Why I write
Forty years in software, sixty years of reading science fiction. The novels are the late book.
The reading started earlier. Lem. Forward. Clarke. Writers who treated science fiction as a way to think about what is, not as a vehicle for spectacle. I have been carrying their books with me my whole adult life.
Clarke first, in my teens – Rendezvous with Rama, 2001, A Fall of Moondust. Books that explained nothing and gained everything by the refusal. Lem came later, and harder: Solaris taught me that an alien intelligence does not owe us its terms; His Master's Voice, that being addressed is not the same as being heard. Forward was different again – a working physicist who treated speculation as engineering, and Dragon's Egg worked because its impossibility was rigorously specified.
These three are the central tradition, but they are far from the whole of it. Asimov's Foundation showed me what scope looks like when an author trusts the reader to wait. Niven's Ringworld and Footfall gave me the satisfaction of an engineer's mind at play. Piers Anthony's Macroscope took an idea most writers would have made small and refused to. There are more – many more – significant writers in this tradition than any one list could honour. What they share is the same underlying question: what does meaningful contact actually require, and how often is it possible?
What drives the stories
I have read many hundreds of science fiction stories - from space operas like the Lensman series, to more serious work such as Rendezvous with Rama, Dragon's Egg, and Ringworld. They have all given me great pleasure.
Apart from a small select number of stories, I feel that human-alien contact is mostly poorly done. To borrow from the Polish author Stanisław Lem: communication is not just words. Lem would say communication requires:
- Shared sensory modalities
- If an alien perceives via neutrino flux, or gravitational gradients, or quantum entanglement patterns, our "language" is noise.
- Shared cognitive architecture
- If their thought is non-linear, non-symbolic, or distributed, our logic is irrelevant.
- Shared evolutionary pressures
- Meaning is shaped by survival. If their survival pressures differ radically, their "concepts" may not map to ours at all.
- Shared assumptions about agency
- Humans assume intentionality. Aliens may not have "intent" as we understand it.
- Shared metaphysics
- Even the idea of "communication" may be a human construct.
Lem's conclusion: the probability of meaningful communication is near zero unless the alien is already human-like. So I am trying to find interesting ways to explore the gap.
How I write
Process is its own discipline. I start with a theme or an idea, and from there develop a storyline – characters, voice, location. That becomes an arc bible, which leads to a scaffold: the structural skeleton I write against.