Penny Ponders The Confines Of Someone Else’s World
As Long As We Remember
As Long As We Remember by Kae is a space adventure set in the world of the video game, Starbound. It starts on a nicely upbeat note with a group of students close to graduating. Although I knew, as a reader, that the path for this group is not going to be smooth, the scale of the catastrophe was way beyond anything I’d expected. Prepare yourself for an explosive start.
For a ‘proper’ review, I recommend this from Mark P Henderson:
I’m diving into the spotlight books for Fantastic Books Publishing’s
For this piece, I homed in on something that always intrigues me about any work of science fiction — the technology.
What is it, how does it work, is it credible within the laws of physics, who thought it up? In the case of As Long As We Remember, there is an added complication for the author. The world in which Kae is writing, although fictional, is not her fiction — it is someone else’s creation.
There are pros and cons to having a ready-built world — tensions between having oven-ready artifacts ready to go and not having the freedom to have exactly the context and devices you might want. It’s a fascinating topic — as evidenced by it having taken me off down a bit of a rabbit hole because this is not the angle I asked Kae about. If you want to explore further, check out what author Drew Wagar has had to say — he is a veteran of multiple game-based books plus books set in worlds he has created himself.
Starbound tech versus Kae’s tech
This was my question to Kae:
Have you followed Starbound’s technology in all the areas where various different technologies pop up or is there an area that is your own invention?
She replied with this:
I’m honestly terrible with even modern technology. Maybe that’s why my normal wheelhouse is high fantasy…? It’s a point of humor with my friends, too. But to answer properly, I followed along with Starbound as closely as I could.
The only things I invented as far as tech goes were little details about why things work — for example, the pistol using energy instead of bullets, because it isn’t explained in-game but might be weird to a reader — and the bit about the escape option in the Library arc. That one is a relic of my actual gameplay.
This whole thing started as a written Let’s Play, and in the very first draft I needed to explain why enemies vanished in a burst of light on my screencaptures. I gave them the typical survival-mode player respawn options, since I was playing in survival mode too and it made sense at the time.
But Nyota doesn’t get the respawn option because that would take away a lot of the tension, so I had to invent why she couldn’t do that too.
I also added Nyota’s hologram ship controls because it looked cool in my head. Fun reason for anything!
But usually I stuck to tampering with social and cultural details instead of tech.
Good answer, and in fact, it’s the social and cultural details that make this such a readable story. Oh, and I love that “Fun reason for anything!” In my book, that’s a good vibe for an author of fast-moving space adventures.
And I must also give a shout-out to Chucklefish, the developers of the video game, Starbound, who not only gave Kae permission to use their world to write the novel she had been planning for many years but also gave Fantastic Books Publishing permission to publish it.
MABLE 2022
Both As Long As We Remember and Kae are in the spotlight during this autumn’s online MABLE 2022 event that will run during September and October. Do sign up. It’s free and you’ll have the chance to chat with the authors.
