{"id":890,"date":"2018-12-10T09:25:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T09:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?p=890"},"modified":"2023-12-12T10:09:29","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T10:09:29","slug":"his-majestys-starship-part-1-origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/2018\/12\/his-majestys-starship-part-1-origins\/","title":{"rendered":"His Majesty\u2019s Starship, part 1: origins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Go<\/a>

Go to the book’s home page<\/p><\/div>\n

[I originally wrote this for the twentieth anniversary of publication. It still stands for the twenty fifth. \u2013 BJ]<\/em><\/p>\n

It was twenty years ago today … that His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em> hit the stands. 17 December 1998.<\/p>\n

All of which inspires me to reminisce. In the best spirit of present-day science fiction I shall do it in three parts.<\/p>\n

In my late teens I read Robert Heinlein\u2019s The Number of the Beast<\/a><\/em>. This proved to be a bad idea because it\u2019s terrible<\/a>\u00a0and I couldn\u2019t believe it had been perpetrated by the same author as my beloved\u00a0Starman Jones<\/a><\/em>, which I read and re-read compulsively up to the age of about 13. However, there is a very brief mention in it of a Royal Space Force. That was an image that hung around in my mind for a long time after, but I didn\u2019t just want to fling it straight into a story as a given. I wanted to know how such a thing had come about.<\/p>\n

Also, much as I love good ol\u2019fashioned space opera, with space battles and hyperspace jumps and lasers, I grew up on much more plausible Arthur C. Clarke-type spaceship stories, where there is no artificial gravity and ships must obey the laws of physics. I wanted to write a story that could start in a Clarke-type universe and plausibly end with whizz-bang-splody ships.<\/p>\n

In my twenties, I read\u00a0Hornblower<\/a><\/em>. I had dipped into this before but now at a stroke I read the entire series. I was struck by an aspect of Hornblower that eluded me as a child: his self-loathing. He is a hero and can never believe it. Every mission he undertakes he is convinced will be his last \u2013 and this at a time when the English had shot\u00a0Admiral Byng<\/a>\u00a0on his own quarterdeck for messing up. That was my hero!
\nI almost had a novel.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know back then that the phrase \u2018Hornblower in space\u2019 was already fast becoming a clich\u00e9; I only had a vague idea who Honor Harrington was and\u00a0David Feintuch\u2019s\u00a0Hope<\/em><\/a>\u00a0series had yet to be published. It probably wouldn\u2019t have been a problem if I had, though, because both those others are set well after the start of their respective eras. I wanted to cover the beginning. For example, why exactly would anyone want to arm a spaceship?<\/p>\n

I also wanted to bring the limitations of nineteenth century naval warfare to space, as I think the principles will be pretty similar if it ever happens. In Hornblower\u2019s day, ships were big and slow and couldn\u2019t hide. If you were doing five knots and your enemy came over the horizon doing five and a half, then sooner or later there would be a battle, but you could spend all day just looking at your enemy as he crept closer and closer without being able to do a thing about it. There was nowhere to run to, and when the fighting started you just sat there and took it. And so, these principles were applied to the big space battle in the novel, when it came.<\/p>\n

Mix \u2019em all together and I had my background.<\/p>\n

Never assume an author is putting himself into his characters, but my hero Michael Gilmore\u2019s Hornbloweresque lack of self-belief certainly mirrored part of my own personality. I began to write\u00a0His Majesty\u2019s Starship<\/em>\u00a0in 1993; I was still in my late twenties and had no idea what the future might hold. I had no idea if I would ever be called upon to lead a large body of people, or even a small one. I did know I didn\u2019t fancy the idea in the slightest because I had no confidence that I could. And so far in my life, I\u2019ve managed to remain a lone wolf.<\/p>\n

However, I kicked back slightly against Hornblower\u2019s depressive excesses. Hornblower never really accepts that actually he\u2019s quite good and over time his self-pity becomes actively annoying to the reader. (Well, to me.) Thus by the end of the story Gilmore has good reason to believe he\u2019s actually quite good at what he does.<\/p>\n

And the required jump to a Trek-type universe by the end? Okay, I begged the question here: aliens, already technologically advanced, come to Earth with an invitation to the human race to help them develop a world they have available. I called them the First Breed, for reasons which become apparent; the humans nickname them the Rusties. When someone in my writers group said \u2018First Breed\u2019 sounded vaguely threatening, hinting at ideas of racial supremacy, I knew I was doing this right.<\/p>\n

It took a while to finalise their physical form. At first I played around with all kinds of shapes in my mind but they all came back to the \u2018man in a rubber suit\u2019 syndrome; I could take them about as seriously as I could take Trek\u2019s alien of the week. I certainly wasn\u2019t thinking of them as non-human. Then I remembered the Hefn of\u00a0Judith Moffett<\/a>\u2019s wonderful (and underrated) Ragged World (tales of the Hefn on Earth – geddit?) series, who are as at home on four feet as they are on two. I put the Rusties on all fours and, voila, aliens!<\/p>\n

This also helped me right a grievous wrong that was perpetrated upon science fiction in the early nineties. There was an especially irritating story in\u00a0Asimov<\/em>\u2019s called \u2018The Nutcracker Coup\u2019. Quite apart from being nauseously cute and upholding the right of all decent Americans to interfere in the affairs of less developed planets if they find the culture un-American or even if they are just plain bored, it featured a four legged intelligent race which \u2013 and I gaped with astonishment when I read it \u2013 still carried things about in its front legs, so that if one of them was holding a gun on you, say, it hobbled along on three legs while it kept you covered. An interesting take on evolutionary theory, I thought. How would these creatures ever invent the gun? Or any human-type tool that effectively disabled an entire limb if it was going to be used?
\nThus, my Rusties had grasping tentacles on either side of their heads which they used the same way we humans used hands.<\/p>\n

Other things about them just came off the top of my own head. Rusties appear to human eyes to be flaking rust, hence the name (at first I actually wanted them to be sweating iron oxide, but my biochemistry isn\u2019t up to it), and when they are conversing face to face, humans have to fight the urge to pick the flakes off the alien\u2019s skin. A Rustie\u2019s nostrils are at the top of its domed head, above the eyes \u2013 they come from a relatively predator-free stock that evolved on the plains, so need to keep their airways free of dust and dirt \u2013 and thus humans tend to make eye contact with the alien\u2019s nose. They communicate very much by body language, managing to transmit whole concepts in an instant with a gesture or a scent that would take a human much longer to say out loud; this meant I had to find a way of writing down a Rustie conversation from a Rustie\u2019s point of view. And they are herd animals, which is very important.<\/p>\n

So. Our friendly aliens offer to take a delegation of human ships to a far-off solar system. But the humans haven’t yet discovered how to travel faster than light. So, how is this achieved?<\/p>\n

I am indebted to my friends David Angier and Tim Bellerby for what became the step-through process. They know more physics and maths and other clever stuff than I do, so I explained my dilemma:<\/p>\n