Interviewing Allen Stroud

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the great Vigilance by Allen Stroud which is a fine continuation of the excellent Fractal series. A science fiction space opera that explores our nearish future, delivers great characters and a lot of tension and action. It was a pleasure to welcome Allen back to the blog to discuss this novel and the wider series.

How do you like to booktempt people into reading Vigilance?

I think it’s about the continuation and conclusion of the story. Ellisa Shann’s voyage was always planned to be the initiating event of a wider context. Vigilance offers a resolution to that and a wider understanding of what triggered the event in the first place. It’s also something of a first contact novel, with the alien presence having an agenda of it’s own as well.

Each of our novels and novellas has had a different theme what did you want to aim for with this novel?

Vigilance needed to bring many of those elements together. Despite my writing tendency towards more and more ‘pantsing’ there was always an interconnectivity to the different Fractal components. In some respects, the addition of the novels made this both harder and easier, pulling in lots of bits, welding them in, but also ensuring that they were layered, so the book caters for different reading experiences. I mean, you probably need to read Fearless (2020) and Resilient (2022) before Vigilance, but the extra episodes (Europa, Ceres, Lagrange Point, Terra, Luna, and Jezero) all have a presence in the book, so there are different reading experiences available.

In a sense, the macro element of the 22nd century context is getting more detailed and explained as you go through the books. Vigilance gives you more of that than before, but that’s only possible because the need has been established in the earlier stories. How did we get here is the question we get a more detailed answer to, and as always with these things, it turns out the answer to that question is complex and messy.

Across the series we have had this tension between commercial and national/international space travel and exploration. What draws you to this topic?

I’ve reflected on this a few times. A few answers came to mind. Firstly, my research work at Coventry University has started to focus more and more on utilising my science fiction thinking. By that I mean asking the big questions like how did we get here? and where are we going? The 22nd century is a great place to explore for that because it’s both near enough and far away enough. Fifty years is too close. We can see things on the horizon that will shape civilisation fifty years from now. A century on we will be in a context that is after the current crises that we can see. The energy crisis will have been solved, but what does that solution look like?

A second answer came from looking at my stories in general. A few opportunities for working class writers have been advertised online over the last couple of years. I think these are great. What they encouraged me to do is think about my own context. Financially, I definitely grew up as working class, but I never identified as that. I don’t think anyone would have identified me as working class or would do so now. I certainly wouldn’t apply for the small grants being offered, but I did wonder, is there a theme in my writing?

I noticed that an awful lot of my longer fantasy and science fiction involves revolutions, overly intrusive regimes, late-stage capitalism, disinheritance, oppression, etc. Maybe that’s normal for all writers, and I’m in danger of a bit of conformation bias, but it’s also interesting to explore and interesting to identify that subconscious focus.

A third answer lies in reading the tea leaves. Horizon scanning often involves taking themes that already exist and letting them continue into a new context. In the Fractal series, Mars is the new frontier, the new America for European settlers. But rather than being bound solely by that historical analogue, there has to be something new about it. Debt is the driver of many national economies, creating a context where debt becomes the means of control in society is only a small push from where we are at the moment. The cost of your trip to Mars has to be paid for somehow, where better than to put it on you as a mortgage. 

Your stories have also explored what life can be defined as in unusual ways. In this case we start to explore what alien life could look like. How did you go about creating that perspective?

I have read, researched and lectured a lot about monsters and aliens and how we identify with the human aspects of these creatures and are most viscerally affected when those aspects are twisted in some way. The famous banned scene in Frankenstein (1931) when the monster throws the child in the lake doesn’t work if he hasn’t first been enticed by the child to play a game of throwing flowers in the lake. We have to follow the twisted rationale or logic being presented to us to see the wrong choice.

Amazing authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky are exploring this aspect of science fiction in many different ways. Alien Clay (2023) for example sees the alien get inside the human and change them slowly and insidiously. The Children of Time books gradually move towards embracing the merging of different biologies and xenobiologies.  

What I wanted to do was go back a step and focus on the anthropomorphising. If that aspect becomes the flaw in how we perceive aliens during our encounter with them, what mistakes and assumptions can we make that will lead to (as we see it) their victory over us? Taking that premise makes you look at the limitations of human perception and the ways in which we define our world and our place within that world. Time is one, dimensions another, etc.

If the alien we meet is able to perceive our reality better than we can perceive theirs, maybe they can or will recreate it to converse with us?

In your series disabilities still exist an area science fiction is still getting to grips with. How important was this in your version of our future?

Very. I read all the criticisms of my work that I can find and process them very carefully. I am very open to critical comment and always re-examine based on what is said. You never know what you may find from someone’s quick review. One reviewer did comment on the profusion/ratio of disabled characters on the crew of the Khidr as mentioned in Fearless (2020) early on. That made me evaluate my decision again. I decided the fact that they found it unusual said more about them than it did about my choice.

For me, disability is a presence in my life, and it needs to be a presence in our futures. Maybe diseases will be cured and operations invented that change the world, but that doesn’t change the here and now. People need characters that they can strongly identify with. The story of that disability doesn’t need to be the focus for those characters. Generally, all individuals try to live their lives with whatever context they have been given.  

With three novels and six novellas all set in the same universe how did this work on plotting? What has this given you an insight into world-building?

Strangely, I have done less traditional worldbuilding (as others describe it) for this series than you might think. As mentioned earlier, I’ve found these books work best when I get into the story and then cross reference.

However, my take on worldbuilding is that your objective is to build a world in the mind of the reader. That requires ‘Glimpse Morsels for the Imagination’, which was a chapter I wrote in Luna Press’s Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction (2022). I want the reader’s imagination fired up when they read my books and that means leaving some room for it. My favourite stories have always been the ones that stay in my head after I put the book down.

What else can we look from you in the future? Will the fractal series continue?

I am currently working on more Fractal stories. As I’m writing this, I’m finishing the first of the second set of Episodes. There are plans for more novels as well.

Where can we find out more from you in this weird world of social media?

‘Allen Stroud’ usually finds me. Most of the creative projects you get as a result of that search are things I’m doing. http://www.allenstroud.com is my usual residence. The British Science Fiction Association Facebook, Discord and other presences also lead back to me eventually.

What great books have you read recently?

The aforementioned Alien Clay (2023) is my current read. Before that The Fall of Numenor (2022). The Second Age of Middle Earth was always my favourite period. I’ve found the audio version makes the annotation much easier to take in. Truss at 10 (2024) by Anthony Seldon is also a recent read, along with James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain (2023). There is something appealing about reading a reflection on events that you have lived through to see another person’s take. I also try to be agile and elastic about that, letting the assessments in, so I can evaluate them against my own experience.