I've got a special treat for you this month. I'm going to devote Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays to writers from eSpecs Books. They're a great bunch of folks whom you need to get to know.
Next up, Christopher L. Bennett!
Tell us a bit about your latest work.
My most recent published work is Star Trek: The Original Series—Living Memory from Gallery Books, my second consecutive novel set in the period between Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. My previous novel, The Higher Frontier, showed how Kirk became commandant of Starfleet Academy while keeping the Enterprise as his flagship for special missions, setting up the status quo that would eventually lead to The Wrath of Khan. While The Higher Frontier showed Kirk commanding one such special mission, Living Memory keeps Kirk occupied with a challenging situation at the Academy, involving the controversial admission of a specially bred warrior population to the student body at a time of public protests at the perceived militarization of Starfleet. Meanwhile, Captain Spock of the Enterprise and Captain Terrell and Commander Chekov of the Reliant investigate a series of destructive cosmic storms that seem to be backtracking the Enterprise’s past ports of call—and that turn out to have a surprising connection to Commander Uhura, one that she’s unable to remember due to the Nomad probe wiping her memory in the episode “The Changeling.” I was glad to take that throwaway plot point and craft a poignant story about Uhura’s struggle to reconnect with her lost past.
My latest original work (aside from a few short stories on my Patreon) is the duology Arachne’s Crime and Arachne’s Exile, published by eSpec Books, also available as a single volume with bonus stories, The Arachne Omnibus. This is an epic interstellar adventure in which a human starship crew inadvertently destroys an alien space habitat and is put on trial by the survivors. Arachne’s Crime devotes its first half to the trial, then follows the crew as they attempt to integrate into the alien society and make amends for their mistake, complicated by factions of both species that would prefer a more violent resolution. Arachne’s Exile then opens up the story on a more cosmic scale, as the characters travel deeper into galactic civilization and discover ancient secrets that drive them to seek escape—leading to a dangerous heist on a unique megastructure orbiting a neutron star. The late Don Sakers of Analog called Arachne’s Exile “a fun, exciting read.”
What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer?
Nothing prompted me to become a writer—just to discover I already was one. I had this set of “Star City” building blocks, like futuristic Legos, and I’d build space cities and make aliens out of my father’s pipe cleaners. One day when I was 13, I told myself a whole story about the city’s inhabitants from beginning to end, just looking at the city rather than physically playing with it, and I realized that what I was doing was writing. That’s when I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life. The future I imagined in playing with those building blocks was the early stage of what eventually became the universe of the Arachne novels, though it had evolved and changed enormously by the time I finally got published. (Unfortunately, I never wrote that daydreamed story down, and I hardly remember it now.)
What inspires you to write?
If you mean pursuing it as a career or coming up with ideas, I just do it by default; there’s nothing else I ever wanted to be. If you mean what motivates me to do the actual work of sitting down and putting words on the page, that’s a more difficult question. Sometimes it comes a lot more easily than others. I have my up and down phases—times when the words pour out of me effortlessly, and times when it’s a struggle to get anything done at all. All too often, what inspires me to produce is the pressure of a looming deadline.
Still, I find the easiest things to write are ones that I have fun with. I’m currently working on a project that I can’t talk about yet, but it’s been enormous fun, with characters and a world I really like, plus lots of big action and humor and emotion, as well as letting me experiment with a new style of writing. I’ve found it a lot easier to write than some of the other things I’ve done in recent years, which is good, because it’s on a pretty tight deadline, and because it’s taken up the bulk of my attention for more than half a year now.
What themes and subjects do you tend to revisit in your work?
I like to write optimistic science fiction, to project futures that are better than the present, more inclusive and fair and enlightened, though not without their failings. I like to explore the problems and complications that can arise even when everyone is trying to do the right thing, the unexpected conflicts and shortcomings of a better society. I like conflicts where both sides are arguably right, yet still end up at odds, so that there’s no easy answer.
I like to write plausible hard science fiction, but I enjoy the challenge of taking normally fanciful genres and coming up with credible justifications for them. My first original novel, Only Superhuman, was possibly the first hard-SF superhero novel. A recent story on my Patreon page, “The Monsters We Make,” offers a hard-SF take on the kaiju/giant monster genre. And that big project I can’t talk about is in that vein as well.
I have a marked preference for writing female leads, particularly funny and quirky and tough and dynamic ones. I was a child of the 1970s, one of those periods when media culture embraced female heroes for a while before they got marginalized again. I grew up watching The Bionic Woman and Wonder Woman and Isis, plus Batgirl in reruns, so I guess I grew up taking strong, appealing heroines for granted. By the time I started writing, I didn’t feel there were enough of them anymore, so I favored creating them. I often intentionally center a work on a female lead, such as Only Superhuman’s Emerald Blair, but I’ve found that sometimes I find myself gravitating more to the female characters in works that nominally have male leads. For instance, in my “Hub” comedy stories from Analog (collected in the volumes Hub Space and Crimes of the Hub), I initially envisioned David LaMacchia as the central character, but I’ve ended up focusing more heavily on the female lead Nashira Wing and have come to think of her as the series lead.
What would be your dream project?
