), and cannot be regarded as a wholly reliable narrator; something her closest friends try to gently point out to her.
The use of the poetry of William Blake is happenstance; nearly three years on from writing A Children’s Crusade, I cannot recall the precise circumstances, or the train of thought that led me to reference the Sick Rose, but I have a copy of Songs of Innocence and Experience, and this poem obviously made a profound impression on me. Initially, I couldn’t remember which of the Songs I was recalling, but when I turned to the text I realised which one it was, and how well it reflected Marta’s mood and circumstances!
It wasn’t a big stretch to imagine that the Children’s general education would include English Literature, and that they would study Blake as part of this. This could be termed ethnocentric, but I have already explained why the Mission education programmes manifest an Anglo-Saxon bias [1].
Anyway you have to go with what you know!
The lines that affect Marta the most (and which she references in her narration) are from The Clod and the Pebble, but she is defined by The Sick Rose. although, of course, she doesn’t know it!
We are introduced to another new nursemaid early in this chapter (although her character is not developed), and we also have another oblique reference to the true nature of the Nurses. The original plan had been to withhold this information for the whole of book one, but I think it’s safe to say that the cats out of the bag by this stage!
The source of Marta’s alienation is that she has made a great discovery, but is not believed. Partly this is because she was unable to record her observations and cannot provide objective proof; but her incipient paranoia leads her to believe that there is a conspiracy (orchestrated by Mission Artificial Intelligence), to exclude and marginalise her!
Spoiler alert! There is a conspiracy, but not the one she imagines!
The root cause of her paranoia lies with her profound insecurity; remember that it’s not long since she was being shunned by the other children, and her apparent self-confidence is paper thin!
Marta’s dissatisfaction is not confined to frustrations about her research work being blocked by the machinations of Nurse Gee; she is also unhappy with Jorge and his reluctance (or inability!) to progress their relationship… However, when this is suddenly (and unexpectedly) resolved, she finds it doesn’t really help, because all the other issues are still eating at her!
What infuriates our heroine most of all is the implication that she may be jumping to conclusions and reading far too much into her data, or (even worse) lying, by falsifying her results, in order to gain attention! In short, her objectivity and competence as a scientist is being called into question…
Meanwhile, she must put up with the triumphalism of the favoured children (Rai, Jorja and Han), who have made another important step forward in understanding the Alphanians, by divining how they communicate…
My revival of ‘steam radio’ as the Alphane medium of communication may have been an (unconscious) nod to the ‘steampunk’ genre!
Marta’s paranoia is not wholly irrational, because they are watching and listening; the Mission monitors the Children twenty seven hours a day, and has done for their whole lives! However our heroine (who is a smart cookie!), has started to develop a strategy to circumvent this!
Marta is still a scientist, and continues with her research work throughout all this; but she has started to believe that nobody cares whether she discovers anything or not!
Her ‘achievement’ in being the first (along with Jorge) of them to lose her virginity quickly palls; spoiled by by her realization that even her most private moments are being watched by the Mission, and that it is impossible to escape this surveillance…
This is what finally persuades her that she has to escape, and go off the grid…
I wanted a pop culture reference to go with all the heavy literature, and I thought that one of Jennifer Aniston’s films would fit the bill, having the same resonance for Marta as the romances and screwball comedies of the thirties and forties (i.e. Hollywood’s Golden Age) have for us…
The timescale imposed on the action is deliberate; I wanted the sense of the clock ticking down before Marta takes what she believes is an irrevocable action, and it also sets up the Jules Verne reference in the title nicely.
I could easily have called this chapter The Sick Rose, but that would have been too obvious, although I rather undercut this by quoting Blake’s poem in full…
The Sick Rose is, of course, a conceit that addresses the notion of tainted love, full of obvious and less obvious sexual metaphors. Marta’s love for Jorge is tainted by the knowledge that their moments of love and sexual joy can never truly be their own, not in the world of the Alpha Mission; but it goes further than this as she finds she has now fallen out of love with the very purpose that gives her life meaning, and even (in her lowest moments, with Science itself!
In these circumstances, it’s not too difficult to guess the identity of ‘the worm’ in this tale…
Note
[1] see Chapter 12, specifically the observations of Mr Bhatt

