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Science fiction
Writing science fiction is not about imagining the future. It is about building a world solid enough to live inside — and then finding the nerve to publish it.
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I have always written. First for myself, in notebooks nobody ever read. Then in Word files I lost to a series of hard disk crashes — a metaphor rather too fitting for a man who writes about catastrophe in space. Then, at last, I decided to finish what I had started.
The Amel Confederation saga grew out of a simple question: what would an interstellar civilisation look like if it had not yet settled its own quarrels? Not utopia, not dystopia. Something more human than either: a humanity that has conquered the stars and has still not conquered itself.
The Shipwreck of Shan is the first volume. The title already gives a good deal away: there is a wreck, there is a place called Shan, and something has gone wrong past all mending. I do not want to give away more than that, but the thread running through it is the loss of control — personal, political, cosmic.
It took me years to write. Not because I am slow, but because the life of a man who programs by day and writes by night comes in pieces. You write in stolen half hours, between a MyShop update and a support call. You build a universe a fragment at a time.
The most absorbing part is the worldbuilding. A science fiction universe needs its own physics, its own history, its economy, its languages, its unfinished quarrels. Not all of it reaches the book — most of it stays in the drawer, in the notes, in maps drawn by hand.
But that invisible material can be felt. When a character makes a decision, it has to happen inside a system of values that makes sense, that has roots. If the universe behind the page is empty, the reader knows.
Oddly enough, what helps me here is the programming. A software system and a fictional universe have the same requirement: they must be consistent with themselves. If a rule holds in one place, it has to hold everywhere. The moment it breaks its own rule, the whole thing comes down.
Volume One is on Amazon. Publishing it was an act of nerve rather than of vanity. Putting something of your own into the world — something written at night, with all your obsessions inside it — takes a certain indifference to what other people will make of it.
Or perhaps the opposite: it takes caring what other people think enough to want to reach them, and not so much that you freeze.
I am working on it. The Amel universe has a good deal left to tell. The stars can wait.