2006 by Sandy Auden, 7 Suns only

[D Pope]

http://www.sfsite.com/01a/ka215.htm

Kevin J. Anderson has embarked on a huge undertaking with his Saga of
Seven Suns novels -- the sheer breadth of story embraced within its planned
seven volumes would make a less determined writer tremble.

Yet Anderson has actually made the task look easy, with a regular stream of
releases throughout the series. But you have to ask why an author would take
on such a big project...




Origins of a Saga

While I was writing my own original stories, Star Wars books and Dune books,
I was also looking in the bookshop. I watched several other writers being
tremendously successful with what we lovingly call big fat fantasy novels.
Many, many volumes, many of which are large enough to be used as a weapon
in military combat, and they were all fantasies. Well I like SF more that fantasy
so why is no author writing a giant continuing science fiction series?

In truth, I was actually doing that anyway. The Dune books I write with Brian
Herbert happen to be a very long epic SF series. But I started wondering what
I would like to do as a large continuing SF story.

I'd already had an idea that I thought was too good to use in a Star Wars
novel. Remember Cloud City, Lando Calrissian's place up in the clouds of a
gas giant planet? I had this image in my head of Cloud City floating above the
clouds but there's this endless ocean of planet below and nobody knows what's
down there. I saw the gigantic Mothership from Close Encounters of the Third
Kind coming up out of the clouds and attacking Cloud City. Nobody knew who
they were or where they came from but they were a race that lived deep within
the gas giant planet. And somehow or other, our characters had done something
to piss them off.

I thought this was a fabulous idea and like a game of dominoes that kept
falling into place, I began to envision why they were attacking, what had
been done to these gas giant aliens. I wanted the people to be destroyed in
the city above the clouds. I wanted them to also have had no part in it at all,
that they were innocent bystanders which would set up other political conflicts.
I knew I wanted to have other races in there too and before I knew it, the
entire story for the first five books fell into place within the first hour, all the
generalities were there. I didn't know all the politics or all of the characters --
all that got built up later as I fleshed it out -- but I really did have the whole
road map for the entire series.

This original plot hasn't changed over time either. At least, it hasn't changed
in the sense that the original story that I had in my head in that first hour is
all there -- that's still the main outline and framework of the whole story.
But there are some characters that I made up to serve no real purpose --
except to walk on stage and maybe say a few lines -- that have become very
interesting to me. They've taken off on their own storylines. And as I develop
them and their own stories expand and they start to intersect with the other
characters so the details have grown in their own directions. But the main
outline, the main trunk of the tree so to speak, has stayed the same.




Character Evolution

One of these made up, wayward characters is called Davlin Lotze.
He's basically a specialist in obscure details -- which is to say he's a spy.
And he doesn't like who he happens to be working for so he's gone AWOL
and done other things.

That character started out as part of a charity auction where two people in
the audience, namely David and Linda Lotze, won a bid to get their name
mentioned in one of my books. So I combined their names to Davlin Lotze
and just assigned it to this character that appeared and wasn't supposed to
do anything. But I found that he could solve a problem that I had set up in the
plot. And he solved it with such panache that I had to use him again and it
turns out that this man has been one of the main characters in all five volumes
of the series I've written so far. So I think those two people have quite got
their money's worth out of the donation.

Another example is a trader woman called Rlinda Kett, who was going to be
a character off and on in the books but she teamed up with her ex-husband,
who's a bit of a clown and an amusing character and who I didn't even know
existed till she started grumbling about him. I thought it might be a good
relationship and it turns out that they're like many real people, in that they
love each other dearly but they can't stand to be married to each other and
now they're doing just fine.

As I build up the family details -- everybody's got parents and brothers or
sisters or uncles etc. -- they've all got something to do. I keep track of all of
this stuff because I feel that when someone has to appear to do a minor thing
in the plot, I may as well use somebody who has some minor connection to the
other characters rather than just, like a movie script would say, Security
Guard Number 1. Well, why call him that? You may as well make him the
grandson of the old woman who just got killed in the last chapter.




Never A Dull Moment

My work on the Seven Suns series is like my own love letter to science fiction.
I've always loved SF and I threw in everything, from the giant nasty robots
that are Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still, to alien ruins on empty planets,
to the dying and decadent aliens from a different race to the space gypsies
and weird planets to the strange religions and star-crossed lovers and good
guys and bad guys and really nasty aliens who live in gas giant planets.
Everything that I love about SF is in some form in these books.

I hate books where there's nothing going on. Seven Suns is about a handful
of races and empires, hundreds of star systems and a multi-strand war that
is going on with many different alliances and enemies and villains. And in
order to show the whole picture you have to have eyes everywhere to see the
different facets through.

You need to have characters who are conveniently in the spot to see the
interesting things happen rather than have one character who couldn't possibly
see everything because then I would have to do things off stage. Readers are
like voyeurs, they want to see everything happening. They don't want to be
told that a great massacre occurred that wiped out an alien race. They want
someone who's actually there.