Blog entry fifteen: On the ice

By C Stevens | 4th October 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

This blog entry should be read in conjunction with chapter fifteen. On the ice is almost self-consciously visual and descriptive, as if to make up for terseness of previous chapters, with their emphasis on dialogue and characterization!
I owe an obvious debt here to James Blish’s wonderful novel of polar exploration, The Frozen Year, published to coincide with International Geophysical Year in 1957 (coincidentally the year of my birth, so I span the Space Age, but that’s another story!). The embryonic and aforementioned Age makes an appearance at the end of this novel with the announcement that the Americans have launched the first artificial satellite! Clearly, in 1956 nobody in the USA would have believed that it would be the Soviet Union that launched the first successful space probe!
None of this detracts from the grandeur of Blish’s epic…
Sal’s optical phenomenon described in On the ice is also a direct lift from Blish’s novel where it’s given the name ‘copper dawn’! I have no idea if it has a real name, but I assume its a real phenomenon… Writing this blog now, it occurs to me that Marta also shares the fate of the discredited astronomer in The Frozen Year, in that she makes an amazing discovery but is unable to furnish the necessary scientific proof…
In narrative terms, On the ice continues the process whereby the Children explore their world. As the Equatorial regions are now considered too dangerous, they venture north to explore one of the planet’s two vast polar ice caps.
At this stage in Alpha five’s history both ice caps are immense, and lock up most of the world’s water between them; but they are also now in retreat, an indication that A5’s climate is now changing, and things are moving in favour of its indigenous inhabitants…
The interplay of climate and biosphere is to become a major theme of the series, and thus a driver of the action…
This process starts with the second of Marta’s two discoveries (the one she can’t prove!).
In this chapter we are presented with the gadfly activity of the Children, whose ephemeral lives buzz around (and are contrasted with), the implacability of the landscape, and the monolith that is geological time…
Marta and Priya confront this disjuncture when they discover the ‘ice crusty’ sealed in its blue prison…
We also observe the Children engaged in routine research (the nuts and bolts of their respective disciplines), and are reminded that they are members of a scientific expedition. Later, circumstance conspires to leave Marta and Sal alone together, an unfamiliar combination, which is prolonged by the arrival of the storm…
Finally, in the interplay between Marta and Priya, we see again that the younger girl is wise beyond her years, and is the grown-up in the relationship…

Blog entry fourteen: Significant others

By C Stevens | 19th September 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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

By C Stevens | 1st September 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

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…

Blog entry thirteen: Another Girl, Another Planet

By C Stevens | 29th August 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

As before this blog is designed to be read in conjunction with the accompanying chapter, now published on the site. To access the chapter, click on the dropdown menu Read Book One, and scroll down…
The title of chapter thirteen is yet another of my pop culture references, and the chapter itself is broken into three parts, each one a two-hander… The first of these features Marta and Priya, out on Mission together, and focusses on their developing friendship (with its ups and downs), a crucial driver of the action later on…
The second half of the chapter has two shorter scenes; the one between Marta and Jorge, that follows her return, comments on what has taken place earlier and develops into a philosophical debate on the true nature of Alpha 5. The coda takes the form of a short exchange between Marta and Rai which drives the plot forward…
The chapter closes with the enormity of what they are doing finally dawning on our heroine, who grows up a little more as a consequence…
During Another Girl, Another Planet, the girls make an incidental discovery about the crusties (they venerate their dead), but their main investigation yields nothing as the pseudo-crustacean ‘Harvey’, the main subject of their experiment steadfastly refuses to engage with the machine they send to interact with it, as Marta had predicted… The girls have also come to understand that the main thrust of Mission exobiological enquiry has shifted, to the pods and their theorised collective intelligence, and their work has been sidelined as a result…
Ever the arch-rationalist, Marta is sceptical about the notion of ‘pod’ intelligence, partly because she is miffed that her insights are being ignored, but mainly because she is instinctively suspicious of anything that smacks of spirituality…
There’s some action in this chapter (it’s still an adventure story, after all!); Marta nearly dies (again), but this time as the result ‘of a stupid accident!’ Priya saves her (as she saved Sal), which strengthens the bond between them; a bond that cannot be threatened by the scientific spat that follows. Although this disagreement will prove to be the harbinger of things to come…
Prior to the accident, Priya had been urging her friend to talk to Han who has data that would support her theories about ‘crusty’ development. Marta is reluctant, and is forced to confess to her rather hamfisted and utterly futile attempt to get the boy to take an interest in her when they were out on Mission in Carl Sagan minor, the year before…

