Tobias Buckell's Backstory

How I came to write Crystal Rain

Ever since I was five or so and read my first SF novel I knew that I would end either being an astronaut or a science fiction novelist. I grew up in the Caribbean, but as time went by I realized almost no genre authors came from or wrote about the islands. It wasn't until I read Bruce Sterling's Islands in The Net that I came across a novel that took the Caribbean seriously, and I decided my first novel would do the same. However I focused on writing and selling short fiction to earn my apprenticeship.

One of my first published stories attracted the attention of an editor who asked if I had a novel. I hadn't really attempted novels before, but I put together several chapters and an outline. And I spun together everything I ever wanted to cram into an SF novel. Aztecs, airships, lost civilizations on other worlds, and all from the viewpoint of Caribbean descendants. I was fired up when I sent out the proposal. Sadly what I got back was a rejection containing, and I swear this is true, the phrase 'too original.'

I learned something interesting about publishing. What the letter explained was that the editor couldn't summarize my novel in a sentence or two that she could pass on to other people in her house, and on down the line to sales and then to booksellers. There were other issues the editor had, but it was a learning experience for me. When I next met an agent who expressed interest in the synopsis I made sure I had a one-sentence blurb for the book at the opening of the synopsis. Maybe it worked, because he asked me to write the whole book so he could represent it.

First and foremost I wanted Crystal Rain to be an adventurous read. I'd cut my teeth on adventurous SF and a lot of westerns and Clive Cussler novels as a pre-teen. I wanted all that. So I had a great deal of fun crafting a world where the Aztec civilization has been restored by aliens posing as gods, where technology has been destroyed in a great war in the distant past, and our hero is facing an invasion by those Aztecs. As I wrote it I began to include points of view from others, including one of the Aztecs. I found myself fascinated by the religious views of the Aztecs as I researched more and more. They weren't just cartoon villains, as menacing as they were, but conflicted and interesting people.

Things mutated by the time I was done. In early drafts of the book I wasn't too clear on how to make the quest part of the story work for the main character. The artifact he was hunting for came from an age of wonders, but one very familiar to SF reading audiences, but I didn't want to give it away too easily. It was an interesting tightrope to walk.

The second thing that frustrated me was trying to represent Caribbean dialect in Crystal Rain, which I felt would be a very important part of the setting. I chose to use it in the dialogue to capture the characters' diction, but not in my narrative. However as I wrote the first draft the way I wrote some things changed from chapter to chapter, and often the dialect bled off into other parts of my prose. Rewriting was particularly challenging and involved lots of tweaking. By the time I was done I was so tired of my own words I wondered if I was breaking myself over it all.

Now that it's done and I'm well into the second book, it's exciting to see people just now beginning to read it and explore the world inside Crystal Rain.

TobiasBuckell  is the author of Crystal Rain

Comments

[Cynthia Valero]

Your story sounds fascinating. I congratulate you on being able to bring all of the various ideas together. I am writing my first fantasy and have found how easy it can be to get lost in creating a world as well as the complexity of same while trying to stay focused on a compelling, moving story. Sometimes it feels like herding cats. I'm trying to keep it interesting but simple. I look forward to Crystal Rain. Good luck!