a not-so-secret Armchair Alien decoder ring

Jeannette
Check out the Armchair Alien Substack

With almost a year’s worth of content ranging from a complete novel, two novellas and handful of fun short stories, I thought it was time to create a decoder ring pointing to the start of all the good things over on the Armchair Alien Substack. It’s all good stuff, head over and check it out.

The Last Stop

A scifi short story where an AI in charge of a captive human struggles to do the right thing.

Lunar Escape

A scifi novella (also available by signing up for my newsletter).

After years of captaining a cramped, Conglomerate owned survey ship, Lucas Ordaz is ready to retire and live his dream life on solid ground beside the love of his life. There’s just one last mission: before Earth’s defences obliterate the asteroid, Lucas needs to shuttle a scientist out to study it.

The scientist’s ambitions are set on fire when they discover a potentially alien object on the asteroid. She forces the reluctant crew to attempt bringing it aboard, and chaos ensues.

Lucas wakes up in an abandoned lunar mining facility, without a clue of what that object was or who he can trust. Most importantly, he has to find a way to make it home.

A Demon of Midwinter

An urban fantasy novella about how a vampire and human joined forces to fight a malevolent creature…and fall in love along the way.

When the Good Lord Calls

A not-quite-dystopian small story about death.

Case File 7 – The One With All the Elephants

A kinda silly, detective caper set on a space station (complete with tiny elephants and spicy cricket tacos).

Boots on the Ground 

A scifi short story giving a bit of background on Corporal Baker from Fractured Orbits.

Debt Collectors

A dystopian tale about trying to run from the collectors when the debt comes due.

In April, the The Alien Algorithm, the sequel to Fractured Orbits will begin (if you prefer the book format, The Alien Algorithm is up for pre-order in all the shops now). In addition there’ll be a new Case File (where the future of apple pie is in jeopardy) and another character backstory from Fractured Orbits, then lots more good stuff. While you are over there, don’t forget to subscribe to get Armchair Alien stories direct to your inbox.

Dune and other epic stories

Jeannette

We watched the latest Dune the other night – I’ve read the book and seen earlier movie versions, and I have to say the newest one was excellent (I also really enjoyed the near monochromatic colour scheme as I tend to notice that kind of thing).

Here’s what bothers me about the story (and many other similar stories), it’s epic, about powerful people wielding their power. People have destinies and the lives of millions are at stake. 

In Dune the protagonist, Paul, is essentially royal born, plus he has a destiny. He doesn’t have free will and he has very little choice on how his life is going to play out. 

Destiny is a common Science Fiction and Fantasy trope – Luke is destined to be a Jedi in Star Wars, Rand is destined to be the Dragon Reborn in Wheel of Time, even Frodo is destined to carry that damn ring to Mount Doom (although it’s really Sam that does much of the carrying). And even Cinder in the Lunar Chronicles by Marisa Myers features a hero that happens to be a lost princess (and a cyborg!). There’s a writing formula for this kind of arc—the Hero’s journey (described by Joseph Campbell a name that comes with a lot of baggage).

But the Hero’s journey is only one type of story structure and not really my favourite. I prefer ordinary people who are pushed out of their normal world. People without a ‘destiny’ but need to make the right choices to solve problem that is important to them.

My new series, Encoded Orbits, features a number of characters that are dealing with exactly that—a problem that is important to them. In this case, the two main character’s daughter has been kidnapped by their military and they want to get her back. No one has a destiny, instead they have choices.

By the way, Fractured Orbits, the first instalment in the Encoded Orbits trilogy is out now and is available direct from me or in any of the usual shops.

As a tangent, I’ve been looking at this story structure: Kishōtenketsu and am itching to try it out in an upcoming novel.

Fractured Orbits is now up for pre-order

Jeannette

Fractured Orbits, Book 1 in the Encoded Orbits trilogy is available for pre-order now!

This is the first book I drafted after finishing up my PhD, and the first draft was completed during the first months of pandemic lockdown (that’s a lot of firsts!). It takes me a while to edit, especially since I try to put a book away for a while between each pass. I’m excited that the book is finally ready to release into the world.