Blog entry twelve: The Truman Show

By C Stevens | 19th August 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

Blog entry twelve: The Truman Show
In chapter twelve of A Children’s Crusade, entitled the Truman Show, we’re back on Earth; specifically the Earth of 2106!
The Earth we’re presented with is in stark contrast to the claustrophobic world of the Alpha Mission, with its nine human crew members; rather its a world of countless billions, each individual scrabbling for their place in the sun…
We get our first inkling as to the status back home of the Mission and the Children, with Marta da Guia’s rather jaundiced description of Marta Fernandes as a ‘…[Brazilian] national hero…’
There are other references later in the chapter (to the craze for all things crusty, and the cult of the Star Children), which confirm this first impression.
We are also told (indirectly) that the relationship between Marta on Alpha and her ‘Earthsister’ might be something more than interstellar pen pals, but the precise nature of the relationship eludes us. Eludes us, that is, until the crucial moment when Marta da Guia, fleeing civil disorder (and the implied threat to her privileged existence), says a prayer for her sister at the roadside shrine…
But how can this be?
Elsewhere in the chapter more detail is sketched in, of a world previously only dimly glimpsed. We begin to appreciate the hold the Networks have over the Mission, and we learn how this came about. And crucially, how the lives of the expedition crew members have been repackaged as cheap entertainment for a mass television and online audience…
We learn more about interface technology and the advantages it gives to the elite who use it; also learning about the downside…
And finally, we are vouchsafed a glimpse of a society in crisis…of a world descending into chaos…
On that cheery note…

Blog entry nine: If six were nine

By C Stevens | 14th June 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

This post accompanies chapter nine of A Children’s Crusade and should be read in conjunction with it. The title is a fairly obvious musical reference, although I changed the grammar to fit the context; the fact that it’s the ninth chapter was just coincidence, but the action does represent a series of plot reversals (from six to nine is not just an expansion, but also an inversion), although not all of these are immediately obvious. What is obvious is that Marta’s role as Mission rebel has been decisively usurped by her arch enemies, Rai and Jorja, who go much further than she would have ever dared at this stage in her personal journey!
The focus of the story shifts; we are not seeing entirely from our heroine’s POV, and this is reflected by a change in the narrative style. In previous chapters my normal practice has been to use a privileged third person, telling the story as if we’re looking over the protagonist Marta Fernandes’ shoulder. We shift briefly to Jorge’s POV in Fear of flying, but in If six were nine, longer passages are seen from Jorja’s perspective, and the use of italics delineates this…
This can be regarded as foreshadowing, letting us know that Marta Fernandes is no longer going to be the centre of everything; and from a psychological point of view this represents a development in her thinking, the point in a child’s life when she realizes that the world doesn’t entirely revolve around her!
We learn more about the topography of Alpha 5; we now know it has an active volcano, and vast plains beyond the Barrier range which even have lakes. We also get a glimpse of the Polar Barrier where the northern ice sheets begin. The children begin to take possession of their world by naming bits of it!
We learn that Jorja’s loathing of Marta is profound and this is one of the reasons she agrees to Rai’s plan; and the social politics of the expanded group come into sharper focus!
We also learn a lot more about Alphane ecology and its implications for life on the planet. Marta gets to show her leadership qualities once more, but another potential rival emerges in Sal…!
But above all else this is a great adventure! The crew are pioneers, but pioneers who are still children, with all that entails. So on one level it’s a SF Swallows and Amazons at this point in the chronology, but children grow up…
Re-reading the chapter while preparing this post, I realised how much changes in this episode of the story, and how pivotal it actually is. So in a sense the world is turned upside down as six becomes nine…

