by Geoffrey Hart
From Star Trek to the fiction Larry Niven, discover the influences and inspiration behind Geoffrey Hart’s novelette “Monkey Trap” from our Jan/Feb issue
I’m always fascinated to learn where authors get their story ideas and what motivated them to write. I’m hoping you’re reading this because you share that fascination, and enjoyed my Analog story, “Monkey Trap” enough that you’ll keep reading this blog entry. (If you haven’t yet read the story, go have a look. I’ll wait. Done? Here we go!)
I’m a gentleman of a certain age, which means I grew up with a particular set of Golden Age science fiction. What I loved about that fiction was the sheer joy of discovery, but much though I enjoy reading it again with 50+ years of hindsight, I’m not blind to some of the flaws. For which I thank Robert Heinlein, who taught me to think about whether I actually agreed with him (often, I didn’t), and Ursula Leguin, who greatly expanded my gender horizons. But the world’s moved on, and it’s become a lot more complex than I realized when I was a wee sprat. I needed to move on with it while rewiring my model of the world. Which I’m doing in my real life, and trying to do better in my fiction.
Literary influences
So what Golden Age elements did I try to preserve in Monkey Trap?
First, let’s start with Star Trek, which, in addition to introducing me to a large number of cool alien protagonists, left me with the optimistic feeling that we’ll still be alive as a species in another century—a feeling I don’t always experience today when I look out the window or make the mistake of doomscrolling social media. But Star Trek also taught me that Imperialism and Colonialism may be sugarcoated in ways that hide the bitter taste. The Trek universe is implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) imperial and colonial, but its good bits still make it my literary emotional support animal.
Second, I think that at some point, I finally read everything that Andre Norton wrote, and particularly enjoyed her focus on people coming together to find a modus vivendi—specifically, finding reasons to survive and help finding ways to survive, usually with a little help from found families. In particular, I loved her concept of “free traders”: self-employed interplanetary travelers who are perpetually just one bad bounce from disaster, but who are somehow managing to earn a meager living hauling goods between planets. (C.J. Cherryh undoubtedly contributed to my take on that meme. Downbelow Station was a formative experience.) But Norton also introduced me to the weight and resonance of deep time and the many galactic civilizations that came before us—and that failed before we could talk to them, leaving behind intriguing ruins and object lessons about how even the mighty can fall. Maybe we could do better if we learned from their history? Despite many signs that we haven’t even learned from our own mistakes, I remain optimistic.
Third, Larry Niven introduced me to the delights of crafting science puzzles to be solved by his unfortunate protagonists through careful thought and gut instinct, thereby surviving traps, disasters, and other inconveniences of future space-going life. Niven’s writing now strikes me as quaintly chauvinist, but nobody did science puzzles like he did. (Well, okay: Many of his contemporaries preceded him or followed in his footsteps. Fred Pohl’s Gateway series comes to mind. But I’ve chosen to focus on Niven here.) I also liked his continuing characters, particularly Beowulf Shaefer. Interestingly, Niven’s vanished civilizations are still around when humans take their first tentative steps into his broad fictional universe. But most of them have disappeared, or have survived after undergoing Shakespeare’s metaphorical “sea change”.
Fourth, the Traveller role-playing game introduced me to the need to be wary about opportunities that look too good to be true and to the need to be capable of thinking on your feet when you forget that lesson and end up in the muck. But role-playing games are also about found families, often dysfunctional and surviving in an environment that heavily favors wealthy and immoral corporations who hold all the cards. (I can’t imagine why this seems increasingly relevant today.)
After the aforementioned 50+ years of reading SF/F, those four don’t even come close to listing all the authors and stories that shaped who I am today, but these are the ones that came to mind first, and thus, subconsciously, are the ones that shaped me as the author of “Monkey Trap.”
When you mix these ingredients all together, they make a tasty stew:
Star Trek’s Optimism
Star Trek characters never stop striving even when things look darkest, confident they’ll pull through eventually. But I’ve gradually been infected by a growing realpolitik cynicism about the Federation’s “prime directive”. For some years now, I’ve wondered whether this was really about plausible deniability: if a starship captain could extend the Federation’s empire without getting caught doing it, they’d earn a promotion. But if they failed? Well, “we told Kirk not to do that”, followed by Kirk being drummed out of Starfleet—and quietly welcomed into Starfleet’s Secret Service, where they have many uses for rebels who don’t mind a little collateral damage. That background, and the resulting persecution of free traders, are key elements of the “Monkey Trap” universe.
Norton’s and Niven’s deep time
Deep time as the background for adventures provides an unparalleled feeling of mystery and a profound past that still resonates strongly at the time of the story. From an authorial perspective and as a reader, I love the concept of fallen civilizations (I blame Ozymandias) and ancient relics lurking in wait for the unwary, witness the eponymous monkey trap. Mostly they’re not designed to be traps: rather, they’re object lessons about the price of carelessness and greed and about the longevity of problems we create today.
Traveller’s found family and continuing characters
“Monkey Trap” is the first published tale in what I call my “Survey Crew” stories, which are about a small group of characters who have survived their indenture in the dystopian emphatically non-volunteer Navy. Their job was to survey the galaxy for potentially habitable planets—there’s that colonialism thing again. These stories fall within a larger story cycle I call the “Black Ships” universe. (That’s based on the forced opening of Japan by the U.S. Navy’s Commodore Perry, who arrived in the eponymous ships in the mid-1800s. Imperialism and plausible deniability for the win! Sort of.) Surviving together for 20-some years builds deep bonds. These bonds will keep the crew alive in a hostile universe, hopefully for many stories.
Niven’s science puzzles
I spend my days editing articles written to be published in peer-reviewed science journals. Clearly, I love the messy business of doing science. But as a writer, I want to provide just enough real science to be convincing—and not so much that it strangles the story. Never let facts get in the way of a good story! I’m good to go with FTL travel, as it permits my characters to travel to those strange new worlds. It builds a sense of wonder, and isn’t that why we still love some of the old SF/F? But if I come up with a Nivenian cool science trick that might require a little handwaving about the physics? Sign me up anyway!
Exploring
And, of course, the crew of the good ship Boule Noire have to make a living if they hope to ever pay off the mortgage and retire. They’re not going to find the good booty if they stick to the well-traveled paths patrolled by the Navy. That means they have to boldly go where nobody’s gone before, in the hope of finding what nobody’s found before—and escaping the Navy’s greedy vigilance, or at least surviving the experience. Many former survey crews are former because they weren’t sufficiently careful. Will that happen to our plucky protagonists? Not for a few more stories, at least.
Boldly go!
If you haven’t already read “Monkey Trap,” have a look! It’s kind of a dog’s breakfast, but I like dogs a lot and create a pretty good doggy breakfast if I do say so myself.
The Astounding Analog Companion 