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.