Shining Moon Episode 08: Space Opera

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon: A Speculative Fiction Podcast, Episode 8. I’m your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we’ll continue our series by asking questions about the subgenre of space opera. How does it differ from Hard Science fiction, which was the focus of Episode 3? What are some of the commonalities that mark this genre? What’s the history of space opera? Who’s currently going beyond endless adaptations of Star Wars and Star Trek? 

 My guests today are Michael Johnston, M.V. Melcer, and Dave Walsh. 

Michael had some audio problems, so please refer to the transcript for his full words.

 Michael R. Johnston is the author of The Widening Gyre, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, and What Rough Beast. His work has been praised by Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, Locus, and Analog. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife, daughter, and four weird cats. When not writing, he teaches high school English, works with young aspiring genre writers, and daydreams of flying starships. 

 M V Melcer is the author of upcoming science fiction novel Refractions (November 2023). Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, GigaNotoSurus, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, and others. Born in Poland, she has lived in the USA, the Netherlands and Belgium before settling in the United Kingdom. When not writing, she is pursuing a degree in astronomy. You can find her on https://mvmelcer.com.

Dave Walsh resides in the high desert in New Mexico with his wife and twin sons, a former combat sports and entertainment writer who focuses on the surreal and speculative instead now. Author of the two science fiction series, Trystero and Andlios, and member of both SFWA and Codex. Find him at dvewlsh.com and everywhere else, as @dvewlsh (@dvewlsh.bsky.social, @dvewlsh@wandering.shop)

 
Next week, we’ll be taking a Walk in the Dark, in an episode featuring horror and dark fantasy writers P.A. Cornell  and Alicia Hilton. We’ll be discussing the story "His Guns Could Not Protect Him" by Sam J. Miller. Lightspeed, Issue 153, Feb. 2023. It’s available online for free to read, if you want to get a jump on our discussion. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/his-guns-could-not-protect-him/ 

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.edda-earth.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon, a speculative fiction podcast episode 8. I'm your host Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll continue our series by asking questions about the subgenre of space opera. How does it differ from horror and science fiction, which was the focus of episode 3? What are some of the commonalities that mark this genre? What's the history of space opera? Who's currently going beyond the endless adaptations of Star Wars and Star Trek? My guests today are Michael Johnson, MV Melcer, Dave Walsh, and hopefully John Wilker. John Wilker is having some internet problems, so he may not be available today, we will see. 

Michael R. Johnson is the author of The Widening Gyre, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, and What Rough Beast. His work has been praised by publishers weekly, Booklist, Locust, and Analog. He lives in Sacramento, California with his wife, daughter, and four weird cats. When not writing, he teaches high school English, works with young aspiring genre writers, and daydreams of flying starships. Hello, Michael, how are you today?

Michael R. Johnston:
I am at a lack of scintillating conversation now. How are you?

Deborah L. Davitt:
I'm doing just fine, thank you. M. V. Melcer is the author of the upcoming science fiction novel Refractions, which will appear in November 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Giganotosaurus, Daily Science Fiction, Nature, and others. Born in Poland, she has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, and Belgium before settling in the United Kingdom. When not writing, she's pursuing a degree in astronomy. You can find her on https://mvmelcer.com. Hi Mel, how are you today?

Mel:
And very well, thank you. Enjoying the good weather.

Deborah L. Davitt:
That's one of us. I'm living in the middle of the heat dome. I do not like this at all. All right, Dave Walsh resides in the high desert in New Mexico with his wife and twin sons, a former combat sports and entertainment writer who focuses on the surreal and speculative now instead. Author of two science fiction series, Tristero and Andealios, and member of both SFWA, I never say that right, SFWA

Dave Walsh:
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
and Codex. Find him at DVE. WLSH.com and everywhere elseFind him at dvewlsh.com and everywhere else, as @dvewlsh (@dvewlsh.bsky.social, @dvewlsh@wandering.shop. Hi Dave, thanks for being on.

Dave Walsh:
Hi, yeah, it's the way that I explain my presence on the internet is Dave Walsh without the A's because there are so many people with my name and so many people who are writers and former musicians. And it's a terrible burden to have a very, very common name. So that's me and I'm living in a weird reality where it just went from over a hundred degrees for like a month straight to like. It's like 70 something today. So who knows? We're,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Ooh, I am jealous.

