I recently got over 1900 on chess.com. But, I sort of think I’m actually no better at chess than I was when I was like, 1200, or something, because all I play these days is bullet. When I play blitz, I do slowly climb the ratings ladder, but bullet’s more like an arcade game than real chess: learn a basic system opening, get through the first ten moves without blundering something, and then try and get a checkmate or run out the clock. I would say the majority of my games end because of the clock, rather than because someone won in earnest; and when I OTB my friends at 10 or 15 minutes, which happens about once a year, I’m not that much better than any of them, partly because I’m so used to bullet now I just play really fast.

A few things I’ve learned are that North Americans play really fast, and really arrogantly; they seem to think they’re definitely going to be able to checkmate you, and so play very aggressively, which makes it all the more annoying when they then do checkmate you. And Indians always play super trappy - the amount of Scholar’s mates and Fried Livers I’ve seen from them beggars belief. I don’t know enough stereotypes about Indians to analyse why they play trappy, but it’s tempting to say that Americans play that way because they’re boisterous, arrogant, and ignorant of their opponents. Ahem.

Anyway, I sort of think that writing a novel is a bit like playing a game of chess, except you don’t have an opponent, or the opponent is like, yourself, or something. You try and learn what you can about the structure of the novel - openings and closings, tactics and strategies for the mid-game - put all the pieces, or characters, in the right places at the right times, and, in my case, hope a stroke of genius falls into your lap which ties it all together into something glorious. (I’m not having much luck in either case, at the moment.) One thing that’s been annoying me about the novels I’ve been reading recently is that a lot of these authors haven’t been working on their openings.

(Major spoilers for multiple sci fi series from here on in.)

I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s seminal sci fi novel Red Mars, which is about a group of 100 nutjobs who go to Mars to start the first colony. And, straightforwardly, I loved it. Or, most of it, at least. The politics of this disparate group of Russians and Americans is highly engaging in a way I wouldn’t have expected it would be.

But I have a real problem with the opening, which does a horrible job of getting you to even reach the second chapter, when the novel becomes amazing. It begins with Frank Chalmers attending a political speech from his friend John Boone. On the face of it, the scene is fine; it’s relatively well written (though I don’t think Robinson is that good a writer stylistically) and you get to know Frank pretty well within the first few pages. And by the end of Frank’s chapter, he’s committed assault, battery, GBH, conspiracy to commit murder, and murder itself.

All of which sounds pretty exciting, out of context. The problem is, it isn’t. The opening to Red Mars is confusing, and, in cardinal-sin fashion, boring. I don’t care about any of these characters; Frank is completely unlikeable, John Boone seems like a pompous twat; the only interesting part is Frank and Maya Toitovna’s relationship, which you only get an inkling of, albeit in a relatively heavy-handed way. You’re stuck in some festival you don’t understand, on a planet that’s not relatable, being told about political machinations that you have no reason to care about yet. Moreover, Maya doesn’t even really seem to care that Boone has died, even though you learn later on that she was in love with him, presumably still is at the point of the novel where he dies. It’s all very strange.

Thankfully, it’s pretty short, and as soon as the next chapter begins, the novel becomes excellent. You’re trapped on the Ares, a spacecraft heading to Mars with 100 of the best, brightest, and, fundamentally, most psychologically fucked up; we see the whole chapter from Maya’s point of view, and her background in diplomatic relations gives the situation a brilliantly analytic bent; and the science, as far as I can tell, is interesting and accurate. Then, later, when we jump back into Frank’s head for a second time, it becomes a downright masterpiece; Robinson’s psychological understanding of humanity, of his characters, is pretty astounding, and while I hated Frank as a person, following him and his thoughts around was one of the most interesting times I’ve had in a book in ages. It’s just great, and my only other complaint is that it does occasionally describe the landscape of Mars in a little too much detail to continue being interesting. At its heart, it’s not a sci fi - it’s a political drama. But while the opening does sort of set that up, it doesn’t do enough to grab the reader before it pulls the rug out from underneath you in chapter two, before it snaps your assumptions of what the novel is going to be about.

