Wednesday 27 June 2012

The PI files (contains significant spoilers)

Clay's excellent timelime prompted me to dig out this material, which is all that remains of the notes I kept during the writing of Pushing Ice. (To be honest, there wasn't much more - a few back of the envelope calculations about acceleration, time dilation etc). I kept these because I felt they might come in handy when I came to write the much promised sequel, and I suppose they will.

First up is a handy breakdown of the organisational structure of the Rockhopper at the start of the novel. This is interesting because it rather obviously lays bare my thinking concerning the likely ethnic makeup of such a ship in the year 2057. It disappoints me that there is not a single Middle Eastern name, for instance, and only one name that could charitably be taken to indicate African origin. Obviously I could have done better, but it is what it is and any sequel would presumably have to draw largely on this pool of surnames.


Moving on, our next thrilling document is a breakdown of loyalties, depending on who I perceived to be nominally on Bella's side and nominally on Svetlana's. While it was easy to keep track of the core characters, and of course there was a certain amount of swapping of loyalties, I needed hard numbers to give the shipboard politicking some conviction.


In similar fashion, once the ship ended up on Janus, and the crew started founding the new settlement of Janus, I needed to keep tabs on who married who, births and deaths etc. This document shows the inhabitants of Crabtree in 2065, by Rockhopper's skewed dating system.


Finally, we come to some aliens. There's a mildly boring story attached to this one. I needed to conceptualise my main "good guy" aliens, but I didn't yet have an idea what they were meant to look like or be called. I'd been bashing my head against this problem for several days when circumstances called me away from my office. I had a dental appointment, which necessitated a stroll through town. Along the way, my mind freewheeling (probably thinking more about anaesthetic and drills than aliens) I spotted an ornamental fountain in someone's front garden. Hence, Fountainheads! I gave no thought to how these strange-looking aliens had evolved; what kind of planet they'd come from, what kind of metabolism they had, etc - all that worldbuildy stuff seemed then to be completely irrelevant and I would take the same view now. They have been space travelling for millions of years; they themselves barely remember how they got there.

I was very pleased with the Fountainheads and enjoyed writing every scene in which they featured. I particularly wanted to make a point that any sufficiently advanced aliens are likely to have no trouble understanding us, which is why these incredibly weird beings nonetheless have a perfectly relaxed grasp of colloquial English, give themselves easily pronouncable names, and do everything they can to set our minds at rest.


Thank you to my wife for scanning these documents, and I hope they are of some interest.

26 comments:

  1. These fascinating glimpses are gold! Thank you for sharing.

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  2. Many thanks Alastair - I always find it fascinating to see how a professional writer works. I love the story behind the origin of the Fountainheads!

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  3. Very cool to see an insight into the thought process. I really enjoyed PI, would love to see a sequel.

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  4. This is great stuff! Pushing Ice is one of my favorite of your novels and I would love to see the sequel - time to put those notes to use?

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  5. Hey Al, if you post much more of this stuff, you're gonna have people barking for a sequel! Or is that you're intention? Generate some enthusiasm? It's working for me at any rate? PI2, PI2, when do we want it? Now!

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  6. "all that worldbuildy stuff seemed then to be completely irrelevant and I would take the same view now. They have been space travelling for millions of years"

    Should that be taken to imply that the Fountainheads empire was significantly longer-lived than the human empire that came before it?

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  7. this is truly a fascinating insight!

    i'd buy the book of your equivalent notes from the Revelation Space trilogy:)

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  8. Chris: there's nothing similar for the RS books, alas.

    Leo: yes I think so (although again, I'd need to re-read PI to be sure).

    Sequel? One day, I hope, although I suspect it won't be the thing I do directly after Poseidon's Children, as I'll likely be spaceshipped out by then.

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  9. It's been 5 years since I read Pushing Ice (might actually re-read it once I finish the Mars Trilogy), so I don't really remember the story that much. Funny thing is, glancing at the drawing of the Fountainheads, I do remember picturing them looking like "Cousin Itt" from The Addams Family!

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  10. How dare you suggest my aliens look like "Cousin Itt". I'm mortally offended.

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  11. Awesome, many thanks to you and your wife for these. I always love reading the methods/notes behind the madness but rarely get the chance.