Here’s the description:

She is a mutation. She is an abomination. She is a power that could change the universe – or end it. And she is only seven years old.

It’s been 250 years since we discovered the vast web of wormholes, created by an alien race, linking a series of planets. Worlds where, with a little genetic tinkering, humans could thrive. No one thought about side effects until it was too late. Now laws prevent further tampering—but not everyone follows the law. The Protectorate used their military might to enforce these laws.

For Veena, a military cipher decoder, these wars are more than her job – they’re the centre of her existence. She knows a secret: the alien race that created the wormholes may not be gone, and pose a threat.

And even worse, she knows that her own daughter is one of “the enemy”. Born with telekinetic powers, seven-year-old Molly is a mutant who must hide her true nature, or face extermination.

But when an accident reveals her child’s powers, Veena’s worst nightmare comes true. The military snatches Molly—to turn her into a weapon, and use her power to change the face of the galaxy… or destroy it.

Now, Veena is on the run, trying to save her child. Nowhere to hide, no one to trust. She can’t give up. The universe is on the brink of destruction, and it is up to her to stop it all from escalating and falling into the madness of a Fractured Orbit.

What to read a sample? The first chapter can be found on this site here, or the first ten chapters are free here.

Five Books

Jeannette
an awesome duck spotted on a recent walk

I’m deep into drafting a new novel, which has gotten me thinking about what draws me into a fictional world. This is tricky business—the worlds that resonate with me often seem to have little in common. My tastes have changed over time, but these are the five novels I read in my teens and early twenties that still stick in my mind now.

The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett

This was the first grown-up book I read. At the time I was 13 and there wasn’t such a diverse amount of YA novels as there are now. Other than a few scenes a little too erotic for a 13-year-old, it’s a solid spy novel set in Egypt during WW2. It has great action and got me hooked on spy stories. I went on to read all the Ken Follett books out at the time then all the James Bond and Sherlock Holmes books.

Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

This book was the first adult science fiction novel I ever read. During my undergrad this book found me. I have no idea this book ended up in my hands. An alien spaceship is passing by Earth, so we send out a group to explore it (as it was published in 1973 the explores had the gender balance one would expect for the time). Inside, the spaceship is fantastically alien. I loved following the heroes as they tried to make sense of the place and figure out its purpose.

As an aside, I heard a rumour this is going to be made into a movie some time soon (which I’m looking forward to).

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Don’t tell anyone, but for a while I went on a romance novel reading stint. Even though I was bored with them, I ended up stuck in this rut. Then I stumbled upon Outlander, someone gave it to me as a romance novel, but although there is a lot of romance in it, the novel is so much more. There’s a lot of these books, and I’ve enjoyed them. I’d go back and re-read them, except now there’s a TV series of them that allows me to just flop on the couch and enjoy.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein

A military science fiction story about a soldier going through combat training, then heading off to fight bug-like aliens (The unfortunately named movies of the same name I pretend are coincidentally named and completely unrelated to the book). I read this during my army training and loved it. It made me excited to be going out a soldiering, and I really wished I could’ve had their powered armour – my knees would’ve thanked me! Published 1959 it has all the issues one would expect from a novel of the era including sexism I doubt I could stomach now.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Eye of the World and the rest of the Wheel of Time series feature high fantasy with a huge cast of characters and multitudes of sub-plots and it sucked me in. A friend loaned me a stack of these books before I went out on an army exercise back in my soldiering days (I had known upfront, that the exercise would include mostly sitting around for me). For most of two weeks, I sat under a tree or in my command post reading these books. There are fourteen 1000 page books and I’ve read them all at least three times and I’m contemplating reading them again.

I’ve watched season one of the show, and although it’s drifting from the source material, I enjoyed it and am looking forward to season two.

What novels stick out in your mind?

