To all my readers,
I’m happy to let you know that this weekend you’ve got an opportunity to grab a copy of my standalone novel ‘Torn’ in ebook form for free. That’s right, free!
There are only limited numbers so please be quick! I’ve been advised these will run out rapidly.
You can find ‘Torn’ here, or just go to your local Amazon website and search for ‘Drew Wagar’.
Enjoy.
Many of you will have figured this out already and will have realised that I’ve left myself quite a big problem to solve. In many locales on my tidally locked world of Esurio, nothing ever changes.
I should be a little more precise. Clearly a lot of things change, people will doubtless be doing stuff, weather will change, and so on and so forth. What I mean is nothing will change on regular, predictable basis.
Here on earth, a lot of our scientific advance in prehistory was concerned with the production of working calendars. It didn’t take too long for the smart ones amongst us to notice regular patterns in the night sky, and that those patterns came and went according to the seasons. We saw the sun rise and set. We saw the moon change shape and position in the sky. Some of the points of light moved too.
Whilst we took a long time to understand the mechanics of this movement (only really getting it completely sorted in the early 20th century), we were able to use the orderly motions of what we could see to our advantage from a very early time.
The stars changed according to the Earth’s orbit; that became a ‘year’. The moon’s cycle became a ‘month’. The rising and setting of the sun; a ‘day’. Roughly we found there were 28 days to a month and 12 months to a year. The calendar was born. We could mark the passage of time. We got even more sophisticated by dividing the day into hours, then minutes and then seconds as our need for precision grew. Then we invented machines, clocks, to keep count of time.
That all works fine on the Earth, but what about Esurio?
You immediately run into problems on the daylight side of a tidally locked world. The sun never moves in the sky. No day/night cycle means no concept of a ’day’. Tidally locked worlds can’t support a sizable moon, thus no ‘month’. To top it all, with the sun in the sky, you can’t see the stars, no ‘year’.
They’d be no seasons either. Tidally locked worlds have little or no axial tilt. Nothing would change.
You could argue that if nothing changes, there would be no need to measure time. In a strict sense that’s perfectly true, but it’s not very practical. People on this world would notice children growing up, plants growing, old people dying.
Perhaps the inhabitants really wouldn’t measure using time at all, perhaps they’d measure by growth. “When you’re so tall, we’ll go climb the mountains.”
Some climatic conditions might be regular enough to use. There could be slowly isolating weather systems, even on such a static world that might give weather of a seasonal variety. Animals might migrate (but why, without seasons?).
Perhaps the surface of the star would have enough features to act as a simple clock, but the features wouldn’t be permanent, and it would be difficult to keep track off.
Stuff would need organising in some fashion though, you’d need something that operated in a period analogous to hours and days.
Of course, on the dark side or twilight areas, the stars would be available once more. Observers in these zones would see the stars moving around them once every fifteen to thirty days, a workable ‘month’. The movement of other planets in the sky might provide longer measurements. Of course, it would be freezing cold and difficult to live here. A reclusive bunch of very dedicated horologists crouched in the icy wastes…
Going back to the daylight side, what’s the Esurio equivalent of “Those crops you wanted, will next Tuesday do?”
I’ve got my own idea, but I’d be interested in yours…
The Shadeward Saga by Drew Wagar is an upcoming series of Sci-Fi ebooks, set on the tidally locked world of Esurio in the Lalande 21185 star system.
Once again, I’m late to the party on this one. Some of my friends had already finished the entire trilogy before I’d even started.
They’ve all been raving about it and even my wife said it was good. Clearly worth a look. I also had to get my finger out as I understand the film is either here or very close to imminent, and I have a rule that I always read the book of the film first.
So, what can I tell you? You can get the plot from wikipedia. Most reviews are quite gushing with praise, which is often a little worrying. It’s a smash hit, though there must be something.
Rest assured then, this is a good book. It’s not great, but it’s good. The primary characters are well portrayed, you get into the action fast and the narrative drags you along quickly. It kept me up to finish it, so it’s definitely ‘good’. You’ll not be wasting your time reading the Hunger Games.
I loved the ideas used. Post apocalyptic stuff is great and this is very compelling. Kids battling to death in an arena. Be warned though, some of the violence is pretty graphic. It’s marketed in some places as ‘young adult fiction’. A bit dubious in my mind.
