Another Review

Here's a nice review of Crossover from Andi Shecter.

Worldcon

Well, I got back from Worldcon in LA on Tuesday, and only now feel up to blogging about it. That might have something to do with the 13 hours straight I spent sleeping on Tuesday night... two trans-Pacific flights in a week is a bit much.

Still, it was a great week, I did get to see a little of LA (Hollywood and its environs) and discovered that that part at least is actually very pleasant. If you have a few spare tens of millions to afford it. Otherwise it was just hotels and the convention center in Anaheim, and lots of sitting at the bar catching up with friends and making new ones. I wont single out individual people, because time spent with pretty much everyone was great fun... but I will single out the signing at the Borderlands table in the dealer's room as a highlight, for the very selfish reason that quite a lot of bookselling people from different chains came up to me and told me that Crossover was selling really well!

Female Characters

I get asked quite a bit why I like writing strong female characters. And the more I think about it, the more I realise it's not a simple question to answer.

Firstly, I like to cast against type. If there's a traditional stereotype for a particular kind of character, I'll always try to do something different. Given that my novels tend to have quite a bit of action in them, the lead character tends to be an 'action character' on one level, at least. Despite all the butt-kicking female characters that have been written, they still remain a small minority compared to all the male 'action characters' around the place, and I find my chances of originality increase dramatically with a female character.

Also, just because I have an 'action character' in the lead, doesn't mean that action is all that character does. I pride myself on being pretty good at characterisation -- it's always been my favorite thing to read in books, all the explosions in the world don't add up to one really good character to sympathise with. In a typical action story, whether in a novel, movie or TV show, the drama comes from asking the question, 'can the hero beat the bad guys?', usually in a straight up fight of some kind. With Cassandra Kresnov from Crossover, she's so lethal there's not ever really any doubt that she can, and will take the bad guys apart, in any straight-up fight. The drama comes from her asking, 'Why should I? And what does it cost me, and how can I live with myself afterwards?" Plus, of course, it's rarely a straight-up fight. I tend to get much more emotional depth from a female character, in answering those questions. Which might be a weak-point on my part, that I can't get as much emotional depth from male characters -- repressed masculinity and all that. But self-analysis beyond a certain point becomes boring, so at this point, I'll stick with what works.

Plus, at the risk of stating the obvious, butt-kicking girls are cool. Non-butt-kicking girls can also be cool, but femininity-as-doormat-or-ornament never interested me on any level. Masculinity neither, come to that. It's not a feminist statement, in that I'm not attempting to make any statement on BEHALF of any group, it's more just a rejection of the idea that any social classification should consign individuals to a small box, outside of which their personality and behavioral type should never venture. Thus I find the 'always manly' male characters in beer commercials tedious, and the 'always girly' women in clothes commercials tedious, and the 'always queer' gay characters in so many sitcoms and other shows pretty tedious too (although they often have the advantage of being genuinely funny, where the others are just annoying). I'm interested in people, not personality-mass-production. The best way to get to know the person, is often to construct them in some form of opposition to the social group into which people might normally classify them. And strong female characters are one way to do that.

Strategic Illiteracy

There's been a lot of talk, in circles of people who care about such things, about why it is that the world community has painted Israel as the bad guy in the latest fighting, and Hezbollah as... well, not the 'good guy', but as having lesser culpability for what we see on our TV screens. There have been many good points made about moral equivalence, and the increasing inability of many comfortable westerners to recognise that some ideologies in the world are simply impossible for liberal democracies to live with, let alone alongside, as Israel does. But I think I've thought of another dimension to the problem -- strategic illiteracy.

I've never served in the military (unless you count a year in air cadets as a kid (I might have stayed in longer if there'd been more aeroplanes, and less marching)) but I've always been interested in military affairs. When I was younger, this was because like many stupid kids, I thought war was cool -- then when I grew older, it was because I realised how important military issues are, and will likely remain, in today's world. Put another way, you can't understand anything that goes on in the world today, if you've no idea how wars are fought. Pick any flashpoint in the world, and underpinning every political initiative, every resolution, every summit and debate, is the issue of military strategy -- what is militarily possible, what it will likely cost, and what the respective potential combatants are prepared to pay. Every policy on North Korea is predicated on the knowledge of what any future war on the peninsula will look like. Ditto the mid-east, Iran, Cuba, Columbia, etc.

