I have slowed down on revamping Aeroquest. You may have noticed, I did not spit out the next Canto yesterday. But I am still noodling around with the characters and the story. I took as my model the short chapters and many characters of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. And since it was intended as a comedy novel along the lines of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it has a lot of ridiculous things in it that subvert the plot and the many subplots.
The story is salvageable. But I will have to do some very big changes. I need to streamline the plot. I need to cut out unnecessary characters. And I need to give more extensive development and stage time to the characters I keep.
So here is an insight into critical characters and who they are.
The Aero Brothers are the two main characters who give the book its name. They were not created by me, but, rather, by one of the high school boys who played the science fiction RPG Traveller with me back in 1985. He created both characters loosely based on Han Solo from Star Wars. Ham was a hotshot space pilot. Ged was a rogue hunter who developed the psionic power of changing his shape. He was so powerful that he could use this mind power to change not only his size and shape but also his species. The boy who created these characters was a natural born leader even though he was small for his age and often taken for granted by his fellow players in the game. So these characters both reflect his real-life personality.
Trav Dalgoda, known as “Goofy” for his weird obsessions (like the eyepatch he doesn’t actually need), is a clown character who is constantly driven by his worst impulses to move the plot forward. He doesn’t mean to betray anybody on purpose, but he is obsessed with treasure hunting and watching things blow up. He can’t help causing massive destruction on planetary scales. Tron Blastarr, the scar-faced space pirate, is a bad guy turned hero who is often on the wrong end of Goofy’s plot-moving missteps. He ends up deciding that instead of merely being a pirate leader, he needs to lead a rebellion and form a new interstellar government.
These four are the most important characters in the entire story. I cannot rewrite it without any of them. All four of them are based on real people who played the science fiction role-playing game with me in the 80’s. I will tell you more about Aeroquest characters in future posts.
Made-Up People
I often get criticized for talking to people who are basically invisible, probably imaginary, and definitely not real people, no matter what else they may be.
The unfinished cover picture is from the novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius which I just finished the final rewrite and edit for. All of the characters in that book are fictional. Even though some of them strongly resemble the real people who inspired me to create them, they are fictional people doing fictional and sometimes impossible things. And yet, they are all people who I have lived with as walking, talking, fictional people for many years. Most of those people have been talking to me since the 1970’s. I know some of them far better than any of the real people who are a part of my life.
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These, of course, are only a few of my imaginary friends. Some I spend time with a lot. Some I haven’t seen or heard from in quite a while. And I do know they are not real people. Mandy is a cartoon panda bear, and Anneliese is a living gingerbread cookie. I do understand I made these people up in my stupid little head.
But it seems to me that the people in the world around us are really no less imaginary, ephemeral, and unreal. Look at the current Presidentumb of the Disunited States. He is an evil cartoon James Bond villain if there ever was one.
Animated cast of OUR CARTOON PRESIDENT. Photo: Courtesy of SHOWTIME
People in the real world create an imaginary person in their own stupid little heads, and pretend real hard that that imaginary person is really them in real life. And of course, nobody sees anybody else in the same way that they see themselves. Everybody thinks they are a somebody who is different from anybody else who thinks they are a somebody too, and really they are telling themselves, and each other, lies about who somebody really is, and it is all very confusing, and if you can follow this sentence, you must be a far better reader than I am a writer, because none of it really makes sense to me. I think everybody is imaginary in some sense of the word.
So, if you happen to see me talking to a big white rabbit-man who used to be a pet white rabbit, but got changed into a rabbit-man through futuristic genetic science and metal carrots, don’t panic and call the police. I am just talking to another fictional character from a book I just finished writing. And why are you looking inside my head, anyway? There’s an awful lot of personal stuff going on in there. Of course, you only see that because I wrote about it in this essay. So it is not an invasion of privacy. It is just me writing down stuff I probably should keep in my own stupid little head. My bad.
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Tagged as characters, imagination, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius