by Eric Del Carlo
Learn about the questions and intricacies behind creating a science fiction universe in this essay by Eric Del Carlo. Read his latest story, “Thin as Blood,” part of his Redmarch universe, in our [January/February issue, on sale now!]
I was a stand-alone guy in a world that wanted me to embrace the multi-book cycle. The bookstore shelves, those given over to science fiction and fantasy, were replete with series. Enticing cover art was framed by the author’s name, the title . . . and the proud injunction that this paperback was Part II or IV, or the second of a whole separate trilogy—so that mindful readers needed to peruse that first three-book sequence in order to be up to speed, so that this set of thick novels (“All three of ‘em!” as the Clash once sang) would make sense.
This didn’t seem like leisurely reading to me. It felt like homework.
Let’s aside a moment: I once sat on the floor on a con suite talking ardently with Elizabeth Moon; I was probably pounding rum back then, she teetotaling but engaging me very sincerely. We talked writing. We talked about reading. I spouted off with something like: “I can’t read for pleasure anymore! I have to try to figure out everything I read, decode it, discover how the writer did it, if I can.” Moon, thoughtfully, rephrased my whole overwrought tirade with: “I don’t read innocently.”
Blam!
Anyway, in those years of intensive SFF reading, as I was (quite outside any classroom) studying story structure and characterization and the nuances of speculative fiction, I was also avoiding series. I didn’t want to bog down, get stuck in the same storyline with the same characters. For that matter, I wasn’t inclined to read book after book by the same author—even if they were a favorite of mine. Mixing it up seemed the smarter way to go.
So I sought the stand-alone novel.
Let us aside again, shall we? When I was a youngster, two of my cherished tv shows were The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, which both ran in syndication. (I don’t say TOS here, because “the original series” was all there was back then. The first Star Trek movie hadn’t even come out. Fans like myself lived in a desert of reruns of the 1966-’69 episodes.) While Star Trek was my favorite show, it was the Zone that fired my imagination where it intersected with burgeoning creativity. Every episode of Rod Serling’s anthology series started from scratch: no sequels, no prequels, no stories told in worlds already created. Each time, they burned everything to the ground and built anew. That amazed me. Where did all those ideas come from? (It hadn’t gotten through to me at my slack-jawed impressionable age that a chunk of these installments were actually pretty mediocre.)
So, in my more adult years of reading I shaded toward my Twilight Zone theory of SFF. Give me the singular book, the story told, entire, between the cover and the final page. I read a neat tonnage of novels this way, and was exposed to all sorts of wonderful and varied writing. But . . . I must have missed out on some stuff, too, right? I didn’t read David Eddings. I skipped Asimov’s whole Foundation. I didn’t read past Dune to any of the subsequent novels, even though I thought that was a very cool book. I never read Robert Asprin’s many Myth books until I met him and he loaned me copies.
Enough asides; time to flash-forward over many years, to the present.
Well, here I am. I’ve had some measurable success with my writing of science fiction and—occasionally—fantasy and horror. My short stories and novelettes have appeared in several of the big name genre magazines, including Analog. In fact, I am here, to my delight and shock, for the sixth time with a work of speculative fiction.
But something curious has happened along the way. I have been writing stories set in the same universe. My universe, one I invented. The Redmarch universe. My current Analog tale is actually a prequel/sequel to my last story to surface in these pages. The latest one is “Thin As Blood”; the companion piece to it is “Boy in the Key of Forsaken” (May/June 2022).
Redmarch, I was breathlessly envisioning at this point, was to be a myth seeded into the dimmest, oldest histories of every galactic civilization teeming across the stars.
This pair not only occurs in the same deep-space far-future reality, but I use the same characters. The earlier story is about a human child abandoned on an alien world, who must then find his own way. In the newer one we learn about the adult human male who did the abandoning. The second story wraps around the first, telling the “before” and a bit of the “after”—thus, the prequel/sequel description I give of it.
Hanging over both short stories is the specter of Redmarch. Redmarch, in this universe, means war. All-out, galaxy-wide war.