Compare and contrast with Greg Egan’s Quarantine. Now, I have my issues with Egan, which I’ll get to, but Quarantine pulls off the rug-pull with perfection. I was far more compelled by the novel than I was with Permutation City or - shiver - Diaspora, because of its setup as a PI story - I bloody love detective fiction. But then, around an act or so in, the rug gets pulled out from under you so fast you might hit your head. Suddenly, it’s no longer a detective story; Nick Stavrianos’ mission to figure out why a girl got kidnapped almost disappears into the background, only resurfacing towards the end of the book, all because he’s injected with a loyalty mod that makes the company he’s working for the only thing he cares about - and so the novel becomes about that (among other things). It’s a fascinating twist that happens halfway through, rather than towards the end of, the story, and it pays off because you really thought you were reading a detective novel that happened to be set in a futuristic sci fi world; in fact, you were reading a book about ideas, and the PI-setup was just to lull you into a false sense of security (or, alternatively, be a structural device to get the character where he needs to go in order for the author to meditate on the ideas, which is fine too, because it’s done really well).

But Permutation City isn’t like that. You start following Paul Durham, who has woken up in a simulation - he’s a Copy, a digital scan of the brain of a biological human, that’s coded into a programme and lives its ‘life’ in there, instead of in the real world. The first chapter follows his realising that he’s a Copy, his brief exploration of the world, and sets up most of the ideas that will follow in the rest of the book, all of which is fine - except that there’s no reason to care about Paul or his situation yet. In the second chapter, Maria Deluca is introduced, and she’s a regular, common, and, critically, relatable person, with whom it would have been much better to start the novel with, because a) I wouldn’t have been spoon fed all the ideas right at the beginning and b) because she’s a more interesting, likeable character (at least, at this point of the novel). And don’t even get me started on Diaspora, which has a whole near-unreadable chapter of ‘orphanogenesis’, the birthing of the citizens which exist in the world of the novel, which themselves are Copies in much the same way those in Permutation City are. It’s complicated, it’s un-understandable because Egan has invented his own physics for the novel, and it’s just boring. I didn’t love Diaspora in general, but when Yatima finally becomes a character who can actually talk and do things, it improved vastly. The whole first section could have just been cut out completely, or heavily edited, and the novel would have been far better for it.

So what is it? Are sci fi writers not good at openings, or what? I don’t think so. The Expanse is a pretty good example of a good opening, though I have my own separate issues with the first book especially. It begins by introducing a scary alien life that gets released during a pirate attack on a ship, and before you know it, the second ship that both finds it and contains our main protagonists for the entire series of novels have exploded, and soon after that the Mars Navy is being shot at and they’re running for their lives. Stuff happens, exciting stuff, there are explosions!!!, and at the same time the plot is being moved forward. Now, initially, I did have an issue with James S. A. Corey’s (it’s actually two guys, but I’ll refer to him as though it’s just one for the ease of writing) constant perspective shifting: it seemed like a cheap way to get people to continue reading, because Holden’s story, at least for the first half of the novel, is far more exciting and interesting than Miller’s. We jump from huge fights in space, to a depressed detective wondering what the hell he’s doing with his life, who becomes obsessed by a case that turns out to be related. But most of his chapters are him moping about - he’s unlikeable to begin with, though he became my favourite by the end - and they detract from the fundamental momentum the other side of the novel is rolling along with. Once you’re used to it, though - and once you get over the contrived cliffhangers of each chapter - Corey’s shifting of the perspective every chapter becomes one of the strongest parts of the whole series, and his characters are well-realised, likeable even in their fallibility, and generally well-written.

And look, it’s easy to say that sci fi worlds have to set up the world, do their world building, and of course all novels need to introduce their characters and start off the story somewhere. But maybe Egan just isn’t very good at picking where his stories should start, and for me, I generally only care about the world building if I care about the characters within that world. Stavrianos is such an interesting character to follow, even if his backstory is a little cliche; Holden is charming and intelligent; and hell, Luke Skywalker’s a guy you want to follow around for his own sake, not just because of the things happening around him. Sci fi stories need to be good as stories, however interesting the ideas contained therein are - and to be clear, Egan’s and Robinson’s ideas are extremely interesting, and I had a really good time thinking about them - still do, in fact. But Corey’s stories work as stories from the first page to the last, minor criticisms notwithstanding, and even some of the stuff that annoyed you the first time round becomes a strength in the second and third book because you’re used to it; because you now know and like or at least care about most of these characters by book two, you don’t mind the switching so much. Or, I didn’t, at least.

So, yeah, that’s my long-form ramble on why sci fi writers need to get their shit together in the first chapters of their novels. Remember to wash your hands.