Big! Space! Battles!
Howdy, y'all!
Let's see how this newsletter thing goes - I am EXCITE! :D I will try to make the topic du jour clear up front so you can quickly decide whether it's something you're interested in reading or not. I am also thinking something like twice/month is how this will go.
So today, I will be discussing my philosophy of writing big! space! battles!, followed by a brief FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions - I can't really say "frequently" since I'm making them up based on random guesses as to things people might have questions about, writing status report kinds of things).
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Big! Space! Battles!
Preface: this is not how YOU should write big space battles. You should do what makes sense to you! This is, rather, some thoughts on how I approach writing big space battles.
My love of military sf, space opera, and big space battles dates partly back to 3rd grade when we had a Middle Ages day and I became obsessed with (classical & medieval) military history, partly back to falling in love with chess in 4th grade, and partly back to encountering Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game. My mom has always been extremely amused by my interest in military history; I spent part of my childhood on Army bases (Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri and Yongsan Base in South Korea) but as my mom points out, my dad was an Army surgeon. I don't have a rational explanation for this fascination.
I loved chess from the moment I was introduced to it in school. Unfortunately, no one taught chess as such. My family was no help. I come from a lineage of Go players (baduk in Korean). No one in my family had the faintest clue how to play this weird Western board game. I tried playing with my little sister but every time she started to lose, she threw the board at me. (She was like five, it wasn't her fault.) I was completely innocent of opening principles, basic tactics, anything. I spent years reading books and trying to decipher them. Mostly I was entranced by, for lack of a better word, the pageantry of chess - the intense one-on-one conflict and the maneuvering and the poetry of the pieces. (I called rooks "castles" for years.) The tactics, glimpsed dimly. (I later learned the basics through the generous tutelage of a tournament chess player friend, but that was only in 2020.)
And then there was Ender's Game. I have massive disagreements with Orson Scott Card's politics, but when I encountered this book in my high school library, I had no clue about those politics. I was a teenager in South Korea in the 1990s and information about authors and their personal lives/opinions was generally limited to the "about the author" paragraphs on the back cover! In any case, while I'd read science fiction before (Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern in elementary school, a lot of, er, Piers Anthony in middle school), Ender's Game was the specific reason I decided to switch from writing pseudo-medieval Eurofantasy to military science fiction. I will never forget "the enemy's gate is down."
Some years later, when I was grappling with the question of how to represent big! space! battles!, I went back and reread Ender's Game. I discovered something very interesting, which was that after the Battle School training sequences, once you get the space battle parts, there isn't a lot of granular detail. Descriptions of space combat are instead more impressionistic - but because the reader has been primed by those earlier sequences, the reader fills in the tactical wizardry that Ender is orchestrating. I took note of the technique for future use.
I am one of the least qualified people on the planet to write space battles. I certainly don't try to do them "realistically" (whatever that means). First of all, I am navigationally challenged. I can barely operate in two dimensions, let alone three. I have a math B.A., but I was mostly focusing on things like abstract algebra and cryptology, not orbital mechanics; I'm not a physicist or engineer, and to be honest the thought of having to calculate orbits and trajectories just to write a book makes me want to crawl under the bed. I am not a soldier of any type and have zero combat experience. (I am a fencer, but not a very good one, and sport fencing doesn't strike me as a good model for starship combat anyway.) And for a kicker, I have aphantasia - I can't visualize.
And yet I write space battles anyway.
I'm pretty clear with my goals when I'm writing a space battle, which is a combination of the following: (a) conveying an emotional situation for the character(s) involved in it, and (b) conveying a tactical situation, ditto. In some abstract sense, writing a space battle is not different from writing about a fencing bout, or a soccer match, or even a duel of words over tea.
That's nice, Yoon Ha, you might say, but now this is too abstract to be useful.
Mostly I'm interested in - to go back to a word - the pageantry. When I'm coming up with a paradigm of space combat for storytelling purposes, I want to (a) illuminate the psychology of the key characters in a way that (b) illuminates the tactics that are being used, and vice versa. And here we go back to chess, and games generally - game-playing styles as they reveal character and personality. Does this captain like to attack? Does this general backstab people? (I would never write a general who backstabs people!) Is this fighter pilot a coward? How can I create a fake combat system that allows me to illustrate personality through action?
For example, I've played maybe twenty matches of chess in my life if you round up, so I would have thought that you couldn't tell anything about me from chess other than "total n00b." My friend the tournament chess player looked over those games and said (among other observations), You really like attacking! I was all, I just made my best guess as to the moves that made sense? What other option was there??
She showed me the French Defense. Reader, I had a fit of the vapors. The French Defense would never in a million years have occurred to me as a possible thing I could do. Why would you want to sit there fiddling behind such a hedge wall of stymied pawns when you could ATTAAAAAAACK?! Give me a nice open center any day.
Yeah.
I don't know if there's such a clear "personality test" breakdown in real warfare! I could maybe read a commentary and go "that seemed like a very risky gamble" or "that seemed very defensive" but that's it. But games - I have been a gamer my entire life and gameplay style is something I've observed, and using gameplay style as a basis for warfare in narrative seems as good as any other model I can access.
