#WIP: Hyperspace Raptor

[robinswrites]

WIP: Hyperspace Raptor

It's a retro pulp sci-fi novel, but queer!

15 years ago, Karo Jaak--then going by a different name--was an idealist. 15 years ago, he and his small group of loyal friends believed they could end injustice forever. 15 years ago, he led the revolution to a glorious victory--and then everything went wrong. Near-fatally injured in the battle that led to the rebels' victory, Karo was in a coma for months, his life only saved by advanced cybernetic implants. He woke up to find that the rebels had won--and then turned on each other, rumours of betrayal flying, friends killing friends. Several of the rebel leaders were missing, presumed killed. Others are fugitives. And a mysterious woman whose real name and past are entirely unknown has declared herself Empress. The Galaxy falls into tyranny, and Karo goes on the run, living for years as a smuggler and a fugitive. He's changed a lot in the past 15 years: new name, new gender, and a newfound disillusionment with heroic causes and ideals. But as tensions between humans and the Galaxy's various alien species grow, and rumours spread that the android labourers used throughout human civilisation are planning a rebellion of their own, Karo is contacted by a mysterious alien who wants him to take up the rebel cause again and fix the mistakes of the past.

FEATURING:

TRANS MAN PROTAGONIST

FOUND FAMILY REBEL CREW

ANDROIDS FIGHTING FOR EQUALITY

VARIOUS ALIEN CULTURES (all of which see gender differently)

SPACE BATTLES: LASER GUNS, PLASMA SWORDS, AND EXPLOSIONS

PODCATS (a creature I invented thanks to a typo--sadly I can no longer find the original message so don't know whose typo it was, so can't properly credit them...)

ELECTRIC SHARKS (that make your brain fall out? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23VI35X6cmA because while I know Lux isn't singing "shark" I can't unhear it)

This is the novel I've been working on in some form or another since I was about 14. At that age, I had big ideas, but a lot of things holding me back: for one, I was reading a lot of websites that insisted that Serious Hard Science Fiction was the only good form of science fiction and was trying to force my ideas into that mould even though most of the stories I loved and that had inspired me to write were not that at all; I also believed everything had to be a trilogy, even when I really only had enough plot for one book; and let's face it, I was 14 and didn't have the life experience or skill to tell the story I wanted to tell.

But I loved the characters I'd created and the world they lived in enough that I couldn't just abandon the idea forever. So now it's back, being entirely rewritten, and this time I fully intend to finish and publish it.

Character intros coming soon!

[robinswrites]

The villain of my space sci-fi WIP is the Empress, a mysterious, heavily cybernetically augmented character whose face is never seen.

After the rebellion, several of the rebel leaders met in private in the former government building. They were there for several days with whatever was going on in there a total secret to the public. At the end of that time, several of them were dead, others were declared wanted fugitives, some had vanished without trace or explanation, and those who remained had sworn loyalty to the Empress--a woman with no known real name or past, who might as well have appeared out of nowhere.

The Empress promised to improve the lives of the Galaxy's human population, but at the expense of the various alien species who had once coexisted with humans. Under her rule the Empire is trying to invade and colonise planets inhabited by other species. Some people support her because she ended the previous regime's use of lab-grown humans as slave labour, but she has replaced it with the use of androids who are also sentient and completely without rights.

Discovering her true identity and past is going to be one of the major plot twists of the novel. All I can say for now is that, naturally, she is connected to our hero (well, it wouldn't be much fun if she was a random nobody).

Let’s take a moment and talk about the villain in your story! Is it a person? An obstacle that needs to be overcome? A big fat CLOSING SOON sign on the front of your favorite video store?

[robinswrites]

Magnolia: Talk about one of your favorite side-characters.

Well, guess it's time for a rant about Rakal, to go with the moodboard.

Rakal is the naturally-born child of lab-grown, genetically modified people who prior to the ascent of the current Empress were used as cannon fodder troops (part of a larger scale enslavement of lab-grown people, though these ones were genetically modified for combat). After this practice was ended, the genetically modified people were essentially abandoned on the planet that had once housed the facilities where they were made. Between the limited resources on this planet and the prejudice they faced, their society suffered from poverty and crime.

Growing up in this environment, it wasn't long before Rakal became a criminal themself: first petty theft, then more major theft and dealing in stolen goods. Eventually, they were caught--and while the Empress supposedly freed the enslaved lab-grown people, that doesn't apply to convicts, and they were forced into working for the Imperial military.

