Anatomy of a Story: The Amber Room

It occurred to me some people might find it interesting to learn how I came up with the ideas for my stories, how I approached those ideas, and what I was trying to achieve with the stories which resulted.

First up is 'The Amber Room', which was published in Pantechnicon #9 in March 2009. If I were to write a blurb for the story, it would go something like this:

Tina lives in a museum, but this museum contains all the lost art treasures of the world. They were found by her boyfriend Chris, who has an amazing ability: he can visit alternate universes. That's where he "found" the lost art treasures.

Here's a PDF of the 'The Amber Room'; so you can read it before reading the rest of this post.

The idea for the story came to me sometime in March 2007. As far as I recall, it was inspired by the real-life Amber Room itself, mention of which I'd stumbled across somewhere on the Web. I wanted to use it in a story, but, of course, it was lost. So why not write a story about it being found? And since I write science fiction, why not have it found in an alternate universe? In fact, why not have an entire museum filled with "lost" works of art which had been found in alternate universes?

But that's not actually a story. It needs a plot, characters... a beginning, middle and end...

I remember banging out a first draft in pretty much a single sitting. In that original version, the story focused on Chris, the universe-hopping "art thief", and was structured as a series of vignettes from his life in no particular chronological order. But it had the same sting in the tail: the identity of Chris' girlfriend, that she was him from an alternate universe in which his "parents" had had a daughter.

I emailed the draft to a group of friends to see what they thought to it. We've been emailing each other stories and novel excerpts for several years now; I value their comments. They liked the central premise, but not the way I'd chosen to tell the story. I rewrote it, making Tina the central character and giving the narrative a linear structure. I sent this second draft to my friends. They liked it a great deal better. However, they still weren't keen on the ending - initially, the story explained that Tina and Chris were alternate versions of each other. I changed that, made it, well, subtle - i.e., having Tina look at a pair of photographs which reveal the truth... And that too nicely linked in with the Amber Room and the whole concept of "lost" art, turning it into a metaphor of the central relationship. Sometimes, you get to a point in a story where all the choices you made earlier, without really knowing why you made them, suddenly slot together and it all works.

After that, it was simply a matter of refining and polishing the prose. At one point, it occurred to me that since the Amber Room featured four mosaics depicting the five senses, then I should do the same in the story. So every section is written such that it references each of the five senses, beginning with Tina hearing something, then seeing, then touching, and so on.

For example, from the first section: we have "The slam of the door echoed in memory, but she heard now only the metronome click of her heels on the marble steps" (sound). Later in the same section is, "The windows to her right painted great rectangles of sunlight on the floor" (sight). Then "Whenever in the Room, she felt a desire to run her fingers over the mosaics' tessellae..." (touch), and "The Room soothed her, calmed her. It smelled of history" (er, smell). And finally, "... the wine tasted unnaturally full-bodied and rich to her" (taste). It's not always a smooth progression - and looking back at the story now, I can see a couple of places where I slipped up and used a sight reference in a line that should have been sound reference, and so on.

Choosing to use the senses in this way also proved useful as it provided a framework for the descriptive writing. Because I could only use imagery specific to the sense referenced at that point in the narrative, I had to think harder about my sentences and word-choices. Take the line "She glanced back up the cochlea-curve of the staircase". Originally, I'd used "nautilus-curve", which was the image I wanted; but "cochlea" is hearing-related, and of a similar shape, so I used that instead. And I think it works better too.

Then there was the research. Every single piece of art mentioned in the story is real, and very much lost. When you're writing, research should hurt. You need to get everything right. Sf is not like it used to be - you can't just blithely invent stuff, or wave an authorial hand in front of the reader. Like you, readers have got access to the Internet, and they can fact-check as well as you can. Science fiction doesn't mean you can make it up as you go along. On the contrary, it's harder to write because you can't rely on readers' assumptions or common knowledge.

And, I should point out, it was while researching more about the Amber Room that I learnt of the four mosaics it contained. Which I then fed back into the story as a framework for the prose in each section. So none of it was wasted.

