Hi, dear readers! This month: My weird take on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. But first, lots of cool book updates!

🚀The Entropy of Trust available in Booksweeps and AuthorsXP

Hopefully you had a chance to enjoy The Entropy of Trust, the second Seela story in preparation for the upcoming launch of Thorn of Concordia (if you didn’t, download it for free as a subscriber benefit, here). This month many new readers had a chance to engage with this story both as part of a Booksweeps SF sweepstakes and an AuthorsXP Space Opera promo (now concluded). Some of those new readers have joined us in this little mailing list. Welcome to all of you!

🖼️ Thorn of Concordia cover is in production!

This month we started designing the cover for Thorn of Concordia. Rafael, design lead for Cover Kitchen, is on point. I’m so excited to see what he comes up with and, after seeing some of the designs Cover Kitchen has done for SF novels in the past, I’m sure you’ll be as well! Stay tuned; in a few weeks it’ll be ready, and of course you’ll be the first ones to see it.

💡 Panels, past and future (SFWA and WorldCon LA!)

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to be one of the panelists in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Association (SFWA) panel on Understanding AI: A Hype-Free Overview, a panel targeted for authors looking to understand more about how AI is affecting their careers. Lots of good discussion and interesting questions.

And next month I’ll be a panelist at Worldcon, the World Science-Fiction Convention, in Anaheim, CA! Worldcon is always a great place to meet both fellow authors and passionate readers. I'll be in varios panels covering AI, role-playing games, and Latin American speculative fiction. If you are planning to attend this Worldcon, be sure to ping me so we can have a coffee chat!

And now for the main course…

🏝️ Why The Odyssey is a Hard-SF story, Part 1*

(*because if the movie is three hours long, why can’t this essay be two parts long?)

Like many others, I flocked to the IMAX theater last week to watch Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Odyssey, and yes, it is worth the hype. There are some slow moments, but on the whole this is an amazing movie I can’t wait to watch again. Full marks!

This is not what I want to talk about, however. I want to talk about the thought that kept popping up in my head as I watched the movie (I guess that’s just how my brain works): This thing is actually a hard science-fiction story in disguise.

Before I delve into this, a warning: There might be some scene-level spoilers here. I should not be able to spoil the overall plot of The Odyssey for you because… well, because you’ve had 2,700 years to read it, y’know. Still, for those who don’t know what it’s about and want to know, here it goes:

(Side comment: one of my daughters has suggested that if Odysseus wanted the Trojans to open the gate and carry him and his soldiers into the city, no questions asked, they should have sealed themselves inside an Amazon Prime box instead of a horse. Considering how every time we find a box on the porch we just bring it into the house, she may be right).

Now for my point: The Odyssey has strong parallels to Hard SF stories because it ultimately speaks of the true costs of travel (time) and the true strangeness of other worlds (culture). Space Opera and “Firm” SF (including what I write) deliberately short-circuit these two issues by the convenient device of “FTL” (drives, hyperspace, warp speed, wormholes, or whatever). But The Odyssey takes the hard path, and it shows.

Time (or why every homecoming is a relativity problem).

Let’s start with Time.

Theoretically, a sailboat trip from what today are the ruins of Troy to the island of Ithaca in Greece could be done by an ancient galley in nine days. Yet this isn’t what happened to Odysseus. Ten years of war plus ten years of wandering take their toll on anyone, and Odysseus finds that home didn’t wait for him: Telemachus has grown; an older Penelope is besieged by suitors, and keeps them at bay by the ruse of unweaving her loom each night (a metaphor for controlling time); and Odysseus’s dog dies when he recognizes him.

This is exactly what a relativistic traveler in space would live. An early Hollywood example of this appears in the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston’s astronaut returns to Earth two millennia after he left, eighteen months before (spoiler: it’s not scientifically accurate). A better example appears in 2009’s Avatar, where the ship that takes humans to Pandora traverses the 4.37ly between Sol and Alpha Centauri in 6.75 years (for people on Earth) or 5 years (for people on the ship). A far more developed example, one that also features a warrior returning home, comes from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War, where soldiers are deployed to a conflict against alien beings, and the deployment, made at relativistic speeds, means that when they return home society has moved on without them.

