The Octopus in the Tin Can, or How I Came to Write Finders

My novel Finders (currently part of the Starting Hurricanes Storybundle) began, as so many of my books do, with a late night conversation at a convention. Don Sakers and I had been talking about Clarkean magic and nanotechnology, and I had been thinking about a favorite trope of mine, remnant populations trying to decipher ancestral technologies, and by the end of the evening, we had roughed out the idea that eventually became the Ancestral Elements — color-coded nanotech that was only imperfectly understood by the people who salvaged it. I am also very interested in the ways people make mental models of technology (this is what my doctoral dissertation was about — the classical sources of early modern gunpowder tactics), and one of the things that appealed to me about the Ancestral Elements was that the story’s “contemporary” culture could be completely wrong about some aspects of the technology, and still have a system that worked well enough to keep their civilization going. That was fun to think about, and when I got home from the con, I wrote up a bunch of notes, but I still didn’t have a story.

I kept the idea in my sketchbook, which is a Scrivener file that I use to keep each year’s worth of notes, quotations, random ideas, ideas that aren’t yet ready to have their own file, and all my business notes, for a year or so. I had a sense of some characters, and a situation — a man returns to the lovers he abandoned before they ended up fighting on opposite sides of a war — and when I added in the idea of the Ancestral Elements and a society that was built on the scavenged scraps of a lost civilization, I thought I had the elements of a story, though not yet of a novel.

Then Athena Andreadis invited me to submit a story to her anthology The Other Half of the Sky, which was described as “SF about heroes who happen to be women doing whatever they would do in universes where they were fully human.” I don’t do a lot of short fiction because I have a terrible time keeping any idea to the word limit of a short story, but this seemed like too interesting an opportunity to pass up. I took the characters and the salvage culture and the mysterious technology, and came up with a plot that let me play with all of the ideas.

I started writing. The story started growing. It wanted to be a novel — there was so much detail that I could see that I knew wouldn’t fit in a short story, so much backstory and so many places I wanted to go after this story ended. By the end, I felt as though I was trying to wrestle an large octopus into a small tin can: there were tentacles and ink everywhere, and it was all madly out of control. If I remember correctly, the draft I submitted was 2000 words over the anthology’s limit. (I warned Athena first.) With her help, I cut it down to about 11,000 words. She bought it, and it went on to be selected for that year’s Year’s Best SF anthology.

But it still really, really wanted to be a novel. I had so many ideas of where to take the characters after the events of the story, so many places I wanted them to visit, so many impossible choices I knew they needed to make… I started rewriting the short story as the first two chapters of a novel, and the 11,000 words became about 29,000. The octopus was loose, and it and I felt a whole lot better. There was room to set the stage, to give the backstory of the relationship and to let the characters untangle what they wanted and needed from each other; there was room to look much more closely at the Ancestral technologies, and how they were being used; there was room to deal with the war that had nearly torn them apart, and nearly destroyed their culture. There was room to explore the vast abandoned space station of Callambhal Above, and room for the story of the rebel AI, who legend said caused the first destruction of civilization long ages ago. Most of all, there was room for Cassilde’s story, for a stubborn salvage pilot to face choices that could bring her culture to new heights, or send it once again spiraling down into a Long Dark.

I think it’s a better novel for having been a short story first. Having to pare down my first ideas to their essentials made me articulate what was truly important about the story, and that became the scaffolding on which I built the larger plot of the novel. With that, I could make the plot tighter, and focus more closely on the characters, and it made all the pieces come together more neatly. But I still remember how out of control it felt in the shorter form, and am glad to have been able to rework it at its proper length.