Studio Project Air Cows Writing Process
By Neil Hogan
The first thing I consider when forming a short science fiction story outline in my head is how to avoid engaging with contemporary life. This is important to me as I regularly write escapist space fiction, with my goal being to encourage readers to consider something other than their own earthly concerns. Also, it excites me to write stories that are as alien as possible, within the confines of the English language and the necessity of being able to be understood by a human reader. These space fiction works are sometimes narrated through a non-anthropomorphic lens, to expedite the environment of alienness and incomprehensibility that I strive to express. Please note that when I talk about non-anthropomorphic, it means I write from the perspective of the alien biology of a creature. For example, if an alien is pure energy, can it feel? What are its senses? What world does it perceive? Perhaps physical matter wouldn’t be relevant to it. Gomel (2014) talks about the need for more science fiction writers who write believable non-anthropomorphic aliens. I agree, and am one of those writers, which puts me in a niche community of practice that also includes Stanislaw Lem, Olaf Stapledon and Isaac Asimov. And so, my studio project story Air Cows was originally going to be about balloon aliens in the atmosphere of a far-off planet, in another galaxy, dealing with the problem of increasing gravity. I thought this would be a great starting point to creating more incomprehensible aliens that can help to expand readers’ minds, and help them to forget the real world, albeit for a short time.
The second thing I do when forming a story is go over what kind of science advances I’d like to include. Suvin (2014) discusses the use of estrangement as an underlying attitude and dominant formal device, and that the science fiction genre focuses on the more cognitive aspects of this. I’d agree with the caveat that, in recent years there has been a distinct lack of science in what has been labelled science fiction by many publishers, which turn out to be fantasy. As I usually write a sub-genre of science fiction—space fiction—the estrangement and cognitive aspects that Suvin (2014) are front and centre. But what kind of science should I write this time? Physics, astronomy, biology, virology, chemistry? Perhaps a combination of all these, and more, depending on the story. Whatever I write, it would be packed with real science as well as logically extrapolated science, reinforcing the ‘realism’ of the un-real storyline.
And why did I want to write Air Cows? The core idea that birthed my studio project is that I wanted to create a homage to Stanislaw Lem, as 2021 is the centenary of his birth. I planned to write a story that would appeal to his readership and fanbase. Up until at least the mid-70s he was the most widely read science fiction writer on Earth (Sturgeon, 1976). I like his works because they explore impossible, incomprehensible and terrifying concepts through a multidisciplinary lens. He wrote it with rigorous science, making many of his works believable. Initially, I thought of writing a sequel to one of his stories, based on the idea that doing this for deceased authors’ characters has become popular in the past few decades (Flood, 2009), but I dismissed that idea, preferring to create a completely new work in Lem’s style and voice.
For style and voice insights I decided to study his most popular work—Solaris. The 1961 noveltakes place on a planet with a faux sea that scientists in the area decided must be a giant alien brain. It features three male protagonists discussing from their different disciplines how to solve the problem of an alien female that was present—a resurrected version of the late girlfriend of one of the protagonists. I listened to the audio book (Johnston and Juliani, 2011), studying Lem’s beats, the kinds of imagery he focused on, the formula for storytelling he liked to use, and the nuances of his dialogue structure. It reinforced for me why his works were so loved in the 20th century and are still popular today (Huds, 2015).
Unfortunately, I learnt that I had to discard most of my original concept. I couldn’t write my unemotional stories unconnected to Earth in unconventional ways if it was to be a true homage to Lem. While Lem wrote stories set amongst the stars, there were a number of anachronisms in his works that I would have to keep if I was to emulate him. For example, even in far future Solaris, scientists had books on their shelves, used audio recorders, and did science in a way that firmly entrenched their behaviour in the 20th century. He also combined cognition and emotion. These weren’t just intellectuals discussing solving a problem, these were intellectuals with real fears, conflicts, dramas and faults failing to solve a problem and squabbling over their own self-importance (Byrne, 2020). Understanding this, I knew I had to set my story somewhere where I would be happy with it and be able to reflect Lem’s voice respectfully and believably in it.
This led to a few issues in creating Air Cows. For example, to have books in my story to reference Lem’s legacy, and for my own obsession about accuracy, it had to be on Earth, as the idea of books in the far future was too anachronistic. After all, books have only existed for close to a thousand years. Why would they exist thousands of years from now? Setting the story in the present was an option but then I’d have to engage with the current problems of society, which wasn’t part of my original plan. I decided that the past was the most likely place where I could really explore all that Lem’s voice had to offer without being tempted to make a statement about anything, and be able to include books and other 20th century devices. And with Lem being Polish, a particular period in Poland, in the city he spent the most time in, Krakow, would be ideal. I decided to create a story that could fit into his early bibliography, so the best time to set it turned out to be the late 1940s.
