Like the previous novels in his Billion Worlds series, author James L. Cambias’ Picaresque / pulpy sci-fi space opera novel The Miranda Conspiracy (paperback, Kindle) is set thousands of years in the future.
So it might surprise you to learn that, in the following email interview, Cambias says this story was influenced by a novel from 1939 that was made into a famous movie in 1946.
For people who haven’t read the previous novels in your Billion Worlds series — The Godel Operation and The Scarab Mission — or the interview we did about Godel, what is Billion Worlds series about, and when and where are these stories set?
The Billion Worlds setting emerged from some thinking I did back in 2014 about what life would be like when the Solar System has become what astronomers sometimes call a “Kardashev Type II civilization.” That’s a civilization which controls the entire output of its parent star. It’s also sometimes called a “Dyson Swarm” after the concept by the late Freeman Dyson about how a civilization might expand until it completely surrounds its star with energy collectors and habitats. (Not a single shell but a whole mass of smaller objects in different orbits.) Some calculations of how many people that could support, and what the average size of a space habitat might be, led me to the rough figure of 1,000,000,000 space colonies, inhabited asteroids, moons, planets, comets, etc. The Billion Worlds.
I did some math on how long this would take, and estimated about four thousand years. Then I doubled that number, putting my stories at the end of the Tenth Millennium. The Miranda Conspiracy takes place in the year 9999, in fact.
The reason for putting my stories so far in the future is that I didn’t want this civilization to be new. For the people of that era, most of recorded history has taken place in the Billion Worlds. They view our current era or the early days of space colonization the way we think of humans spreading on foot out of Africa and across the world.
The huge setting and long time scale also gives me room for exotic cultures and political systems, strange genetically-engineered species, and so on. And when I was first thinking of all this, I realized something: that’s a lot like Golden Age sci-fi. Lots of weird beings, alien cultures, and exotic environments all existing within just a few weeks or months of travel of each other. Characters can go to strange new worlds in realistic spacecraft with no magic FTL drives. I can tell almost any story I want to in this setting. That was very exciting.
And then what is The Miranda Conspiracy about, and when and where does it take place in relation to the previous novel, The Scarab Mission? Or does that not matter because they’re not connected other than by sharing the same fictional universe?
Things are about to get complicated, so buckle up.
When I first started writing tales set among the Billion Worlds, I had what I call my “Brilliant Bad Idea.” That idea was that instead of writing a series of stories, I would write a “Slice.” All my Billion Worlds novels would be happening at the same time, involving different characters in different places. The first of them was The Godel Operation, a picaresque romp ranging from Uranus to Mars, about the hunt for a possibly-mythical superweapon. It was narrated by a smart-aleck digital intelligence named Daslakh, and the primary human characters were a young couple named Adya and Zee.
The Slice was still in my mind when I plotted out my second Billion Worlds book, The Scarab Mission. The original idea was that while Daslakh, Zee, and Adya were searching for the Godel Trigger, and dealing with super-criminals and a cat mastermind, a completely different set of characters would be trapped aboard a wrecked space colony, trying to escape the deadly menace still lurking in its cold dark halls.
My publisher [Baen’s Toni Weisskopf] hated the idea of the Slice. Readers like some continuity of characters, so that if they get invested with them they’ll buy more books to find out what else happens to them. She insisted on a more straightforward chronological series.
I saw the wisdom of that, but there was no way I could plausibly squeeze Adya and Zee into the action of The Scarab Mission.So I had to get creative. I moved Scarab back in time thirty years, to 9965. Zee and Adya wouldn’t even be born then — but Daslakh’s been around for a very long time so I could make it a secondary character in the book. It immediately began trying to steal every scene, but that was fine.
So “book two of the Billion Worlds” takes place a generation before the first book.
Once I was done with Scarab I started thinking about the characters from The Godel Operation, and decided to wind up their story line. As a result, The Miranda Conspiracy follows directly after The Godel Operation.
In The Miranda Conspiracy, Zee, Adya, and Daslakh voyage aboard the orca-brained cybership Pelagia to Miranda, one of Uranus’s moons and the home of Adya’s wealthy and powerful family. Except that when they get there they learn that the family’s wealth is almost gone and they’re about to lose their political power as well. Adya’s parents want her to make an arranged marriage to a wealthy lower-class family in order to restore the family fortune and maintain their position. She’s torn between her love for Zee and her duty to her family.
Adya tries to find out who’s responsible for the destruction of the family fortune, because she suspects it’s one of her father’s political rivals. Meanwhile Zee is trying to track down what happened to the rights to a fabulously valuable payload of exotic matter particles, which have been traveling inbound from the Oort Cloud for hundreds of years and are due to arrive soon. These two mysteries come together in a plot to overthrow Miranda’s government. Along the way Adya and Zee have to deal with an octopus crime lord, space mercenaries, Adya’s madcap clone-sister Kavita, corrupt police, and a mysterious secret agent of Deimos who readers of The Scarab Mission may recognize.
So, where did you get the idea for The Miranda Conspiracy?