That end year post (a week late)

Jeannette

The picture is of my daughter’s stuffed otter, watching patiently as we recently took a ferry ride in the rain. Like the patient otter, I’m taking a moment to look back at 2021 (a week late as I started the new year with a migraine). I’m a bit of a sucker for dwelling in the negative—I have to work hard not to. A side effect of that is that I tend to overlook the positive. So I thought I’d take some time to list my creative accomplishments for 2021:

First up, writing related things:

Non-writing things:

First off, I made a bathing suit (because I got annoyed when I tried to buy one). I’m surprised at how well it turned out. And here’s a view of it (to the right), by the way, I love polka dots.

This is my first one, usually the first item of clothing based on a new pattern I make doesn’t fit, so I always plan on making at least 2. I was pleasantly surprised that the first version fit. I wanted to swim some laps, and I’m now ready to do so.

I also made two quilts (on a whim, I took a workshop on quilting) and I sewed various other things (shirts, pants, underwear, etc).

I started knitting again (working on socks and a hat, next up a sweater).

I also learned how to needle felt — sold tones of needle felted mushrooms at a local craft fair (who knew mushrooms would be so popular). I did some drawing (not as much as I’d like, but some). In my backyard garden, I grew a ton of tasty veggies like potatoes, beans and leeks (and there are still plenty of fresh things to harvest). Finally, I painted my bedroom a lovely bright yellow (it was a darker purple before, so I had to put on many, many, many coats).

Thinking about the source material

Jeannette 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about TV shows based on loved source material—and how tricky it is. 

Right now, we’re watching the new Wheel of Time TV show. I loved, loved, loved the books—I’ve read them multiple times, some of the characters live in my head. So a new TV show is risky (as was having the series finished by another writer). The TV show is not the same, some things I like, some things I don’t but I’m willing to see how it goes. 

Lord of the Rings is another one where I made sure I’d read the books before the movies came out—in this case I found the movies way better than the books (even then I found it lacking in good female characters). Along the same vein, I was pleasantly surprised by the Outlander TV show after enjoying the books. 

Another book I enjoyed was Starship Troopers and I refuse to admit the movies carrying that name are related in any way to the source material. The Orchid Thief was a book that was exactly my kind of thing, but the movie was just weird and left me uncertain what to think.

But, what happens when I enjoy a show and delve back into the source material? I purposely didn’t read Game of Thrones after watching the shows. But I did go back and read one of the Witcher books after enjoying the show (which I found delightful and I loved the non-linearity to the story telling—which isn’t everyone’s cup of tea). I found the book a little rough around the edges and the characters showed up in my head looking and acting differently, still enjoyed it though, especially Geralt’s long discussions with his horse (the horse didn’t answer).

As a kid I loved Dukes of Hazard (at the time blissfully unaware with all the issues with that show). For nostalgia sake, I watched the remake and I’m pretty sure my IQ dropped. After enjoying the Battle Star Galactica series that came out a while back, I watched the original which left me with a big nope.

Both seasons of The Umbrella Academy I’ve found delightful. As I’ve said before, I love a non-linear story, especially if it’s quirky and takes unexpected turns—which is exactly what this show does. I delved into the graphic novels hoping to fine more of the same, in this case I still enjoyed the stories but I was really turned off by the artwork (stylistically it just isn’t my thing—artwork is subjective that way). I’m pretty sure if I’d found the graphic novels first, I wouldn’t have bothered reading them.

Which brings me to Cowboy Beebop—it’s a quirky, kinda ridiculous space opera western TV show and I’m loving it, even the aesthetic is exactly my thing. I’ve noticed that the original anime is also on Netflix—so I could watch it. But should I?

NaNoWriMo 2021 and Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

Jeannette 1 Comment

Last summer, while I was editing a different novel, a new idea popped into my head. So shiny, so tempting… but I resisted and finished the work I’d already planned. When October came around and I started thinking about NaNoWriMo, I dusted off my shiny idea and started fleshing it out.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo before (2020 and 2018). For those who need a reminder, November is national novel writing month—where one writes 50,000 words over the month. I find setting this goal is a great way for me to get a first draft down. By the way, I hold no expectations on my first drafts—other than getting the story down. Later I edit and polish to the point I’m willing to share the work.

