Look! Up in the sky

I have all the movie channels free this week on cable; I’m not asking why, I’m simply enjoying them.

The second three of the Star Wars movies played; not the originals, but the 20th Anniversary ones from 1997. I watched them all with nostalgia and interest – since I hadn’t seen the digitally remastered versions.

My parents took me to see Star Wars when it was first released and I was enchanted. Can you imagine? Two adults and six kids sitting in the balcony seats without a murmur, without popcorn or Coke, staring wide-eyed at the screen. The drive home was silent, each of us enthralled by the adventure we’d just seen.

I even remember sitting by my window at home, staring up at the night sky and wondering ‘what if’. My imagination had already been stirred by Space 1999, Doctor Who, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Battlestar Galactica.

I was reading Ann McCaffrey and Andre Norton, along with JT Edson – books I still have on the shelf – listening to Yes, Rick Wakeman and Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds (that red weed bit really scared me; I still can’t listen to it at night).

As I grew older, I remained a fan of science fiction; it was the best. But I still didn’t know how to create my own worlds. My first fiction piece, in fact, was a spy novel – light on words, heavy on action – written before I’d ever heard of Ian Fleming.

What intrigued me about Star Wars is that it started at number 4. Like a lot of other people, I wondered what happened to the first three: did we miss them? Where they not released in Australia?

Now, I know different and there are a number of series that don’t start at the… well, start. Anita Blake is already scarred in Guilty Pleasures with relationships established and references to what came before. So, too, Honor Harrington had already commanded a starship before On Basilisk Station, Diana Tregarde, Rachel Morgan, all had adventures before the first books; even Bilbo Baggins had a life before he found the One Ring.

So where to start in a series? If your character has had adventures before hand, the first book is simply a part of a series, albeit an unwritten one. Is it simply a device to lure readers in to wanting more? To wanting to know what came before? To understand how a character came to be like they are?

Well, if readers are asking that, you’ve hit the jackpot, because what it means is that you’ve written a three-dimensional character; more importantly, it means you know more about your character than you need to.

I’m still working on that, but for now, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country is on. One of the best lines in Wrath of Khan is Spock telling Kirk: “You forget, I am Vulcan; I have no ego to bruise.” I wish I’d written that; maybe one day I will.