Someone responding to my sample posted up on Youwriteon.com, which deserves a plug, as it is a very useful place to get feedback on your writing, once told me I should change Gaia’s name as it had been used in another adventure novel. I didn’t point out that it had also been used in Lovelock’s The Gaia Hypothesis, which is where the idea to use it came from. Gaia doesn’t really like the name, though she understands why her parents gave it to her. It is central to her self-image, but she dearly wishes they hadn’t hung such a hippy-sounding tile on her. She knows who she needs to be and does do what she has to, but she’s also very conscious of who she’d like to be and fashions an identity around that image.
In the first version of this story, Gaia didn’t come in at all. I hadn’t thought of her. The book got to the point where it finishes now and stopped there. It was a good place for it to stop and that’s why it still does, but I had no idea what happened after that point. I had already decided to make a virtue of this necessity and pretend I was being a bit edgy. What happened next to Phoebe and Adam, what had been happening outside while they had their adventure? I thought the reader could decide for themselves. This isn’t as naughty as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which cheats by not telling one story or the other, but it was still a bit weak. Fowles knew what his possible endings were and, as a story-teller, should have picked one and told it that way. He got away with it though, so had left an open window for me to do the same. I sent the book off to MacMillan New Writing and waited to become rich and famous.
That didn’t happen. While I was waiting for them not to publish (and no, I’m not surprised that they didn’t), I read Iain M Bank’s Feersum Endjin. It’s a brilliant book, I think possibly his best, and it caused me to think about the future of machine intelligence and the idea of a mind being stored inside a programme. I’m sure I’d seen The Matrix by then, but I hadn’t thought about it except as a way of abolishing the laws of Physics. Magic can work inside a computer programme – you just have to tell it to. At the time I hadn’t read anything about the idea of the Singularity though, so I wasn’t thinking about the idea of the abolishing of death. Once you get onto that a lot of other possibilities open up.
I sat back and thought a bit and realised that I did know where the story could go. I sat down and started to write the second book. Gaia was one of the first things I knew I would have to put in it. As soon as I had though, I realised that she could/would probably have to go into the first book. As she says, she isn’t in it, but it is a big part of her story.
I took the prologue that I’d written for the second book and put it at the front of the first. It considerably confused an already confusing beginning. Originally the story started with Adam becoming conscious in Newcastle, a part that hasn’t changed much since I first wrote it. After a while of people telling me they didn’t know what was going on, I decided I needed to give a bigger hint.
This is something I’m very reluctant to do. Orson Scott Card, writing his book on how to write SF and Fantasy, points out that the SF crowd are very good at ‘holding in abeyance’. They read, to nick an example from a book that my daughter Aki just introduced me to * , the term storking (the spelling is correct) and are quite happy to wait a page or so at least to find out that it means to dump an unwanted child on someone’s doorstep. In more extreme cases, and as long as enough hints are given, they are happy to hold off for a long time. In this I don’t see them as being any different from Mystery or Detective story fans. I don’t know for sure that Agatha Christie ever rushed to assure readers that the butler did it so that they wouldn’t get confused and fretful, but I doubt she’d have become such a big seller if she had. I read William Gibson, Iain M Banks, China Mieville , Philip K Dick and Neil Acherson. They all charge cheerfully into their stories knowing exactly where they are going and pretty much dare the reader to keep up.
So I wrote the next part of the prologue. That will come in a couple of posts’ time. To my mind, it pretty much tells you what is happening, but it still seems to throw some people who can’t join the dots between it and the first posts by Adam and Phoebe. Tough. That’s all they are getting. Anything more would be a spoiler, akin to telling everyone that there are no butlers here, which I’m not promising.
Anyway, getting back to Gaia. She means every word that she says about the End Days and resurrection. How real these concepts are to her and what the implications of that are to others doesn’t become obvious until book three, tentatively titled Resurrection, by which time the reader might have worked out a lot about her. She may have another prologue appearance in book two, working title Virus, but I’m still thinking about that. This wasn’t my original prologue. I have a very clear idea of what Gaia looks like and how she sounds in ordinary life. After a bit more thought, however, I realised that she’d have to assume a disguise and present herself as two different personalities. I think I can tell you that and still not give away anything. When I finally get round to writing Resurrection, it shouldn’t get in the way of anyone reading it to know that Gaia isn’t going by her own name in it. I’ll post the original prologue just for interest and then move on to the second part of the current prologue after that. Step by step.
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