Rakal is a cynical, snarky when he thinks he can get away with it, sullenly silent the rest of the time, sneaky little rat man masc-adjacent nonbinary person (not that I think he'd actually have a problem with being called a man). He hates his boss and is deliberately bad at his job. He also spends a significant chunk of the plot assuming Si'tak is loyal to the Empire (and also resenting him for a whole host of other reasons) when they could have solved all their problems by teaming up much sooner, because he defaulted to everyone else being the enemy who he should scowl and snark at if they dared try to talk to him, instead of having a normal fucking conversation for a change. He is deeply offputting and extremely difficult to get along with at the best of times (unless you're a podcat--despite being nicknamed "Rat" he seems to be a cat person) but I love him.

They do undergo some actual positive character development over the course of the story but they stubbornly resist it the whole time. Still, I have plans for them to appear in a follow-up mini story where they get less misery and more Be Gay Do Crime. Because really (in any universe where they can't just be a mall goth) heists are what they're best suited to. They'll also get to team up with Karo and experience the shocking revelation of "someone is treating me like a person?", so let's see how that might affect them.

LIKES

Rayguns

Alcohol

Punk rock

Cats, including podcats (he can befriend vaguely cat-shaped carnivorous plants but not people?)

Crime

DISLIKES

People

Authority

Being condescended to/assumed to be stupid (happens all too often)

Space fascists

[robinswrites]

So, my sci-fi WIP is very much space opera. In fact, I've made it an actual goal to hit every bullet point on Brian Aldiss' list of what makes a space opera, not because I'm even much of an Aldiss fan, but just because I thought it would be cool:

The world must be in peril. There must be a quest. And a man or woman to meet the mighty hour. That man or woman must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must rain down the palace steps. And ships launch out into the louring dark. There must be a woman or man fairer than the skies. And a villain darker than a Black Hole. And all must come right in the end.

(The 8th of those is a bit of a stretch, in that there isn't a love interest subplot *in the present day* of the story, but still.)

If we treat the opposite genre to space opera as being "Very Serious Gritty Science Fiction For Serious Intellectual Adults TM" written by the kind of writer who considered "space opera" to be an insult, then...I have a lot of thoughts about what the story would be like in that case, because when I first tried my hand at writing this thing, I was feeling a lot of pressure to write like that.

On the one hand, most of the scifi I'd enjoyed was stuff like Star Wars and Doctor Who--I'd enjoyed Asimov and Arthur C Clarke at short story length, but dropped out of the Foundation series halfway through because I found Asimov's writing style dry to read at length even when the events were interesting.

On the other hand, I was on science fiction websites that insisted Star Wars wasn't real science fiction (it was fantasy in space! [obviously it does use a lot of high fantasy genre conventions but still]), and Doctor Who was also not real science fiction and was silly and juvenile, and real science fiction was about serious exploration of the consequences of a new technology and/or trying to predict what our future will actually be like (invariably a pessimistic prediction).

And I forced myself to read several science fiction "classics", and while there are classics that I love (Le Guin!), a common thread in several of the "classics" that I slogged through out of obligation was a slow pace, a dry writing style, and a very grim and depressing setting with very little humour or colour or fun. (I'm very glad to see this has changed in a lot of recent SF: the Imperial Radch series manages to have a lot of colour and humour and warmth despite being set in an oppressive empire and I love that about it.)

So I was torn as I initially outlined my story, between all my favourite fun tropes, and the websites that said this and that was unrealistic and bad science and you should never ever do it.

I'm now rewriting with a much stronger idea of what I want from the story and more confidence in it. But if I'd given into that "advice" that was really just "your whole genre is wrong and you should write in a different genre entirely"...

Well, for a start, it would no longer have been about an empire ruling "the Galaxy", because interstellar travel is slow and difficult (FTL is impossible, remember!), it would take years, even decades to get from one place to another on that kind of scale! I remember being very frustrated trying to figure out how I'd fit multiple alien civilisations into a couple of star systems, while also knowing most star systems won't have that many habitable planets...

Until I also read that having that many different alien civilisations was unrealistic, because there's no evidence of aliens at all yet and even if we accept that life has a reasonable chance of existing on other planets, the universe is so old that there's a high chance it's already extinct by the time we get there, or that it hasn't evolved yet and won't for millions of years more, since the universe will last for so much longer... and even if we've been lucky enough that life exists on another planet at the same time as us despite what a small fraction of the universe's existence we've existed for, it's more likely to be bacteria or something than a civilisation of sentient beings. And also it definitely wouldn't be remotely human-shaped or able to communicate with us. And the human-alien hybrid character is right out!

Now, of course there are various classic works of space sci-fi without aliens: Foundation, Vorkosigan, Dune, Firefly... So at one point I really was fully prepared to replace all the aliens with different human cultures, but it was disheartening, because the aliens had been one of the things I'd been most excited about.

