© Stephen Baxter 2003

The Spacetime Pit  was my second collaborative story with Eric Brown.

The story’s genesis goes back to June 1995. Eric stayed with me and my wife over the weekend of the launch, in London, of my novel The Time Ships. We’d been friends since first being introduced by David Pringle, Interzone’s editor, in 1989. We’d toyed with the idea of collaborating on stories a couple of times before, once coming to nothing, and the second time - almost by accident - coming up with the idea for Sunfly (IZ100), which we were both pleased with. So, that weekend in June, we consciously set out to start a new collaboration.

The core idea was Eric’s, a notion that had kicked around his notebooks for some years. He imagined a sublight starship carrying a crew in stasis, who would be woken regularly - say, every century - to carry out maintenance. Two of the crew would be lovers, with the catch that their periods out of stasis did not coincide.

Cut to the woman waking to find that the ship has crashlanded on an Earthlike planet. On investigation the planet proves unable to support her, and she will have to go back into stasis for centuries, waking a few days at a time.

She discovers her lover’s pod has also survived.

Hundreds of years pass. The pods are discovered by competing tribes of technologically primitive aliens. The sleeping spacers are considered gods. On awaking, the woman tries to reach her lover, only to be prevented by ‘her’ tribe. While she sleeps they study the principles of the pod’s technology and develop their own.

Over the centuries the two races go to war, using Terran technology to destroy not only themselves but their planet ...

That was as far as it went.

We started to kick around the idea. I saw holes in the logic: crashing on an Earthlike planet was coincidental, and ditto the idea of just the woman’s and her lover’s pods surviving. Maybe the entire scenario of stranded lovers was sentimental. And we felt the story lacked a central conflict.

We dug into the themes: loneliness, alienation, isolation, desperation.

We started to look at specific questions, trying to winnow out the coincidence and build up a logic in the story. What level of technology should the aliens be? How did the astronauts communicate with them (if they did)? What was the astronauts’ motivation? Were they colonists, explorers?

We didn’t come up immediately with specific answers; rather, up from my subconscious came a reworking of the basic idea.
What if the glimpses of time were separated, not by centuries, but by millions, even billions of years? The whole thing could become ‘cosmological’. The astronauts could watch the evolution of the species around them, perhaps seek to influence the course of that evolution - but, as such schemes do, it would all end in tears ...

This idea was appealing, but maybe it would dilute Eric’s original vision. The emphasis might be on the scenery and not enough on the isolation of the stranded astronauts.

We began to see that we could perhaps combine the two options. What if the leaps in time increased in size, from centuries, all the way up to millennia and aeons? That could give us the best of both worlds: the poignant isolation of the beginning, and the stranding of our heroes in a twilit far future as a sort of coda.

We focused on the essentials of the story. We would have a single character on the surface, for simplicity, and drop the lover angle. He/she would be a surveyor of Earthlike worlds. His/her motivation would be the strongest of all: to survive. He/she would be projected into the future in increasingly desperate - and futile - attempts to adjust the world around him/her. This version gave us a new theme: hubris, the futility of human actions attempting to influence events on geological timescales.

Excited, we went to the pub.

We worked up a five-step preliminary outline:

1) Crash of a shuttle on the surface. Our heroine (as we’d settled on by now) must find a way back to the orbiting mother craft. The aliens have a level of primitive agricultural technology set at around 1000 AD. Our heroine retires to a stasis pod to wait out the years, in the hope of some technological development.

2) After a century our heroine finds no change. The aliens are evidently pacific, in equilibrium with their environment. Our heroine evolves a long term plan: to initiate a technological revolution by introducing, for example, an Archimedes screw. She retires to the pod.

3) After five centuries our heroine wakens in an early industrial revolution. There is a new class of aliens we called ‘entrepreneurs’: industrialists, interested in the secrets of the pod. Our heroine revises her plans. She will gain power by dividing and conquering: promising the entrepreneurs gadgets, and at the same time planting the seed of a new, pod-centred religion in the minds of the serfs.

4) After fifty years our heroine emerges to Armageddon, predicated by a millennial crisis surrounding her emergence from the pod, with pod-worshipping religionists fighting off the entrepreneurs. She is taken to a launch site, in the hope of being ferried to orbit - but the rockets turn out to be ICBMs, designed to attack the mother ship. Fearing a disaster she rushes back to the pod.

5) Our heroine emerges to a desolate, lifeless planet. The mother ship is destroyed; now her isolation is complete. We enter the ‘cosmological coda’. The stasis jumps continue to the far future, as no other options exist.

