Posts Tagged ‘military SF’

Creating a good protagonist, and why James Bond is a permanent teenager . . .

Chris Bunch and Allan Cole wrote the Sten Chronicles –  one of the truly classic military science fiction series. As of this week, you can now buy the entire series (that’s eight books!) in these three gorgeous Orbit omnibus editions in print and ebook – that’s BATTLECRY (UK|ANZ), JUGGERNAUT (UK|ANZ) and DEATH MATCH (UK|ANZ).

Read on to find out in Allan’s words how he and Chris created the eponymous Sten, and to find out a bit more about how to come up with a multi-book protagonist of your own.

all three omnibuses in the Sten series of space opera adventures

Chris Bunch and I went about breaking into book-world with the same fervor that we attacked Hollywood. Young and dumb as we were, we thought we could conjure up the key to literary success that has eluded countless wannabe writers, past, present and future.

The first thing, we decided, was that if we came up with a series – instead of a standalone novel – there was more of a chance that all the books would remain in print. A little bit true at the time, but mostly wishful thinking these days.

Then we looked at the genre markets. Westerns? We dearly loved Westerns. But in those days – both in books and the movies – the Oater, as they called it, was done. Westerns just weren’t selling.

Detectives, then? We were ardent fans of Chandler and Hammett – all the hard boiled guys. Again, at the time mysteries and detective stories had a limited, if passionate, audience. A flurry of rack sales, then the local library, where the sale of one book serves a legion of readers, but does not impress your banker one damn bit.

We finally settled on Science Fiction – fantasy was still waiting for Terry Brooks to break that genre out of the doldrums. Plus we had been ardent science fiction readers since childhood.

Next, we examined the nature of book series. In our opinion, there was a tendency for writers to grow to despise their main characters after a few books.

Sir Arthur came to hate Holmes so much that he killed him. The storm over that literary assassination eventually led to Holmes’ miraculous revival. Agatha Christie loathed Poirot, but wisely let him live. Ian Fleming killed James Bond in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, only to resurrect 007 in DR. NO to appease his publishers and fans. And so on. There are countless examples. (more…)

CHIMERA: the final installment of The Subterrene War

CHIMERA (US | UK | AUS), the concluding volume of the Subterrene War series is available now!

As with GERMLINE (US | UK | AUS) and EXOGENE (US |UK | AUS), CHIMERA follows a different combatant into the dark underbelly of the warfront. Escaped Germline soldiers need to be disposed of quickly, and Stan Resnick is just the man for that job.

Back in June, T.C. McCarthy first introduced us to Stan Resnick saying,

“If Germline and Exogene are character studies about a man who can’t handle war and a girl who rejects it, respectively, then Chimera is a study of someone for whom war is a natural habitat: Stan Resnick. I’ve seen this. These types of soldiers exist — ones who genuinely thrive in settings that would make most of us want to huddle under a rock and stay there until everything dies down.”

You can read the entire article here and find out how his short story, SUNSHINE, connects to the secrets that are revealed in CHIMERA.

Pick up CHIMERA today or start elsewhere in this rich and complex setting featuring a futuristic world at war.  There are many ways to immerse yourself in The Subterrene War series, including short fiction and video.

 “The highly detailed, brutal depiction of futuristic warfare brilliantly complements the intimate narrative, which examines the insanity of war and those personally affected by it. Breathtaking and heartrending, this is the future of military science fiction.”  – Publishers Weekly, starred review

Germline and Beyond: How my Short Fiction Links to the Subterrene Novels

Caution: this isn’t a blog post about fiction as much as it’s a post about a weirdo. Me. Because you’d have to be weird to (a) hammer out three books in 1.5 years, (b) write one that wins a major genre award, and (c) figure it would also be easy to also generate a short story and two novelettes to compliment the books’ universe. But that’s exactly what I did. Why? Because people fascinate me in the number of ways they can be ridiculous and murderous, and sometimes I wonder: where will war take us in the future and will people ever change?

Germline, my first book and winner of the Compton Crook Award, is a gonzo-like account of futuristic front lines — the way an outsider sees things, someone not indoctrinated to the military lifestyle and who feels like a teenage outsider going in, an adult alien coming out. But where Germline is a coming of age story, Exogene is something different. Truth be told: I don’t know what it is. Exogene goes deep into the mind of the artificial, a manufactured human-like creature whose path to existence includes brutality too bizarre to be fiction. Some readers dig it. Wildly. Others can’t relate, and that’s just fine. The characters are strong women who find it difficult to tolerate incompetence or cowardice. Looking back, the main character, Catherine, took over the story and I had to follow her lead, a mind that dragged me in some strange directions. I was listening to a lot of The Distillers and Spinerette at the time so Brody Dalle may have seeped in through the cracks.

Then there’s Chimera. If Germline and Exogene are character studies about a man who can’t handle war and a girl who rejects it, respectively, then Chimera is a study of someone for whom war is a natural habitat: Stan Resnick. I’ve seen this. These types of soldiers exist — ones who genuinely thrive in settings that would make most of us want to huddle under a rock and stay there until everything dies down. And by the time writing began for Chimera, a few silly comments regarding Germline came in, comments suggesting it was an Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket derivative (because anything that features a reporter from Stars and Stripes has to be channeling Full Metal Jacket, right?). Neither movie entered my thoughts in writing Germline. But to poke a finger in the eyes of these critics, I watched Apocalypse Now — over and over and over — and decided Chimera would address the enigma of Richard Colby.