As for the roll call of alternate history sf mentioned on page four... The novels and stories mentioned are all ones I've read, and some of them I admire a great deal. Sticking 'The Amber Room' in among them was just my attempt at a little postmodern humour. And the "two films - different futures dependent upon whether or not a train was caught" on page seven... Most people have realised that one is Sliding Doors; the other is Blind Chance by Krzysztof Kieslowski.

'The Amber Room' was a deliberate attempt to write a "literary" sf story. I wasn't interested in exploring the central premise. I was interested in the premise's effect on two people and their relationship. How their relationship came about, how it was progressing. And I wanted the story to be about politics too, about the complicity and greed of politicians. Yes, I could have written a story in which Chris uses his experiences of all those alternate universes to create the perfect political system, or to help humanity reach the stars, or something equally sfnal... But that would be a different story and, to tell the truth, I'm not that interested in writing sf which privileges the central idea. I see the premise, the sfnal aspect of the story, as an enabling device - it enables a story that could not take place without it, that could not be transposed into another genre. If you can swap out the furniture and change the labels, and the story remains unchanged, then it's not science fiction.

'The Amber Room' is by no means perfect - there are rough spots in it. But I achieved what I set out to do with it, and I stand by it. I was disappointed it received so many rejections - five, according to my records - before Pantechnicon took it. I thought it was better than that; I still do. I'd like to think others do as well. And I'd like to think others have found this dissection of it informative and useful.

I hope to do the same soon for the other story of mine I've posted here: 'Thicker Than Water'.

Thicker Than Water

My story 'Thicker Than Water' was published in Jupiter magazine's January 2009 issue. Unlike 'The Amber Room' (see here), it received a couple of reviews and was described as an "exciting story" (SFRevu) and "a good story with much promise, atmospheric and exciting" (SF Crowsnest). SF Site was less complimentary - "I was not really convinced ... either by the motivations of anyone involved, nor by the potentially interesting conclusion, which is not sufficiently a part of the rest of the story." For the record, 'Thicker Than Water' was inspired by the story of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. Click the link below to download the story in PDF format.

Thicker Than Water

The Amber Room

My story 'The Amber Room' was published in March this year by Pantechnicon magazine. But there appear to be problems with the magazine's web site, so I'm putting a copy of the story here on my blog. Click on the link below to download the story in PDF format.

The Amber Room

Favourite SF Stories

SF Signal today posted a couple of Mind Melds on "Memorable Short Stories to Add to Your Reading List" parts one and two. An excuse, in other words, to ask a bunch of people to name their favourite genre stories.

So I thought I'd do the same - list my favourite stories, that is. And here they are in chronological order of publication (where copies exist online, I've linked to them):

'Aye, And Gomorrah', Samuel R Delany - first appeared in Dangerous Visions (1967), edited by Harlan Ellison, and while much of the contents of that anthology weren't exactly memorable, Delany's story has stuck with me through the years. It's very 1960s, very lyrical, and notably thin on plot. But I think it's the evocativeness of the prose which appeals most.

'And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill Side', James Tiptree, Jr - was originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction's March 1972 issue, although I read it in Tiptree's collection 10,000 Light-Years From Home. This story is a classic, a simple idea approached using an entirely original angle of attack. It's bleak and a perfect antidote to most space opera. Everyone who likes space opera should read it.

'The Lake of Tuonela', Keith Roberts - was a more recent discovery for me (see here). It first appeared in New Writings in SF 23 (1973), edited by Kenneth Bulmer, but I read it in Roberts' collection The Grain Kings. Roberts' prose is impressive, and in this story he manages to evoke the titular lake, and the long tunnel to it, with some beautiful writing. If the story had actually done more, and had managed to really evoke its alien setting, then it would have been very nearly perfect.