We made some supplementary notes. Our heroine would be an ordinary person on a routine mission, cruelly ripped out of the pattern of her life. We should sympathise with her plight, her struggles to survive. An element of Eric’s love interest would survive, in a token of a lover or family - perhaps a pendant - being worked into the plot. We knew the idea was gaudy and large-scale and would need a lot of careful detailed work, particularly in foreshadowing, to pull it off.

In the course of all this we drew a few intrigued comments from the other punters in my local. Happily, the idea and outline still looked strong in the harsh light of the next morning ...

We agreed that Eric would work on the first chunk, through step 3), and I would complete the draft. Our first working title was Queen of Aeons.

We worked by post, passing successive drafts back and forth. The biggest technical problem was incompatible disk sizes - we had to retype everything ... The ultimate collaborator is online, of course.

At the end of June, Eric had the first half of a first draft, around 4500 words. He’d come up with a new title: Prisoner of Eternity. Our heroine was now called Katerina. She was alone; the mother ship, her shuttle and the pod were all automated.
The story started with the shuttle crash. Katerina descends from her mountain-top to encounter F’han Lha, a young farm worker, of the Han-rai, our aliens. The story proceeded pretty much as our outline through step 2). In step 3) Katerina is captured by soldiers, and taken into a city where she confronts six Han-rai entrepreneurs - dressed, well-spoken, who describe to her the evolution of the society since her last emergence. There is a conflict between themselves, self-styled ‘Progressives’, and Luddite-like ‘Wreckers’ who see Katerina and her technology as evil.

My completed first draft came in at 9000 words. I didn’t like Eric’s last few pages: the entrepreneurs seemed too well-spoken and conversant with their situation - perhaps even, fatally, a little comical. The action in the later stages stayed focused on the mountain top, with the conflict between Progressive and Wrecker simplified to an unstable master/serf relationship. Katerina’s presence galvanised the aliens in two ways: the religious inspiration, symbolised by her pendant, and her scientific revolution, symbolised by the Archimedes’-screw spiral shape. Katerina’s story was now extended to the end of the outline, far beyond the alien conflict, all the way to the death of the planet’s sun.

I also did some work on Eric’s first half, increasing the science content (the basic biology of the planet, the details of the crash ...). The name ‘Han-rai’ was dropped; isolated and unimaginative, the aliens now had no name for themselves, and they became stranger, their language coarser and less anthropomorphic. There was more foreshadowing, in the early sections, of Katerina’s increasing desperation. I called Katerina by a surname - ‘Wake’ - with the idea of emphasising that she was a tough professional, out on the frontier.

I suggested new titles: Prisoner of Eternity seemed corny, and gave away the ending! Crew Loss Scenario. The Zeno Option. The Pit of Space and Time.

Eric responded with a number of detailed cuts and changes. I had collapsed steps 2) and 3) of the outline to accelerate the story; Eric felt this should be restored to give the story better logic. I had Wake wasting away in the final story stages; Eric felt it would be more poignant to keep her healthy, as the planet ages around her. Eric felt The Pit of Space and Time should be the title.

Though after one more redraft we more or less had the shape of the story, we continued to exchange drafts throughout the summer. The work got successively easier; later drafts were about points of clarity, detail, conciseness and balance. Redrafting, as usual, involved a lot of cutting - the final draft was 8600 words - and we even cut the title, to The Spacetime Pit.

In September we bounced the story off another colleague, Keith Brooke. Keith responded with some big, perceptive remarks concerning the story logic. What was the cause of the crash in the first place? And Keith felt Wake lost his sympathy, after the ‘Armageddon’ plot-point; she showed little remorse, in our draft, for the destruction of a biosphere to serve her own purposes. We put those things right.

By mid-September 1995 we were ready to submit the tale to Interzone. We felt we’d come up with a good story which retained the elements of Eric’s original vision, enriched by my ‘cosmological’ perspective.

Collaborating is something of a holiday, for the jobbing author. The kick-off ideas-generating brainstorms are a joy. The process of first drafting can be very tough; to have someone else share that burden is a huge relief.

Our styles are quite different - Eric’s character-driven, my ‘cosmological’ - and we like to feel they are complementary when we manage to fit them together properly. It’s endlessly interesting to see how someone else’s mind works. It’s important to submerge egos; every story goes through painful redrafting, and in some ways it’s harder to criticise another’s work than one’s own.
More collaborations? At time of writing we have one more joint story in the pipeline. At the moment we’re both following our own stars as far as the novels are concerned, but maybe one day ...