Surprisingly, the core of Miranda was the idea of the fabulously valuable incoming space payload, traveling for centuries as its value fluctuates. That came from an economics paper by Paul Krugman, trying to analyze whether interstellar trade would be possible and how it might work. An incredibly valuable MacGuffin is a perfect plot driver, and it makes a nice mirror-image of The Godel Operation. In that, the characters were looking for something hidden, which might not even exist. In Miranda, the location and velocity of the payload are known with perfect precision, but nobody can get their hands on it until it lands.
When I combined that with the obvious conflict of Adya’s upper-class family and Zee’s humble origins, the story kind of popped right out.
In the interview we did about The Godel Operation, you said it was a pulpy sci-fi space opera story, while adding, “You could also call it a ‘Picaresque’ novel, as it follows a group of roguish characters in their encounters with others.” Is The Miranda Conspiracy also a Picaresque / pulpy sci-fi space opera story, or is it something else?
No, The Miranda Conspiracy is not a picaresque novel. Nearly all the action is confined to Miranda itself, which is a pretty interesting environment in the novel. The real moon Miranda is mostly composed of ice, so I posit that in the future, terraformers will melt some of that ice to create a sub-surface ocean kept warm by fusion power. The ocean serves as an immense protein factory, so that Miranda can export seafood throughout Uranus space. (When dolphins are a significant part of the population, that’s a pretty good business model.) The waters are dotted with floating cities and the mansions of the ruling class, known as The Sixty Families.
The Sixty Families control most of Miranda’s wealth, and essentially fund the government out of their own pockets. This is similar to how the Republic of Rome did things before it became an empire. The oligarchs of Miranda are so rich that wealth is effectively meaningless to them — they compete for status, instead. However, there’s a kicker: a family which can’t afford to maintain any government departments loses its power.
Miranda’s a moon, but it’s not all that big, so it essentially functions as a single place in the novel. Characters bounce around within it. There is a subplot set in space, but everything eventually comes together at Miranda.
Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on The Miranda Conspiracy but not on any of your previous novels, and especially not The Godel Operation or The Scarab Mission?
Yes. I try to make each of the Billion Worlds stories feel different, and The Miranda Conspiracy is my “Raymond Chandler novel.” I was very influenced by The Big Sleep, both the book and the wonderful Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart. There’s a lot of the same structure: my heroes dig into a mystery and encounter various strange and shady characters along the way.
How about non-literary influence; was The Miranda Conspiracy influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
Other than the Bogart film, not really. I did slip in one reference to the Traveller tabletop role-playing game which a few alert fans might notice, but I’m not going to say more than that.
Speaking of tabletop games, when not writing novels, you work as the Chief Game Architect for Zygote Games, who made the card games Parasites Unleashed and Bone Wars. How, if at all, do you think working on those games may have influenced how you told the story in The Miranda Conspiracy?
My card games do have a bit of an “emergent story” aspect to them. In Bone Wars you’re essentially chronicling a scientific rivalry among the paleontologist characters the players control, often including a lot of shady goings-on. Parasites Unleashedtells the life story of an imaginary parasitic organism.
I can’t think how either one of them might have had much influence on Miranda Conspiracy, though my experiences running a small business did give me some insight into the financial woes of Adya’s family.
Going back to the interview we did about The Godel Operation, in it you said you thought that novel could work as a movie or TV show. Do you feel the same about The Miranda Conspiracy?
The Miranda Conspiracy could indeed be filmed. It’s got lots of spectacular visuals and strange characters. It might wind up being a little confusing to viewers — like The Big Sleep, in which even Chandler himself famously lost track of who committed one of the murders.
And if someone wanted to make that adaptation, who would you want them to cast as Zee, the voice of Daslakh, and the other main characters?
I’ve considered this a couple of times. There’s a Web page called “My Book, The Movie” which poses the same question.
For Zee, I want an athlete who seems naive but isn’t. I imagine him as having “normal” looks for the Tenth Millennium — vaguely Southeast Asian or Latin American in appearance. Unfortunately I don’t know of any young actors, so I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
For Adya — and in The Miranda Conspiracy that also means her sister Kavita and their mother Mutalali — I’ve suggested either Anya Taylor-Joy [Furiosa] or [Wednesday‘s] Jenna Ortega. Whoever plays the part will have to wear a latex skullcap since most Mirandans shave their heads.
Adya’s father is Jared Harris [Foundation]. That’s pretty much who I pictured when writing him.
The voice of Daslakh could be Alan Tudyk [Rogue One: A Star Wars Story] or possibly Jeremy Irons [The Borgias]. I know they aren’t remotely alike, but those are two ways to play it: energetic and kind of motor-mouthed, or dryly amused.
Pelagia’s voice is Scarlett Johansen [Black Widow].
The toughest character to cast is the secret agent “Qi Tian” (not his real name). He’s described as looking perfectly average and completely unmemorable. So we need an extremely good actor who is utterly unremarkable in appearance. I’m kind of at a loss there.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Miranda Conspiracy, what sci-fi space opera novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out?
Right now I’m having a great time reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series. It’s wonderful “New Space Opera.” When I describe it to people I tell them it’s “What happens if you drop the crew of Firefly into the Shadow War from Babylon 5.”