    I am so pleased the Fountainheads resembled what I had in my minds eye but the list of supporters for the troll, Svetlana, annoys the crap out of me... well, a bit of an exaggeration but I really do not like that woman(character)!

    Thanks again.

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  12. Uh oh.. I probably shouldn't have begun reading the last couple of blog entries. I'm about a third of the way through Pushing Ice. Spoilers!

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  13. Matt - sorry about that, I've added a warning in the topic title.

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  14. Very interesting, like the fact of a sequel eventually being in the works, does that hopefully mean there are notes like this for Terminal World and my all time favorite of yours House of Suns.

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  15. Oh its no problem... my own fault if I read too much. I will have finished the book in a couple of days most likely, then I will check out your notes more closely. Its great that you posted this stuff. Thanks!

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  16. Imo, you more than make up for a slight shallowness of ethnic diversity in PI with many of your other works, especially the entire Revelation Space universe.

    As a language scholar I particularly enjoyed your frequent allusions in "Chasm City" to the development of language over time and its social/cultural implications. Canasian, Russish, Norte: all very plausible in a few hundred years.

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  17. Probably an old and dreary question, but here goes (because I don't know the answer): Has anyone ever approached you about making any of your novels into movies? (Note: I am not involved in movie-making in any way! Just a fan who would like to see it attempted.)

    Thank you, C. Steve Allen

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  18. Joe: not, there aren't really detailed notes for the other books.

    Suchiazski: thanks!

    C. Steve Allen: lots of approaches, nothing ever happens. There is something bubbling away in the background at the moment, but more to do with TV than film. The odds of it getting anywhere are probably fairly slim, though.

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  19. Patrik Wilhelmsson3 July 2012 at 05:00

    Are you going into space Al? Or was that a joke?

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  20. I've read PI's French translation (named Janus) this week-end, and there seems to be an inconsistency with your files. You list 44 names, while the text says the the crew is 144. I suppose this difference of 100 was introduced by you and not by the translator, and it gives you enough room to add a few names in the future...

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  21. Patrik - did you mean my "spaceshipped out" comment? No, much as I'd like to go into space, I was anticipating that after a few novels with lots of space travel in, I'll feel like a change of scenery.

    Frederic: I think you're quite right, the actual crew is larger. I'd forgotten that.

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  22. I'm curious about how Jim Gleason in the notes became Jim Chisholm in the book. Did the name just not seem right for the character (or you had a good pal named Chisholm?) and how late in the process did that happen? (Big global replace in the old word processor?)

    Frederic: My English copy says 145 souls "at the last rotation".

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  23. I don't remember exactly why, but the Fountainheads reminded me of the Octopus/Spider aliens from Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. Their actual 'species' name escapes me.

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  24. Charles: I don't remember making that change, but yes, it would have been done with a very careful global search and replace. It's pretty standard for me to do that with character names - sometimes they're just placeholders until you hit on the right one.

    Regarding the number of people on the ship, I think I remember now that the original number was the same as the names in the scanned file, but that I later decided this wasn't enough for a plausible seed population on Janus. So I just arbitrarily added 100 to the figure and presumed that we never hear about these 100 other people.

    Anon: I was surprised when the book came out at the number of comments which seemed to imply that I was riffing off specific elements in the extended Rama sequence, when in fact I've only read Rendezvous, and that was 30-plus years ago. I don't remember any aliens in it, were there?

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    1. No, there aren't any aliens in the original "Rendezvous with Rama", only some sort of robots that look like Earth creatures (Octopus/Spider forms included). While I can see some similarities with "Rendezvous with Rama", "Pushing Ice" is definitely original and more enjoyable.
      Personally I think it's closer to Clarke's "Space Odyssey": big alien object sitting around in the Saturn system (Janus/Japetus) waiting for people to discover it and take them on the ride of their lifetime.

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  25. I've just come across this blog and am busy reading some of the older posts - but I was wondering about your comment about the paucity of ethnic names in PI; are you implying that an author nowadays has to include a wider ethnic mix, in order to get published? For example, would it be realistic, if PI was set on a Chinese-crewed ship, to have European names in it at all?

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