Raven's Children

Escalation.

When I was a child there were these things people read called newspapers. And I saw headlines that said the Vietnam war was escalating. Escalation can be a terrifying prospect in the context of a conflict between nuclear-armed antagonists. This is a Bad Thing.

But escalation is exactly what you want when you have a novel or a trilogy to write.

I first saw this in a long-running series of Science Fiction novels from Germany -- Perry Rhodan. You also see escalation when reading the Lensmen series. This brings us to Raven's Children wherein Sabrina Chase uses escalation to good effect.

Raven's Children (5 stars) is a rollicking yarn that takes up where The Long Way Home left off.

The protagonist, Moire Cameron is now a Captain in her own right with a loyal crew and the same pack of evil corporate types is out to get her.

The Long Way Home introduced a mystery of where and how Moire's son came to be. This mystery provides the axis about which this novel and it's title turns.

In Raven's Children Moire manages to make some more friends and some questionable allies as well.

When I reviewed The Long Way Home I noted how she provides answers to prior story questions and uses the answers to raise more questions. She manages to satisfactorily resolve story questions along the way.

In Raven's Children there is still a war going on with the aliens and the evil corporation's insidious plan appears to be advancing rapidly.

In contrast to The Long Way Home, Raven's Children shows Moire doing more than just running from Toren (the evil corporation), but she is hitting back. This is good, because we've already seen a lot of Moira fleeing the bad guys. In fact, the stuff Toren is throwing at Moire is now serving to make her stronger.

It is helpful to see that story questions that have not yet been raised are being foreshadowed. I can see the outlines of a very satisfactory solution in some of the little details that have been left for the reader to notice if she has eyes to see. As a writer I think I like anticipating how the conflicts will be resolved as much as the story itself. 

Let's look at a larger context than fiction writing momentarily. You may someday be given an impossible job to do. If you are smart, creative, brave and/or persistent you can fine a way or make one to do that impossible job. After that it gets interesting.

There's a limited amount of competence in this world. 

The boss who gave you the impossible job last time will think of you when the next, harder, more impossible job comes up. And if you manage to do that impossible job, you'll get another impossible job. And after that another.  

It is easy to get discouraged by this pattern, but that's the wrong way to look at it. Each impossible job is a reward for being a problem solver. And each time you do the impossible you become more capable.

This is the truth that a lot of fiction depicts. Or the fiction that I like to read depicts.

The Reader's Contract

When the reader approaches a novel, s/he has a vague feeling of what it's about based on the cover art, blurbs, and/or reviews. As the reader commences to read, s/he should have some questions begin to form: Who is the body in the library? Who put it there? Who murdered the girl?

When this happens there is an implied contract between reader and writer. "Keep reading and I'll show you the answers to these questions." There are some things a writer ought never do, and failing to honor this contract is a Bad Thing. The longer the reader goes without these answers, the more impatient s/he is going to become. You don't want this.

And you don't want to be too hasty about answering all the story questions. It's a good thing for the writer to answer a question while raising another, bigger question. OK, the Bohemian guy put the body in the library, but why was she already dead when he found her in his living room?

I like Science Fiction, particularly, Space Opera. Any SF writer worth his/her salt will be adept at "world-building" creating a future history and populating that future history with various institutions and social constructs. The biggest mistake a rookie writer can make is to spend the opening ten pages of his novel describing the secret colonization of Sirius, the rise of the Terran Empire, and the Jim-Jones-In-Space cult called Camelot. The reader doesn't want to wade through the wars of Independence that brought about the stable configuration of great powers and non-aligned worlds that make up human space a few centuries from now. But the science fiction writer must know all this and keep track of it as scaffolding. Most never sees the light of day, but some of it spices up the narrative along the way through your story.

The reader parachuted into a Space Opera is immediately confronted with a bunch of story questions about the nature of the world s/he's reading about.

This is what I felt like when I began reading The Long Way Home, by Sabrina Chase. The story starts with a space battle with mercenaries and Fleet going up against aliens.

The hero is Moire, a girl who's on the run, and a very good pilot. She single-handedly saves the day for the humans and the reader clearly sees she's a tortured soul who's gone through hell. But we don't know anything about why and how she suffered. We have to read more to find out.

This is the stuff of page-turners.

What follows is the girl having adventures and keeping one step ahead of the evil corporation who's after her as well as a love-interest Fleet investigator who wants to arrest her for the Fleet's own reasons.

All along the way, she's just a decent person and that decency causes her to win friends. But to prevent the evil corporation from hurting those friends, she has to move on and abandon them. We see Moire sort of come out of her shell, but she doesn't really become a leader until the last quarter of the novel. Could Ms. Chase done a better job of showing Moire make that change? Mebbe.

The book had a Firefly/Serenity feel to it, and the evil corporation's chief minion had something of The Operative about him. And I think The Operative is the gold-standard for villainy.

The trouble with a book like The Long Way Home is that there are too many story questions in the first chapter to answer in the scope of a single novel. Most of those answers raise questions like "what's she gonna do about this?"

And this is why it requires a series of two or three novels to deliver satisfying answers to the reader. Happily, Ms. Chase is working on those sequels. I can hardly wait for them.

The bottom line is that you want to be intentional about how you disclose things to the reader and what you must NEVER DO is leave any story-question unanswered. I suggest you ask your beta-readers to keep a diary of story-questions that they consider while reading your work. Then you should take steps to make sure that every story-question has an answer either in this novel, or in a sequel.

Oh, and in The Big Sleep, how did the Sternwood's chauffeur die?

Was it murder or suicide?

Like I said, get your beta-readers to keep a diary of story-questions.