However, I soon realised my story had no choice but to be engaged with something—history. After all, if I set my characters in 1948 Poland, then I would need to make sure the world around them is 1948 Poland, and for that I needed to include various issues that the characters might be dealing with at the time. Being only a few years after a devastating war, I now had to refer to the Nazi occupation of Krakow and what effect that might have had on my learned characters. Of the 1940s, why 1948, particularly? I mainly chose it to escape the need to discuss Poland’s major political change that didn’t happen until December of that year (New World Encyclopedia, 2019). Also, by 1949, most of Poland had been restored due to a three-year restoration plan instigated in 1946 (W., 1947). Setting it later than 1948 would have meant my war-torn university would have already been removed.
And so, I knew some of these issues must then influence the actions of my characters, such as Doctor Tomasz Lehrman’s PTSD from his fear of lifts due to being stuck in one when the Nazis killed a group of teachers in their Sonderaktion Krakau operation (Miodoński, 1963); Doctor Gottfried Meier’s mental collapse due to expecting the future to have angelic Aryans being broken; the risks of genetic engineering; the disruptions of arbitrary government decisions on people, and a lot more. This research also led me to think about Marie Curie, a Polish scientist who won the Nobel prize for physics. I decided that if the work of my character, Professor Henrika Solon, had been interrupted by the war, and she had had a need to win a Nobel in physics, then she might work dangerously harder afterwards to make up lost time, as there are a lot of things that need to be done to be able to win one. (Doherty, 2008).
I should mention that, while Gottfried Meier is barely in the story, his character was the hardest to create. He had to be different to the two Polish characters, yet not stand out too much in white, Polish-only, 1948 Krakow. I knew that Lem had had a propensity for exploring differing views through brilliant, eccentric, mad scientists, and decided I should visit this trope as well. At the end of the war, many German scientists escaped to the West and were employed, mostly in rocket-building in the USA. Hence the stereotype of the mad scientist with the German accent (TV Tropes, n.d.) With Lem using ‘mad German scientists’ in his stories, it was something I had to do, too. And so, in Air Cows, I made sure that the protagonist who goes crazy is German. Meier’s fate was not only assured, it was preordained!
But could Germans have remained in Poland?Why would they? Finding that only a few Germans remained (Korbonski, 1998), enabled me to expand on Meier’s character and belief systems, and give a reason for him hiding in the building, though most of that was in my character profile notes to influence his behaviour, and not specifically included in the story. Meier, like many Germans at the time, would have believed in Aryans, an idea by 19th century scientific racialist Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (Gobineau and Collins, 2015). But how could I get my scientist to go crazy? I surmised that Meier discovering that angelic Aryan-type humanoids are not the future of humanity might break him, but I eventually decided, for more believability, that it was the onset of the alien infection that finally sent him mad. Even so, the plan wasn’t to focus the story on a mad scientist, and so Meier is only seen in a pivotal scene in the middle when he kills himself, even though his influence is felt throughout most of the story.
This leads me to discuss another writing technique I’ve learnt through my community of practice—to include as many plausible and scientifically possible facts to add believability to a story. I feel that, writing a cognitive tale rather than an emotive one requires a scaffold of real information. I found that this technique could be considered making use of the Illusory Truth Effect—the more something is shown or repeated, in various ways, the more someone will believe it (Hassan and Barber, 2021). I made sure my studio project included a plethora of facts to make it believable—not only in pushing the story forward, but also in the discussions of the characters trying to convince each other of different viewpoints. An idea connected to this, to make a conversation more convincing, is to have a character reveal fact after fact that then convinces either the reader and/or another character of the realities of the situation. I learnt this technique from watching an episode of Yes Prime Minister called The Ministerial Broadcast. In it, Appleby tells Woolley how easy it is to write leading questions in a survey to influence the surveyed to answer one way or the other, then gives examples for both results. By having characters or situations change due to new information being introduced, I can make the scene more convincing and believable by changing the minds of the readers and the characters (Belludi, 2015). And so, Air Cows contains so many facts that I can now personally believe that something like this could happen, or even could have happened in reality, even though I wrote it and I know the story is fiction.
Now that I had the basics of the story in my head, and in copious notes either on my PC or littered about me in scribbled half sentences, it was time to start writing. I employ a writing technique I’ve decided to call ‘jigsawing.’ My process is to come up with the main stages of a story first, usually in my head. Then I’ll write down the most interesting parts first before I forget them. In the case of Air Cows, I wrote the last scene first, the middle scene second, and the introductory scene third, then joined them together with transitions, and smoothed out the sections so that they matched. I usually put my stories together the same way I do jigsaw puzzles—doing the more interesting looking parts first. I find that this is the most efficient way to create a story and as a result of this the first 14,000-word draft took just two weeks. If I had plotted it out and written everything linearly, I would have probably taken a lot longer as writing those descriptive parts are my least favourite part of writing, meaning more reading or watching of other artists’ works to avoid doing it!
