Mercyblades | An Interview with the Author
Hi. I’m Daniel Bayn. All the top interviewers want to talk to me about my new novel, Mercyblades, but they’re too shy to ask. So, until they muster up the courage, I’ll be interviewing myself…
What is Mercyblades about?
It’s swashbuckling science fiction, but I’ll give you the elevator pitch: A trio of transhuman swashbucklers cross swords with luddites, cults, and petty tyrants in an optimistic, post-scarcity future. It has all the action and adventure of a space opera, transported into a hard sci-fi setting.
A few hundred years from now, humanity has colonized the solar system. A swarm of isolated, spin-gravity “bottle worlds” provides sanctuary to every psychopath and charismatic leader who can’t get along in polite society. Enter the Mercyblades, vigilantes who’ve made it their mission to free people held under their boots.
The novel explores ideas around identity, transhumanism, augmented and virtual realities, post-scarcity civilization, and the limits of human progress in the face of humanity’s inhumanity. With swordplay and fisticuffs.
Why “swashbuckling” sci-fi?
I’ve always loved adventure fiction like Zorro, The Musketeers, and (of course) Star Wars. Big, brash heroes who leap into action, even when maybe they should’ve thought it through first. However, I also love the hard sci-fi stuff that gets left behind when you have artificial gravity, faster-than-light travel, and other kinds of space magic. Spin-gravity habitats are cool! Nanotechnology is cool! I wanted to blend it all together into a single, savory, optimistic stew.
Another thing I love, unlike a lot of novelists, is writing action. The first long-form story I ever wrote was a serial called Dustbowl Xia. It was a wall-to-wall kung-fu action extravaganza set in 1930’s America. My first (almost) novel-length work was Star Wars fan fiction about a semi-retired Jedi who lives on the beach. I know how that sounds, but it also involves a lot of action. Mercyblades is full of swordfights and weeping kung-fu, but I got to set some of those fights in zero-g or, in one memorable case, hanging from the outside of a spin-gravity habitat.
Who are the titular Mercyblades?
They’re the Three Musketeers in space. And one of them is Zorro. They’re vigilantes who seek out people who are being held in violation of their human rights, through coercion or manipulation, and help them escape abusive bottle worlds. They’re named after their signature weapon: a blade made of segmented rope that snaps off to hot-tie their enemies, totally non-lethal.
- Roka is the youngest of the group. He dresses like the god of rockstar cowboys and wears his shiny mercyblade on his hip. He’s an idealist and a troublemaker.
- Padre is a robot-bodied monk with an old soul. They were born into a fallen age of Earth’s history and know how truly fragile social progress can be.
- Ashe is a brain in a jar inside a heavily-armed spaceship. She’s also an illegal copy of a “real” person who committed a horrible crime… of which Ashe has no memory.
What does “post-scarcity” mean?
It’s a utopian idea, to which I subscribe, that says we’ll eventually be able to produce energy and goods in effectively unlimited supply. This would make everything essentially free. In Mercyblades, this comes from a combination of fusion power and automated manufacturing. People can 3D print most anything they need. If you want something bigger, like a spaceship, all you have to do is design it (or download a design) and send a probe out to some lonely asteroid to build it.
The same applies to everyone who wants to F — off to their own O’Neill cylinder and remake civilization in their image… so that’s not the greatest. Inside the orbit of Mercury, you end up with a swarm of bottle worlds run by luddites and lunatics who don’t play well with others. That’s one of the places I found dramatic conflict in a setting otherwise free of war and crime.
(See Finding Conflict in a Post-Scarcity Future for more about that.)
And how does transhumanism fit in?
Aliens! Kinda. The solar system is full of isolated enclaves with different ideas about how to be human. Some stay in their meat bodies, though even these are often full of medical implants that extend life and enhance performance. Most use nanotechnology to replace their brains, one neuron at a time, with a more durable synaptic network… that can be plucked right out of the skull and plugged into a new body.
From there, people can be whatever they want. Padre, for example, is a 300-year-old android who’s been male, female, and animal. The extended cast includes a robot-bodied bare knuckle boxer, a samurai with heat-radiating tattoos, and several people with sensory implants that expand the range of their senses.
For these people, reality can also be augmented. They swim in an ocean of data, layered over their vision as lights, images, and other data visualizations. Ashe never had a physical body — outside of her brain — and only appears to others as a “hologram” of a woman. Some people plug themselves into VR dreamworlds and live their entire lives in realities of their own choosing.
What do you love most about the book?
Megastructures! I love all the crazy, ambitious habitats people have cooked up, based on realistic physics. No hand-wavy artificial gravity or hover technology needed. Mercyblades features four different O’Neill cylinders, an orbital ring, a Matrioshka brain, spinning dome cities on Mars, and floating habitats on Venus.
(See Megastructures of Mercyblades for more about those.)
But actually, my favorite part was probably getting to write my three protagonists. I love Roka’s earnest wit and Ashe’s biting sarcasm. I invented an anti-religion for Padre called the Weeping Monks, so called because they meditate with their eyes open. I got to write a lot of banter, which is my second-favorite thing after swashbuckling action!
What’s your writing process?
Outlining, lots of outlining. All the way up to my rough draft, everything’s in bullet point format. It helps me stop fixating on formal issues like paragraph structure, blocking between dialog, and I can easily jot down alternate versions of a line. I don’t write anything out in proper prose until the first draft.
I also use bullet outlines to prep for each scene or chapter. I ask myself all the questions I’ll need to answer as I write…
- What’s interesting about this scene?
- What does each character want?
- What’s the location like? Who else is there?
- What’s the POV character thinking about?
…
Finally, I’ll jot down fight choreography ideas, complications, background characters, anything I might need. If I don’t haven’t done any brainstorming ahead of time, I tend to get stuck. I delete my bullet list as I go, replacing it with proper prose.
(If you’re interested in that process, see my article on Bullet Drafts.)
What’s ahead for the Mercyblades?
In the sequel, I want to really lean into the infinite possibilities of transhumanism, so I’m sending the Mercyblades to Saturn for the Great Conjunction. The Saturnals aren’t just transhumans, they’re artists! Their bodies are canvases for self expression, from an ambulatory tree to a kitten inside an astronaut’s helmet. Also some weird ones. Every chapter has a cantina scene. It’s nuts!
Mercyblades is now available on Amazon Kindle.