It's pretty clear to me, from reading or hearing the opinions of Israel's western critics in the current conflict, that most of them don't have much knowledge or interest in military strategy. Indeed, many regard a knowledge or interest of such things as morally suspicious. When you've no idea what the IDF is trying to do in Lebanon, it's easy to write it all off as barbarian-minded 'eye for an eye' stuff, and no better than what Hezbollah does. But if you take the time to read or listen to people who know, about what Israel is trying, and what Hezbollah is intending, then a picture begins to emerge. It's unpleasant, but it starts to make some sense.

How surprising, then, that most Israelis support the IDF's actions? Not merely are they the ones being attacked, Israel also has conscription, so most people have served, and they can see the strategic picture without needing to be convinced. And how surprising that the other nation to support Israel most strongly is the USA, where amongst half the population at least, military service remains an honorable concept? And how surprising that it's the Europeans, where military service has come to be regarded as something vaguely vulgar, who are most opposed to Israel's actions? It's not just that the Europeans aren't big fans of Israel, it's also that they simply don't understand WHY Israel's military must do the things it does. And the only people telling them what's going on are the media, who are of course the greatest strategic illiterates around.

This is why pacifists will never achieve peace -- their approach to war is like the Catholic Church's approach to the AIDS virus, they ignore the factual research, and preach matters of ideological principle at the expense of practical solutions, because those practial solutions offend their moral sensibilities. To cure the disease, you first must take an interest in understanding it. Once you study it enough, you might have a chance at, if not a vaccine, then at least a treatment of some sort. Disdain for the methods of warfare, like disdain for the workings of viruses, will only kill more people in the long run. Ignorance doesn't save lives, and never will.

What Price the Stars?

Virgin Galactic, and other suborbital tourism companies, are talking initial price offerings of 200,000, in either US dollars or UK pounds, for a seat on a suborbital flight. Now this is quite a bit more than they were initially saying, which was about 100,000. So were the earlier predictions of low prices overoptimistic?

I don't think so. Richard Branson has been saying that the latest price is for 'premium seats', meaning (I think) the first two hundred or so tickets sold. In other words, he's charging extra for the privilege of being among the first passengers, for the name-in-the-history-books thing. This is just sensible economics -- in other words, charge what the market will allow. Why ask a hundred grand from people willing to pay two hundred? It would also help pay off Virgin Galactic's overhead faster, and put the company in the black more quickly.

So how quickly could the prices come down, and where could they finish? Obviously it's impossible to predict precisely, but it's worth examining all the input costs to consider how fast it could decline. Firstly, there's the cost of the spacecraft itself. Let's just say that Spaceship Two, as it's being called, ends up costing somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million each. How much of that you pay in each ticket depends on how many times each vehicle flies. If you fly it once, then throw it away (as has constituted orbital spaceflight thus far) then your ticket will cost you all of that $30 million (divided by the number of seats on the spacecraft), plus extras. Virgin Galactic is much cheaper because Spaceship Two is reusable, so it's $30 million divided by the number of times it flies. The more it flies, the less that initial expenditure cost will show up in the ticket price. This is how airlines today can afford so many expensive aircraft -- they spend more time in the air, making money, than on the ground. Needless to say, if NASA ran an airline, it would fly each aircraft once, then throw it away, so your average ticket would cost a few million dollars.

Then there's fuel. My understanding is that fuel isn't actually that expensive on Spaceship Two (it's rubber and laughing gas) and will probably get cheaper as their flight-frequency increases, allowing them to order in bulk. Mass production makes everything cheaper -- witness every piece of consumer electronics ever to achieve success. That's because similar overheads can be employed to create much larger volumes of product. The same applies to space tourism operations -- Virgin Galactic will have spaceport fees, various licensing fees, engineers, pilots and staff to pay, catering and hospitality for its customers, etc. Much of this cost will remain constant, whether they fly ten times a year, or a hundred. Obviously, if it flies a hundred times a year, that will mean the overhead costs, divided by a hundred, thus meaning much less cost per ticket than if it only flew ten times a year.

