NOT AGAIN! IK thought, as the story opened for our intrepid band. Did I know why Ik thought that, when I wrote it? I did not. And that was probably the first sign that The Infinite Sea was going to be like Strange Attractors at least insofar as I would be writing out on the edge, on a wing and a prayer. There was a reason my subconscious had decided to call this series The Chaos Chronicles.
One thing was clearly different in this book, though. I would be drawing more on personal experience than I had in any previous book. How's that? Have I swum in alien seas? Nope. And I've never flown in space, or traveled to other stars. But I have logged a great many hours underwater as a sport diver, and some as a working diver—and for a brief period I even worked as a scuba diving instructor. While I didn't know about oceans of alien worlds firsthand, I did know what it felt like to be in the deep and the dark, enveloped by the squeezing pressure of depth, the world transformed into another place and time, measured out by the hiss and bubble of compressed air in water. I'd even done some night diving (my favorite), and had a visceral sense of the strangeness, of lights flashing in weightless darkness, of sparkling plankton, of the briny taste and sea smell, of the near-total dependence on technology to maintain existence.
Translating that earthbound experience to an alien world was a challenge, but it was one I felt I could meet. I'd written a couple of undersea stories before, the most realistic one being a near-future eco-short called "Seastate Zero," published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I knew what worked and didn't work in the undersea environment, and I had a pretty clear feel for the sensory details that might bring the experience to life for the reader.
To carry that into an offworld setting, I needed to combine elements of realism with an even greater sense of the inhuman. Dangers like decompression sickness and nitrogen narcosis still loomed—indeed, the bends would prove fatal to someone at a crucial part of the story. At the same time, this was an alien ocean, and unearthly elements pressed in on our people in unpredictable ways. I had a toolbox—to be used cautiously!—that included normalization and translator-stones and other alien technologies sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic (to quote Arthur C. Clarke). Perhaps those tools could help our band adapt to life under this alien sea. My goal was to write a plausible and compelling story, justifiable in terms of known science but with plenty of latitude for extrapolation. My biggest concern wasn't to persuade you that this is how it would be in an alien sea, but to convince you that this is how it could be.
As in the previous book, I left the storyline largely up to the characters: I turned them loose to see where they would go. God knows I didn't know where it was headed, except in the most general terms. The original proposal as I look at it now seems like an interesting premise for a different set of novels.
In an earlier afterword, I wrote about differences in the way writers handle the development of a storyline—some planning everything out ahead of time, and some discovering it as they go. That same principle applies to the characters who live in a story. Some writers excel at getting to know their characters in great detail before they ever let them step on the stage; these writers often have extensive biographies of their characters all written out and organized, for easy reference. It's a fine way to work—if your muse works that way. Others learn about their characters as need and opportunity arise. It requires interaction with other characters, with setting and plot, to ignite the synapses in the brain that make you realize, Oh yes, of course. He was a loner who worked on physics problems, and he was feeling keenly and morosely aware of his aloneness on the night that the aliens came. That's how it works for me, most of the time.
There is one character in this story about whom I knew a lot before I even began The Chaos Chronicles. That's the one who spends the least time on stage: Jeaves, the robot who makes his appearance on the final page. Readers of my Starstream novels (From a Changeling Star and Down the Stream of Stars, both available as ebooks) may have recognized Jeaves, who played a key role in both stories. We'll be seeing more of him in the books to come; and if you think this is the first clue that the Chaos universe is the same as the Starstream universe: Bingo, you're right.
* * *
I'd like to close with a few words about The Chaos Chronicles as a whole—and about Sunborn, the next episode in our company's journey (available in both paper and ebook from Tor/Macmillan). The series is taking far longer to write than I'd ever imagined. Life is like that sometimes. I'm grateful to the longtime readers of the Chaos books who have stayed with me.
There was a long, unplanned gap in publication between this third book, The Infinite Sea, and the fourth, Sunborn. For contractual reasons and because I needed a break from the world of chaos, I undertook an unrelated novel, Eternity's End, set in my Star Rigger universe. Maybe I should have guessed: Eternity's End took years longer to write than I'd projected. It all worked out well in the end, but by the time I got back to Bandicut and his friends, the chaos engine had churned things in my head to a fine murk. It took me years longer to sort out before I would finish Sunborn. As of this writing in 2010, I'm hard at work on the fifth book, The Reefs of Time. I've learned my lesson; I'm not going to predict a publication date.
You've been with me, and with Bandicut and company, for quite a journey so far. I hope you'll stick around for the rest of the ride.
Next up, Sunborn*.
—Jeffrey A. Carver, 2010
*Available in the U.S. as a Tor/Macmillan ebook. Available elsewhere as a Starstream Publications World edition.