Dave Walsh:
yeah, it's kind of nice actually.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And I'm going to read the intro for John Wilker anyways, just in case he does pop on. But so we are dealing with the ghost of John Wilker who lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife, Nicole, dog Paco, and a foster dog, Princeton. He grew up on the kind of sci-fi that the sci-fi channel aired before it changed names. Rompy Action Adventure sci-fi is what he loves and what he writes. His best writing seems to happen on the patios of breweries or when traveling. 

All right, we're going to dive right into it. We talked in episode three about hard science fiction, the kind of fiction that crunches between your teeth when you're writing it, or when you're reading it. How does space opera differ from hard science fiction? And I will throw this to Dave first, and then I will ask the rest of you.

Dave Walsh:
I think the whole thing about space opera is kind of hard to define almost on purpose. It's very,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
people think Star Wars and Dune and Star Trek and there's a lot of it that can overlap with the military science fiction which tends to focus

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yes.

Dave Walsh:
on people who are in the military, space fleets and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't have to be. I don't write anything that's military related because I would mess up all of it tremendously just like I would mess up hard science fiction. It tends to be closer to science fantasy sometimes, although it doesn't have to be. It's a very broad term that basically just means it's about big adventure happening over a span of time and space, and usually has a big long story arc of some sort with the hero's journey kind of stuff. And that tends to be sort of what it is. It's very, I've never found a suitable definition for it. And I've always just operated under the premises of I grew up reading a lot of stuff that was classified as space opera. So what I write will be probably like space opera, if not diving into the space adventure sub genre stuff. So that's, I don't know, you know, it's, it's a mess.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mel, how do you define space opera?

Mel:
Yeah, tricky question. We had this discussion on the hard science fiction episode. And then I sent you my novel, which I sent was space opera. And you came back to me saying that this is hard science fiction. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
It is, it's wonderful.

Mel:
the line between them is much thinner than it may be. I mean, there may be cases where you really say now that's definitely space opera like Star Wars, you know, or that's definitely hard science fiction, as you know, something like Kim Stanley Robinson writes, you know, it's very fact, so

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
scientific, I think. But for me, I think the definition, and it's just the way I think about it, by no means a definition that is, you know, anybody else can share or whatever. I think it's about the stakes. I think the stakes in a space opera tend to be bigger. They tend to be, you know, world saving, planet saving, culture saving, things like that. Whereas some... parts of science fiction or hard science fiction can be just focused on a smaller thing, you know, a planet, an issue on a planet, a mission or whatever. Not that they don't have stakes, they have huge stakes, but they tend to be less operatic, basically, in scale. So that's kind of, and the scale of emotions that go with it, you know, that's kind of the line for me, where I would place one thing as a space opera versus the other. But as I said, some of my favourite books are What I would classify as both. I mean, I mentioned last

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
time Alistair Reynolds, who is a scientist, was a practicing scientist, and he writes galaxy-spanning adventures, and yet they are fairly hard science fiction. There is no faster than light travel and no other obvious sins against science. So the line is quite fluid for me.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, that's fair enough. Michael, how would you go about defining the genre that you write in?

Michael R. Johnston:
For me, there's a couple of things that are required to be space opera. There needs to be an interstellar scale so if it's set in one star system for me, that's not quite space opera enough and There need to be various cultures There are exceptions. There are a few space operas where we only see from the human point of view but I grew up in the era of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica and all the other stuff so

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh yes.

Michael R. Johnston:
For me, there needs to be various aliens who are often reflections of human foibles. Interstellar travel is a must. There is, as Mel said, some fluidity, but for me, those are the two big things.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright.

Mel:
Interesting if I could play on this because for me, for

Deborah L. Davitt:
Absolutely.

Mel:
instance, I agree with the cultures and different societies, but for me it never had to be exclusively humans and aliens. It could have been very much evolved humans which in fact formed already very different societies. As example, Arkady Martyn's work with the Memory Called Empire and this thing, it's very much a space opera. And I think they're all humans. They're just evolved or developed to a point where the cultures have nothing to do with each other. I think the same with like ancillary justice with Unleaky. I would still qualify it firmly as space opera. And yet, so they do have this, what you mentioned, very different cultures and yet they're all human.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, Dune is one of those ones where the genre line is very fluid for me because Herbert definitely was hard science fiction in some regards, because he was looking at environmentalism at a time and period where environmentalism was almost non-existent. But he does have fractions, factions of humanity rather, that have split off and have become transhuman. and the Tleilaxu and the uh the spacing guild and so on and so forth. So yeah you can say that most people would probably regard it as space opera today but yeah. Um, let's talk a little bit about the history of space opera. The Lensman series by E.E. Dock Smith is commonly considered the earliest space opera. And some people believe that it's been brought to its pinnacle by Iain M. Banks Culture series, but who has influenced you the most personally? Dave?