Over the last two weeks of October I developed my outline (some people can write a coherent novel without and outline, but I’m not one of those people). My shiny idea morphed into a story full of airships, fantastic beasts and a quirky robot. 

Weirdly, while working on pulling my ideas together, I stumbled upon a poem by Emily Dickinson that describes my plot better than I could’ve imagined (here’s the book of her poems I’m slowly working through). I know this poem has deeper interpretations, different interpretations, but my story is about hope, a bird and storms. Here it is:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches on the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

I forced my idea into a story arc complete with turning points and characters who develop. Also the more I worked on the story, the less shiny it became (which is what always happens).

On November first, I started writing. Five days in, writing in a third person point of view, it dawned on me the story I’d plotted would work best in first person point of view, so I switched. I also realized that the story is a coming of age one, and thus might classify as YA—so I’ve added some scifi YA books to my to-be-read pile just to get an idea of what tropes are expected (starting with this one).

I’m just about at the half-way point of my draft. Writing is always hard, and this one is not exception, but I think it’s going well. Of course a new shiny idea for a different story has popped into my head, which I’ll resist until its time comes.

*Image above is from here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple-crowned_fairywren

An aside about what wasn’t an UFO

Jeannette

When I was a kid, I saw something in the sky that freaked me out. 

I grew up in a rural area, the kind of place where the Milky Way was visible overhead (unlike the light polluted urban area where I now live). On clear summer nights, my friends would come over and we’d sleep on deck watching the stars and telling scary stories. 

The night in question, when I was probably 8, two of my friends and I lay in our sleeping bags staring at the cosmos above. As we watched, a blazing ball of orange appeared directly above us. As it descended, it slowly disintegrated, vanishing before it reached the height of the surrounding trees. I was used to watching shooting stars, and knew for sure that was not what we saw. 

Screaming in the way only little girls can, the three of us ran into the house. Although I can’t remember exactly, I suspect we didn’t sleep outside that night. The flaming ball freaked me out so much that for years after I avoided even looking up the sky when out at night.

By nature, I’m a bit of a skeptic, so I never assumed what I saw was a UFO—instead my thoughts went to meteors the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. But I could have made other assumptions and the assumptions we make about the things we see but can’t explain are fascinating.

Recently, I’ve been mildly obsessed with this podcast about UFOs. It doesn’t take the stories as fact, instead; it looks at how the UFO phenomenon has become intertwined with our culture. Over the last two weeks, I blitzed through both seasons, ignoring all the other podcasts I normally listen to.

As an aside, I don’t doubt there is alien life out there somewhere—maybe even in our own solar system. I suspect first contact will be more like The Andromeda Strain than humanoid aliens snatching us out of our beds, but I don’t really know. However, I’ll stick with Carl Sagan when he said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

There is so much possibility of what alien life might be like (and I realize alien life might be the wrong term when it’s us visiting their world). It’s entirely possible that we won’t even recognize it as life, or, in my opinion, less likely, a spaceship might land from which logical humanoids with pointy ears might emerge to help usher us into a new space age.

Alien contact is one of the hallmarks of science fiction. Sometime encountering new life is filled with wonder (Contact or To Be Taught if Fortunate), or it can go terribly wrong (Alien), and sometimes we even join in with a complex pantheon of other types of life (Space Opera, Star Trek or The Algebraist). 

As a writer of science fiction, I’ve been thinking hard about how to fit alien contact into my work. In the Settler Chronicles series, there is an alien artifact that plays into how the series concludes. In Fractured Orbits (chapter 1 drops this Thursday, September 30th, 2021), humans now live in a part of the galaxy where an alien civilization once thrived, but no one knows what happened to them.  

Starting Thursday, chapters from Fractured Orbits will be serialized over on the Armchair Alien SubStack. The first ten chapters will be free, after that a paid subscription will be required. But, I’m happy to offer a free year long subscription for a limited time. Head over here by October 4th 2021 to claim this offer.

