Author Archives: Tony Ballantyne

Cosmopolitan Predators! Dramatis Personae

Cosmopolitan Predators! appears in Aethernet Magazine

 

Billy Bunyan: teenage boy living in the skin of the Rock with his two fundamentalist fathers. Billy has a radio hidden behind his locker which he uses to listen to the spaceships that pass by outside. If his fathers ever find out he will be in big trouble…

Chelio: had his neocortex altered so that he can be friends with many, many people. He knows everyone on Eunomia and has slept with about half of them. So far.

The young man: wants to be the man with no name. He insists he’s not an assassin, even those he’s carrying several intelligent, high cachet weapons, and despite the fact he’s already killed two people.

Eli: legendary invincible soldier. He wants to be left alone to search the libraries on Eunomia for a particular book.

Mary-Ann Hodgson: naive new arrival on Eunomia Everyone exploited her back on earth, does she really expect things to be better on the Rock?

Jenny Solzhe: knows Mary-Ann from back on Earth (and has a tattoo just like hers). Very intelligent – she’s up to something.

Cosmo Lyttleton: devastatingly attractive, breathlessly charming and frighteningly intelligent. Ebony skin, a chiseled jaw and eyes so dark you can see your own reflection in them, eyes in which you could watch your own eyes melt as you lose your heart to him… He’s the new head of Buziness

Piper #320: engineer. She wants to get the job done properly, unlike most of her colleagues…

Graham Ian Stains: not really worth knowing. Don’t bother remembering his name.

Damon Masterson:  The Open Source Detective.  He’s interested in the young man, but why…?

Otis Memphis: Teenager.  Earns money incubating viruses in his body

Lisa Mortis: Professional Gambler

Szent-Gyorgi:  One of the second tranche.  Owns a cafe in the Zoshull district

The Backpack:  Former Security AI working in a jetpack.  Saving money to buy a ship to inhabit.

 

The Founding Family

Lipton Mercedes: Buziness

Brandy Marsalis: Zoshull

Mary Kenton: Civics

McConnel Hudson: Engineering

Zunel: Processing

Josephine “Farmer Joe” Daniau-Beauchene Wong: Agropower

The Seventh Founder:  Doesn’t exist.  Never has existed.

Futura Science Fiction Convention

The FUTURA science-fiction convention takes place at the Light House, Wolverhampton, 15th June
I shall be taking part in panels and a Kaffee Klatsch.  Come and say hello if you’re in the area.

The Last Days of Loss

I have a picture here on my desk, drawn when I was 17.

I seemed to have spent my life up to the age of 40 accumulating stuff that I’m now going to spend the rest of my time sorting through and throwing away. One of the many things unearthed by the sorting process is a picture of a spaceship I seem to remember drawing when I should have been doing A level maths homework. It’s not a bad picture, in my opinion. I’m no artist, but when I found this picture I must admit I was quite impressed by my younger self – I’ve not thrown it away yet because I can’t decide if I want to hang onto it. The question I keep asking myself is how often do I really think I’ll look at it in the future? It’s not worth framing, so if I do stick it in a file, am I really going to take it out and look at it, or am I just delaying the inevitable and postponing throwing it away by a few years?

I could scan the picture, of course. If I do, the picture might live for ever. I back up all my files both locally and to the cloud, and because I backup to the cloud there may well be backups of my backups on servers around the world. There is a possibility that my backed up data will be around indefinitely.

If I don’t scan my picture, the paper will go brown, the picture will fade and eventually it will be lost or thrown away.

If I scan my picture, I’m giving it a chance to last forever, or at least for as long as there is someone maintaining the computers. I could do the same with everything I’ve written or drawn. No doubt in a few years everything we do will be recorded indefinitely. A few years ago we had no such opportunity. We may be the last people who understand this choice…

It’s a nice picture. Maybe I will frame it.

Serial Fiction

Just in case you haven’t seen the other posts, tweets, adverts or fliers…

This Easter my wife and I launched a new magazine called Aethernet.  Aethernet is intended to be the magazine of Serial Fiction.

But before you go, why Serial Fiction?

The idea for Aethernet came from a conversation Chris Beckett and I had at Eastercon 2012.  We were discussing the pleasures of reading serial fiction.  I grew up reading comics where the stories were presented over time.  V for Vendetta had an extra excitement when I read it in its original form in Warrior as I spent a couple of years trying to guess who V actually was (there was also an element of frustration when the magazine took longer intervals to appear and then finally folded.)  Now, if you’ve only ever read the graphic novel, the mystery would have lasted only a couple of hours.  When you have to wait a month between episodes, there is more time to consider the story.  Both Chris and I agreed that Serial Fiction afforded an extra dimension to the reader…

But then we began to think about writing Serial Fiction.   When I write a novel I start roughly at the beginning and then work through roughly to the end.  Roughly is the word.  I jump backwards and forwards, constantly changing things when I write any story, whether it’s 1000 word short or 100 000 word novel.  More than that, the story I end up writing is never the one I had planned.  What would it be like to write a story in the way Dickens and rest used to?  How would a story evolve if there was no going back, if you had to follow the characters where they went?  Would it be difficult?  Would it require a different way of writing?  Would it be a new challenge?  Mostly, would it be fun?

Well, we’ve tried it, and I can report that the short answer to all of the above is a resounding yes.

The long answer is available in Aethernet Magazine.  Most of the stories in there are still being written.  We’re about four episodes in front of you due to the editorial process, and the twists and turns continue to surprise and delight us.

I’ve been inspired.  My own story, Cosmopolitan Predators! starts in issue 2, and I’ll talk more about that another time.

Finally, one last piece of serial fiction.  The Loving Heart is a spin off from Cosmopolitan Predators!  and will be told through tweets.  Follow @aethernetmag to read it.  It will be starting in a couple of weeks…

Plot and Character

8SquarePanelMarcus Gipps asked an interesting question on a panel at EightSquaredCon: do writers think of the plot first and then try to think of characters to go with it?

Since genres such as SF tend to be plot driven, I think there is a tendency for people to believe this to be the case, but it’s not the case.  Plot and character drive each other.

Even the simplest of plots have characters, clichéd though they might be. If the hero is attacking the dark lord, you have two characters there right away, a good guy and a bad guy.  You couldn’t have the plot without the characters: if the bad guy wasn’t bad, the good guy wouldn’t have a reason to attack.  If someone just attacks someone else, the reader will just think why? If you take away the characters from a story, all you’re left with is machinery. You are, in effect, describing how a steam engine or a canal lock works.  Both of these things are interesting,  but they’re not a story.

Of course, just having a good guy and a bad guy doesn’t mean that you can tick the box marked character and then get on describing the world or the spaceships or the fighting.  You may be writing a story but it won’t be a very interesting one, and this was what Marcus was really asking when he posed his question do writers think of the plot first and then try to think of characters to go with it? My answer?  The plot suggests the characters, the characters suggest the plot.  Listen to the characters, and they will tell you where the plot is going.  Follow the plot, and the characters will react accordingly.  If you don’t know what your characters will do, then you haven’t understood them properly, and neither will the reader.

EightSquaredCon was a great event, by the way.  Superbly organised, there was a great atmosphere throughout the hotel.   Well done to all involved!