Have you ever read a book so good it ruins other, similar books? Sometimes I struggle to pick up new sci-fi because I’ve read such interesting stories that it starts feel like a waste of time reading other material. So many of them are so similar to one another that the end result is that some books just feel like lesser versions of other books. It’s an unfortunate reality that I can’t help but think I might be running into with my own books. There’s so much good stuff out there it’s hard to compete and remain interesting. I don’t necessarily believe you need every idea to be original, but something has to be unique for the story to be impactful, right? Like I couldn’t just write a character identical to Batman in form and execution and make it interesting because Batman already exists. I’d have to be either way better at writing Batman, or have a better Batman. Maybe it’s trivial to say so, but I find I sometimes learn the most when stating the obvious.
These books I’ve read recently in the ‘Revelation Space’ series are one of those that kinda ruined other space epics for me. The ideas and the characters are so new and exciting that it’s hard to even attempt similar stories now. I read another book that I’ll leave unnamed that began by spelling out the physics of centrifugal gravity on a large, rotating space station over the course of a few pages. That might have been cool if I hadn’t just read a book where one of the first chapters begins with a degenerating ship the size of a city maintained by a woman who uses nanomachines to restructure the ship at will. That, by the way, generates it’s own gravity by accelerating through space at one gee, a throwaway detail of it’s operation. Something about the depiction of centrifugal gravity as a novel concept felt almost insulting after reading ‘Revelation Space.’ Not to be a snob, but what’s the point of starting your book with a lengthy description of a space station almost everyone has seen before? It just didn’t really have much going for it, and sad to say it lost me within a few pages. I’m afraid my story will do the same thing though. I can’t help but look at it and read a mound of old tropes, especially in the first chapter. I think I’ll have to do some restructuring there when I finish up this editing pass. It just won’t do.
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley
Dangerous Day Job 