Ad Luna #1: The Beginning

As I’m out of writing workouts and I’ve managed to accidentally time my book release quite well, I thought I’d spend the next few posts talking vaguely about Ad Luna (which is my new book if you’ve missed my last couple of posts), and a few of the things that went into writing it. I figured I might as well start at the beginning.

I was going into my third year of university, and for some ungodly reason started thinking about the dissertation I wouldn’t have to write for another six months. i had no idea what to write, and spent far too long wracking my brains on what to do.

Then I remembered a thing I’d seen on a long-lost reddit thread. The True History of Lucian of Samosata. A satirical travelogue written by a mad Syrian satirist who’d gotten sick of historians inventing details about places they hadn’t actually been. So he decided to take the piss, by doing the same thing but better.

The True History takes Lucian across the ocean, to the Isles of the Blessed, inside the stomach of a giant whale, to islands made of cheese and into battle against giants and minotaurs and fish-people – and most importantly it takes him into space, to the Moon, where he and his crew merrily muck into an interplanetary war. There are giant monsters, aliens from a dozen worlds – it’s insane, and beautifully written.

I was captured, instantly, by the sheer madness of it. And despite the fact that my dissertation tutor was supposed to be teaching me about Roman government and politics, he let me write about it.

And then the next year, after significantly more persuasion on my part, my MA dissertation tutor let me write about it again – this time in comparison to Star Trek and some other SF. But this time I delved deeper. I read and reread, and as I was comparing it to other bits of sci-fi I started to see all the places where I wanted more.

Because the True History isn’t a very long book. And the section on the Moon – the section on which Ad Luna is based – is only about 30 pages long. There are terrible monsters, yes – but they don’t get anything but the bare minimum of description. The fantastic technologies of the Moon are mentioned, but there’s no talk about how they might work, or the impact of their existence on lunar society. The people of the Sun – the antagonists of the whole section – aren’t described at all. Lucian gets you thinking about a thousand things, but most of those thoughts are ‘well how the hell would that work?’

So I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. And then one day I just said ‘F*ck it’, and I started writing.

Tune in next week for a) the book itself and b) some more specifics on the bits of Lucian I really wanted to bring to life.

Read the True History at Project Gutenberg. Seriously, it’s worth it.