JULY 2024
I know this is just repeating last month’s news, but the official version of the fourth novella associated with the Backdoor Angels series – and providing some extra fun, I hope – is now available from Amazon. As usual, I’m keeping the price at a modest 99 cents/pence (can’t do the same with yen, I’m afraid) for the first month or so.
And I’m back on Mars again now, the shadows cast by the rocky outcrops on the plains above the Valles Marineris canyons reaching towards me across the red dust, warning of the coming darkness. But that doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying myself! I’m afraid I’m not the kind of writer who stares for long at the blank page/screen, racking my brains for inspiration and suffering over each sentence. I can’t imagine the production of a book being a great struggle, though I remember it being impossible when the kids were still young! If I was desperately trying to predict the future accurately, I might never “put pen to paper”, but I’m not. Most of sci-fi is a distorting mirror used to look at the here and now, don’t you think?
Character and place names can take time, of course, but Roland came easy. I sometimes wonder if I was inspired by the Warren Zevon song Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner or Browning’s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Returning to the poem now, I see some similarities between the two grim quests, so maybe that was it. At least it’s an unusual name. Red, in contrast, is definitely overused as a nickname, but I gave it to her long before I saw an episode of The Blacklist or Orange is the New Black, and I refused to abandon it with an entire novel already completed. Meanwhile, Mar and Laguerre and other names grew on me more slowly, which means that the characters were ‘born’ with temporary names that they went on to shed.
I tend to find place names are harder because we haven’t colonised any moons or planets yet, but I don’t see naming conventions based on Greek, Roman, Norse and other myths continuing for much longer, certainly not if Elon Musk gets there first. And if he doesn’t, perhaps Chinese mythical names will dominate the landscapes.
Returning to this last novella to be published, Karima-Napata is probably the most obscure name I’ve come up with so far. The truth is that, just like Roland in the story, I’ve been to the ‘original’ Karima in the north of Sudan several times. Why couldn’t that also be true for one of the engineers who founded the spacetown on Mars? I asked myself. Perhaps he could have been working on the regreening of the Nubian Desert at the time? Anyway, here’s a picture I took of some of the Napata pyramids on one of my visits, many years ago (my friend Mel is the lonely figure walking across the sand):
Okay, it isn’t exactly Giza, but Napata was the capital of one of the very late Egyptian dynasties for a while and of the Kingdom of Kush, and there are better-preserved monuments in the area that I didn’t get to see. The photo came to mind when I was looking at some of Curiosity’s pictures from Mars a few months ago, and I was reminded that riding on the trucks that crossed the Nubian Desert between Karima and Dongola had made me think of a Martian landscape at the time, especially when we wound along the invisible or non-existent tracks around sunset, with no sign of anything but sand, rocks and the lengthening black shadows.
In less nostalgic mode, I’m still on target for the new – and entirely free! – novella featuring Red (and Doshi) next month, which is essentially escapist stuff, being literally all about escapes! But Roland and Mars are rarely far from my thoughts.