The violence is strong. The poor girl is stabbed, burnt, starved, beaten up and sees all many of horrific mutilations of her fellow ‘tributes’. The idea of children killing each other like this has echoes of ‘Lord of the Flies’.
The character of Katniss, the main protagonist is well executed (no, not that kind of executed!). You get a good feeling for her emotions and mental state throughout the book. Toughened by personal tragedy, she is cool and harsh at times, but also has periods of self doubt, fear and uncertainty which endear her to you. Other characters are less well developed though. The book is simply too short.
There is a love triangle, a bit of a change from the simple one to one love story you usually get, which is left unresolved at the end of the first book. So far, it’s pretty ordinary. Perhaps there is a twist coming up.
On the critical side? I’ve read a few other reviews and so far no one else seems to have complained that author does a lot of ‘telling rather than showing’. Large paragraphs of story backfilling as the protagonist thinks from the perspective of the reader. The story is written in the first person (I’d prefer it hadn’t been, but that’s really just me), but this could have been done a lot more elegantly.
Conversely, you want to know more about the environment, the social structure, what happened to the world before current events. Hardly anything is forthcoming at all. You can argue that this book is written from the perspective of a 16 year old girl, so perhaps she wouldn’t know, but there is a huge rich untapped vein of creativity that could have emerged here, which (so far) hasn’t.
I also found suspension of disbelief a little difficult early on. Here is a post apocalyptic world where most are in grinding poverty, yet there is still sufficient infrastructure for electric trains, petrol cars, TV and clearly some technology more advanced than we currently have today. It didn’t quite gel for me, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Overall though, a good read. I’d give it 7/10. Worth a look.
It’s happened again! Grrr.
One of my creative commons books (my most recent one, Finis) has appeared on Amazon without my permission.
This time it doesn’t seem to be blatant copyright theft like last time, it just appears to be a mistake, but this begs the question of how it ended up on the site (with the correct thumbnail, description etc).
Just to be clear – it wasn’t me! 
Thus I’m a bit bemused as to how it could have spontaneously appeared.
The offending article is here > http://www.amazon.co.uk/Finis-Oolite-Saga-Part-ebook/dp/B007X4SNHS/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1336373706&sr=8-3
If you look inside you can see it is the Creative Commons version (badly formatted by some automated system) of Finis.
Anyway, I’ve sent the required forms into Amazon (again). We’ll see how long it takes them to sort it out this time…
In the last few entries I’ve given you some of the background to my imaginary world ‘Esurio’. It’s very different from the Earth!
Another way in which life on Esurio would be strange would be the weather. In many places on Earth we get a seasonal climate. Rain at one time of year, sun at another, snow in the winter and so on. Of course, if like me, you live in the UK, it’s always drizzling, damp, chilly and a bit blustery. The UK doesn’t have a climate, we have ‘weather’.
The energy source for weather on Esurio would be the same as it is on Earth – the sun. Or rather Lalande 21185 in the case of Esurio. Let’s assume that Esurio has oceans much like the Earth. Water would evaporate, rise, cool, condense and fall as rain. So far, so ordinary.
The difference is that the Earth is spinning around once every 24 hours. Esurio’s rotation would match its orbit. Something more like 30 to 50 days. With Esurio being tidally locked and always presenting to same face to the sun, this wouldn’t be an intermittent daily cycle like it is on Earth, infact it wouldn’t be a cycle at all. The conditions would be pretty much static.
Modelling the weather on such a world isn’t easy, and there are a number of possible outcomes.
One suggests that water would evaporate from the sunlit side, condense over the frozen edges of the planet and settle as snow and ice beyond the reach of the sun. Eventually all the water on the daylight side would ‘freeze out’ and that would be the end of the weather. The sunlit side ending up a dry and barren, forever scorched desert.
Other models suggest there would be violent ‘adiabatic’ winds blowing from the frozen wastes to the centre, constantly driving around the planet, making the surface uninhabitable.
These don’t make for a great environment in which to tell a story – at least not to my mind. I need something a little less extreme. There is a third model, which strikes me as both aesthetically pleasing, most likely and most useful.
In this third model, water does indeed evaporate from the seas, but it condenses out into the atmosphere – not because of the cold at the edges of the planet – but rather by swirling inwards and forming a massive cyclone at the ‘solar pole’ – immediately underneath the sun. Esurio wouldn’t have a desert at its centre, rather an eternal raging hurricane that spins in place, never ceasing.
