By Alex Scarrow: With the 4th book in the TimeRiders series – THE ETERNAL WAR – soon to be released in the United States I thought I’d let readers into a little insight; I like to do concept art for my books before I write them. Usually I do images depicting some of the key scenes that will go into the book. This then helps me to visualize the scene before I write it. So, I figured, with the release date looming (July 1st) I thought I’d reveal a few of the pieces of concept work and talk a little about each piece and what you’re seeing.
If you’re the type that HATES SPOILERS….probably best to stop right here! (That, or just look at the pictures and don’t read the text.)
In this 4th book, our team discover that a young President Lincoln has been run over by a runaway cart in New Orleans and they’ll have to go back to prevent this happening otherwise the North will not have their wartime president many years later, resulting in the civil war taking a very different course!
But as always, things go wrong and having been saved, a curious 27 year old Lincoln follows our team back to the 21st century, only to escape the TimeRider’s Brooklyn archway and go on the run through modern day New York!
As a result of Lincoln being absent from the past, things inevitably go very differently. No President Lincoln means the civil war becomes a stale mate and America ends up becoming two nations living side by side in a permanent state of war. With the backing of Great Britain, the Southern Confederacy becomes a client state. We wind the clock forward a hundred and fifty years to the present…and the British have brought their industrial might to bear helping the south.
More than that…the British bring their military muscle to bear…
Author Jack Campbell joins SciFiChick.com on his Blog Tour to promote his latest release The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian.
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Jack Campbell on his vision of the future and how it affects his stories:
The setting of a story drives a lot of the plot, and heavily influences the characters. SF and Fantasy writers have the luxury of creating the setting, but (being human and heavily influenced by our own settings) the futures and worlds we create reflect our own hopes and fears.
The future in my stories is what I call a competence-based culture. That means when someone wants to do a job, the only question will be whether or not they can do it. Nothing else will matter, not appearance or race or religion or sex or anything else. Someday, I hope that’s the only question in a job interview. I don’t know if that future will happen. Humans have a bad way of seizing on “differences” that don’t really matter and making them the most important issue, or establishing job requirements that rule out the “wrong people” before they even have a chance to compete. The result has been an incalculable waste of human potential. But I can hope, and I can present such a future the way it might look. It’s not a perfect future, because humans are far from perfect, but it’s better.
Another aspect of my futures is what I call “transparent” technology. That means technology which can be used without having to think about how to use it (or describe it in detail! Who actually does that when they use something?). Instead of having to enter bizarre, complicated commands while stepping through multiple menus and trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do next, transparent tech involves things like increasing the size of a picture by spreading your fingers. My hope is that will become the rule rather than the exception. (Though in one scene in the Lost Fleet books my characters recognize that they should have realized a certain tech was designed by aliens because the control interface was so simple and intuitive. “No human software designer would have done that.”)
A lot of my stories are set in space, in other star systems. I think we’re going to go to the stars someday. It’s not going to be as fast and as easy as writers imagined in the 1940s and 1950s, but it may not be as slow and hard as a lot of people now assume. Getting to the stars is a very hard problem, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be solved. Anything is impossible if you don’t know how to do it, and anything is hard if you don’t know how to do it right. If the answers are there, I think we’ll find them.
One thing I work hard to avoid is the Flintstones/Jetsons Theory of Anthropology. Those two cartoon series assumed that everywhere in the far past and the far future had societies which were a stereotyped version of 1960 suburbs in the United States. That assumption wasn’t unusual. One of the things that seriously dates most SF from the mid-to-late Twentieth Century is that the futures shown, no matter how distant, are in that Mad Men mold. Men do all the thinking, acting and decision-making, and if women appear at all they are usually either housewives or somebody who needs to be rescued. It is incredibly jarring to read those stories now and see futures in which women sometimes don’t even seem to exist. It is also a given in many of those stories that everyone in the future has Anglo-Saxon names. Even Star Wars fell into this sort of trap, originally presenting a future in the first film (A New Hope) in which there were lots of aliens but no humans of African descent. Star Trek TOS did, too, claiming that only men could be captains of starships because women couldn’t handle the job. As a result, I try to avoid assuming that Tomorrow will be dealing with exactly the same role models and cultural assumptions as Today, and I try to avoid presenting a future which includes a narrow vision of who will be represented. Very often, I don’t provide physical descriptions of my characters, letting the reader assign them whatever shape, color, or type feels right to the reader. (In my novelette Lady Be Good, the sex of the point of view character is never identified. It wasn’t necessary to the story, so I didn’t confine the story by setting that characteristic in stone.)
Finally, my futures are ultimately hopeful ones. Terrible things happen, great challenges arise, people are confronted by awful choices, but nonetheless my futures are places where human effort matters, where hope is ever-present, where answers to the toughest problems exist even if not easily found. My characters strive, and suffer, and in the end succeed, because I think that’s the sort of future humans can aspire to.
Contest is open to US residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends May 24. I’ll draw a name on May 25, and notify winner via email.
