The Unification Chronicles

I made a mistake today. Already bummed out by getting booted back to Old Job after three months at New Job because of a stupid political pissing contest between management, I read the Turkey City lexicon. This is a vocabulary of common problems or tropes in SF for use in SF writing workshops, so people don’t waste time reinventing terms and can get right down to the business of ripping each other apart. Reading through the whole list with various aspects of UC in mind, I came away thinking, “well, there’s no bloody point in writing anything, is there?”

Honestly, only a few of the things mentioned in the lexicon apply to UC, and most of those can be fixed. Only that scares me even more. I keep thinking, I have never seen anyone write a story like this, spanning settings and genres like UC does. This means either my knowledge of the industry is insufficient, or it means that no one really has done this before.

If it’s the former, I wouldn’t be surprised. Contrary to what some of the folks in my critique group think—one guy hasn’t read a vampire story in a decade because he doesn’t want to “influence” the vampire story he just might get around to finishing some year—most of the advice I’ve seen is that you should read heavily the market in which you intend to write. This is so you know what’s been done, what works, what tropes are accepted and what tropes are tired and stale. It’s good advice. Only I don’t follow it.

I tend to read modern technothrillers (James Rollins, Michael Crichton, Preston & Child) or urban fantasy (Lilith Saintcrow, Christopher Golden). Every so often I’ll mix it up with some far-thinking hard science fiction (Stephen Baxter, Arthur C. Clarke). Unification Chronicles has elements of all of those, but really isn’t any of them. If I had to nail it down to a genre, I’d call it epic space opera. Which means I should be reading Asimov, Heinlein, Weber, Drake, etc. And I have lots of those in the “Unification Chronicles” group in Stanza on my iPhone. But right now I’m reading the third of Saintcrow’s Jill Kismet series, and then it’s on to Rollins’s latest standalone—not part of his Sigma Force series—Altar of Eden. So it’s possible that UC is rife with stale tropes everyone has seen a hundred times, only I don’t know because I think I made them up.

But the alternative possibility is even worse. Maybe no one has done this kind of story because it doesn’t work. I’m a big believer in Occam’s Razor: given a number of possible explanations for something, the simplest tends to be true. And what’s more likely? That I really have come up with a story that no one in over a century of SF (going back to Verne/Wells/Stoker/Stevenson in the late 1800s, though you could go all the way back to 1818 and Shelley’s Frankenstein) has come up with, or that I’ve independently come up with an idea lots of people have tried, but no one could get to work? And if the latter, is it likely I’m the one who will finally pull it off?

This is another reason why I think all the people complaining about the story in “Avatar” are barking up the wrong tree. Cameron uses mythic story structures because they work. They’re a safe platform on which to build what he adds to make the stories new again. Coming up with something completely original, something no one has ever done before, gives you a better than even chance of falling flat on your face. Look at any “avant garde” work. The more original you are, the more chance that the audience just won’t get it. And yet, if you’re not original enough, people complain that they’ve seen it before.

I’m really starting to wonder why I do this.