Writer's Diary: A Ship Called Aspiration

Thoughts and commentary on the third pilot

This is the third Writer’s Diary post, as announced for Pilot Season here. You can think of this as a commentary track for my third pilot, A Ship Called Aspiration, and should definitely read that first before reading this.

These are my thoughts as I was writing the piece, facets I’m considering in the piece if/when I move forward as a longer serialized piece, things I was worrying about, and so on. Feel free to ask any questions about the piece below in the comments and I’ll try to answer as best I can. In the future, these will be paid only posts, so be sure to sign up as a paid-subscriber if you want to see these types of posts in the future.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I don’t really know the science behind a lot of science fiction. My dad always loved Isaac Asimov, but I was more of a fan of Robert Heinlein. Even when Heinlein attempted to dive in deep on science (like genetics in Time Enough for Love) I never really found it that interesting; I usually skipped ahead. A little ironic considering my parents are both scientists. As a result, I really don’t know if a binary star system with the planet Izra within it makes sense. The question of whether a planet can have multiple sun-rises, multiple sunsets, and still function as an actual planet that people could have colonized is a hard one to truly answer. What effect would two stars like that have on the gravity in such a planet? How would multiple sunrises and sunsets affect a person’s circadian rhythm? Would multiple sunrises just mean that the planet is turning really quickly, or would it also impact the gravitational orbit?

These are questions worth answering, but I don’t have answers to any of them. I also don’t know how much this would affect the rest of the work if most of the novel takes place on a station. Would a space station be affected by the twin stars? It would, right? I’m just not entirely sure how. Just as I’m not entirely sure what it means to be an owner of a “hacker shop”. I wrote that down when I first came up with the idea for the pilot, but I don’t really know what that means. I ultimately decided to just go with a PC shop of some sort, without any real specificity. I guess Leah is selling hardware, but again, I’m non-specific. And I’m leaning on the hardware that exists today, even though I’m sure by the time we get to space travel our hardware (and software!) would have changed radically. For God’s sake, they’re still using shell scripts!

This leads into a timescale question: Aspiration has been orbiting Izra for more than two hundred years, according to the pilot. This means that not only has space travel existed for more than two hundred years, but we’ve somehow been able to retain that technology across stars and planets. This is impressive by itself, but the interface has also remained the same; we can interact with the technology in a way that is recognizable to us today. Is this a reasonable choice within the world building of the story? Probably not, but it’s what is there for now. I’ll have to edit it to be more consistent with future choices at some point in the future.

Leah and Ralph’s relationship represents a concept that I think we are hard-pressed to actually see within most existing media: a couple who are in a good place, whose connection does not add to the drama of the story. The story isn’t about Ralph and Leah. It’s about Leah trying to build a place for herself. Ralph can lend support, can be there as a helping hand, but ultimately, it’s not about the internals of their life. I don’t want to have the possibility of their relationship falling apart to be a “subplot” within this book (if it becomes a book). I just want them to be a relationship, a couple who see the world together and are willing to face problems head-on.

The concept of Leah in a wheelchair just kind of came to me. When I first conceptualized her, I didn’t think of her in a wheelchair. But when I began writing the first paragraph, I thought of my fiancée who, due to health conditions, has to occasionally use a wheelchair. Our Scotland trip back in August made me very aware of how cautious you have to be when navigating a public space in a wheelchair, how aware of every single movement we made because of her chair. I imagined how nice it would be for someone who has no use of their legs to live and work in a zero gravity environment. In zero gravity, nobody’s legs matter. We’re all weightless and pulling ourselves with our arms.

My partner at Edinburgh Castle, surviving the cobblestones.

I suspect I’ll have to deal with artificial gravity at some point (or the concept of using centrifugal force as an artificial gravity), but I think Leah would want the ship (and station) to be in zero-g for as long as possible. She wants everyone to kind of feel the way she does, a little helpless, a little surprised, a little suddenly aware of their body when they’ve never had to be before.

I don’t really remember reading many science fiction books that have a disabled protagonist, although that might be a gap within my own reading. As a result, I don’t have an explicit guide for this book. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein centers on a computer technician (Manny) who is missing an arm, and that book will always be a big influence on any science fiction I write. So will Becky Chambers’ work (who I’ve talked about ad nauseam on this blog), and the TV shows Deep Space Nine and Firefly. Just the very concept of setting all of this on a space station could be lifted directly off Deep Space Nine, and there is even an episode involving a disabled protagonist, Melora. In contrast, however, I doubt there will be very many aliens within this universe.

Melora from the Deep Space Nine episode of the same name.

I struggle with the otherness of aliens. I feel as though one of the only science fiction authors who has really nailed aliens was Andy Weir in his novel Project Hail Mary. I think he was able to successfully create an extra-terrestrial race that is so strange and unlike anything we’ve ever seen that they are, in a strange sense, sort of believable. I don’t want to try and bring around aliens only to create a universe of hats, or pull the Star Trek problem of only having humanoid aliens, when the universe is far too vast and multi-faceted to really only have aliens that resemble us within it. Humanity is too fascinating by itself for me to really feel like there is anything to be gained by exploring alternative species.

Speaking of representation and the diversity within humanity, all of the major characters in all three of my pilots (except for Ko) have been people of color. Why is that? Is that something conscious? I don’t know. Maybe purposeful, but I don’t think it was conscious. I saw a lot of myself in books and in TV shows and movies when I was a kid. Or, at least, a lot of myself as I understood myself at that point: white, cis, seemingly straight, seemingly male. Creating characters who look different than me, who can act as representations of parts of the world that don’t see themselves as frequently within media (especially within speculative fiction, which is where I happen to write most of my work) seems like a good idea, something to strive for.

But I have to be careful. I don’t want to write POC characters just because I want to. Their race and cultural background is an integral part of who they are: don’t ignore it. I am reminded that the author of Lovecraft Country happened to be white, which was incredibly surprising to me when I read that book. But the way he was able to pull that off was by talking to many, many Black folks, having many, many Black beta readers and doing a lot of research. With the way that I am writing the novel in 2025 (through serialization on this blog), I don’t really have the ability to ask BIPOC readers to give me feedback on a chapter before it is released. But is that any reason to pretend as if BIPOC folks don’t exist? I don’t think so. It feels a bit like the cowards way out.

With the choice to publish my “first drafts” (or the closest thing to first drafts that I feel comfortable releasing), there is a slight twinge of nervousness. If I accidentally have a character do or say something racist within my posts, I could, and should, be called out for that. I hope for forgiveness, but I also know that I am not owed that by anyone.