Life would be close to impossible in this region of course, and the frozen wastes beyond the light of the sun would be equally uninhabitable. Fortunately the model suggests that there would be a zone between the two extremes in which the climate would be temperate, stable and calm.
So guess where we’re going in the ‘Shadeward Saga’…
The Shadeward Saga by Drew Wagar is an upcoming series of Sci-Fi ebooks, set on the tidally locked world of Esurio in the Lalande 21185 star system.
In my last entry I talked about some of the strange and unusual effects that a visitor to my hypothetical planet ‘Esurio’ might witness. We’ve already established there is no day or night, nor seasons in the traditional sense. Part of the planet would be in perpetual frozen darkness and the other in unceasing sunlight.
Red dwarf stars, like Lalande 21185 in this particular case, are very different from our Sun. We’re so used to our familiar yellow star that it takes quite an effort of imagination to envisage something different. The view from Esurio would be unfamiliar to us.
Firstly, Red Dwarfs are much smaller than yellow ‘G-Type’ stars like our Sun. Lalande is estimated to be only 40% of the diameter. They’re also much less bright, of the order of a mere 1% or thereabouts. Planets needs to be much much closer to stay warm.
How close? Astonishingly close actually.
In our solar system, the planet Mercury (closest to the Sun) orbits at about 36 million miles average distance. At this range the surface temperature is over 300 celsius. Earth, by comparison, is 93 million miles away. To stay warm enough around a Red Dwarf, my planet ‘Esurio’ would have to be a mere 1.3 million miles away.
At this range, as we’ve already discussed, Esurio would be tidally locked with Lalande motionless in the sky. But the view would be nothing like it is on Earth, because Lalande would be much bigger in the sky than our Sun is.
How much bigger? What would that look like?
Fortunately, a bit of simple mathematics provides a rough result. We can use trigonometry to find the answer for us. Don’t be scared, I’ll do the maths for you!
Let’s work it out for the Earth and Sun first, by comparison. We know the Sun is about 864,400 miles across and is 93,000,000 miles away.
The formula is:
tan (x) = 864,000 / 93,000,000
x = 0.53 degrees
In other words, if we imagine the whole of the sky as a 360 degree sphere, the Sun (and our Moon for that matter) appears to be around half a degree across in the sky. Not all that much really.
What about on Esurio?
Lalande is smaller than the Sun at a guesstimated 345,760 miles in diameter, but we’re much closer, at around 1,395,000 miles. Let’s do the maths again.
tan (x) = 345,760 / 1,395,000
x = 13.92 degrees
So in the skies of Esurio, the star Lalande would appear about 28 times wider than the Sun does when viewed from Earth. About 1/6 of the width of the sky covered by the star – a huge sphere. Quite a view!
Wouldn’t that be blinding? Well, no apparently not. Red Dwarfs are incredibly dim when compared to our familiar Sun. The illumination level would be very similar to the interior of a room lit by old fashioned incandescent bulbs.
There is a tendency for us to think everything would look ‘red’ too, but this would not be the case. Our eyes would quickly adjust to the frequency of light and compensate, much as they do when we first go into illuminated rooms after being out in bright sunlight. It might not be the best choice of holiday for those amongst us who suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) though!
At this distance, the features on the surface of the star would be plainly visible, particularly sunspots and faculae. How might the appearance and disappearance of these features be interpreted? What a good plot device…
And the sky itself? Surprisingly mundane. It would probably be blue-ish, much like the sky on Earth. The colour of the sky is caused by short wavelength blue light being scattered by the molecules that compose the atmosphere. Assuming the atmosphere is similar to Earth (and it would have to be for people to live there) we get the same result.
Another side effect of Red Dwarfs is that they don’t emit anywhere near the amount of visible light that we’re used to here on Earth. Other than for illumination this doesn’t really matter to animals and humans as our eyes are sensitive enough to cope, but plants are a different matter. Green leaves wouldn’t work so well. To work effectively it seems likely that leaves on Esurio would be black, evolving to pick up the lower energy photons from Lalande.
Plants would thus be very different to those on Earth, which means the animals would be different too…
The Shadeward Saga by Drew Wagar is an upcoming series of Sci-Fi ebooks, set on the tidally locked world of Esurio in the Lalande 21185 star system.
