I Love Space Battles
Space battles are the coolest.
My favorite space battle is featured in a comic book. It was part of the Star Wars: Legacy comic series where Admiral Gar Stazi of the Galactic Alliance Remnant teams up with the deposed Emperor Roan Fel’s fleet and out-matches the enemy through brilliant strategy. Reading this comic, it was my first real exposure to how fun it could be to read military space strategy. That’s probably why I still look at it so fondly.
When it comes to space battle strategy though, the book series that comes to many people’s mind is often the Ender’s Game series. There are some awesome, amazing space battles in that series with brilliantly smart and compelling strategy. There are excellent battles throughout, but the final battle of the first book is one of the best. It’s a blast to read and the movie adaption of that scene is also incredibly riveting.
I really like a good space battle. The problem is, there are so many poorly-done space battles out there and in my opinion, a good space battle is difficult to find. A good space battle should be about the strategy, about the how they defeat the enemy with the resources they have at their disposal. A good space battle makes the battle a battle of minds, not a battle of guns.
Strategy is about how to save resources until the opportune moment, how to change the field of up and down in a void where orientation is nothing more than a hindrance, how to assess what the enemy has or doesn’t have and how to take advantage of weaknesses, all spontaneous and in the moment. It’s not about flying X-Wings into the Death Star’s trench at the opportune time because you happen to come by secret data telling you just how to kill it. That is compelling, sure, but it’s not strategy. It’s just a mission plan. That’s it.
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Hive, the upcoming fourth book in the Color of Water and Sky series, has a couple of space battles in it. There will be three to be exact. And today, I just finished writing the second one, which happens about 1/3 way into the book.
In case you haven’t been able to tell, man, do I love a good space battle. That’s why it’s been such a blast to write this chapter. I’ll write it, then go do something else and another scene of the battle comes in my head, so I’ll go back and add that in, then go out and do something else and the process continues. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up adding a few more pages to what is already a 5,800+ word chapter. It’s so fun to think of how these grand, massive battles will fit together. And the scope of space battles can be just enormous!
When I first plotted out the story for Hive, the moments that stuck with me the most were the space battles. Finally getting a couple of those scenes down, I realize I need to write more stuff like this. I enjoy it so much!
To conclude this day of space battles, I played some space missions in the game Star Wars: Battlefront II on Xbox. It’s been a day filled with space battles and when Hive finally comes out, I hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.
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