Category: Science Fiction Thriller

TIWIR- SAUCER: Savage Planet by Stephen Coonts

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In this installment of This Is What I Read I present SAUCER: Savage Planet by Stephen Coonts.

I’ve always known Coonts as a military writer and have read several of his books.  This was something I picked up on a random visit to Barnes & Noble.

The Saucer series brings science fiction to the forefront and Savage Planet represents the third book, bringing a conclusion to the series and the primary characters; Rip Cantrell, Charley (Charlotte) Pine and Egg Cantrell.  Coonts uses a near-human alien, Adam Solo, marooned on Earth for over 1,000 years, to bring the primary characters to their respective destinies.

With so many reviews out there for this novel I’ll take a different tack and analyze some of it’s structure.  There is sufficient information on our characters in this novel where it can be a standalone read, which was fortunate since B&N didn’t have the first two titles of the series lol.

Coonts begins with Adam Solo and gradually uses his history on Earth to take our heroes around in one, of two, recovered saucers to secure areas to avoid two selfishly ambitious pharmacy moguls and the US government itself, as Solo waits for a starship with his fellow aliens.

There was much more introspection written into Solo and I found myself far more interested in him than the main characters.  I could see how he was important to the lives of the mains as well as the plot, visitors from outer space meet the President, but somewhat lamented the fact that he was secondary in the storyline.  Solo was the adverb, the pronoun, the conjunction that propelled the story along. (In a blog post Coonts does hint at possible stories with Solo as the main character)

On a related note, and this is something I see in many novels, we don’t get too deep into any of the characters.  Perhaps that happened in the first two novels but again, I’ve seen this in many novels.  Maybe it’s done to fit the book into a word or page count …

An example I can provide off the top of my head is the book Starship Troopers.  It’s just way too short.  You  really start to get into it about 3/4 of the way in …. then it just ends.

Still, Saucer is a good story I give it a rating of 4/5.

If you wonder what I consider deep character development, my personal standard for getting to know a character is Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, but that is a novel where the character we get to see inside of is the main character.

Part 8 Surprises in writing a science fiction thriller

Never let the technical overshadow the art.

Then I thought about how I might explain that, and came up with this:
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Art always trumps the technical; the grammar, the sentence structure, the etc, the ad infinitum.

Technical:

What is that mild illumination coming in through the window?  That’s the sunrise, and Juliet represents the sun.

Art:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Multiple online results talk about how Shakespeare had more freedom back then to use the English language in the manner in which he did.

Yeah, so?  What’s holding people back today?  Catering to the lowest demographic or something?

If someone were to ask me about writing in that form I would wholeheartedly encourage them to go ahead and write like Shakespeare.

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But if you are ‘terrible’ at art and really have to work at it then how would you tell it?

First of all you can do art just fine, remember that.

Second, you don’t tell it ……. you show it.

Tell:
Is that the early morning sunlight beginning to come in through the window?  Due to the rotation of the earth the sun rises in the east, and there is Juliet, her inner glow providing it’s own illumination, she’s just like the sun.

Show:
But soft! What light through yonder breaks?  It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Early on I was very much inclined to write in the ‘Tell’ format.  Showing is moh bettah and moh fun.

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There is a last part:

STORY trumps all, including art.   Showing is good, but not at the expense of the story and it’s flow. 😀

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Part 6 Surprises in writing a science fiction thriller

How will I feel?
How will I feel?

I’ve been procrastinating.

Primarily because of Part 1, my first surprise in writing a science fiction thriller novel, Emotions.

Weird huh?

I know that the part I’m going to write is going to go deep into emotion, that’s the point of that particular plotline.

I’m concerned about how I’ll feel about it 😆

But it has to get done. This weekend baby 😀

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Twitter, Blogging, Flickr, Instagram …

I’ve had these profiles and web domains for years.

Yet I’d never actively used them until ordering Chuck Sambuchino ‘s ‘Create Your Writer Platform’.

I recognized at the time that getting a hold of these profiles was the smart thing to do. I just wasn’t sure what purpose they would serve later on. For a while danpassaro.com was hosting my Zenfolio account for photography. I also have danielpassaro.com which simply forwards to danpassaro.com. I’ve done this with several domains.

Now that I’m moving along with the Distance In Time Series (Distance In Time: Michelle) I see how it will all come into play.

Get those usernames and domains! Inexpensive to hold on to, profitable in the future 😀

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