I think it was around the time that I encountered a take that depicting an interstellar human civilisation at all was not just unrealistic, and therefore bad writing, but also morally wrong because it encouraged people not to care about the environment on Earth, that I realised some people really do just have a problem with entire large genres that include plenty of well-regarded classic stories, and that trying to force my story to be an entirely different genre wasn't just "learning from writing advice".

So now I'm rewriting the story, and it's back to being space opera, though not quite as far to the fantasy end of things as something like Star Wars. I've discovered that many of the science fiction books I enjoy are ultimately space opera and that that's not a bad thing--and that they can still be intelligently written, and definitely science fiction and not just high fantasy tropes in a space setting, and ALSO be action-packed and fun. (That being said, a bit more scientific thought has been put into how certain things work than my very first draft, because I'm not 14 anymore. For instance while there are aliens coexisting with humans, they're now weirder and more developed as their own thing, whereas one of the species in the first draft was basically just orange people--we've had one of those as President of the US, we certainly don't need them in our sci-fi!)

Ultimately, I think the answer is that if this story had been serious gritty hard SF instead of space opera, it would be...permanently unfinished because I'd find it much less interesting. Good thing that's not going to happen.

Let's learn a bit more about your story. Let's learn a bit more about your story is NOT.

Share the genre of your story here. Tell everyone why you picked that genre. What part makes you most excited?

Then take a moment and think about what your story would look like if it was the complete OPPOSITE genre, and share a few thoughts about it!

[robinswrites]

OK THIS IS MY CHANCE LET'S TALK ABOUT PODCATS!

So, some time ago, on a Discord server (I have been completely unable to figure out which one and find the original message, so apologies for not being able to credit the person who unintentionally inspired this story element), someone typoed the word "podcasts" as "podcats".

At which point I latched onto this and decided a podcat HAD to be a sci-fi creature now.

Podcats are an alien creature that, as the name suggests, hatch out of pods--specifically out of what appear to be seedpods on the alien plants on their home planet. When they hatch out they are kitten-sized and grow over the course of a year to the size of a fully-grown Earth cat. They have large round eyes; skin in various shades of red, brown, or green; and thick "fur" that forms a mane and a tuft on the end of their tail (there is no fur on the rest of their bodies--some have a tiny amount of hair similar to what might be found on some leaves, others have an almost scale-like texture)--this comes in a variety of colours, has a texture very similar to real fur, but is shed once a year so that the spores can grow into the plants which more podcats will hatch out of.

Other physical features vary between varieties. Their eyes are much like cats' eyes except for their large round shape, and coming in a wider range of colours. Some types of podcat have a ridge along their spine similar to a ridgeback dog. They tend to have 2 or 3 rows of teeth, though their teeth are otherwise similar to those of Earth cats. They can also have up to three tails.

Podcats are found in the wild and can survive well in the wild, but can also be kept as pets. While they hunt and eat small animals in a similar way to Earth cats, they don't need to eat nearly as often, as they can survive for some time via photosynthesis--this makes them more popular pets than Earth cats for many spacefarers.

Speaking of trends from the past, I want to bring up a particularly furry one. Specifically, furbys! Did you collect them? Did you long to collect them? Did you find them creepy?

Let me know!

BUT--I also want to know about a small cute or creepy critter from your story!

[robinswrites]

Well, this prompt was perfect for my space sci-fi WIP!

I think the Firefly influences on Karo are very obvious as are the cyberpunk/Matrix influences on the android designs (is it cheating to use the Heroforge models I made of the characters on my moodboard instead of just images from other things? ah well, they look cool) and even though I'm not that into Star Wars anymore, it was a big early influence on the whole thing.

The Fifth Element, meanwhile, was not really an influence on the story at all but has a cool aesthetic.

Are you ready for a moodboard prompt? Good! Because I've got a very specific one for you. I want you to make a moodboard for your story, but I want it to be retro. I want to look at it and think, yeah, this is a blockbuster from the late nineties or the early 2000s for SURE. I want to think it belongs to a movie I've just picked up off the shelf of my local video store, and rent it KNOWING it is cheesy as all get out!

[robinswrites]

IN A WORLD… Where the rebellion failed 15 years ago, plunging the Galaxy into bloodshed and tyranny… [Shot of Imperial troops marching about ominously.] An outlawed rebel hero is recruited for a dangerous mission. If he succeeds, the Galaxy could be free at last. [Karo piloting Raptor during a spaceship battle.] Recruited by a mysterious alien-- [Cyfar smirks: "Well, I suppose you could say I like the underdogs."] Into a team of outcasts-- [Shot of Martax levitating, telekinetic energy building up around his hands.] [Shot of Takar drawing his plasma sword.] [Shot of Deilas sneaking around the enemy base.] [Shot of Karo blowing something up.] In a Galaxy divided-- [Si'tak and Rakal glaring at each other, drawing or about to draw their laser guns.] It's a battle for freedom, against all odds. HYPERSPACE RAPTOR: Brought to you by Raygun Gothic Productions. In theatres this summer.

