I've mentioned this previously but one of the things about being a SF author is the requirement to have a vision of what the future looks like.
I'm the guy that dismissed email as a glorified sticky note and scoffed when a friend told me that broadband would change my life. Doesn't really bode well, does it?
We probably all wonder what the future will bring. I listen to my dad's stories of growing up in the 50s, with rationing and the communal toilets being at the end of the street and compare it to the things we take for granted now. I worry a bit that this is the golden age; the best it will ever be, and that things won't be as positive for my children. That the oil will run out, the temperature will rise and crops fail on a massive scale. At best, somebody pisses off the Russians and they turn the gas off and we're reliant on the Scots for what's left in the North Sea.
At other times, I'm hopeful that technology will avert the potential disasters. That we'll start to tap what appears to be massive reserves of fuel under the ground, that there are still lots of the brightest minds looking to find answers to our future troubles rather than trying to make my next phone see -through or weigh the universe.
Echo has space ships, laser weapons, faster than light travel, aliens. Nothing that I've created. I took bits of other peoples creations and mixed them together in a particular way. There's science and there's fiction. So I write science fiction.
Different people read different things in my books. Some (blokes normally) comment on the action. The other day somebody commented that she liked the relationship stuff and wasn't so keen on the action scenes. So I apparently write soap opera, and romance.
The Echo series is drawing to a close. I'm about a third of the way through E3 and, having scrapped a couple of crap chapters, much clearer about where it's going to go. Already I'm starting to think about what will follow it. I've got a couple of chapters of War Crime (SF set in the Echo universe but with a different set of characters) and Yorkshire Gothic, which is steampunk.
Perhaps I should try and stick to one particular thread. Perhaps it will make the books better if they're more focussed. Perhaps I'm fooling myself about how much control I have over the content. These things have a habit of taking control and going their own merry way.
Hopefully it will be an interesting journey.
