A glance at my Current Projects page shows that I have quite a bit going on. Unfortunately, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been suffering from an acute case of writer’s block. This is a shame, because there are a lot of stories I’m hoping to read before I pass on. Since nobody else has written them, it has fallen to me to do so.
One story listed on the page, down near the bottom, is called The Return. I note on the table that it “addresses themes of identity, genetic engineering, and colonialism.” That’s both true and accurate, but what the summary doesn’t mention is that The Return is part of a much larger project that I’ve been developing, off and on, for over twenty-five years.
In my notes, that project is called The Roscaran Chronicles, because it’s set on the fictional planet of Roscara. The idea for this planet began just before the turn of the century (yes, I really am that old) when I was working in Raleigh, North Carolina, but actually lived in the suburb of Clayton. This often meant driving along Ten Ten Road in Wake County.
The section I drove had a stretch where the road was the border between the town of Garner and the city of Raleigh. One side of the road was in each municipality, and it showed: the Raleigh and Garner sides had been developed in strikingly different manners.
At the same time, though, I knew some of the folks who lived in the area, and they tended to identify more with being in that border area than they did with the side of the road where they lived. It was a borderland, and in my mind the concept became “Borderland.” It was on those drives that I began imagining a planet that had a literal, fixed border between its two hemispheres.
Since I often drove on Ten Ten around morning and evening twilight, it was quite possible for it to be twilight on one side of the road and full dark/full light on the other. That was the source of me deciding that the border was between an area of perpetual light and an area of perpetual dark.
For a long time, I wasn’t sure how to accomplish that, until some years later (when I was actually living in Raleigh) when I was talking with a friend who was fascinated by all things space. I mentioned that the planet — then called Chiaroscuro — apparently didn’t rotate, meaning that the same side of the planet faced its sun all the time. He frowned and pointed out that wouldn’t work, but then suggested the concept of a tidelocked planet.
(At the time, neither of us realized that tidelocked planets are a science fiction trope. Keep in mind that this conversation happened before TVTropes went online.)
The dynamics of such a planet worked wonderfully for the scenario that I was imagining involving its inhabitants, who were human colonists. Over the next several years, I started playing with the concept in my imagination, thinking about the original sources of the two rather disparate cultures on the planet and why they would have developed separately instead of coming together to create one, amalgamated culture. It wasn’t very much later when I realized that the story that needed telling was the story of how and why the two cultures might have come together into one — in Borderland.
That story is told in The Return, but by the time I finished fleshing everything out well enough to write it, I’d figured out that it wasn’t the only story that could be told about the planet, which I later renamed “Roscara” as a corruption of the original “Chiaroscuro.” Today, I’ve peopled Roscara with at least four different cultures and have developed a significant back story as to how the tidal locking happened.
What I haven’t been able to do is actually write much of The Return. Even so, it has never gone away, and I suspect that either it, or the larger Roscaran Chronicles, will end up becoming my magnum opus.
…if I can ever write it, that is.