Welcome to another episode of Coffee in Space, brought to you by The Author’s Toolbox, by Anne Corlett. Go to The Author’s Toolbox to learn more about how to create better stories and stronger characters. 

 

Hi. I’m Dan Smith and I’m the host of Coffee in Space. I’m glad you’ve chosen to join me today on the show. Coffee in Space is a podcast about the journeys our characters—no—our friends take. It’s a celebration of turning the final page, reading those dreaded words, “The End,” and immediately missing the story. Missing our friends.

Think for a moment about those characters you’ve missed over time. I think about them periodically myself. For example, one of my recent-ish favorites is Pounce, from C. Robert Cargill’s Day Zero. Pounce is a nannybot who finds himself having to decide between killing his young charge Ezra or protecting him from the other awakened robots who now want all humans dead. It’s not the robot uprising that sells this story though. It’s Pounce and his friend Ezra, a boy who wants to think he’s older and more mature than he is. I would pick up a blaster and take on any enemy if Pounce was by my side, odds be damned. And the end of this book? I was in tears. Not just wet eyelids…tears. There are plenty of stories about robots and the end of the world, but Terminator cannot hold a candle to Pounce. I don’t give a lot of 5 star reviews, but Pounce earned it for Cargill.

 

Robots aren’t the only things that make me cry. In fact, I flat out bawled toward the end of Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger. I didn’t even read that book until I was in my 40s. Now, I want to claim that I cried because I was suffering from a bout of COVID when I read that book in February of 2021, but the fact is, when Phoebe Caulfield shows up with a suitcase, ready to abandon all for the sake of being with her brother, even as her brother is falling ill and headed for a mental breakdown, I bawled. Why? Because my little sister wouldn’t let me go the morning I left for the Navy over twenty years before. She was about the same age as Phoebe too back then. Because my sister is gone, and all I have left of her are memories and photographs, I saw her in Phoebe. And I cried. And I would do anything to have another page or two to enjoy the care, concern, and sibling understanding that Phoebe and Holden Caulfield had for each other.

 

Of course, it’s not all about the tears. Plenty of books don’t leave me in tears, but they do leave an impact. I think of Leviathan Wakes, the first book in The Expanse series. The scyfi show does a pretty good job of capturing Detective Miller, and of course Thomas Jane is a master of the hard boiled character. But the book does it better. We get to feel the things Miller feels. We get to know what he thinks about his own failures. He has a lot of them. We get to see him struggle to be taken seriously again. Get to feel his emotion as he tries to become a better person, if only to help a dead girl find justice. Holy crap is Miller what I want in a character. And his journey is what I want in a book. Leviathan Wakes is the best book in that series. Easy answer. And Miller is why. I read that book nearly a decade ago. Doesn’t matter. If they’d write ten books about Miller, I’d buy them all just to reward them for their efforts. I speak of the two authors of course. Heck, I might write a fanfic about it, now that I think about it.

 

Speaking of detectives, John Scalzi breaks my heart daily by not writing another book about FBI special agent Chris Shane, who lives his life via a golem because he’s “locked in” his head after contracting a nasty virus. Hayden’s Syndrome is what the virus causes, and millions are in the same state. I appreciate the plot of course. Scalzi is a master at that. But what I loved is his characters. Shane isn’t the only one in the book that makes me feel this way. Leslie Vann, the veteran agent he’s paired with, was exactly what I wanted in a lead veteran. Flawed but reliable. She was authentic. I say all that in past tense because I can’t spend more time with them. Thanks, Scalzi. To be fair, I did get one more book with them, but come on man. This could have been a series and readers like me would have rewarded you for every stinking volume.

 

These aren’t the only books that drive me to despair over characters and their journeys. Derek Kunsken knows exactly what he did to upset me at the end of House of Styx when a certain person dies. He knows it because I told him personally. No restraining order, thankfully…yet. I miss that character like I miss a friend. You’re a mean, mean, man, Derek.

