Q: Who do you think are the best new writers in the science fiction or fantasy genre?
A: I'm gonna vote for Devon Eriksen, the author of Theft of Fire.
In order to even begin talking about this book, I have to talk about the publishing industry first.
Traditional publishing is a bit like academia, in that it’s a dinosaur. It moves very slowly in both a proximal and a distal sense. Proximally, publishing moves slowly in that it can take years for an author to go from acceptance letter to distribution. Distally, it moves slowly in that the publishing industry has not adapted to the 21st century reality. It has adapted to 21st century fashion, certainly, but not to the realities of the digital age. For example, some publishers will ask prospective new authors to have a sizable social media following before taking a risk on them — but if a new author already has a social media following, then what the hell do they need a publisher for? After all, distribution and prestige are the only two reasons that authors need a publisher, and the second one is rapidly eroding, although traditional publishers remain blissfully unaware of this.
Enter Devon Eriksen. He self-published this book and promoted it mostly on Twitter, with his two wives (yes, two of them) helping out. Surprisingly, he has actually gotten some traction. Apparently, he moves a decent number of copies per month. If you’re someone who wants to write professionally (or even just have a large audience of your own), then this should excite you. The world of media is moving toward self-publishing as the default, I think, because the distribution once offered by publishing houses is now freely available to anyone with an internet connection. If Eriksen can pull this off — and by “pull it off” I mean becoming decently well-known — then that’s proof-of-concept for a new breed of author.
This all relates to the content of the novel, because it’s full of things that are verboten in traditional publishing. I’ve a list:
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A character cannot be compelling unless they are flawed. Female characters in mainstream media are not very compelling, because they’re too perfect. If you create a female character who is genuinely flawed, then you’re a misogynist. Unless you’re a woman, in which case you’re suffering from internalized misogyny. Either way, it’s not permissible to make a genuinely flawed, thus genuinely interesting, female character.
But one of the main characters in Theft of Fire is a woman, named Miranda Foxgrove, who comes from a very wealthy background and is, as a result, an insufferable, entitled little goblin. But as we learn about her past, she becomes a sympathetic little goblin, because she went through some really fucked-up shit to become that way. -
The main character, Marcus Warnoc, is an asteroid miner who spends months at a time isolated on his ship. He’s a tad bit thirsty, to put it mildly. As a result, he is attracted to Miranda, and expresses this frequently in his internal monologue. In traditional publishing, this sort of thing is forbidden, because traditional publishing considers male heterosexuality to be intrinsically offensive. If the author, or any male character, expresses attraction to a woman, this is automatically a horrible, objectifying case of the male gaze. This is another place where norms around discourse create unrealistic characters; to be politically correct, your male characters must never give the slightest hint that they’re attracted to women.
(A fun exercise you can do: take a description of a female character — written by a woman — and show it to someone. Tell him it was written by a male. He’ll immediately respond, “Oh, I can tell a man wrote this. His female characters are all hyper-sexualized”. Completely oblivious to the fact that he’s reading a female author. I have an answer on that here.) - The book has no overt political message. Eriksen’s politics do show up in the book; it’s a capitalist world with very little government. The only governments in the book’s universe exist on Earth. Outer space has none. But there’s no preaching about it. The characters just live in an outer-space Wild West, and that’s all. I didn’t realize until I finished the book that it was set in an anarcho-capitalist future. The setting just works without the need to preach about it.
- It’s actually entertaining. I’m not sure if traditional publishers make a deliberate effort to publish boring shit or if it’s just incompetence, but this is the first 21st century novel I’ve read that successfully entertained me. This is possibly because I’m not a great reader of fiction. Then again, the fact that Theft Of Fire entertained someone who normally doesn’t read much fiction should tell you something.
As to the book itself, I can praise more or less every aspect of it. The pacing is perfect, where every trough in the action is set up with anticipation of the next crest. The characters are all memorable and endearing and delightfully weird in their own way. The technological world seems perfect to me, but maybe that’s just because it confirms all of my own opinions about where things are headed.
One thing I have to note, however, is the research behind it. This is most definitely a hard science fiction book. Everything in it has been researched to a fine degree of precision that one normally does not see in science fiction. But — and this is the really astonishing part — Eriksen manages to pull this off without boring non-technical people. All of the science that is explained in the book can easily be read as “Cool science-speak” by someone who is not interested in the particulars.
(minor spoiler ahead)
More importantly, much of the research in the book shows up in events rather than lectures. For example, there’s one part near the beginning where a space ship nearly crashes into a space station. The space station repels the ship, and the means by which it does so are sound according to our current understanding of physics. Eriksen obviously put a lot of research into understanding exactly how a space station would accomplish a feat like this. But, as I noted before, this doesn’t take the form of a lecture. Eriksen merely describes the events as they occur; less technical readers will just accept that that’s how the book’s universe works. Whereas more technical readers can, if they want, go and do the research and realize that nearly everything described in the book is realistic with regards to how physics works. The author doesn’t lecture you on physics. He just allows physics to guide the events in the book, so that the realism is felt rather than seen.
Another point: Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So if you’re going to write futuristic technology, you can’t explain it all the way down. By definition, if a technology has not been invented yet, then the in-universe explanation must me incomplete. Logically, this means you have to hand-wave somewhere. Eriksen does this really ingenious trick where he comes up with a hand-wave that is just as mystifying to the people in the book as it is to the reader. And because the characters accept it, so do you! As a general principle, if I want you to do something, I should make it easier for you to do that thing. Eriksen wants us to suspend disbelief, so he makes it easy for us to do that.
One big problem with a lot of indie books is the roughness. They’re just not as polished as traditionally published books, due to the lack of editors. Theft of Fire doesn’t have that problem. It’s quite polished. More so than some of the mainstream novels I’ve read.
tl;dr if you like hard sci-fi then buy this book yesterday. Stay away from it if you’re an easily-offended weenie. Peace.