Karen Sandler

Tag: TANKBORN

  • RTW – A Christmas Gift for My Main Character

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, What would be the ideal holiday present for your main character? Since my characters tend to talk to me like real people, walking around in my created world as if they really exist, I guess it makes sense that I’d add them to my Christmas gift list.

    I’ve written dozens of main characters over the years, but none of them mean as much to me as the main character in my YA science fiction novel, Tankborn, Kayla 6982, nurture daughter of Tala. She’s had a difficult life, and I’ve been putting her into one hazardous situation after another, first in Tankborn, and now in the sequel I’m writing, Tankborn Awakening. If anyone deserves a Christmas gift, it’s Kayla.

    Kayla doesn’t celebrate Christmas (no one really does on the planet Loka), but I’m sure she’d appreciate a present. If you asked her what she wanted, she would surely say, Freedom for all GENs, or something equally altruistic. She tends to put the good of the many ahead of her own needs, so it’s unlikely she’d ask for something for herself personally. If you pressed her, she’d probably want something she could give to her best friend, Mishalla, like a gorgeous scarf made of uttama-silk or a pretty piece of metal jewelry. She might ask for a month’s supply of kel-grain for her nurture mother, Tala, or a bleeding-edge gadget for her tech-crazy nurture brother, Jal.

    But if you could dig deeper, maybe download her bare brain (yes, not possible since only a GEN’s annexed brain is accessible via a datapod download), it would be clear what she wants most. The one thing she’s least likely to get–Devak. The high-status trueborn is so out of her reach, she doesn’t even hope for him. But if I could give her that one special gift, it would be at least one night with Devak, just to be with him, to talk, to kiss, to hold his hand, and be close.

    Sigh. That would be Kayla’s best Christmas gift of all.

  • Tech and Big Brother

    While returning from San Francisco for a weekend trip, we stopped for lunch in Emeryville, just outside of the city. As we were about to pull back onto Interstate 80 from Powell Street, a white light flashed on the nearby left turn lane as the red light camera took a picture. The drivers in that lane were being obedient, all of them legally behind the limit line when the arrow turned red.

    That flashing white light set off a discussion between my husband and me. Were the light flash and the camera capture triggered by the green arrow turning red or when someone crossed the limit line after the light is red? We figured it was probably the former, but that would mean that plenty of people are having their pictures taken when they’ve done nothing wrong.

    I don’t like the idea of an automated camera capturing my image while I’m at a stoplight. Of course, people shouldn’t be running red lights. It’s against the law and could be dangerous (I witnessed a nasty collision once that was caused by someone turning left on the red). But are those images collected used for purposes beyond checking for red light running? Like to establish the whereabouts of a certain person at a certain time and place to build a case against them?

    While my husband and I talked about the possibility of the images being misused, it led to further discussion of our expectation of privacy when out in public. There’s a case currently being considered by the Supreme Court in which police attached a GPS device to a drug dealer’s car in order to monitor his movements. They installed the device secretly while the car was in a public parking lot and tracked the man’s movements for a month.

    Many of the justices were troubled by the actions of the police. Justice Scalia in particular considered it trespassing since the police attached the device to the man’s car without his knowledge or permission.

    In the course of this conversation, I wondered: what if police could use technology to track this individual without affixing a device to his car? What if that device was already there?

    What if every car manufactured were required to have a GPS installed? And let’s say it’s installed within the car’s electrical system in such a way that it could not be easily removed or its removal would disable the car. I can imagine this “every car must have a GPS” being sold as a way to minimize car theft. If a thief knew every car could be tracked, that might make them think twice about stealing one.

    So we’re all happy that no one is stealing cars, until we realize that cars are not just being tracked when someone is suspected of breaking the law. We have the equivalent of red light cameras on every street corner that sense and record the location of every car that passes. The cars are identified by their VIN numbers which are read when the car’s location is noted. All this data is dumped somewhere in a server farm and whenever the police need to know the whereabouts of someone, they can scrape out that data.

    Okay, I’m paranoid. I wrote about essentially this sort of thing in my book Tankborn, except it’s people being tracked instead of vehicles. But I do think there’s a slippery slope here with attaching GPS devices to cars, even if that car belongs to a bad guy police want to catch. Because I just have too good an imagination of where it could lead.

  • RTW – How far would you go to get published?

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway is asking, How far would you go to get published? In my case, I’d have to answer the question How far did you go to get published? since I’m already published and have been for 13 years.

    Along with the blog prompt, the RTW post shows the graphic here of a baseball field on which is represented four escalating options for how far a writer would go to get published.

    I’m here to say that getting every one of my 18 books published has always required a trip to home plate. While I haven’t chased a trend (first base), and not all my books were agented and so did not include agent feedback (second base), while I wrote and published romance, my editor always put in his or her two cents (and sometimes a whole dollar) before the book was ready to be published. I learned to go with the flow (except for my dirty little secret below) and make those changes that would improve the book.

    Then came Tankborn. Young adult wasn’t the big hot new thing when I started writing Tankborn, or if it was, I didn’t know that fact. All I knew was that I wrote five proposals for my romance editor (each one comprising three chapters and a detailed synopsis) and he turned down every one. I was starting to think that maybe it was time for a genre and market change. YA science fiction sounded like just the ticket.