 

And there’s Jean-Luc Picard. Yes, that Jean-Luc Picard, who I already loved but learned to care more about than ever through Una McCormack’s book, Last Best Hope. Thank you, Una, for giving me a Picard I hadn’t realized I wanted. And let me just say…spoiler alert…holy continuum batman did settle Q’s story arc in season two of Picard. The way he was able to see himself passing away, knowing that he needed to fix his relationship with Jean-Luc, and how he made his amends were both touching and, of course, all Q. Now, some of you are going to be upset about how they used Q’s pending death as a plot device and I get that, but the nice thing about Star Trek: Picard is that it has allowed the to finish character arcs that weren’t as locked up in TNG and the associated movies. Of course I mean how we saw Data properly laid to rest in season one and now Q gets his send off in season two. And isn’t that what character is all about? I want to know that the characters I loved (or loved to hate for many of us), are treated well by the writers, producers, etc. And by the way, not everyone is happy about how Q was treated, feeling that the writers had left cannon.

 

Speaking of characters and cannon. Let me give you another example going on right now on the tv screen. Master Chief finally got his own show. Halo, a game I first played in the early 2000s. I haven’t played the more recent versions because of the style of gaming I like to do, but I definitely enjoyed a good amount of it periodically. Like Star Trek, Halo has a lot of die hard fans. Fans who know what they want their characters to act like and be like. And of course the main character is Master Chief. We all know what we think of him. Just like I know what Spock should be, I know what Master Chief should be. Who he should be. So…duh…people are upset that the new tv show on Paramount doesn’t follow the books or the games. At least not close enough. A lot of people shout about cannon and leaving script, including Marcus Lehto, who worked on some of the original games. But that’s what a strong character does to us. And for the record, the whole relationship with Spock and Micheal Burnham is just all wrong. Una McCormack, author of several Star Trek novels, helped me see that maybe it’s ok for folks to enjoy the characters as they are now, even if it’s different from what I loved. But because of my love for Spock, I can understand others love and anger about Master Chief. It’s the powerful of a loved character.

 

OK, back to books: Ann Leckie brought me to a deeper understanding of the future character of AI with her space ship-turned-human named Breq. Breq’s style is a cross between human and AI leaning more human because of her situation. I’ve highly recommend Ancillary Justice in the past and I still think it’s an amazing book.

 

The really neat thing about characters is that they’ll have you thinking about them long after you’ve finished the story. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, I read about Otto Prohaska, a WWI submarine captain created by British author John Biggins, in 2017, and I still think about him and the insurmountable odds he fought against. Come to think about it, Lothar Gunther Buchhelm, author of the WW2 classic Das Boot, still has me thinking about the crew of U96, and I read that book as a teenager.

 

Finally, Bo-Young Kim, a South Korean science fiction author, still has me thinking about two star-crossed lovers as they literally cross time space to try to find each other. Their love story, which she tells over the course of two novelettes, is mesmerizing in it’s simplicity and endearing in it’s authenticity. In my review of the book, posted on Goodreads, I said, “And that ending. That freaking ending. I just set my kindle down carefully on my bed, said a few choice words, and basked in the afterglow of one of the greatest stories I’ve ever read.” Get a hold of I’m Waiting for you, and Other Stories, by Kim. You’ll be glad you did.

 

It’s not just about the emotional connection between reader and character. Characters are, and some will not like this, but characters are designed to convey something important to the writer. Sometimes, that something is just a piece of who they are. Sometimes, particularly in science fiction and religious fantasy, it is to convey a message.

 

I’m going to make a promise to you. I promise that you—the passionate reader who falls in love with characters and misses them after they’re gone—you have a home here at Coffee in Space. Yes, mostly we’ll deal with science fiction characters and stories, but no matter the genre, we will celebrate falling in love in story form, the feelings of sadness at the end, and the thought of friends we’ll never forget.

 

So that’s my promise to you. And I hope you’ll keep me accountable for to that promise. Write me any time at comments[at]coffeeinspacepodcast.com or tweet at authordansmith. If you’re new to my show, go to www.coffeeinspacepodcast.com to learn more about my episodes and find more about the show. And if you know another passionate reader of science fiction who would love to listen to this show, would you please share this with them? You can do so straight from the app or via email. And I want you to join me again next week as we look into another character and discover their story, over a cup of coffee in space.