The Concept
Sometime in 2014 I had my first experience with an anechoic chamber. This is a room with surfaces that are designed to stop the reflection of sound and electromagnetic waves. What you feel when you walk in is a deadness, no timbre or resonance when you talk. I didn’t stay long and my hosts did not close the door. Apparently, it is disturbing to be in there too long.
That got me thinking: what if you had the opposite? What if there was a room in which you heard everything; every sound, every signal. And if you could then eliminate the things you know about and understand, the noise that fills our senses, what would you be left with? In that moment was born the Echo Chamber, the piece of tech that sits at the heart of Silent Running.
Hear everything, silence what you control, listen to the secrets of creation.
The Setting
I had the universe of the Lethe Cluster already formed. It appeared in story form with that title in a competition entry to the annual NYCMM short story competition for 2012 and go me through the first round of the competition with confidence-boosting feedback. You can read that story in “Image and Other Stories“. I’ve also noodled around that universe on this blog, under the broad heading of Cluster Wars.
The potential of tech that hears everything, and a region of space that defies intrusion combined to give me Silent Running. The characters and the broad arc of the story came together relatively quickly after that. Early versions of the eventual novella were rejected and hindsight says rightly so. I took it through my beloved beta readers and the text came back covered in suggestions and corrections. I cannot thank them enough. Hours of their precious time were spent sharpening my prose, tightening the story and holding up a mirror to where I had been lazy or just plain wrong.
The Process
That process, painful as it was, got me most of the way to this version. It still needed tinkering and getting to the point where I was happy with it, but there was something that still felt incomplete. It took dinner with one of my writing group to set the seal on this story. He was visiting the UK and we managed to find a few hours one evening to devote to good food and an absurd range of topics. Corporate governance, religion, astrophysics, quantum physics, and more. It gave me a combination of context and confidence. There was a way to bring the science in the story together with what I was developing in the broader Lethe Cluster universe, the way I wanted space travel to work and how this linked to faith, commerce and politics.
The Result
Shadows of all of that are in Silent Running. Faith and science feature heavily. There are three strong female characters at the heart of the story, each bringing something potent to the plot. Silent Running stands on its own (it may spawn a sequel) and it will now fit seamlessly into the universe I have imagined. That will take a five-volume space opera to explore fully. I hope you enjoy this taster of the stories to come.
My thanks to my crew, they know who they are and how their efforts got me here, nine years after the idea first popped. Thanks also to Mike at Lost Colony Magazine for the gentle editing and publication that has brought this story to the world. Head over there to read the preview and pick up a copy. Nine years have gone into a 90 minute read. I hope you think it is worth it.
END
Ali Abbas 