Greta van der Rol

The first book I ever wrote is ‘The Iron Admiral’. I read it again just the other day, after not having touched it for the good part of a year. And I must say, I enjoyed the read. Very much. Sure, I tweaked a little. (I’m a writer. You always want it to be the very best.) But not much. So yes, I’m pretty happy with my work.

 Mind you, I thought it was pretty good when I finished the book maybe two years ago. I started writing it probably four years ago. I cringe a little at the memory. It reeked of Jedis and superior mental powers, all by other names, of course. All that got tossed out quite early, rest assured, never to resurface.

It was always going to be about an admiral and a conflict with an alien race, though. And a girl. I didn’t think about it at the time but really it was inevitable that I’d end up with star-crossed lovers. It makes me smile, now, when I think about my amazement – and yes, embarrassment, when I recognised I’d written a Romance!! I read ‘serious’ science fiction as well as fluff like Star Wars; Asimov was a long-time favourite, as was Arthur C Clarke and many others. These days it’s Jack Mc Devitt and Elizabeth Moon. I suppose, in reality, I read some romance books, too. But never the Mills & Boon types where the romance was the whole story.

Still and all, after I’d accepted that’s what I’d written, I went along for the ride. Certainly the characters in the book I read the other day are not the same as the ones I started off with. They’ve grown and changed and in parts of the story, they simply told me that’s NOT how it would have happened. He wouldn’t have done that; neither would she. I listened to my characters and I feel I’ve ended up with a good book.

And now I feel I can go and finish the second book, “The Admiral’s Choice’. They deserve to be together.

Have you ever noticed how often ‘Aliens’ (especially in the movies or the TV) are humanoid? They usually have two arms, two legs and one head, two eyes and they speak with a mouth. Or maybe four arms or legs just for variety. Check out Star Trek sometime. And what’s more, in Star Trek they can actually mate with humans and produce hybrid beings like Spock. Or so we are led to believe. Yes, okay it’s not always like that. But cast a glance at the Cantina scene in Star Wars I, or even the new arrival, the being in the new movie Avatar.

What’s wrong with that, you ask? Well, in a way, nothing. After all, we’re not talking intelligence here, we’re talking technology. Sure, you can have all sorts of aliens inhabiting other worlds. Look in a pond on mother Earth, or in the ocean trenches or in the deepest caves. Life abounds in all sorts of conditions. But not much of it uses technology. Take dolphins; acknowledged to be very, very smart with abilities (like echo location) we can only dream about. But I can’t see your average dolphin building a spaceship. To do that, it seems you need first the desire and secondly the digits to make it happen.

Enter the opposable thumb. Oh, and some brains. And suddenly all those humanoid aliens become a little more understandable. You need things like fingers to build machines. So smart lizards would fit the bill. Very common, your lizard-like alien – especially if it’s a baddy.

Okay, so there might be other ways of building technology that we quite literally cannot imagine. That’s not much use to a writer, is it? So let’s accept that our aliens will have to have some way of getting around (we call them ‘legs’ in our part of the universe) and some means of manipulating material (fingers, hands). But there are other issues. They’ve just found an ‘earth-like’ planet seventy light years away. That means lots of liquid water, a reasonable temperature range. Just one small catch, though; it’s three times the size of Earth. Can you imagine the effect of gravity on a planet that size? I reckon we’d have trouble walking. Unless we can invent some sort of anti-gravity suit.

And what about the air? What if there’s too much oxygen? Or not enough? Earth’s atmosphere hasn’t been the way it is now for most of its existence. Indeed, we need breathing apparatus if we go above a certain altitude on our own planet. So it’s pretty hard to imagine all those aliens in the cantina scene all comfortably breathing Tatooine’s air. Yes, I know some of them wore respirators or some such. But not very many.

Really, when you start looking at the difficulties the solution used by more and more SF writers makes a stack of sense. Bioengineered planets, terra-formed to suit humans. You’ll find them in Elizabeth Moon’s books and Jack McDevitt’s books among others.

I must say also that I find it difficult to imagine why the inhabitants of a planet like (say) Jupiter would ever want to come to Earth and do more than take a passing look. Always assuming, of course, the amorphous blobs living in Jovian storms subject to enormous gravity would bother to build a space ship.  So they get here and then what? Wouldn’t they be more likely to eye off Jupiter? Now this assumption puts paid to a lot of space wars. Why bother, after all?

Which is why the Ptorix (aliens in my book ‘The Iron Admiral’ evolved on a world similar to ours and live on worlds similar to ours. We are cosmic rivals trying to share a galaxy.

And the Ptorix don’t look humanoid. But they do have tentacles.

On a roll. A place in the Krystor mountains, I'd even found a picture to fire my imagination.

And then last night a little thought tapped diffidently on my shoulder. "Greet?"
Mumble wizzle. "What?"
"Why would they be in the mountains, Greet?"
"Go away. I explained all that." (Turns over)
"Yes, but where did they grow the food?"
(Sits up) "Down in the valley."
"Well then... why-"
"Oh, shut up. You've made your point."
Bloody little thought just shot down my wonderful plot device.

But all is not lost. I'd actually thought this all through with rather more sense many months ago (before 'Die a Dry Death' took up residence in my brain). And fortunately, I hadn't thrown the scene away. It was just a couple of pages but it was enough to put me back on plausible track.

The mountains are still in there, but they're not quite so important, now.

Oh, bugger. It can't be the TEMPLE at Krystor anymore... hmmm. Then again, maybe it can...

I guess we all get it. One of those times when you can't get in the groove. When your characters won't talk to you. You can see them, imagine them. But Ravindra's lying back in the chair in his office, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Morgan just throws me one of those 'looks'. And I don't know where I'm going. Or more particularly, where they're going.

Well... I do, but that's at the end. That's the thing about books. You know where they start, you know where they finish. But how do you get from one to the other?

So I thought 'bugger it. I'll work out how they get there later.' And I wrote the BIG chapter. And it all started to flow. And then I went back and started the second big chapter. From there, I came up with a title and the ideas queued up in a semi-orderly fashion to the extent I had to write some down.

On a roll now. 'The Temple of Krystor', book two of 'A Legacy of War', is well underway.

Oh, and if you're interested, I wrote the Big Sex Scene ages ago. (Grins)