The series is now complete; I put the finishing touches to The Lost Colony (the final book in the trilogy) just over a week ago, bringing a three year plus writing project to an end.
I’m not sure how I feel…!
Clearly, I’m satisfied that I’ve done it, that I’ve completed a coherent piece of writing, more than one thousand pages (and nearly 300,000 words) long, but feeling slightly bereft that my story is now complete. Of course, I can re-visit the world I’ve created any time I want, but never again will I go there not knowing how it all ends, with the delicious thrill you get from the realisation that you’re still writing the story (or possibly the story is writing itself, using you as the medium?), that your fictional world is still evolving, and everything is still up for grabs! I have viewed the series as a detective story, with me in the role of detective…but now the case is closed…
My intention when I embarked on Lights in the Sky more than three years ago, was to write a post-modernist SF series, and I feel I have largely succeeded…
But how is it postmodernist?
Well, it incorporates a number of the features which have characterised postmodernist literature. Specifically, pastiche and a rather wholesale mixing of genres: including detective fiction, YA, fairy tales, the adventure story, SF (obviously), future history, coming of age, family saga etc…
Thinking I’d only ever write one science fiction work, I decided to chuck everything in! But, as often happens, the process of writing changes your intentions along the way, so there will be a fourth book, a companion volume, set on Earth, and (depending on your relativistic standpoint), either a prequel or a sequel to the Alpha 5 narrative…
Magic realism is also present, through the use of fairy tales and dream sequences; also fabulation, through the incorporation of fantastic elements; temporal distortions, and altered states that turn out to have objective reality, although this cannot be because it would violate relativity! My text also incorporates characters with similar names who are in fact doppelgangers! (there are three in the text!) A scientific explanation is advanced for both of the above (in the case of the relativistic paradoxes, this is based on my rather imperfect knowledge of the phenomenon of quantum tunneling!). This one of the advantage of SF as a form, one can always reach for science (real or imaginary) to provide explanations!
As SF, the text features technology heavily, but also hyperreality; specifically through the game show that features the Children as unwilling actors in a scripted narrative, produced and stage-managed by the robots, acting as agents for the shadowy Mission…
In addition we have paranoia; ‘…the belief in an ordering system behind the chaos of the world’. In Lights in the sky, this system has three distinct agents acting for it; the Mission (of course), the Alphanians, and behind them all, the Divine Architects, who we never actually meet…
My use of genre tropes is obviously self conscious, but not consciously ironic! I have no desire to distance myself from or deconstruct these genre elements which I love, and have loved, in many cases since childhood…
Clearly, I’m a fan of narrative form experimentation (which is in itself postmodern), but this is not an absurdist Universe, and the tale does come to a final resolution, which is less so…
You may become aware that the narrative is intended to work on a number of levels, however it’s not necessary to fully understand all of them to gain enjoyment from reading it…
We have paradigm shifts at the end of each book, and, oh yes…! It’s about time…