On THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS

I've never spoken about why I wrote this novel, but it may be of interest to some people.

The idea for the novel first came to me back when I was 18, whilst at university. At the time I was still enjoying BABYLON 5. In my eyes (and many others) it was something that TV scifi had needed for years - it was edgy, had a fully planned story arc, was filled with drama, and had some great action sequences. I never liked STAR TREK for these reasons - it was all too nice and you never really feared for the characters' lives during pivotal moments.

I wanted to read a novel that was more like the TV shows I had enjoyed. I wanted a set of characters I could grow to know and follow the journey with. I wanted it to have a tight story line that wouldn't meander into random events just for the sake of raising the page count. I also wanted to know that the story had a definite ending and that it was actually going somewhere, and wouldn't consist of random books in-between that served very little purpose.

So, one day in 1999 I sat down and began to figure out the plot. I took a basic premise: a galactic war that focused on five starfighter pilots. After that I started to work out a the overall story. I actually worked backwards, deciding how it would all end and then working out how I would reach that goal.

Once I had that worked out I began to write out the names of the characters: I settled on Elliott Parks and David Turner as the Commodore and Admiral who would be heading up the ATAF starfighter project quite quickly. Zackaria was also a name that I came up with quite fast. I wanted a name that sounded hard and with a nuance of evil in it. The name was inspired by a book called Z FOR ZACHARIAH.

I then threw some more ideas about and wrote stuff down, though most of the story notes stayed in my head. However, despite intending to begin writing the BATTLE FOR THE SOLAR SYSTEM, I never got around to doing so. I'm not sure why, perhaps it was because I had just started working and was adjusting to life in London.

In the winter of 2006, I decided the time was right to put pen to paper and so I wrote down the entire plot of the trilogy. It only took me about a week to do so, since it was just a case of dumping the ideas in my head onto the word processor.

Like a lot of writers, I wanted to write a story that I would enjoy reading, and one thing that I find lamentable in the few science fiction novels I read (you might be rather surprised to hear that I don't read a great deal of scifi!) is the lack of space battles. Of course, I know why this is now: because they're hard to write. More often than most they will turn out to sound like one is describing a video game they just played (see previous post). Still, after much re-writing and editing, I believe that I have made a commendable effort of getting over that hurdle.

Once I was done I read it over and thought it was okay. But to be honest, it was too short. It was only 77k words long (too short for a scifi, where the UK market looks for works of around 120,000 words).

After some chopping and changing, I came up with a significant new plot device: Patrick Dean. Aside from the prologue featuring Jacques Chalmers, the original story draft actually began with Simon Dodds entering the meeting with Turner, Parks, and Hawke. When I introduced Patrick Dean's thread, it brought three new chapters to the novel. Not only that, it gave me scope for working new details into later chapters, as well as into the second novel in the trilogy.

I also changed the way the novel ended. In terms of plot, it was only one sequence that was changed, but it meant that I had to re-jig and rewrite a number of chapters, as well as add new ones. I'll write about what was changed another time (because it obviously consists of a number of spoilers), but I far prefer the new ending.

So, did the novel turn out the way I first envisioned? Actually, yes. In fact, I think that the story has shaped up better than it did when I first thought it out 14 years ago. It has grown and matured and become very different to what I started with.

What the original story was, I won't say now; that is a tale for another day. But hand on my heart, I can say that I am pleased with the direction the BATTLE FOR THE SOLAR SYSTEM has gone in. THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS did indeed turn out to be the kind of story that I wanted to read, and hopefully it will find favour with those that pick it up.