Rites of Passage

Introduction

I like writing long stories (between around 7,500 words and 15,000 words). I find that they give a little more creative leeway than the short story; I can expand on the setting, the characters, and the actual story. There’s a bit more elbow room to explore ideas. Interestingly, I find that when I start a short story, I have no idea whether it will grow into a long story (though when I begin a novella, I know very well that it will reach the fifteen, sixteen thousand word mark and go well beyond). As I write what I think is going to be a short story, along the way it grows — either the characters demand a bit more room to develop, or the story requires more scenes in order to do justice to the plot. What I do notice about long stories is that the setting becomes more important to me than I initially realised; it almost becomes a character in its own right. This happened in three of the stories in this volume.

“Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” (10,000 words) was my very first attempt at steampunk (in the very loosest sense of the word), and it’s the only story in the collection in which the setting did not become a character in its own right. It features the enigmatic Bartholomew Burns — saviour of the Earth on many occasions — and his young sidekick Tommy Newton, who together thwart an evil alien invasion. While in all the other stories collected here it is the central characters that undergo the titular ‘rite of passage’, in this story it’s Tommy Newton who learns much from his travails. The story saw light of day in the online serial magazine, Aethernet, edited by Tony and Barbara Ballantyne.

“The Guardians of the Phoenix” (13,000 words) began as a short story — I thought it would come in at around six thousand words — but expanded in the telling. I rarely write post-apocalyptic tales, but I was gripped by the idea of a bunch of good people travelling across an inimical desert in search of water. Even after I finished the story, it kept on growing in my imagination, and a year later I expanded the story by some eighty-seven thousand words and it became the novel of the same title, published by Solaris in 2010. The story appeared in Mike Ashley’s anthology Apocalyptic SF (End of the World in the US).

“Sunworld” (11,000 words) is not only a rites of passage tale but one of conceptual breakthrough, to which the genre of science fiction is admirably suited. I enjoy writing stories in which the central character undergoes a journey the events of which, by the end, will subvert everything he or she thinks they know about themselves and their world. This tale is another which begs to be expanded, and some day I would like to write Sunworld, the novel. The story was first published in George Mann’s anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2.

The closing tale in the collection is “Beneath the Ancient Sun” (16,000 words), which appears here for the first time. Again it’s a rites of passage tale and a story of conceptual breakthrough, as Par and Nohma — who inhabit a deep valley in what was the sea bottom on a far, far future Earth — embark on an initiation quest and along the way learn a lot about the past greatness of their race and their place in the world. While the story in itself is complete, and I have no plans to expand it into a novel, I do hope one day to write more stories about Par, Nohma, and the brave troupe of cavern dwellers battling inimical conditions beneath a vastly swollen sun.

I hope you are as entertained by these long stories as I was while writing them.