Why I Wrote... The Surly Bonds Series
- Aug 4
- 12 min read
By Tom Anderson.
Thus far the Surly Bonds series consists of two books, The Surly Bonds of Earth and Well Met By Starlight. The third book in the series, a direct sequel to Well Met will shortly debut and is entitled On the Wings of the Morn.
To explain what this series is about is – well, a long story in itself.
In the world of science fiction, since the 1960s Star Trek has become so influential and inspirational that many science fiction writers have essentially started out writing their own Star Trek fanfiction and then using that as the basis for a more original work. One example is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. Meanwhile, fantasy writers cannot escape the similarly dominating example of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; some of them manage to peep out from its shadow and add something original to the genre, while others will forever remain nothing more than a derivative copy.
What has become the Surly Bonds series takes inspiration from both of those as childhood influences, and more. In its origins it dates back to things I would write at primary school, which I developed over the years and made more original. Critically, my focus in these writings was never on humans or humanity; I wanted to create and develop alien races. I made use of Star Trek because it comes with good rules of storytelling: energy weapons are usually called phasers, they hit shields and deplete them for drama, you can beam around by transporter but you can’t beam through shields, etc. Finding ways to subvert these rules in a clever way helps one develop a plot. But when I wrote stories, I never wanted to actually have my characters run into the Federation or the USS Enterprise or Captain Picard; that wasn’t the point of what I was writing.
Around the year 2000 I realised that if I was ever going to develop this further, I would have to bite the bullet and sever this connection. As a teenager I had grown wise enough to realise that no-one was ever going to let you use their universe to tell your own unrelated space opera tales. (Of course, Timothy Zahn has somehow gotten away with writing his own unrelated space opera tales within a corner of the Star Wars galaxy which never mentions any other part of Star Wars, but he’s Timothy Zahn.)
For this reason, I developed my own storytelling rules and terminology (which weren’t identical to Star Trek’s, for example removing transporters). I was also aware (in the words of my teenaged self) that most readers are boring racially self-centred tryhards who only want to read about humans, so I needed to fit humanity into this setting and figure out a futuristic backstory for them. Since doing so, I should say, the internet has taught me that this is one of those things ‘everyone knows’ which may not be true in reality; in practice readers are much more diverse in their interests than what most publishers think or thought.
There are a few curious paradoxes about this process. When I started this phase of developing the setting, I didn’t know that much about real-life history; indeed, I was one of those people who learns about military ranks and so on from Star Trek rather than real life. The interesting thing I found was that the alien races I’d created often felt more ‘solid’ and ‘detailed’ than my conception of humanity, because while still at school I had imagined mediaeval fantasy stories with them in, which I could now use as the ‘past backstory’ for their futuristic versions. This is an idea which has, of course, been developed elsewhere too, recently by Brandon Sanderson who follows the same fantasy world from mediaeval to futuristic eras.
For a while, I was trying to work from the year 2350, which is the year I intended to set the ‘now’ of my science fiction stories in, and bridge the gap between the present day of 2000 and then. I found this was very challenging, because it’s like trying to build a scaffold down from the top of a skyscraper floating in midair; it’s too easy to contradict yourself or end up with boring predestination (you can’t blow up this planet in the past if it’s still around now). Also, the folly of this approach became very clear in the year 2001 when a certain terrorist attack happened, and the immediate future of the world went down a very different path to the one I had been envisaging.
This is partly what first awakened me to the possibilities of alternate history. Star Trek has struggled in recent years over indecision about whether to serve as an unchanging utopian vision from the 1960s or whether to try to keep implying it is the future as our own world changes. For example, in the 1960s Star Trek imagined the then-futuristic 1990s would see a world war fought by genetically engineered supermen; as those years have been and gone, later incarnations of Star Trek have struggled to know how to reconcile this. It cannot be dismissed altogether, as one of those genetic supermen became one of the franchise’s most iconic villains.
Instead, I decided to embrace the alternate history angle. Although you typically wouldn’t guess from reading the Surly Bonds series, it is technically an alternate history, diverging shortly before the year of my own birth in the 1980s. There are a few hints here and there, like a reference to President Gore. This was considerably freeing, as now I don’t need to worry too much about incorporating current events into the backstory.
In 2006 I was writing on an alternate history forum and decided I’d found a way to sneakily develop my ideas with a captive audience of readers. I decided to take a scene from near the end of a story I’d conceived but never finished, where an alien invasion is approaching the Moon (where the capital of the future UN equivalent is). Interrupting the original story, I then set up an event where an ‘Island in the Sea of Time’ event snatches the Moon of 2350 from its own time and replaces our own Moon in the contemporary year of 2006. This was a fun way to develop the setting as I could write the futuristic people interacting with contemporary ones. As there were also ambassadors and spies from humanity’s alien allies and enemies on the Moon too, I could also incorporate a plot where they try to aid their own ‘down-time’ counterparts and use this to further develop the other alien races.