In my last entry I promised you some details about ‘Esurio’, the planet where the upcoming ‘Shadeward Saga’ will be set.
We’re out in space, though in astronomical terms, not too far away. Our setting takes us to the star ‘Lalande 21185’. It’s only 8.1 light-years away from here, not quite twice the distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri. This star is much cooler and smaller than our Sun, about half the diameter and only 10% of the brightness. It’s a type of star known as a ‘Red Dwarf’. Esurio is a planet in orbit around this ‘little’ sun.
It’s a fictional planet of course. To date we’ve not found any real planets in the Lalande 21185 star system. That’s not to say that there isn’t anything, but we’re fairly certain there aren’t any really large planets there. We can’t detect anything below the size of Jupiter around stars like this, so we’re a little way away from detecting a real life ‘Esurio’. But there is nothing below that is impossible, or even all that unlikely. So perhaps, just perhaps, it is really there…
Given Lalande 21185 is cool and dim, this means that any planets would have to be much closer to the star than our Earth is to the Sun in order to be comfortably habitable, so close in fact that some rather unusual things happen.
Firstly Esurio’s ‘year’ would be very short, a matter of days, not months. Secondly the star would appear much larger in the skies of Esurio than our Sun does in the skies of Earth, simply due to the proximity.
It gets far stranger though. Due to the peculiarities of gravity, Esurio would rotate in step with its orbit, with one side always in sunlight, and the other in perpetual darkness. Lalande would never move in the sky. There is a phrase for this – ‘Tidally locked’. It’s the same thing that’s happened to our moon; the moon is tidally locked to the Earth, always presenting the same side to us.
On Esurio you’d be able to find a spot where you could enjoy an ‘everlasting sunset or sunrise’ – or, more poetically, a land of perpetual twilight. Concepts such as ‘East’ and ‘West’ would be meaningless without movement in the sky. It’s possible that ‘North and ‘South’ would make no sense either (no guarantee of a handy magnetic field on Esurio). The name of this saga is based on the two directions that do makes sense on the surface… Sunwards and Shadewards.
Being tidally locked to a star makes an even bigger difference through. One side of Esurio gets continuous light and heat, and the other gets nothing at all. What would life be like on a world with perpetual daylight or darkness?
Some things are reasonably obvious. Much of the darkside of Esurio would be in an everlasting ice age, perhaps even the atmosphere itself would freeze out – imagine kilometre high sheer cliffs of ice at the limits of sunlight. Conditions on the daylight side would also present a challenge, what would happen under eternal sunlight?
A tidally locked planet is likely not to have an axial tilt. On the Earth this gives us the seasons; it seems likely there would be no such seasonal changes on Esurio.
And there is a further twist… Red Dwarf stars aren’t completely stable. They can flare up dramatically, and then just as rapidly cool, giving some interesting environmental conditions to deal with.
How would animals evolve in such an environment? How would we adapt if we found ourselves there?
Well. Thereby hangs a tale…
The Shadeward Saga by Drew Wagar is an upcoming series of Sci-Fi ebooks, set on the tidally locked world of Esurio in the Lalande 21185 star system.
I’ve been a bit remiss on the blog of late, though hopefully you’ve had some concilation by reading ‘Alien Items’ in the mean time. Real life has been on the busy side so there hasn’t been much time for anything else.
However, I have found time in the midst of this for some work on my next project, and I’m pleased to be able to give it a name, and also tell you a little about it, what I’ve been up to and what the plans are for it. (Also, doing a bit of blog helps to unleash the writing ability, and getting the name out there is good for the ‘Google-fu’! )
First, a brief rewind. For those of you born after 1995, substitute ‘previous track’ for ‘rewind’.
I truely enjoyed writing the ‘Oolite Saga’, but was stuck in a universe (or an ‘Ooniverse’!) that was not of my creation. In that universe FTL drives, spaceships, weapons and so on were very ‘space-opera-y’, in other words not really very plausible, based on what we know today. There were other brakes on creativity; organisations, powers, occupations and behaviour were largely set in stone and I couldn’t deviate from them all that much. Also the copyright position for Elite inspired stories was, and still is, rather woolly – meaning I was rather limited in what I could do with the stories.
