{"id":5220,"date":"2023-12-15T10:28:08","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?p=5220"},"modified":"2023-12-15T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:28:08","slug":"his-majestys-starship-what-i-got-right-what-i-got-wrong-what-i-got-meh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/2023\/12\/his-majestys-starship-what-i-got-right-what-i-got-wrong-what-i-got-meh\/","title":{"rendered":"His Majesty\u2019s Starship: What I got right, what I got wrong, what I got meh."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"HMSS<\/a>Forgive me for lapsing into pseudo Dickens, but: it was everything I wanted, it was nothing like what I wanted, it was everything I expected, it was nothing like I expected. Let\u2019s be frank. His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em><\/a> made me a professionally published novelist and it garnered some good reviews<\/a> but it wasn\u2019t my key to the big time. I was in no danger of having to make room for a Hugo on my mantelpiece, or indeed having to acquire a mantelpiece to put my Hugo on. The big time was singularly untouched by my presence. In short, it was a bog standard first time novelist\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll come back to where I am now in a moment, but first I think it\u2019s far more interesting to see how a bit of twenty-five-year-old science fiction holds up. In general I think it does so quite reasonably. The Expanse<\/em> might have more sex and swearing but I maintain my takes on politics, human nature and physics are on entirely the same spectrum. Those reviews still hold true.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also interesting to look at developments I didn\u2019t expect.<\/p>\n

The United Kingdom<\/strong>
\nMy \u201cUnited Kingdom\u201d is but a virtual construct in the mind of the man who would be King if Great Britain was still a monarchy. Which it isn\u2019t. My thinking was that at some point the geographic British Isles became a republic and were subsumed into a bigger and better sort of European Union. All quite peacefully and democratically done. King Richard takes his riches and sets up shop on the giant asteroid miner UK-1, \u201cthe largest spaceship ever built \u2013 seventeen massive wheels in space spinning around a common axis. The last redoubt of the exiled House of Windsor.\u201d It has its own Royal Space Fleet and seven thousand four hundred and thirty seven subjects, and is \u2013 crucially \u2013 recognised as an independent state.<\/p>\n

Look, I just wasn\u2019t expecting my fellow citizens to put the electoral gun to their heads 133 years before the novel is set and vote for Brexit. I\u2019m an optimist. I don\u2019t do dystopias.<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence<\/strong>
\nMy first published stories were mostly set in a more or less consistent proto-cyberpunk world \u2013 a world of artificial intelligence and networks, written by someone with a naturally wistful turn of phrase, who knew very little about the internet and hadn\u2019t at that point read any William Gibson. However, I knew enough to see no point or purpose in having a consciousness hardwired into a particular physical, mechanical body. In other words, cute as droids might be, they make no sense. It seemed far more likely that intelligence would be virtual, able to operate whatever hardware it was connected to.<\/p>\n

I kept this concept for HMSS. I don\u2019t have robots or droids in individual bodies; the intelligence is software, able to roam around in a network or operate its own pro tem mechanical body. The main AI player is Plantagenet, one of a suite of AIs owned by the Royal Family with its own variable and mostly reliable agenda. (Why Plantagenet? Officially, because all the set are named after one dynasty or another. Unofficially, I like the word.) We first meet Plantagenet as the controlling intelligence of an amboid (ambulatory droid, get it?) but later on he exists only as a character in Ark Royal<\/em>\u2019s network.<\/p>\n

I started writing the novel in 1993, delivered the first draft in 1995, saw it published in 1998, and along the way I learned a whole lot more about the internet and networks. Like, how they actually work. That\u2019s really why my AI stories had dried up by the end of the nineties \u2013 I didn\u2019t buy them myself anymore, so why should anyone else?<\/p>\n

And that is why the AIs themselves were quietly phased out for The Xenocide Mission<\/em><\/a>; you can assume they\u2019re there but they play no significant role.<\/p>\n

Handhelds<\/strong>
\nRelated to this \u2013 the aide, which I neologise as an acronym for \u2018artificial intelligence device\u2019 but which nowadays we would probably call a phone. I didn\u2019t see that coming.<\/p>\n