I also take both "rule of cool" and "incompetence is everywhere" into account when I come up with warfare paradigms for fiction. My YA space opera WIP has individualized mecha that work in teams - so combined arms and people having different roles is legitimately a thing, but because of Space Magic, there is an element of "every mecha is its own unique special snowflake reflecting the personality of its pilot" for id factor. I can only imagine that in "real life" this would be a logistical nightmare (replacement parts and maintenance?? training??).
At the same time, I am a great believer in showing randomness (in the colloquial sense of the term, rather than the mathematical one) throwing a monkey wrench into battle plans, outdated equipment/tactics, or just plain incompetence, as a way of spicing things up. I will never forget this example from Mark D. Mandeles' The Future of War:
A neglected aspect of the coordination problem is the choreography of motions in conducting attacks and defending against attacks....Historian E.E. Morrison describes an interesting case of how choreography appropriate to a superseded technology remained after the introduction of the newer technology. In the early days of World War II, when armaments were in short supply, the British used some light artillery that had been used during the Boer War for coastal defense. However, the British commanders soon became concerned that the rate of fire of these older guns was too slow. A time and motion expert was asked to improve and simplify firing procedures. He watched one of the five-man gun crews practice and became puzzled by some aspects of the firing procedure. Viewing slow-motion pictures of the men loading, aiming, and firing, he noticed something odd: shortly before firing, two members of the gun crew stopped all activity and stood at attention for a three-second period that extended through the discharge of the gun. The time and motion expert consulted with an old artillery colonel to decipher this unnecessary pause. After viewing the film several times, the old colonel said, "Ah, I have it. They are holding the horses."
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with a realistic or wargame-like approach. (James S. A. Corey's The Expanse!) When I was reading BattleTech novels, I could practically tell which critical hit tables were being referenced during the descriptions of mech combat. I've been told that David Weber's Honor Harrington books have combat modeled after pre/Napoleonic naval warfare. I love that these approaches are out there and I love reading them. But I don't have the skill set to do something similar in my own writing.
So I skip the detailed choreographies, I only talk about gravity wells and libration points in general terms, I almost never draw maps. The reader has to understand: What's the threat? How well do the characters understand their situation - if at all? (I will sometimes obfuscate parts of the situation because characters are operating on incomplete information, or actively being deceived.) How do they feel about their chances, what are their plans for dealing with the current crisis? Have they been outsmarted? What's the emotional trajectory of the fight, the way you would have an emotional trajectory of a tennis match - Alice just served two aces, Bob came back at the end of the game with an unexpected volley, Alice put sidespin on that ball and Bob wasn't prepared for it, Bob just pulled a McEnroe and cussed out the ref because the stress is getting to him.
And let me be clear: by "understand their situation" I do not mean that the reader has a clear start-to-finish diagram in their head of the whole battle, as opposed to snapshots of moments. Probably there are readers who do, but as someone with aphantasia that is forever going to be something I don't understand. I'm more interested in conveying the impressionistic experience.
I sometimes wish I were that writer who could plot out technicolor space tactics and deliver them to the reader. But the truth is that, when reading books, I can never have that experience. When I write, this is what I do as a workaround instead.
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FAQ (Foxily Asked Questions)
- What are you working on right now?
I recently turned in Thousand Worlds #3, Fox Snare - that's my middle grade space opera (#1 Dragon Pearl, #2 Tiger Honor). That will probably come out sometime next year (2023) but I don't have a release date yet. I'm currently working on edits for the first book of a YA mecha/space opera trilogy. That one definitely doesn't have a release date.
I'm also working on edits to the Ninefox Gambit TTRPG, forthcoming from Android Press sometime in 2023. What's exciting is that beyond the rules set and appendices (with things like "statted" versions of major characters, worldbuilding notes), it will come with three scenarios so you can get started playing more quickly. Those are being written by Marie Brennan, an excellent writer with extensive experience in game writing and a background in anthropology; you might be familiar with her Lady Trent series, as well as the Rook and Rose epic fantasy books by M. A. Carrick (Marie is one half of that pen name; the other is writer Alyc C. Helms).
- Will there be more hexarchate books?
At the moment I'm hard at work on a YA space opera! However, the Ninefox Gambit TTRPG should release next year (see above) and I have some Thoughts on a possible novella or short stories. You know, in my infinite free time.
- Do you have any stories coming out soon?
My sf short story "Counting Casualties" sold to Tor.com recently but hasn't yet been scheduled. I will let you know when I know more!
- What's one book that you're reading right now?
I'm a slow reader, but I'm enjoying Jeremy Holcomb's The White Box Essays, which is about indie tabletop game design/production. It has singlehandedly convinced me that I never want to self-publish a board game OR run a Kickstarter. Fascinating reading, though!
- Why is your newsletter address in Oregon? I thought you were in Louisiana?!
The Oregon address is a mail forwarding address (similar in concept to a P.O. Box) so I won't be tracked down by the gators. You know how it is. ;)
- I have a foxy question you haven't answered here!
Sure, please email deuceofgearsart@gmail.com and I will get back to you!