Yes, I have a working title now!

You've introduced your story to us once. Now, I want you to do it again! This time, I want to hear you present it to me as if your story is an up-and-coming blockbuster.

Go all out! What would the name of the presenting studies be? How can you make your prompt match the grandeur of our Old Friend, Movie Preview Narrator? (also known as Don LaFontaine)

[robinswrites]

Oh Rakal "Rat" Vild, you were not meant to be important, but I love you.

Featuring lyrics from: I Think I'm Wonderful by The Damned; Vicious by Halestorm; Red Flag by Billy Talent.

Let’s make a moodboard! Specifically, let’s make moodboards your favorite side character in your story!

[robinswrites]

Well, one of my WIPs, Hyperspace Raptor, is something I first outlined when I was 14, so a lot has changed there--I started out in one genre, then later tried to force it into a different genre that I thought was more "grown-up", then went back to the original genre when I realised I should just write what I enjoy. I made an early attempt at drafting it out in 1st person, and now it will be in 3rd. The main character is trans now, which actually resolves some plot holes from my early attempt, where people didn't recognise someone they'd been quite close with 15 years before. And the actual plot has changed, because I initially thought it would be a trilogy, and now my plot outline is much more streamlined--all the good parts in one book, none of the stuff I added in because I felt it was obligatory for some things to not happen until book 2 or 3 so tried to stretch it out.

I also have a fantasy WIP that I haven't talked about on here yet, which when I first had the idea as a teenager involved a magic school, and is now a university instead.

My other WIPs haven't changed so drastically because they're more recent projects so I haven't changed drastically as a person since starting them, though I've had a few cases of a character who wasn't meant to be important taking on a much bigger role than I expected.

Just like Mareen is going on a journey. writers go on journeys too. I want to hear a little bit about yours. What changes have you made during the time you've been writing? Have you changed genres? Have you changed styles? Have you gone from being against including certain subjects to loving them?

[robinswrites]

Reblogging now that I have a (working) title: HYPERSPACE RAPTOR!

WIP: Hyperspace Raptor

It's a retro pulp sci-fi novel, but queer!

15 years ago, Karo Jaak--then going by a different name--was an idealist. 15 years ago, he and his small group of loyal friends believed they could end injustice forever. 15 years ago, he led the revolution to a glorious victory--and then everything went wrong. Near-fatally injured in the battle that led to the rebels' victory, Karo was in a coma for months, his life only saved by advanced cybernetic implants. He woke up to find that the rebels had won--and then turned on each other, rumours of betrayal flying, friends killing friends. Several of the rebel leaders were missing, presumed killed. Others are fugitives. And a mysterious woman whose real name and past are entirely unknown has declared herself Empress. The Galaxy falls into tyranny, and Karo goes on the run, living for years as a smuggler and a fugitive. He's changed a lot in the past 15 years: new name, new gender, and a newfound disillusionment with heroic causes and ideals. But as tensions between humans and the Galaxy's various alien species grow, and rumours spread that the android labourers used throughout human civilisation are planning a rebellion of their own, Karo is contacted by a mysterious alien who wants him to take up the rebel cause again and fix the mistakes of the past.

FEATURING:

TRANS MAN PROTAGONIST

FOUND FAMILY REBEL CREW

ANDROIDS FIGHTING FOR EQUALITY

VARIOUS ALIEN CULTURES (all of which see gender differently)

SPACE BATTLES: LASER GUNS, PLASMA SWORDS, AND EXPLOSIONS

PODCATS (a creature I invented thanks to a typo--sadly I can no longer find the original message so don't know whose typo it was, so can't properly credit them...)

ELECTRIC SHARKS (that make your brain fall out? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23VI35X6cmA because while I know Lux isn't singing "shark" I can't unhear it)

This is the novel I've been working on in some form or another since I was about 14. At that age, I had big ideas, but a lot of things holding me back: for one, I was reading a lot of websites that insisted that Serious Hard Science Fiction was the only good form of science fiction and was trying to force my ideas into that mould even though most of the stories I loved and that had inspired me to write were not that at all; I also believed everything had to be a trilogy, even when I really only had enough plot for one book; and let's face it, I was 14 and didn't have the life experience or skill to tell the story I wanted to tell.

But I loved the characters I'd created and the world they lived in enough that I couldn't just abandon the idea forever. So now it's back, being entirely rewritten, and this time I fully intend to finish and publish it.

Character intros coming soon!