By the way, I now know for sure what I saw in the sky that night was a flare (which is a little anticlimactic).

The name of a rose

Jeannette

A couple of weeks ago, I took a day off to wander through a local rose garden–one I’d been too many times before, but this time I noticed something new.

There seems to be a family somewhere out there with my last name (long lost relatives perhaps?) breeding roses and giving them fun names.

How to build an idea-generator

Jeannette

It’s not a secret that I keep notebooks containing the random things I come across (the photo above is an assortment of some of them). These books include notes from what I read, hear on podcasts or find in articles. Within these notebooks, I also jot down my ideas. 

I started over a decade ago when I’d just gone back to university to work on an advanced degree. At a ‘how to be a successful grad student’ workshop, one session was on keeping a notebook. They advised us to write everything down from the content of research articles to our grocery list in one place. We’d have a record of our research that wasn’t precious and we’d offload the contents of our mind to free up space for thinking. When the time came to write out thesis, the notebooks would be the starting point—at least that was the theory.

I took this advice to heart—I filled multiple notebooks for both my Masters degree and my PhD. The single notebooks morphed into separate ones for my non-research related stuff. Now I have stacks filled with notes, including these gems (found by a random flipping through)

  • On the International Space Station, fresh fruit and vegetables seem to rot faster than on Earth (from Endurance: A Year in Space. A Life of Discovery by Scott Kelly)
  • From 4 January 2012 – What do you get if you cross and snowman and a vampire? (Frostbite) a bad joke found in a Christmas cracker.
  • Sepia means and ‘cuttlefish’ in Greek after an ink made of dried cuttlefish with a colour between red and brown.
  • Or this quote by Ursula Le Guin – “If you see a whole thing—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Plants, lives,… but up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job. You get tired. You lose the pattern.”

So ten years on, I have a delightful pile of notebooks filled with random stuff. Stuff that I chose over the years, stuff that probably clusters around themes I don’t yet see. Stuff that might make interesting articles, fodder for my next scifi story, or even a non-fiction book. I’m sure they all add up to something. I just don’t know what.

I actually quite enjoy filling my notebooks, but I’d like to mine the contents better. I’ve always noted where the contents came from. About five years ago, I started adding page numbers for ideas found in books. About a year ago, I started adding indexes (based on bullet journal ideas). My notebookery is improving. 

Stumbling upon How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens shows the next level of note taking. This method is based on Luhmann’s (a prolific sociologist) slip-box and here’s how it works.

Whenever Luhmann read something, he would make a brief note on the topic on an index card—always sticking to a one idea per card. He’d then put the card into a ‘slip-box’. The next time he put an idea on an index card, he’d look in his slip-box for other relevant notes. He would file the new card with links to existing notes, creating a web of connections.

It’s the connection between notes that’s important—this is where insights and more questions form. Notes expand our brain’s capacity and can become the mechanism of our thinking.

In time, the cards would form a complicated web of connected ideas. He’d then mine his slip-box for topics to be delved further into or put together into publications (he was an academic, after all).

This non-linear system would allow its creator, in time, to build a highly personalized idea-generator. 

“The more you learn and collect, the more beneficial your notes should become, the more ideas can mingle and give birth to new ones.”

How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens

In theory, the material in a slip-box will cluster around themes the creator is interested in but may not actually realize. The slip-box can bring forward forgotten ideas, or even remind us we’ve had the same idea multiple times (this happens to me). It creates a place to juxtapose and tinker with ideas, allowing new patterns to form the web of associated information.

Here’s an example of what the physical version of this system might end up looking like:

By Kai Schreiber from Münster, Germany – zettelkasten, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38417590

I like the potential of the slip-box method because I’d love my own personalized idea generator. But maintaining a physical box (or drawers of them like old library files) seems a bit much for me. However, there is software capable of the task. I’m now futzing with different options to get my system going (I’ll report back on how it’s going). 

As a tangent, in the book there’s a reference to half of all doctoral theses staying unfinished. Sadly, I’m not surprised. Fortunately, I finished after what felt like a really, really long time.