But even though my original goal was to emulate Lem’s style, I found I couldn’t do that completely. Poland had been a monoculture for many years, and recorded history suggests only white men spent much time on the streets in the late 40s and early 50s. This influence meant many of Lem’s stories just contain white male scientists. With many of the stories I write featuring confident, strong, powerful, intelligent females, I just refused to bring into the world another story full of male scientists. So, while retaining some historical accuracy, I had to also make the story appealing to readers who had more of a cosmopolitan upbringing. This meant that I made sure the second protagonist was a female professor, and a strong one. Bark-Persson (2020) discusses the rise of female masculinity in science fiction and I’d count works as part of that trend. Also, by making Henryka a professor and Lehrman a doctor, he naturally deferred to her leadership, avoiding the need to make him sexist, which would have been the most likely behaviour of a male scientist at the time, according to some of Lem’s stories. However, for Henryka to have existed as a professor in 1948 Poland, she had to be hidden and focused on her work to somehow make this story more realistic for those who have studied Polish history. As mentioned previously, believability is important to me in the fictions I create.
My story now had a plot, but being a Lem-style story, something bad had to happen to the protagonists by the end. I decided it had to be an alien virus. Ever since I read Erickson’s 1986 novelisation of a 1966 Doctor Who TV series story called The Ark about a woman from the 1960s going to the far future with a common cold and killing half the population, I had planned to explore this idea someday. As there is an element of time travel in Air Cows, I thought that a nice twist would be that my characters bring a future disease back to their present.
Another thing I felt I needed to do for Lem fans specifically and science fiction fans generally was to include ‘Easter Eggs’—hidden references or tiny homages that fans would recognise (Cerabona, 2019). Some of these are subtle like the sign outside the university says ‘Politechnika Krakowska im. Stapledon’ which is a nod to Olaf Stapledon, a writer whom both Lem and I admire, and who also likes to write stories about non-anthropomorphic aliens, Star Maker being a great example. Others were more obvious, such as Lem’s need to create a factual book or other text within the story, which I reflected early on. In Air Cows, I created ‘Creating Exotic Matter: Theories and Hypothesis by Lien A. Nagoh. (My author name backwards). I describe Lehrman turning to the first chapter titled ‘Rectangular Prismic Constant Null Energy Condition Violations in Symmetry’ as well as detailing other parts of this imaginary book. In many of Lem’s stories he created non-existent texts which characters would read through for research or inspiration. Sometimes the text would contain an important kernel of information. More often than not it simply added to the atmosphere of the story and could be skipped without affecting the overall plot. In this sense, the book I included in the first section of the text had a little relevance to the rest of the story in that it mentions exotic particles, something that had recently been created on the International Space Station (Gibney, 2020), and is crucial for the Einstein-Rosen Bridge to operate. The book did do something else besides appeal to Lem fans, though. It positioned my protagonist Lehrman as less knowledgeable about physics than Solon who owned the book.
Other references to Lem include his hating of most science fiction that came from the USA due to the lack of scientific knowledge evident in most stories (Nast, 2019), so I had Lehrman discover ‘…a wastepaper bin overflowing with yellowing American novels’ surmising Solon had ‘…discarded them when the science wasn’t rigorous.’ Further into the story, when Lehrman is thinking about space fiction – “I also very much enjoyed a serialized story in Nowy Świat Przygód called Człowiek z Marsa by a new author whose name didn’t immediately come to mind.” This is an early story by Lem that was printed in a magazine (Hosch, 2021), so Lehrman’s thoughts on this was added to keep the tone a little lighter before the story descended into hell. I also created the Other, the aliens that Lehrman and Solon eventually see that are almost incomprehensible and cannot be communicated with. Lem frequently wrote of aliens that were incomprehensible (Prisco, 2014). There are other Easter eggs, but I hope this gives you a taste of what I did for Lem fans and science fiction fans alike.
Finally, I decided on some symbols and tropes to further engage readers. The Einstein-Rosen bridge wormhole door (Einstein and Rosen, 1935), another mainstay of science fiction, is red and burning—like hell in the Christian religion tradition. Wormholes are theorised to exude huge amounts of microwave radiation so, escaped energy would have to look hot, and they would need to be kept open with exotic particles. (Guendelman et al, 2009). Also, to add emphasis to the scene, when Lehrman and Solon take an old, gated lift slowly down to the basement to see the door, I thought it ideal to use the symbolism of descending into hell, by adding a reddish hue and a burnt floor. And being in a claustrophobic hidden laboratory under a bombed building with scorched walls and decaying cement gave the scenes the right amount of atmosphere for what is to come. As this is a hard science fiction story, I didn’t want to go too overboard with unbelievable fantastical elements, so the door doesn’t have wailing screams of the dead. It does have “…a rending, screeching note as though space itself was being torn.” There is also the obligatory twist. The world they find when they go through the door is initially alien-like with different stars, but with so many familiar things (air, gravity, yellow dwarf star) and so Lehrman eventually finds it is Earth in 25,000 years’ time, a terrible discovery considering what humanity ends up as in the future.
In conclusion, I very much enjoyed researching and creating Air Cows in homage to Stanislaw Lem. It is packed with both scientific and historical facts that lend believability to the plot, but also a wide variety of references and Easter eggs to attract fans. I have learnt a lot in its construction, and I hope that readers will have their minds expanded after reading it.
References
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