One of my favorite toys growing up was a Playmobil pirate ship. That ship was so well built that one time when a repairman came to the house, it so captured his imagination that he got down on his hands and knees on the floor next to me to better examine it. My father often speculates that that ship may have sparked my later interest in history, which in turn led me to an MA, several years of teaching, and above all, a desire to write fiction inspired by history.
One thing's for sure: I played the hell out of it. A young child is a devastating force, harder on a ship than rounding the Horn. My hands were like a tiny Scylla and Charybdis, eventually knocking away the beautiful canvas sails and losing a goodly number of parts.
With the sails gone, my older brother suggested that the ship might be powered by some kind of water-jet action, pulling water in the front and shooting it out the back. We were an imaginative bunch even then.
The water-propulsion idea appealed to my little mind because then the ship could go where it wanted, not worrying about how the wind was blowing. This, I think, encapsulates the difference between how a child thinks and how an adult thinks.
A child wants to get somewhere fast and in a world of automobiles and instant gratification (or, since this was the '80s, near-instant gratification), they see life as a Point A to Point B kind of deal. Anything else is a detour and a distraction.
Life isn't so simple, though. We often have to tack in life, to go one direction when our goal is in another, hoping that when we drop anchor we'll be where we want to be.
As a writer, I especially appreciate wind as a motive power. It creates an inherent challenge for the characters to overcome. Challenges are crucial to fiction. I realized this after I started reading Patrick O'Brian's work. The wind or 'weather gauge' is a topic of much discussion, a potent force in the novels. The novels become exciting precisely because the heroes can't just aim their ship, hit a button, and arrive where they want to go.
This same principle is what makes the Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter Jon Williams so awesome. Dread Empire's Fall has a lot in common with Patrick O'Brian's work, even though it's science fiction.
Walter Jon Williams decided not to introduce any technology that wasn't backed by scientific theories of today. This meant no warp drives, no hyper space, and above all, no 'grav plating' that magically creates gravity without disrupting the ship's course.
What Williams did instead was use basic physics to explain his starships. Instead of grav plating, the characters rely on the ship's acceleration to provide gravity, This meant the ships were designed so that the nose or front of the ship was at the characters' heads and the engines were below their feet. It also meant that any time the ship made a hard course change or acceleration, the characters had to run to belt in or be thrown around like clothes in a dryer. On a wider scale, ships without warp engines have to follow narrow courses that utilize the slingshot effect of planetary and solar orbits. This created an inherent limitation to the battlefield, just as the weather gauge effected ships.
Rather than shying away from physics, Williams used them to make a riveting story.
I often credit Williams and O'Brian with growing me as both a writer and a person. Wind and gravity aren't impediments, they are challenges that can be overcome and utilized. This attitude goes far beyond writing. I strive, whenever I encounter something frustrating, to tell myself:
This, too, is a challenge.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, well...that's a challenge, too, isn't it?
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