Dave Walsh:
Um, when I was a kid, I was a giant as a Isaac Asimov fan, and that was the thing that really got me going. And I was really into the foundation books. And then from there, I sort of spidered out into other stuff as well. I don't know, I was a child in the 80s and 90s. So when the Star Wars expanded universe book started coming out, that's what got me

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh yeah.

Dave Walsh:
to keep reading it. And And then from there, it was sort of like I discovered like, you know, Dune, which I have a lot of very complicated feelings about at this point in my life.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Dave Walsh:
Um, you know, just all over the place, I would still consider that space opera. And then I got more into some stuff that, uh, I don't know how you would even classify it. I mean, I really got into Ursula K. Le Guin and you know, other authors like that. And to me, it was always gut back to, well, I like the big adventure stuff that happens in space opera. And as we've sort of tried to establish here, like big galaxy spanning stakes. So that sort of was my journey through that. I read a lot and I read a lot of the stuff that was sort of the old like dime store novel kind of things. Cause we had a good used book store down the street for me when I was a kid. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
I just go spend my allowance on it and. There's a lot of names. I mean, the Lensman books were something that I got into later. So, you know, I tried to go through all of it. I didn't like all of it, but,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Dave Walsh:
you know, it also helped form what I didn't want to do when I eventually started writing these things. So I got really stressed out writing my first space opera and... That was, I was like, it has to be this and that and has to be all these things. And it was sort of a mess because of that. And then after I let some of those things go and said, I'm just gonna do whatever I want it to be, I was a lot more comfortable with it and people tended to react a lot more favorably towards it. So that is that.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mel, I saw that you were getting a book down off of your shelves. What did you bring for us?

Mel:
I just had to show it to you because it's a very special book that holds a very special place in my heart. I have not re-read it and I will not because probably now I will hate it. Now, you mentioned I am Polish. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain reading my father's book and my father was an avid science fiction... lover up to the point that you know, he was actually building rockets himself and lost his hand doing it. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh no!

Mel:
yeah, when he was 18, yes, so he they were building rockets using the two cop using gunpowder. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh god.

Mel:
yeah, yes, very healthy.

Dave Walsh:
That sounds like my childhood to be honest with you here.

Mel:
Yes, and then it was the rain was drizzling down. So he went to check with the fuse went up and woke up in the hospital. And his first question was, how high did it go? Unfortunately, yes, it went up together with some parts of him. But you know, he survived. He lost his right hand at the age of 18. But he's in his passion of sorry, I hope it's not too dark. 

Deborah L. Davitt:
We can have you show back up for the horror episode if you like.

Mel:
It was, but he was an avid reader of science fiction. And, you know, I still have his collection of clippings of when the time when the Sputnik went up, but we grew up in a different sphere of science fiction. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
I never, you know, saw an Asimov or Heinlein's book in our house, but we had a lot of Russian writers and obviously had Stanislav Lem. So I grew up reading everything by Lem and basically love it. It was super formative for me. But the one book that was even more formative because nobody knows it. But if you Google, you'll find a lot about it. It's a book by an author called Yevgeny Yefremov, after whom I named the doctor in my novel.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I was about to say that sounded familiar

Mel:
That was an homage. Yeah, that was an homage. It was called the Nebula Andromeda because it was written before, you know, it was recognized that Nebula Andromeda sorry, and I called him Yevgeny Yefremov. But anyway, this is the book I'm holding, you know, it's in shatters, it has no,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Oh God, there's no cohesion left

Mel:
Yes, and I read it back and forth. I don't know how many times when I was a teen. And if you Google it, still you'll find out that critics at the time said that it said it did as much for science as it did for science fiction. because it was like one of the first really, really hard, well, still space operas, because it took part in different planets and different solar systems all over the place, but at the very, very cutting edge of what was scientific knowledge back then, and that was early 50s. So, you know, I obviously read it way, way later, but it was inspiring and the visions of the world, it showed, it just... It's just the whole idea of the space travel and all these planets and all these things. And yeah, that was just really, really amazing. And my first book, science fiction book that I wrote, at least started, it was called Space 2020. And if it reminds you of Space 1999, it's a good reason for it

Deborah L. Davitt:
hmm.

Mel:
yeah, that were my beginnings.

Deborah L. Davitt:
And Michael, what was formative for you other than Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars?

