Must write faster!
Oct. 20th, 2007 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI was in the library today, looking at all the bad science fiction writers who seem to have wild books of derring-do on the shelves. Some of them seemed to be terrific rehashes of themes that have been beaten about since the 1950s, soldiers doing soldiery things, AIs doing HAL-ish things, and so on. And I started to angst because, really, the one big thing missing from my first Caprice Starr novel was, well, the big thing. Every good SF book's got one. Something huge falls from the sky was a popular one for a while. Set us up the bomb. Illyan Simon forgetting himself for a moment at dinner. That sort of big thing.
I hadn't come up with one. I was thinking, I should have everything I needed: I had corruption, and pecadillos that bordered on the local culture's obscene-beyond-words, and threatened riots breaking out because the obscene-beyond-words gets mistranslated into a different kind of obscenity. I had the bright, slightly neurotic heroine with the mysterios background, the sad mysterious sidekick, the mustache-twirling villain (man, the priest with a rubber fetish was a godsend), I had the ready-to-explode Slums of Mars ™, full of a half-million down-and-outers marooned in underground tenements arcologies maintained by a Mars Agricultural Syndicate resentful at the constant, government-imposed upkeep of an aging, creaky infrastucture and its ungrateful occupants...
Oh.
Must write faster.
I hadn't come up with one. I was thinking, I should have everything I needed: I had corruption, and pecadillos that bordered on the local culture's obscene-beyond-words, and threatened riots breaking out because the obscene-beyond-words gets mistranslated into a different kind of obscenity. I had the bright, slightly neurotic heroine with the mysterios background, the sad mysterious sidekick, the mustache-twirling villain (man, the priest with a rubber fetish was a godsend), I had the ready-to-explode Slums of Mars ™, full of a half-million down-and-outers marooned in underground tenements arcologies maintained by a Mars Agricultural Syndicate resentful at the constant, government-imposed upkeep of an aging, creaky infrastucture and its ungrateful occupants...
Oh.
Must write faster.
