I’ve long held that a story I’ve started writing must reach a certain “critical mass” in order for me to carry it through to completion. This critical mass might be defined as the written length — the word/page count — beyond which I will not, can not stop writing. A story which might become a novella (or longer), for instance, seems to hit critical mass at about 10,000 words. At this point, the narrative has so much momentum in my head that it’s a force in its own right: I know enough about the characters and the story to know how little I really know about them, and how much I want to find out.
(I’m pretty sure many/most other writers feel the same way, incidentally, although we’ve probably all got different critical masses.)
Mostly, this is just a descriptive figure, not a prescriptive one. It’s an observation which seems to have held true in the past and (as I expect) will likely hold true in the future, not a make-or-break target.
For the piece I’m working on now, though, I seem to be approaching — perhaps have already crossed — a different and perhaps unquantifiable threshold: a critical mass of research.
Science-Fiction Plus, April 1953
The thing is a science-fiction story. I’d prefer to keep most of the storyline under wraps, obviously. (Not hard to do: I’ve written only a few thousand words of it.) But in developing that storyline, some things have happened to it which result, I believe, entirely from the weight of the answers I’ve accumulated so far: answers to dozens, hundreds, an avalanche of questions I have asked myself about the background.
The first element of this background is the world — including the time as well as the places — in which events unfold.
To start: I must tell you that although I’ve read science fiction for a long time (okay, okay…) decades, I’ve not studied it much, let alone become immersed in it. I’ve never subscribed to a science-fiction magazine. My approach to reading SF has been unsystematic, to say the least. I’ve read lots of short stories, some novellas, and a goodly number of novels.
But I’ve never been the sort of fan who can claim to have read everything by (say) Asimov or Heinlein, LeGuin or “Tiptree,” Simak or Van Vogt. They’ve all contributed something, but it’s not much more than a giant, unstructured stew: I can remember the bite and savor of particular spoonsful — some of them quite large — but don’t necessarily have the chefs’ names at my fingertips.
Given this background of casual ignorance, you may understand why I thought, or imagined I thought, my first approach to the current story to be utterly original…
If you slogged through any of my “first draft composed online, and never revised” serial, The Propagational Library, you may recall my first attempt to introduce something (as I thought) new: a disembodied protagonist. Without the human body and its various issues, I thought, you could live pretty much forever — to the extent of being able to “travel” to any point in the past, anywhere in the universe. You couldn’t interact with any of it, of course — you couldn’t take souvenirs (except possibly intangible ones: memories, conceptions, and other mental constructs), but on the other hand you also couldn’t leave any footprints.
But in the TPL series I did some Mandrake-the-Magician-style hand-waving, you bet. Some of this I intended; much of it was unconscious but inevitable — in composing it on the fly, I couldn’t stop and back up for do-overs built on more sustained research and thought.
Some months ago, I wrote and then spent some more months revising a longish story with a Brand! New! Solution! to the classic interstellar time-and-space difficulties. One aspect of this solution I still believe — after much more investigation — to be original. But the setting, very important to the solution… eh, not so much:
Suppose, I thought, we could build interstellar living quarters for many, many people inside an asteroid. (I’d fairly recently read Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow novels, which housed several people within an asteroid for an interstellar flight. But I wanted thousands of people.) Protection from meteor strikes and cosmic rays! Built-in raw materials for (some) things during the trip, especially fuel but even water!
This general idea, I have learned, is not so new. It’s not always, but often is, based on using an asteroid as the vessel.
One early example was proposed in a non-fiction piece for a science-fiction magazine, in the early 1950s — way before (probably) I’d even looked at the sky very much. This was an article called “Interstellar Flight,” by a Leslie R. Shepherd, in the April 1953 issue of the short-lived Science Fiction Plus. That’s the cover of the issue, above. (The cover’s title: “Thousand-Year Space Ark,” by classic pulp illustrator Alex Schomburg.)
If you’ve got a Scribd subscription, you can download the entire article as it was reprinted in 1953’s The Complete Book of Outer Space, complete with many illustrations. If you don’t have a subscription, here are the first couple two-page spreads [620KB PDF] to whet your appetite.
Anyhow, in reading about what is generally referred to as the generation starship sub-genre of science fiction, I’ve had to confront many of the same issues as earlier authors who proposed this kind of interstellar travel. (Luckily, I’d already considered some of them in the story I wrote last summer.) Among other things, I’ve had to investigate:
- radio signal strength, and its relation to distance
- the geometries — separate and together — of cubes and spheres
- Creole cooking
- Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (both his original novel and the film series)
- cargo cults
- approaches (including fictional ones) to maintaining artificial gravity
- (de)constructing housing from a single large block of material
- population dynamics and sustainability
- what asteroids are made of and are generally “like” (especially deep within — e.g., big enough to have a molten core?)
- the speed of thought
- Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria,” or NOMA
- what is sleep?
- interstellar/celestial navigation
- star types
Etc.
I’ve undertaken (apparently) book-sized research projects before. So what makes this different? Before, it was always a case of “work out the narrative, and research as needed during the writing.” But for this one… I wasn’t sure if I had enough narrative in the first place, so I was just noodling around with some (a few) open questions I had about the setting and so on. As the research effort has expanded, and expanded, and expanded, suddenly I’m getting both new plot points clicking into place, and answers to problems I didn’t even know I had with the existing story.
Don’t worry: I know (have experienced plenty of) the dangers of using research as a procrastination tool. This time around, however, masses of research are building up all the internal pressure of narrative normally supplied by masses of verbiage. A marathon is coming.
It’s cool, but also a bit… disconcerting. But mostly cool.
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