So that's the initial market, which might bottom out at maybe $80,000 per seat. But flying 52 times a year, as Galactic say they intend to first up, and with six seats on each spacecraft... that's $480,000 revenue per flight... what, about $24 million a year, per spaceship? If they've two, that's $48 million etc. Obviously, if they could fly each ship twice a week instead of once, they'd double that. So here's the challenge thrown out to all the rocket developers out there -- make improved engines that can fly more frequently without sacrificing safety (say, once a day) and Galactic will happily buy your engine, because you'll be making them money. With promise of such a payoff, there's suddenly big incentive for new developments in engine technology. Ditto any other technologies out there that would make them money. Probably you'll have Spaceship Two Mark Two, and Mark Three, etc, as engines, heat shielding, avionics etc are upgraded... just like the latest Boeing 737s are so much more advanced than the first models, and for the same reasons of economic pressures.

Then there's the competition -- Rocketplane, Space Adventures, Blue Origin, etc. Once the market is established, no doubt there'll be others. Obviously, the company with the cheapest price will have an edge... not always THE edge, because there's more than just price at play here (I reckon if someone was offering rides to space for a buck fifty he wouldn't get many takers) but among reputable players, it will matter. From there, it's just the same old game of supply and demand. The price will hold up until there's more supply than demand (lots of operators, flying lots of spacecraft) and then the price will start coming down, and operators will be howling for new technology to let them fly more frequently, thus boosting their overall revenue as their revenue-per-seat declines. More frequent flights means more revenue, and declining prices mean more and more people can afford to fly. As the industry gets bigger, the economies of scale will increase, greater revenues will attract more and more money into technology investment, and soon enough you'll have people investing huge amounts of money in seriously reusable technologies -- stuff that could certainly be useful for orbital flight too.

At $100,000 per seat, I'd guess maybe one percent of the western population could afford to fly. If that came down to $15,000, maybe ten percent could afford it. Ten percent of America's population is 27 million people. And from there, it wouldn't take a genius to see same economic model would apply to orbital spaceflight too... and so the investment would start.

Theme Music

Ian McDonald does a nice thing in the back pages of River of Gods -- he has a 'soundtrack' page, listing the music that (I presume) he was listening to when he wrote it. I thought I'd post something similar for Crossover.

The opening scene was written to the first track of the Vangelis album 'The City', called 'Dawn'. If you know it, you might recognise the mood. The final scene was written to 'Malibu', by Hole, from 'Celebrity Skin'. The rest of it, I can't really remember... except that Tool's 'Anima' probably featured for some of the combat scenes. Tool is awesome for darkly futuristic visuals. In fact, Tool are awesome fullstop.

Writing fantasy at the moment as I am, I'm finding classical works better. I usually don't write with the music on, I just have it running around in my head... but lately, I'm finding that I can actually write with classical music playing. It's not so intrusive as rock. Rachmaninoff is terrific for mustering the kind of emotion that might inspire someone to charge headlong into an army of sword-wielding fanatics. I like jazz, too, but haven't quite found the literary sub-genre for a jazz-soundtrack in my head. Crime, maybe? I can't ever see myself writing crime, though it's likely I'll borrow some elements for an upcoming science-fiction idea that's still a few years off. Maybe then I'll be able to start crediting Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk...

Ten Questions

It seems I've been challenged to answer some questions.

1: One book that changed your life?

Probably anything from Douglas Hill's 'Last Legionary' series. As a kid, that was when I knew I loved this stuff and was hooked for life...

2: One book you have read more than once?

Cyteen, CJ Cherryh. Worth reading more than once because it's so densely written you can get something entirely new from it each time.

3: One book you'd want on a desert Island?

Dunno... something on fishing?

4: One book that made you laugh?

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein.

5: One book that made you cry?

Watership Down. Yeah, it was a while ago...

6: One book you wish had been written?

Several that I'm working on. I thought someone should write them, and further reckoned it should be me. Cunning, huh?

7: One book you wish you'd written?

If I'd written it, it wouldn't have been the same book. Unanswerable...

8: One book you are currently reading?

Inhaling the Mahatma, Christopher Kremmer

9: One book you have been meaning to read?

River of Gods, Ian McDonald

10: Now tag five people.

Condaleeza Rice, Nicolas Sarkozy, Danica Patrick, Hamid Karzai, Jodie Foster

Hey, I can wish, right?

More Reviews!

I'm having a nice run with reviews for Crossover so far. I wonder if everyone actually likes it this much, or if the people who hate it just don't bother posting reviews? Maybe I'd rather not know...

Here's one from Monsters and Critics, and another from the Philadelphia Weekly Press, which is online here