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Wargame!!

Nothing beats a military SF battle!  The hiss of  plasma beams bouncing off body armour.  Computer targeted bullets that hunt their enemy.  And robots that can fight wars.   For many decades, science fiction writers within the space opera and military SF genres have revelled in such wild fantastical extrapolations.

However, when I was writing my first SF novel DEBATABLE SPACE,  I was very struck by the fact that in modern wars then being fought (this was at the height of the Iraq war) such supposed science fictional technology had become  a matter of fact.  We’ve seen smart missiles turning corners and unmanned drones hovering above enemy forces, and peasant guerrillas brandishing surface to air rocket-launchers that fire missiles with computer tracking technology.  The war of the future is with us today;  and my Doppelganger Robots are no more than a minor extrapolation of what is taking place already.

And more recently, I’ve been researching this area from the opposite direction, while writing a three part radio drama for the BBC about contemporary military wargames.  I went to the Defence Academy in the South of England, where soldiers are trained in simulated warfare using computer joysticks and even computers with steering wheels (like Wii games…!)  I tried my hand at the flight simulator, and crashed the darn aeroplane with worrying swiftness (hey, I’m a writer, not a warrior!) And I learned about the army bases with simulation tanks where you can experience flying an Apache helicopter in the midst of combat, with no risk of being killed.

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T.C. McCarthy: On Screenplays

I’m reading an email; Orbit wants me to write screenplays – four of them – and my reaction is to write back “not just yes, but HELL yes.” Then I hit send. It’s only later, while I’m scraping ice and snow off the car that I realize what’s happened and that within a few months Jeremy Tolbert and Levi Thornton will have made four short films and that all will be based on what I write. Me. The concept is Jeremy’s idea but the scripts will be mine, and every word from the actors’ mouths will have come from my keyboard.  I can’t call up Christopher Markus to ask for help and what would I ask anyway? “Hey, dude, would you mind critiquing my screenplays instead of working on the next Captain America script? I know you’re busy but, come on. Can’t that McFeely guy get around to it?”

Right.

***

It’s snowing again. If we get caught in Vermont, in the snow, there’s no way to tell how long we’ll be stuck. This makes me sad because it means an early departure. The kids are crying and my daughter wants to go skiing with me one last time, but everyone is exhausted and before I know it the house is quiet because all the kids have passed out barely making it to their beds. Now I can write. Now I can take the hours to read about how to format a screen play – because they have their own rules, their own look, their own way of conveying information to the actors and the audience. “(Beat)” means pause, for example, and script dialogue has to go in a certain place on the page. Jeremy is counting on me to hand in something incredible, something that will make it all worthwhile — thoughts that bring me to a terrorized state where it occurs to me: I can’t do it. They asked the wrong guy.

But now it’s too late to quit.

***

“Balmy?” I hear the neighbor say, “what the hell is ‘balmy?'”,  but it must be the right word because the dogs are panting and I’m in my shorts despite the fact that it’s January in South Carolina and even we aren’t supposed to wear shorts in January. There’s no more patch. There’s no more patch. Quitting chewing tobacco leaves me with phantom pains, and now there are four scripts on my computer laughing at me because they know all I want is nicotine — something to take the edge off that voice, the one telling me that my work isn’t good enough.Maybe it isn’t. But there’s nothing left for it except to keep revising, to go over the words until I can’t see them anymore, and a few hours later my wife shakes me because I’ve fallen asleep in my chair.

***

The scripts are finished and I handed them in a few weeks earlier; it’s hard to say if they’re any good. Then I get an email while working on my next book, and it’s from the filmmaker with a link to a rough cut of the videos and everything becomes clear: why writing screenplays is so much fun. The actors give life to the words; the director has his/her own interpretation of the script and adds, music, lighting, camera angles — everything. Are these my scripts? What the hell is going on? The movies are so spooky that I start chewing my nails and wondering what will happen next, even though I know what will happen next. You might love these video-trailers too. You might not. If you haven’t read Germline or Exogene, you might get the sense that whatever my books are about, they’re not typical, futuristic military science fiction novels, and maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re books about the reality – the insanity – of the present and of the truth, a reflection of dark spots on my brain.

Read an Excerpt from EXOGENE

In GERMLINE journalist Oscar Wendell introduced us to a new breed of special forces and the surprising humanity these elite and deadly soldiers are capable of. Now read the first chapter of EXOGENE (US | UK| AZ) – a story of war from the perspective of one of these genetically engineered soldiers.

Live forever. The thought lingered like an annoying dog, to which I had handed a few scraps.

I felt Megan’s fingers against my skin, and smelled the paste—breathed the fumes gratefully for it reminded me that I wouldn’t have to wear my helmet. Soon, but not now. The lessons taught this, described the first symptom of spoiling: When the helmet no longer felt safe, a sign of claustrophobia. As my troop train rumbled northward, I couldn’t tell if I shook from eagerness or from the railcar’s jolting, and gave up trying to distinguish between the two possibilities. It was not an either‑or day; it was a day of simultaneity.

Deliver me from myself, I prayed, and help me to accept tomorrow’s end.

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Also check out The Subterrene War Clips – an in-world introduction to the destruction and political intrigue tearing the front-lines apart. Welcome to hell. Welcome to Kazakhstan.