A Pteronaut? What's a Pteronaut? Why, didn't you know...?
OK, with apologies to fans of The Gruffalo everywhere, my previous post was about inspiration in very general terms. This post is going to be about the specific ingredients that went into my book Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. I'll try to avoid any spoilers: there shouldn't be anything in here that can't be guessed at from the cover-blurb.
I wrote RTRH (as my cousin calls it) alongside Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, and they're two very different books. I'll talk more about Thalassa in another post. RTRH is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi desert chase book. I wanted it to be very pure and simple, a bit like a desert appears to be: just a straightforward hunter vs. hunted story. The hunted is the Pteronaut; the hunter is the Crawler. This is a book with two characters (you could argue for more, but basically two) and no dialogue. In the very first draft synopsis, I had one line of dialogue, but at that time the Crawler hadn't really developed into what it became, so that single line of speech vanished very quickly.
The Pteronaut is humanoid, probably human, probably not genetically engineered. I'm not really sure, and it doesn't really matter. He is a survivor who travels the deserts for reasons which are hinted at, but which never become clear.
The Crawler is an ancient and very sentient machine. In my early drafts, the Pteronaut was the less human of the two. I wanted him to react to situations without thought, and even in the final version, he remains largely true to those origins. The Crawler is the antagonist, but in some ways perhaps, the one that a reader might understand a little more. The reasons for the Crawler hunting the Pteronaut are again hinted at but never really made explicit. This is a book that is a snap-shot of something bigger.
The setting is the dead red deserts. I'm not 100% sure whether this is Earth or, as I think I prefer, an incompletely and unsuccessfully terraformed Mars. There are some hints that the latter is more likely: it's cold but the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and there's lots of water in the permafrost. The lower Martian gravity (about 38% of the Earth's) would also help the Pteronaut to travel, but it doesn't actually matter. While writing the book, I steered clear of references to compass points and celestial phenomena. There is no mention of the Sun, only daylight, no stars, and no moon. Those options are all kept well and truly open.
So, the ingredients. Not many of those are literary. Richard Matheson's Duel: Novelette and the Steven Spielberg TV-film based on it were big influences. 2000 AD's Rogue Trooper: Future War is a strip I enjoyed as a tween/teenager, and his travails on Nu-Earth were in the mix. Other ideas about desert pursuit that I owe to youthful TV habits were series like Logan's Run, based on the book Logan's Run, and the TV series of the book and film of Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes (the book is not as good as either, IMO), as well as too many trail-westerns to mention. The trigger for writing RTRH was Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North, as I said in my previous post, and other elements along the same lines were the flying knight scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Walt Disney's Condorman, and the Rocketeer. Finally, the Crawler owes its existence to another 2000 AD favourite, Mek-Quake from A.B.C. Warriors: Khronicles of Khaos and Ro-Busters Book 1, as well as Philip Reeve's traction-cities from the Mortal Engines quartet, and of course the jawas' sandcrawler from Star Wars. The Crawler not really exactly like any of them: more like an intelligent oil-rig on wheels. One final ingredient for the desert setting came in the form of the Nazca Lines.
Add all that together, stir slowly on a low heat (preferably minus 5) in a carbon dioxide-rich environment for 6 years, and you end up with Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. If you do take the plunge, I hope you enjoy it. Let me know.
I wrote RTRH (as my cousin calls it) alongside Thalassa: the world beneath the waves, and they're two very different books. I'll talk more about Thalassa in another post. RTRH is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi desert chase book. I wanted it to be very pure and simple, a bit like a desert appears to be: just a straightforward hunter vs. hunted story. The hunted is the Pteronaut; the hunter is the Crawler. This is a book with two characters (you could argue for more, but basically two) and no dialogue. In the very first draft synopsis, I had one line of dialogue, but at that time the Crawler hadn't really developed into what it became, so that single line of speech vanished very quickly.
The Pteronaut is humanoid, probably human, probably not genetically engineered. I'm not really sure, and it doesn't really matter. He is a survivor who travels the deserts for reasons which are hinted at, but which never become clear.
The Crawler is an ancient and very sentient machine. In my early drafts, the Pteronaut was the less human of the two. I wanted him to react to situations without thought, and even in the final version, he remains largely true to those origins. The Crawler is the antagonist, but in some ways perhaps, the one that a reader might understand a little more. The reasons for the Crawler hunting the Pteronaut are again hinted at but never really made explicit. This is a book that is a snap-shot of something bigger.
The setting is the dead red deserts. I'm not 100% sure whether this is Earth or, as I think I prefer, an incompletely and unsuccessfully terraformed Mars. There are some hints that the latter is more likely: it's cold but the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, and there's lots of water in the permafrost. The lower Martian gravity (about 38% of the Earth's) would also help the Pteronaut to travel, but it doesn't actually matter. While writing the book, I steered clear of references to compass points and celestial phenomena. There is no mention of the Sun, only daylight, no stars, and no moon. Those options are all kept well and truly open.
So, the ingredients. Not many of those are literary. Richard Matheson's Duel: Novelette and the Steven Spielberg TV-film based on it were big influences. 2000 AD's Rogue Trooper: Future War is a strip I enjoyed as a tween/teenager, and his travails on Nu-Earth were in the mix. Other ideas about desert pursuit that I owe to youthful TV habits were series like Logan's Run, based on the book Logan's Run, and the TV series of the book and film of Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes (the book is not as good as either, IMO), as well as too many trail-westerns to mention. The trigger for writing RTRH was Anthony Gormley's Angel of the North, as I said in my previous post, and other elements along the same lines were the flying knight scene from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Walt Disney's Condorman, and the Rocketeer. Finally, the Crawler owes its existence to another 2000 AD favourite, Mek-Quake from A.B.C. Warriors: Khronicles of Khaos and Ro-Busters Book 1, as well as Philip Reeve's traction-cities from the Mortal Engines quartet, and of course the jawas' sandcrawler from Star Wars. The Crawler not really exactly like any of them: more like an intelligent oil-rig on wheels. One final ingredient for the desert setting came in the form of the Nazca Lines.
Add all that together, stir slowly on a low heat (preferably minus 5) in a carbon dioxide-rich environment for 6 years, and you end up with Race the Red Horizon: the Flight of the Pteronaut. If you do take the plunge, I hope you enjoy it. Let me know.
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