This was why glandular modification had never taken root in the military culture. A squad of soldiers without hesitation or doubt, so full of adrenaline they could tear their own muscles and not care, might win battles. But the same fighters curled up and mewling for five minutes afterward would lose them again. It was a failed technology, but not an unavailable one. Enough money, enough favors to call in, and enough men of science who had been cured of conscience. It was easy. The easiest part of her plan, really.
Her sobs intensified, shifted. The vomiting started. She knew from experience that it wouldn’t last long. Between retching, she watched the bodybuilder’s chest heaving for air through his ruined throat, but he was already gone. The smell of blood and puke thickened the air. Melba caught her breath, wiping the back of her hand against her lips. Her sinuses ached, and she didn’t know if it was from the retching or the false glands that lay in that tender flesh. It didn’t matter.
The knocking at the door was more desperate now. She could make out the voice of the fat man by the door. No more time. She took the plastic envelope and shoved it in her pocket. Melba Alzbeta Koh crawled out the window and dropped to the street. She stank. There was blood on her hands. She was trembling with every step. The dim sunlight hurt, and she used the shadows of her hands to hide from it. In this part of Baltimore, a thousand people could see her and not have seen anything. The blanket of anonymity that the drug dealers and pimps and slavers arranged and enforced also protected her.
She’d be okay. She’d made it. The last tool was in place, and all she had to do was get to her hotel, drink something to put her electrolytes back in balance, and sleep a little. And then, in a few days, report for duty on the Cerisier and begin her long journey out to the edge of the solar system. Holding her spine straight, walking down the street, avoiding people’s eyes, the dozen blocks to her room seemed longer. But she would do it. She would do whatever had to be done.
She had been Clarissa Melpomene Mao. Her family had controlled the fates of cities, colonies, and planets. And now Father sat in an anonymous prison, barred from speaking with anyone besides his lawyer, living out his days in disgrace. Her mother lived in a private compound on Luna slowly medicating herself to death. The siblings—the ones that were still alive—had scattered to whatever shelter they could find from the hatred of two worlds. Once, her family’s name had been written in starlight and blood, and now they’d been made to seem like villains. They’d been destroyed.
She could make it right, though. It hadn’t been easy, and it wouldn’t be now. Some nights, the sacrifices felt almost unbearable, but she would do it. She could make them all see the injustice in what James Holden had done to her family. She would expose him. Humiliate him.
And then she would destroy him.
[End Excerpt]
Copyright © 2013 James S. A. Corey.
From Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey.
Published by arrangement with Orbit.
All rights reserved.
James S. A. Corey is the author of four novels and four short stories, most of them set in The Expanse universe, including the critically acclaimed short story “Drive” in the anthology Edge of Infinity. He has been shortlisted for the Hugo award for best novel for Leviathan Wakes and the Locus Award for both Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War. He lives in New Mexico with his family, and works closely with iconic fantasy author George RR Martin. He is also the pseudonym of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
Interview: Robert J. Sawyer
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
Robert J. Sawyer—called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen and “just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days” by The Denver Rocky Mountain News—is one of only eight writers in history (and the only Canadian) to win all three of the science-fiction field’s top honors for best novel of the year: the Hugo Award (for Hominids), the Nebula Award (for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Mindscan). He has written more than twenty books, including Flashforward, which was adapted into a television series on ABC. The show ended in 2010, but more Sawyer adaptations are in the works, and the author himself has been tapped to write the screenplay for a feature film version of his 2012 novel Triggers, a near-future conspiracy thriller.
This interview first appeared on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the entire interview and the rest of the show, in which the hosts discuss various geeky topics.
First of all, your new novel Red Planet Blues started life as a novella called “Identity Theft.” So how did that story first come about?
Yeah, very interesting. The meta-story is that amazon.com was kicking the crap out of book clubs in general. It used to be it was only through book clubs, mail order book clubs, that people in rural areas could get a decent selection, and so the Science Fiction Book Club was always a reprint publisher. When Amazon started really eating into their business, they got a brainstorm that they would try some original, only available through the Science Fiction Book Club publications. They commissioned the great Mike Resnick to edit an original anthology for them called Down These Dark Spaceways, science fiction and detective fiction combined together. And he commissioned me, Catherine Asaro, Jack McDevitt, David Gerrold, [Robert Reed], and himself to write novellas for this anthology. And it had not occurred to me to do anything in the noir vein, although I had always been a fan of that genre, but Mike is the guy who kind of orchestrated this shotgun wedding of the two genres for me. I was very lucky that my novella, which was called “Identity Theft,” was very well received. It was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula. It also won Spain’s top science fiction award; it got me six thousand euro for that. So it did very well in its own right, and it came out in 2005. But I had gotten a lot of fan mail about it over the years, a lot of very positive feedback, and I really enjoyed the character and the setting. And I thought, “You know what? I’ve got 25,000 words of story here. All I have to do is add another 75,000 and I’ve got a full length novel.” Sounded easy. Turned out to be one of the hardest novels I’ve ever written.
