Dremiks as Space Opera

I used to wince when people described my first novel, Dremiks, as a space opera. The term made me feel tawdry and seemed to cheapen my writing. I’ve come to embrace the description, though. Opera, in all its mediums, deals with the emotions of the human condition. If I had to summarize the work I’ve been struggling with all these years, it would be just that: an examination of human interaction and behavior and the contrasts it presents with alien races.

So much of science-fiction and fantasy futuristic fiction assumes that man overcomes his inherent tendencies toward violence, xenophobia, and avarice. I’ll admit that at the tender age of 13, when I started writing Dremiks, I subscribed to that ideal as well. Surely by the time man conquered inter-galactic travel we would be kinder, smarter, more noble. The slap-in-the-face that is day-to-day adult life made me cynical in my writing as well as my political out-look. Dremiks has evolved from a giggling teenage short story to an imagination of the continued war between man’s demons and angels. The setting is still deep-space and most of the character names are the same, but that is where the similarities end.

There are elements of romance involved in the novel. I’m a romantic at heart. I find it difficult to believe that a group of people thrown into the unknown and living together for over a year would not develop some intimacies. It is far more un-realistic to assume that all officers and crew of a starship would remain celibate and platonic in their relationships than it is to let human nature take its course. There it is again- that basic belief that man has not changed so very much, despite our technological and sociological advances. Of course part of my belief that men and women (or any other pairing you choose to make) naturally fall in love, or lust, while working together is personal bias. I met my husband in college while we both worked in the same dorm.

There’s betrayal, lust, deception, love, life, and death in this novel. I try to interject light-hearted moments because no one’s life is wall-to-wall drama. While I hope the adrenaline junkie reader will find enough action to keep his interest, Dremiks is not a militaristic, space-battle, novel along the lines of Battlestar Galactica. You’ll be three quarters of the way through the book before you find a character wielding a gun. (A few knives make earlier appearances. Stabbings are fun!)

Here is a short excerpt dealing with some of the themes I’ve just discussed. For reference, the commanding officer of the spaceship Hudson is Captain Brett Hill. His executive officer and chief pilot is Commander Margaret (Maggie) O’Connell. This scene takes place half-way through the book. The setting is the officer’s mess (dining room).


“So what do you think, Cap’n?”

Brett sipped his water. When he glanced sideways at O’Connell his lids drooped slightly and his left eyebrow rose a fraction. A quirk of his lips, so fleeting it was possible the others never saw, let Maggie know that he had noticed the shortened, more familiar, form of address.

“Do I think it was inherent nobility that brought us out here?” He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t call it nobility, though. I think it’s our innate human need to champion the underdog. We are constant optimists. We’re the emotional descendents of the caveman who stood defiant in the front of the wooly mammoth. We rebuild cities at the base of Vesuvius, get back on the bicycle when we fall off, whack that hornet’s nest every spring. Humans cheer for the couldn’t be, believe in the shouldn’t be. We love causes; the harder, the more lost they are, the more we love them.

“Is that nobility? Maybe. Maybe it’s a pernicious genetic defect that makes our species susceptible to shared delusion. What ever it is, it keeps life interesting.”

Welcome

I wanted a separate blog to share my writing. I'm not sure, yet, if I'll use this forum, or format, to market my novel. For now this is a place to share short stories, highlights from Dremiks, and fan-fiction.

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