The Galactic Tourists is an old piece of writing, which I finally completed in 1997 but which I had started much, much earlier. It had a very long gestation period and there were certainly times when I thought it would never be finished.
I have a number of critical thoughts about aspects of the tale and the telling which I'm unhappy with, even to the extent that I considered not posting it at all, but in the end I've decided to add it to the site so readers can judge for themselves, warts and all.
If, after you have read it, you'd like to know my opinion now on the success or otherwise of the Galactic Tourists, then you can open up the spoiler section below for some commentary.
The initial inspiration for this story came from a dream, which was kind of a cross between an Agatha Christie style detective thriller and the film Alien, in which I had to solve the murders of passengers on a weird angular grey and black spaceship before everyone was killed off. I don't know what flavour of cheese I'd eaten that day but it must have been a strong one!
The dream was punchy, urgent and like all dreams, more about mood than plot, but it obviously left enough of an impression on me in the morning to embark on a story that ended up with only a pale hint of the source and a container for many other things...
One of the obvious issues with the Galactic Tourists is that it is far too long. It accreted lots of bits and pieces I happened to be interested in at the time I was writing each section and this made it difficult to keep a focus on the main theme. What started out as a short story with a somewhat abstract mystery at the heart of it, soon burgeoned into something that was looking more like a novel in length. The trouble with this is that it wasn't planned like a novel, it just grew. There's a big difference between the way I think a piece of this length ought to be structured and what happens if you just let organic growth go where it wants to go without considering the pacing and design needs of the whole narrative. Essentially, because of these structural issues, I feel that the Galactic Tourists is an overblown short story and not a novel, despite its length.
Interestingly, I think I fell into the same trap when I came to write the long story "Nine Meditations in the Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment" which can be found in the "Bubble" universe. That too, exploded far beyond my original intent, so maybe this is a lesson I find hard to learn. In fact there are a lot of parallels between this story and the Nine Meditations, so that they can almost be considered reflections of one another. Both have a grand design at the heart of their plot engines, both take long digressions away from this design, both have large casts of characters and both are concerned in a certain sense with the same theme looked at from slightly different angles. I'd like to think that the Nine Meditations is a better piece of writing though, as I hope I have learned how to improve on some of the issues that cause me to be dissatisifed with this story.
So apart from the length, what else is wrong?
The main problem, I think, is that the relationship between Quella and Vega doesn't feel convincing. Character development and depiction is not my strong point and some of the passages I thought were necessary to get me to the outcome I wanted, ended up being written near the end and inserted back into the story. I expect you can spot the joins. This comes over as a little clunky and there are pieces of purple prose that don't quite do the job I wanted. In fact, whilst I think it was an ambitious idea to write from the perspective of a main female character, and not necessarily a bad one, I just don't think I succeeded in making it work or in doing anything with the idea that wasn't just tokenism.
Some things about the plotting also don't sit right with me in 2021. The initial seduction scene in the middle of chapter three is problematic for a start. At best it's a corny old trope that's passed its sell by date, and at worst it's verging on exploitative. Without wanting to overdo it, rereading this does make me just a little uncomfortable and if I was writing the story now, I'd defintely find a different way to connect Quella and Vega. Apart from anything else, I don't find the passage in question half way believable either.
Another issue, is how well the "message" of the story is conveyed through the murders and their interpretation. Does this really make much sense to the reader? Are Vega's arguments even vaguely plausable? And is the outcome of the trial and the response of the public at all likely? It's all a little nebulous, I fear, and attempting to use the deaths in the way the Quiet People have planned, maybe doesn't feel like a convincing rationale for the actions of their agent. I certainly feel now, reading this story many years after I wrote it, that the murky motives of the murderer are extremely flimsy and possibly too flimsy to bear the weight of the plot.
Finally I ought to mention the writing itself, portentous without justification in some places and overly florrid in others. A few sentences actually make me cringe now but for this one as with everything else posted on World Anvil, I've made a decision not to do any substantial edits, although I am correcting minor typographical and spelling mistakes if I spot them.
So that's all the bad things. What do I still like about this story, despite everything I've just said?
Well, I still think the world building for certain scenes and places on the route holds up well. These locations feel vivid and were good sources of inspiration for some of my earliest digital art work. I used Bryce in a first attempt to illustrate the same scenes I've attached on this page and the Gaftiz Nebula image is still a Bryce rendering with a bit of apophysis added in (apophysis is a fractal generator). I've lost the other ones from that generation of images and they weren't very good by modern standards anyway, but they taught me a lot. When I upgraded my work flow and software to use Vue, I made new improved pictures to see how I could develop the art from Bryce and this second generation of images are the ones shown here.
Secondly, I think the key idea from the Galactic Tourists, was, in fact, quite precient and that I'd latched onto something in the zeitgeist that my country had been struggling with for a very long time, and continued to do so with even more intensity in the years after the story was finished. As a metaphor for all that politics, this story definitely still resonates with me. If you want to draw out the analogy which was at the back of my mind when I wrote it, the Galactic Confederacy can be seen as the EU and the Quiet People as Brexiteers, with their exceptionalism and their prophecies of the fall of the Confederacy, mirroring some of the xenophobia and wishful thinking found in the worst examples of those who wanted to "take back control". I chose the term "regulars" for humans, with other letters used for aliens as a deliberate example of how language can embed exceptionalism into world views. Since 2016, England has embarked on its own road to Descendency, and who knows where that will end?
So all in all, I find myself just about giving The Galactic Tourists a grudging pass mark. It's not great, it has a lot of faults, but it was ambitious, it has some good bits and I have at least tried to learn something both from the experience of writing it and illustrating it. Just managing to finish it, finally, after many years of very slow progress was an achievement in itself and for that reason alone, I can't bring myself to be too condemnatory. Even so, it's arguably the worst piece of long prose I've let out into the daylight, so if you didn't enjoy it, all I can say is that you still might like some of my later writing!
DMFW 15/12/2021
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