This story, called “Moonstruck”, definitely grew in the telling and ran away from me. One sequence is set on the planet Culvana, home to humanity’s oldest allies, the Culvanai, and features a civil conflict with interference from ‘up-time’ people. The idea here is basically an alien allegory for a concept that other writers, including Harry Turtledove, have written of; imagine a group of pathetic modern neo-nazis travelling through time and trying to appeal to Nietzsche and Bismarck, who would find them contemptible. So the person who is historically considered the start of the slide to a dark regressive force on Culvana is actually the one who turns away from it and helps the good guys.
“Moonstruck” thus helped me develop not only the human race of 2350, but also the backstory of the Culvanai and other races, such as the Vároto (more on them in future books).
Around 2013 though, I decided I was still struggling too much to try to depict 2350. One problem was that technology was moving at an inconsistent pace compared to predictions; it is hard to come up with what 2350 might be using in place of a tablet when those, imagined in the 2260s by Star Trek, are already here now. It’s also generally easier to imply a rich backstory if you write that backstory first. Tolkien cheated here by writing much of The Silmarillion, but not publishing it, before he wrote The Lord of the Rings and could therefore tease the backstory in enigmatic hints in the latter book. I thought about doing the same, but then wondered if I could turn the backstory sketches about twenty-first century humanity into an actual book.
From this idea, The Surly Bonds of Earth was born.
This is a very long-winded way of getting to describing the series as it now exists. The Surly Bonds of Earth begins in the 2050s. Humanity fought a world war in the 2020s (remember that alternate history part) and has mostly survived the aftermath of that and of climate change, but now overpopulation and scarcity are challenging the planet. The book follows the lives of some characters I had already created years ago for the backstory, like Seth Graham and Pierre Janvier, as well as others newly created for the book like Kim Belmont and Quynh Nguyen. The reader gets to experience about forty years of history as tensions rise and some crises threaten to explode, like the ‘Augean’ terrorists who unleash viruses to try to cull the human population. A.I. increasingly underpins society, but can it be trusted? (Given I wrote this part in 2018, I think I did quite well in terms of near-future predictions…)
Speaking as a scientist in my day job, I’ve always seen ‘hard science fiction’ as a bit of a futile quest, because science moves on and an attempt at hard science fiction will probably seem like soft science fantasy a century later. (For example, see E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s The Skylark of Space, featuring a nuclear-powered spacecraft that runs on fissile copper, not uranium, and can travel faster than light because Einstein’s newfangled theory could just be shrugged off as maybe it’s wrong). Nonetheless, for The Surly Bonds of Earth I made an effort to try to get the science as hard as possible, at least for most of the book. Similar to The Expanse, I take the view that if you show a reader you do understand this early on, they will be more forgiving of you introducing fantastic elements later on.
In this case, Pierre and other characters are involved in the discovery of a new physics which means faster-than-light travel may be possible after all – but their pathway to being able to actually use it is a long and fraught one. The first test is not intentional, but resorted to in desperation as a major crisis threatens to destroy the world. But in the end, there is finally a way for humanity to, yes, slip the surly bonds of Earth and spread across the stars.
The Surly Bonds of Earth is intended as a largely self-contained work. There is a distant finale epilogue disguised as the prologue of the next book, Well Met by Starlight, but otherwise it is not intended as prerequisite reading for what follows. By contrast, Well Met by Starlight and On the Wings of the Morn are two parts of a continuing story: the story of first contact between humans and an alien race.
First contact is a topic that has been tackled so many times in science fiction that you could argue it’s a hackneyed cliché. On the other hand, it’s not as if people have stopped buying romance novels about boy meets girl, is it? There is always more to say. I like to think that what I have mainly brought to the genre is how the story was originally conceived. As a reminder, when I first started developing humanity in this universe, I had imagined stories would be set in 2350 and I would just be making periodic backstory references to the past. As a result, I had never actually stopped to think what first contact was like or who it would be with.
However, while writing “Moonstruck” in 2006 a comment from a reader asked about this and made me realise I had never thought about it. (So keep up with your comments on our writing forum, it does make a difference!) I quickly and vaguely came up with an idea, and then liked it so much that it became the basis of these two books. Ironically, or appropriately, I imagined a first contact that would be as inadvertent and thoughtless as my own failure to think about it till now. What if first contact came on a day when both the humans and the aliens were so consumed with their own affairs that they miss what’s happening – until a shocking realisation explodes?