'A Little Something For Us Tempunauts', Philip K Dick - I first read in the anthology in which it was first published, Final Stage (1974), edited by Edward L Ferman & Barry N Malzberg; and which was, I think, one of the first sf books my parents bought for me. It also contains one of the few Harlan Ellison stories I remember liking, 'Catman'. Like the Delany above, this is another story which is very much of its time - it feels very early 1970s to me, all Apollo and Grateful Dead and the like. But that works very much in its favour.

'Air Raid', John Varley - was originally published under the name Herb Boehm in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine Spring 1977 issue, because Varley already had a novelette, 'Goodbye, Robinson Crusoe', in the issue. 'Air Raid' was adapted as film, Millennium, and Varley later expanded his own screenplay into a novel, also titled Millennium. The story's premise is certainly original - people from the future snatch passengers from planes just before they crash in order to repopulate their own time - and the pace never lets up from start to finish. The later novel rounds out the background and characters, and adds an interesting twist in that the different narratives follow the events of the plot in a different order, but the original story's brevity gives the central idea greater impact.

'The Gernsback Continuum', William Gibson - was first published in Universe 11 (1981), edited by Terry Carr, but also appears in Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling. Elegiac is not a word I'd normally associate with Gibson's prose, but it's certainly one that fits this story. For all its insistence of looking forward, sf has a curious tendency to gaze fondly at its past, and at the futures of its past. 'The Gernsback Continuum' is an excellent description of that tendency.

'A Gift From The Culture', Iain M Banks - is the first of three Interzone stories on this list. Interzone is probably my chief source of short sf, and has been since I first subscribed to the magazine back in the late 1980s. 'A Gift from the Culture' appeared in #20, Summer 1987, but can also be found in Banks's only collection to date, The State of the Art. Banks's Culture is one of the great sf invented universes, and 'A Gift from the Culture' is one of the few pieces of short fiction set in that universe. It's also quite a sad story and, like 'A Little Something For Us Tempunauts', there's an inexorable quality to its resolution - although it's driven by character and emotion, rather than the laws of physics.

'Forward Echoes', Gwyneth Jones - is another Interzone story, this time from #42, December 1990. A slightly reworked version was also published three years later as 'Identifying the Object' in a chapbook collection of the same name from Swan Press. 'Forward Echoes' introduced the two main characters of Jones's novel White Queen, and the Aleutians, the alien race of that novel and its sequels North Wind and Phoenix Café (and, of course, the recent and excellent Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant - see here). I think what first appealed to me about this story was its strangeness. It's one of the most sfnally-evocative (to coin a phrase) stories I've ever read.

'FOAM', Brian Aldiss - was later expanded into a section of Aldiss's 1994 novel, Somewhere East of Life. In 1991, Gollancz relaunched the magazine New Worlds as a paperback anthology edited by David S Garnett (in those days, Garnett was almost ubiquitous), and the story first appeared in that. Aldiss manages to layer strangeness upon strangeness in a somewhat picaresque plot set in the central Asian republics in the near-future (as was). This is another story, like the Jones, which makes something peculiar and sfnal of our world.

'The Road To Jerusalem', Mary Gentle - is the third and final Interzone story, from #52, October 1991. It's also the only alternate (alternative) history story in the list. In it, the knights templar have continued to exist to the present, and the world is a very different place. But it's only as the story progresses does it become clear exactly how different.

The most recent story of the ten above is nearly eighteen years old. Which means it's probably about time I brought the list up-to-date. I've certainly read some excellent stories published since Mary Gentle's 'The Road to Jerusalem', but none seem to have stuck with me as much as the above ones have done. Perhaps I need to read stories a couple of times before they grow on me enough to be tagged as "favourites". Perhaps that's an exercise for another day - looking back over the short fiction I have access to which was published after 1991, and seeing if any of them have the same impact on me the above ten did.

PDF of Pantechnicon 9 Now Available

Containing my story, 'The Amber Room'. Download it from here.