Michael R. Johnston:
I mean, it really, I have to admit, it starts with those things. I was six years old when the first Star Wars came out, so it's definitely imprinted on my brain. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Michael R. Johnston:
as a young reader, I discovered CJ Cherryh, and her sort of anthropological science fiction and space operas really definitely impacted me as a young reader. And then as a teenager, I stumbled on a debut by... C.S. Friedman called In Conquest Born. And it's one of those human only space operas, but that definitely the clash of ideals between two different cultures imprinted directly into my brain. So when I write now, I owe her a huge debt. And then a later influence on me, cause I didn't read him until I was probably in my thirties is Peter F. Hamilton. His stuff has such a scale of distance and time and the technologies that he uses are so incredibly off the wall compared to what we have and what we can generally conceive of now that it's inspired a lot of the stuff in my own book.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, I can see that. Let's see, who besides you guys is writing space opera these days? Who should we be reading? And I would say, I would argue that The Expanse became space opera. It started off locked to our single solar system and being very hard science fiction in terms of how people were able to move around the solar system and how they engaged with the technology and with each other. And then- I would argue very much that as soon as the gates opened, it became space opera. But what other ones might you recommend to people? Dave?

Dave Walsh:
I mean, that's hard because it's, I know for me personally, like while I've written a lot of space opera, I read a lot all over the place. I feel like

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
there is, when it comes to space opera, it gets sort of blended in with a lot of other things. I feel like I have like one of my favorite series is Legend of Galactic Heroes by a Japanese author, Yoshie Tanuki. And it is a It turned, it was a, I only discovered it because a friend sent me that there was an anime for it. And this was like back in the 90s. And I watched some of that and I'm like, cool. The books got translated like 10 years ago, finally into English. And I read those and loved them. And it also ruined my first science fiction book because halfway through I'm like, I want to write something like this. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm.

Dave Walsh:
but like as for right now, it's hard because like, I feel like the like something like the Locked Tomb series by Tamison Muir is very space fantasy, but at the same time, through the course of those three books that have been released, they tend to get pretty space opera-y in the, like it's in the DNA, even if it wouldn't technically be considered like strictly space opera. So it's hard. And then it's like, I read a lot of, as I, you know, mostly indie published my books, I read a lot of you know, comp titles kind of stuff. And there's a lot of people writing it right now. And for better or for worse, it is hitting what people want from it. And there's not

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
a lot of going off into like different kind of stuff. And that's, I think that's a part of our field that writers don't talk about a lot is that we have expectations on us sometimes to write a certain way

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Dave Walsh:
and not to veer off too hard. I've veered off in some places and gotten some... criticism from people. So it's uh yeah I feel like space opera right now is in a weird place of almost trying to meet the expectations of what people grew up with and which is largely Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek kind of stuff and then

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm.

Dave Walsh:
a lot of writers want to be expanding out a little bit and it sometimes gets some pushback. So I don't know. I've read a lot of cool um Afrofuturist stuff, like one of my favorites in that is Jelani Wilson, but it just kind of is what it is.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mel, what would you say would be a good author to read right now other than yourself?

Mel:
I've already mentioned Anne Leckie. I absolutely love the Anselmere Justice trilogy or there's more books in the world but the initial trilogy.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah.

Mel:
Arkady Martin, the same with Memory Cold Empire and then the other books that come and are coming. Megan O'Keeffe, really good fun. If not... Alistair Reynolds, as I already mentioned, he's still publishing and I still love

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
his books. Iain Banks, goodness, he's just like one of my heroes. Unfortunately, he's no longer publishing, but I will still mention him. There's so many good authors and there is a large variety, as Dave mentioned, between the more indie, more adventure-focused books and all kinds of different... aspects being examined in different books. I mean, Kim Stanley Robinson, for instance, Aurora, I would qualify

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
Mm.

Mel:
it kind of borderline space opera because of the scales of though it's really hard science fiction, but it was just an amazing book. It blew my mind. I mean, so yeah, I think these are the top books that come to my mind at this moment.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, and Michael, same question to you. Who should we be reading today?

