The Problem with Space Travel

Last summer I stared writing my space epic. I know that’s a strange statement, and a slightly pretentious one at that, but rest assured in the knowledge that I’m being a little tongue-and-cheek when I say that. Essentially I decided that since I love sci-fi so much, and have pretty much tackled every other genre in my writing, I ought to try my hand at creating the kind of space novel I’ve always wanted to read. And that’s when it became an epic, because I decided I wanted to do it ALL. One of the things I decided early on was that instead of ignoring the difficulties of travelling to a new planet, I would embrace them. Things like every planet having its own clock and version of a year were things I wanted to play with. However, there has been one inherent problem I have yet to wrap my head around: Disease.

H.G. Wells wrote my favourite sci-fi book, The War of the Worlds, and I think he’s probably the most clever man who ever wrote in the genre, because he seems to be one of the few men clever enough and ballsy enough (and certainly the first) to realize that the one thing you will definitely encounter when travelling to a new place is all the wonderful diseases it has. Bios by Robert Charles Wilson is another wonderful novel that explores the concept of alien habitats being paradises of death for humans. The rampant spread of diseases is something people didn’t really think about until Europeans started coming to American bring lovely gifts hidden in their germs. Entire civilizations can be wiped out by an alien coughing on you. We know diseases will be a huge fucking problem if we ever find a habitable planet and want to visit it. Hell, there are scientists who don’t want us drilling into Mars because we will contiminate the planet.

The problem I’ve been mulling in my head is: what do I do? Try to roll over it by having my intrepid space travellers get a shot or take lots of pills whenever they go to a new place? I just can’t shake the feeling that ignoring something that will be of such vital important once humans actually start visiting other habitable planets (in the when and the if of the future) will be a huge misstep in my epic. So I guess I’m looking for advice/opinions from you lovely people. How far should I take it? How far is too far? How much is enough that you’ll believe a human won’t drop dead every time they step onto a new planet’s surface?

Writing Begins (and Never Ends)

I’m sure if I did some serious detective work I could figure out when exactly I wrote the first chapter of Jirale, but one thing I do know is that it must have been during Grade 10 (2000-2001) and a period of time (maybe as long as a year, but perhaps no more than a couple months) passed before Kat attached herself to the project and I began work on the rest of the story.

Let me be absolutely clear about something. I never would have gotten past chapter one without Kat. There are no if and or buts about this. If Kat hadn’t offered to start drawing Jirale it simply would have faded away as something I plan to finish one day, instead of becoming the main obsession of my life. However, the first chapter I did manage on my own, so let’s go back to that for a minute.

The idea for Jirale had been bouncing around in my head for awhile, and I had tried once or twice to start it (including a rather embarrassing attempt to tell the story with stick-figure in lieu of a real artist), but I never really had the inspiration to dive in – until I had an Escaflowne marathon with my older sits Sonya. To give you an idea of what Escaflowne is, here’s a fan-made music video:

I took a lot from Escaflowne. I don’t mean I took characters or story from it, but I definitely stole the devices it used for story-telling. The constant use of dreams and ghosts is something that comes up again and again in my own novel. I think the action/gore is also similar. The tone and a lot of the visuals really stand out to me as I re-watch this anime. The flying ship, the katanas, Hitomi’s crystal, the young man with angel wings, a lot of it showed up consciously or unconsciously in Jirale.

And yeah, the two biggest inspirations for this story involve mechas, and yet not a single mecha is anywhere to be found in my own novel. Of course, the other thing influencing how I wrote Jirale was this:

Basically, how I started my “career” as a writer was way back in elementary school. I would take notes on games I played with my friends. I would draw maps, invent languages, maths, write out family trees. I would write pages and pages on background stuff. In junior high I kept doing this, and in lieu of acting out this stuff with friends (which is still socially acceptable when you’re in Grade 6), I would begin to write short mythologies from these worlds. It wasn’t until I got into Tolkien that I realized I could apply my love of inventing worlds with a proper narration, a novel if you will. Writing Jirale coincided with The Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to film, so it was front and centre in my mind when I started writing it, meaning once Kat said she’d draw the comic, I got really excited and created more background information than I knew what to do with… and maybe I’ll write about that another day, when I’m not so drowsy on oxycodone.

Evolution of an Idea

After writing that post about Jirale I started thinking about how I wrote it, specifically just how much the idea changed before I actually started writing anything.

People like to ask writers where their ideas come from, and I know most writers have a hard time answering. I think it’s quite rare that writer’s actually remember when and how they get an idea. I don’t remember when and how I thought of Jirale, but I do remember where I got it from. I got it from this:

Gundam fucking Wing.

And those of you who are familiar with this wonderful example of 90s homoerotic mecha anime, and with Jirale which is a fantasy dealing with religion, racial segregation and vengeance, might be wondering wtf this:

has to do with this:

Jirale began its life as an idea for a mecha anime. A lot of what I had in mind has long since been forgotten, but the basic plot involved a young mech-unit pilot (this evolved into Ichitake) crash-landing, meeting what I had envisioned as a blonde huntress (who became the Asian Cheng-I) to guide the pilot to safety. There were a few other plot points that have survived in some form in the current novel, but basically where Jirale ends is the halfway point of this original story.

By the time the idea had changed time periods, the second half of the plot (which involved a clone of the Ichitake character – which is where that one on her forehead originally came from, by the by) no longer fit, and so it was completely cut. On a side note, I actually took this second half of the story and used it to plot out a completely different comic idea, though I only ever wrote an outline for it.

Some of what I just wrote remained in the plot of Jirale, like the crash-landing (now from a flying ship), Cheng-I does sort of play the role as guide through most of the novel, and the main antagonist and the search for the armour remained. And of course, the braid…

Duo Maxwell from Gundam Wing and Geiru Mizuno From Jirale. Magic!

How did the idea change so drastically? I have no bloody idea. Keep in mind this thought process took place in 2000. I think I wrote this post not in an attempt to figure that out, but just to share how ideas can form for a writer, and how sometimes the idea you sit down to write has nothing to do with the novel you end up producing.