I’ve blogged previously about the ‘pilot’ for the series, The Memory Box. With the first series,
it’s given me an opportunity to do fantastic things; firstly, to develop the
character and explore her back-story, and secondly, to give other writers a
chance to write Vienna stories.
The box set, currently available from Big Finish as a download or CD box, consists of three stories. The first is Dead Drop by Mark Wright, and is a
no-holds-barred rollercoaster ride as Vienna finds herself on board a spaceship
in the middle of a warzone, where everything that can wrong, does. It’s action-packed,
heart-racing, white-knuckle-ride stuff and that’s just from reading the script.
It’s a sci-fi spectacular.
The second is Bad
Faith by Nev Fountain, and is harder to describe because it’s so, well,
original. It’s very funny, incredibly imaginative, includes a wonderful alien
race, the Kreyfin, and contains more twists and turns than a twisty-turny
thing; Nev is known for his ingenious twists from stories like Omega and Peri and the Piscon Paradox and with this story I think he
surpassed even those.
And the third is Deathworld,
by me. Which is kind of a densely-plotted mash-up of every sci-fi book I’ve
ever read and every film I’ve ever seen, as well as the original myth of the
assassins, and which concerns the nature of identity, memory and reality itself,
where nothing and nobody is quite what they seem.
What I’ve tried to do with these stories is to tell a
different sort of science fiction story. You see, the ‘science’ in science
fiction usually refers to technology or astrophysics, when it can apply to any
science – psychology, economics, even philosophy. The sort of science fiction
that was written by Philip K Dick and Kurt Vonnegut and which is still being
written by Ursula K Le Guin, Brian Aldiss and Christopher Priest, which isn’t about the technology
of ‘hard science fiction’ but which concerns the state of consciousness, of imaginary
realms where reality, dreams and virtual reality interact, where the stories
are about inner worlds rather than outer reaches. At its best, it’s mind-bending
stuff that gives you the same vertiginous feeling of arriving at a new vista or
understanding a new concept - a ‘consciousness-expanding drug’. It’s an area
ripe for exploration, it’s about extraordinary ideas and generates great,
dramatic stories, and that’s what I find exciting. Vienna still has all the
trappings of science fiction, laser guns, spaceships, robots, aliens and distant
planets – but the stories are about ideas of telepathic hive-minds, subconscious
programming, belief systems that you can inject into your brain, unreliable
narrators, unreliable memories, unreliable realities.
Hopefully it’s giving people something they haven’t had
before, to not just push the envelope but to tear it to pieces and stick it in
a blender, to tell the boldest, weirdest, most thrilling, most unpredictable,
most mind-boggling stories imaginable.