So, whether it’s a ten-year sea journey, or the time dilation caused by 0.99c travel, emotionally there is little difference, and we see that in Odysseus’s return. We’re all slaves to physics.

As if to reinforce the perception that this world is ruled by physics, Nolan’s Odyssey practically features no gods, with the exception of Zendaya’s Athena, whom the film implies is a figment of Odysseus’s guilt-ridden, traumatized imagination. Circe and Calypso, while presented as beings with supernatural powers, don’t exude the godhood aura that Homer’s poem suggests for them (and Odysseus’s interactions with Calypso occur while he’s half-drugged anyway). There are frequent references to the wrath of Poseidon and others, and of course monsters galore (more on the monsters next month), but if the gods exist, they work through the impersonal physics of raging storms and deadly winds. Again, Physics, not godhood, rules the universe.

Now, can anyone honestly imagine Odysseus returning to Troy, say, for a nostalgic visit, after all this? The viewer is left with the perception that the gulf of space/time is simply too vast to be crossed twice.

Which brings us to FTL.

In the movie, Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island on a raft, braves the seas, and, half-dead, reaches Ithaca. This is Christopher Nolan refusing to take Homer’s storytelling shortcut Homer: In the poem, Odysseus’s raft capsizes but the Phaeacians find him and take him home overnight, by means of one of their enchanted ships.

That sounds suspiciously like FTL, doesn’t it?

We’ve become accustomed to space stories using Faster Than Light as a means to keep the story going at human scales at the expense of scientific accuracy. But we’re paying a price for that. The speed of light is not a pesky “75 MPH maximum speed allowed” sign next to the highway; it is a dividing line between how space and time behave in our universe.

And what a line it is! Our current understanding of the universe suggests that if we were somehow able to breach the speed of light, causality would reverse: Consequences would happen before their causes, messages would arrive before being sent; it would basically be like traveling backwards in time!

(I’ll admit it was an effort to resist the temptation to begin the previous sentence with an “As I’ve already told you twice before…”)

At this time it’s worth pointing out that Christopher Nolan has already filmed this movie before: Interstellar is another, less metaphorical take on a journey that exacts its price in time. The scene in which the protagonist Cooper spends three hours and change on Miller’s planet, and it costs him twenty-three years back home, is the Odysseus’s “twenty years gone” beat made literal.

And what about Thorn of Concordia?

In Thorn of Concordia, ships travel between planets by using jump membranes, specific spherical volumes of space located roughly one astronomical unit away from the planet’s main star (depending on the star’s mass), usually perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. These membranes are activated by a special kind of drive that “rips” them, moving the ship to another location in space up to eight light years away. So, your standard FTL stuff, with a couple of cool nuances that make space battles very interesting (you’ll have to read the book to find out why that is. It’s coming, I promise!). There’s also a Stellar Communication Network that leverages these membranes to allow relay transmissions between planets in a matter of days or weeks, leveraging 22nd-century successors of real-life interplanetary protocol architectures such as Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) or TIPTOP (an “FTL Internet”).

In short, Thorn of Concordia leans on the genre cost to leverage FTL and ignore the contradictions brought up by causality, while keeping a Firm SF veneer atop it all. The tradeoff enabled by this deliberate scientific blasphemy is the possibility to tell rich, interesting stories about planets that have grown differently, yet are still close enough to matter to each other, a tapestry of very human intrigue that creates rich, immersive storytelling.

Which is why we read stories in the first place, isn’t it?

But if the voyage represents time, what about space? Distance affects culture, and The Odyssey also presents that. I’ll geek out on this next month. 😉

That’s all from me for this edition. Next month I expect to have some exciting news about the novel!

As always, thank you for being here, for reading, and for keeping the faith.

Until next time,

L.E.