Michael R. Johnston:
I will always cheerlead for Katie Martin. She and I were classmates at Viable Paradise about 10 years ago. So I'm so proud that she's doing so well. But an author I would really recommend is J.S. Dewes, D-E-W-E-S. She first started publishing a couple of years back with two books in a series called The Divide. And then she followed it up with a standalone, well, beginning of a different series called Rubicon. and they're both space opera series. They are incredibly well written. And I became a huge fan immediately.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Well, now we're gonna take a turn into your works. And I'm gonna start with Michael's books. What Rough Beast is the third book in the Remembrance War series. Tajen, the main character, has just discovered a terrible truth about the war he fought in 15 years before, that the enemy he thought he was fighting was actually extinct long before he was born, replaced by nano swarms that acted on pure cold logic. He also discovers that these nano swarms can incarnate inside humans and aliens. He further discovers that the Empress of the Zen that he once served faithfully is just another incarnate, one obsessed with destroying the other Tabran nanoswarms. This story features expansive space empires, faster than light travel, a ruined Earth, multiple alien species, quantum fabricators, nanosuits, and every far-fetched flight of fancy you can possibly imagine, so this is really fun. Each of them has their own missions and. I'd like to open the floor for you to talk about your work. Do you view your job as an author in this to be an entertainer or a teacher?

Michael R. Johnston:
I am an English teacher, but for me,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm

Michael R. Johnston:
entertaining my readers is absolutely first and forefront in my mind. After a day of trying to cram grammar into a bunch of teenage minds, I don't wanna teach anybody much. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm.

Michael R. Johnston:
at the same time, I want them to think. So in the widening gyre, there was a moment where someone asked Tajen, should we... be expected to apologize for the actions of people from 1,000 years ago. And his reply is, yes, if you're still benefiting from it. And that's directly related to the cases in America where we are still benefiting from 300 years of slavery and its aftermath. And it wasn't like that was what the book was about, but I wanted it to be in there as a I wanted readers, especially young readers, to see that and go, oh, you know, that's a good point. But no, primarily I'm there to tell a good story. Hopefully.

Deborah L. Davitt:
All right. When I was in college, and I've mentioned this on a different episode, my creative writing course, my professor who had some 200 novels to his credit under various pseudonyms talked about the structure of what he called commercial fiction. In short, every decision was made by the protagonist made the situation worse until there was no other choice but to resolve the plot somehow. From what I read of What Rough Beast, it seemed to be struggled structured along the lines of traditional commercial fiction? Was that a deliberate choice on your part or was that just lucky?

Deborah L. Davitt:
Because it definitely makes it very readable

Michael R. Johnston:
I think it's just that I've read enough stories that I have that instinct. It wasn't something I ever consciously thought about.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, fair enough. What do you want people to take away from this series? And this is not just talking about the final book, but the entirety of the three arcs so far. Is there an overarching theme or message?

Michael R. Johnston:
The theme is a weirdly emergent property. I'm sure that there are readers out there who would read the trilogy and come up with themes I never thought of. But for me, the themes of healing, healing a culture, healing a family, healing an individual are all part of it, which is a weird thing to say about a trilogy centered on warfare. But Tazin is in the beginning a broken person, although he doesn't recognize it. in the first book he kind of fixes himself or at least starts to. And then by the end of the trilogy, they have begun the process of healing to two different cultures.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hmm.

Michael R. Johnston:
So that I think is probably my biggest. Weirdly, the series started out as a sort of retelling of the Irish independence struggle, but it branched out much further than that, as I wrote.

Deborah L. Davitt:
and trusting. We're gonna turn to Mel now. We've got a couple of different things here that you have written and that I wanted to talk about I'm gonna ask you some more questions Excuse me We'll cut that out in post. I'm gonna talk with you a little bit about your novel after you do your reading, but for the moment, I wanted to talk about your story, Patterns in Stone and Stars, which appeared in Giganotasaurus in 2022. On a distant world, a second-class citizen of a scientist has the chance to save a planet by declaring its native population intelligent and sapient, but to do so maybe to torpedo her military career. Any way she turns lies the possibility being prosecuted by the Federation for quote-unquote treason. How is this uh I appreciate okay I appreciated the details in the biology of the of the aliens which are not quite animals not quite plants but something between and very wholly alien. How did you go about developing their biology? Where did you get the inspiration for them?

Mel:
I think they actually started the story, it was an idea of like can intelligence exist, can an intelligent society exist without communication? And you know that was just like that question that I threw out because part of the problem is the scientists on the planet are facing is they're trying to prove that whether these species are intelligent or not by by looking for signs of intelligence, you know, buildings,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
construction, anything, artifacts, any kind of communication, and there's nothing except for the different patterns in stone that they just kind of built. And so there's, you cannot really tell whether they that they're not obvious signs of intelligence. And, and

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
I was that was that was what sprung the story of like, okay, how do you tell if something is intelligent? Can you have a society that it's so evolved that it basically moves beyond it, that it just kind of lives in a Zen kind of state of existence. So, and then develop the biology that would kind of support it. It just had quite a fun of imagining these creatures, which are called, well, the scientists call them electric potatoes. So, you know,

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm,

Mel:
how they could kind of exist and what biology could support them. So that was that was what started the story. And then from that came the story of, okay, what do we do with that? And what kind of background do we have with the characters?

