Inspiration and Anger
Today my novel, SUNWARD SKY, is released to the world! Grab a copy at the links below, but before that I wanted to talk about its inspiration.
https://books2read.com/u/bWxz2M
https://www.booktopia.com.au/sunward-sky-henry-neilsen/book/9780648942634.html
I’ve written extensively about the creation of Sunward Sky, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the books, movies, art, politics and science that influenced it.
The first and most overt comparison is to James SA Corey’s The Expanse. Corey’s space opera blends all of the magic of a space opera with the grounded feeling that I like so much in other types of sci-fi. Corey’s world has given us the solar system, but I wondered what would happen if we didn’t even get that far.
Then, the 2003 series of Battlestar Galactica. This series was a study into how humanity behaves when there’s nothing left, and showed me what a space story with no aliens could look like. A story about people and their relationship to one another.
Speaking of Aliens, Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien film has always been my favourite of the franchise because of the way it depicts, first and foremost, a bunch of people doing a job. The militarism and jingoistic hoo-ra of the sequels doesn’t do as much for me as the terror of people having just the worst day at work.
Images like The Day the Earth Smiled with the earth visible as barely more than a pixel, the Hubble spacecraft’s pillars of creation, or any of the dozens of pictures I had in coffee table books that blew up my imagination with thoughts of the immense loneliness of the universe.
I wanted the world of Sunward Sky to feel lived in. I wanted it to seem like our current race toward climate collapse and technofeudalist didn’t stop, and we were surviving, trapped on the surface of the world we killed. Andor has an amazing example of this kind of place - covered in junk and barely surviving, riffing on the retrofuturism of Star Wars in a really interesting way.
More than that, I wanted the grievances to feel real. Around the time I was writing Sunward Sky, many stories were coming out about the way people like Musk and Bezos were treating workers at their factories. Musk forced people back to the factory, creating hundreds of new Covid cases in the process. Six people died in an Amazon warehouse when they weren’t allowed to leave prior to a natural disaster.
This has been going on forever. The Hawk’s Nest tunnel saw hundreds of people die of silicosis because of cost-cutting and profiteering. The union movement began because of the exploitative conditions in factories during the industrial revolution. This is an ongoing problem with the nature of Capitalism. In order to maximise profits you have to be truly innovative to charge more money, or you have to minimise your costs, and human labour is a massive cost, so what’s a board of directors to do?
What’s more, in most of these cases the responsible parties are the companies themselves, who operate as a set of intellectual ideas rather than manifest agents. So many times, it’s functionally impossible to punish those who have caused manifest harm. The company behind the Hawk’s Nest tunnel still exists. The web runs on Bezos’s AWS. And we all know what Musk is up to these days.
Space travel is dangerous, incredibly so. The degradation of the muscles means weeks and months of physiotherapy when you’re up there. it can increase cancer risk, stuffs your skeleton up, it’s a really bad time. I decided to wrap this all up into one thing called “Space Palsy” as a catch-all for the effects of the zero-gravity environment.
The idea that people sent to space would be sent to what was effectively a death sentence, that the company in question would let their assets degrade to the point of danger, and the fact that a group of these people would eventually decide to say “screw it” and burn it all down, really stuck in my head.
But I wanted my story to have hope.
Modern medicine is incredible. The work that researchers are able to do to construct and understand how viruses work and mutate is incredible. When I was writing Sunward Sky, I was following the development of the Covid-19 Vaccine, which is one of the most incredible joint human efforts that we have ever achieved.
More than that, a subset of these people elect to test medications on themselves prior to their approval by drug administration policies. This kind of ballsy confidence and assuredness in doing something incredibly dangerous for the benefit of others is something that I find inspiring, and some of the best values the human condition has to offer.
So Sunward Sky has some of that, too.
Get your copy of Sunward Sky here, and support an indie author (me!) today:
https://books2read.com/u/bWxz2M
https://www.booktopia.com.au/sunward-sky-henry-neilsen/book/9780648942634.html
