Why am I moving from fantasy to science fiction?
I’m somewhat established writing fantasy. You know I can do it. I know I love it. So what am I doing dabbling with science fiction?
Sneaking away to watch fantasy
From when I was a child, I’ve loved both fantasy and science fiction, but struggled watching both genres due to . . . age restrictions. My mom wouldn’t allow me to see The Lord of the Rings, and I desperately wanted to see them. I was around 11 at the time The Two Towers came out on DVD, and was under strict orders not to watch it. It could “scramble my little brain,” she said. Perhaps she was scared I would swear allegiance to Saruman and paint his white hand on my forehead, not knowing I would end up dreaming about riding with the Rohirrim. Anyway.
Some of my friends had cooler moms who didn’t care as much about what their kids consumed, and after school, I went home with them. Naturally, I got to see all three movies this way, without my mom ever suspecting a thing (this would come back to bite me in the ass later).
I loved them. I think I watched the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I know it’s also called Battle of the Hornburg, settle down) fifty times that year.
But I grew older, and was suddenly of age to watch the movies with my mom. She was excited and rented the first one, buying some sweets for us so we could fully enjoy the movie.
Somehow, I kept predicting what would happen (like an absolute idiot), knowing characters’ names before they were said (what was I thinking?), and even told her names that were not said in the movie. She quickly figured out that I’d seen it before, and I cried and apologized. It all ended well, and we saw the movie to its end together.
Then it happened all over again
But while all of this happened, the exact same story played out with Star Wars. I was not allowed to see the Star Wars prequels, so I snuck over to some friends and when Darth Maul blasted that dual lightsaber, my brain melted. The Jedi fights in the prequels are absolutely crazy. I didn’t care much about the story, but I LOVED the action, the speed, the finesse, and I’ve always wanted to recreate that.
Isn’t this art from my next book, SPECTER, so FREAKING COOL?!
Swords in space?
When I played outside with sticks in hand, I pretended to be in one of two universes: The Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars. If I wanted to hack and slash - I was Legolas, slaying orcs with arrows and daggers. But sometimes, I wanted more finesse and class - so I was a Jedi, expertly wielding my lightsaber, dueling my friends or slicing imagined robots to pieces.
The concept of lightsabers really stuck with me though (as with A LOT of others). The idea of using swords in space is so cool, and I wanted to create that - hence Specter came into existence. Before I go deeper in on Specter, let me answer the original statement regarding the genre-change. I’ve always loved both fantasy and science fiction, and have spent a lot of time in both genres, loving fantasy, such as Pirates of the Caribbean, and scifi, such as Interstellar and the original Alien. So moving between the genres feels natural to me, as they both feel equally familiar. The reason I’ve written SPECTER is because I want to recreate what Star Wars gave me as a kid. I’ll never forget the thrills or the tears my 14 year-old-self felt watching Anakin and Obi-Wan fight on Mustafar (during Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith). It was beyond awesome, but also heart wrenching watching the ending.
Another AWESOME depiction from SPECTER.
SPECTER is only inspired by Star Wars in the way that there are swords in space. Other than that, it’s entirely its own story. The blades in SPECTER aren’t light or laser, but regular steel blades. So how do I make that work? In science fiction, surely there are guns, rifles, tanks, spaceships, futuristic technology, tyranny, planetary warfare, and so on, and the answer is: yes. All these things exist, and so do people wielding swords. The Dune method would work, with shields only blocking bullets, but I have another method (when I wrote SPECTER all those years ago, I didn’t know Dune existed).
This is where the fantasy element comes into play. I won’t reveal too much, but when a subset of humans ingest a rare and valuable gas, they are granted certain powers. Some of these people get the ability to move with uncanny speed and think faster than supercomputers. It’s not like the Flash, as that is too overpowered, but they can still run at inhuman speeds. Non-instant-acceleration and momentum is a very real thing in SPECTER, but these super soldiers are able to deflect bullets with their blades, for instance. So they are still INCREDIBLY fast, and when two of these fighters meet - well, speed of the lightsaber duels in Star Wars pales in comparison.
This is how I make swords in space work, and it works better than I could have imagined. This gas gives other powers too, and there are in total 11 classes with different powers, but I’ll go more into this in the future.
SPECTER is coming along nicely, and I think it will be ready sometime this year. I am so freaking excited, and I hope you are too. I’ll continue dropping tidbits here and there, until the book hits the shelves.