Top of the Monday, Space Crew!
Today I need to get personal. This campaign has been among the most heartwarming and most stressful experiences of my life. It seems that you all hold the power to make or break my day.
That’s something I hope to get better at pushing out of my mind as my writing career advances, but this is my first major publishing endeavour, so I’ve got a lot of jitters around the whole thing.
I was recently asked about why I needed to publish this book in an Inkshares article. You can see my full answer there, but it comes down to this:
Science-fiction used to be a thing that brought people together. I think of Star Trek in the 1960s, and how groundbreakingly diverse it was. That was a time when we didn’t divide people into segmented nerd cultures. It was a time when grandparents and children could share an appreciation for fiction together.
When I try to put a genre on my stories I get pretty overwhelmed. If I want to appease the "true" sci-fi crowd, then I need to go with hard sci-fi, which means pulling out the old physics textbooks and hitting up r/askscience. If I want to include magic it becomes fantasy, unless it could be explained by science. If I mention anything potentially unscientific while the rest of the story is consistently well-researched, I break suspension of disbelief.
Now, I love science-fiction. I have a sort of reverent respect for futurologists, and well-studied fiction writers. But I couldn’t take all of these constraints and still make The Traveller’s Cup what it is today. So when I discovered the Nerdist Space Opera contest, and my eye caught the following line, I gaped for a moment:
"We define (a space opera) as any adventure that takes place in space."
I have never felt so liberated as a storyteller. I began to dig out old notes. I tore a page out of one of my fantasy ideas and shoved it in the middle of a sci-fi project. I let my imagination run wild with all the rules I could now break! I can write fantasy set in space. My heroes can be space pirates who run into space dragons battling space wizards. The Tolkien-esque fundamentals of a classic adventure story can exist in a galaxy far, far away.
So with reckless abandon I began breaking these rules, and found a story that was always meant to be told. A story that I think can transcend our need for niches and subgenres and just breathe. This is a book for your mom. It’s a book for your geeky brother. It’s a book for teens as much as seniors. At least that’s my hope. I wrote The Traveller’s Cup to be approachable and accessible.
Because I think it’s time we stopped focusing on our differences and let our minds experience the unknown again.
Your Exuberant Overlord,
-AC