Deborah L. Davitt:
Alright. I would also like to say that this work does not plop for easy answers, even in its interpersonal relationships, which makes it a tough and uncompromising read that I greatly enjoyed. How did you develop the political, personal, and military screws that are slowly racking your narrator in this story? Because no matter where she turns, there's another consequence, there's another consequence, there's another potential bad outcome. So how did you wind up developing this?

Mel:
I wanted the story to begin from the beginning. I wanted the story not to have an answer. So they do not find out whether these creatures are intelligent or not. And they have to live with these consequences. And because it then needed to be important, it needed to be a reason for why the question really needed to be answered. And the scientist, the main character needed to be pushed towards answering it. Turns out is that... What I came up with is that the planet is basically at a junction between three warring empires and they have a treaty that if there is sanctioned life, it cannot be colonized. So her decision, whether the species are sanctioned or not, will mean whether somebody can establish a military outpost very close to the enemy border or not. So it has very strict military consequences. And then on top of that, there's obviously personal relations, because the chief scientist now running the base is her former lover.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
And she comes from a, you know, she's an immigrant from a subjugated community, the only one who has achieved that level in the empire's military. So she is now, you know, she is the only one and the weight of her decision, the weight of her failure or her success will reflect on her entire culture. So, you know, just. This is this perfect mix of pressure coming from her from every side.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah, it's very good.

Mel:
And it reflects my background. I mean, I'm white, so I'm privileged in that respect, but I am Polish living in post-Brexit Britain, where, you know, I am the second class citizen. And the moment I open my mouth and you hear my accent, you can obviously see it, I'm not from here. And on purpose I gave my character a Polish sounding name, Szkazy, which tripped off many readers saying, I can't read it. Well, that's the point.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm. Right, Dave Walsh's Cracked Palace is the sixth book in his Tristeros. I'm saying this completely wrong. How do you say it?

Dave Walsh:
It's Trystero. It's it's named off

Deborah L. Davitt:
Trystero

Dave Walsh:
Yeah, it's named off of an old Thomas Pinchon book, plot device. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, thank you

Dave Walsh:
I try to take my influence from all sorts of places, right, you know.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah. The perspective flips in a braided narrative between that of an assassin, Zed or Zera, who is looking to assassinate the head of a xenophobic political movement on Earth, the captain, Valencia, and the Inquisitor, the artist Drake, who has been transfigured by god-like aliens that threaten to invade our galaxy and wipe out life as we know it. This novel features an alien race called the Gra'al, which I looked at and I immediately went, is this a deliberate reference to the old term for Grail?

Dave Walsh:
Yeah. It is.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Cool. I like being able to pick up pick up what you're throwing down. I love that. God-like aliens called the Void. Super powered humans who've been infused with the powers and technology of the Void. And a xenophobic militaristic movement on Earth that's focused on trying to wipe out the Graal. So this is a question for Dave, but anybody else can chime in. Your main character has gone from being an off the shelf human in a book, in book one, to being bonded with a god-like alien in the current book. How do you deal with power creep and scope creep over the course of a long running series?

Dave Walsh:
Um, so I am in the strictest sense, like a pantser, I don't plan anything out whatsoever. I have a loose idea of what I'm doing. And I go for it. And I it tends to unfold however my mind feels like working at that time. My series

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay.

Dave Walsh:
started off the first book broken ascension is a single POV be that was sort of a challenge to myself because all my previous books have been multiple POVs. So I did one POV see how you can do it, get through it, whatever, you know, try to follow a decent commercial structure. I was really careful with that book. I really tried to appeal to who I was marketing my book to and everything. It still had a lot of really what I consider interesting thematic content, buried me at the surface and all that. And then from there came the cosmic horror and metaphysical stuff. And my big thing was I wanted my character to be extremely limited. You may have all these big powers, but there had to be massive consequences. And the whole, through the whole six books, it was about you use these things and there are very dire consequences that come from it. So it allowed me to be. confining for those things instead of just he can go do whatever he wants, it can be fun, he can go do whatever it had to have, you know, it had to be that where this that was the stakes, right? Is that the more that humanity use these things, the more that you're telling the you're knocking on the door for the you know, this giant weird sentient alien race, so you have no clue about and telling them, hey, we're abusing your stuff. Maybe you should do something about it. So that was my instinctual Like that's how I kept kind of tamped him down. And the same thing, there were multiple characters impacted by this. There were spaceships impacted by it. I got into some weird stuff with this, but it still was trying to be grounded in there had to be consequences for every action. So that was for my very loose in how I plot things out, that was my idea the whole time is there always had to be a consequence for every action.

