Revisiting my previous books leads to a range of emotions. There’s pride (’this is something I created!’). There are moments of surprise (’I’d forgotten how well that twist works!’) But there’s also a vague sense of disappointment.

Yes, I may uncover mistakes (proofreading errors always slip through), but that isn’t what I’m getting at here. As I continue to write, my writing and story-telling improves. And there are moments in those older books that now feel clunky. There are passages (some long, some short) that I would now tighten. There is a great deal of room for improvement.

In retrospect, I didn’t use technology to its full in my Shadows and ShadowTech books.

In both series most characters have a lattice. This is a tech layer that sits beneath the skin and interacts with the body and mind. It can speed up healing. It can increase the efficiency of the body. It enables people to interact with different systems without physical connections, too. Pilots fly their craft by the power of thought. Hackers don’t need to rely on keyboards or other interfaces, only their lattices. People can operate machinery without needing to press any buttons.

The lattice also enables a kind of tech-based telepathy. People can ‘talk’ through their lattices, either in tight or wide conversations, without uttering a sound or moving their lips. With the aid of boosters, this communication can happen over vast distances.

Almost everyone has a lattice‌—‌but not everyone. A central character in these books has to cope with being seen as ‘inferior’ because of her lack of functioning lattice. Another character’s lattice starts playing up, leading to various complications.

So, what’s the problem?

Let’s take a step back. Think of mobile phones, and how different things were prior to their existence. Travelling to somewhere new meant using paper maps to plan a route, with no sat-nav to guide every single turn. End up in difficulties in the middle of nowhere, and you’d better hope someone came along, because there was no way to (easily) call for help. And if you came across something amazing you’d be telling people about it later, trying to convince them you didn’t make it up‌—‌no magical device you could pull out to record and transmit images and videos across the world in real-time. Need to know something? You’d have to visit a library instead of doing a quick internet search. Need to sort out your finances? Better make time for a trip to the bank, then wait five working days for any changes to take effect.

And I haven’t even touched on social media. Or QR codes. Or having a complete library of books, music and films on hand wherever we are, all the time.

Having these devices on hand at all times has changed so much of our daily lives that pre-mobile times are like another world.

Technology has consequences. Technology can change societies, in ways that can’t always be predicted. Technology can be invented for one purpose, but people will use it for all kinds of other purposes.

The same should be true in fiction. A powerful technology should have a major impact on day-to-day life.
I came across a great example of this a while ago. I think it was in Peter F Hamilton’s Salvation series (although I could be wrong).

Many sci-fi stories circumvent the impossibility of faster-than-light travel through portals or wormholes. Sometimes they are in set places (think Stargate), but in the Salvation books portals can be any size, and are extremely portable. Characters have collapsible portals they can carry around with them.

But throughout the books Hamilton explores how these portals could be used in so many different ways.

How do you change a desert into fertile farming land? You need water. How do you get water to the desert? You can pipe it in, after first laying the pipes. Or, with these portals, you can literally drop water onto the desert‌—‌a portal in the air above the arid landscape, a corresponding portal being fed water, and instant rain!

Cities would change, too. When workers can use portals to commute, there’s no need for mass transit infrastructure, so those unused wide roads become green spaces, turning the cities into more pleasant environments. With travel times so drastically reduced, there is also less need for hotels, less need for dense urban residential areas. Why live close to work when, with portals, anywhere is close to work?

That might be fine for the hoi polloi, but what about the wealthy? There’s no need for holiday homes when each room of a ‘house’ can exist in a separate geographical location, connected by portal doors. Eat in a dining room looking out over a vast Savannah, then relax in a lounge on a tropical beach. When that gets too warm, retire to the bedroom and watch the snow-covered mountains from the balcony.

And what about those exploratory craft travelling through space (because portals only connect to other portals‌—‌you can’t skip to somewhere totally new)? Hitting debris in space could be catastrophic. Place a portal at the front of the craft, another at the rear, and the problem is solved.

See what I mean? A technology that serves an important purpose in the story (allowing characters to travel vast distances without the time of that travel slowing the story), but one that has story-world implications. Even if the technology itself is ‘impossible’, the consideration of the wider impact makes it feel ‘real’.

So this is my challenge (one of the many) as I work on this new series. For every piece of technology I introduce, I need to consider the implications. How would it impact daily life? How would it be used for work and for entertainment? How would people twist the technology to their own purposes?

How can I make the fictional technology in my books feel as real as a mobile phone?

It’s definitely a challenge. And a daunting one. But this kind of world-building is all part of the fun of writing science fiction.

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This post originally appeared as a part of my Substack on writing a new series. If you want to have these posts delivered to your in-box when they’re released, please consider subscribing for free to my Substack by clicking here.

You might’ve heard writers say things like ‘my characters keep on doing things I don’t want them to’, or ‘my characters are always surprising me’. For a long time I thought this was nonsense‌—‌if you’re writing the story, surely you’re in control. Those characters are your inventions. They do what you want them to.

But this happens to me. I’ll be writing, and because of my planning I’ll have a solid idea of where the scene’s going. Then I’ll have a line of dialogue come to me, and before I’m aware of it the words are out of my mind and onto the screen. I’ll read it back and realise this one line could throw the whole story off-script.

