I love writing to an assigned theme. One of my longest-held beliefs about writing is that constraints improve one's creativity. There's something awfully daunting about a blank screen and the knowledge that you can write absolutely anything. It can cause creative paralysis, or a lot of abortive starts.
But put down some boundaries and the creativity flows like a river. This story is an example. Shimmer is a very well-respected small-press fiction magazine, and back in 2007 they invited the rising editorial star John Joseph Adams to guest-edit an issue devoted to pirates. Because everybody loves pirates.
John mentioned it to me, and I immediately started thinking about pirates. Now, at the time Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean films were plundering the box office at movie theaters, so I knew there would be a lot of timbers being shivered and nautical blood and thunder under the black flag.
I decided not to do that, for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to stand out. If the submission pile was going to be filled to the gunwales with scurvy rats cruising the Spanish Main, I needed something different. Second, while I enjoy sea stories, I'm not especially knowledgeable about ships and sailing. I need a cheat sheet to tell a futtock-shroud from a mainbrace, and I've never been to sea under sail.
So instead of writing about historical pirates, I decided to write about space pirates. There's a long and colorful history of space piracy in science fiction. One of my favorite old magazine covers is a painting by Frank Kelly Freas of a bearded pirate climbing aboard a spaceship with a slide rule clutched in his teeth.
The trouble with space piracy is that it's completely ridiculous. Spaceships aren't sailing galleons. They can't heave to and be boarded. They can't change course in mid-voyage. There are no convenient islands in space where pirates can lurk. There's no place to hide, which means that everyone would know exactly where the pirates came from -- which makes piracy an act of war rather than a crime.
So I was faced with a choice: tell a fantastical space opera tale of piracy, consciously deploying old-fashioned tropes with a wink at the reader, or . . . try to make it work.
I picked the second option and applied my favorite technique of intellectual brute force. How could space piracy really work? Well, the first thing to do is get rid of the pirates. An unmanned vehicle is a lot cheaper and a lot more plausible than a beat-up old rocketship full of buccaneers.
Then I realized there is a place, one particular place, where pirates can lurk in space. If you're going from Earth to the Moon (or coming back), your flight path is almost certainly going to pass through the L-1 point.
What's the L-1 point? Back in the 18th Century the astronomer Lagrange was analyzing Newton's three laws, hoping to come up with a general solution of the three-body problem (which I don't have space to go into here). He couldn't -- because no general solution exists -- but he did discover some interesting special cases. When you have a body (like the Moon) orbiting a larger body (like the Earth) there are several places where their combined gravity produces stable points. These are known, inevitably, as the Lagrange points. One of them, the L-1 point, is the place where the Earth's and Moon's respective forces of attraction balance out. You can park a spaceship there and it'll remain in place with only minor station-keeping thrusts from time to time.
The L-1 point is also a low-energy "pass" on the way between Earth and the Moon. A minimum-energy trajectory must pass through it. (I am informed by no less than Gregory Landis that there are ways to avoid L-1, but they are much more round-about and time-consuming.) Rocketeers always want to save energy, because that reduces their fuel requirements, which in turn reduces the size of the booster they're using.
So there's my spaceborne equivalent of the Florida Channel, where pirates can lurk and valuable cargoes must go past them. All I needed was a suitably valuable cargo and a suitably colorful buccaneer, and the story was ready. David Schwartz, a.k.a. "Captain Black the Space Pirate" has a cheaply-built satellite at L-1 waiting to intercept payloads of expensive Helium-3 from the Moon. Meanwhile his nemesis Captain Elizabeth Santiago of the Air Force's Space Command tries to stop his depredations.
It was a fun story, and appeared in the special Pirate Issue of Shimmer in autumn 2007.
In fact it was so much fun I've been expanding it, turning it into a novel under the working title Corsair. So watch this space for more news about Captain Black the Space Pirate.
Arr! There, I said it.
That picture is awesome. I like the sound of the novel, too.
Posted by: Chuk Goodin | 09/19/2012 at 04:19 PM