Note: The internet makes the world a very small place indeed, and eventually you start running into people who share your interests....even if they are a bit odd. Take for instance the combined interests of Science Fiction, politics and the Roman Empire. My - first ever - guest blogger today, Sarah Hoyt, writes prolifically in these areas. She actually makes a living doing so.
(See link below ) Sarah, you're up!
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I’ve been invited to
consider how my having grown up in Portugal, with the detritus of empire
literally – more or less – underfoot has made my writing science fiction
different.
I was about to say it
hasn’t, not that much, but it has in a way.
You see, Science Fiction
was first explained to me as “History, but turned forward.” This was the explanation my brother gave me,
when – in his first year in Electrical Engineering – he started bringing home
these odd books. (Out of Their Minds is
the first SF I remember reading – I’ve determined before that I’d read Have
Spacesuit, but I read it UNAWARE that it was science fiction. I thought that was just how things were in
America – and A Canticle for Leibowitz was the third. The second has completely slipped my
mind. I think it was one of those “the
bomb explodes and then we survive by doing unspeakable things” books so common
in the seventies. However, even though
the name and the author have gone into those mists from which no memory
returns, it was the first book to make me aware I was reading a different
genre. I knew that WWIII hadn’t
happened. I mean, I was eleven. So I looked at the spine, and then went in
search of Alvarim (who is almost ten years older than I) and asked him “what is
science fiction?”) And he – poor kid, I
mean, he was what? Twenty? -- gave me the best explanation he could
“history turned forward.”
I guess that stuck,
because when I first started writing science fiction -- sixteen? Years ago –
the first thing I did was sit down and write a future history extending a
thousand years in the future.
(I thought more than a
thousand years would be beyond my scope, because I’m modest that way.)
I have for some time now
been feeling that doing this was odd – I think I realized most people don’t do
carefully outlined future histories before setting pen to paper for space opera
(forgive them Heinlein, they know not what they do) sometime around when
Darkship Thieves came out, and I was on a panel trying to explain when it was
set.
However, it wasn’t till
this blog invite came along that I realized that uh… maybe the reason I did
this (I can’t answer for Heinlein, though I could make guesses) is that my
background is SO different. As in, I
grew up in a region that many ways felt like a mishmash of times.
I think the first time I
became aware that the language spoken in a region changed, I must have been
four? Maybe three. On Saturdays, dad took me “for a walk” so that
mom had the house to herself and could clean without me underfoot. The walks usually went into the woods around
the village where dad would show me birds’ nests, explain the different ways
they were built, or we caught tadpoles, or…
Yeah, there’s a reason ‘vacation’ for me is the Natural History
Museum. BUT in Portugal it’s impossible
to do that without tripping on ruins, and lintels, and even boundary
markers. A good number of these were in
Latin. So dad had to explain that
Portuguese came from Latin, and the other influences that fell into it. (Okay, he didn’t have to explain, but he
chose not to be bludgeoned to death by “why?”)
After that at some point –
between six and eight? – I started reading history books, starting with my
brother’s (there is no real lending library system in Portugal, or there wasn’t
when I lived there – might have changed now – so for a voracious reader every
book is meat. I waited with bated
breath for my brother to get his school books each year, because I read
them. I also read the old ones, or
re-read them.) And then I started
noticing all the debris of the past around me.
Portugal has a long past –
going back, in my region, to a Celtic background and then to Phoenician and
Carthaginian colonies, well before Rome came.
It’s impossible to ignore. Some
of the houses still in use dated back to the middle ages. There were Roman ruins all over. The soil under the village was hollowed by
Roman gold mines, which were then followed by Moorish gold mines. It played out sometime under the Moors
(though I often wonder if new tech would allow us to mine residual gold)
leaving a poor agricultural region and gaping holes under the entire area,
which lead to sudden cave-ins in heavy weather.
History is impossible to
escape. The village up the road (from
which my paternal grandfather came to marry grandma) was called Rio Tinto –
that is Blood River and the story of the name is that at the last great battle
between Moors and Christians, so many dead fell in the river that it ran red
like blood. (Now I’m older, I wonder if
it’s been more than one battle and the name is just ascribed to the last.)
When a farmer up the
street dug down to build a cow shed, he came across a Roman cemetery. (And he shut his mouth and built anyway,
because he didn’t want his land expropriated.
However, artifacts made their way out to various hands.) When, up the street, they started digging for
apartment buildings, they came across a Roman (industrial scale) oven,
answering forever the question of why that area is called Forno (oven.)
Of course, the Romans
weren’t the only ones to leave traces.
The area is called Aguas Santas (Holy Waters) and local tradition
ascribes it to Our Lady appearing over a certain fountain in what is now a back
alley. Only… the area name and the
legend date back to before the Christian Era.
Of course, Balaat of the Carthaginians was also “Our Lady.” (Yes, I very
much fear excavations would reveal a tophet.
Anyway, this is by the way
of saying that I could never think of history as something with an end. A lot of the science fiction books – not just
in the Golden Era, but now – seem to assume there is a beginning and an end. An easily discernible beginning, I mean,
something that we can trace exactly “it was because of Western hegemony” seems
to be a favorite or “patriarchal oppression.”
Coming as I do from a place that is a hodgepodge of times and cultures,
all melding together to create an unexpected result, I’m more likely to think
“it’s because of humans.”
In the same way, I tend
not to think of history as “ending” which means that for instance post
apocalyptic novels where everyone just lives in the mud forever drive me
nuts. Civilization WOULD rise again. It’s what our kind does. Now, it might be unrecognizable to us, but it
would rise again. (This is why A
Canticle for Leibowitz struck such a deep note.)
And this is why my novels
tend to be set in a future history that has a past, but not a defined end.
There are certain forces I
see playing out in human history – the play and counterplay between the people
who want to control others (often for their own good) and of the people who
want to be left alone (aka be free.)
Even though I think
freedom can’t be won permanently (well, you know, the other guys get a say too)
I think it’s the only fight worth having.
Because if we have a little more individual freedom, even for a short
time, it allows civilization and humanity to take huge leaps in comfort,
knowledge, and expansion.
This is largely the theme
of my work. And the freedom of Eden in
Darkship Thieves gets a push-back-against in Darkship Renegades (out from
Baen.) At the same time, the regime of
the Good Men is taken down (or starts to be taken down. It’s a long process) in A Few Good Men, which
starts at the end of Darkship Thieves and which comes out March 5. It is of course, not a permanent
freedom.
But for a while, it allows Life
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to flourish. And it passes the torch of freedom and hope
to others, down the long road of history, who might find the ideals worth dying
for.
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