Deborah L. Davitt:
I like that, I like that. So my next question sort of ties into that, which is how do you keep the scope of a cosmic level conflict grounded and real for your readers? Because we're dealing now with Drake having become this Inquisitor, and this Inquisitor figure is basically going to planets and taking the entire population and just sweeping them away to a different location, but it looks like they're all being killed to the other characters. that he's just able to do this at the blink of an eye, how do you keep that grounded and real for the readers?

Dave Walsh:
I mean, it's one of those things because we're in the sixth book there where I have a lot of these characters have been established. And then it was kind of hard because there's a lot of characters that play and I had to make sure that they were established early on in the early books in the series. We had, you know, every book experimented with different point of views. Drake and Valencia

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
were the only ones that really carried over throughout the whole series. And the whole idea was basically always focus on them, what they're doing and the people that they care about. So you always have the reader always has a tether into what they're engaging with and who they're engaging with and why they should care. Because you can only be told so many times the whole fate of the galaxy is that, you know, you know, the held in the midst and you're just that's cool and all and happens a lot and people read and watch that stuff

Deborah L. Davitt:
haha

Dave Walsh:
all the time. But if you don't have your core cast of characters, for people to latch onto and for them to have

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
real consequences is the important part. So, you know, they all have their families and their relationships, and I try to focus on those as much as I can. And, you know, there were certain characters that, like Zara, I didn't establish until the fourth book in the series. And that was sort of, I had to introduce a lot of her problems very early on in the, in that fourth book, and then to make them really matter for the... fourth, fifth, and sixth books. So

Dave Walsh:
yeah, it was basically just always focus on these characters, their interpersonal relationships with each other and why all of it matters beyond, save the galaxy because you're always saving the galaxy, right?

Dave Walsh:
So.


Deborah L. Davitt:
One of your predominating themes is xenophobia. The Void have it for humans, creating an Inquisitor to eradicate any use of their technology by humans. Humans have it for the Graal. In fact, there's one point in time where the term Inquisitor is used for a human that isn't Drake. It's just another person that is just an Inquisitor. So, what message do you want readers to take away from this book in particular?

Dave Walsh:
I mean, it's very, these are not easy times. Then I think that's, it's really hard for me to write stories that are kind of carefree. I mean, a lot of the whole arc of the whole series for me was about a couple of different things. It was about parenthood. It was about dealing with being an artist in a world that doesn't seem to like art all that much and what it does to you and makes you as an artist. kind of stretch and do to accommodate the whole world around you. And then dealing with the face of just people who hate each other and, and trying to instead, I made a really conscious decision at, uh, after the first book where I didn't want to put gun violence in there anymore, which for

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
books like this is not going to be a popular decision. I set it up in the first book where it was the people with the guns were the bad guys. There were some good guys with guns, but bad things ended up kinda happening to them when they were playing with them. And my background is I wrote about combat sports, UFC, kickboxing, I was a big kickboxing guy for a long time, and pro wrestling because that was something I grew up with, the weird storytelling with it and all that. And

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Walsh:
to me, I knew enough about this stuff to be able to write it into my books and kinda transform. the action scenes into like fight scenes where they were hand to hand combat and you kind of made things a little bit more personal, got rid of the gun stuff. And it allowed me to use guns as a tool for people who are, you know, space fascist kind of deal. It was very, I don't know. I write on a progressive tilt because that's who I am and that gets some flack from readers sometimes and you alienate some people for that. but at the same time, you can reach tons of people with this kind of stuff. You can always grab new audiences and being able to show people that A, you don't need to have guns is a prominent thing and B, people that are different from you are probably okay and you probably don't need to be afraid of them. Those were important themes for me to get out there into the world after reading dozens and dozens of space opera books that felt like just trying to recapture the worst things that Heinlein did back in the old days. So. That was important to me.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, that is interesting. Thank you very much. We're gonna be turning now to a reading from Mel Melcer. This is from Refractions due out in November, 2023. I've been lucky enough to read the whole thing and I can't recommend it highly enough. I really enjoyed reading it and I hope lots of people pick it up when it's available. In this book, the protagonist, Natalie, takes a journey in cryo sleep to the first human colony outside of Earth to escape her own past. Little dreaming that she'll be forced to solve not one but two mysteries. First, what happened to that first colony, which has gone dark and silent? And second, who's trying to sabotage the mission and the ship that they depend on for their very lives? Take it away, Mel.

