When I set out to write a science fiction episode of Genrenauts for the first season, I couldn’t just use ‘Science Fiction’ as the genre for this second episode. Science Fiction is too broad a category to have the specificity of expectations and tropes, so I had to drill down. I could have done it by sub-genre (diplomatic/political space opera), by tone (heroic but nuanced), or by character (a story about a kidnapped ambassador).
I picked Space Opera as the genre category, but that is still too wide. Space Opera has been used to describe works from Star Wars to The Expanse, Guardians of the Galaxy to Dune and beyond.
I’ve written extensively about the influence and inspiration I’ve taken from Babylon 5 in my writing, and Genrenauts is one of the many places in my writing where that influence manifests. Once I had the idea to use Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine as the setting touchstones, I had to dig deeper into what I thought about that mode of science fiction, what was important, what would be fun to poke at.
The entire concept of Genrenauts is science fiction, so in that way, every Genrenauts episode is a science fiction episode, even when it’s also investigating other genres. The series plays with the conventions of science fiction more broadly, as well as some of the more specific tropes and structures of time travel stories (despite the Genrenauts’ travel being interdimensional rather than time-travel). There’s still the “end up in a place very different from your home, where there are different social mores and you have to tread carefully” element that is so common in time-travel stories, as well as the “blend in with the locals” and others.
But back to the Babylon 5/Deep Space 9 portion of Space Opera. A lot of the diplomatic stories seen in that mode of storytelling come down to individuals and their connections with people, the authority and trust they’ve accrued through their action, the reputation they’ve built. Groups will trust a meeting held by this individual because they did X, Y, and Z in the past. They’ve proven their integrity, and so on.
Which then provides an instant opportunity as to a place to find a narrative break, the breach – if a key figure in diplomacy disappears, then not only are they not around to see things through, that trust is no longer there to bridge the gaps between the factions, *and* there’s the suspicion of who kidnapped the key figure and why. That gave me the main thrust of the narrative, which then could be split into two threads – keeping things together diplomatically and finding the ambassador. I got to cast Shrin and Leah into the roles of “senior diplomat” and “junior diplomat”, having Leah’s unfamiliarity with the setting to allow Shirin to unpack and explain things to her and therefore the audience. This was another move to suggest that the setting had a history and a life of its own that would make the individual story breach feel like it had impact and that the world itself was lived in and that its happenings had real weight and importance.
So I had my setting, I had my story breach, and I had one major thread of the plot. In building out the rest of the episode, I decided on some other narrative tropes to showcase. I wanted to play with the fun of distinct and cool-looking alien species, as well as some of their cultural mores, showing humanity to be one among many, to give contrast without too much flattening any species to a single set of traits.
I also wanted to put some spotlight on Roman, the action-adventure hero type of the group. That meant that I could bring in and comment on the ways that the expectations and tropes of action stories manifest in this type of SF stories – diplomacy and politics is balanced with and/or challenged by action and violence, which requires characters like the security chief, the traveling adventurer, etc. And since it’s space opera, that meant I could have dogfights in starships and gunfights in cool locales.
For the dogfights, I wanted interesting terrain that could provide the ability to maneuver. Asteroid fields are the easy answer, so I wanted to also have another option – hence the spaceship graveyard. That graveyard also helped convey a sense of history for the setting, since I was trying to make the world feel real and lived in with 30,000 words or less, which is not a lot. (For context, most novels are 80,000 words or more, often around 100,000 words).
And for the climax of the adventure plotline, I got to show Roman’s push-pull relationship with recklessness. Action heroes take big, needless risks, always pushing the envelope and usually getting away with it because the storytellers want them to. Roman and King’s argument over method and risk puts that part of how action storytelling manifests in other genres into focus and plays with it while also delivering a set-piece action sequence in the kidnapper’s base. It’s the “parody and critique the thing while you show it” approach as seen in works like Galaxy Quest, Blazing Saddles, etc.
Earning readers’ trust in this episode was just as important as in the pilot, again *because* Genrenauts is science fiction all the way through. If I couldn’t show that I had interesting things to do with the premise of story worlds and broken narratives in science fiction, it’d be harder to get them to stick with me through the other episodes and to see what I was going to do once the formula had been established (it’s hard to break a formula before you establish it. You set a rhythm and then break it, etc.). I also wanted to leave this universe in a place where readers could expect that the individual problem had been fixed but that new problems would emerge in the future, since it is a world where stories are constantly playing out. The episode was done, but there was far more in store for Ahura-3 and for our Genrenauts.
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