What was so challenging about it?
What was challenging about going from the novella to the novel? You know, I thought, “Very easy. Start off with 25,000 words and you’re kind of a quarter of the way there. Boom.” But it isn’t easy. Part of it isn’t easy because I’m going back and trying to write in a voice that I hadn’t written in for six or seven years at this point. I’ve changed as a person. My writing style changes, only incrementally from book to book, but cumulatively in the half dozen books I’d done in the interim, quite substantially. My advice to anybody who thinks there is a shortcut to writing a novel by taking an existing piece of work, you know what? That isn’t really true. It’s going to end up being more work, not less, to try and do justice to what you started with, but also to really give value for money. And I wanted to be absolutely sure that anybody who had already read “Identity Theft”would not feel they were getting anything less than a full new book’s worth of material when they went to buy Red Planet Blues.
How about combining the science fiction aspects and the detective aspects, did that come naturally to you or was that a challenge?
Yes, that did come naturally. You know, I often said that science fiction and fantasy never should have been paired because they’re antithetical genres. Science fiction is about things that plausibly might happen. Fantasy is about things that never could happen. They’re completely opposite from each other. But science fiction and mystery both prize the rational thought process, and both require the reader to go along picking up clues as he or she reads. In the mystery, of course, to solve the ostensible mystery or crime at the heart of the novel. And in science fiction, we writers artfully salt little clues as to what the whole world of the story is like. We don’t stop for a lecture on the
politics or the ecological situation at the time, but we drop little hints here and there. It’s the same reading process to read science fiction that goes into reading detective fiction. My very first novel that came out in 1990, called Golden Fleece, was a science fiction/detective novel, and I’ve repeatedly done science fiction mystery crossovers. My Hugo winner from 2003, Hominids, is a science fiction mystery crossover features a lot of courtroom drama that’s playing out as one of the major subplots of that novel.
One of my favorite books growing up was Larry Niven’s The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, which is a set of science fiction detective stories, and in that book he talks a little about the history of the science fiction detective story. And he says that, actually, John W. Campbell said it was impossible to write a science fiction detective story.
Yeah, and Campbell was wrong! And he wasn’t often wrong. Let us not run a steamroller over John Campbell here in our haste to mention this. Of course, as the editor of the great Astounding Stories, which went on to become Analog, he was the mentor to Asimov, to Clarke, to Heinlein, to a whole generation of writers. But yes, he felt that it would be too easy for the detective to say at the end of the story, “Well, as you know (in fact we don’t know at all) that gravity on the planet Zetox works in reverse, so of course the corpse floated to the ceiling, and that’s why nobody noticed it when they came into the room and they thought it was simply a missing persons case.” Or whatever ludicrous thing they could lay on the unsuspecting reader as almost a deus ex machina, something they pulled out of the air to solve the crime. Niven very adroitly dealt with that issue in, as you say, The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton—very good story—part of his known space universe. I actually prefer, and I hope Larry will forgive me, what Isaac Asimov did to refute, while Campbell was still alive, directly to Campbell, this notion. And of course the great Asimov novel is The Caves of Steel,which works absolutely perfectly as a mystery story. It works absolutely perfectly as a buddy cop drama. And it works absolutely perfectly as a science fiction novel. It is, to my way of thinking, the best novel that Asimov ever wrote. And it certainly puts to rest this notion, which, you know, Campbell said it. Campbell’s a brilliant writer. Campbell wrote Who Goes There? which became John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is a guy that did lots of really important writing and editing, but he had this notion that he tossed off, and may we all be forgiven for these little things that we toss off at some point and say, “Well of course this is impossible.”
So you say in the introduction that, “My working title for this book was The Great Martian Fossil Rush, but my American publisher wanted something that played up the noir angle. I asked for suggestions online and hundreds of possibilities were put forth.” I was just wondering, do any of these suggestions stand out as being particularly odd or memorable?
It’s funny. At this point I’ve forgotten almost all of them, I have to say Blood Red was one, which is not bad, you know? Red for Mars and the blood. But the one that definitely resonated for me immediately was Red Planet Blues, and it was suggested by multiple people in multiple online venues. It’s also the only one my US editor, Ginjer Buchanan, liked. And we were all set to go and then, boom, flag on the play, my friend Michael Walsh points out that Allen Steele had used that title for a novella he had written in the late ’80s. Well, I don’t want to use Allen’s title without permission. Allen incorporated that novella into a book that he called Labyrinth of Night. Labyrinth of Night was about the face on Mars. It’s out of print now. Allen considers it justly, reasonably out of print, in that what it wrote about is no longer considered scientifically valid: that there might have been an archaeological artifact that looked like a giant face on the surface of Mars in the Cydonia region. That’s just gone from science now. So the book is fallow, out of print, and he never used the novella or reprinted it subsequently, so he said, “I’d be flattered. Go ahead, use my title.”