Mel:
So I'll be reading from chapter one, which is not really the opening chapter, because we have chapter zero and then we have chapter minus five, and then we get to chapter one, and the minus chapters connect with the main storyline a bit like about halfway through when the repercussions of the past events become relevant. But this is where we start on the ship. 

Reading ensues, snipped for copyright purposes.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Thank you. This was just a taste of the novel. What gave you the idea for this story? Because it is very intricately braided and there are fracture points between the crew members that they're not aware of at first that create the motivations going forward. It's very delicately balanced. How did you, are you, it seems like you're a plotter rather than a pantser. Am I right in guessing that?

Mel:
I was a complete pantser. That's how I started and I still have a very strong pantsing streak. But

Deborah L. Davitt:
Yeah

Mel:
once I acquired an agent and realized that I need to kind of say what I'm going to write next and you know get kind of an outline, I started plotting a little bit and then realized that it actually helps when you know where you're going a little bit. So I'm kind of in between.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
But it's not that this novel has been plotted thoroughly from the beginning. No, it started with an idea of a ship with secrets. That everybody was there for a different reason. And this is not, you know, as you could see, there were cryopods. So this is not faster than light travel. So people who committed to go on a rescue mission that would take them 70 years to go there and back. basically people who are running away from somewhere rather or something rather than you know just committing to the rescue mission and from there you know I went like okay what are the secrets what you know what are they hiding what are they running away from and then from that you know it evaporated because evaporated elaborated because the secrets are multi-level they're personal they are political and they all tied to what the main The thing is that it's happening, the secret they're trying to discover.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm. What do you want an audience to take away from reading it?

Mel:
Well, I do want people to have a good ride and enjoy it and in a sense of, you know, following a mystery. But, you know, I can't hide it. There's, there's, there's a message that, you know, in the book that is very strongly about, you notice that this is, it's based in a world that is post climate change. So basically, the Earth has kind of come to apocalypse and survived or basically by the skin of our teeth and emerge totally changed with different political landscape and different crises and different conflicts. And yet kind of the same in that, you know, there are the haves and the have nots and people blame each other for everything and basically looking for scapegoats to... always finding the other that they can blame the trouble on. So

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
I was basically commenting on a lot of things that are happening around us at the time and this is what where the conflicts are, both on the personal and the political level in the story. And I don't want to say exactly what the message is because I want, you know, it's not like, you know, dear humans, get along or... I want people to kind of discover the message, but it

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
is a story that plays with weaponized discrimination and prejudice. I mean, people are turned against each other along a national basis very strongly.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Mm-hmm.

Mel:
And I just wanted to show you like, okay, maybe what's happening around us is not exactly a coincidence. Maybe somebody is pulling the strings.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Dave

Mel:
Yeah

Deborah L. Davitt:
and Michael, do you have any recent projects or any upcoming publications that you'd like to promote?

Dave Walsh:
I don't really have anything that's scheduled to be released soon. I have a very, I don't even know, like novel ed, I guess, that I'll probably be releasing. I released it on my Patreon for people who pay me monthly. But it's called Grisaille, which is a old painting style of... Yeah, I, sorry, I went to art school for a long time before I went to go be a writer. So... I tend to work a lot of that stuff into my work and that will be, I'll probably just release it at some point, I sent it off to my team of editors. So that'll happen at some point soon because I don't have anything else ready to release and I kind of have that itch of like, well, I haven't had anything come out since January. What am I doing here? I've just been working on

Deborah L. Davitt:
Hahaha

Dave Walsh:
other stuff and trying to pivot a little bit into some different kind of work. So yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Michael, do you have anything recent or upcoming?

Michael R. Johnston:
No. I'm working on a project that is sort of space fantasy or I like to call it space opera disguised as high fantasy. But no, I'm still in early days and nothing is scheduled for the foreseeable future.

Deborah L. Davitt:
Okay, well, that sounds interesting.


Deborah L. Davitt:
Thank you all for having come on the podcast. It was a pleasure speaking with all of you. Next week, we'll be taking a walk in the dark in an episode featuring horror and dark fantasy writers, P.A. Cornell, Amanda Helms, and Alicia Hilton. We'll be discussing the story, 'His Guns Could Not Protect Him' by Sam J. Miller, Lightspeed, issue 153, February, 2023, is available online to free if you wanna get a jump on our discussion. Thank you all for being here and we are out.