Author Kevin Emerson joins SciFiChick.com today to talk about our fascination with aliens and alien abductions… and to promote his new book THE FELLOWSHIP FOR ALIEN DETECTION! (reviewed here)
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I had never run into a person who seemed to sincerely believe that aliens had visited Earth until I visited Roswell in 2004. Sure, I had many fun theoretical conversations about it, mostly related to the better episodes and theories on The X-Files. And I certainly believe, given the size and age of the universe, that there are definitely other complex life forms out there. But as to whether those aliens have been here: maybe? But it doesn’t seem likely. For every compelling oddity in ancient history or strange account in modern times, there tends to be a fairly compelling alternate, non-alien possibility.
But the people in the International UFO Museum and Research Station http://www.roswellufomuseum.com/ seemed to genuinely believe that they had been visited. Walking up to the museum, I was expecting something with a similar kitschy vibe as the surrounding alien-themed gift shops. The museum, inside an old movie theater, definitely has kitsch, but it’s also free admission and staffed by retirees (or it was the day I visited anyway), which makes it feel a lot less like a hustle. Inside, it seemed sincerely devoted to exploring the question of what happened on that stormy night in Roswell in 1947. I found myself torn between feeling like I was part of an elaborate joke, and feeling like I’d stumbled into an alternate reality. Did these people really believe this stuff? And afterward, did I? Not necessarily, but I wanted to more than ever before.
The aliens in my novel THE FELLOWSHIP FOR ALIEN DETECTION are entirely fabricated, and many of their aspects were crafted in service of the story I was writing about Haley and Dodger, the main characters. (Though they do stop in Roswell for some other-worldly action midway through the story.) It was exciting to write about aliens and UFO’s, and I have a few thoughts on maybe why these stories are so enduring, why we “want to believe” as Mulder’s poster said, or in many cases, really do believe. This list is just meant as food for thought.
1. UFO Stories blossomed in a new and scary world. The fact that Roswell happened in 1947 may be no coincidence. It was a new age of science, and the global landscape had been drastically changed by World War II. In a very brief span, we’d dropped two nuclear bombs that forever changed the scope and scale of destruction possible in warfare, and the Soviet Union had risen to become our chief adversary on the global stage: a massive, aggressive country, similarly armed, and subscribing to a very different philosophy (communism) than us. UFO’s represent the unknown, not just in terms of foreign beings but foreign technology, both of which could crush our frail species. Post-war atomic America was ripe with these fears.
2. Our lives are still a mystery. For all of our scientific advancements, so much in our lives is still unexplained. We are a physically vulnerable and psychologically unstable species, living in a world that can kill us with virus, bacteria, cancers, madness. Most of us can’t afford the kind of all-access to health care that we know modern science is capable of. That leaves us not only feeling left out, but powerless, even suspicious. You might do your best to live a responsible life, only to find out that the water you were drinking for ten years was actually contaminated with some chemical. Or that there was a test for the condition you had, but you never had a chance to get it. So maybe sometimes we look for other explanations for our lack of control. We imagine government conspiracies, alien abductions and cover-up’s. I think sometimes, in a sense, we give away power to others in order to feel better about our lack of control, about the s###-happens nature of our lives.
3. We want there to be more. We want to live longer, go farther, see more, to understand the great mysteries of life and death. We seek to understand our greater purpose, to know the reasons behind life’s twists and turns. Humans have looked to the stars throughout the ages for these answers, believing larger truths lie beyond our vision. And yet, all of alive right now on this planet are unlikely to leave it in a space ship, at least not beyond low earth orbit where Space X or a similar venture might go. Maybe my kids, ages 2 and 7, have an outside chance at the moon, maybe their kids at Mars, but that’s it. We are never going to get to the aliens, unless they come to us. We need them to come here before we die. And if they came, maybe it would answer some of these mysteries: why we’re here, where we came from, where we’re headed. Or, they could at least open our minds to a vastly larger scope of existence, which would, if nothing else, put us in our place. Actually, what would probably fire us up to get to space faster would be to discover something like gold on another planet.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that when I look to the stars, the reason I hope that one of those static dots will swoop down, unroll a metal tongue and spit little green beings onto my lawn, is for some larger knowledge. They’d make the lonely dark a little less unknown. And if they had an elixir for extra long life, a warp-capable ship to show me the Horsehead Nebula, and knew how to get to Mos Eisley, even better.
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Kevin Emerson is the author of THE FELLOWSHIP FOR ALIEN DETECTION, published by Walden Pond Press, as well as THE ATLANTEANS series, the OLIVER NOCTURNE series, and Carlos Is Gonna Get It. His band, The Board of Education, wrote the Star-Wars-themed kids’ song “Why Is Dad So Mad?” He lives with his family in Seattle.
Contest is open to US residents only. No PO Boxes, please. To enter, just fill out the form below. Contest ends May 24. I’ll draw a name on May 25, and notify winner via email.