I don't want to use a narrative voice because you don't care about the narrator.
There's a very good example in book three Horizon Storms, I needed to have
the robots, the nasty people, wipe out one of our innocent little human colony
that was set up by a bunch of wide-eyed pioneers. They're building a town,
they've got all their hopes and dreams packed up in their suitcases and
they've gone to set them up. And I thought it would just be very nasty if
these evil robots came and wiped them out. In this situation, it's no fun to
tell that story from the evil robots point of view, because you don't care about
them, so I created this poor innocent little girl colonist who happens to be
there and happens to escape and be the only one left alive after this tragedy.

She's another character that I found so interesting that I've kept her in a
couple of books and I'm now sending her off on a completely different story
line. The character came about when one of my editors (the producer for some
of my audio books for Random House) was sending me a whole bunch of free
books on tape and she said, 'Well, now you've got the throw my name in as a
character somewhere.' Her name is Orli and I told her I'd either make her
princess of the universe or do horrible things to character. And I ended up
doing horrible things to her character.

Because of the nature of this multi-volumed epic story that I'm telling, it
would really get rather dull if by book five I hadn't managed to off one of the
characters. I have the luxury of off-ing a lot of the characters because I'm
constantly planting the seeds for new characters to come up and take the roles.
I don't want to say that you want to regularly kill off your characters but you
want to keep the story line unexpected enough so that the reader doesn't yawn.
By killing off somebody that they really like makes them blink their eyes and go,
'I didn't expect that.'

Another thing is that, especially from book four onwards, the characters
that you thought were the villains from earlier books are starting to come
around and seem to be doing things for the right reasons after all. The primary
example for this is the Dobro Designator. There's a really terrible person, or
you think he is, and then in book four you kind scratch your head and think,
'I kinda like this guy after all.'

I've done that with several characters, because I don't believe that heroes
and villains are black and white. I think that most villains are doing their
terrible things for the best of reasons, or at least reasons that make sense
to them; it's not because they want to cackle and crack their knuckles and
claim they want to take over the world. I don't know what I'd do with the world,
if I was the ruler of it anyway. I think I'd just have bureaucratic headaches.




A Quality Approach

One of my biggest advantages is that I grew up as a science fiction fan.
I read the books all the time and I know what pisses me off as a reader
and I promised myself not to do that with my own books.

One of these things is every one of these books so far (and frankly every
one of my Dune books with Brian Herbert as well) has been brought out on
time, every year. You can count on them to come out -- a Seven Suns book
every June/July and a Dune book every September -- because I hate it when
an author hooks me on a series and leaves me hanging for years and doesn't
turn in the next book.

I made a vow to myself that if I was going to do these books with a whole
bunch of cliff hangers (so you could almost hear the resounding thuds of books
being thrown across the room as people wish they didn't have to wait another
year!) then I will come out with the next book, next year. You don't have to
wait so long.

Also, when I read giant epics -- space operas with more characters that you
could list in a telephone book -- I find it very upsetting when the author doesn't
put a glossary at the back. Despite my best intentions I might forget who
somebody is or which family they come from. So I've made sure that I always
put a glossary at the end of each of my books so you can flip back.

And I know that if you're reading the series you don't want to have to re-read
all of the previous books every year. So I do a 'Story So Far' section at the
beginning to get you up to speed. I'd be delighted if you wanted to re-read
them every year but I want to give you enough clues so can get up to speed.
It's almost like the TV show, they do these scenes from 'last week's episode'
just to remind you.

And it looks now that to tell the whole story will take me six or seven novels.
I prefer seven just because it's Seven Suns and it feels like the right amount
of books, but I'm not going to keep making up things to drag it along. I have
my plan, there is a finish line, I know where we're going with the story, there
may not be any characters left alive at the end of book seven but I don't want
to have readers think that I'm just stretching it out so that I'm forcing them
to buy a book every year. The situation is always so much different at the end
of each book than the beginning, I'm moving the story along, characters are
dying or changing, the political situation is changing, I'm extinguishing stars,
I'm blowing up planets. It will be finished. I want the readers to know there's
hope, that there will be closure.


Copyright © 2006 by Sandy Auden
Sandy Auden is currently working as an enthusiastic reviewer for SFX magazine



...

[merkin muffley]

I'd already had an idea that I thought was too good to use in a Star Wars novel.

And he wonders why fans hate him.

That character started out as part of a charity auction where two people in the audience, namely David and Linda Lotze, won a bid to get their name mentioned in one of my books.

Hack. Whore. Cheeseball.

You need to have characters who are conveniently in the spot to see the interesting things happen rather than have one character who couldn't possibly see everything because then I would have to do things off stage. Readers are like voyeurs, they want to see everything happening. They don't want to be told that a great massacre occurred that wiped out an alien race.

Famously, this is his take on Frank Herbert. He might as well just come out and say, "I hate and do not understand Frank Herbert." He has contempt, and he clearly thinks he is a better writer.

I made a vow to myself that if I was going to do these books with a whole bunch of cliff hanger (so you could almost hear the resounding thuds of books being thrown across the room as people wish they didn't have to wait another year!)

That is not quite why all those books were being thrown across rooms.

What an unbelievable talentless arrogant DOUCHE of a hack.


(Hi DPope, good to see you here! )

[SandChigger]

Hack. Whore. Cheeseball.

Mind if I Tweet that at him later?

(Hi DPope, good to see you here! )

Quite.

[D Pope]

Thanks Guys!