I don’t want to describe exactly what my words were because it’d be a significant spoiler, but suffice to say that events that take place in Well Met by Starlight derive directly from that original off-the-cuff forum comment. Humans and aliens blunder into each other. Both are internally divided and concerned with those divisions, and both have been so long between fictional first-contact speculations and the reality that ‘aliens’ has become a children’s dream, an old idea to be dismissed. This means the actual event is all the more shocking.
Speaking of those divisions, that is another thing I want to innovate with in my science fiction writing. I’m not the first to play with the idea, but many works of science fiction (including Star Trek again) have a tendency to portray aliens as mono-cultural and we never hear about them having different cities or countries. Indeed, humans themselves are often treated as a single united people and we no longer hear about different countries! Conversely, I find it fascinating to imagine a divided human race interacting with divided aliens. This is where developing the past backstory of aliens (as in the mediaeval fantasy example) is highly useful, because then you can make reference to different regions having different languages or cultures, and it makes your later aliens feel richer and more realistic.
The Culvanai, the aliens who feature in Well Met by Starlight and On the Wings of the Morn, take a number of inspirations from other works of fiction. Because of the factor I mentioned above, about aliens frequently being treated as monolithic, some writers suggest that it’s humanity’s very diversity and divisions that make it unique. However, some writers have taken that same tendency and exaggerated it for some aliens. The aforementioned Timothy Zahn does this with his Troft aliens in his Cobra series, which are divided into many ‘desmesnes’ with ever-shifting alliances. The Star Wars Corellian Trilogy by Roger Macbride Allen does the same with Selonia, a planet with an intricate jumble of land and water with no large bodies of either, leading to a divided civilisation made up of many ‘dens’ or clans.
Similarly, Culvana is a watery planet with many small islands and Culvanai are divided into clan-like Clusters rather than nations as such. Because of their small size, the Clusters necessarily form large, ever-shifting temporary pacts or ‘tempacts’ in order to cooperate on bigger projects. One such tempact, now known simply as the Tempact, was formed to deal with a major crisis and has since stuck around longer and grown more powerful. It is opposed by traditionalists who fear such things, as well as opposing greater gender equality (the Culvanai are largely matriarchal) and who are known as the Profondistes.
I have always been fascinated by xenofiction, a writing genre in which the writer attempts to put themselves in the mindset of a non-human perspective. Though often associated with science fiction, there are other examples, often involving animals – a classic example being Watership Down. One could even stretch the definition and argue that even writing from the perspective of someone from a different human culture or gender can be a significant challenge – certainly, many writers stereotypically struggle with it.
I like being able to use the tools of a writer in innovative ways to explore these xenofictional elements. In the case of the Culvanai, I have tried to represent their matriarchal society in language by developing nonexistent English feminine forms (e.g. commandress instead of commander) or by making use of French-derived terms as French is a more gendered language (e.g. Profondiste above). As you can imagine, this was a proofreader’s nightmare, so many thanks to Ed Feery for his proofreading aid.
Meanwhile, humans remain divided into nations and supranations, and there are tensions even between those which are formally allied. A big part of this story is devoted to the tensions aboard the Magellan, the ship which is the main setting of much of the tale, between its European, American and ASEAN crews. Among our main viewpoint characters are Heinz Adler, a German who struggles to understand his American counterpart Cynthia Johnson, and Suki Verwoerd, a Dutch woman of Japanese descent who feels excluded by those who assume she must be part of the ASEAN crew. But all these groups feel threatened in turn by the mysterious Russian-Chinese ship Bering that is shadowing them on their mission…
There are also mysterious conspiracies that belong to no nation. By the 2130s, when this story is set, many parts of the world have seen their economies collapse as people travel to other planets for work and cheaper land. Africa, once the poorest continent, is now the richest – or at least it has the most trillionaires. Amos Nkomo, one of those wealthy men, is involved in a plan which we, the reader, know little of…
Finally, another slightly peculiar inspiration for the story of Well Met By Starlight involves a fellow SLP forum member and writer who complained that, as a child, his parents had replaced his preferred reading matter with Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series. As I was determined to clear the good name of Ransome, those stories form a thread of intentional references throughout the book.
I am happy that, after some delays, this story will now conclude with the release of On the Wings of the Morn. But the broader setting offers many more possibilities for storytelling: watch out in the future for Worlds Away.
The Surly Bonds series is on sale at Amazon now.
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