Doing the Hugos - an update

Asimov's have finally put their Hugo nominated story and novellas on their web site. So here's my thoughts on:

'From Babel's Fallen Glory We Fled', Michael Swanwick (Asimov's Feb 2008)
An interesting story. I can't decide if it's taking the piss or a little bit lazy. The meta-fictional framing feels like an afterthought, and the typographical tricks for the alien's speech feel like Swanwick is having a sly laugh at his readers. There are some nice ideas in the story, but it feels too thin a treatment, as if it should have been longer and more detailed. It's a great deal better than Resnick's story, and not as inconsequential as the Kowal, but the Chiang and Johnson still have it beat.

As four of the five novellas are now available, I'll work my way through those. It might take a while - they're the longest of the "short" lengths, as long as an old-style novel in fact. Sadly, the missing novella is the one I really wanted to read. For the record, the shortlist is as follows:

The Erdmann Nexus', Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
'The Political Prisoner', Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
'The Tear', Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
'True Names', Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
'Truth', Robert Reed (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)

Incidentally, a point of order. Mike Resnick's 'Article of Faith' was first published in Postscripts #15 in September 2008. According to the Hugo shortlist, it was published in Jim Baen's Universe in October 2008. But that would be a reprint. At the very least, the Hugo committee should correctly attribute the magazine in which the story was first published.

Pantechnicon 9 out now

Pantechnicon 9, containing my story 'The Amber Room' is now available. Read it here.

At present, the contents have been posted to the web site, but the PDF version is not yet available.

I'll post links to reviews, as and when and if they appear....

Doing the Hugos, Part 1

First, I have to confess I won't be attending the Worldcon in Montreal, nor am I a supporting member. So I didn't nominate the shortlisted titles, nor will I be voting on them. Nonetheless, I have decided to read the shortlisted novellas, novelettes and short stories, and give my thoughts on them.

So. Short stories first....

'26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss' by Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Jul 2008)
While this is clearly a good story, it's not the sort of genre fiction I normally enjoy. The premise is whimsical, the treatment is whimsical, and I'm not a big fan of whimsy. Nevertheless, it's one of the stronger stories on the shortlist.

'Article of Faith' by Mike Resnick (Baen’s Universe Oct 2008)
I thought this was appalling: dated, dull, and wholly predictable. A new robot joins the staff of a small-town church and ends up wanting to worship. Cue arguments on whether robots have souls. Yawn. And who writes stories featuring these sorts of silly pulp sf robots - because, let's face it, if the robot is a stand-in for a foreigner, i.e., not-one-of-us, then why not actually use a foreigner and give the story more impact?

'Evil Robot Monkey' by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2)
What is this? The Year of the Monkey? Er no, it's actually the Year of the Ox. But the story. The title is a silly joke - the monkey in the story is a live Chimpanzee. A "smart" chimp, in fact. Who makes pots out of clay. The story is around four pages long in the mass market paperback Solaris anthology. It is mildly amusing and mostly inconsequential. It's not even the best story in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2.

'Exhalation' by Ted Chiang (Eclipse 2)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Chiang is one of the best writers of short science fiction currently being published. Which means every Chiang story is not only judged against all others published around the same time but against every other Chiang story. Which does him no favours. Especially in this case. 'Exhalation' is pretty much a thought experiment, with very little in the way of plot. It's well-written, but it failed for me in several aspects. It lectures the reader... and the explanation for this doesn't quite justify the up-front info-dumping. Further, the central premise isn't actually that interesting, and all the story does is provide a slow and cumbersome vehicle for the narrator to figure out that entropy exists.

'From Babel's Fall'n Glory We Fled' by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
This story is not yet available online, and I don't subscribe to Asimov's.

It is, overall, quite a poor selection of short stories, and I find it hard to believe they were the best last year had to offer. While I wouldn't have nominated Kij Johnson's, it's clearly the strongest of the bunch. Having said that, I've yet to read the Swanwick, so perhaps I should reserve judgment until I have done. All the same, the Chiang is a bit dull, the Kowal is inconsequential, and the Resnick is embarrassingly bad.

Now to read the novelettes....