Okay, I do have to back up a little here. One can’t entirely escape exposition. Let me tell you how all this came about.
The run-together two-syllable word “Redmarch” popped into my head one day, without warning. If you write, some part of your brain is probably always humming quietly in search mode, looking for interesting phrases, names, ideas, etc. Redmarch sounded to me like a title, something sword-and-sorcery. I could almost see the cover art: a grim line of soldiers in leather armor with bloodied spears at right shoulder arms, trudging in a landscape of hopeless snow.
Sometime after that I was hunting around for a science fiction concept, something beyond near-future, preferably away from Earth. I’d thought further about Redmarch—what to do with it, if the title suggested anything—and considered, rather idly, that maybe it could be a prophecy story. Perhaps Redmarch was some ancient legend, ready to loose itself on a fantasy world like the one depicted in my above imagined cover art.
Thing is, I don’t like prophecy as a plot device. Why should anyone take divination seriously? But then—ding!—I imagined applying the prophecy concept to a science fiction tale, something big and broad maybe. It was one of those creative epiphanies that feel great in the moment but don’t always pan out. Nonetheless, I excitedly pondered this scenario. In the space of a few minutes one afternoon, I put together the key elements of the prophecy. Redmarch, I was breathlessly envisioning at this point, was to be a myth seeded into the dimmest, oldest histories of every galactic civilization teeming across the stars. (In this setup the Milky Way was rife with advanced life and cultures.) The legend had four “cardinal points”: 1) A Royal must flee the throne, 2) A Lawmaker must betray the law, 3) A High Cleric must renounce the faith, 4) A Warlord must go mad.
If those four conditions were met at the same time, in any corner of the galaxy, then a vast, bloody and berserk galactic war would erupt. The planets would turn on each other, shattering the long-held peace. It would be a senseless, catastrophic conflict.
Now, what made the concept particularly alluring to me was that I could play up the astounding ridiculousness of this prophecy. Here I had a prosperous, peaceful galactic civilization, where a multitude of disparate life forms coexisted more or less in harmony—presided over by a bureaucracy I planned to call, no less, the “Galactic Cooperation”—and yet . . . and yet . . . there still lingered in the collective unconsciousness of this star-spanning culture a terrible impulse toward the primitive, toward the cruel, toward madness itself. Redmarch would have abided as a spook story down through the many millennia because people, on some dank behavioral level, wanted it to be true.
That was something I could sink my creative teeth into. And I did. I wrote up a swing-for-the-fences novelette which I sold to a pro-level magazine. In it I portrayed the third of the four cardinal points of Redmarch coming to fruition: “A High Cleric must renounce the faith.” I had concocted a religious personage of galactic import and put him into a position where he was forced to make a momentous decision, one which could be interpreted—by the masses, and perhaps by other more nefarious forces—as having satisfied that condition to begin to set Redmarch in motion. That sale was proof of concept. The universe I’d imagined was viable. It was somewhere, perhaps, I could return to.
And so I have. The Redmarch universe offered a rich array of possibilities. If the galactic war of prophecy came to pass, it would literally affect every life in the galaxy. But even the potentiality of that conflict gave rise to fecund storytelling. The legend would be moving in on the galaxy at large like a slow-motion nightmare. Rational people of numerous races would balk at the very idea that such primitivism could intrude on the gleaming workaday modernity of the current affluent age. Those tales would be at least as rewarding to tell as the ones which dealt directly with the realization of the remaining three cardinal points. More, it seemed to me, any story I told in this universe would have an added weight to it. Impending war would press on the scales, and the stakes of every act and deed would be automatically higher.
Thus, you have my two linked Redmarch stories in Analog. The concept I conceived greatly enhances—I think—both works. I have also noodled about with other stories, some published, some not. Someday, there might be a book-length entry. And let’s just suppose, that might just find itself part of a . . . series. The Redmarch Cycle. Just the kind of thing my younger self wouldn’t have troubled himself to read.
The Astounding Analog Companion 