Since it was supposed to be called The Great Martian Fossil Rush,obviously the premise is that people are going to Mars looking for fossils. What do you think about that as a scientific possibility?
I think that if I was a betting man, I would bet a substantial amount of money that we will eventually find fossils of life on Mars. I would bet a reasonable amount of money that we will find extant active biology on Mars. Sub-surface, microbial, but still living. But I think it will defy most of our understandings of biogenesis, of the basic principles of how life came into being. That Mars was a warm, wet planet billions of years ago. That if life did not emerge then, we really do have another thing coming about how common life is in the universe. I think we will find fossils on Mars. And that we’ll find them as soon as we get actual people on the surface. Finding fossils requires covering an awful lot of territory with trained eyes. That’s how we do it on Earth. Little Pathfinder and Curiosity and Sojourner and so forth aren’t quite yet up to that. We’ll get paleontologists to Mars and then we’ll find the fossils.
And it comes up in the book that fossils on Mars would be different than the fossils that we find on Earth. Could you talk about that?
Sure. There are two possible answers to the question of life on Mars, if you accept that there is life on Mars. One is that that life and our life share a common ancestry, that is, biological material was transferred from Mars to Earth, or from Earth to Mars, which is a little bit of a harder one to do, on ejecta, material that was kicked out by asteroid or cometary impacts drifted through the solar system and landed on the other planet, which means that we’re all cousins. Martians, humans, we’re all cousins. The other option is that there were two separate biogenesis events: one here and one there. And the one there, if it’s different, would have given rise to different kinds of lifeforms. My Martian fossils are all more or less invertebrate. They’re all fairly primitive. They’re equivalent to the things that would have existed on Earth about 550,000,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian explosion. But on Mars, I have it happening much, much earlier in their history. So over three billion years ago, when Mars still had an awful lot of surface water.
Well, it wouldn’t be mineralized, right?
That’s an interesting question about how fossilization occurs. On Earth, it mostly is mineralized. That is, you take a natural bone and it gets buried in sediment and minerals percolate through the sediment from rain water and ground water and fill in the little gaps in the original material, all the little cellular spaces in your bone, for instance. And it gets filled up with minerals and it gets, as you say, mineralized or petrified, turned to stone. What happens with my Martian fossils is very different. Mars underwent a great desiccation. It dried out almost completely. It’s a very, very arid planet, and very rapidly did it dry out, too. So what I have is things that actually are frozen in permafrost for billions years and have not been mineralized. When you pick up a Martian fossil and thaw it out, the permafrost melts away. The shell or the exoskeleton that you get is the actual shell or exoskeleton that was part of a living creature billions of years ago. It’s a very different kind of paleontology that’s being done on Mars, though I think a plausible one, given the very different geological histories of Mars and Earth.
The Mars colony in this book is covered by a dome that’s described as being made out of aloquartz. What is aloquartz?
Right. “Alo” is a prefix that’s used in chemistry to mean “altered,” so it’s simply quartz that’s been altered. In this particular case, it’s been altered so that it has a sharper fractive index for ultraviolet radiation and helps a little bit with the radiation shielding as well. Quartz is silicon dioxide. It’s easy to come by. It has the property already of being clear, as you well know; it’s what glass is made of. I allow for a little bit of material science modification of source material, because it is the future. One of the things John W. Campbell said, and he was right about, is that the future doesn’t happen one at a time. You don’t get uploaded consciousness, as I have in this novel; you don’t get routine interplanetary travel, as I have in th
is novel; you don’t get human hibernation, as I have in this novel, without also getting a whole bunch of other technological advances as well.
What are the basic facts of life on Mars you have to keep in mind when writing a story set there that you wouldn’t have to think about in a normal detective novel?
Well, the single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It’s thirty-eight percent of Earth’s gravity, about one-third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that’s got reddish sand, but otherwise is pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert. And that’s not the case. Fundamentally, it is very, very different. How that impacts it being a detective story, when you get to it being a noir detective story, where your characters end up roughing people up and there’s some fisticuffs and there’s face-to-face personal combat, you get very, very wild and exciting fight scenes. I like to think that I went to town in writing them in this novel, taking full advantage of the fact that you can really pick up somebody and throw them across the room in a way that would be fantastic to watch. The other thing, of course, is that Mars is deadly everywhere except under the dome. Death is very close at hand. And for a mystery story, especially a noir story, it’s hard to write a story about how dangerous it is to be in the dark streets of, let’s say London, England, that’s the classic example right now, because there are no dark streets anymore, in the sense of not being observed by security cameras. On Mars, you open it up to an area where you’ve got dark spaceways, dark alleyways, places that aren’t covered by cameras, and a whole wide planet whose surface area is equal to the surface area of Earth’s. Dry land surface area is equal between the two planets. That is an enormous place to run around on, where death literally lies around every corner.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37 Page 7
