#2 – “Ice Planets are really… cool!”

Into the Void

Rocket engines burning fuel so fast… yes, we blast up into the night sky with the launch of the sixth and final Chimera Company book. The Last Redoubt.

To mark the end of the series, and to get your reading juices flowing, I’m publishing the Six Secrets of Chimera Company.

In it, I’ll be delving into one aspect of the series that I find particularly cool, and then spilling a few secrets for each book in turn.

If you just want to race ahead and buy the book, here’s the series link on Amazon

Amazon.com  |  amazon.co.uk  |  amazon.oz  |  amazon.ca

You can also try out the series by reading one of the three Chimera Company prequel novelettes (one for each of the following three factions: Legion, Militia, and Special Missions Executive). To get the prequels delivered to your device, Join the Legion here.

Trapped Under Ice

The first book is set on the ice world of Rho-Torkis.

One of its key themes is that the characters of Chimera Company have to trek across a world in which the icy conditions are as much an adversary as all the many factions trying to kill them. Kind of a cross between Dune and Hoth in Empire Strikes Back.

Writers will often speak of the iceberg principle of research, the idea being that the author understands a great deal more about how their world works than they explain to the reader. The twenty percent of the worldbuilding that is explicitly referenced is supported by the eighty percent that is hidden under the water. Without that hidden research, the part you tell feels hollow and fractured. Readers can tell when an author doesn’t understand how their worlds work!

This is what science fiction and fantasy writers usually mean when they refer to the iceberg principle. In fact, the term originates from Ernest Hemingway, who used it in a slightly different way to express the idea that he felt he could make his stories more powerful by leaving some of them out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_theory )

This is all a bit science fiction writing 101, but when you research how your world works by drawing on real-life examples, there is enormous temptation to slip in all the things you learned.

I’m a seasoned writing veteran with about 3 million words of fiction in print, and I am still susceptible to this. I’ve just gotten ruthless at expunging anything in my writing that feels like showing off how clever I am, or how exciting this thing is that I’ve just learned about.

After all those words, I seem to have become more ruthless than I realized, because with researching the ice-world of Rho-Torkis, it wasn’t so much the iceberg principle as the Uranium Principle.

Instead of 80% of the research supporting the 20% I write about, I had 99% supporting 1%. (In naturally occurring uranium, 99:1 is approximately the ratio of uranium isotopes U-238 to U-235.)

It is possible that I became a little obsessive with the Rho-Torkis research.

To start with, I read accounts of the First World War from the perspective of Austrian soldiers fighting Italians in the Alps (the so-called White War). These men were in a part of the world that is extremely dangerous even for experienced people with the right equipment. Not only were soldiers living there on the front line up to four kilometers above sea level but patrolling and fighting battles. Unbelievable!

 I also read accounts of German soldiers cut off and deep behind enemy lines after the Russian winter offensive 1941/2, an account from a French guards sergeant of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, and Roald Amundsen’s account of his polar expeditions. I have wheeled military transports charging across frozen lakes, so naturally I watched a series of Ice Road Truckers on the telly.

With some of the descriptions of living in the ice of Rho-Torkis, I lean on accounts written by people who actually experienced this to slip in tiny details such as the way marching soldiers would step inside the footprints of those marching before them because it is much less effort than breaking the snowy ground yourself, and hence the constant cycling of soldiers to take their turn at the front of a march column.

One detail that kept coming up again and again was the peril of going to the toilet at temperatures far below freezing where dropping your pants is a very dangerous proposition. In many cases, these soldiers were riddled with diarrhea, so it isn’t surprising that they come across as obsessed with these inevitable bodily functions.

I didn’t want to explore this in graphic detail on Rho-Torkis, but it came up so often in the real-life accounts that I do hint at the obsessive hold it might have on my characters deep in the Great Ice Plain of Rho-Torkis.

Hopefully that is a successful example of the 1% hinting at the 99% that lies behind.

Snowblind

In the cover for the second book, Vincent has illustrated the Phantom (roughly speaking, our equivalent of the Millennium Falcon) coming into land at Joint Sector High Command, a space station orbiting a gas giant whose magnetosphere is being mined by a Dyson ring (which is why there’s all the fancy lightning).

Here’s Vincent’s initial pencil sketch of the station.

And here’s an alternate version of the space station. Look very closely at the writing on the space station and you can see Vincent cheekily snuck in my birthday.

NEXT TIME…

How Chimera Company channels the epic-ness of The Lord of the Rings.