    So maybe I hit a double and I went straight to second base. Once I wrote, edited and polished the manuscript for Tankborn, I went on the agent hunt. Thirty agents and four months later, I signed with my agent and it was time for that mad run to third base. My agent wanted some fairly extensive changes, much of it cutting back on the “throat clearing” in the opening chapters.

    So now I’m done, right? That sucker must be polished so shiny, it’ll put your eyes out looking at it, huh? Um, no. Because I’m still stranded on third base. I need to make one last all-out run to home plate.

    My agents submitted Tankborn, and Lee and Low bought it for their new Tu Books imprint. I galloped toward home, along the way performing one, two, three major revisions (luckily three strikes and you’re out did not apply). Maybe I should have scored three runs during that process. Instead I got the MVP award of seeing my book in print.

    Let me tell you the little secret about all those revisions that I alluded to above. When I receive my agent/editor notes, I don’t bounce around saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, sometimes I do when they point out something that makes a light bulb come on and I realize, Doh, that’s why that part wasn’t working.

    But usually my response is (a) sheer terror that I won’t know how to fix the problem, (b) anger that they have a problem with what I’ve written, or (c) a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of work required to make the change. It’s kind of the stages of grief, I guess. I’ll often let myself wallow in those emotions for a few minutes.

    Then I’ll put on my big girl panties and start working.

  • RTW – The Best Book I Read in November

    I just finished a post on why I love reading e-books and scheduled it for this coming Saturday. I mention this because YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday prompt for today is What’s the best book you read in November? and thanks to my Kindle, it was easy as pie to refresh my memory on what I read this past month. I could have also checked Goodreads, but since I’m not great about updating my reads there, it’s not as reliable.

    Anyway, my best book for November was The Declaration by Gemma Malley. In The Declaration, Anna and Peter are illegal children living in a hellish children’s home that’s like something from a Dickens novel. A Longevity drug that extends life indefinitely has led to an overcrowded world, and the illegal children are the ones who pay the price. It’s set in a futuristic Britain and its British voice is part of what led me to fall in love with this book and its characters. I very much enjoyed the humor interleaved with the very dire situation Anna and Peter were in. I also found the set-up intriguing and since we’ve recently reached the 7-billionth mark of the population on our planet, The Declaration had some very real-world elements to it.

    Of course, this is an “older” book (published 4 years ago), but as a newcomer to young adult, I’m still catching up on the great books. The upside to that is I don’t have to wait for the sequel. The Resistance is already available. And since I have the patience of a flea when it comes to waiting for the next book in a series, I am a happy camper about that.

    Has anyone else out there read The Declaration? What was your take?

  • What’s Science Got to Do With It?

    Last Thursday, #MGlitchat’s topic of the week was science fiction in middle grade books. I write YA rather than MG, but I was kind of jonesing for a writerly discussion (and science fiction is a subject dear to my heart), so I joined in. It proved to be a lively topic.

    In the course of the hour or so I was participating, a few of us got into a side discussion of what constituted science fiction. Since I’m of, ahem, a certain age, and have been reading SF for a few decades (no, I won’t tell you how many), I ascribe to the classical definition of the genre. That is, it’s science fiction if, were you to remove the science element, there would be no story.

    One of the other folks on the chat wondered if that definition is no longer valid. I think it’s a fine question to ask, but I just can’t think of another definition that would serve the same purpose. It is, after all, science fiction, so there has to be science. I guess the only question would be, can you call it SF if there’s no actual science? Or if the only “science” aspect are space ships, or laser guns, or people use unfamiliar slang?

    Are there books that one might want to call science fiction, but have no science integral to the story? For instance, is Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games science fiction? It certainly has a science fiction feel to it. But what’s the science?

    How about the Games themselves? There’s a great deal of science not only in the creation of the horrific arenas, but also in the tracking of the participants every moment. There’s a certain scientific aspect to the projection of the future as well (although that element of the series could also be labeled “speculative fiction,” which is a more generic term).

    What about my own book, Tankborn? Is it truly science fiction? I believe it is. Yes, I could have created a straight fiction novel based on the Indian caste system but it would have been an entirely different book. Instead I used caste in a futuristic novel in which a bastardization of that system re-constitutes itself in a society that has left earth and colonized another planet. There is science in the creation of the genetically engineered GENs, science in the circuitry wired in their bodies that is used to control them, science in the devices that are used to interface with the GENs’ annexed brains. Some of the “science” in the book, e.g., my lev-cars and illusory holographic projections might not be strictly necessary to the story, but they do flesh out the setting. However if the science of the GENs were pulled out of Tankborn, many crucial aspects of the story would fall apart.

    So are dystopian books, in and of themselves, automatically science fiction? I can’t speak for every dystopian out there since I haven’t read them all (yet :-)). But in addition to the Hunger Games trilogy, there are other dystopians that would certainly qualify in my mind as SF. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind is an excellent example, as is Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In both books, certain scientific advances (in addition to social changes) led to the dystopian world depicted in the story. In fact, without the science and social aspects in tandem, there would not be a story.

    I’d love to hear others’ opinions of what science fiction means to them. I’d like to hear what books you think are science fiction and why you think they are. For instance, I believe Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic SF book, but some might call it literary. So what are you reading in science fiction? And what’s science got to do with it?