Wattpad brings you a guest post from Tim Norwood, author of the sci-fi adventure “Red Spring”:
In the final scenes of the Martian Chronicles (the TV mini series) Rock Hudson takes his children out on a camping trip with a promise that they will meet some martians. They drift along a canal through martian countryside that looks suspiciously like western USA and eventually stop to pitch their tent. The children are getting impatient by this point, so Rock takes them out on the boat and gets them to peer over the side where the martians will be waiting for them. It is, of course, their own reflections that are looking back…
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(Image from the Martian Chronicles)
Apparently Ray Bradbury wasn’t particularly keen on the TV adaption of his book. He described it as ‘just boring’ but this scene was borrowed from his story ‘The Million-Year Picnic’.
I have to say, I loved the Martian Chronicles (both the TV series and the book) but it did raise a few questions for me. I was particularly intrigued about the way the characters seemed able to breathe without space suits, and I knew that there were no canals on Mars…
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(Image from NASA)
On August 22nd 2012, the NASA rover Curiosity set out on its first journey. Its landing site was given the new name ‘Bradbury Landing’ in honour of the great sci-fi writer who died earlier this year. Ray Bradbury couldn’t have known what Mars was like when he was writing his stories, but we know quite a lot about the Red Planet now and we can begin to imagine what life will be like for the first true martians.
Curiosity is the latest robotic explorer to give us a glimpse into the reality of Mars. I’m afraid I’ll be one of the Mars-nuts who follows every trundle of its wheels across the dust of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp. It’s going to be exciting.
For me, it was the Martian Chronicles that got me hooked. It was a fantasy version of Mars, of course, but it did get me interested – and it wasn’t long before I started to dream my own martian dreams…
I read every novel I could find about the planet (Kim Stanley Robinson’s were the best) but really wanted to have a go myself. Most of the stories were too fantastic, unrealistic or shallow. I wanted to see a Mars with depth – with its own culture, history and character.
As a starting point, I pencilled out a rough history of the planet, stretching from the first explorers to the distant future. I started writing a few times, but didn’t get anywhere. I eventually realised that I was trying to be too grand. If I wanted a good story, I would need to keep things simple…
Now, I do love sci-fi, but it is easy to get bogged down in technology, ideas or action. Good stories however, require characters and relationships. Good characters are complex and have hidden depths. They are flawed and go on emotional journeys. They are seldom good or evil…
The one thing that frightened me most about writing a novel was the issue of characters and relationships. I’d written lots of non-fiction before and knew I could string a few sentences together, but a proper story would need more. I was seriously frightened that I would end up with cardboard characters whose life or death would mean nothing. I’ve seen enough bad sci-fi to know how dull that can be…
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So I started my project with two challenges. The first was to produce a realistic and believable account about people becoming martian. The second was to write a character-based story which worked in its own right. Nothing too difficult then…
I decided to keep it as simple as possible and focus on a tiny slice of my fictional history – just a couple of weeks rather than thousands of years. Because I wanted a story about new beginnings and identity, it seemed logical to place the events within a war of independence, and this would provide all sort of opportunities to explore the key themes.
As far as the characters were concerned, I took time to create a back-story for each one, and thought carefully about their personality and the journey that each would go on. Some of them, I’m sorry to say, were set up for a fall. I wanted them to be likeable so I could kill them off later. How nice of me!
It was then a question of throwing them together in a situation which would make sense in its own right, reveal something of my fictional planet, but not become too world-changing. The result was my first novel, Red Spring. I enjoyed writing it and I’ve learnt a lot in the process, but you will need to tell me whether I’ve achieved my objectives or not.
Writing the novel through Wattpad has been very rewarding. It’s been great to post it a chapter at a time and get feedback and suggestions. I know I wouldn’t have finished it without my Wattpad friends and their encouragement. I am therefore profoundly grateful!
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As far as the future is concerned I’ve got a pirate-fantasy-adventure to write for my daughter, but then I’ll go back to Mars. I’ve got an idea for a story which links my martians with other worlds as they take their first steps into a wider universe. I wonder if there will be a town called Bradbury Landing…
Read Tim Norwood’s stories on Wattpad!
