Aurora's Stargate fic

Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/29/the-big-idea-miles-cameron/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59263

Author Miles Cameron is here today to introduce you to book number one of his space opera series. Though the first of many to come, there’s plenty of spaceships, drama, and war to go around, so strap in for the Big Idea of Artifact Space.

MILES CAMERON:
In 2018, I was sitting at a small SFF con in London with Alistair Reynolds, one of my favourite all-time Science Fiction authors, and I confess I was being a bit of a fan boy, telling him all about what I loved in his books, and he waited me out and then said something to the effect of ‘I hear you spent time on an aircraft carrier.’ The two of us then chatted away for half an hour about life on a carrier and how much we both thought it might be the closest thing to life on a big spaceship, when my editor (up until then I mostly wrote historical fiction and fantasy) turned around in her seat and said, ‘I’d buy that.’
When you are an author, these are very important words. I marked them down. I began to consider how I’d write a science fiction novel loosely based on ‘life on an aircraft carrier.’ Still, despite my military service, I wasn’t really interested in writing ‘military sci-fi’ per se, and I wrote myself some notes and—did other things.
A year later, I was writing a series of historical novels based in fifteenth century Venice and I became fascinated by the idea that Venice—a maritime state—built enormous (for 1450) galleys that carried on most of the trade with the Islamic world, travelling for months and even years on pre-determined routes that linked far-off lands like England and Egypt. I loved the idea that these Venetian seamen would, in the same trip, see so many disparate societies.
These ships doubled, in time of war, as major fleet elements. The idea of combined trade and military fascinated me, and Venice fascinates me still, and there it was—Great Galleys, like spaceborn aircraft carries, on long trade missions to the stars. I mean, there it was, except that it lacked a story.
I have a belief that art makes art; some of my best ideas have come to me while watching a good live play, an opera, a ballet, or a movie. I’m not sure exactly why; there’s an element fo free-association to watching people perform, I suppose—but it always works for me, and in the case of Artifact Space I was watching Florence Pugh in ‘Little Women,’ the last time I went out before COVID and lockdown here in Toronto. I sat there, watching this wonderful performance of one of my favourite books from childhood, and suddenly it was all there. I knew how I would design the human sphere to reflect Venetian trade routes; I saw how I could have the book start in a futuristic Saint Mark’s Square (the heart of Medieval Venice) and I suddenly saw my protagonist and the arc of her story. I think one of the problems of my first ‘Big Idea’ was that the aircraft carrier wasn’t a story—it was an idea. Venice in space was an idea. Both were backdrops on the way to world building. I have the good fortune to be a second-generation author, and one of my father’s favourite sayings was ‘an idea is not a book.’ True words. The aircraft carrier was not a book. Even the idea of Venice in space was not a book.
But Marca Nbaro is a protagonist with a back story and a future arc, and putting her, via Florence Pugh playing Amy March, aboard a ten-kilometre spaceship trading with aliens—it all came in a second. I knew Marca, I knew where she was going and I knew the set of secrets at the heart of the series that would drive the action. I could see the events–alien contact, Artificial Intelligence and its possible flaws, and the difficulties of a trade empire suddenly forced to act as a polity in the face of threat and change.
Good stuff. Other writers have been there before; I’m a huge fan of C.J. Cherryh and she won a Hugo writing on similar themes in Downbelow Station, one of my favourite books of all time. But I had one more ‘Big Idea’ to toss into the mix, because politics interests me and we live, right now, in ‘Interesting Times.’ I wanted humanity to be trapped in someone else’s war, bit players in a larger play, forced to make society-altering decisions just to survive. I wanted to show change, the sort of change people my age have already seen sweeping over us; technological change, societal change, political change.
Interstellar trade, giant spaceships with thousands of crew, massive political change, Alien contact, and one somewhat battered orphan trying to find her place in the universe. Sitting in the theater as the lights came up, it was, I promise you, all one Big Idea.

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/01/29/the-big-idea-miles-cameron/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59263