The Others

By C Stevens | 16th April 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

As the title suggests, the Others adds new characters to the story, and follows up on the revelations contained in the second chapter, revealing more hidden aspects of the Mission and our little settlement.
I think I decided fairly early on that six characters would not be enough to carry the story, and since Marta and Han were clearly not compatible, more potential mates were needed, especially if the Mission was to succeed in the secondary aim of founding a colony.
There was a long hiatus between the writing of the first chapter (originally conceived as as a stand-alone short story, entitled Light-out, and submitted to Analog Science Fiction & Fact in the autumn of 2013), and the decision to make it the basis of a novel. Needless to say the short story was rejected, and a cursory reading of the content of the magazine would probably have dissuaded me from submitting it in the first place. However, the feedback I received, although contained in a standard rejection letter, made a number of useful suggestions, including ensuring that the science used in the story was both plausible and accurate.
By the time I received the letter, I’d given up on the idea of a sequel to my first novel, a mainstream effort written under a different pen name, and decided that my next book would be a science fiction novel based on the characters, the scenario, and the concepts outlined in Light-out…
I wish I could say that I conceived the idea of a trilogy at this point, but the truth is I don’t remember. But when I revisited the short story and revised it to make more credible scientifically, I became increasingly convinced that I had something! Convinced, in fact, that I had created a world and characters with mileage in them, that I wanted to find out more about, and hopefully one that others would too…!
It may occur to you that, in certain aspects, a Children’s Crusade reads like a detective story, and this is very much how I view it! Alpha 5 is the problem, the mystery that needs to be solved, and I’m the detective; and the answers we discover along the way are the discoveries that I’ve made in the process of writing the series…
For fiction to work, it has to have a life of its own, dictated by the characters and the scenario. From dialogue comes character, and from character flow plot and action…
So in a sense the series writes itself, and in accepting that to be true, I’m consider myself privileged that this particular story has chosen me to be its medium…

We live in different times

By C Stevens | 31st March 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

We live in different times…

Hi, this entry is designed to accompany and act as an introduction to Earthsister, chapter five of my saga. So, if you’re just joining me, please read chapters one to four, to avoid confusion…

In this chapter I wanted to confront two issues:

The impact of relativity on an undertaking like the Mission. Alpha 5 is 4.37 light years from home, and given that (in my Universe, at least), there is no possibility of faster than light travel, the colonists and home are effectively in two different time frames, separated by those 4.37 years!

Secondly, I wanted to dramatise how someone in the unique position of Marta would be socialized, and find out about where she came from… It’s also a good way to sneak a peek at how things are on Earth, needless to say!

The interstellar pen pal arrangement Marta has with her ‘Earthsister’, Miss da Guia, is also more than just a convenient dramatic device, as you’ll find out if you stick with the story.

The relationship here is very much ingenue and worldly wise older woman, inevitably considering the circumstances of Marta’s conception and upbringing; but the Mission Planners clearly know this and have built it into Marta’s education, as they don’t just want a competent scientist and explorer, they want a fully-rounded human being.

Hence our heroine has to learn ‘girl stuff’ as well as science…

If this all sounds a bit Space Family Robinson at the moment, don’t despair! Other darker themes will emerge in due course…

The above is not all this chapter is about, naturally… Our heroine gets into more scrapes and learns some more life lessons, and we learn a bit more about the planet and its inhabitants…

‘Til next time…

the story so far…

By C Stevens | 17th February 2016 | Comments 0 Comment

The story so far

I’ve just posted posted Out, the next chapter in book one of the Lights in the sky series. Chapter one, the Light, introduced the six children and their mentor, Nurse Gee, parachuting us into the action at a critical moment. The crisis brought about by the astronomical and climatic phenomenon, the children call ‘Light-out’, forces Marta to grow up and take adult responsibility for the first time, while laying bare some of the tensions that lie beneath the surface of her little community.

In Behind the door, we found out more about the hidden agendas that lie beneath the facade of the Alpha Mission. Marta pokes her nose in where she really shouldn’t (as ever), and in consequence achieves a conceptual breakthrough that changes the lives of all of them.

Whereas chapter two explored the inner workings of the place where the children live, Out, as the name indicates, explores the alien world that lies beyond the Dome, and we begin to discover something about the indigenous lifeforms of Alpha 5.

We’ll learn much more about them in later chapters…

Ta ta for now…

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