stevenpiziks | Audible and Dreamer

Continuing our trip back in time to look at my books that have just become available at Audible.com :

It is through first contact with an alien species that humanity learns of the Dream. It is a plane of mental existence where people are

able to communicate by their thoughts alone–over distances of thousands of light-years. To ensure that future generations will have this ability, human genetic engineering produces newborns capable of finding and navigating the Dream.

They become known as the Silent.

Rust is just one planet among many in the Empire of Human Unity. It’s nothing special, nothing unusual…except for the fact that it is home to an unknown boy who may be the most powerful Silent telepath ever born–a Silent with the ability to possess the bodies of others against their will. This mysterious child may be causing tremors within the Dream itself.

For now, only the Children of Irfan know about him. A monastic-like order of the Silent, the Children protect their members even as they barter their services with the governments and corporations that control known space. But power like that cannot be hidden, and soon every Silent in the universe will know about the boy–and every government will be willing to go to war to control him.

And if the Children of Irfan cannot find him first, the Dream itself may be shattered…

In 1999 I saw The Phantom Menace, and I "Hmmm . . . " When I got home, I talked to my friend Sarah Zettel, who had also said, "Hmmm . . . " There were several aspects of the movie we, as writers, would have done differently, and we discussed them at length. How would a group of telepathic monks work? What would the government be like? What would the universe be like? What sort of people would be involved?

Finally one of us--and I honestly don't remember which--said, "Do you want to write this together?" And the other said, "I think we should!"

I went over to Sarah's house with ice cream (because you have to do these things with ice cream) and we worked out an entire universe. We created the Dream, a plane of shared telepathic existence that allows anyone who enters it to communicate with anyone else who enters it, regardless of species or language. We decided that faster-than-light travel was cheap, but faster-than-light communication was non-existent, and that these Dream telepaths were the only way inter-galactic governments and companies could communicate.

We split up to do work at home and share via email. At the time, Sarah was dealing with carpal tunnel problems and dictated most of her work to her computer. The software didn't recognize the word "psionic" the first time she said it, and it wrote "silent" instead. We both like this very much and decided to keep it as our term. Telepaths were called the Silent and telepathy was called Silence. Since Silence is valuable, the Silent were treated in any number of ways, depending on the culture. Some were revered, some become rich, some were enslaved, some were hunted down as evil.

Each of us created a protagonist. Sarah created Ara Rymar, a round, middle-aged woman who was high up in the Children of Irfan, our group of monks who maintain a telepathic communication network for the galaxy and also scour the planets, looking to rescue enslaved or endangered Silent.

I initially created Sejal, a teenager living in poverty who comes up with a version of Silence powerful enough to get the attention of more than one inter-galactic government. Sejal never knew his father, and his mother is a war survivor with secrets of her own. However, Sejal refused to take center stage when the actual plotting of the novel began. I realized he was a good secondary character, but as a protagonist, he wouldn't work. I cast about desperately for a new main character.

And then Kendi said, "I'll do it!"

Kendi and his partner Ben were meant to be background characters. Sarah and I had meant to have them as part of Ara's crew to show that same-sex pairings were considered a norm in this culture. If this had been Star Trek, they would have been a comm officer and a transporter chief--a few lines, maybe an action scene, but nothing more.

But Kendi grabbed the spotlight. I let him.

I already knew Kendi was an Australian Aborigine. I had done a lot of reading about Aboriginal culture and the Dreamtime for unrelated reasons and realized the Dreamtime and the Dream would work very well together, and that Kendi might see them as the same thing. This set off more research, and more background for Kendi. He was witty, didn't always think before he spoke or acted, talented with the Dream, and really, really good at finding other Silent. This last talent saved him from getting into more trouble with his superior Ara.

To make things complicated, Kendi's partner Ben was Ara's son. And they were currently on the outs.

Now that we had universe and characters, we needed a plot. Right around the time Sarah and I set to work on one, Sarah got an offer on what became her Isavalta trilogy (the first book is the excellent A Sorcerer's Treason), and she realized she couldn't work on both projects at the same time. She graciously handed the Silent Empire over to me.

Although I totally agreed with Sarah's decision to drop out, I was a little nervous. This was going to be a collaboration, and now it was going to be a single-author book. But I definitely didn't want to drop the project! I moved ahead.

I wrote up a synopsis and sample chapters. Baen Books didn't show interest, but Laura Anne Gilman over at Roc (Penguin) did. I was so glad! She offered a two-book contract with an option on a third book, though she wanted me to take a pen name to distance me from Baen Books. That was fine with me. I chose the name Harper and I set to work. Nine months later, I turned out DREAMER. Laura Anne loved the book and said quite seriously that the Silent Empire might well turn into the next Miles Vorkosigan series.

It might have happened, too. The book got great reviews and a fair amount of attention. However, it came out only two weeks after 9/11.

During that awful time, sales of everything dropped, especially books. DREAMER actually sold very well, considering the date, and I still wonder what might have happened to the series if things had been a little different.

DREAMER is still available as an ebook from Book View Cafe and from Amazon. Now it's come out from Audible.com.

The books Audible.com has recorded include two novels I wrote as Steven Piziks (my real name) and the four Silent Empire novels I wrote as Steven Harper. The books are:

In the Company of Mind (by Steven Piziks)

Corporate Mentality (by Steven Piziks)

Dreamer (by Steven Harper)

Nightmare (by Steven Harper)

Trickster (by Steven Harper)

Offspring (by Steven Harper)