2063 update, and some thoughts about Kim Stanley Robinson’s new(ish) book, Aurora

[Minor spoiler warning: I’m not a spoiler person. In my experience good material stands up to knowing the basic outline of a story. But if you are sensitive to this, I discuss a plot point from about a quarter of the way through Aurora that is not a known quantity at the beginning of the book. If you’re still curious how my book is going, stop reading after the second paragraph! -da]

After giving it as much of a self-edit as I could manage earlier this year, I sent the draft of my book out to a very small group of beta readers a few months ago. The results are starting to come in. So far, the ones who have started it all finished it, which is the first bit of good news. Their responses have been generally very positive, which is even better news, but the best news is that they’ve all given me piles of thoughtful critiques. Based on this response I’ve started querying agents, and while I wait to hear back (it takes weeks and weeks), I’m leveling the guns for another big edit to tackle the issues they’ve raised.

The plan from here is to agent hunt until either I find one or have had my fill of rejection. If I get to that point, based on the feedback so far, I’m looking hard at going the self publishing route and will probably set up a Kickstarter. I’m pretty excited about either direction at this point. I would love to get the help of a professional in editing, positioning and marketing it, but it seems likely I could raise enough for a good edit and a toehold on the marketing with the Kickstarter, and figuring out the marketing on my own sounds like a fun and interesting challenge.

I’ve also started reading a new book that is keeping me fully inspired: my author/idol Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book about the first voyage of humanity leaving the solar system, Aurora.

One of my readers’ feedback was that my book gave her a little bit of an ache of wanting to live in that world. (That was actually the second best bit of feedback; the best bit was Jen saying she thought this was the best return on investment the State of California has ever gotten from its unemployment system!)

I think about that Ache a lot; I like all sorts of fiction, including stories set in completely other worlds that bear little semblance to our own and thus don’t generate much Ache, but I LOVE the stories that resonate more with a world we could possibly live in that do generate the Ache.

Aurora does that like crazy. Without giving too much away, there’s a scene where the first humans witness an eclipse while standing on an entirely new world that pegged the needle, broke the glass and melted the mechanism on my Ache-o-meter.

But if we’re going to get there, we have to figure out stuff back here on dusty ol’ Earth first. The events of the past few weeks have been an illustration of some of the failure modes there still isn’t much alignment on addressing. Maybe we’re headed for a downward spiral from racism fueled, state sponsored violence followed by waves of terrorism, accelerated by the kind of rhetoric that every single GOP presidential candidate is spewing this week to thunderous applause from their base. Maybe climate change will catch up with us. There’s still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world; even with tremendous diplomatic effors like the Iran deal, they could easily do us in.

Or maybe things won’t get much worse for most people and will improve for some, and we’ll just skip along at the low edge of progress. Conditions for the teeming, hungry masses will continue to improve slowly and unevenly, but we’ll stay stuck in low gear by continued attachment to austerity and the private affluence and public squalor generated by the casino economy.

My book doesn’t talk about space travel much. I only mention it once. But my goal was just to envision one possible path forward and to try to tell a fun, engaging story around that possibility. We probably can’t ever fully solve social justice, but we could sure do a hell of a lot better than we are now. And we can’t solve climate or inequality without addressing the strong girders of racism, sexism, greed, anger, and plain old inertia that hold the current system in place.

Which isn’t to say that I have any degree of certainty about what it’s really going to take. In fact even though I’ve written a pretty optimistic book, I’m not personally all that optimistic. And if we do address these challenges, I’m sure it’ll look nothing like the picture I paint. But I hope it reads as one plausible path. Going all in on social justice and tackling racism head on is a moral prerequiste if we’re ever going to be standing on that planet and looking up at the eclipse from our new system home. We have a lot of work to do.

I feel like there should be an ask here but I don’t even have my FB author page set up yet. So thanks for your attention so far on this project and stay tuned. Hopefully I’ll have more news soon.