Maybe I should illustrate this with a couple of examples.

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The main character in the story I’m currently working on (a story adjacent to the main series, because I needed a break‌—‌read my previous post for more information) is called Kane. He’s a loner. He’s been through a lot, done things he’s not proud of, and he’s learnt from his mistakes. Older and wiser (he hopes), he prefers to solve problems without resorting to violence, but if things get physical he can usually take care of himself.

As the story progresses he finds himself on a courier vessel, a part of a team hired for a particular job. But Kane manages to enter the crew’s area, where he strikes up something like a friendship with the vessel’s captain (once she’s overcome her wariness of him).
But as I wrote scenes where they talked I became aware that some of their dialogue and behaviours, bordered on flirting. This came from both the captain and Kane.

This wasn’t something I’d planned on. Kane generally doesn’t like people‌—‌he’ll work with them, and he can be sociable when it’s required, but he’s content on his own. H isn’t looking for any kind of relationship, even a short-term one.

At least, I didn’t think he was. But maybe there’s a side to Kane I wasn’t aware of.

But I didn’t plan for anything like this. It’s going to force me to reassess the rest of the story‌—‌if I introduce a bit of flirtation, that sets up an expectation. If I then ignore this flirting I’m not honouring an implicit promise‌—‌that this flirting will be relevant or important in some way.

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Let’s look at another example. Kane comes into contact with another member of the crew (who I haven’t yet named). This crew-member is antagonistic towards Kane, and I initially thought this was because Kane shouldn’t have been in the crew area. But in a later conversation with the captain she said that this crew-member has been struggling for a while now.

The vessel, by this stage of the story, is docked at what I’m calling an orbital‌—‌a satellite the size of a large town. There are tensions on the orbital, with different factions vying for power‌—‌a situation that will, over the course of the story, push Kane to ‘save the day’.

But as Kane and the captain talk, she mentions that this crew-member has worked on the orbital before, and that this is a big part of his problems.

I have no idea where that came from. But as I thought about it, I saw possibilities. I saw how a troubled past could interact with the current situation. I saw how it could enhance the whole book.

But, as with the flirting, it’s going to mess with my planning.

So I have two options. Either I go with it, or I rewrite these scenes to edit out these ‘surprises’.

I’m reticent to throw these surprises out, though. Because there’s something important going on here.

I’ll try to explain.

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We’ve been conditioned to think of work as ‘doing things’. If we’re being paid, we’re expected to be physically doing things for the time we spend at work. If there’s nothing productive to do, we find things to make us look busy‌—‌because not doing anything isn’t working.

It’s the same with writing. If words aren’t going down‌—‌whether in drafting, planning or editing‌—‌then it feels as if we’re not really writing. There’s a certain amount of pressure to produce a certain number of words each day. When we’re not physically writing (or typing) there’s a nagging guilt, and we tell ourselves we’re being lazy.

But writing, as with any creative activity, is far more than simply ‘doing the physical activity’. So much of writing involves thinking. We need to think about our stories and our characters. We need to explore different possibilities. In science-fiction we need to imagine exciting and interesting technologies, wild new worlds, craft that can travel across the vastness of space.

Some of that thinking is ‘active’. It happens when we’re sitting at our (metaphorical) desks. This is the kind of thinking we do at the laptop, typing up our ideas as they occur, or scribbling into a notepad. This is the thinking we do between lines, when we look up from the laptop and stare into space for a while, mentally running through possibilities for the next paragraph.

But thinking goes far deeper. When working on a story (or a whole series) we have countless ideas in our minds. We need to write them down to keep track of them, but those ideas are still buzzing around when we’re not typing or writing. We have a problem in the story, and that problem sits in our mind. We ruminate on it. It’s easy to become distracted while doing something else because we’re trying to find a solution.

And, far too often, that solution seems to come out of the blue, and at some random time. In the shower, or while exercising, or as we’re dropping off to sleep.

Because these problems sink into our subconsciousness. And our subconscious minds are churning away all the time. We’re ‘thinking’ even when we’re not thinking.

So when ideas seem to appear out of the blue‌—‌when characters do things I hadn’t planned or say things which go way off-script‌—‌I have to take notice. Chances are, these surprises come from my subconscious mind, and are solutions to problems I’m not yet fully conscious of in the story.

So Kane and the captain’s flirtation tells me I probably need to open Kane up to the possibility of not being so much of a loner. Or maybe it’s telling me that there’s another part of the captain’s character I haven’t fully understood yet, a part that is going to influence Kane’s decisions later in the story. And the crew-member’s history with the orbital tells me I need to make the story deeper to make it richer. It’s forcing me to reconsider Kane’s motivations for various things I ‘want’ him to do.

Does this mean more work? Definitely. I need to pause (maybe not for too long) and adjust my planning. When it comes to editing I’ll need to make sure these surprises don’t feel too random, that they’re foreshadowed as much as they need to be. And maybe this will lead to more ‘problems’ later on, with more things needing to be worked out when it comes to the edit.

But the extra work is worth it if it makes the story better.

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This post originally appeared on my Substack, as a part of my attempt to document my work on a new series. If you’d like to read these posts as they are published, delivered to your in-box, then sign up to my Substack for free by clicking here.