At this point, I’ve already written a fair number of my dream projects. I’ve gotten to write Star Trek novels set in my favorite period, after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I’ve gotten to tell stories I wanted to tell, like Captain Picard’s missing years in The Buried Age and a comprehensive take on Star Trek time travel in my Department of Temporal Investigations series. My Arachne duology is a story I’ve been trying to get into print for a long time, and I’ve finally succeeded.
At this point, what I want most is to continue to expand the Arachne/Troubleshooter Universe, as I call the continuity that encompasses the duology and Only Superhuman. I have ideas for several more novels, including a third Arachne tale and sequels to Only Superhuman. I’d also like to try my hand at writing comic books.
What writers have influenced your style and technique?
That’s not something I really keep track of, since I draw on whatever examples strike me as worth emulating. My early influences included Asimov, Clarke, Niven, and the various writers for Star Trek. But I’ve drawn on much more eclectic influences since then, from Diane Duane to Alfred Bester to Joss Whedon. When I went out to Hollywood to pitch for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine once in the 1990s, I learned a lot from Robert Hewitt Wolfe about the importance of grounding stories in character rather than plot. In recent years, I’ve found myself unexpectedly influenced by the Japanese Kamen Rider franchise, particularly the work of writers Shogo Muto and Yasuko Kobayashi.
There are writers I wish I could emulate stylistically but never really could as well as I’d like—master wordsmiths like Bester, Ray Bradbury, and Edward Wellen, or wildly imaginative worldbuilders like Max Gladstone. Conversely, an agent once favorably compared my writing to Kim Stanley Robinson, even though I’ve never consciously modeled my style on Robinson.
If you have any former project to do over to make it better, which one would it be, and what would you do?
That’s an amusingly apposite question, because that’s exactly what I did with Arachne’s Crime. The first half of that novel (the first fourth of the duology) is an expanded, revised retelling of my first published story, “Aggravated Vehicular Genocide,” which appeared in Analog in November 1998 (and is collected in Among the Wild Cybers from eSpec Books). That novelette made some scientific assumptions I later learned were problematical, and it was also fairly weak at character development. For the novel, I revised the science and fleshed out the characters and worldbuilding substantially, then continued the story well beyond the novelette’s conclusion.
Where would you rank writing on the "Is it an art or it is a science continuum?" Why?
I’m not sure I accept the premise that the two are opposites. Art and science have always been interdependent—just ask Leonardo da Vinci.
If the question is whether I approach writing from a more intellectual, technical standpoint or a more emotional, intuitive standpoint, I think I’m a hybrid. I consider myself a hard science fiction writer and I research my fiction in detail, but I also tend to go with what feels right and make spontaneous discoveries along the way. I outline my novels in advance, but some of my best writing often comes in scenes or even whole subplots that occur to me on the spur of the moment to fill gaps in the outline. And I prioritize character and emotion in my fiction as much as science and reason.
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?
Maintaining the focus and discipline to actually sit down and do the work. Avoiding distractions and overcoming lack of motivation and self-doubt.
Also, I’ve often struggled to come up with specific story ideas. Some writers can churn out new concepts and stories on the spur of the moment, but it’s always been harder for me. When I have a specific assignment to come up with something by a deadline, I’ve always been able to manage, but when I’m trying to generate ideas for original fiction on my own time, it’s harder. I have this whole universe I’ve developed that I’ve wanted to write about for years, but I’ve never quite managed to figure out the right story to tell.
How do your writer friends help you become a better writer? Or do they not?
I’m an introvert, and I’ve never drawn on friends or family as much as I probably should have. Still, I value my social connections with my writer friends on those all-too-infrequent occasions when we get together, and I’ve been able to draw on them as sources of expertise or as beta readers on occasion. That’s been more the case in my Star Trek work, which is often collaborative to a greater or lesser degree. One of my most enjoyable experiences in tie-in writing was when I collaborated with a number of other writers on the Star Trek: Mere Anarchy miniseries. Our epic e-mail exchanges in developing and plotting the miniseries were a great deal of fun, and I’ve always hoped to be part of something like that again.
What does literary success look like to you?
I’ve been pretty successful at Star Trek tie-in writing, but my goal has always been to be known for my original fiction first and tie-ins second. I’ve never wanted or expected to be hugely famous, since I’m shy, but I’d like for my original SF to be moderately well-known and popular, and to earn enough to remain a full-time writer and build up some decent savings, so I have the time to focus more on original projects I’ve never quite managed to get around to. I certainly wouldn’t be averse to selling the film or TV rights to one of my creations.
Any other upcoming projects you would like to plug?
I’d really like to talk about the big project I mentioned before, which is really cool and fun and new for me, but I can’t until the publisher announces it. Still, I think it will be announced fairly soon, so keep an eye on my social media. I’m only just starting to plan out what comes next when I’m done with that.
I have two standalone campaigns for Modiphius’s Star Trek Adventures role-playing game currently in the editing stages, in addition to the half-dozen I’ve done before. I don’t know when they’ll come out, but it’ll probably be at least a few months. Beyond that, there’s just my Patreon page and the original short fiction and reviews I post there.
For more information, visit:
Written Worlds (my homepage and blog): https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/
My Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/christopherlbennett
Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/ChristopherLBennettAuthor
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CLBennettAuthor
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