By contrast, I had complete freedom in ‘Torn’. By necessity though, in order to use various bits of research, this had to be in a contemporary setting – a complete change from Oolite. Torn was always going to be something of a one hit wonder too. I’m not planning a sequel and I’ve told that story completely – job done. Torn is not really all that far from a documentary, so whilst the plot and story were made up, many aspects of the characters weren’t, though the names and places were changed to protect the innocent, and the guilty!
So, what’s next? Let me introduce the ‘Shadeward Saga’.
This is going to be harder Sci-Fi. I’ve set myself some limits in this. Nothing will be included that is ‘impossible’ given our current understanding. No hyperspace for example, no warp drives. No magic per se either, but before you get too disappointed, bear in mind Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
You’ll doubtless know the late Anne McCaffrey’s ‘Dragon’ series. Whilst I’m not going to be in anyway derivative, her approach to ‘Fantasy’ by following pretty strict science fact based principles is something I’m planning to adopt. Thus, rather like Pern in the Rukbat system, my stories take place on a possible world circling a real star called Lalande 21185. Why? Well, stay tuned.
But it’s not going to primarily be ‘Sci-Fi’ in the traditional sense either. I’m not intending to explore technology and its impact, not directly anyway. Unlike Asimov and Clarke the Shadeward Saga will ultimately be about people; personalities, drive, ambition, bravery, cowardice – in short, what I consider my strengths in writing – characterisation.
So expect conflict, drama, adventure and my usual dramatic set pieces along with the obligatory cliff hangers at the end of each book (I’ll be wanting you to buy the next one after all!).
The first book will be free, or very nearly free. With the rest of the saga being available at very reasonable prices. It will probably be an ebook exclusive too, I fear there is little point in taking the time to create hard copies other than for a few select special editions.
I’m hoping the first book will be available in 2013, with others following on a yearly basis until 2017. That’s the plan, wish me luck!
For up to the minute information, don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, or join my Facebook fan page.
So that’s it for now. In my next entry, I’ll tell you a bit more about my new location, the strange and wonderful world of ‘Esurio’…
The Shadeward Saga by Drew Wagar is an upcoming series of Sci-Fi ebooks, set on the tidally locked world of Esurio in the Lalande 21185 star system.
Many of you will know my writing from the Oolite Saga, but you may not be aware that there are other fans of this game who have also written fan-fic for the ‘Ooniverse’.
I’ve been privileged to have gained permission to pull some of the best examples together and create ‘Alien Items’ – the Oolite Anthology.
My four short stories have been combined with another nine from other folks to form this, into a single download. It’s available online now.
If you’ve enjoyed the glimpse into the Ooniverse from my perspective, here’s the same genre, viewed from different places…
‘Alien Items’ can be found here.
This was a story called ‘Exiles Return’ written in around 2004. The premise was that there had been a bitter and bloody war a generation before, which had resulted in various atrocities. The victors, by sheer force of numbers, had routed a technologically superior civilisation and forced the survivors to flee overseas – the ‘Exiles’.
This was set in a fantasy world, though there was no magic here. I’ve not yet worked out how I’d like that to work in my stories.
Things come to a head when a shipwrecked ‘Exile’ washes up on the shore and is nursed back to health… thus the current generation has to decide whether to keep the hatred of the previous generation alive… or consider the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.
The central character is (as usual!) a conflicted individual, who discovers that her ancestry leaves her with no true allegiance to either side. Once again I clash together characters who are poles apart in outlook and let them find a common understanding.
One of the important aspects of the characters I like to put together is that they have complex backgrounds. This first bit was written for my benefit more than it was intended to be part of the story, in order to explore where ‘Evelyn’ was coming from. In the story she was to be bitter and twisted, which begs the obvious question… why?
Why didn’t I finish this story? Stripped of its fantasy elements, almost all of the ideas of bitterness, redemption, bigotry and forgiveness ended up being incorporated into ‘Torn’ making this repetitive and superfluous.
As it is there are some ‘not bad’ bits in here and it also serves as an example of the sort of thought process that led to ‘Torn’. Hopefully my depiction of another world also works to a degree.
There’s quite a bit here, about 23k words, so hopefully meaty enough to get into.
I haven’t proof read this much, so there will be typos and other such detritus in the text, but do please let me know what you think of it.
Click to download Exiles’ Return in PDF.
