I’m very lucky to have Keith Stevenson visiting the blog today to talk about writing and his science fiction novel, Horizon.
Can you tell us a bit about your new novel?
Horizon is a science fiction thriller, where personal and political differences between a small group of space explorers play out in the cramped confines of a starship far from Earth, with repercussions for the future survival of the rest of humanity. I wanted to write something that set believable characters, with their own fears, weaknesses and biases, in an extraordinary situation while addressing the key issue of our time: climate change, how we respond – or fail to respond – to it and what that means for our future. It also has quite a bit of cool science about travelling through space and exploring new planets, but at its heart it’s an adventure story.
Keith can tell us a bit about yourself?
Well I’m originally from Scotland, but settled in Australia in 1989 and now live in Wollongong. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some really cool projects, firstly as submissions manager and later editor of Aurealis Magazine, and organising convenor of the Aurealis Awards when they were still in their relative infancy; then founding my own publishing company coeur de lion with fellow author Andrew Macrae, publishing a lot of excellent Australian spec fic authors (and picking up more than a few awards); running the Terra Incognita speculative fiction podcast which featured the best Australian speculative fiction read by the authors who created it; and most recently launching Dimension6 the free and DRM-free electronic spec fic magazine.
All through that time, and even before, I’ve always been writing. I actually started writing horror stories for a class magazine in primary school. I’m a really slow writer, so I’ve only had a handful of short stories published in Aurealis Magazine, Agog! Fantastic Fiction, and ASIM. And Horizon took a lot of time to come together.
Tell us a bit about why you are write SF?
I love he hopefulness of science fiction, even when it’s SF where bad stuff happens, because at the very least it posits a future where humanity still survives. When I was a kid I read in a junior encyclopaedia that the sun would eventually swell up and destroy the Earth, killing everyone on the planet. That really upset me, regardless of the fact that fate was billions of years in the future. It was pretty soon after I discovered science fiction and realised that was our escape plan – the future imagined by SF writers is a future that has to come about in order to save us all.
Later as I read more and more, I understood that SF was also an ideal way to dissect and interrogate the present, magnifying trends or playing out ‘what ifs’ to demonstrate the underlying truth of the world around us. And it’s a genre that lends itself easily to amazing, adventurous stories. It’s an incredibly powerful and underrated genre. There should be more of it.
I understand that you have been working on this novel [for a long time?]. What kept you going back to this story?
First novels are pretty daunting. I was lucky because Horizon was my ‘project novel’ while I was studying Professional Writing Course, so my approach was very structured. I had to write a proposal for my tutor, exploring the ideas and forms I wanted to portray, and a detailed chapter by chapter synopsis, and then turn in 3,000 words every fortnight for group critting. By the end of it, I had 60,000 words of fairly robust text, which was a big leg up to getting the thing finished. Of course it still took a long time to finish, but I had developed the characters so much that I wanted to see how it all panned out for them, and how believable I could make the whole story. It’s the same with the space opera I’m writing, which I talk a little more about below. Those books have taken me years, but I have to go back to finish the story because I owe it to my protagonist. I’ve made a promise that I won’t leave him high and dry. But I’m also just enjoying writing a massive adventure.
Can you tell us a bit about what’s coming next (is there a sequel)?
Horizon was always envisaged as a standalone. There’s room for a prequel based on the events on Earth as well as a sequel, but I like the story as it is. The crew learn what’s happened on Earth while they’ve been in hibernation and the book ends with a very neat jumping off point that leaves the reader to imagine what might happen next. My focus was on the character interplay as part of the present action and how they deal with the dangers and threats that face them.
What are you working on at the moment?
Aha, well this is another long term project. The Lenticular Series trilogy is a huge galaxy-spanning space opera with lots of alien species, space battles etc., which will hopefully see the light of day in a couple of years. It has at its core a really strong character study of a person (alien actually) who loses everything, achieves some sort of redemption but almost destroys himself in the process. That’s really given me a solid backbone to build lots of action and intrigue around and I’m really enjoying writing on such a big canvas.
What is your writing process? (planner, panster, write every day, write sporadically, writers block etc).
I map out key plot beats, where I know characters will end up at point A, B, C on the storyline and then I tend to just write towards that beat. I prefer to write longhand for the first draft, because it really slows me down to think about the action as it’s unfolding. It also lets me follow impulses (and maybe stray off the main throughline to explore and develop related ideas). That’s allowed me to build in whole side plots I hadn’t considered in the planning stage. I pretty much go at that day in day out until I’ve written through to the end point – which may not be the end point I envisaged at the start. After that it’s into the rewrite phase, interrogating what I’ve written and trying to coalesce it and also look for missed opportunities, things that are not working, or aren’t fresh enough and so on. At some point I’ll sub the ms to Serapeum, which is a group of Australian writers who meet every year or so and is solely focused on novel development. If I please those guys, I know I’m on the right track. Then it’s more rewrites until I think it’s ready – to be put through the wringer by an editor, that is!
I’ve never encountered writer’s block. I tend to stop writing in the middle of a scene, so I know where to pick things up the next day. Richard Harland does something similar and he’s never been afflicted with it either.
What do you prefer drafting the story or revising and reworking?
I really like the discovery of first drafts. It’s almost dreamlike the way lines of dialogue float onto the page. But I also love the invention of revising, when you’ve just read something you wrote a while back and it suddenly falls into place with something else, creating possibilities you hadn’t considered before.
What part of writing do you find hardest?
Making it right. Work can always be improved and at some point you have to trust someone else – an editor – to help you do that. A fresh set of eyes really makes a difference and I am very much in awe of what a really good trade editor can do across a whole spectrum of things from making ideas gel better to really making the language sing. Authors are often too close to their work to do that for themselves.
What do you plan to work on next?
Well I need to redraft book 2 of The Lenticular and then start on drafting book 3. That will keep my busy for a long while, I suspect. After that I have an urban thriller I worked on as a screenplay with Paul Haines many years back. I’d love to dust that off and see if it can be turned into a novel.
Thank you, Keith. Those are some very insightful and indepth answers. Here is the book cover image and the blurb.
Horizon book cover
Thirty-four light years from Earth, the explorer ship Magellan is nearing its objective – the Iota Persei system. But when ship commander Cait Dyson wakes from deepsleep, she finds her co-pilot dead and the ship’s AI unresponsive. Cait works with the rest of her multinational crew to regain control of the ship, until they learn that Earth is facing total environmental collapse and their mission must change if humanity is to survive.
As tensions rise and personal and political agendas play out in the ship’s cramped confines, the crew finally reach the planet Horizon, where everything they know will be challenged.
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“Refreshingly plausible, politically savvy, and full of surprises, Horizon takes you on a harrowing thrill-ride through the depths of space and the darkness of the human heart.” – Sean Williams, New York Times bestselling author of the Astropolis and Twinmaker series
“Crackling science fiction with gorgeous trans-human and cybernetic trimmings. Keith Stevenson’s debut novel soars.” – Marianne De Pierres, award-winning author of the Parrish Plessis, Sentients of Orion and Peacemaker series
You can say hi to Keith on Twitter and Facebook and on his blog.
https://www.facebook.com/keithstevensonwriter
@stevenson_Keith
Donna Maree Hanson, Author and PhD Candidate 