I did see more and more applications coming to roost on a single, handheld device. At the time I didn\u2019t even have a mobile phone of my own, but I knew people who did. And an electronic handheld organiser. And an electronic this, and an electronic that. They would proudly whip them out at a moment\u2019s notice and talk me through them. But all had the same underlying technology inside the casing and so it seemed obvious that they would all eventually converge into one gadget.<\/p>\n

I cannot claim to have come up with this insight. If memory serves, you will find the same idea in Arthur C. Clarke\u2019s Imperial Earth<\/em><\/a>, and probably places before that too.<\/p>\n

And now \u2026 I think even that is pass\u00e9, or soon will be. I see AI becoming so pervasive that just voicing your wishes within range of an appropriate sensor \u2013 which will be pretty well everywhere \u2013 will get you what you want. You won\u2019t even have to address it by name: not \u2018Alexa\u2019, not even \u2018Computer\u2019. This is what I was groping for in Phoenicia’s Worlds<\/em><\/a>, fifteen years later.<\/p>\n

Israel<\/strong>
\nOne of my more bizarre fan encounters was with a rabbi from New York, who bought his copy of His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em> at the WH Smith\u2019s on Woking station, where of course all New York rabbis do their shopping. He was intrigued by my use of things Israeli and Jewish, and did some web searching in those pre-Google days to see if I was Jewish myself. He managed to establish that a) I\u2019m not but still b) we overlapped at school. In Dorset. Where all the New York rabbis go to school, of course.<\/p>\n

In particular, he called me out on the name of the Israeli ship in the delegation fleet \u2013 Adonai<\/em>. And why not? I thought \u2013 it’s a perfectly cromulent Hebrew word. Except that, I’m told, no Israeli government would name a ship Adonai<\/em> \u2013 it\u2019s just too risky. “Adonai” means “Lord” in Hebrew and is read instead of vocalising the Tetragrammaton (the four letters that correspond to YHWH) that make up the Ineffable Name of God. Orthodox Jews will not even say “Adonai”, outside of the context of reading liturgy and Torah, but say instead “HaShem” which means “The Name.” Anything with the name of God on it may not be destroyed but must be buried in the ground in a designated “Geniza.” So you can see the problems of giving that particular name to a spaceship, especially one that might end up in combat.<\/p>\n

So now I know.<\/p>\n

And where it got me<\/strong>
\nThe dream: being a serious sf author, up there with the best hard sf authors. The reality \u2026 Well, not being.<\/p>\n

His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em> had been brewing at the back of my mind for years, as the space opera story that I wanted to see out there. Having written it, I then went on to write Wing\u00e8d Chariot<\/em><\/a> (re-released as Time\u2019s Chariot<\/em><\/a>), which had been brewing at the back of my mind for years as the time travel story that I wanted to see out there. Then there was The Xenocide Mission<\/em><\/a>, the unexpected sequel to HMSS; and then The New World Order<\/em><\/a>, which had been brewing at the back of my mind for years as the alternate history story that I wanted to see out there. And after that I was out of stories I had wanted to write for years and was having to make up new stuff.<\/p>\n

So, I didn’t really know what I wanted to write anymore, and I didn\u2019t really have time to let anything brew at the back of my mind. I had distractions, like unexpectedly finding myself running my own company, which went bust, and equally unexpectedly meeting my future wife, which had a much happier ending, and one way or another the initial rush of my writing career ground to a halt. No one (well, hardly anyone) makes it big on the first novel. You need momentum, and I let the momentum lapse.<\/p>\n

And I wouldn\u2019t change it. Accidentally becoming a children\u2019s author led to writing for Working Partners<\/a>, which kept me afloat financially while my company sank around me. It also led to offers of ghostwriting work when my editor there changed jobs and inherited a series that needed a writer. The ghostwriting accelerated my return to a financial even keel, and ultimately led to the breakthrough contract eight years ago that let me go full time freelance. I\u2019ve written other books since His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em>, and may yet write more, but I owe where I am now to that particular book. So, God bless HMSS Ark Royal<\/em>, and all who boost at 1g at the head of a constant fusion flame within her.<\/p>\n

See also my experiences of writing and publishing the novel:<\/em><\/p>\n