How do the shape of rooms and the buildings that come out of them affect, reflect and shape the ways we see the world? And, what would we learn about the minds of aliens if we were to discover and explore their spaces? Dreamspace is my first novel, and those questions are what I wanted to explore in it. It would be a novel approach for a first contact story, pardon the pun.
Now, speculating about architecture hardly suggests your readers are in for a ripping yarn, does it? But then again, think of such novels as Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Christopher Priest’s Inverted World or Greg Bear’s Eon. All of these are stories that involve the effects of structure and space on mind, and there’s astonishment and excitement in every chapter. It reminds me that the best science fiction evokes a sense of wonder for the reader that lingers in the mind, no matter what else it accomplishes. The jumping-off point for Dreamspace was a short story written by Robert Heinlein way back in the early nineteen forties. That story is ‘-And he built a crooked house’. It’s an ingenious tale of how a seemingly ordinary house uses an arcane mathematical structuring principle to conjure decidedly unusual experiences for its occupants. In the story the protagonists find themselves revisiting the places they’ve been as they move through the rooms. In several instances, they find themselves transported to another part of the country. One of my two protagonists in Dreamspace, Quincy Tern, was named after Quintus Teale from the story. The embedded AI in Quincy’s head also goes by the name of “Heinlein”. Like Quintus, Quincy is an architect. Unlike Quintus, he’s got a certain addiction he has to deal with, one that nearly brings him undone. Now, I didn’t want to resort to trickery or magic in the spaces I was going to describe in Dreamspace. However, I did want my characters to have memorable experiences in them. I also wanted to engineer a sense of gradual discovery and wonderment that would surprise, delight and tease questions in the reader’s mind. The real question was: How was I going to weave such an architectural theme into drama that would be compelling. After some brainstorming, I thought: What if it dropped the discovery of the first alien building into a background of human hyper-confidence about their sense of uniqueness and worth in the universe - a hyper-confidence spread throughout human colony worlds tens of light-years from Earth and tens of light-years from help? And, what if it happened amidst a successful, centuries-long push into our stellar neighborhood that had as its end goal, the settlement of the whole Milky Way? Human irrationality is a deep well-spring of inspiration to draw from. You only have to look at some of the reactions to today’s Covid19 pandemic to see the potential. Not much is required to inspire panic when you have an unseen, incalculable threat to human health and livelihood. So - imagine: colonists on new worlds with minimal infrastructure who have suddenly found, not only are they not the only intelligent life in the universe, but that ET might be coming back to visit them? How would that play out? Add to the mix other groups of humans who positively embrace the idea of meeting the neighbors and who abhor their fellow humans building a wall to keep them out. This is where my other protagonist, Japanese astrophysicist, Dr Ikumi Hayashi, comes in - she embraces such an ideal. Naturally, she has some history with Quincy, and a few issues of her own to deal with. But I’ll let you, kind reader, find out about these things if you are generous enough to get into the book. For that purpose, I have included the first chapter for you to sample. Well, that is the basic recipe for Dreamspace, and it was fun to see how it would all work out as I started writing - don’t think writers have it all figured out when they commit fingers to keyboard or pen to paper. It’s a process of slow evolution and lots of crossing out, not to mention, killing off your “darlings” (that’s a writer’s expression for getting rid of stuff you think is good but which doesn’t advance the plot) and rewriting the whole damn thing for the nth time. If you do decide to read the book, I’ll be glad. I’ll be even gladder if you give me (constructive) feedback to help me improve. Until next time…
0 Comments
|
Jeremy Alam
Jeremy is the author of this website. ArchivesCategories |